Chapter 2
The Blue of the Sky on Rainy Days
It was dragging his feet that Eunhyuk came back the following week. All his friends in high school had pitied him a lot for this drudgery instead of going to the arcade with them. The hospital’s sweetish smell he oh so hated made him wrinkle his nose. He pressed the elevator’s button with a sigh.
- "What in the world will happen today? He’ll swallow his abacus because I'll greet him a bit too loud?"
He nodded to Kaehyun upon entering the playroom, and threw his bag in a corner before looking for the helpless boy he was in charge of. He was in the same place as last time, prostrate on himself. But this time, he was not fiddling with his abacus. A flood of sheets were spread out in front of him and he was feverishly scribbling on them with a creaky, green felt pen.
- "So Donghae, you're making beautiful drawings today?" He asked him as a greeting. Glancing at the sheets, he noticed that the little doodles were actually numbers. "Ah well, apparently not", he went on to the patient’s silence. "What are all these numbers for?"
- "The head of the floor didn’t tell you?" Replied a young nurse with an imposing figure and a jovial air while sitting on a chair by the small table. "This guy's a real calculating machine!"
- "Oh no, I didn’t know", Eunhyuk replied to the invasive nurse.
- "I'm Kangin", the latter continued despite the schoolboy’s little interest. "Go ahead, ask him an addition, a multiplication, a subtraction, whatever you want, with big numbers, you'll see, he’ll find all the results by head!"
- "Oh really? Well then, Donghae, tell me how much is 4563 multiplied by 768?"
- "3504384", replied the young man barely ten seconds later
It was the first time Eunhyuk could hear his voice, which was quite monotonous but a bit anxious. He checked on his cell phone if he had the same result. It was exactly the same. He repeated the experiment four or five times before being perfectly sure that the young man was indeed a real calculating machine.
- Well, he’s not as stupid as he seems! He inwardly noted. I might not be completely losing my time here. "Donghae!" He said aloud. "Let’s play even funnier games okay?"
He took out the math homework he had to give back on the next morning, the one he had not touched for the entire week, thinking he could risk everything.
- "You know how to read, right? You see those small sentences here? That’s the game’s rules. It’ll all be about speed. I give you four minutes per exercise, so twenty minutes in all. Are you ready? Three, two, one, go! Oh and most importantly, write clearly so I can copy it clean afterwards, okay?"
Donghae eagerly plunged on the sheet of paper. Nurse Kangin looked at the scene with amusement, finding it comical to use a patient in order to do his homework. Eunhyuk looked over the young man’s shoulder, noting with surprise his speed in solving the exercises one after one. He buckled his bag less than half an hour later while rubbing his hands, having obtained a complete draft of his homework.
- "Ahah, awesome, that old stick-in-the-mud of Choi won’t yell at me for once. Here, as you passed the test, I'll give you a special price, a pen just for mathematics", he said to Donghae while taking out a pen he very rarely used anyway.
The boy remained frozen in place, and Eunhyuk grabbed his hand to open it by force and drop the pen here.
- "Come on, don’t play shy, you won it".
He looked up and noticed that the strange boy was looking at him with wide, round open eyes despite the flange. His hair was a bit dirty and he had a strand flattened on his forehead, like mature men who wanted to hide a growing baldness. He wore a green shirt with a palette knife collar buttoned under his chin. But the features of his face were regular, they were rather thin.
It’s not that obvious that he’s dumb, Eunhyuk thought. It shows up because of how he behaves. And he’s not really dumb; he’s rather a freaking math genius! Such luck I’ve got! He delighted, forgetting the lack of enthusiasm he had showed while coming to the hospital with the sole purpose of not being expelled from school.
- "How come he's so good at math?" He asked the nurse Kaehyun while going back as she was accompanying him to the elevator again.
- "Well to make it simple, let’s say that the mathematical part of his brain is developed to the extreme, while the part that deals with social relations is completely atrophied. As if he was born with an index of thirty centimeters and no thumb for example."
Eunhyuk did not reply, pensive.
- "In any case, keep taking care of him; it makes him good", she told him before the doors of the elevator closed.
Eunhyuk went back home and locked himself in his room. He opened the window and lit a cigarette. His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. It was one of his friends from high school who was calling him.
- "Hello, Heechul? You okay man?"
- "Yeah, yeah, and you? Didn’t you get too bored with your little trisomic?"
