Baekhyun knew exactly what Kyungsoo had been doing. It wasn’t hard to tell, because while Kris hovered over the GPS and his cell phone, and Lu Han took photos holding the camera wrongly, Baekhyun was free to observe Kyungsoo’s frequent trips to the washroom. This time he watched as Kyungsoo tried to walk as quickly as he could to the rest stop. Baekhyun considered it for a moment, before he got up and followed behind. 

He found Kyungsoo doubled over in a cubicle, almost kneeling but not. In his hurry he’d forgotten to lock the door behind him and Baekhyun stood there, watching like he always did. Kyungsoo heaved and retched for a moment more, then turned around to face him. They looked at each other in the silence of the restroom, the rest stop still a moving, buzzing world around them, until Kyungsoo broke it to wipe his mouth off the back of his hand. “Don’t you ing dare…” his words broke off mid-sentence while Baekhyun reached for his arm and helped him up. 


Something like this had happened to an acquaintance once. Baekhyun remembered Chorong from their church always expanding and deflating like a balloon. His cousin had found her collapsed over in a cubicle once during a church camp and by the end of it everyone knew about her and her weird case of bulimia. Chorong moved up north by the end of the summer. Baekhyun didn't understand why Kyungsoo was trying to hide it—he knew no one here and no one would force him out anywhere. This was America, not the part of K-Town that Baekhyun used to live in back in their city that was miles and miles away now. Kyungsoo was being stupid, but Baekhyun found it strangely entertaining. Perhaps now he did really have a limit and Baekhyun knew it anyway, anyhow, right from the start, because everyone had one and Kyungsoo, however brilliant and excellent, was too flesh and blood. 



Baekhyun washed his hands slowly and waited for Kyungsoo to exit his cubicle. They would do this every time Kris pulled over at a rest stop, and Baekhyun found it funny that nobody else would notice. There was the snap of a lock being pushed back, and Kyungsoo walked over slowly to wash his hands. Baekhyun could see the way he was shaking and sweating, an illness that he couldn’t understand. Kyungsoo looked up at him through the mirror, and Baekhyun shrugged. “So, how long have you been doing this?” He asked and was sure Kyungsoo would tell. 

“High school.” He did. Kyungsoo wiped his hands on his jeans, dark blue turning even darker from the water imprints. He stared at them and further down at his red sneakers. They too were from high school. Too many things began when he was in high school. Baekhyun nodded thoughtfully. 

“Must hurt.” He said it like it was nothing. Baekhyun had a way of dismissing things without sounding patronizing. There was a small smile on Kyungsoo’s face as he nodded again. 

“When you’re used to it, it doesn’t hurt anymore.” Kyungsoo’s eyes were slightly glazed over as their sights met in the mirror again. It was covered with stains and mould. “I might actually like it now.” 

Sick. “You sound like a ing poet.” Baekhyun laughed and clapped a hand on Kyungsoo’s back, and they walked out of the restroom. Kyungsoo’s skin did not radiate heat through the thin of his t-shirt—Baekhyun found him inexplicably cold, like an ice cube, like he wasn’t very real. 

“You’re not going to tell anyone, right?” Kyungsoo asked again as they approached the Hyundai. Baekhyun shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and shrugged. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. He found nothing to be ashamed of in this, but Kyungsoo was waiting for an answer. So he did something that was more of a tip of the head than anything else, and Kyungsoo seemed satisfied enough with that.





Lu Han snapped a picture off the roof of Kris’s car. The sun was boiling hot, and Kris glared at him off the side of the car. “Get off my car.” He said before reaching over to pull at Lu Han’s leg, and he slid off without much of a protest. Kris was slightly interested in whatever Lu Han was taking photos of, mainly because Lu Han was holding the camera all wrong. 

“Oh wow, pictures we took over New Year.” Lu Han said, scrolling through his previous photos. Kris’s family never celebrated Chinese New Year, because it was just him and his mother, while his grandparents lived somewhere in Guangzhou. Over the years they’d grown old enough to be afraid of long haul flights and his mother would never go back to the mainland. So they treated it as they would any other cash-making holiday and it wasn’t important to them. 

