In Constant Stars
17 -- o n e - w a y  s t r e e t s

He didn’t even need to turn around to see who had come to bother him when the next day I found him on the rooftop during lunch. He was squatting down as the place didn’t really have a comfortable sitting place and always looked kind of gross. There were pieces of gum stuck here and there and butts of cigarettes kicked into a corner.

“Who told you? Jae or Himchan?”

Surprisingly, sleeping the anger off had helped amazingly. When I awoke the next morning, I was surprised to find nothing particularly unsettling going through my mind. No panic, no worries, no stress or anger. It was still just guilt. Always guilt.

Calmly, I crossed my arms as I leaned against the wall of the stairwell. Even through my sweater I could feel the cold of the stone seeping to the skin of my shoulder. Though I knew he couldn’t see me, I still shrugged. “Neither. As I said, I figured it out myself.”

“Something must have given it away. There’s no way you figured it out just by recounting that evening’s events,” he stated simply as his eyes searched for something in the very little view we had of Seoul from the roof. Our school building was big, but it didn’t stand tall. Other complexes surrounding our ground reached almost as high, if not higher. All of them were the same, grey, boring buildings with dirt on their walls from the rainy season in July. If Daehyun chose this moment to stop focusing on himself and finally look at his surroundings, his timing really did .

“She was sick that day and the day after,” I stated simply. “I know because I was assigned an English project with an absent partner. The following morning the two of you were all chummy again, so it couldn’t have been a fight. I tried thinking up any other reason why Jinae wouldn’t want to talk to you but none of it actually seemed likely.”

“And?”

I couldn’t help the ends of my lips from quirking up a bit, though it happened wryly. “And you looked utterly helpless before you went in for the kiss.”

When Daehyun didn’t say anything I pushed myself away from the wall to walk towards him and stand next to him, just so to figure out what exactly about the boring scenery was so captivating that he seemed to like staring at it so much. I didn’t find anything, so I said: “I only see buildings.”

“You genius, you.”

“I’m actually surprised you didn’t try to cover yourself up by telling me lies or excuses.”

Now it was his turn to shrug. “I couldn’t imagine you actually believing any of the stories I could come up with last night anyway, so why bother?”

The wind grew stronger. How long had Daehyun been out here anyway? The fall was usually still relatively warm, but that day in particular wasn’t. The wind was sharp, and felt like it could cut straight through you. I, too, crouched down, carefully tugging my already oversized school uniform sweater over my bare knees, all the while cursing our school’s uniform.

“Why are you here anyway?” he asked grumpily.

“Obviously because I enjoy making you feel miserable.”

He made an annoyed clicking sound with his mouth and hid his face in his hands, his fingers stretching so far that the tips dug into his windblown hair. “Couldn’t you at least spare me for this moment and stop enjoying this so much?”

“Nah,” I answered with a smirk. “I think I’m really getting on your nerves right now and I have to say I’m pretty proud at myself for that.”

“What do you want?” Daehyun’s voice sounded muffled from the textile of the sleeves hiding his face. I almost dare say he seemed to be pleading with me to leave him alone.

“Simple. Your side of the story.”

Our knees accidentally touched, briefly. He didn’t seem to notice, so I retracted mine.

Chuckling, Daehyun muttered under his breath: “You are so persistent.” Then he looked to his left – to me – and quirked up a perfect brow. “Well? What do you want me to tell you?”

I smiled, taking his remark as a compliment. “Whatever you think is okay to tell me.”

“Fine.”

He took a moment to think to himself, possibly wondering where he should start. Like Jinae had said, she and Daehyun went way back and I had no doubt there was a lot to say. That was okay. Lunch break had barely started and if I needed to, I didn’t mind skipping a class. As long as it would mean that Daehyun would finally be honest with his girlfriend.

“I first met Jinae when I just moved here from Busan. I think I was eight or something… or nine. I have no clue, actually.” He waved it off and moved to sit down on the dirty concrete. I followed his movements as my legs had started to feel a little sore from keeping that position. “Anyway, she was my new neighbour and we liked each other enough that we had each other’s backs at school. Somewhere along the line I started thinking I might want to marry her someday and it turned out she thought the same about me, so we became the classic ‘childhood friends turned lovers’ cliché.”

I nodded silently, all the while staring at the concrete beneath our butts and playing with a little stone in my hands. For some inexplicable reason listening to this didn’t make me feel bothered, nor happy. I just felt nothing.

“Ah,” he seemed to remember something. “No, that’s not right. We only started dating after her parents died. Man, I’m so ty at remembering things with numbers and time.”

I rolled my eyes. “Just go on.”

