“Are you sure it’s okay?” Jonghyun demanded over the phone. “I can come and stay with you if you’d like. I don’t think that neighborhood is very safe, Kitten.”

I rolled my eyes.

It was Wednesday night, and since Jonghyun’s father was throwing some sort of business dinner party at their house, I had decided it would be better if I spent the night at my own house instead.

“Jonghyun, I’ve lived in this apartment for most of my life and I’ve been perfectly fine,” I told him. I was sitting on my sofa, my phone sandwiched between my shoulder and my ear, painting my toenails with some dark blue nail polish Amber had bought me over the weekend.

He didn’t seem convinced, even though, logically speaking, I was much better equipped to protect myself than he was. “Is your dad there?”

This earned him another eye roll from me, even though he couldn’t see it. “What do you think? Of course he’s not here. He’ll probably stumble home at four in the morning, drunk off his .”

There was a pause, and then Jonghyun said, “That’s it. I’m coming over.”

“Shut up and stop being dumb,” I grumbled, capping the nail polish and setting it aside. “You’ve got to make an appearance at your dad’s shindig and up to some big shots. I’ll be perfectly fine here.”

“You don’t even have a television,” he pointed out. “How on earth will you not be bored out of your mind?”

“Well,” I drawled, blowing on my toenails to try to get them to dry faster. “There’s this little thing called homework. I thought I’d do some. You should try it sometime.”

He barked out something that was a mixture of a scoff and a laugh. “Yeah, yeah. Fine. I’ll come pick you up in the morning.”

“There’s really no reason for you to do that,” I argued. “I’ll take the bus. I don’t want you to waste your gas on coming all the way out here.”

“But-” he started to argue.

“Goodnight, Jonghyun,” I interrupted him loudly.

He grumbled about it a bit, but eventually he told me goodnight and agreed that he would see me at school the following day and I was able to hang up my phone and toss it down onto the scratched and cluttered coffee table.

Since my nails were in the process of drying now, I pulled out my homework and started working on it. I had a lot, but it didn’t take me long to plow through it all when there was no Jonghyun to distract me. Once my homework was finished, I took a shower and then laid in bed, reading a book until my eyes grew heavy enough that I could fall asleep.

I wasn’t sure how long I had been asleep when I was woken by a heavy banging on my apartment door. I blinked sleepily, rubbing at my eyes, and glanced at the clock. It was nearly half past three in the morning, well past time when anyone should be visiting.

I climbed out of bed and checked my dad’s room to see if he had gotten home yet, as I didn’t quite feel comfortable dealing with loud strangers outside my door in the middle of the night. But his room was empty, the bed a disaster the way he always left it.

Nervously I crept closer to the door. Our apartment was old and hadn’t been updated in ages, so we didn’t have a security camera like most of the newer apartment buildings. So I had to press my eye to the peephole and hope that nobody was looking back.

What I saw on the other side of the door was two policemen, looking grim. While I looked on, the taller one reached up and knocked on the door again. “Ms. Song?” he called out.

I took a deep breath and opened the door a crack, leaving the chain in place. “What is it?” I asked.

The taller policeman looked at me through the little gap in the door. “Are you Song Narae?” he asked. “Is Song Heeseok your father?”

I unchained the door and opened it. “Oh god. What’s going on?”

“Your father was arrested earlier this evening,” the second police officer explained grimly.

I groaned. “What is it this time? Disorderly conduct? Public drunkenness? How much is his bail? I don’t have it right now, but I can get it.”

But the first policeman shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s a bit more serious than that. May we come in?”

So I stood aside and let them into the grungy apartment, a sinking feeling somewhere in the pit of my stomach.

“Your father was arrested for breaking and entering a private home,” the second policeman explained.

I groaned. Trust my father to get drunk and do something stupid like trying to rob somebody. It was a wonder he hadn’t done something like this before.

But that wasn’t all, apparently. The policeman continued, “He was armed, and fired his weapon several times with the intent of injuring or killing the owner of the house.”

Here I clapped my hand over my mouth. Breaking and entering was a bad enough charge in and of itself, but if you added attempted homicide to that then my father wasn’t going to have a bail I could ever afford. He might not even have bail at all.

“The charges he’s facing are pretty severe, Ms. Song,” the first policeman explained. “He’s being held at the province jail right now, and he’ll probably be tried within the week.”

The other officer spoke up. “Since you’re still underage, we’re going to have to ask you to come with us,” he said. “You’ll be placed with a foster family until your father goes to trial. After the judge decides his sentence, a more permanent home will be found for you until your birthday.”

The slow-building panic I had been experiencing since the policemen arrived outside my door suddenly erupted. I couldn’t be placed in a foster home. That would take me away from Jonghyun, from Seol Chong, from Yongguk and Zelo and my friends.