But Kris remembered the times when he would dress up in new clothes and red packets being stuffed into his hands at every turn. It was exactly like the pictures that he was now leaning over Lu Han to take a look at. Lu Han gave him a weird look, and Kris retracted back to his driver’s seat. There was a can of beer from the night before in the cup holder but now it was too hot to touch. 

“You celebrate it here?” Lu Han asked, and put his camera down. It dangled around his neck, a lens too big and too professional for him to handle. Kris knew it was just an accessory but within it at least it contained blurry, high-resolution photos of people that Lu Han had fond memories of. He had nothing. So Kris shook his head. “No. America’s not big on this.” Lu Han couldn’t give up though, and kept right on at it: “But you live near K-Town! Where all the Asians are, right?” Kris ignored the question and swiped his phone to life. 

“Chinese New Year dinners are the best.” Lu Han continued. Kris didn’t want to admit it, but they were. His grandmother used to cook up a feast, and he was the seven year old who went out distributing chopsticks and bowls of rice. They would eat together with aunts and granduncles he no longer remembered anything about except that they smelled of citrus and sometimes very badly rolled-up smokes. His memories seemed to blend in faultlessly with whatever Lu Han was saying, like they were the one and the same, like they’d experienced the same things because they were cut from the same cultural fabric. And that scared Kris. 

“Get back in.” He snapped at Lu Han. Kris couldn’t afford it, to think that they were the same. Lu Han scared him in the sense that he would have been Lu Han. The would have beens terrified Kris, and he pressed down hard on the pedal as they turned right and back onto the highway. He would run away, but the car confined him.






Kyungsoo sat in the space between the two beds of their tiny motel room. Baekhyun and Kris were drinking on one side and Lu Han was looking through his camera on the other. He didn’t want to join either side, so Kyungsoo figured that the best game plan was to sit in the middle and thumb through his iPod, listening to his English podcasts on the lowest volume possible. He could hear Baekhyun talking about his ex-girlfriend, the one on his phone wallpaper. “I keep it to remind myself to have better taste,” Baekhyun laughed, and Kris clinked cans with him. Kyungsoo thought they were almost drunk already, bright eyes and stupid words and all. 

Lu Han looked up like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t in the end. Baekhyun wasn’t somebody that would take words from anybody. Kyungsoo knew it, because Baekhyun occasionally asked him about his problem in the car, and he couldn’t say anything otherwise. He had to answer Baekhyun, because logically nobody else understood them. But what if they did? He was doing the exact same thing to Lu Han. Kyungsoo’s stomach churned at the thought. 

“How’s your stomach today, Kyungsoo?” Baekhyun asked, suddenly. He’d switched to Korean, and Kris was watching amusedly at the side. They probably thought this was an affectionate conversation about something funny. Kyungsoo blanched. “Good,” he mumbled. Baekhyun wasn’t reneging on his promise, and he hated him for repeatedly abusing the loophole. But he wasn’t breaking his promise and that was good enough for Kyungsoo. No expectations were good expectations.

Kris stretched himself out on the bed, and Kyungsoo inched himself towards Lu Han. “What?” Kris liked to make his syllables as sharp as possible. To the Korean trained tongue it was impossible to replicate, and Kyungsoo tried to listen to his iPod teaching him how to pronounce “vegetables” instead. Baekhyun shrugged and downed the can, shaking it for the very last few drops. 

“Kyungsoo…” Baekhyun looked over at Kyungsoo, and the English podcast resonated in his ears. V-e-g-e-t—he froze and waited for Baekhyun to complete his sentence. Kyungsoo was afraid of too many things, but most of all he was afraid that Baekhyun would toss him aside. They were not friends—didn’t even know each other, only last names and that was it, not how many members they had in their families or the dates of their birth even—but Baekhyun had become the person he was clinging on to the most in the world. Kris aimed and threw his can at the trashcan. It landed out. “Nothing.” That was all Baekhyun said in the end. 





