“Yay, winter break!” Annabelle cheers, flinging herself onto Marcus’ couch. “Preet, make me hot chocolate.”

“Make it yourself,” Preet scoffs, popping a marshmallow in his mouth. “Actually, don’t. You’ll probably make a mess of the whole kitchen and blow something up.”

“That would be pretty bad,” someone chuckles. We turn around. Mrs. Johnson is leaning against the doorframe, a soft smile on her face. I remember Marcus mentioning that his mom used to be an actress years ago, and now I can totally see why- with her long, curly black hair, rich brown skin, and smile wrinkles near her eyes, Mrs. Johnson is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. Her eyes seem to have a permanent look of melancholy, however.

She lost a son, I remind myself. Going through something like that must be indescribably dreadful.

“We’re not going to burn the house down, Mom,” Marcus sighs. Mrs. Johnson shakes her head.

“I hope not. If you all need anything, I’ll be down the hall.” She pauses before she leaves the room. “Lina, how’re you doing? I haven’t seen you in a while.”

Lina is staring off into space. She starts after I nudge her.

“Oh, sorry, Mrs. Johnson,” she says in a tired voice. “I’m okay. How about you?”

“Doing fine.” Mrs. Johnson peers at Lina. “You look tired, honey. You better catch up on sleep during the break!”

Lina gives her a small smile. “Will do, Mrs. Johnson.”

Preet, Annabelle, Marcus, and I exchange nervous glances. Lina has been completely out of it lately. Usually loud and brash, she’s barely spoken 5 sentences in the past week. Every time I see her, she’s zoning off, just looking at nothing with cloudy, unreadable eyes. Whenever we try to ask her what’s wrong, she responds with a forced grin and an, “I’m fine!”

“Lina, I bought your favorite.” Marcus tosses a jar of Nutella at her from the kitchen. “We have pretzels in the pantry, too. I'll start making hot chocolate. I don't trust any of you in my kitchen.”

“Let’s watch ‘Mean Girls’,” I say, eyeing Lina. “It’s somebody’s favorite movie... hm?” I poke Lina with my toe. She rolls her eyes and flings a pillow at me.

“Shut up, schmuck. You’re getting all sappy on me.”

“Sappy rhymes with crappy, which is what Ami is,” Preet pipes up. Annabelle struggles to hide her laughter as I launch myself at him, murderous intent in my eyes.  

“Hey, save that for Jungkook,” Preet protests, flailing his arms around as he tries to defend himself. His comment just makes me even madder.

“What’s with you and Jungkook anyway?” Annabelle asks. “You’ve suddenly become all buddy-buddy with him again. Are you faking or did something happen?”

I pause. Although I usually tell the Anime Club everything, I purposely withheld Jungkook’s past from them. It seems to personal to share. It’s not my place to do so.

And... for some reason, I’m strange protective over Jungkook. It’s stupid, and irrational- why the hell would Jungkook Jeon need protecting?- but some things just make no sense.

“I dunno,” I shrug. “We just talked at the banquet. It’s so weird.”

Preet snickers. “You two are like a real-life soap opera. You’ve gone from hating him to dating him to hating him to-,”

“Shut the hell up,” I snarl, raising my fists. “Do you want me to beat you up again?”

“Oh, I’m trembling in fear- ahh! Get off of me, you freak!” Preet shrieks as I smother his face with a pillow.

“Hey, hey, get off of him,” Marcus calls from the kitchen. “I just finished making everyone hot chocolate.”

“Hot chocolate!” Lina exclaims. “Dibs on the first cup!”

“I’ll fight you for it, Lina,” Annabelle says, tackling her. Lina emits an unearthly scream and curls up into the fetal position.

“No! Stop! Don’t tickle me, you demon child!”

I chuckle. Lina’s finally starting to perk up. She’ll be back to her normal self in no time.

    “Hey, Marcus, where’s the bathroom?” I ask.

    “Down the hall and to the left,” he responds, handing a mug of hot chocolate to Preet.

    I roll off the sofa and peer down the hall. Down the hall and to the left? I open the first door on the left, and it’s just a little storage closet.

