-Chan Yeol’s POV-   I glanced at Aerin who was seated beside me as I made the curve out of their neighborhood. Like me, she lived around the suburbs. I knew she was one of those rich kids in school, but I didn’t really know anything about her family. She never mentioned them so I began to think that Sehun was her only family. That’s not even it. If they were living together like that, unrelated and all, sharing one room, any other person who didn’t know better would think that they were some live-in couple. I shrugged the thought off. I looked at her again as we made it to the highway.   She was too quiet. The silence was deafening. She repeatedly ran her hand on the part of her head that she hit on the side of my car. Talk about clumsy. The first time I saw her, I thought she wasn’t capable of being a klutz, but then, all the while that I was thinking that she was just being careless, something else was going on. After Sehun told me those things, I kept thinking how I would tell her about it. Should I apologize for the things I didn’t have any control over? Should I tell her that we couldn’t hang out anymore because I was hurting her indirectly? Honestly, I didn’t know what to do. I just knew that I liked seeing her a lot, happy and smiling.   Since then, Sehun never spoke to me again. I wanted to tell Aerin that we shouldn’t be friends and I could see the taunting challenge in his eyes whenever she did as much as waved at me. He never left her side since Thursday morning and I could feel the annoyance in him whenever we see each other. I tried asking him what exactly happened, but he’d tell me that it didn’t matter because all things are done and there was no point going over them again and again. I wanted to beat the truth out of him, but we can’t possibly show the others that we were fighting. He knew better and so did I.   Once again, Aerin touched the tender spot on her head. I instinctively reached for her hand and put it back down to her side. “Stop touching it,” I told her, keeping my eyes on the road.   She frowned. “But it hurts,” she whined.   “You should’ve been more careful.”   She didn’t say anything after that. I wonder what was eating on her. I didn’t fail to notice how she looked at Sehun earlier when she glanced up at their balcony. I just pretended not to see. I was sure he would ignore me anyway and I didn’t want Aerin to notice anything out of the ordinary. Sehun and I didn’t talk much since we understood each other perfectly well even without the use of words so it wasn’t such a problem trying to strike up a conversation with him. Now I hated the fact that we were like that, too close that we couldn’t pretend not to get what the other was saying.   “Could you tell me something about your family?” I asked her after a while.   She looked at me with one brow raised. “O…kay. What do you want to know?” she said slowly.   I smiled. At least she was talking.”What do your parents do?” I began. That was a safe topic.   Chuckling, she looked out the window. “What’s this, a background check?”   I shook my head. “I just want to know you more. Is there something wrong with that?”   “I didn’t say that.”   “So what do they do?” I prompted her. She really had the ability to sidetrack people with her minute gestures.   Aerin looked hesitant, but she spoke eventually. “My mother runs the company she inherited from my grandparents. At the same time, she manages my father’s tea farm and refinery in Japan that’s why she’s always away.”   I frowned. “After your father…” my voice trailed off when I realized what I was saying. “I’m sorry.”   “It’s fine,” she answered. “My mother and I weren’t close to my father’s family and we were mostly alone since then because my mother was an only child and all her closest family members were crazy people. I meant that in a good way, of course and we were quite close to her cousins. It just so happened that she began being distant to them after my father…” She sighed. “Died.”   “That must have been hard,” I commented.   She loosened up after that. “It was at first. You could just imagine what a crazy life my mom and I were living back then. That’s natural. Then Sehun came along.” She smiled at that. “He made everything turn a hundred and eighty degrees. Somehow, he put order in the house. Umma began acting herself after he arrived.”   I laughed along with her. “How did he get to live with you guys anyway?” I asked, curious. He never really told us anything about it except that he grew up in California where his father worked. We all knew that his mom died some years after they moved there. He often joked that his father kicked him out their house, but we never really knew the real reason.   Aerin laughed more, reminiscing about it. “Oh Sehun’s appa is my mother’s high school sweetheart. Can you believe that?”   I didn’t see anything funny about it. “Yeah?”   She looked at me. “Don’t worry. I was shocked, too when I first found out. It’s really funny. Umma took him in because he’s having trouble with his appa. They didn’t get along, I guess. It’s just a problem about managing a bad teen. He really hated his father. He tells me about it a lot.”   “I see.”   “He never told you?”    “No.” I chuckled. “So why did you transfer to Reishin?”   “Come to think of it, it’s because of him, too. See how that kid transformed our way of living?” she said, rolling her eyes, but I didn’t even detect any trace of bitterness. I guess she liked him a lot. “Sehun had been our ray of sunshine in the house after appa left us. Umma liked him a lot and he served as the playmate to what used to be a lonely kid. He’s like my imaginary friend.”   Imaginary friend? I laughed at that. Her words weren’t exactly saddening, but I felt it tug at my heart. Sehun was one of the important things that happened in her life. I wonder where I was in the equation.   She sigh