“Anyway, so her parents died in a car accident. She told you about that, right? To be really frank, I don’t remember much about them anymore, except that her mother made the most delicious cookies in the world. And the fact that that’s all I still know about her is kind of bizarre since she died in front of my eyes.” This made me look up at him. Daehyun’s eyes were closed, but he slowly opened his left one to shoot me one cheeky look. “Did that throw you off at least a little bit? You’ve been acting so cocky this whole while that I wanted to catch you by surprise.”

What was with this guy? He was still fooling around even though he was talking about someone else’s death?

“Don’t look at me that way, Nana. I don’t remember much about them anymore, but what I did hear a lot was that they were both people who loved happiness and that they wanted for everyone around them to do that too. They’d be crazy mad if they saw me still being depressed about their death years after their accident.”

It took a moment for those words to settle in, because no matter how much the will of the passed was instilled in the minds of others, it was hard to believe that the joke-y air he had about this was still deemed okay. But then again, if that was what Daehyun truly believed, who was I to change his mind?

“That’s not how Jinae sees it,” I didn’t ask as much as I simply said it.

“That’s not how Jinae sees it,” he confirmed. “Before their accident, Jinae had a fight with them. One of those typical tantrums, y’know, the basic ones that every ten year old throws on a daily basis. Jinae actually used to be really spoiled, so when her parents one day said they couldn’t take her to the swimming pool because they still needed to do a lot around the house, she ran out of the house angrily and dragged me along.

“In the beginning they thought we’d come back by ourselves when we’d get hungry and they weren’t really worried since these were the same streets we walked every day. But then two hours passed and they still hadn’t seen us around, so they got into their car and thought we might’ve gone to the swimming pool by ourselves even though we were actually playing with some kids from the neighbourhood. They just wanted to check.”

And, of course, that was when it happened. Daehyun told me how, right in front of their eyes, just a block away from the street where he and Jinae lived, her parents were forced to drive into the wall of a building because of a drunk driver being on the wrong side of the road during broad daylight. Of course during the accident Jinae and Daehyun been standing too far away from the crossroad to actually see everything happen in detail, but that didn’t mean they didn’t hear every sound of the accident, every scream from the people around. And standing far away didn’t make it any less heart shattering.

Daehyun’s shoulders had drooped as he told me this, his expression blank like he couldn’t bring himself to show any emotion for fear that he might break down. Even if he’d been joking around just a moment before, this accident had made a big impact on him too.

“It wasn’t her fault, you know? No one thinks it’s her fault, but she does. Every year when it’s their death anniversary, Jinae just locks herself up in her room and there’s no one who can convince her to come out. She doesn’t listen to me either. Heck, she even responds less to me than she does to the pleas of her uncle and aunt. She doesn’t even look back to me even though I vowed to her – I vowed to her – that I would always stay by her side and make her happy.”

Even though by then I’d put my hand on his shoulder, he didn’t show the slightest sign of knowing I was there. It was almost like he was talking to himself and himself only, in a world closed off from reality, wherein only he and Jinae and her parents mattered. A world I didn’t know – also a world I didn’t want to know.

“Every year, it hurts more than it did the year before. It’s not like I don’t mourn them, but the fact that she’s beating herself up over it so much hurts more. And this year I simply couldn’t take it anymore. In some ed up way I thought–” He stopped, his eyes widening as he thought about what exactly he was going to say after this. He tried again: “I thought–”

“It’s okay,” I said hoarsely, rubbing circles on the blade of his shoulders using my palm, hoping it might calm him down. He nodded vaguely in my direction in some sort of way of saying thanks, which was the first time that he acknowledged my presence since we’d started talking about this. There were many points at which I’d wondered maybe I’d pried my nose into business that wasn’t mine to mind, but this was probably the breaking point. With a soft voice, I said: “It’s okay. You don’t have to talk about it. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

“No, you were right,” Daehyun  said almost immediately. “I should have told you from the beginning. Hiding it from Jinae just made everything worse. I screwed up.”

I chewed my bottom lip, not knowing what to say this.

“What I thought was…” He came to another stop, then looked up to the grey sky like it held the answer to all his troubles. I joined, hoping I might help him find it. “I thought maybe I would make her snap out of it if I showed her how much it hurt me. Selfish, right? But I still did it. Got drunk at Youngjae’s by stealing his parents’ vodka, kissed you at that stupid snack bar… But the worst was probably wandering around the streets drunk. I could’ve been hit by a car or a truck if I hadn’t passed by your work place and seen you inside and thought ‘hey, bothering her could be a good idea’. Imagine if that hadn’t happened. What would’ve become of Jinae?”

All of a sudden I felt his hand on my head like I was little kid. With shiny, slightly bloodshot eyes, he looked at me and said: “It’s kind of ironic that you might have saved my life, right? If only her parents had someone like you working at some snack bar too back then.”

