“Mom, I’m gonna go now!” I yell out loud from where I’m standing downstairs in front of the exit door. My mom, who I’m sure is picking on her eyebrow hair in our shared bathroom is upstairs, ready to begin her day and also wholeheartedly ignoring my yells.

“Mom!” I yell again, and all through the house I hear her receptive sigh, loud and dragged, as she finally unplugs her imaginary earphones from her ears to listen. 

“Okay, sweetie,” she yells back, although her voice is significantly less loud than mine. “Be careful on your way and come home straightly after work. Don’t wander around.”

“‘Kay,” I answer. She acts as if she doesn’t know me. When do I ever wander around? If there’s something I don’t like doing it’d be spending time on unsavory and unnecessary things that waste time. “I made you breakfast. Make sure you eat a lot. I put the water pill next to the smoothie. You have to drink that as well.”

I hear my mom let out a responsive, low groan. “But I hate the smoothies you make! It has all of those weird vegetables I hate.Vegetables! Seriously, who makes smoothies with veg—“

“Mom, stop nagging,” I roll my eyes at her, even though she isn’t here to see me. “I’ll be going now, I’ve already spent five minutes of the road here. Bye.”

My mom and I have a unique relationship. Her and I are more of best friends than a mother and her daughter. We’re rather roommates in this house of ours and we have chores divided for the both of us instead of being like a family. Today’s breakfast was on me and even though she doesn’t like the smoothies I make her, she drinks them all. Mom’s a bit malnourished; she always has been, so I always put more effort in cooking her things that would be healthy and good for her weak body. Ever since she and dad divorced three years ago; she’s going through severe body changes. I blamed him on it because he cheated on the only woman who loved him entirely when he had nothing to offer, and that had played terribly negatively against my mother. It was only recently that she began to grow out of her bad habits and consider herself worthy of another chance at life.

Which is why I plan on having the best grades in school so I can offer myself a scholarship that won’t break mom’s back with dozens of loans. Mom’s also the nicest person out there and if there’s one thing I really appreciate in life it is that it gave me her. I can’t do a lot of things for her because I’m still minor and have nothing of ownership regarding my life, which is why I dedicated my entire school life to her.

I’m going to a good university, get a good paying job, buy her everything she ever desired, and give back everything that dad has stolen from her in the process. For me, my life was all about my mom and making her happy. There will be nothing that will make me second guess myself and change everything that I wanted from this life. Nothing.

-

I thought that working on my English coed project with Chanyeol would go smoothly considering he and I got along a little—or not. Anyway, I thought with Chanyeol’s loose personality, he’d be okay with anything that I give him and that he’d lean against his chair and let me decide everything for him, even his work parts. However, I was wrong, and it’s my fault that I underestimated Chanyeol’s personality. He’s not the type to sit still and do nothing, which is a pleasant surprise of its own.

Still, I really thought he’d give me an easy A like he said he would, and I had a lot of expectations about how our session will go, but every thought I had went flying through the window.

“What about this book?” Chanyeol asks wondrously, his eyes looking clearly twinkling so I knew not to take his suggestion seriously. He’s standing amongst the shelf closest to where I’m sitting in one of the many white tables scattered in our school library after school hours, holding a red book with approximately four hundred pages of Shakespeare’s works, only. “It looks interesting, and it has a red cover. Now, I don’t know about books but I know when they come in red, they must be Awe-some!”

“Chanyeol, put that back, please,” I roll my eyes from where I’m sitting, going through books of my own about all kinds of literature the library is big enough to contain. I’m focused hard, my back solid still, whereas Chanyeol is slouching, his school blazer (which he finally wore) opened and lying against his shoulders like an extra piece of fabric. “The librarian is staring at us and I know in the back of her head she’s looking for a way to kick us out.”

“Nah, she’s only looking for a way to kick me out,” he says casually, twirling the red book around his large, long fingers and making it look tiny in comparison to its original size. “Man, I admit, I pissed her off so many times.”

