“Unlike our sweet Yang Sojin here, Luhan, I am absolutely no good at babysitting.”

“I’ll do the babysitting, Lichen.” I was muttering in an undertone but somehow, Sojin had managed to hear it from the other side of the door to her bedroom, hollering, “I don’t need babysitting, you guys” in sync with the rolling of Lichen’s eyes.

“Sure you don’t, honey,” Lichen called back, and then to me, “I’m taking the couch by their living room.”

“You’ll be all right?” I squinted down from our spot in the second tier to eye the crescent-shaped divan in the middle of the living room, giving it an intense assessment.

“You haven’t slept in their couch, have you?” Lichen smirked. “It’s like sailing in the clouds of the heavens, I tell you.” She patted me on the shoulder and skipped down. “Good night, Sojin!”

Sojin’s bedroom door creaked open then, and her head jutted out from the crevice between the door and the frame. She said, “Go home, Lichen. Luhan, please walk her home. She’s not far.”

“Chill, will you?” Lichen, halfway down the staircase now, gestured a wave out the window. “There’s no way any of us is walking out under this deluge. If you’re worried about your snoring sprees -"

“I don’t snore,” Sojin interjected, shaking her head.

“- I’m pretty sure Luhan won’t mind. All right, enough talk.” She leapt over the last three steps, strode across the living room and dove into the heavenly couch, the blanket she’d been clutching onto earlier landing over her in a slow-motioned sea wave. “Good night, love birds. Big day tomorrow.”

Miss Arquette’s house had a second smaller living room and I was standing in the middle of it. By the corner of this secondary living room was also a couch. It wasn’t crescent-shaped and it looked less heavenly than the one in the main living room, but the day’s fatigue was rendering even the hardest bedrock a cottony mattress of solace at the moment.

Sojin was coughing a little when I’d walked her inside earlier and it was then that I decided it was my turn to tend to her. She wasn’t as sick as I’d been when she’d tended to me, but I insisted anyway, to which she finally though unwillingly agreed. And I had the perfect excuse: her Aunt wasn’t around so who could make sure she would eat her meals or take her medicine or wake up early tomorrow?

“I eat pretty well even when I am sick,” she had told me. “I try to avoid medicine as much as I can, and you can trust my biological clock to be more accurate than the digital one.”

“Okay,” I retaliated. “So I’ll stick around just to make sure.”

In the end, when she had given up trying to shove me away, I had to contact Lichen and ask her to come over as a third wheel. I wouldn’t call myself particularly traditional, but there was something about the idea of me staying the night here at Sojin’s place with nobody around but the two of us that unsettled me. I had no sinister intentions - heck, no - but, well, I guessed I just wanted to avoid nasty talk in case worse comes to worst and feeble-minded people took the wrong idea. I was doing this to protect Sojin.

I took the blanket Sojin had tossed me earlier and sank in the couch by the mini living room just outside Sojin’s room. Her bedroom door was agape and I could see faint light coming from within, perhaps it was from the post lamps along the perimeter of Miss Arquette’s lot.

It was quiet, with only the wrath of the storm as it poured down in million miniature sledgehammers over the roof and on the window pane and across pavements to keep the silence from being absolute. I stared into the cleft of the bedroom entrance. “Call me if anything, Sojin, okay?”

“Good night, Luhan,” she answered. She didn’t sound sleepy at all. I wondered if she were dreading over the clincher for tomorrow. Even when there was nothing to dread about because the girl was simply a genius and I could bet she would easily nail the IAC, I had a feeling she was being tormented by it, just as she’d been when she figured we were bound for disqualification in light of her transferring.

“Good night,” I replied, but more to myself than to her as I let my lids drop.

It could have been five minutes from the time I’d hit the sack, and it could have been hours, but when I was awakened by the feel of somebody else’s presence beside me, the rain was angrier than ever. And it was now being accompanied by equally enraged friends in the form of thunder and lightning.

I waited a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. When they did, I flinched back. Sojin’s head was rested over her folded arm in the small space by the edge of the couch. I jolted to a sitting position at once.

“Sojin?” She stirred. I placed a hand on one of her shoulders and gave it a gentle shake. “Sojin, what are you doing here?”

She groaned, lifting her head from her arm and blinking a few times. “I can’t sleep. The lightning keeps flashing; I feel like a bunch of paparazzis are constantly stealing pictures of me or something.”

I laughed, tucking away strands of stray hair from her sleepy face. “Okay, do you want me to accompany you?”

