ON MONDAY EVENING, Mr. Bogum stood behind a podium at the head of the largest classroom in Augustine, attempting to make shadow puppets with his hands. He’d called a last-minute study session for the students in his religion class before the next day’s midterm, and since Jin had already missed a full month of the class, he figured he had a lot to catch up on.
Which explained why he was the only one even pretending to take notes. None of the other students even noticed that the evening sun trickling in through the narrow western windows was undermining Mr. Bogum’s handcrafted light-box stage. And Jin didn’t want to call attention to the fact that he was paying attention by standing up to draw the dusty blinds.
When the sun brushed the back of Jin’s neck, it struck him just how long he’d been sitting in this room. He’d watched the eastern sun glow like a mane around Mr. Lee’s thinning hair that morning during world history. He’d suffered the sweltering mid-afternoon heat during biology with Ms. Kang. It was nearly evening now. The sun had looped the entire campus, and Jin had barely left this desk. His body felt as stiff as the metal chair he was sitting in, his mind as dull as the pencil he’d given up using to take notes.
What was up with these shadow puppets? Were he and the other students, like, five years old?
But then he felt guilty. Of all the faculty here, Mr. Bogum was by far the nicest, even gently pulling Jin aside the other day to discuss how far behind Jin was in the writing of his family tree paper. Jin had to feign astonished gratitude when Mr. Bogum walked him through an hour’s worth of database instructions yet again. He felt a little ashamed, but playing dumb was far superior to admitting he’d been too busy obsessing over a certain male classmate to devote any time to his research.
Now Mr. Bogum stood in his long black crepe coat, elegantly interlocking his thumbs and raising his hands in the air, preparing for his next pose. Outside the window, a cloud crossed over the sun. Jin zoned back in on the lecture when he noticed there was suddenly an actual shadow visible on the wall behind Mr. Bogum.
“As you all remember from your reading of Paradise Lost last year, when God gave his angels their own will,” Mr. Bogum said, breathing into the microphone clipped to his ivory lapel and flapping his thin fingers like a perfect angel’s wings, “there was one who crossed the line.” Mr. Bogum’s voice dropped dramatically, and Jin watched as he twisted up his index fingers so the angel’s wings transformed into devil’s horns.
Behind Jin, someone muttered, “Big deal, that’s the oldest trick in the book.”
From the moment Mr. Bogum had kicked off his lecture, it seemed like at least one person in the room took issue with every word that came out of his mouth. Maybe it was because Jin hadn’t had a religious upbringing like the rest of them, or maybe it was because he felt sorry for Mr. Bogum, but he felt a growing urge to turn around and shush the hecklers.
He was cranky. Tired. Hungry. Instead of filing down to dinner with the rest of the school, the twenty students enrolled in Mr. Bogum’s religion class had been informed that if they were attending the “optional”—a sad misnomer, Ken informed him—study session, their meal would be served in the classroom where the session was being held, to save time.
The meal—not dinner, not even lunch, just a generic late-afternoon fill-up—had been a strange experience for Jin, who had a hard enough time finding anything he could eat in the meat-centric cafeteria. Bo Young had just wheeled in a cart of depressing sandwiches and some pitchers of lukewarm water.
The sandwiches had all been mystery cold cuts, mayo, and cheese, and Jin had watched enviously as Ken chomped through one after another, leaving tooth-marked rings of crust as he ate. Jin had been on the verge of de-bologna-ing a sandwich when Jungkook shouldered up next to him. He’d opened his fist to expose a small cluster of fresh figs. Their deep purple skins looked like jewels in his hand.
“What’s this?” he’d asked, in a smile.
“Can’t live on bread alone, can you?” he’d said.
“Don’t eat those.” Hoseok had swooped in, lifting the figs out of Jin’s fingers and tossing them in the trash. He’d interrupted yet another private conversation and replaced the empty space in Jin’s palm with a handful of peanut M&M’s from a vending machine sack. Hoseok wore a rainbow-colored bandana. Jin imagined yanking the thing from his head and pitching it in the trash.
“He’s right, Jin.” Jimin had appeared, glowering at Jungkook. “Who knows what he drugged these with?”
Jin had laughed, because of course Jimin was joking, but when no one else smiled, he shut up and slipped the M&M’s into his pocket just as Mr. Bogum called for them all to take their seats.

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What felt like hours later, they were all still trapped in the classroom and Mr. Bogum had only gotten from the Dawn of Creation to the war in Heaven. They weren’t even at Adam and Eve. Jin’s stomach rumbled in protest.