Lu Han could not sleep that night, so he huddled up in the only chair in the room and hunched over his cell phone. He’d gotten a Facebook account the first night he came over to America, and insisted the fellow Chinese students sign up for one too. Now he thumbed through his feed, and there were very few updates from them. He’d forgotten about the Great Firewall, and Lu Han read statuses from his Japanese and Thai classmates instead before signing into their own version of the social network. Their country was great for that, making their own crappier versions of everything and anything. This time everybody was online, joyous blobs of green that signaled their willingness to talk. Lu Han couldn’t remember the last time anybody in this group was disposed to talk to him very much. 

Yixing was one of the Chinese students sent to study English, from Changsha and not a very fast learner. Lu Han clicked on his name and typed in a Hello!. Exclamation marks always made one sound friendlier on the Internet. Yixing replied a few minutes later, with a more muted Hi. He was never really the happy sort, Lu Han thought. 

He punched in a Where are you are you near school now? and waited for a reply. In the bed directly opposite Kris was curled up to the right, while Baekhyun lay beside with his mouth slightly open. Their feet were almost on top of each other, and Lu Han thought that if they were part of the sort of music his younger cousin listened to it would be a scene straight out of fan fiction. His phone buzzed and Yixing’s name leapt about on the screen. I’m in Changsha. What school? Lu Han frowned at his answer. Yixing was also supposed to be a literature student. They had done the online registration together during the last day of language school, and Lu Han had no idea why Yixing sounded like he should have known. They were supposed to be in America, right here, right now. 

On the bed they shared Kyungsoo flipped over and he instinctively clutched his phone tighter, before remembering that he already had it on vibrate mode. It was quiet, again. The frequency of this was becoming so often that even Lu Han felt stifled. It wasn’t supposed to be this way—Lu Han had imagined it so often that it should have been reality. He was supposed to have fit in so seamlessly and effortlessly, not be constantly trapped in extended periods of silences with people who could understand what he was saying but pretended not to. This was not the America that he loved, and for once Lu Han was frustrated with it. He stared right into the darkness, the three outlines of bodies elongated in shadow, cell phone gripped so hard in his hand that when it vibrated again Lu Han could feel it in his upper arm and it hurt. 

He tapped open the message and it jumped out at him in black text. I’m not going to study in America. I told you that the other day. Yixing’s replies read properly, Lu Han could fully understand what each character meant, but he could not comprehend what Yixing was trying to tell him. 


> But you registered, right?
Things have changed. 
> What?
I can’t stay in America any more. It’s too expensive. 
> But you were there for an entire year. 
That was before. God Lu Han are you getting what I’m trying to say? I can’t go back to America. Ever. 
> But you a
Lu Han you have to deal with the ing fact that not all of us are like you. America was great yes but when my parents can’t afford it I just have to come back. You’re so ing obsessed with being American you can’t see it can you? 


You can’t be American. 
You’re ing Chinese like all of us. 








Kris woke up before anyone else did. The room was completely dark, save for the bathroom light that Kyungsoo had forgotten to turn off the night before. He tried to not wake Baekhyun beside him but as soon as he moved his left leg, Baekhyun was up. Kris sat up and tugged at the curtains before deciding against it. There was no point in waking everyone up at—he glanced at his cell phone, 47 percent battery life left—three in the morning. He seemed to be suffering from some sort of odd insomnia, because sleep didn’t matter to him very much now. Baekhyun coughed, and Kris pulled away. 

They decided to go finish up the rest of the six-packs that Minseok had gifted them with. The sole of Kris’s sneakers scuffed against the asphalt as he and Baekhyun walked towards the car. Baekhyun had his hands shoved into the pocket of his hoodie, and watched silently as he unlocked the boot and lifted it open. The vodka was half finished, and Baekhyun took a swig while Kris tore open the packaging on the six-pack—their penultimate one. Kris didn’t feel like they were going too fast, he only regretted that the age on his card wouldn’t tick upwards until the end of December this year. Baekhyun hoisted himself on the car boot as soon as Kris slammed it down, and handed him the vodka.

