He passed him in the hallways between classes, gracefully breezing past and maintaining his stiff, aloof façade. They didn't meet in the bathroom again – Junhong was careful to avoid that hall entirely, practicing his music at home instead of at school. He heard lockers slamming, ancient doors creaking shut, but he restrained himself and reined in his curiosity, his desire to spend time with his mystery boy again. When he tried to stop cutting himself for a week, the experiment ended in failure and more horrific injury than he had anticipated. Without the strangely comforting thought of the mysterious boy in his mind, he couldn't achieve the same release he once had when he heard the grating snap of a knife flicking open. Junhong stayed up at all hours, lying on his bed with his violin's bow in his hands, running the soft string over his wrists and wishing it would hurt him without him forcing it to.

His mother dragged him to church every Wednesday, every Sunday, praying for his 'misguided soul' and trying to 'force the devil out.' He read these amusing quotes from the weekly bulletins passed around during the service, detailing exactly how Jesus would save him, how believing in God could make his pain fade. Junhong knew his pain was more than spiritual – he was defeated, body, mind, and soul. He woke up in the mornings thinking the world had turned gray, his fuzzy half-conscious teenage mind telling him that he had to get up and face the world when really all he wanted to do was curl into a little ball and cry. But no tears ever came. It was as if he was broken, his emotions running haywire, so out of control that he couldn't feel them anymore.

He stumbled through month after month, eating, sleeping, doing homework and writing, putting the finishing touches on his senior thesis and lying down every night feeling emptier than the night before. Fall passed without much fanfare, though he took notice of the blood-red leaves on trees, matching the new scars on his arms, as he walked home from school in late November.

Winter was dull and droll, a shapeless whiteness blotting out the landscape and, thankfully, giving Junhong less to focus on. He saw the heaps of snow, feet deep like sand dunes, and his mind was thankfully blank and quiet. He liked winter. No one questioned him wearing long sleeves in the winter.

Junhong walked to and from his school every day, thick winter boots protecting his feet from the worst of the chill. He was walking to his house, a few blocks from the main center of town and set far back on its lot, wide lawn needing attention and sidewalk needing shoveling, when he saw a flash of golden brown over the hedges he walked past. He stopped and walked back, peering through the gap in the dense, piney bush, and spied the boy, his bathroom acquaintance, cutting across an open lot to the next street over.

He pushed his snow-laden blue hair of his eyes, making a mental note to buy more dye at the drugstore next time he went for bandages, and slipped through the bushes to follow the boy. Junhong didn't know what possessed him to follow the comforting figure, he was drawn like a grey moth to a bright light and he was tethered by an invisible string to this boy, this mystery, this enigma.

The walk got abruptly harder, heaps of snow lacking shoveling piled higher and higher as they walked further and further into the cold outreaches of town, passing the high-rises and condos, Junhong's own house, and then the more disreputable part of town was all around them and the boy in front of him relaxed. Junhong took advantage of a pause in the boy's stride, seemingly searching for a key, and emptied his boots of the accumulated snow. The brown-haired male hung his backpack on the fence outside the house he was in front of, so Junhong deduced he wouldn't be staying long. He hunkered down in his fleecy coat and waited.

After 15 minutes of bone-chilling cold and a sudden downpour of freezing rain, the boy walked back out of the house, lugging with him a seemingly heavy bag, brown paper handles straining under the weight of what they contained. Junhong had a strange urge to run and help him carry it, but stayed back, far behind, observing and biding his time. The boy was lopsided, listing to the side as he fought to balance the weight of the bag and the weight of his backpack as he stumbled down icy streets.

They walked for another mile, perhaps, until the handles of the bag broke. It hit the snow with a dull 'thump' even Junhong could hear from his hidey-hole a hundred yards back, and a myriad of cans and bottles spilled out. At least half the space in the bag must have been taken up by alcohol, he calculated, and the rest of it by a strange assortment of canned fruits and vegetables, boxes of dry pasta, and a couple of wry-looking potatoes.