“And do we all know who the wicked angel was who battled God?” Mr. Bogum asked, like he was reading a picture book to a bunch of children at the library. Jin half expected the room to sing out a juvenile Yes, Mr. Bogum.
“Anyone?” Mr. Bogum asked again.
“Roland!” Jimin hooted under his breath.
“That’s right,” Mr. Bogum said, head bobbing in a saintly nod. He was just left of hard of hearing. “We call him Satan now, but over the years he’s worked under many guises—Mephistopheles, or Belial, even Lucifer to some.”
Yoongi, had been sitting in front of Jin, rocking the back of his chair against Jin’s desk for the past hour with the express purpose of driving Jin insane.
Jin was ready to take his chances with Yoongi’s temper when Mr. Bogum pulled his attention to the light box.
He had both hands raised over his head, palms up and cupping the air. As he lowered them, the shadows of his fingers on the wall looked miraculously like flailing arms and legs, like someone jumping off a bridge or out of a building. The sight was so bizarre, so dark and yet so well rendered, it unnerved Jin. He couldn’t turn away.
“For nine days and nine nights,” Mr. Bogum said, “Satan and his angels fell, further and further from Heaven.”
His words jogged something in Jin’s memory. He looked two rows over at Taehyung, who met his eyes for half a second before burying his face in his notebook. But that second’s glance had been enough, and all at once it came back to him: the dream he’d had the night before.
It had been a revisionist history of him and Taehyung at the lake. But in the dream, when Taehyung said goodbye and dove back into the water, Jin had the courage to go after him. The water was warm, so comfortable that he hadn’t even felt wet, and schools of violet fish swarmed all around him. He was swimming as fast as he could, and at first he thought the fish were helping push him toward Taehyung and the shore. But soon the masses of fish began to darken and cloud his vision, and he couldn’t see him anymore. The fish became shadowy and vicious-looking, and drew closer and closer till he couldn’t see anything, and he’d felt himself sinking, slipping away, down into the silty depths of the lake. It wasn’t a question of not being able to breathe, it was a question of never being able to rise back up. It was a question of losing Taehyung forever.
Then, from below, Taehyung had appeared, his arms spread out like sails. They scattered the shadow fish and enveloped Jin, and together the two of them soared back to the surface. They broke through the water, higher, higher, passing the rock and the magnolia tree where they’d left their shoes. A second later, they were so high Jin couldn’t even see the ground.
“And they landed,” Mr. Bogum said, resting his hands on the podium, “in the blazing pits of Hell.”
Jin closed his eyes and exhaled. It had only been a dream. Unfortunately, this was his reality.
He sighed and rested his chin on his hands, when a paper airplane came to rest on his left forearm. He looked to the far left corner of the class, where Jimin sat holding an exaggerated winking pose.
I take it you’re not daydreaming about Satan. Where’d you and KTH scurry off to Saturday afternoon?
Jin hadn’t had a chance to talk to Jimin alone all day. But how would Jimin have known that Jin went off with Taehyung? While Mr. Bogum busied himself with a shadow-puppet-focused representation of the nine circles of Hell, Jin watched Jimin sail another perfectly aimed plane at his desk.
So did Yoongi.
He reached up just in time to snag the plane between his fingernails, but Jin was not going to let him win this time. He snatched the plane back from Yoongi’s grip, ripping its wing loudly down the middle. Jin had exactly enough time to pocket the torn note before Mr. Bogum whipped around.
“Seokjin and Yoongi,” he said, pursing his lips and steadying his hands on the podium. “I would hope whatever you two feel the need to discuss in a disrespectful passing of notes could be said before the entire class.”
Jin’s mind raced. If he didn’t come up with something fast, Yoongi would, and there was no telling how embarrassing that could be.
“Y-Yoongi was just saying,” Jin stammered, “that he disagrees with your view of how Hell is broken down. He has his own ideas.”
“Well, Yoongi, if you have an alternate schema of the underworld, I’d certainly like to hear of it.”
“What the hell,” Yoongi muttered under his breath. He cleared his throat and stood up. “Well, you’ve described Lucifer’s mouth as the lowest place in the inferno, which is why all the traitors end up there. But for me,” he said, like he’d rehearsed the lines, “I think the most tortured place in Hell”— he took a long, sweeping look back at Jin—“should be reserved not for traitors, but for cowards. The weakest, most spineless losers. Because it seems to me that traitors? At least they made a choice. But cowards? They just run around biting their fingernails, totally afraid to do anything. Which is totally worse. But that’s just my opinion.” He sat down.