She rose from squatting across the floor and rubbed her eyes. She was looking down at me when she answered, “No.” Her face twisted in hesitation. “Maybe.” Then it softened. “Yes - if that’s okay with you.” She blinked a few more times. “You didn’t have to wake me just now, though. I was fairly in a good sleep already.”

I chuckled. “You’re impossible.” I ruffled her hair and led her to her bedroom. She plunged immediately into her bed, snuggling beneath the comforts of her comforter and drawing it up to her neck. Watching her snuggle like that, like a kid on vacation, I resisted the urge to pinch her cheeks and ruffle her hair more. I had to look away, to find an ottoman or anything to settle myself into. I didn’t feel that surprised when I spotted at least five ottomans scattered all over one side of her room. Two of them were in black and white covering, designed to resemble cow skin from the cows of Alaska, I suspected. One was also hued black and white but in stripes, like those of a zebra. One was in plain, pale green.

“You can take the blue one,” Sojin said from behind me. The blue one was tucked away in the farthest corner, but I complied. It resembled a sky with a few clouds on a fair sunny day. When I touched it, I realized it was still encased in plastic. “That’s actually yours,” she said.

Mine? If I wasn’t mistaken, I had never been to her room before, let alone leave an ottoman here. I’d never even purchased one. Brows puckered, I dragged the unopened ottoman towards the bedside.

“I was supposed to give it to you as your present last year,” Sojin explained. “But I had transferred and your birthday was long over when I’d come back and I guess I hadn’t found an occasion to hand it to you.”

She was doing it again; making herself more endearing to me than she already was. “Are you giving it to me?”

She nodded beneath the shadows. “I mean, that’s for you anyway.”

“Well, thank you, Sojin,” I curtsied, stripping the ottoman of its plastic and finally taking my throne. “It’s very comfortable.”

“Where’s the essence of an ottoman if it’s not comfortable?”

I laughed. “You’re right.” And then there was nothing else to say and Sojin didn’t say anything else as well and we were just gazing at each other’s eyes, none of us averting and appearing to want to avert either.

Unspeaking, she wriggled her arm free from beneath the comforter and reached for my hand. I automatically met hers halfway and laced our fingers together.

“Thanks for doing this,” she said.

I shook my head, leaning over the edge of her bed and caressing the back of her hand with my thumb. “Anything for you.”

She lay on her side then, dragging her lids shut. “I mean it. Thank you.”

Half an hour later, however, I still couldn’t sleep. Neither could Sojin. Her eyes were closed, and she was mostly immobile but I could tell that she hadn’t exactly drifted to dreamland.

“Sojin, you have to sleep,” I said at last.

“I know, I’m sorry.” She sighed, stuffing her face into her pillow. Her words were slightly muffled as she whined, “I’m just so nervous. I can’t stop thinking about tomorrow.”

I knew it. “Perhaps it would help you if you focused on other things?”

“Oh, I’ve tried that,” she breathed long as she faced me again. “I’m just.. this is why I really don’t like contests, you know. I get so intimidated by the fact that I’m representing somebody else - a bunch of people, an entire school for crying out loud! - that I can’t bring myself to calm down until after everything is over.”

“But you’re doing a great job. You’ve done excellently so far and among us all, you’re the only one who perfected the contest.”

“That doesn’t exactly reassure me of anything.”

“Don’t say that, Sojin.” I placed a hand on top of her head. “Of all the people I know, you’re the one person who’s supposed to least likely to dread over your performance because you’re just so smart and witty and, well, you’re a genius.”

She rolled her eyes, chuckling. “I’m just hardworking, I guess. And I suppose I’m able to see greater perspective from an unbiased disposition, from a point of insignificance.”

“Insignificance?”

"Yes,” she smiled. “Insignificance.” Her notion didn’t make any sense of course and she must have read it on my face - as per usual - because she then said, “You see, Luhan, you are so busy basking in the glory of your pedestal, you fail to recognize the importance of insignificance. Of being what you really are, which is absolutely, undeniably and downright nothing."

She saw herself as insignificant, was she freakin kidding me? I retracted from patting her hair and enclosed her hand with both of mine. "What would you know, Sojin?" People have always seen you as significant in every way, I wanted to add. But then again, she had never been mindful of people’s opinion about her.

She chuckled, darting her eyes over my shoulder and out towards the thundering rain. "Oh, I know enough, Luhan. Did you really think I ar