He and Baekhyun didn’t need to talk much. When they did Kris often found himself privy to suggestions by Baekhyun that ranged from plain stupid to reckless. Baekhyun didn’t seem to have any second thoughts about doing anything. Sometimes Kris felt like he would go with it, but thought of his mom and potentially getting his car taken away, and that would stop him. Today Baekhyun was plying him with beer and eyeing the grocery store behind them with interest. Kris worked his way steadily through the cans, then tore open the very last one. Baekhyun popped one open while Kris finished the remainder of the vodka. He was feeling warm already, that fuzzy feeling worming its way through the rest of his body. 

“When I was younger the older boys would always do this,” Baekhyun suddenly said, “sit out in the open and do .” Kris nodded. He was probably talking about the bunch of boys that had gone off to college a few years before them. Kris remembered the name of one of them because he was always hanging around in Chinatown trying to chase after the daughter of one of his mother’s friends. Junmyeon, or something. He remembered it only because it had a Chinese ring to it. 

Kris crushed his empty can and said, “You always seem to have fun.” Baekhyun shrugged. It wasn’t the case, he explained. “When you have a father who’s constantly reminding you that you caused your brother’s death, it just seems appropriate to have fun. You know, to get over it.” Baekhyun said it with a smile, like always, but Kris saw it flash in the glow of the street light and felt cold. He wondered if this was better than knowing about a father but not actually knowing him. Baekhyun looked at him over his can, like he was waiting for a reply. “I don’t have a dad.” Kris decided to say that because it sounded more neutral than comforting. Baekhyun continued to smile: “You’re lucky.” Kris didn’t feel that way, but reached over for a new can and drank some more. It now felt like he’d a small peek into the inner workings of Baekhyun but he couldn’t see much. Or maybe he was just drunk already. Kris went with the latter. 



“Want to do something fun?” Baekhyun’s eyes were slightly bloodshot and glinted with something he couldn’t refuse. So they did. 


Baekhyun smashed through the store windows first. Then he turned around and it was Kris’s turn. The stick was damp with Kris’s sweat in his hand, and he watched as he swung and hit, glass spraying in all directions like his garden hose gone crazy whenever he managed the lawn back home. It was sort of beautiful in his eyes, and he swung again. The alarm didn’t ring, maybe because they were in a small town and nobody bothered with security, and it emboldened him to continue. The adrenaline rushed through him, speeding up into his hands, his head, and Kris felt a savage sort of relief at watching the glass fly, cutting through the air and scattered all over the floor. Destruction was beautiful, and when Baekhyun laughed from the sheer thrill of it he did too, the sound reverberating through his eardrums. Kris panted as they walked like nothing had happened through the lobby of the motel, but his hands gripped tight around the one shard of glass that had found its way into his wrist, and the texture of the blood all dried up told him otherwise. Something had happened, and he was it.





“Self destruction is ok,” Baekhyun said to him five hours later on the road, “we all do that.” Kris couldn’t deny it at all. 







Baekhyun probed at Kyungsoo like he was an experiment in a petri dish. In many ways he was like one. A product of testing by the most vigorous methods to produce a perfect child capable of studying and showcasing only the emotions that his makers wanted. But somewhere along the way Kyungsoo got jacked up, the bad way. He wasn’t perfect now even though he’d like to think otherwise, and Baekhyun found that fascinating. He would bring up the bulimia issue again and again when they were with Lu Han and Kris, and every time Kyungsoo would freeze up but still answer. Why didn’t he swing a fist at him? Baekhyun wondered as he poked at the leather covering of Kris’s car seats. He wondered what it would take for Kyungsoo to tip over the edge, and maybe produce some heat of his own, like the way he’d gotten jacked up when the glass cleaved through his skin last night. His fingertips could still feel the clamminess of Kyungsoo’s skin through his shirt. 

