In Constant Stars
01 -- w e a k n e s s

When Heeyoung and I were younger, it was expected of every child of our age that we found a companion whom we played with all the time, paired up with all the time and shared our chocolate candy with all the time. It wasn't a written rule, as is the case with most social expectations, but somehow everyone knew about this condition and seemingly everyone felt the need to accomplish it as well.

This companion was who we liked to call the 'best friend'.

I'm not sure why humans constantly feel the need to have a person in their life that they can share their everything with. I just know that it's a phenomenon that occurred and grasped all of my classmates back in primary school. It was like one day, one of my classmates had woken up and realised he needed to grab his closest buddy by the collar and parade him around the class as his best friend, as if it made a difference.

For Heeyoung and me, however, the situation was entirely different.

Heeyoung and I never got to properly meet each other, because we already knew each other before we were even born. In fact, I had kicked her when she was in her mother's stomach and I was in my mother's, an action that more or less defined our friendship for the rest of our lives. I can at the very least confirm that up to this day, as both of us are eighteen, that I've always been the one to act ty while she was the one to take my . It's ridiculous that she actually tolerated me and that she had been doing that for eighteen years already. In my defence though, at least I knew I was guilty.

In some sense we were stuck to each other. Heeyoung never complained about it, but I knew she often thought that I could be too detached, just like I thought she was too reckless sometimes. Still, we knew each other well. Even though I didn't tell her often enough, I did appreciate her being the only friend I could trust entirely. Above everything else, it would’ve been a lie to say that she wasn't an important person to me.

Therefore, I suppose, it's not all that surprising that Kang Heeyoung was actually the one who started it all.

"Oh please, Nana! We've already asked everyone and no one is available, except for you!"

It was quite a sight. Kang Heeyoung, the powerful daughter of a multimillionaire software developer, was bowing down to a girl whose family's financial reputation was practically non-existent. And that girl was me.

I slammed my locker shut and crossed my arms. "Why should I? Just have your date on another day. It's Hyunwoo's shift and I'm not going to work another evening in that stinking place just so you guys can frolic around."

Don't get me wrong. As far as I've ever liked any of my co-workers, I'd always thought that Hyunwoo was actually quite a decent guy. So decent, in fact, that I thought it was a good plan to casually introduce him to my man-eating best friend, which led to them planning dates on my only evenings off in a week. How I regretted the way I tended to think of plans without actually visualising their consequences.

“I told you,” she whined to me, obviously exasperated with my lack of understanding for her request. “He’s got cram school on every single evening for the rest of this week and the next. Except for today!”

“How convenient,” I muttered to myself. I didn’t believe that she had heard me, because she did look at me in an annoyed way, but she never said anything back. “So that means we won’t even be switching shifts, but that I’ll be taking over one of his shifts? That is, if he really doesn’t have time.”

Heeyoung winced and I realised she hadn’t wanted for me to think further in this way. She knew I needed to earn money and that I could only do that by working in the snack bar. But that also meant that I valued the one free evening every week that I had to catch up on school work or just do nothing. And she was asking me to hand that evening over to her date. “Pretty please?”

I contemplated the entire situation. On one hand, she was my best friend and I did owe her for a lot of things. Also, I wasn’t behind with my school work. Also, money. On the other hand, I was supposed to do the cooking tonight and all day I had been looking forward to couch-lounging with a good bowl of freshly made popcorn and some melodramatic soap operas playing on the TV screen.

“Okay, how about this,” Heeyoung tried, observing that I was still hesitating. “The next time you come over, I will make sure that our cook makes you a crême brulée.”

I wasn’t necessarily doing this for the whole idea of being able to shamelessly eat sweets in exchange for one evening of serving fries to customers. In the end, the reason I decided to take Hyunwoo’s shift over was simply for the reason that Heeyoung was and would always be my best friend. Or, put in other words, she was kind of my weakness.