“But my school,” I blurted out. “I have a full scholarship to a really good school and I can’t miss any days or my scholarship will be forfeit! Can’t I stay with someone instead?”

They looked skeptically at each other. “Do you have any relatives nearby, Ms. Song?”

“Oh, yeah,” I lied. “My cousin lives just down the street. I can stay with him, no problem.”

Obviously the officers hadn’t had time to check through my familial history yet, so they didn’t know that I had no cousins. So they agreed. “Fine, you can stay with your cousin, but only until the trial. After that, a more permanent arrangement will have to be made. One that is legal.”

It was the best I was going to get considering the situation, so I swallowed the thick lump in my throat and nodded.

“Would you like us to drive you to your cousin’s house?” one of the policemen offered. “We can drive you there in our cruiser.”

“No thank you,” I said, and even though I wasn’t really a crier my voice was thick and uncomfortable. “It’s not far. I can walk.”

“This really isn’t the safest of neighborhoods,” the other officer said. “Let us drive you. I insist.”

So they waited in the living room while I got dressed and shoved some belongings into an overnight bag, and then I locked the front door behind me and got into the back of the police cruiser. They drove me the block to Yongguk’s building, then parked out front and watched until I went inside.

Even though it was closer to dawn than midnight by now, Yongguk answered the door after only a few seconds. At first he looked surprised to see me there – it wasn’t like me to show up at this time on a school night since I took my studies so seriously – but then he looked downright alarmed to see how upset I was.

“What the happened, Narae?” he demanded, pulling me inside. Himchan was sitting on the sofa, smoking a joint, but he, too, looked alarmed to see me there at that time and in that state.

I opened and closed my mouth several times but couldn’t quite make the words come out. I really hated to cry, but it seemed unavoidable now.

Eventually I forced out, “My dad got arrested.” My voice was cracking, and the tears were right there. “He’ll probably be sentenced to several years in prison this time… They want to put me in a f-foster home…” And then the tears did come, and I bawled like a baby.

My life was far from perfect. I could barely afford to survive sometimes and I was in a school where I was constantly having to prove my worth, but I had a lot of good things going for me too, like my boyfriend and my friends. If I had to go into a foster home, I wouldn’t get to see them anymore, and that hurt more than anything else.

Yongguk and Himchan were suitably alarmed by this revelation, and Yongguk muttered some choice words about my father under his breath, but they sandwiched me between them, petting my hair and whispering soothing words until my tears had subsided to nothing more than damp hiccups.

Once I had calmed down enough to actually speak, Himchan insisted that I drink some tea – and have a few hits off what remained of his blunt – and Yongguk asked me to explain what had happened.

So I explained about the cops showing up at my door and about the charges that were being brought against my father. And then I had to explain about how if he – and he most definitely would be – was found guilty, I would be sent to live in a foster home until I came of age, which was still months and months away.

“They can’t do that,” Yongguk said belligerently.

“They can, actually,” Himchan pointed out. “Narae is underage and, without any living relatives to take her in, she’ll become a ward of the state. I wish we could take her – you know we would in a heartbeat – but legally they wouldn’t allow it.”

“You could run away and just hide out here,” Yongguk suggested.

But I shook my head. “I can’t hide out and still go to school,” I said. “They’d know where to look for me. And whatever happens, I can’t not go to Seol Chong.” But then a new thought hit me, one that was almost as terrible as all the others whirling around in my head. “Oh my god! What if I’m expelled?”

Yongguk scoffed. “Why would they expel you? It’s not like you’re the one who got arrested.”

“To them I’d be guilty by association,” I muttered glumly, my hands clutching the chipped teacup tightly. “I’m already a pariah at that school. If it gets out that my dad is in jail…I don’t even know what they would do to me.”

“Can’t that boyfriend of yours protect you?” Yongguk demanded.

“He’d definitely try,” I muttered, but I wasn’t so sure that even Jonghyun could protect me from whatever -storm this would cause. Then I sighed. “I don’t know what to do. What should I do?”

Yongguk and Himchan exchanged a nervous look. “To be honest, nothing is coming to mind,” Himchan admitted. “When is your dad’s trial? Just lay low here until then. I mean, maybe he’ll get off?”

“Fat ing chance,” I muttered under my breath.

Even though I was anxious and worried, I must’ve fallen asleep at some point. When I woke up the following morning, it was long past when I was supposed to be at school. Himchan and Yongguk had fallen asleep too. My legs were stretched out across Himchan and my head was resting on Yongguk’s lap, his fingers threaded through my hair.

Even though I must have slept for a while, I felt drained and exhausted. I disentangled myself from my friends and went to take a shower. Yongguk and Himchan had woken up by the time I got out, pulling on one of Yongguk’s old sweatshirts that I’d been trying to steal from him for ages. Himchan was making a pot of coffee and Yongguk was perched on the sofa, smoking a cigarette.

