“Alright. You know the drill. Line up!”

The woman in charge of us that day was a screamer, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up every time she opened .

I gripped the hem of my shirt with both of my hands, staring at the ground in front of me. Glancing at the feet of the person standing to the right of me, I noticed how their feet were pointing straight forward. I tilted my head in confusion. I had noticed that pattern amongst everyone in my group.

Why were my feet so different from the rest? Mine never seemed to point forward, no matter how hard I tried. It just made them feel uncomfortable and after a while of persistence, they ended up hurting if I didn’t let them naturally turn out to the sides.

"Today you will be learning how to absorb caligos. Keep in mind that not everyone gets it right the first time." She grinned sinisterly at our group and I felt my stomach churn. I looked around at everyone who was equally confused on what a caligo was and why we were being trained to absorb it. As I gained enough courage and opened my mouth to ask the person next to me, something caught everyone's attention, especially the boy next to me. His eyes blew wide as saucers as he stared straight ahead, making me afraid to look over at what everyone else was seeing.

Mouth slightly agape, I turned my head back to the front in defeat. I immediately stiffened at the sight in front of me. People were filing in and moving to stand in front of us, the amount equal to the number of kids in our group. My goosebumps now turned into shivers of fear, wracking my body visibly. I never had a good feeling about group activities because of where we were, but something about this scared me more than anything we had ever done.

"You will now be shown by the eldest in your group how this is done, so pay close attention or you will be taken care of accordingly."

The eldest in our group was a girl at the age of seventeen. I instinctively moved my feet forward, ready to volunteer in her place, when the boy next to me shot out his arm and pushed me back in place, shaking his head only enough for me to see. The look on his face told me everything. He had been here longer than I had by a few months and from the look on his face, sadness twisted with worry, I knew that nothing good was to come out of what we were about to do.

The girl named Joy stepped forward confidently. The woman in charge watched as the trainer led Joy to the person standing in front of her, instructing Joy to put her hands on his chest. His chest had a small black dot that looked ominous, the darkness of it sending shivers all over my body once more. She concentrated her hands above the foggy black mist, the trainer calmly telling her to visualize her absorbing it into her veins.

Joy had always excelled at everything that was asked of her, but today was different. Her veins began to turn a charcoal black and her knees buckled, letting out a silent scream as she fell to the ground. I jolted in surprise at the sight. There wasn't anything any of us could even do to help her, either. We would be reprimanded in the worst way and as I had been advised from the start, everyone avoided it at all costs. No one else moved a muscle, not a single twitch of a finger as we saw her writhe in pain on the floor, the trainer exhaling an exasperated sigh and scooping her up to take her to the infirmary.

I swallowed down the thickness in my throat and searched the faces of the rest of my group, all of them having paled at the task that now awaited them.

If I had known then what I knew now, I wouldn't have bothered to stay. If I had known what would become of me, maybe I would have made different decisions that led to me never existing further.

I awoke to the sound of a beating heart.

Except this heart was beating at such a high speed that I sprung my eyes open in worry. It sounded exactly like mine felt when I woke up from a nightmare. My fingertips brushed against the cotton of someone's shirt, their chest firm and heaving.

Alarm set in.

I inched my head upward to see who I was up against and got slightly startled at the sight of him. Everything suddenly came back to me in waves and, of course, who else would it have been?

Who had I been expecting to see?

Jimin had his arm lightly around me, cradling me in the nook of his upper arm and chest. For a split second I thought I could stay there a bit longer, the comfort almost lulling me back to sleep, but then my hazy half opened eyes saw the sudden change in his features. It was so drastic, how his calm sleeping face quickly twisted into one of pain.

I carefully rose up on my left elbow and gently wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of my sweater, then smoothed his hair back and away from his face.

“Are you erasing me?”

It was faint, fainter than it had been in years. Faint, but still unforgiving.

I retracted my hand with a shaky breath, slowly easing myself out of his embrace.

Why were my mind and heart constantly out of sync with each other? Hadn’t I decided that even though I would hear Jimin out, that I still wanted nothing to do with him regardless?

It was tiring, going back and forth between what my heart and mind wanted. I glanced over at Jimin's now calm sleeping face once more before silently slipping off the bed and down the hallway, in search of my phone. Maybe I could call Hoseok to pick me up from wherever this was. I had been here too long.

