Late nights were becoming a regular occurrence for Luhan. In fact, they had been becoming an increasingly regular occurrence for as long as he could remember. After entering his last year of high school, the work was piling up and he couldn't afford to fall behind. It wasn't that he was unorganised, In fact he was quite the opposite. Luhan wasn't one of those teenagers who was still trying to figure out what they wanted to do with their future. He also didn't have a constant battle with his parents, who wanted him to go into a career he hated. Luhan had planned his entire life years ago. He would graduate high school with top grades, get into the best university in the country, become a successful lawyer and retire early with plenty of money to support himself. Somewhere in that space of time he would find a beautiful wife and have two children, both boys, but that wasn't his main concern in that moment. He wasn't stupid, he knew that hard work was the only way to get anywhere. Walking round the streets of Seoul wouldn't get him a job, under average people like him didn't get those one in a lifetime opportunities everyone else got. He wasn't handsome, and certainly not dellusional; he looked like a girl and no woman on the planet would give him a second glance if he was poor. Thus, he was hunched over a pile of fractional quadratics at some early hour of the morning. Any time he spent looking at the clock across his room took away another chance to have a good future, as far as he was concerned. The work would take him at least another hour to finish, but like love, school did not concern him. There was nothing he learnt there that he couldn't teach himself, and his obsession with grades meant there wasn't a single person in his contact list. He knew all the important numbers off my heart, so really he only had a phone to assure his parents that he was at least somewhat normal.

And he was lonely, but naturally refused to admit it. Not a single person in that place would matter in 9 months when he moved across the country. His fractional quadratics, no matter how useless they seemed, would. He rarely spared a thought for himself or his social life; each minute he wasted was another mark off his final grade. Even if Luhan did reach out to someone, it's not like he had a queue of people just waiting to be noticed by him. He wouldn't be surprised if less than 20 people in that school knew his name. He was pure in every aspect; he had never drunk, been to a party, kissed someone, smoked, had or even had a wet dream. The only reason he even knew what the last one was was because he had studied it for his biology paper the week before. 

He knew that was unlikely to change anytime soon, but worrying about that would only be a temporary distraction.

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