Kyungsoo had his earphones on again. Baekhyun knew that he was constantly listening to podcasts for learning English, but he’d never seen Kyungsoo try and practice saying any of them aloud. Kyungsoo, Baekhyun thought, was even more interesting because of this. He was trying to hold on to vestiges of self control when he was already ravaged by a disease that warranted him no such thing. Baekhyun didn’t believe in self-resolve too much. Kyungsoo liked sticking to the rules, apparently. He knew nothing much about the boy, but Baekhyun wanted to know how far he could be pushed. That was Baekhyun’s philosophy in life: get over or get under. There had to be a limit in everybody’s life and it was Baekhyun’s personal goal to find every one of these. He pushed and poked and pulled and if it caused pain then it was something for the person to overcome. Baekhyun saw the limits in everybody’s lives but failed to see his own. They wouldn’t come to him, and he wondered where and how he would hurt if anyone ever found his own. They said that he wasn’t supposed to be unhappy, and Baekhyun supposed that the only reason that he was even remotely happy was because he wasn’t, yet. 

He leaned over and pulled the ear bud out of Kyungsoo’s left ear. “How’s your stomach today, Kyungsoo?” He whispered in Korean, and watched as Kyungsoo blanched white again. It seemed to be a reflex already, and Baekhyun leaned back into his corner, amused for now.






What was he, then? Kris couldn’t stop thinking about it. What exactly was he? He’d asked Baekhyun under the pretext of a faux deep conversation when he was taking a smoke outside, and Baekhyun had simply said “a Californian dude”. That was simple enough for Baekhyun, but not complex enough for Kris. He wanted concrete proof that he was part of something, a community with established roots and cultures and not part of an extended connection that was based off the colour of his skin. The lines between he and Lu Han blurred enough that Kris sometimes saw himself in Lu Han whenever he turned around to glance at the mirror off the passenger’s side of the car. Baekhyun scoffed at the idea: “He’s just Chinese.” He said it loud enough that Lu Han could hear him from his side of the car, where he was taking pictures again with the wretched camera that was too large for him. 



Lu Han heard the jibe at him, of course. But he had nothing to say about it while Yixing’s messages read themselves aloud in his voice in Lu Han’s head. They repeated themselves over and over until he wanted to slam his head against the car, but Kris would take umbrage with it. Lu Han had nothing to say about that either. 

He couldn’t help himself. It was in the afternoon, when the clouds had battered the sky in complete whiteness and they were the only ones awake. Baekhyun snored softly in the seat behind and Lu Han set his eyes on the stud embedded in Kris’s right ear. He couldn’t help it: “Do you hate me?” Kris’s jaw tightened, and Lu Han heard the GPS tell them to continue going straight. Highways were defined lines in states and between them but the ones between him and Kris were not. He didn’t understand anything about himself anymore and wanted someone else to tell him otherwise. But Kris just pretended he couldn’t understand the one language they were born to speak, and kept on going. 








Baekhyun felt like it was right to do it now. There was no particular reason to it, but everything just felt right. Baekhyun didn’t need reasons, he thought. Kyungsoo’s eyes were averted downwards like he was deep in thought. So he reached over and jerked the earphones out of his ears: “Kyungsoo, why don’t you tell everyone about your bulimia?”




Baekhyun said it like he wasn’t a menace; just somebody eager for a proper discussion, and Kris pulled the car to an abrupt stop. Kyungsoo stared at him, blood rushing in his ears, deaf to everything else except the way Baekhyun had said it—soft syllables, no trace of any Korean heritage at all, why did he think that Baekhyun would have stuck to his promise, they were nothing to each other—and Baekhyun’s mouth moved again, up and down. Then Kyungsoo leapt at him with a yell and punched Baekhyun as hard as he could in the face. He went for the nose like it was an automatic reflex, and he was happy to hear the sickening crush of bone meeting bone. Either Lu Han or Kris was yelling in the back, but they sounded miles away to him. All that mattered to Kyungsoo now was his hand curled around Baekhyun’s collar and swinging the other hard enough so that it would collide with Baekhyun’s face every time. The blood was sticky on his knuckles, bleeding into the teeth marks that had been there since high school. But Kyungsoo didn’t care. He was throwing all caution to the wind like Baekhyun did, and the savagery racing through him pressed him on.