And so it was decided that I would be working that evening. That one destined Wednesday evening, I spent in a dirty, run-down snack bar called The French Fry.

Like many teenagers, I would’ve liked to say that I actually liked my part-time job. The truth, though, was that I found it awful.

My job was very uninspiring. It consisted mainly of standing in a lacklustre and stinking fast-food diner, wearing a lacklustre and stinking uniform, trying to deal with lacklustre and not necessarily stinking or, with bad luck, still stinking customers. I didn’t particularly enjoy the idea of feeding people food that was bound to destroy their bodies if they kept coming back for it every day, but then again, who was I to judge others for their lifestyle choices? I just had to brainlessly serve them their cheeseburger and leave them be. What they did with their lives and bodies was none of my business.

The only reason I stayed here was because it paid ridiculously well. Though I never did anything to make my boss favour me, one day I found that he had randomly raised my monthly pay. A few months later, he did it again, once more without any actions of mine to support his decision logically. When I asked him about it – which, given, might not have been my smartest move, but at least I wouldn’t have to deal with karma afterwards – he didn’t even reply and just shrugged.

My boss was an okay guy, I guess. Apart from the fact that the snack bar he ran was completely dull, he usually kept a low-profile and didn’t bother his workers much. He made sure everything ran sufficiently and then liked to keep to himself in the backroom. His surname was Lee. He never bothered with his given name, and I wasn’t even sure why. He didn’t call me by my name often, so I doubted he actually knew what my name was. He just said: ‘You’ while pointing at me and then told me to do something for him. I couldn’t care less. I was here for the money.

So, that Wednesday evening he was hidden in the backroom as well. When I walked in at the end of the afternoon, he nodded to me curtly and let me mind my own business. I’d already been working here for a while; I knew how things worked.

My other colleagues for the evening were Silent Simon – who wasn’t really called Simon, but no one seemed to care enough for that fact and Simon himself didn’t say anything, so… – and a girl called Yujin. Yujin had just started working at The French Fry. Apparently she had decided from the moment she’d first laid her eyes on me, that she didn’t like me. I didn’t understand where her dislike had come from, but I didn’t care enough to confront her about it. As long as she did her job and I could peacefully do mine, everything was good.

“Welcome to The French Fry. May I take your order?”

At least, I thought while cleaning one of the few tables we had, she’s good at handling customers. Better than I am. And then I found a 5000 won tip, which was a pretty ridiculously big tip for a worker at a snack bar. I usually didn’t get any tips at all, in fact. I wickedly grinned to myself, pocketed it and turned back to throw away the garbage.

It was half past nine in the evening. We only had one customer, a forty-something year old man, who was being helped at the counter by Yujin. Silent Simon was working in the kitchen. I went to the changing room and got out my phone. I sighed when I saw that Zelo hadn’t replied to my text telling him that I wouldn’t be home to cook dinner for him. I hoped that he didn’t eat ramyun again, because he was really eating too much of that stuff and it couldn’t possibly have any positive effects on his health. Maybe he’d gone to Jongup’s to have dinner? I could only hope.

There was only half an hour left before we would be closing and we’d have to start cleaning and closing up. I went back to the front to see if there were any new customers, but there weren’t. Yujin was busy racking up the order.

I got out a swab and started cleaning the black and white tiled floor. I figured I could as well start doing the cleaning now, so we could close up earlier and go home earlier too. I didn’t have anything to do anyway, and there weren’t going to be a lot of new people looking for food at this hour anymore.

At one of the tables I found a shoe. I wasn’t even surprised; people could leave the weirdest things behind in The French Fry. Plus, it was a pretty ugly and worn down one too.

Yujin was done with serving the customer. The man nodded to me in goodbye before exiting the snack bar, a plastic bag in his left hand. His feet, thankfully, didn’t leave behind any marks on the clean tiles. Except for the background music playing from the radio, it was completely silent. Yujin was standing behind the counter, so bored that she was inspecting her nails. I continued with mopping the floor. I found a 500 won coin. That was all.

