01.

Foregone Conclusion

People say that you will always remember everything the moment someone drops important news on you.

 

Jeno didn’t have to search too far to find an example for that. He only needed to ask his dad about what happened on the day that his mother told him she’s expecting, and he would probably get a two-hour long stream-of-thought monologue, consisting from tiny, useless details like what he had in the morning, to the exact emotion that he went through when he received the phone call.

 

Jeno is his dad’s son, right? Yes. Through and through.

 

And so he wondered, why then, when he got his own version of a life-changingly important news, he processed it in a way so different from how his dad did.

 

He couldn’t remember where he was, who he was with, what he was doing, nothing. Nothing sticked to him at that critical moment, after his phone let out a distinct ping reserved specially for his closest school friend, after he fished it out from his jeans’ back pocket, and after he fixed his glasses in preparation to read the content of Renjun’s text message.

 

Written in such a casual stance, as if he was only announcing the weather of the day (which, try as he might, Jeno also could never make himself remember), Renjun’s message read like this,



 

‘Surprise. I have cancer.’



 

Maybe he threw up his lunch after that. Maybe his brain committed an emergency shut down after being put through such unexpected onslaught of shock and everything else from that point onward was just a lucid dream conjured up by his mind to keep his vegetable self happy. He couldn’t remember.

 

Oh, how he wished it would happen the same way to everything that happened after.



 

_ _ _



 

Initially, he thought Renjun was lying.


 

‘It’s not funny.’


 

Jeno typed up those words on his phone with so much force, his fingernails would’ve left scratches on the screen if there wasn’t a protective layer of plastic that separated the two.

 

The answer to his accusation came not even a second later.


 

‘I know it’s not. Who told you I was joking?’


 

‘Call?? Can we? Now?’


 

He was not the one who was told that his body is hosting a deadly mutation, yet Jeno’s words were the one jumbled to oblivion caused by a sense of panic so strong, it was a whole new world of such intense emotions that he never thought he could possibly feel.


 

‘I can’t. I’m at the hospital.

Currently hiding at the restroom.

This is a highly illegal act.’


 

Jeno’s world was reduced to only his mind, the feeling of hard plastic under the pad of his fingers, and the blaring brightness of his phone screen.

 

‘You just found out?!’ Jeno wanted to type those words down. Angrily. With his capslock . He wanted to leave Renjun a voice note consisting nothing but unintelligible screams of his frustration. The audacity. The nerve. The gall. He felt utterly insulted when he found out that this was how his friend valued his worth. Telling him a very important message through an online chatting app.

 

‘How dare you! This sort of things should never be told over text messages!’

 

But the moment Jeno was about to hit send on the long rambling text that was the essence of his bursting anger, Renjun beat him to it and stole his moment with a textual equivalent of a dismissive hand wave.


 

‘I gotta go, they’re looking for me.
Talk to you later.’


 

_

 

Jeno admitted, after he spent a whole night lying wide awake on his bed muling over Renjun’s sudden revelation, that he might’ve overreacted a tiny bit.

 

Ok. So maybe Renjun was diagnosed with the C word. That doesn’t mean he has a death sentence hovering over his name, doesn’t it?

 

‘Doesn’t it?’ He thought, watching from his desk as Renjun sauntered into their classroom the day after, while his face betrayed all of the emotions that he thought he was doing such a good job hiding. Poorly masked bewilderment, that’s it.

 

He hoped that Renjun would just jump in front of him with full on confettis and jazz hands and a mariachi band, screaming, “it was all a joke, stupid!”

 

Jeno promised to himself that he will forgive Renjun if it ever came down to that. He will. He promised he will. Just tell me it was all a joke.

 

But when their gazes met, he instantly knew that it wasn’t the case.

 

Jeno, for once, was glad that he was too scared to switch from glasses to contacs. Because he decided that the more layers he have to separate him from the mere existence of this new kind of Renjun is always going to be a good thing.

 

There was a sour smile sitting on Renjun’s lips. As if he was telling Jeno that, ‘I know. It’s messed up, isn’t it?’ And at that moment he realised. It was all true.

 

In terms of hiding unnecessary emotions, they are two peas in a pod, really. As every single inner ticks of emotions would be projected onto their faces, however hard they tried to hide them. Essentially, it was the secret behind how they could sometimes communicate without saying even one peep of a word.

 

And that was also the reason behind how Jeno suddenly found himself biting into his lips so hard to stop them from falling off with how hard they were quivering. To use the dull pain as a mean to distract him from breaking into tears in the middle of a quickly filling class.

 

He told himself not to cry. At least not there, not then, not in front of the person who shouldn’t even be there after everything that he’s been through the day before and yet there he was. Renjun. Strong as ever. And careless as ever, painfully demonstrated when he leaned closer, a hand placed carefully over Jeno’s balled up fist, so he could whisper some reassuring words to his ears, “don’t worry. You know this won’t be enough to kill a bad like me.”

 

The bell ringing right after blared over the top of Jeno’s weak, disbelieving laughter. But judging from the smile on Renjun’s face, no longer sorrowful and instead was radiating the usual overabundance of warmth from within him, Jeno knew Renjun heard his reply that followed suit.

 

“You twisted little .”



