It was hours later that Daehyun finally called back; by then, I’d finally managed to escape my parents’ scolding and escape into my room. He was lucky his parents’ didn’t care much for his grades.

“Sorry it took so long to call back,” he sighed through the line, “he didn’t want to go to sleep.”

Daehyun must’ve had some sort of a brother complex or something. “It’s fine,” I grumbled, crumpling down onto my bed with a whine; my shoulders ached from sitting up for the whole of the test. But that wasn’t the problem here, “What’re you going to do about your scores. You can’t just not go to college.”

“And why not?”

He really knew just how to choke me out of my words. How was I supposed to reply to that? “Do you want to man the register your whole life? What about when you get a family? Your wife? Kids?” I ran a hand through my hair. I didn’t much have a right to lecture him about this. It wasn’t as if I was doing such an amazing job with my life either. “You need to go to college Daehyun.”

Silence followed me on the line, fuzzy whines of breath sounding distant across the line. For once, I couldn’t picture his expression from the other side. What exactly was going on in his mind?

“What about your brother? He’d probably want you to go to colle –”

“Youngjae, he’s sick,” Daehyun hissed, making me bounce a little in surprise. Daehyun never got mad at me. Never. “What he wants right now, shouldn’t win over the fact that he needs to get better!”

I bit down on my bottom lip. I hadn’t meant to upset him – Daheyun of all people. “Sorry,” I hadn’t meant it that way. From our previous conversations, I’d always known that Daehyun had had some sort of an obsession over his younger brother; I shouldn’t have bothered him about it.

Hearing my whine, he mumbled out a sort of an apology, shifting his phone from one side to the other (as he always seemed to do when he lacked things to say). We sat in silence for a minute, hearing each other breath (plus the smaller whimpers from Daehyun’s side) before he broke the silence, changing the subject. “I don’t have work tomorrow. I’m taking my brother to the park since he hasn’t left the house in forever. Do you wanna tag along? He’s wanted to meet you for a while now.”

“I thought you said he was sick.”

“He is, but the air’ll do him some good. He always liked going outside.”

I considered this for a minute. Maybe I should just let him alone. He must’ve been asking just for the sake of being polite.

“Please Youngjae?”

Then again.

I sighed, rolling around on the mattress to press my face into the pillow. “Fine.”