At a certain point Yujin went to the storage room to check the status of our supplies. I went to clean the counters, where we prepared all of the drinks, soft ice creams and where we made and kept the French fries. I started humming along to the radio – I was horribly out of tune, but I didn’t care – while working. It had been a rather uneventful day, but at least it was almost over and I could go home.

I’d just finished cleaning the front of the counter when I heard the bell of the snack bar ring, which signified that a new customer had come in. I mentally groaned to myself, but plastering a fake smile on my face, I turned around and faux-pleasantly said: “Welcome to The French Fry. May I take your order?”

It wasn’t a regular customer. Standing there was Jung Daehyun.

Jung Daehyun wasn’t a friend or an enemy. I didn’t particularly dislike him, and he’d never done anything to make me dislike him. He was one of Zelo’s best friends. Our first meeting with each other had been… awkward, was all. Our acquaintance to each other was rather distant and detached, mainly thanks to me.

Zelo came home one Saturday a few years ago with his new friends. It was around the time when he’d been actively skateboarding for about three months and he’d been hanging around the skate rink in our neighbourhood quite a lot. That was where he met Bang Yongguk. Via that meeting, my little brother became friends with a few other guys from our school, amongst whom Daehyun. At first sight they’d seemed a bit intimidating, but it turned out that they were okay. I just wasn’t very close to them and I’d never really had the urge to get to know them well, especially not since my first impression on them consisted of a teenage girl dramatically sobbing over an animation film. Thus, they were just my little brother’s best friends.

“Uh, hey,” I started awkwardly. I wasn’t sure on how I should greet him in this setting. Perhaps it was out of line to just say hi to him in this manner, but then again it would be weird to treat him formally like any other customer. “I didn’t expect to see you here at this time.”

Then I realised that he wasn’t being his usual self. I knew Jung Daehyun as a clean cut boy. His family wasn’t very wealthy or poor. They were pretty regular; your typical, normal family. He knew how to dress himself and what kind of look suited him the best. That evening, however, his hair was extremely messy, as if he’d just walked through a hurricane. He looked kind of tired and confused. And when he took a few steps forward, I realised he wasn’t walking straight.

“Neither did I,” he slurred.

I raised my eyebrows at him, completely unimpressed with the sight in front of me.

My, he was drunk.

“Wait,” I said. I held my hand out in front of me as a sign for him to stay where he was. I quickly walked around the counter, got a soft drink cup out and poured him some water. Returning to him with the drink, I pulled him by the arm, dragged him over to one of our tables and sat him down. “Now be a good boy and drink this.”

“I’ve already had enough Vodka,” he slurred again, but he did as I told him to. He downed the water in one go and I went to refill it for him. To my surprise, he did everything I told him to without complaint. If he’d just sat there and I hadn’t known how he usually looked like, I wouldn’t have been able to tell that this guy was completely plastered out of his mind.

“She doesn’t want to talk…” he murmured when I came back with a second cup. He was looking out the windows with bloodshot eyes, watching cars passing in the faint, yellow light of the street lamps.

I didn’t bother with saying anything to that because I had no idea what he was talking about. The only thing that I kept thinking was that, one, my boss wasn’t going to be happy to find a happy teenager in his snack bar just before we were going to close up and two, I had no clue how he possibly could have come from the suburbs, where he lived, all the way to here while being so drunk. Admittedly, I couldn’t think of a lot of ways that didn’t involve chances of getting hit by a vehicle.

“She’s stubborn…”

Some random Kpop song was playing in the background. I got out my phone and started scrolling through my list of contacts, looking for any of his friends’ names. Worst case scenario, I would have to call Zelo and no way was I going to let my little brother pick up a drunk friend of his.

“Are you going to call her?” Daehyun garbled. He was watching my phone with big eyes and, before I even knew what he was doing, he made a grabbing motion for it.

