It had been unfair of me, coxing the answer out of Jaebum. After that last time at school, I hadn’t once bothered calling – nor answering his calls. In all ways I possibly could, I’d broken contact with him, leaving him with an ugly black eye – Daehyun’s doing – and not a proper answer. In the end, I justified my actions with just the idea that he and Jiyeon would do just fine without me in his life. And now, I was calling him, using him, for my own selfish needs.

I really was the lowest of the low.

“We were seven,” Jaebum began, swirling his cup of coffee in his hands, recalling the memory with a sour grimace. “And he’d gotten into a fight with his parents again. He always got into fights with them. They always wanted him to study, but Daehyun’d never really been much of an educational kid,” he paused, looking up at me, “but you know that better than I do.

“Anyways, he’d gotten into a bigger fight with his parents than usual. It was the same ideal as always. He’d done something to hurt his tutors – mentally and physically, he was good at that – and his parents were going through their usual screwed way of discipline.”

Growing up, I’d never known too much about Daehyun; I knew he was Jaebum’s best friend, but that had been about it. But if there was one thing that everyone knew, it was his parents were beyond crazy come in their sense of discipline. Several days at a time, I’d watched Jaebum walk the cul-de-sac alone, hands shoved in his pockets and lonely without a Jung Daehyun there to follow.

I remembered calling him a stupid fart brain – or something along those lines – for leaving Jaebum alone.

“Usually he sat through it pretty well without too much of a fight. He’d complain like a little girl after he was let out again, but he flipped out that night.” Here, again, he paused, thoughtful, “Something about not wanting to look stupid or something. Though, I don’t remember ever calling him stupid for dealing with his parents’ .

“He called me up that night. Apparently, he was running away. He’d supposedly packed his bags and was outside waiting for me. When I got there, lil’ Jongup – he was five at the time, if I remember correctly – was clinging to his legs, bawling for Daehyun not to go. I’m sure he wasn’t really running away, just faking it for a day or two, but Jongup took it seriously, and he was practically begging us not to go.

“And … … I guess it’s sort of my fault what happened to Jongup too, cause I didn’t stop Daehyun. We grabbed his bags and headed to our lil’ hide out,” a little tree house built by Jaebum’s dad off behind his house, “Jongup wanted to go too, since he all but worshipped Daehyun, but we had better ideas. We didn’t really want a little kid on our tails to tell us off. But Daehyun was a lil’ harsh, pushing Jongup like that.”

It was a little hard to imagine, with the way Daehyun treated Jongup now, that he had pushed him away like that.

“He yelled at the kid a little too. Jongup was pretty much screeching like a banshee by the time we were on our bikes. He was chasing us the whole time, trying to keep up. We … … we didn’t know he was just mindlessly following us though.”

I had trouble keeping up with Jaebum’s story from here, his words messing up to garbles of illegible whines (I swore I heard him beg Jongup for forgiveness somewhere in between his story).

“We didn’t know the car’d even hit him until he stopped screaming.”