And maybe it was Daehyun’s way of saying thank you or something, but in that moment I felt anything but glad. I felt a little lost, because I had no clue it had gone this deep. I had no clue that Daehyun had been hiding these thoughts somewhere inside. It was like Pandora’s Box, and I had been the one to open it.

Moments of silence passed by. Lunch break was probably already over, but my mind wasn’t there at all. I was still letting his words replay in my head, like an echo. I had no clue what it must’ve been like for Daehyun, let alone for Jinae.

“You know, I kind of thought you would tell me off and say that I’m dating her out of guilt,” he softly remarked.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped, all the while feeling a painful lump forming in my throat. I was surprised at how angry I seemed to become at this, because it did sound like something I would have said normally. The uncaring, cold-hearted side of me would have.

The quiet looming over us would have been called tranquillity by an outsider looking at us from one of the windows of the buildings surrounding our school building. They might have thought ‘It’s so nice being young’. But being young . Being young means you have to face the world even though all you want to do is hide behind a safety blanket and hope you may be the exception to stay that way forever. Our silence was a storm.

“I’ve seen the way you look at her, Daehyun,” I said, this time a lot softer. “That’s not guilt. It’s love.”

He nodded.

“We’ve talked about this right? I’m stopping the judging. Your relationship, your business. I have no right to say that. Plus, you’re not even that interesting to begin with. Like I’d care why you’re dating who you’re dating.”

Daehyun seemed extremely surprised by the sudden turn of this conversation. Frankly? I wasn’t sure I could take the solemnity without bursting out in tears myself. I felt miserable, mainly because I’d forced him out of his comfort zone and made him be so honest and raw with his own emotions. It was too much for me to handle.

Then he grinned, I forgot about my worries and he punched me softly in my arm. This, too, was some way of his to say thanks, but oddly this one made me feel a lot better than the hand over my head had.

“I think I’m going to tell her.”

I was concerned about this. “Do you want me to come along and give her my explanations too?”

“No,” he got up and dusted off his dark pants. “I think I’m going over to her place after school and tell her honestly. This mess is my fault to begin with.”

“If you say so,” I said, looking forlornly down at my feet. I still felt guilty for never telling her.

“Hey,” Daehyun said, nudging my foot with his. “Don’t think about it too much, okay? It’s not your fault. You’re being so out of character right now that I’m almost getting scared. Choi Nana missing a class and not freaking out over it? Terrifying.”

I glared up at him. “Bite me, Jung Daehyun.”

He smirked. “Do you really want me to say anything to that?”

“Ugh.” I waved him off. “Just go away.”

He probably shrugged at this as he turned around. I wasn’t watching him so I could only guess. He’d only taken a few steps when Daehyun said: “Hey, you staying out here? Be careful not to catch a cold, yeah?”

I turned back to look at him. He seemed a little taller and a little happier. Meanwhile, I could almost feel myself sinking down into a pool of self-wallowing, unsure what exactly I was doing with my life. I was such a no-good that it wasn’t even funny anymore.

“Oh, and Nana?”

I barely contained myself from barking an annoyed ‘What is it now?’, but then he smiled especially brightly and I could slowly feel the blood rushing to my cheeks. I thanked the heavens that the wind was blowing my messy hair into my face, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to explain myself.

“Thanks, you know. For a lot of things.”

With a half-smile, I said: “Just go already. You talk too much.” To which he only chuckled as he walked down the stairwell, away from me.

I turned back to look at the scenery that Daehyun had been caught up in when I found him here. Maybe I would be stuck there for the rest of the day, staring at the grey complexes like a pathetic little thing while thinking how inconvenient all of this was. How inconvenient it was that my heart had started fluttering at the attractive sight of Jung Daehyun smiling.

All of a sudden I kind of understood why he’d spent so much time staring at buildings.

“Okay, class, I want you to form pairs with the person sitting next to you so you can finish the questions together,” Mr. Lee said as he wrote down the pages on the board. “And remember, no leaving the school until you actually finish them.”

The whole class groaned in unison at this announcement. Mr. Lee had the tendency to assign us just a wee too many questions to finish before the end of class. On top of that, he was likely to announce even more homework to do afterwards. I, too, felt like groaning, but only because the person I had to pair up for these History questions was none other than the guy who’d been actively ignoring me for several days in a row.

Yoo Youngjae was still pretending to be busy copying down the notes from the board. I knew he was pretending because the combination of his handwriting being crappy and him not caring about writing in an ugly manner meant that he was usually very fast with copying notes. For him, it was all about efficiency, and being slow with jotting down notes was not an efficient way of studying.