    “Goddammit, Marcus,” I huff. The next door opens up to a dusty bedroom with a faintly stale smell in the air. I am about to move on to the next room when I see a picture of Marcus hugging a tall, handsome young man on the wall.

    A tall, handsome young man who looks a lot like him.

    Kyle.

    I warily step into the room. There isn’t much in the room- a bed, a dresser, a study table, and a lot of pictures everywhere. I curiously peer at the walls. There are images of Kyle receiving his high school diploma, images of a younger him posing with toddler-Marcus, images of him at a bonfire with his friends.

    “This was Marcus’ brother’s room,” someone says behind me. I whirl around. Mrs. Johnson is standing outside the door, her arms crossed. My face reddens in embarrassment.

    “I- I’m so sorry, I was looking for the bathroom-,”

    “It’s fine.” Mrs. Johnson smiles. “You know what happened to Kyle, don’t you?” When I nod slowly, she exhales. “Marcus was never himself after that happened. He’s only started opening up again very recently. I want to thank you, Ami.”

    “Uh, thanks, but why?”

    “You and the others have been by Marcus’ side and have been spending a lot of time with him. Taking him out. It’s what he needed, and look- now he’s talking and smiling and happy. Thank you for being his friend.”

I blush. If she really knew why I started spending a lot of time with him, and where we were taking him out, she’d be a lot less happy. But still, I can’t deny that over the course of these past months, Marcus and I have developed a true friendship.

“It’s my pleasure, honestly,” I tell Mrs. Johnson. “And... I’m sorry for your loss.”

She smiles wistfully at the pictures on the wall. “Kyle was always laughing. We were going through tough times when he was growing up, and he had to work so, so hard. After he died... Yohan, the company who hired him as an intern, didn’t even acknowledge his death. They acted like they hadn’t just lost one of the greatest young minds in their business.”

Mrs. Johnson points to a picture on the dresser. “See? Only a few weeks after he started, he and his team won some kind of award for some engineering paper they wrote. That’s a picture of them at the corporate headquarters.”

I glance down at the picture-

And then double-take.

I rub my eyes. No way. I must be seeing things.

“Mrs. Johnson,” I ask in a trembling voice, “who’s that girl hugging Kyle?”

She smiles sadly. “That was a girl on his team. They started dating a few days after this picture was taken. She was a nice girl, but I never saw her again after Kyle’s funeral.”

My voice is so faint that it is almost inaudible. “What’s her name?”

“Camille. Camille Rosenquist, I believe.”

It feels like I have been doused with a bucket of icy cold water.

    Camille Rosenquist, the grinning, blonde-haired girl in the picture, is none other than Marge.

    Almost immediately, my cell phone starts ringing.

    “I- I have to take this,” I stammer to Mrs. Johnson, staggering out of the room. “Hello?”

    “Ami, it worked,” Chanyeol tells me in an urgent voice over the phone. “16 hits came up for Camille Rosenquist, and every single piece of data about her had been altered from an address at Yohan headquarters. Baekhyun took one look at the digital signatures and knew that it was Marge. Marge is Camille Rosenquist.”

    I slump down onto the floor. “Oh my god.”

    “And that’s not all he found. We need to video-conference you all ASAP.”

    “I’m on it.”

I gaze at Baekhyun and Chanyeol over the screen. Lina, Preet, and Annabelle only seem surprised by this revelation. But it’s because they don’t know Marge. And they don’t know Camille, either.

But Chanyeol, Baekhyun, and Marcus seem as shell-shocked and astonished as I do. Chanyeol keeps running a hand through his hair in confusion. Even the normally aloof Baekhyun is restless and tense.

    “So that was the name of my brother's girlfriend? Camille Rosenquist- or, should I say, Marge?" Marcus clenches his teeth. "I'd seen her around so often, but Kyle had never bothered to introduce me to her. He was always so quiet about her. Dammit, if I had known her name-," He slams his fist onto the table.

It's weird. Mrs. Johnson said that Camille and Kyle had dated for over a year. Why wouldn't Kyle have introduced his girlfriend to his little brother? Something's off here.

