chapter eight

twisted truths

What happened?

How did it happen?

None of the group could eat during lunchtime. Sehun, Rei, Kyungsoo and Baekhyun all sat, waiting in the library, hoping, questioning. Chanyeol had insisted on going with the warden to check on Jongin and be with him through the process of managing his sister’s death; funeral, death certificate, police report and all. ‘What happened?’ Kyungsoo was fiddling with his fingers under the table.

Baekhyun looked lost, but nevertheless opened up the story. ‘The police came here yesterday to check none of us got hurt, because some of us were out last night. Apparently the club where we hit last night there was some fight, and it got pretty bad that the police had to step in. It happened an hour after we left. It was between two gangs, I think. And some of the kids here were also lurking there. That was that. But some passer-by’s got hurt in the process.’

‘Jongin’s sister was there?’ Sehun asked.

‘Apparently she worked near there, I heard.’ Baekhyun answered. ‘But-‘ he raised his tone. The rest all kept their eyes focused on him. ‘-she was not caught up with that.’ His voice was quiet again. He inhaled, along their patience with him. Sehun glanced over at Rei, who merely had her eyes lowest and her hands crossed over each other, pressed to her lips. Of course, she already knows. He thought to himself.

‘She didn’t come in for work last night,’ Baekhyun said, recollecting exactly what Chanyeol had told him. ‘She hung herself,’ he felt something in his throat as he said it. Sehun looked away, a look of remorse on his face.

Kyungsoo lowered his head. What kind of pain must Jongin be going through then, he thought.  Sehun opened his mouth to ask something, but kept it to himself and decided to channel his inquiries to Rei instead.

‘Where is Soojung, by the way?’ Sehun looked around him, finding her nowhere to be seen.

‘Unwell,’ Rei answered. Rei had gently woke her up, telling her had an urgent matter to inform, and pale-faced Soojung, poor girl, only managed to look up at Rei, clutching onto her blanket and ask what it was. When Rei told her she looked away.

No.

That’s not true. Rei heard her mutter as she pulled the blanket over her head. Jongin’s sister can’t be dead.

Rei had walked away to get ready for class, and when she checked again on her before leaving, she was still enveloped in her blanket on her bed, fast asleep again, though she looked to be struggling and shaking. Her forehead felt hot and her neck was sweating. Tears were drying off on her cheeks. Again, Rei woke her up tenderly to give her painkiller to take, and after convincing her and aiding her, the girl went back to bed and Rei left her alone.

‘Does she know?’ Baekhyun asked. Rei merely raised her gaze to him. It took her a while  before she nodded. A call erupted but disrupted not their grieving silence. Baekhyun answered the call. His posture straightened. ‘How is he?’ he asked, listening hard to every word Chanyeol said through the phone.

‘He’s quiet,’ Chanyeol answered. There was the sound of very faint chatter in the background and the ringing of the door every time someone enters the café he was in. ‘We’re trying to get him to eat but he doesn’t look like he can take a bite at all. All he wants is coffee,’ he was standing in line, waiting to place his order as he glanced over to where Jongin, Ms Poulin and the dorm warden had sat by the window.

‘Where do you guys have to go to next?’ Baekhyun asked.

‘We thought this was going to be simpler,’ Chanyeol said quietly. ‘But this was sudden so Jongin had to wait see whether they wanted to do a post mortem on her.’

‘Is it that bad?’

‘It’s not that, but there could be a chance she didn’t do this to herself.’ was all he said, leaving Baekhyun to ponder on his own. ‘Anyway, Jongin’s getting a public lawyer because apparently there’s money issues. We don’t know when we’ll be back,’ he finally reached the front of the queue. He put his phone aside for a moment, ordering three cups of coffee and some bread for his table, paying and then heading towards the bathroom so that he could continue talking to Baekhyun. ‘If it really isn’t a suicide, it will take a long time before this is over.’

