The silence in the kitchen was obvious by the time I’d pulled my phone away from my ears, staring down at the darkened screen of dial tones.

I wasn’t quite sure what call had been about, but something told me it wasn’t good. Daehyun hadn’t called me in four months; he probably wouldn’t have called me over for nothing.

“We’ll take my car.”

Himchan’s face was scrunched in worry as he regarded me carefully, as if he expected me to explode any second. Slipping away from Yongguk’s grip – they’d been near wrestling prior to Daehyun’s unexpected call – he stood to place a gentle hand on my shoulder. The way he held himself up, straight and stiff, told me that he knew exactly what had happened. Was I the only one who didn’t understand?

“But your classes,” I was making excuses at this point. In a sense, I guess I was scared to face Daehyun again, especially after all that time. “You’ll miss them because of me. You can’t afford that.”

Currently, Himchan stood at the top of his class, easily dominating the rest of the idiots – or so he called them – in his class. It was by this that he was able to maintain his scholarship, his only real reason for still attending lectures instead of finding a job like Yongguk. If he ditched class, he’d lose that scholarship along with his hopeful future.

And it’d be all because of me.

“No way,” Yongguk interrupted as Himchan’s mouth popped open for a reply, “you’re going to class. I’ll take him.” We could both tell that Himchan was going to complain again, blabbing some bull about how I was his problem and his only to deal with. The look in Yongguk’s eyes was what made him shut his mouth again, nodding slowly before pressing his car keys into Yongguk’s hand, whispering hurriedly between each other. (I could just barely make out the words ‘Take care of them for me,’ between their hushed back-and-forth.)

Giving me a firm clasp to the shoulder, Himchan then took off for class, glancing back only one last time at Yongguk and me before rushing out the door to catch the bus we never really took. And it was a second later that Yongguk reappeared from his bedroom with a jacket over his black wife-beater and a hat thrown over his bedhead that we began out the apartment door to my brother’s car.

The ride back to our old neighborhood was silent.

I didn’t have much to say and Yongguk was kind enough to respect that. He didn’t pry, instead opting to let me drown in my thoughts and imaginations. The only real conversation we had inside Himchan’s beat up Hyundai – that he somehow had been able to snag up for a quarter of its original price – was where we were headed. I’m sure he’d tried reassuring me that everything was probably okay (and that Daehyun just missed me), but I’d drowned out his concern, staring blankly out the window as the other cars whooshed by. I hoped everything was okay.

The second the car stopped in front of the park, I was struggling to undo my seatbelt, cursing to myself when it wouldn’t unbuckle nearly fast enough for my tastes. With Yongguk hollering after me to call him if anything went wrong, I took off down the too familiar road, huffing a little from my lack of exercise.

The usual place at the park. You remember it, right?

I did remember it. It had been the place Daehyun (along with Jongup, Junhong too sometimes tagging along) and I always met up. We’d joked about how it was beginning to become our usual meeting place and how we should someday put up a landmark for it. How could I forget?

By the time the big tree and the bench came into view, I was huffing. Sweat was clinging to my lashes and beading around the bridge of my nose. I was a mess, like a sweating pig. But I didn’t even notice it at all, focusing only on the slouched boy seated in the middle of our bench, where I would usually sit in wait for the group.

Something was clearly wrong.

“Daehyun!”

He looked up, immediately, and just by the look he held in his eyes, I knew something was wrong. So very wrong.

He was pale, tanned skin flushed to a nearly scary state and his eyes drooped, a fountain of emotions I couldn’t read pooling them with tears. Was he crying? Had he been crying? Daehyun sat on the bench with a near painful hunch, not caring if his favorite suit – the one that Jongup had picked out for him – was crinkled in the process.

Upon seeing me, he straightened up a little, his lips parting to a small ‘o’, before he stood up, near running into me as I approached him.

His arms automatically, as if practiced, wound around my waist as he dropped his head into the crook of my neck, shaking. Something wet was hitting my shoulder, and I could only assume that he was crying. Jung Daehyun, the boy who never cried, was crying.

I did my best to sooth him, not knowing what exactly was wrong. I let him soak my jacket in tears as I led him back to the bench to sit. While I wasn’t sure what was going on, something obviously wasn’t right. Whispering into his ear, I hushed his garbled whimpers, placing steady pats on his back as he had those years back in high school. He could explain later, when he was more ready.

“J-Jongup’s not here,” he constantly sobbed, squeezing the dear life out of my forearm, gasping for breath in between his chants, “he’s not here Youngjae. Jongup isn’t here.”

I wasn’t too sure what he was talking about. Of course Jongup wasn’t here. Was he at home? Not knowing what else to say, I hushed him instead, asking him as gently as possible where Jongup could possibly be. It took thirty minutes of that same answer before I could drag something else out of him.

“He’s gone Youngjae. Jongup’s dead.” Saying this, he shot up to stare up at me, his bottom lip quivering, “And I killed him. It’s all my fault.”