    “So Camille Rosenquist changed her name to Marge,” Preet says slowly, biting his lip. “She used to be an intern for Yohan with Kyle. And then all of a sudden, Kyle dies, Camille transfers over to Yohan headquarters in New York, and changes her name to Marge. But why?”

    Baekhyun looks at us with a stony expression. “What I’m about to tell you is... not going to be pleasant to hear. Especially for you, Marcus.”

    Marcus furrows his eyebrows. “What is it?”

    “I went back and traced Kyle Johnson. It took only a few moments for a hit to appear in another database... a database that I’ve worked with for years.”

    “Okay...,”

    Baekhyun takes a deep breath. “Kyle had a ghost file in the Seven Stars site, with all his stats and medical records. It was highly encrypted, and I barely found it, but it was there.”

    Annabelle gives him a bewildered look. “So what does that mean?”

    Chanyeol and Baekhyun exchange an uneasy look.

    “We can’t say for sure unless we gain more information,” Chanyeol says. He fixes the camera with a penetrating look. “There’s nothing else on the Seven Stars database that pertains to Kyle, so that must mean that whatever information they have about him is totally confidential. The Seven Stars stores its most confidential records on paper, in the middle of their headquarters. We need to obtain those, but we can’t hack into the Seven Stars, and it’ll be extremely difficult to break in, too. We’re at a dead end.”

    There is utter silence.

    “If anyone has any Seven Stars contacts,” Baekhyun says, tilting his head, “that would be wonderful.”

    “How the hell are we supposed to know anyone from the Seven Stars?” I snap. “Shouldn’t you two know people from there, since you all are interconnected?”

    “I don’t have the best relationship with the head of their IT department,” Baekhyun says. “And besides, why would they give me confidential gang information? And Ami, you’d be surprised. You never know who’s a gang member and who’s not-,”

    Lina suddenly shoots up.

    “I’ll handle this,” she says in a low voice.

    “How?” Marcus questions. “Lina, what-,”

    But Lina has already grabbed her coat from the sofa and strode out the door.

    We gape after her in shock.

    Then Baekhyun clears his throat.

    “She’ll take care of it,” he tells us in a hushed tone.

    I look at him in utter confusion. “But how-,”

    “I think there’s a conversation you need to have with Marge, first,” Chanyeol says, interrupting me. “And I think that Marcus needs to be a part of that, too.”

    Marcus and I look at each other in trepidation.

    “You’re right,” Marcus murmurs. “Camille has some explaining to do.”

    The sound of a door opening causes us all to whip our heads around. Mrs. Johnson is staring at us in confusion.

    “I heard shouting. Was that Lina who just left?” she asks concernedly.

    Annabelle hastily moves in front of the computer screen to block Chanyeol and Baekhyun’s faces. “She, uh, forgot something at home. She’ll be back.”

    “Alright.” Mrs. Johnson smiles. “Tell her that I ordered her favorite pineapple and ham pizza when she gets back. Kyle is the same way, always eating the most bizarre foods-,” Her eyes widen. She swallows. “I mean, Kyle was the same way.”

    We look at her uncomfortably, not sure what to say.

    “Excuse me,” Mrs. Johnson coughs, hurrying out of the room.

    We are quiet for a few minutes. Then Chanyeol says, “That’s your mom?”

    “Yeah,” Marcus responds monotonously.

    “Do her a favor. Don’t tell her anything we discover about Kyle.”

    Marcus blinks. “Why?”

    “Because I have a feeling that what we’re about to find out about Kyle isn’t going to be pretty,” Chanyeol says grimly.

A/N: sorry for not updating in a while LOL I've been juggling college application essays, a job at my city's finance department, an internship with a judge, and a fundraiser for the nonprofit that I volunteer for that I've been putting together smh I feel like i'm going to die and those things are all so mentally draining.... i've been rewatching Bleach to try and revive myself LMAOOO

the internship with the judge is really fun though tbh

but yeah LOL marge is CAMILLE LOLOL

btw don't watch the movie self/less it i saw it yesterday and it was trash oh my god