I look up from the book I’m viewing with a flat, unamused look upon my face. “Let me guess, you bring your girls all the way here because of the many hidden shelves which you use, play with them, act like a chauvinist with them, and them dumping them. How many times did you actually get caught?”

“I’m not sure,” he neutrally shrugs his massive shoulders, but I’m not blind to the wide smirk up on his face, outlining his deep dimple. “But I think about four times? Five-ish? So-so.”

“You’re disgusting.” I grimace. 

He eyeballs me, his wide eyes looking ridiculously wider at such gesture. He looks positively offended and I feel a flare of low-pitched amusement flicker within me like a sound of an abrupt squeal at that, glad that I’ve been able to wipe some of his neverending playfulness. “I’m really thinking about the fact this word is the only adjective in your vocabulary.”

I clear my throat and eyeball him back. “Put the red book down, Chanyeol. We didn’t even discuss the topic we want to choose, dummy. Come sit down.”

“What is there to discuss?” He wails, and I look around me in nervousness to see if anyone present around would be able to hear his loud baritone noise. He comes over to the table and drops the book on it, leaning his hands against the back of the chair. “We’re clearly going to choose love. The classical literature had a whole bunch of works regarding the genre. It’s the richest concept, and everyone knows the widest concept is the easiest one to search in. I told you, I’ll get you an easy A in this.”

“There’s no way in hell am I agreeing on the concept love,” I affirm with a very defensive tone, a finalized quality underlying my voice. “Just like you said, it’s the widest concept which automatically means everyone is going to want to use it, too. We have to choose the least subject and make a huge paper out of it, like hate, for instance, and leave the love bull away.”

He leans against the table, his eyes suddenly looking serious. “What do you have against love, you black hearted horse?”

I flinch, both at the concept of having something against love in particular, and at being labeled a dark horse. I don’t have anything against horses or dark animals in general. But I know that black resembles the decaying heart of a very frivolous and bad person, and if there’s something I take seriously is the differences between bad and good. I know I’m not the nicest, most outgoing, cheerful, approachable person out there, but I make sure I don’t let myself get consumed by emotions and burn like a flame that eats everything in its wake. Losing my emotions towards SeungJin was a one time thing and I deeply regretted it, because I knew it was a bad thing to do, despite who I am. I always considered people and their emotions, but I never really thought about love. If I’m being honest, I’m not sure I know what love is. All I felt from it is what I have regarding my mother. The feeling and I clash terribly, and I admit that I might find myself grow queasy and sporadic when it comes to it, but do I have something against it?

Secretly, I always wanted to feel.. love. I liked the cheesy concepts of soulmates and lovers, and had a fancy mindset that I’ll once find someone to love completely. Nobody knows this about me considering I am who I am, but a deeper part of me; I longed to be loved and to be in love. If there’s a correct answer to Chanyeol’s spontaneous question, its that I honestly had nothing against love.

“Why am I a horse?” I blink my eyes at him. Seriously, why a horse? “And I don’t have anything against love. I just think it’s an overrated subject and basically everyone would choose it for the coed project. We have to be original. We have to choose what minimum of students would choose, even preferably if none chose it.”

“But love, Yuji, love!” Chanyeol exclaims, and with his naturally low voice, the words echo all over the library. I want to smack my head against the table with how atrociously loud it was. “The purest of all existence! The most wonderful emotion in all human lives! The softness you feel regarding people! The amazing happiness it consumes you at the simplest touches of it! And you want to talk about hate?” He gives me a dramatically disappointed look, “I’m very disappointed in you, very very disappointed.”

The teacher gave us very basic subjects to talk about. Love, hate, and friendship. He told us to collect as much subjects in literature that fell under those genres and talk about them, what made them special, and what made them stand out. He also had a special question in the form of why we thought these literature works fell under these three subjects. He told us that he’d know if we copied ideas of people online, and that he’d know if we faked our answers or answered halfheartedly. Frankly, I didn’t think he was that sharp to catch all of the fake answers, but it didn’t matter to me anyway. I don’t do cheating, and as much as convincing it