‘Tell him we’re here for him,’

‘I will. For now-‘ he sighed. ‘-make sure everyone lays low,’

‘You got it,’ Baekhyun said before they both hung up.

Chanyeol returned to the table, finding the silence unchanging. Jongin’s eyes looked weary, but only from drained energy. Chanyeol was not sure whether or not the boy had cried before he arrived to accompany him, but he had not since. It struck him as odd. He looked almost accepting of the situation, although the suddenness of it did take a toll on him.

It only became clear to Chanyeol that Jongin was now truly alone. Although Chanyeol doubted that the siblings were close, or shared family intimacy, still she was the only family he had. Jongin had grown up with her, survived as orphans together. He had spent 15 years of his life, whether or not he remembered it with her. That had to pass as some kind of connection, at least. Now she had gone too, like his deranged parents.    

Jongin merely picked on one of the bread, his gaze aimless. Ms Yoon stared at him, then laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You should try to eat a little,’ she said. Chanyeol wondered, she must have been the closest thing he had to a matriarchal figure. He did as he told, tore off the end of the bread and slowly put it in his mouth, although his taste buds could barely function then. He struggled to swallow the lump of food, but did so anyway, knowing that his stomach had been growling for hours and it was the least he could do to lessen his hunger. He put the bread aside then downed his cup of coffee in one go.

Then he looked back at the woman. ‘Where else do we have to go?’ he asked, as if he had snapped out of his subconscious realm and into one completely detached from all human emotions.

‘Back,’ the warden sighed. ‘There’s nothing else for you to do now but wait,’

Jongin got up, and the rest followed, ready to take him back to school. Throughout the journey back, Jongin was disconnected from everyone else. Ms Yoon, who sat beside him had looked at him with a hand over his. ‘She loved you very much,’ she said in her aging voice. Jongin did not show his internal distaste towards her statement and only continued looking out of the window, as if he could not wait to get out of the car. When they arrived, she assured him that he did not need to worry about the procedures and that as the legal guardian of both the siblings, she would be responsible to handle whatever it is that was needed to be done.

Without a goodbye, Jongin headed back to his dorm. He was deliberately oblivious to the people around him, the students of whom part of them stared at him. He could sense that word had gotten out of his sister’s death. Every time someone calls his name, he acted deaf towards it. He did not want to stop and talk to anyone at all, and those who had enough common sense would try not to aggravate his grief further, and let him walk alone. He would brush off anyone who tried to run up to him to offer their condolences.

Once, a classmate of his ran to him and stopped in front of him, so eager to offer the words of kindness that she had. But Jongin dismissed her once, and she persisted. ‘If you need anything-‘

‘Just-‘ he stopped her. ‘Leave me alone,’ he had said so in such quiet sternness that she did not understand his implicative that he wanted her to stop talking to him.

‘Look, I know how sad you must be-‘ she made him sigh. ‘-I mean it’s all so sudden,’

‘My sister killed herself!’ he bellowed so loud he startled her, and also the rest of the students who were out in the hallway. ‘I don’t need your sympathy,’ he said before turning himself away from her and walking in an even faster speed, though no one would dare stop him now.

She killed herself.

She was probably too dumb to take care of herself anyway.

Jongin could hear the words over and over again.

Several feet away, Rei watched his breakdown unfold, then turned back to the vending machine where she got two small cartons of chocolate milk. Shaking her head once, she returned to her classroom, where Sehun looked all the more dead. The next period coming up was Calculus, and he could not be more bothered. He raised his head seeing her return to her seat beside him.

‘There’s no soda?’ he asked as she put the carton on his desk.

‘You’d hurt yourself,’ she simply said, to which Sehun did not understand, but figured that it had something to do with him not having eaten yet. He decided to trust and not argue with her. She was always right, literally anyway. He took a sip, then voiced out.

‘What’s with Soojung, anyway?’ he asked.

‘Fever,’

‘She must have been close to Jongin’s sister,’

Rei raised her head. ‘Why’s that?’ she wondered out loud.