Kris kicked the door open in his hurry while Lu Han did the same thing on his right. Kyungsoo and Baekhyun had rolled out of the car and into the grassy mounds just up ahead, and with every step he took running towards them Kris could hear the cries of Kyungsoo, garbled in a language he did not understand. Lu Han reached them first and tried to pull Kyungsoo off, but couldn’t because Kyungsoo just kicked him to the side instead. Kris could see the crazed expression on Kyungsoo’s face between blows, and the blood running down the smile on Baekhyun’s. They were insane, and he reached over to pull Lu Han up. 

“Stop them!” Lu Han’s breath was heavy, and Kris pulled him back before he could rush off again. This time they heard the sickening crack, like somebody had broken something. It wasn’t hard to guess who had. Kris wanted to stay out of it—it was none of their business—but Lu Han lunged at Kyungsoo again, and got struck in the face another time. Baekhyun wasn’t even attempting to fight back, and Kris shoved Lu Han off to the side. “It’s between them,” he said while Lu Han’s right cheek swelled up rapidly. Lu Han glared at him like he was trash, and shook his arm off. “You know it’s never been that way, Kris.” For the very first time, Lu Han pronounced his name with the correct intonation. 





Baekhyun couldn’t feel the pain any longer. The blood blinded him, streaks of red in his vision, and the smell of iron in his lungs. Kyungsoo didn’t let up at all, and Baekhyun didn’t feel the need to raise an arm in defense. It was getting harder to breathe because his nose had been broken a moment before. Through the red he saw Kyungsoo’s face, feral and wild, like he wanted him to die. Baekhyun admitted that he was pushing for this—this was exactly what he wanted Kyungsoo to do. To beat the hell out of him for ing around with him. Kyungsoo didn’t disappoint, Baekhyun thought as Kyungsoo slammed his knuckles into his cheeks again and again. It didn’t hurt anymore, but Baekhyun wanted it to. 

“Tell me,” Kyungsoo roared and shook him by the collar. Baekhyun flopped around like a rag doll, the sun behind Kyungsoo now casted right into his eyes. Kyungsoo was a shadow before him that he couldn’t see well, a shadow that morphed into his brother’s face whenever he wasn’t prepared enough. All of them turned into hyung whenever he didn't notice, all of them people he played around with, pushed and pulled and manipulated to see whether they would fight back at him. None of them did. Why were all of them exactly like hyung? Why did all of them leave him to his devices, like hyung did? Except hyung one-upped him—he left permanently, forever, so that Baekhyun couldn’t do anything or even say sorry. His brother had died. That was the ultimate limit one person could have and Baekhyun could never top that. Kyungsoo swung again. “You ing tell me!”

The sun seemed to get a little brighter as Kyungsoo pulled him up by the collar. The cloth cut into the back of Baekhyun’s neck, and he coughed, blood staining the inside of his throat. Perhaps this was what Kyungsoo felt like on a daily basis. Baekhyun watched through the slits of his eyes—all swollen now, did hyung feel this way when his car crashed into the tree at ninety five miles an hour, stomach pumped full of the alcohol he’d insisted on making him drink?—as Kyungsoo screamed his question over and over. But Baekhyun didn’t know. He had no right answer that would placate Kyungsoo, that would make him hit harder and let everything be set right. So he said what he wanted to for once, Baekhyun thought as Kyungsoo stared straight into the depths of his bloodied eyes:

“I want to die.”





He had wanted to die since the very beginning of high school. But Kyungsoo never had the courage to put a blade to his wrist, or to take too many sleeping pills, or to tie a knot with his bed sheets and hang it from his ceiling. Kyungsoo was a coward—and so was Baekhyun. All of that casualness about Baekhyun was cover for his cruelness, Kyungsoo thought, for his inability to even know what he wanted. Baekhyun was worse than he was, because at least Kyungsoo knew he wanted to die by his own hand. Baekhyun wanted it forced upon him so that he would be guiltless. With this realization Kyungsoo dropped it. He dropped Baekhyun to the ground and disgust washed over him, at whom he didn’t even know, but he looked at his bloodied hands and Baekhyun’s unrecognizable face and was overwhelmed. What had he done? It was a question from Kyungsoo and to Kyungsoo. 

