The First Secret Revealed During the Night Before the End of My First Time in Korea

“Cheondung!” I whisper. He was the last one to shower today, except for me—but I don’t have the right mind to shower.

After Joon said that, he shut the door, and took a longer shower than G.O. This of course gave me substantial amounts of time to run to my room and see the folded up note that I stole from him, lying open on my dresser.

I left it on the dresser this morning, open.

I could see him discovering it. He walked into my room, laughing at me, and then went over to my drawer to grab a pair of shorts. He checked out the stuff on my dresser first, and saw it.

That would explain why he took forever in my room, at least.

Since then I’ve been pacing in my room, distressed. I couldn’t talk to Joon yet; he’d gone to bed straight after the shower. Now, though, my head is poking out of my room, scaring a half- Cheondung.

Like I’m some kind of ert, he covers his abs with his hands. I roll my eyes, “Put on some clothes, we need to go for a walk.”

He drops his hands, “Why?” Even though he knows what happened, and even patted my shoulder earlier.

I almost pull out my hair, “Because I need you to tell me why he’s freaking out about me having the note! You know he won’t tell me!”

His eyes evaluate the situation for a second, before his shoulders deflate and he walks to a rack of clothes and pulls on jeans, a tank top, and then a zipped up hoodie.

“Come on,” he says. We’ve been talking in English, and I’m vaguely nostalgic. It seems this is always how things end up—the foreigner talking with the English speaker about being an outsider.

He slings an arm around my shoulder and out we go. He’s leading us somewhere, but I don’t know where and he refuses to talk, so I’m quiet as we walk.

The air tonight is cold, and the clouds make the sky lighter than it is. There are no stars or planets visible.

We go to the park—the one where I was officially welcomed to South Korea three months and a week ago. It feels like that span of time is both too short and not long enough. I feel like a native that moved away for years and recently returned, I guess.

We sit under the same tree as before, his arm around me as before, and we sit against the trunk of the tree.

He’s quiet for a moment, before, “You took the note from Sora, didn’t you?”

I almost start punching him, and growl in frustration before spitting out, “I don’t know! I found it in a pair of his shorts one day, I took it; it was my first day. I couldn’t read Hangeul—which, by the way, I still can’t do so I don’t even know what it says, much less who it’s from!”

Cheondung sighs, rubs his forehead with his free hand and says, “I shouldn’t be telling you this. But with the way things are going, I doubt he ever will.”

I am silent, waiting.

“Sora used to be Joon’s best friend. She was from Japan, but she spoke Korean. Her family moved around Joon’s neighborhood when he was ten, she was eight. They loved each other very much.”

Well, that’s what the girl Joon has feelings for really wants to hear, right?

“Well what happened?”

Cheondung sighs. “First, Joon started attending the arts high school, and she wasn’t into dance or art, she was into Science. So they grew apart, but not enough to end their friendship, they still talked all the time.

“Within the next four years, they became in a relationship, but kept it quite for the sanity of their parents and their futures. Then Joon auditioned for acting parts and went into a small slump because he kept being rejected. They started to grow apart more and they fought a lot. When he was accepted into MBLAQ, they completely cut off communication. During the first six months of training, Joon later found out that Sora fell into a deep depression. She was pursuing a career in microbiology, but her studies were stressful, her boyfriend was gone from her life, and she had to take care of her ill father and deal with his debts.”

“That’s horrible,” I say, feeling sad for her, but also wondering what that had to do with the note. “So they broke up?”

“No,” he says. “She hung herself two months later.”

Then I threw up. I can feel all my emotions purging out of me (in the least disgusting way possible) as my heart aches for the boy I care about and the girl that left him.

“Why?!” I say leaning back against the tree and staring at its looming branches.

“Depression,” Cheondung says. “Everything became too much. But, they found a note—”

“No! No! NO!” I groan, leaning my head into my hands. I don’t want to hear this. Don’t tell me I took this away from him.

“For Joon,” Cheondung continues, knowing that no matter how much I don’t want to hear this, I have to. “When he would get into slumps, she would take sticky notes and sneak into his room, and put stick them everywhere, and the all said ‘I believe in you, so you should too.’ Well. The note read, ‘I believe in you, so you should too. I love you, very much, and I know you’ll do great things. So don’t disappoint me, wherever I end up—okay?’ He keeps it with him when he’s having hard times. A lot of the time he leaves it in places where he thinks he won’t remember it. I think he thinks that as long as it ends up back to him when he needs it, she still loves him.”

I’m sobbing now, so mad at myself. “Why did you do this?!” I say to the air, questioning myself, Cheondung, Sora. “Why did you hurt him like this?!”

I cry for a few hours, for Joon and Sora, for myself and my stress, for Cheondung, who is probably the greatest person I’ve ever met in my life.

Finally, I lean back, hiccupping, staring at the dawning sky. I look at Cheondung, who is picking at grass. “Thank you,” I say. “Can I borrow your phone?”

He reads my face, and I know he knows what I’m about to do. He must see something bigger than that, something that overruns his concerns, though, because he hands it to me. I call Rain Sunbae. He answers on the sixth ring, hoarse, “What’s wrong, Cheondung?”

“Sunbae,” I say, “it’s Lucy. I need to go back home for a little while.”