He surprised me when he seemed to be done and then looked at me like he was waiting for me to do something. I had no clue what he was expecting, so I quirked an eyebrow at him. “What?”

“Did you talk to Daehyun?”

“Yeah. How did you know?”

He flipped to a new page in his notebook and opened his book to see our assignment, all the while nonchalantly commenting: “Our favourite high-reactive Princess caught you sneaking up to the roof after she saw you shadowing him at the beginning of lunch.”

I wasn’t all that surprised that Heeyoung had seen me so I just shrugged. We went on answering a few of the questions. Despite the fact that we had been kind of fighting for the past few days, our teamwork was undeniably good. Where he didn’t know the answer, I could find an explanation. Where my memory failed me, he could flawlessly correct me.

“Hey, Youngjae?” I softly murmured as I looked at him from the corner of my eye. He was studying his book and his eyes didn’t drift away from the pages even as he hummed a low response to me. “He says he’s going to talk to her after school today.”

Still Youngjae was focused on reading. “I sure hope he will.” But it sounded like he wasn’t sure.

Maybe a textbook best friend would nod at my statement and be happy, fully trusting him to do this. But Youngjae and I were thinking the same thing and that was that we couldn’t entirely trust Daehyun to actually do what he should do. Both of us were aware of what had happened in the past and both of us understood why it had been so hard to begin with. Therefore, we were also aware how likely it was that Daehyun would still change his mind at the last moment… or just avoid fulfilling his goal from the get go. Who knows, maybe the only reason Daehyun told me this was so to get me off his back.

Call me a pessimist, but I didn’t know what to think that moment. However much I wanted to trust him, I still felt extremely sceptical. It didn’t make me feel any less unsettled when I realised that Youngjae shared the same sentiment with me.

“I’m glad you went to talk to him, though,” Youngjae said after a moment. I was amazed at how good he was at multi-tasking. Even whilst holding up a serious, cryptic conversation such as this one with me, he still managed to answer another question. Meanwhile, I had been wasting my time pondering over things that weren’t up for me to control. “I think he really needed that. Not a lot of people know how he really feels every year around this time. He acts the same, like the same carefree idiot everyone knows, but if you pay close enough attention you’ll see it’s mostly faked. Venting about it might have helped.”

And that was the last thing he said to me on the matter until we finished everything and handed our assignment in as one of the first pairings. The kids sitting at the front of the class watched us in envy as we walked out the classroom door, fifteen minutes before the end of the day bell would ring.

I supposed I was more or less forgiven as Youngjae walked with me to my locker while whistling a song that sounded indistinctly familiar. I had my bag awkwardly slung over one shoulder and tried not to look too misbalanced as I walked. Some students were loitering around the corridors. A few of them recognised Youngjae and me. Usually they only greeted Youngjae, which was fine by me. He was generally more approachable than I was, after all.

Sometimes I forgot that Youngjae and Daehyun were best friends, possibly because their relationship seemed vastly different from Heeyoung’s and mine. However, they spent a lot of time in each other’s presence and even if they joked about this all being part of tolerating one another, it was easy to tell they cared a lot. The fact that they were so different made me forget that in a lot of ways, they were alike too. How they were both well known around our school, for example. How easily they got along with others. How gentle they could be. How harsh they could also be.

“You’re a good friend, Youngjae. Daehyun is an idiot if he doesn’t appreciate that,” I randomly said as I opened my locker.

“I’m pretty sure he’s an idiot no matter whether he appreciates me or not,” his dry response sounded. “Thanks, though.”

He waited for me as I threw in the books I wouldn’t need anymore and arranged them all neatly, so I had an organised view of all of the subjects. He greeted the occasional student passing us by while he oh-so casually leaned against the other lockers next to mine. Even Daehyun’s and Youngjae’s relaxed, ‘I look so cool leaning against something’ poses were eerily similar.

“What are you grinning about?” Youngjae asked me confused.

I could only shake my head. “Nothing in particular.”

He furrowed his brows at this, which only made me smile even more. Looking at the time on my phone, I asked: “Say, Youngjae, you don’t happen to have seen Manor 36 Chronicles already, do you? I heard that that one’s pretty scary.”

So it happened that I spent that afternoon watching a horror movie with Youngjae. The reviews on the internet had totally lied to me; instead of it being an actual horror movie, it felt more like a comedy. Not that we really minded. But even though both of us had our fair share of laughing during those two hours, I never quite managed to keep Daehyun and Jinae fully out of my thoughts. And maybe that wasn’t all that bad. If thinking about them together would prevent me from thinking about only him, it just might also make me feel a little less attached.

After all, this was so not the time for an unrequited love.