 

_ _ _



 

Accepting reality, next he hoped that Renjun’s condition was at least under control. A tiny mess in his genetic making that could be blamed on universe slipping up, easily fixed by the marvels of today’s medical world.

 

Turns out it wasn’t.

 

Renjun never actually told him how bad his condition was, on accords that he doesn’t want Jeno to worry more than he already has. (“Your hair will turn completely white if you keep on fussing over me like this all the time.” “As your friend, I have all the rights to know.” “As the one who’s going to die soon, I have all the rights to tell you to shut up.”)

 

Initially Renjun would still show up at school every single day. Then he would occasionally take half day offs. A few full day skips here and there, nothing more than once every two weeks. Then it was once every week. And not even three months after they both found out about his condition, Renjun had started missing half a week’s worth of class work in one go.

 

Rumours were spreading, of course. Gossips. Speculations.

 

Their head teacher knew and yet she didn’t dare say anything on accords of Renjun’s own privacy.

Jeno knew and yet he was afraid of sharing his knowledge to anyone else, not even to his parents (although they already knew anyway, told directly by a bewilderingly nonchalant Renjun himself), as he feared that once he said that Renjun had it, then everything would come true. As if it wasn’t already true to begin with.

 

The denial that he’s so carefully compartmentalise inside his brain would burst out from their respective cabinets and they’d chase after him. Drowning him in deafening screams that demanded him to finally face the truth. To face the fact that Renjun essentially lied to him all those weeks ago. When he inadvertently jinxed himself as he told Jeno that he would be okay. That he would come out of this mess on top, with a victorious grin on his face, looking more alive than ever.

 

On each and every occasion when they saw each other face to face, or more exactly, on each and every day that Renjun was feeling healthy enough to wake up early and prep himself up for school, Jeno had to be reminded of that lie.

 

The gaunt eyes was the biggest reminder. His greyish skin too. Renjun has always stood more at the waifish side of the spectrum even when he was still healthy, but now he looked certifiably ghoulish.

 

It was their class’ best kept unspoken truth that one of them was clearly closer in standing with death than the rest of combined.


 

_

 

One random early morning, someone managed to burst the bubble of tightly maintained ignorance.

 

As usual, because it’s an important event, Jeno wasn’t able to clearly recall what happened on ground zero when the bomb was dropped.

 

He only remembered Renjun ambling his way into the class when he heard someone saying, loud enough to be heard over the casual conversations of students waiting for the bell to ring, yet quiet enough that the speaker could’ve gotten himself off the hook if he decided to feign innocence and claim that he was saying it for nobody else’s attention but himself.

 

“Why do you still bother coming to school if you know you’re not going to need all this in a few months?”

 

Jeno was so ready to square up on whoever was that insensitive douchebag who dared grabbing the proverbial cat by the loose skin on its nape and yanked it clean out of the bag with. In this case, the cat was everyone’s fear of mortality, and the bag was the thin veneer of public decency.

 

Jeno was so ready to use the blinding rage to sack someone on their jaws, but he somehow found himself not being able to do anything but sit there, petrified on his seat.

 

Maybe because he feared that those words somehow was unknowingly said by himself. His unconscious finally getting tired of this exhausting tippy-toeing around the elephant in the room and finally letting go of the question that’d been coiling itself so tight around Jeno’s tonsils, he was always afraid he might accidentally blurt it out with every sneeze that he let out.

 

But no. Turns out it wasn’t him who said it.

 

Although he might’ve just been and it wouldn’t have made any difference.

 

Because the way Renjun gave him a fleeting glance before boldly addressing the culprit (the hero of the class, actually, as he’d liberated them from the weight of an anvil that’s been constantly hovering over their heads for the past two months), told him way more information than any of the mindless, meme-filled chats that they would engage in everytime Renjun was feeling, as he said it himself, “like a week old tangerine thrown on a freight train’s windshield as it was running full speed through a field of freshly fertilised farmland.”

 

“Man, to be honest? Mood.

 

He silently sat down on his chair after that, and for the rest of that day, everything seemed to return back to normal. To a point far enough in the past where Renjun was nothing more but the same ol’ student at their school, whose capability of stressing out only reached the point of ‘oh god I forgot to study for the geography pop quiz’, and Jeno could finally let out the long exhale that he’d unknowingly kept inside of him for acting as the sole gatekeeper of Renjun’s secret.

 

It was a good day for the both of them.

 

Jeno knew. Because he asked him when he accompanied Renjun on the short walk to his mom who was waving at them from inside her car. “Are you happy?”

 

Renjun was still looking ahead when he answered, but his smile bled into his words and for a moment Jeno believed that maybe the sun could still rise up on his horizon.

 

“I am.”


 

_

 

The sun didn’t shine for very long, it soon dawned on Jeno. Because after that day, he spent a whole week calling Renjun’s home asking if he would be coming to school, and all he got for an answer was his mom telling him a saddened ‘no.’

 

Jeno quickly learned, that whether he liked it or not, it was time for them to prepare for the home stretch.

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tiny_smalltiny
#1
Chapter 4: OK NOW I’M CRYING LIKE CRAZY YOU PUT SO MUCH EMOTION INTO THIS I LOVE IT I’M GOING TO GO CRY IN A TRASH CAN BYE-
tiny_smalltiny
#2
Chapter 2: Imma cry, and I’m at school....