Somebody pushed him off Baekhyun and he stared at his hands some more, knees folded under him. The strength had drained away from him—he now had not even the energy to lift himself up from the ground. Kyungsoo looked up at Lu Han, who had a swollen cheek and no expression. His mouth twitched, and Kyungsoo wanted to scream. But he no longer had the voice, his throat now stuck together. Nothing came out even when he strained—Kyungsoo was locked within himself. Baekhyun was still lying on his back, and Kyungsoo could see his smile. It was infinite—his grief and cowardice would be infinite. And so would Kyungsoo’s. Lu Han knelt down beside him and Kyungsoo could feel the warmth of his palm on his shoulder. He said something in Chinese Kyungsoo could never begin to understand because he was afraid that it would not be what he wanted it to be, but it was enough. So he held on to Lu Han’s arm and began to cry. 





Kris looked down at Baekhyun. He was in horrible shape, broken nose, blood running into his eyes—Kyungsoo hadn’t laid up at all. It was hard to feel sympathy for Baekhyun, Kris thought, while Kyungsoo was sobbing quietly in the background. But he knew it—he had known that Baekhyun was doing it on purpose but he did nothing to prevent it. Kris was guilty all the same, because he had known about it. Suddenly there was no more reason to look down on Lu Han or Kyungsoo or Baekhyun, because they were all the same. Cowards. Bullies. Baekhyun looked up at him, still smiling. It was this damned wistful smile that Kris never liked; the one that said Baekhyun knew that he knew. Kris loomed over him, tall and not speaking, until Baekhyun reached an arm upwards and whispered: “You look like my brother.” 

















It wasn’t hard for Lu Han to readjust to school. He took three days to settle in and figure out how to use the coin operated washing machines, but apart from that he was fine. Sometimes words and pronunciation still daunted him, but Lu Han was now in the habit of listening to the English podcasts Kyungsoo sent to him via email. Their campuses were in proximity of each other, and sometimes they would have dinner together. Lu Han would drive, and Kyungsoo would still not talk much, but they managed well. Lu Han thought it a precursor to healing. Baekhyun he never saw again, but he didn’t find it a pity. Maybe next time, when the scars were less obvious and they had learnt how to derive better control over them. Kyungsoo called them “monsters”, the sides that had emerged on the car ride to college. Lu Han couldn’t find a better name for it. 

Kyungsoo messaged him again, in grammatically perfect English that Lu Han could never hope to imitate. He was still Chinese though, and Lu Han thought it gave him a free pass for that. He still liked America, but now it scared him too. Lu Han replied him slowly as he made his way to the library—midterms were on their way and he hoped to really be the good Chinese student his mother thought him to be. Kyungsoo had asked him about Kris once, and Lu Han didn’t know what to say. They were on the same campus but never met each other ever. Sometimes Lu Han thought about it, how it could have been. He often imagined meeting, but nothing after that. He still didn’t know what to say to the boy who had so obviously wanted him gone. 

He dug into his backpack for his matriculation card, and somebody tapped him on his back. Lu Han turned around, bag still ped, and it was Kris. It was so odd how nothing happened, Lu Han thought, no sudden rush of hatred or urges to strike Kris in the face. Just nothing. Lu Han even wondered if he should shake hands with him. Kris had shorter hair and a laptop tucked under his right arm. They stood in silence in front of the library, but it wasn’t the sort of unbalanced silence that they used to have in the past. Lu Han no longer wanted to talk, at least excessively. He was comfortable with it now. Kris coughed: “Hi.”

Lu Han was faster to reply. “Hi,” he said and pulled at the zip of his backpack. It made a loud noise, and the lady sitting at the counter shot him a dirty look. Kris blinked again. They had nothing to say to each other, did they, Lu Han decided as his phone buzzed in his pocket. His group mates were probably waiting for him now and he didn’t want to be late. Kris scuffed at the floor with his sneakers—still the same pair he’d worn during the trip down—and said nothing. So Lu Han turned around and started walking off. 

“Lu Han.” It was clean and completely faultless pronunciation in the Southern style of Chinese. Lu Han paused. 

“See you again.” 




Goodbyes were never ultimate in the language they were born to speak. And Lu Han was, somehow, okay with that.