- "He’s not really a trisomic; in fact he’s really good at..."
- "Yeah okay, no one’s give a , I just wanted to know if you were okay to hang out with hot chicks from Cho Haram High School tonight."
- "Of course", Eunhyuk replied enthusiasticaly.
- "Ok, see you to the Nights and Days at nine o'clock then dude. Tchuss."
He went to take a quick shower then made a copy of the sheets covered with green pen that he had brought back from the hospital. Oddly, it seemed rather interesting to him. The way this boy prostrated on himself had solved the exercises was quite different from what his teachers were desperately trying to make him learn in class, and he could pretty much redo the reasoning he was copying. It was almost contentedly that he looked at his completed homework, which had not happened to him since at least middle school. I might ask him to explain me a few things next time, he thought, just so I don’t get another three on the next test. And it would be a bit lame to be the only one of my friends to not get my diploma at the end of the year. I'd prefer not to rot in high school one more year... Then he chose a t-shirt matching his sneakers and went out.
- "Eunhyuk, where are you going?" His mother asked with an apron around her waist, standing in the kitchen’s doorway.
- "I’m going out", the latter vaguely replied.
- "Did you at least do your homework?"
- "Yes, I finished my math test."
- "Oh please, don’t lie to me at least. You’re despairing Eunhyuk. You want to cause your mother’s death?"
- "I told you that I’ve done it, you'll see on Monday, I'll bring my mark back", he said before slamming the door shut behind him.
And indeed the following Monday, great surprise, both in the classroom and staffroom. Eunhyuk had obtained the best score to their homework, all exercises being correct. He had even beaten the few students with glasses who usually fought for the first place in class.
- "What I don’t understand", his math teacher explained to his colleagues around the coffee machine, "is that none of my good students managed to find the solution of the fifth exercise, so even if he copied answers on almost everyone, I don’t see how he managed to find this one."
- "Maybe he's got a parent gifted in math, or asked a professor to do the test for him", suggested the young English teacher that students nicknamed Eeteuk - no one really knew why.
Mystery remained and the teacher, not being able to find cheating evidences, merely told Eunhyuk in a rather ironic way, while handing him his sheets that, with his quick progress he expected a lot from him on the next test, which cut the boy to the quick. When Eunhyuk arrived at the hospital on the following Wednesday, he had brought with him all his math sheets the next test in class would be about, and this time, did not throw his bag in a corner.
- "Hello Donghae!" He said with a satisfied air that visibly startled the boy. "Do you remember last week’s game?" He asked him while pulling the sheet out of his bag. "You got everything correct! Look, it's my teacher who corrected it and there’s not a single mistake! Congratulations!" He encouraged him again, laying his hand on his shoulder.
The young patient still looked anxious, but some sort of half smile formed on his lips.
- "I’m fully aware it’s a bit too much for me to ask you this because I’m the one who’s supposed to take care of you but, hey, I can’t change reality, the fact that you’re much smarter than me; so would it be all right with you to explain a few things to me?"
The boy did not reply anything but slightly nodded. Oddly, Eunhyuk was glad to see he had made small progresses in communication. He spent the next hour carefully following the calculations Donghae wrote on his sheet with his new pen, asking him to solve exercises related to the chapters he had to learn. When he did not understand something, he underlined it in red and Donghae detailed his calculations or suggested another one in order to explain it better. Eunhyuk, who had always thought he hated math, did not see time flow. The day was already ending when he noticed the time he had spent here.
- "Oh dear, I must go home now or my mom will yell at me again. I'm sorry, you're not too tired?"
Donghae shook his head while staying sat at the small table as Eunhyuk was tidying his things.
- "It's really nice of you, you know", he continued while closing his kit, "I understand ten times better with you than with my teacher, you explain really well, even if you don’t talk much."
The boy was now curling the right corner of his mouth while weirdly turning his head. Kangin told him later on that it was his way of showing his satisfaction.
- "Would that… that be okay with you if I came back tomorrow so we could do more math? Because I have a test Monday morning ..."
Donghae slowly nodded and Eunhyuk suddenly got an idea.
- "So, is that okay?" He asked again, pretending not to understand. "I really need you."
- "All...right", the young boy replied, in a great effort, with a broken and completely off voice since he did not use it a lot.
- "Ah, I knew you could talk", Eunhyuk replied with a triumphant air. "See you tomorrow then."
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