“Thank you, Yoongi,” Mr. Bogum said carefully, “I’m sure we all feel very enlightened.”
Jin didn’t. He had stopped listening in the middle of Yoongi’s rant, when he felt an eerie, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
The shadows. He sensed them before he saw them, bubbling up like tar from the ground. A tentacle of darkness curled around his wrist, and Jin looked down in terror. It was trying to weasel its way into his pocket. It was going for Jimin’s paper plane. He hadn’t even read it yet! He stuffed his fist deep into his pocket and used two fingers and all his willpower to pinch the shadow out as hard as he could.
An amazing thing happened: The shadow recoiled, rearing back like an injured dog. It was the first time Jin had ever been able to do that.
Across the room, he met Jimin’s eye. Jimin’s head was cocked to the side and his mouth was hanging open.
The note—he must still be waiting for Jin to read the note.
Mr. Bogum flicked off the light box. “I think my arthritis has had enough Hell for one night.” He chuckled, encouraging the brain-numbed students to chuckle with him. “If you’ll all reread the seven critical essays I’ve assigned on Paradise Lost, I think you’ll be more than prepared for tomorrow’s exam.”
As the other students rushed to pack up their bags and peel out of the room, Jin unfolded Jimin’s note:
Tell me he didn’t give you that lame “I’ve been burnt before” bit.
Ouch. He definitely needed to talk to Jimin and find out exactly what he knew about Taehyung. But first …
He was standing before him. His silver belt buckle shone at eye level. He took a deep breath and looked up at his face.
Taehyung’s violet-flecked gray eyes looked rested. He hadn’t spoken to him in two days, since he’d left him at the lake. It was as if the time he’d spent away from him had rejuvenated him.
Jin realized he still had Jimin’s revealing note spread open on his desk. He swallowed hard and tucked it back into his pocket. 
“I wanted to apologize for leaving so suddenly the other day,” Taehyung said, sounding oddly formal. Jin didn’t know if he was supposed to accept his apology, but he didn’t give him time to respond. “I take it you made it back to dry land okay?”
He tried a smile. It crossed his mind to tell Taehyung about the dream he’d had, but luckily he realized that would be totally weird.
“What did you think of the review session?” Taehyung seemed withdrawn, stiff, like they’d never spoken before. Maybe he was joking.
“It was torture,” Jin answered. It had always annoyed Jin when smart people pretended they weren’t into something just because they assumed that was what a significant other would want to hear. But Jin was not pretending; it really had been torture.
“Good,” Taehyung said, seeming pleased.
“You hated it, too?”
“No,” he said cryptically, and Jin now wished he’d lied to sound more interested than he actually was.
“So … you liked it,” he said, wanting to say something, anything to keep him there next to him, talking. “What did you like about it exactly?”
“Maybe ‘like’ isn’t the right word.” After a long pause, he said, “It’s in my family … studying these things. I guess I can’t help feeling a connection.”
It took a moment for his words to fully register with Jin. His mind traveled into the fusty old storage basement where he’d glimpsed Taehyung’s single-page file. The file that claimed that Kim Taehyung had spent most of his life in a Los Angeles County Orphanage.
“I didn’t know you had any family,” he said.
“Why would you?” Taehyung scoffed.
“I don’t know.… So, I mean, you do?”
“The question is why you presume you know anything about my family—or me—at all?”
Jin felt his stomach plummet. He saw the Warning: Stalker Alert flash in Taehyung’s alarmed eyes. And he knew he’d botched things with him yet again.
“T.” Seo-joon came up from behind them and put his hand on Taehyung’s T-shirt-clad shoulder. “You want to stick around to see if there’s another yearlong lecture, or are we going to roll?”
“Yeah,” Taehyung said softly, giving Jin a final sideways glance. “Let’s get out of here.”
Of course—obviously—he should have bolted several minutes ago. Like, at the first instinct to divulge any details of Taehyung’s file. A smart, normal person would have dodged the conversation, or changed the subject to something much less freakish, or at the very least, kept his big mouth shut.
But. Jin was proving day after day that—especially when it came to Taehyung—he was incapable of doing anything that fell under the category of “normal” or “smart.”
He watched as Taehyung walked away with Seo-joon. He didn’t look back, and every step he took away from him made him feel more and more freakishly alone.