It was hard. Going to school everyday, only to be called names and told how stupid you are. Getting up every morning and having your own family not talk to you. They never did, mother and father to busy with work to acknowledge him. Hoseok had spent night after night eating alone, watching TV alone, living, alone. It wasn’t a fun life that he lived. No friends, no siblings, no one to talk to.

There had been at one time. A little girl who had asked him to play with her, only to have her and her friends push him down the slide and into a puddle of mud. Now, ten years later and sixteen years of experience, Hoseok knew better than to trust a word spoken to him.

The last straw came in the form of a pretty boy named Jungkook. He came up to Hoseok with a smile that made him trust his words. He talked and ate lunch with Hoseok, made him smile, laugh, he made him feel. Feel more than pain, hurt, loneliness. Jungkook asked him to meet him after school, in the boys locker room. He had thought it was a strange place to meet, but he went there after class anyways. Jungkook wasn’t there, but the rest of the football team was. They beat him until he was black and blue. Hoseok went home and he would have hid his bruises from his parents if they ever cared to look his way.

The next day at school Hoseok looked at Jungkook and the later never met his gaze. That’s when it was the last straw.

Hoseok went home and trashed his room. He ripped the pages out of every book and threw his favorite comic into the fire place. He didn’t know what else to do with all these feeling. He didn’t have anyone to talk about them with, no way to express the amount of betrayal and hurt he felt. The loneliness.

In his furriery of throwing things around he had knocked over the bookcase in the hallway. One side of him said he didn’t need to pick anything up, that no one cared. But the other half didn’t want the first time his dad speaks to him to be a lecture. Hoseok wipes his face, sick of crying and focuses on cleaning up.

Only one book left to pick up and Hoseok sees it. A piece of paper sticking out at an odd angle in the middle of the pages. He opens the book and slides the paper out. It’s plain notebook paper, nothing on it except when he flips it to the back there’s a number and a little note.

Lonely? Call me.

xxx-xxx-xxxx

Hoseok turns the paper over in his hand and laughs. Yeah, he’s lonely, but not so much as to call a random number to talk to some girl that’s getting paid by the second to talk to him. He closes the book and tucks the paper in his pocket to throw away later.

After cleaning up the huge mess he’d made, he sits on the couch and listens to his parents talk on their phones for awhile. The TV plays a rerun and Hoseok really wishes he hadn’t burned his comic book. He gets up to head to bed, maybe do some homework, and the paper falls out of his pocket. He studies it from where he stands for a moment before he picks it up.

He goes to his room and types the number into a search engine. No names come up, nor any phone operating company’s, much to Hoseok’s surprise. Curious, he grabs the phone and starts to the type the number. It rings twice and then not at all.

“Hello?” Hoseok asks, unsure if there’s someone on the other line or not. There’s no answer but there’s a click and then the dial tone. So someone had been on the other side. He sighs and throws the paper into the trash bin. He glances at the clock and deems it time for bed. He turns the light out and goes to sleep.

The clock reads 6:66 when he opens his eyes and Hoseok doesn’t know what woke him up. The numbers on the clock blink 4:45 AM and he rubs his eyes to double check. It stays the same and he’s about to close his eyes again when there’s a knock on the door.

Hoseok stills completely. Is it one of his parents? What do they want? “Yes?” Hoseok calls out, hopefully loud enough for his dad or mom to hear him. No one answers, but the door slowly opens. In the dark he can’t see much besides the outline of a figure standing to the left of his bedside. It’s eyes are yellow and Hoseok is frozen in place as it stares at him. He thinks just when his eyes are going to fall shut from sheer exhaustion of keeping his eyes open to keep eye contact, the figure blinks and then disappears. Somehow he falls back asleep and when he wakes up he looks around the room. There’s no proof that anyone had been at his door, it was even shut when he had got up.

When he got home from the usual terrible day, he threw his bag down and went straight to his room. His phone went off and Hoseok was too shocked to pick it up. The only number in his contacts were his parents, so who would call him? Thinking back to last night, Hoseok picked the phone up and looked. They had left a message, so he pressed play and lifted the device to his ear. A voice that sent chills through him prickled through the speaker.

Hope you’re not lonely now. If you are, call me sometime.