‘Well she’s close to Jongin. I would have thought she’d be the one to be with him through all the stuff he has to do. But you said she had a hard time taking in what you said. Isn’t it weird?’ he pondered. ‘It’s almost as she’s grieving like he is too,’

Sehun did have a point, and now Rei was thinking about the circumstances surrounding it. Was she distracted about something else? Or was she disturbed about Jongin’s sister’s death?

Rei could feel her heart sink remembering what she heard through the phone when she called Jongin. She had no idea why she felt obligated to call him at such an odd time when she was sure he was fine. She was not sure why she was up in the first place. Perhaps the possibility of them being busted as a group for such illegal activities kept her on guard and awake. She had not an ounce of sleep at all.

Or maybe she was afraid for Jongin and his safety, and when she saw that he had moved his whereabouts – a hospital, out of all places – she wondered why he was there. Why would he be there? Not to mention at the same night there were reports of gang activities. It was odd. He had travelled at least 10 kilometres to the hospital, when there was another hospital closer to where he had gone off to.

Was there someone else he was trying to visit? Rei sometimes hated her good assumptions. Sometimes to the point she tried to deny her thoughts. But when she heard a man say,

‘…sorry…tried.’

She knew her head was right.

Sehun did not realize Rei was sleeping until halfway through Calculus period. She had her arms bent and her head tucked at the elbow. He was pretty sure the teacher noticed too, but probably chose not to care since she almost always got full marks for his subject and the homework he assigned the class. Besides Rei looked awfully tired the entire day.

Lucky being smart, he thought to himself.

Rei would beg to differ if she heard his thoughts.

*

Interruption.

It is 10 past 2 in the afternoon.

Soojung could barely sleep. She heard every single word Rei had said to her ever so softly that morning. Her heart stopped. That’s not true, she had murmured, and it was not subconscious. She cried herself to sleep the moment Rei stepped out of the room to get to class, sobbing in grief to sleep until she woke up at 2.

She stayed in bed for a couple of minutes, then checked her inbox messages. What Chanyeol had explained in their group chat confirmed that the sliver of hope that she had that what Rei had said was just a dream; it was all in vain.

It was true. Chanyeol was out with Jongin settling things for his sister’s death; his sister who had died suddenly last night and was admitted to a hospital.

Soojung’s fingers hardened around her phone, shaking, but she dropped it onto her bed.

She slowly got out of her bed and stood up, running her fingers coarsely through her ginger locks before she spotted her mug sitting on her desk. Her veins were tensed and she felt an uncontrollable fury welling inside of her. She picked up the mug, then threw it hard against the wall just next to her bed, watching it hit hard against the lilac-coloured wall with a loud thud, then shatter to pieces onto the floor.

Soojung’s heart hurt the same way. Her chest rose and fell heavily in a uniform sequence, then her tears came again. Her chest staggered and she cried helpless in the empty space of the room, questions translated into unpleasant sounds of unintelligible wails and screams that not a single soul heard. She fell to the floor, body bent and her hands pushed against the floor and she kept throwing fists against the wood. The skin on her pale knuckles were turning red from such anger and she could not care less.

Then the interruption came.

She ignored it for several seconds, then looked up at her phone ringing and vibrating on her bed. She stopped her sobbing, then slowly crawled over to her bed to reach her phone.

She stared at the ID of the caller until the call ended, feeling her blood boil again.

A message then came in.

I heard the news. Are you okay? The message read.

Soojung gritted her teeth. ‘ you,’ she hissed.

I’ll come see you tomorrow after school.

Soojung’s grey eyes widened, then she tossed the phone immediately onto her bed again, steering away from it. She could feel her lips tremble. She rose up in and instant and closed the curtains quickly, then ran to the door to make sure it was locked. Her breathing was quick and unstable. She stood behind the door, overcome by a certain demon that ceased to let her be in peace. She leaned her head against the door, then slid down, clutching onto her body and crying silent tears again.

Interruptions; for Soojung they were unexpected…and frightening.