As I neared the end of the hallway, I passed a light blue blanket that was splayed on the floor. I didn’t recall registering the color in the slightest last night. Continuing toward the kitchen, untouched and in a bit of a disarray, I glanced at the uneaten pancakes and pile of dishes in the sink. None of what had happened felt real until now, the evidence of it everywhere I looked.

In the corner of my eye, I saw a tiny flashing yellow light and walked toward it, recognizing the familiar shape of my phone. Upon unlocking it, I saw that I had a few texts from Ji Eun and Hoseok. I tapped on Hoseok’s name and hovered my finger over the call button when a thought wedged itself into my mind, nagging and gnawing at me until I could no longer ignore it.

"You know, we're going to have to change our hair colors. They know what we look like."

If I called Hoseok and those predators saw me with him, would I be putting him in danger?

A flash of faded orange hair ran across my vision and I gripped my phone until my knuckles turned white, the anger rising in me. I couldn’t drag anyone else into whatever this was. Admittedly, I wasn’t angry at Jimin. This would have happened to me eventually, too. The only difference was that Jimin had been more of a high risk unbeknownst to me. But even if I had known, would I have stayed away?

Shaking all thoughts from my mind and determinedly tying my hair up into a bun, I pulled my hood over my head and swiftly wrote a small note to Jimin that I'd be gone for a bit in case he woke up. The last thing I needed was for him to be wandering the streets hallucinating.

As I was deciding where to leave the note, I heard footsteps from behind me and instantly froze in place. “Are you leaving?” Jimin said groggily, his voice as deep and raspy as I remembered it. I turned around with the note in my hand. “Oh, well, I…”

In the seconds it had taken me to turn around, he had made his way to me and plucked the note out from my hand. He carefully squinted at the note, holding it far too close to his face.

“Do you need glasses?” I asked curiously. It seemed I was never one for delicacy when it came to him.

He finished reading the note and then glared at me with overly squinted eyes, before pushing his palms into his eyes and rubbing at them slowly. I breathed in purposefully then, my heart threatening to do several flips inside my rib cage. It only slightly worked.

“Yeah, I have contacts in right now but they’re really blurry. I need to take them out.”

He continued to make faint noises from the uncomfortability of his lenses and all I could think of was that this was no good. The more time I spent with him, the more I wanted to know about him.

I glanced up at his arms, at the veins in them. They were now lightly dusted here and there with grey and the unsettling feeling in my stomach returned. It didn't seem to matter how many times Jimin assured me it was fine and that he would eventually be okay. The split-second decision to take away my caligo had been a mistake.

“Jimin, your veins, I-”

“Let’s get the hair dye together. Just let me get changed, okay? Actually, you should too.” His hair covered his eyes and his smile was tired and drained.

The continuation of my sentence died on my tongue. I no longer had the heart to bring it up anymore.

“Okay.”

I could see why Jimin loved his greenhouse.

It was secluded in the forest, but just barely, so he could still get the things he wanted or needed easily. The mile walk to the store was beautiful, too.

We walked the whole way in silence.

And maybe it could have been what Jimin had done, but I truly hadn’t enjoyed any type of scenery since I lost Jin. It had never felt right for me to enjoy something he so desperately wanted to experience. But right now, I breathed in the fresh air without a care in the world and admired the huge towering trees above me.

As I snuggled further into another one of Jimin’s black hoodies, for the first time in a while, I felt light.

Maybe it was childish of me to run off the way I did as soon as we got inside the store, but I ran straight past the register and into an aisle full of beauty products.

The awkward silence that had flowed between us the whole way was driving me up a wall. Especially after what had happened. I needed to talk to him about it before the guilt ate me alive once again.

For now, I calmly strode past all the cosmetics just as I heard Jimin arrive at the beginning of the aisle, and decided to quickly turn into the next one myself but stopped short at the sight in front me.

How could I have forgotten?

It was mid-September now, and some people actually looked forward to October.

“Hey, why are you running away from me? Are you five?” Jimin came up behind me with a playful tone, glasses with clear brown eyes glimmering through, but it all looked blurry and sounded muffled to me.

Tainted? The moment was tainted. All I could do was stare at the contacts in front of me as if I had tunnel vision.

I knew that I should have felt something more.