“Woooow, don’t do that,” I muttered. My hand was thankfully still holding my phone, but when he’d tried to take grip of it, he had slightly scratched the skin of my hand. It burned. My other hand pressed against his chest in an attempt to keep him at a distance. “Mine. No touchie.”

He didn’t say anything, though his eyes were still directed at the little machine in my right hand. He didn’t want me to use my phone, I realised, and if I didn’t want for him to snatch it and possibly destroy it, I would have to hide it out of his sight. I put it back in my pocket.

Ten minutes to ten. Yujin was still doing the inventory and hadn’t returned yet. My boss was probably only going to come out of the backroom after at least fifteen minutes. I still had a few minutes before any of my co-workers would discover Daehyun in here.

I gave Daehyun a peppermint as a peace offering. After popping it into his mouth, he slumped back into his chair. He’d half-finished the second cup. He was rolling his head from left to right and I knew that he was probably really, really dizzy. However, I felt no sympathy for him and just kept praying that someone would come looking for him and get him out of here – until my prayers were heard and I saw Youngjae frantically looking around him across the street, obviously searching for Daehyun. He didn’t see us at first and was about to run further, so I dashed for the door and screamed his name, loud enough for him to hear.

“Christ, I’ve been looking for him literally everywhere,” Youngjae panted when he’d reached the snack bar. “Sorry, Nana. I was supposed to keep an eye on him because he was completely buzzed when he was at my place, but I went to the toilet for a moment and when I got back, he was gone.”

Ah, that explained why Daehyun hadn’t been hit by a truck during his adventure to The French Fry. Youngjae’s parents were rich and so it was that they lived in a penthouse nearby. It was probably about five minutes away by foot.

“Is okay,” I said, which was the truth. I would’ve been troubled if Daehyun had caused a ruckus and been seen by my boss, but he didn’t so all was good.

Youngjae nodded and went over to Daehyun. “Come on, man. Get a grip. We’re going back.” He tapped Daehyun on the shoulder a few times until he got up. Youngjae nodded to me in thanks and went out the door, assuming his best friend would follow him. He didn’t.

Daehyun stopped in front of me and stared at me with his bloodshot eyes. I knew that many girls in our school thought that he was ‘incredibly hot’ and ‘totally drool-worthy’, but all I could think was that this guy really needed a good sleep and a good shower too.

“Try not to puke,” I muttered to him with a faint smirk.

Once again he didn’t say anything, though he did smirk back.

And then his lips were pressed on mine and all I could taste was alcohol and mint.

Maybe in a different situation I would have enjoyed the kiss, because it had vaguely registered that he was quite a good kisser. But we were standing in the place where I worked, he was drunk and I stank and was about to get off my shift. I hated it, and more specifically, I hated the fact that he was so strong that I had no power over him. I had the physical power to push him away, especially because he wasn’t standing firmly to the ground. However, somewhere between my mind thinking ‘I need this guy to back off’ and my muscles working to fulfil that thought everything went wrong and I couldn’t push him away.

He paused shortly for air and then kissed me again, his pretty lips nipping at mine with a softness one wouldn’t expect from someone so intoxicated. From the corner of my eye I could see the ratty shoe I’d found on the floor on top of a few boxes of bottled drinks. I could barely reach it with my right hand, but when I had it I hit Daehyun’s shoulder with it, hard.

He stumbled back in surprise. Behind him I could see Youngjae looking at us with eyes wide in confusion as the door behind him shut closed. He was silent. Daehyun was silent. I was silent. It should have been okay, until–

Daehyun reached out for me again and though I should have realised that he didn’t do it so he could kiss me again, I still yelped and did the best thing I could think of in that moment.

And so it happened that on that fateful Wednesday evening, in a dirty, run-down snack bar called The French Fry, I had thrown a shoe at Jung Daehyun’s face.