Junhong could hear the boy's curses even through the muffling, blinding curtain of snow and watched regretfully as he crammed as much of the alcohol and food into his backpack and left the rest of it in the snow, dusted by a light powder of pure white. He continued on his arduous trek, and as Junhong passed the remainder of the bag's spilled contents he stuffed them into his own messenger bag, not wanting them to go to waste.

After another 45 minutes of silent stalking, the male turned a sharp corner and walked up a driveway Junhong hadn't noticed before, a mile out of town and obscured by snowfall. He could make out the shape of a house at the end of the drive, and he knew his journey neared its end. The boy trudged up the gravel-and-snow path, which looked to be recently shoveled or plowed, and pulled his keys out of his pocket.

He fumbled with them for a few seconds, cold-numbed fingers bumbling past the key he wanted to grasp, before locating it and shoving it rudely into the lock on the door. The door creaked as it opened and shut, rusty hinges disrupting the perfect silence of the countryside. Junhong saw a light turn on, in the farthest corner of the small house, and walked up to the door. They were miles from school, and he knew no one would see him out here unless they came out the door, right on top of him. He put his ear to the door, listening and feeling foolish.

Then the yelling started. He heard a young voice – it must be the boy's – and then a crash. A man's roar, deeper than the voice before, resounded around the small house and made the windows vibrate with force, and then it was silent. Junhong was in shock for a few seconds – coldly analytical and disbelieving, he pulled the cans and the booze out of his bag and sat them on the front step, backing away slowly. He stared at the silent house, eerily quiet now, and turned. He ran home.

Junhong's mother questioned him when he got home, not believing his hastily concocted excuse of being at a friend's house, and he just brushed her off. He sprinted up the stairs into his room, shutting the door as carefully as he could and picking his way across the mounds of papers that littered his floor. Pushing his blue covers off his bed, he lifted up the corner of his mattress and grabbed the little black bag in which he kept his razor. He ran, quickly and silently, to the back door and let himself outside again.

It got even colder as the darkness set in, the night black and star-studded, beautiful and deadly. He ran, nearly sprinting, the entirety of the few miles back to the blonde's little house in the country, obscured by even more snow but unmistakable on the barren landscape. Junhong stole quietly to the front door, his breath making clouds in the cold air as he fought to catch his breath.

The cans and bottles were gone, but their imprint was still fresh, meaning they'd been left out for a while. He sighed as he thought of the food, frozen solid, and moved to the left, to peek into the window. He pushed his blue hair aside and snuck a look inside, and was dully surprised by what he saw. The boy, his secret friend, humming and making dinner. He had a tawdry apron on, sequins running around the edges, and he was moving like a dancer as he stirred and poured, pirouetting from counter to counter.

There were fresh bruises on his arms, sore-looking red marks that would surely be purple by the next morning, and Junhong sighed in sympathy. He watched wistfully as his secret companion took a plate of mystery noodles into the living room adjacent to the kitchen, presumably feeding the man who had hurt him.

Junhong turned away from the window, walking down the long drive in silence. Half way down, he remembered what he was there to do. He walked back to the front door, and laid the bag with his razors in it on the front step. He looked at the little black package, and turned away. Without turning back, he walked the long walk home.

He came back to the little house every night that week, watching carefully. His mother stopped questioning him about his whereabouts. Junhong settled into a comfortable pattern, and was relieved to see that the extra food he'd taken to leaving on the brown haired male's doorstep was helping out as much as it was. The boy was putting on more muscles, and his ribs were slightly less visible through the fabric of his shirts. He smiled more, and his hair glimmered in the fluorescent lighting of their school.

Junhong, hesitant to engage the boy in any kind of conversation, kept his distance. He knew that the boy would have figured the identity of his secret benefactor out, seeing as Junhong had left a memento of their only time together on his steps. The male acknowledged him only once, when he was carrying his violin case and backpack into the music room, which he'd started to use again only the week before. He strode up to him, a bit self-conscious if the blush on his face was any indicator, and kissed him on the cheek.

Junhong didn't see him again until the school year was nearly over.