“How are you feeling?” Yongguk asked me, pulling me onto the sofa next to him.

I shrugged. “Horrible,” I admitted, grabbing my phone out of my bag. “I’m so scared, Yongguk. I don’t know what to do. I don’t…”

He hugged me close and pressed a kiss to my forehead.

“,” I muttered, checking my phone. I had about a dozen missed calls and nearly a hundred text messages from Jonghyun. There were even a couple from Amber and Sunyoung, wanting to know where I was and why I hadn’t gone to school.

I didn’t want to tell them what had happened with my dad. For one thing, it was embarrassing. Sure their parents could be a bit unscrupulous, but their worst infractions were charging too much for their products. My father had gotten drunk off his and tried to shoot a guy whose house he broke into. I’d always been pretty embarrassed by my father – who wouldn’t be? – but I’d always gotten over it because, even if he wasn’t a very good one, he was my father. But this was too far.

For another thing, I didn’t want to tell them that there was a very real possibility that I was going to be sent away. There was a chance I wouldn’t get to finish out my schooling at Seol Chong, and that I wouldn’t get to see them again – at least until I came of age. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them.

But as I was sitting there, flipping through the various text messages now cluttering my inbox, my phone rang again. It was Jonghyun.

“You should answer that,” Yongguk said, nodding towards my phone. “He’s probably worried about you.”

“I thought you didn’t like him,” I grumbled.

“I don’t,” Yongguk agreed. “But he’s your boyfriend, right?” He patted me on the knee and got up to help Himchan in the kitchen.

I sighed and answered the phone. “H-hey…”

“Hey?!” Jonghyun practically exploded. “I’ve been calling you all morning! What the hell, Narae? Why aren’t you at school?”

Before I could stop it, a sniffle escaped.

Jonghyun changed tact immediately. “Oh my god, oh my god! Are you crying? What the hell is going on?”

I tried to answer him but suddenly there was a huge lump in my throat and I couldn’t quite form words.

“That’s it,” Jonghyun said. “I’m coming to your house right now.”

“D-don’t,” I managed to get out, and I hated the tremble in my voice. “I-I mean, I’m not there.”

“What do you mean you’re not there?!” Jonghyun demanded. “Where the hell are you?”

“I’m at Y-yongguk and Himchan’s,” I said, and there was that damn tremble in my voice again.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Jonghyun said firmly.

“N-no, wait-!” I tried, but he had already hung up on me.

It seemed like next to no time had passed before there was a banging on the door of Himchan and Yongguk’s apartment. It was Himchan who opened it, standing aside so Jonghyun could come in.

“I was wondering when you’d show up,” Himchan said. “She’s over there.”

Jonghyun looked positively haggard when he came in, and I burst into tears at just the sight of him. Whatever he had been expecting, I’m sure it wasn’t that. He looked at me, shocked, then at Himchan.

“Something has happened,” Himchan explained as Jonghyun sat next to me and wrapped his arm around me.

“M-my dad got arrested,” I managed to explain. “It’s for something really serious this time. I-I think he’s going to go to jail for a long time…That means that I-I’m going to have to live with a foster family…”

Jonghyun jumped, and I could tell that he was shocked by this news. He probably didn’t know much about the legal system when it came to things like this.

“What do you mean, a foster family?” he demanded.

“Like, a family that I’m not actually related to that will take me in until I come of age,” I explained. “Because I’m still a minor, I can’t live on my own and I don’t have any relatives to take me in.”

“No relatives?” Jonghyun repeated. “No aunts or uncles?”

“Not that I know of,” I muttered.

“What about your mom?” Jonghyun asked.

From the kitchen, Himchan whistled. “Dangerous territory there, my friend,” he called.

But it wasn’t Jonghyun’s fault. I’d never told him the truth about why my mom wasn’t around. “My mom left before I was even a year old,” I explained. “From what my dad told me, she fell in love with someone else and abandoned us. I don’t know who she is or where. I don’t even know if she’s still alive. That’s not an option.”

“Then come and live with me,” Jonghyun said. “You practically already live with me anyway.”

“I can’t,” I grumbled, wiping at my tears. “You’re not family. And you’re not a registered foster family. Even you can’t pull strings this time, Jonghyun.”

He grasped my hand, fully realizing the situation. “So…what’s going to happen?”

I sniffed again. “I-I don’t know…” I admitted. “My dad’s trial should be in a few days, but I know he’s not going to get acquitted. I…I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, Jonghyun…”

He pulled me to him, wrapping his arms around me comfortingly. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he promised.

And, even though I let him hug me and press kisses to my forehead, I knew it was a promise he couldn’t keep. Even someone as powerful as Kim Jonghyun couldn’t save me this time.