They hold sleepovers in April. The adults don't mind; to them, Chanyeol goes home and sleeps alone. They stack two columns of books and spread two blankets on the floor and drag a thin bedding over their makeshift tent frame (it's always orange so they can pretend that the orange light is from a bonfire). And underneath their bonfire bedding, they sit knee to knee, Jongin's table lamp between their feet. Their words wind and crouch around crooked fingertips, carefully picked and returned, like a transaction of secrets, because they can't have anyone finding out, no- you see, nobody knows that Jongin's here, too.

  Then again, nobody ever knows when Jongin's home. He's home, but his mother still looks out the window , as if waiting for him to come home. She looks in his direction but when he tries to search her eyes he can't find them. When he comes home from school, the living room is deserted, and when he calls to ask if there's dinner nobody answers . The food he eats is not tasty, only cold, and maybe he could have warmed it up so the flavours can bloom but eating hot food is like living in a dream- and Jongin doesn't want dreams, he wants reality.

  Nobody ever knows when Jongin is home. But he thanks Chanyeol anyway, for making it feel like someone will find out.

  (It's warm inside the tent. Jongin wants to know if his friend's hands are the same, but it's hard to tell when he's touching so little of it. Nonetheless, they are touching, and Jongin sees the touch registers on Chanyeol's fingertips, watches as it turns into impulses that crawl up his wrist and run along the length of his wiry arm and explode at the nerve endings in his brain.)