In Constant Stars
18 -- a  s p a c e  i n  b e t w e e n

The next morning I was horrified to notice that my seemingly cool behaviour was actually a cover up for my desperate desire to see Daehyun. Maintaining a neutral look, I tried to search the hallways for his silhouette. It was pathetic, really, seeing what had become of me. Despite any efforts not to think about him and all of my attempts of distracting myself, I’d had an awful night’s sleep. My mother, who had once again decided to randomly drop by and show her face, even noted that I looked like a wreck.

My response to that?

Great. Fantastic. Whoop-dee-doo.

“Okay, noona, try not to run into people while in your zombie mode!” Zelo ran off before I got the chance to glare at him. Brother complex or not, there were simply moments that our sibling relationship was just as any other one and we’d squabble. I barely stopped myself from growling at his retreating figure.

Then it turned out that he wasn’t the only one trying to aggravate me.

“Good morning, my bestie!” a painstakingly joyful, high-pitched voice sounded from behind me.

Some kind of miracle had occurred and it had turned Kang Heeyoung into a morning person. She was usually the type of girl to sleep in until noon given the chance, and even waking up around that time could make her grumpy. As it was still eight in the morning, I had no clue what had suddenly made her all perky.

“My parents have announced that they will be travelling around the world for a while, starting from this afternoon,” she quickly clarified even though I hadn’t had the chance to ask her yet. “I’m so happy, Nana! They’ll finally be off my back about college applications for at least for a few months.”

“You mean you still haven’t started on them?” I asked with an eyebrow raised as we kept on walking.

“Hey, not everyone knows what they want to do with their life, okay? Ideally I’d keep going the way I am now, living this easy life without worries. But we can’t all have what we want, huh?”

Rolling my eyes, I tried not to comment on her dramatic antics, which had seemed especially ironic considering that she was the heiress to the great fortune her father had built. If anything, she of all people would be able to get what she wanted.

But that wasn’t how Kang Heeyoung worked. She feared not knowing what was coming, just as how she feared the dark. Despite her fierce and powerful appearance, she was anxious about what was awaiting her. And therefore, making a choice – a final decision – was what freaked her out. She was comfortable being the way she was right now, and that comfort was more important to her than superficial materialism.

“Anyway,” she sing-sang, “we’ve cleared why I’m in a good mood. The big question mark now rests in why you are so irritated? Isn’t waking up every day at six o’clock all chirpy, like, your favourite thing to do in the world?”

“Please stop saying it like I’m some kind of freak.”

“But it is weird how early you get up every morning! And you’re like… super coherent first thing! Like… no eye-rubbing, no sleepiness, no muttering or anything.”

“Please stop talking about that as if it’s a super power.”

I could use as many ‘please’s as I wanted; Heeyoung wouldn’t listen. She kept up the whole speech on why I must be some kind of extra-terrestrial creature simply because I enjoyed waking up early, all the way until we reached my locker. I didn’t open it before softly massaging my temples with my fingers as she droned on and on about my other weird habits.

“Oh, and you always put lemon slices in my water. Not that I mind because that’s so nice, but hoooow? How can you bring yourself to actually cut open an entire lemon just so I can have some very nicely flavoured water? How do you manage going through all that trouble without going crazy?” Heeyoung asked as she stared up at me with big, wondering eyes

I didn’t have a clue what she was asking, but even I in my half-awake state could tell that this girl was here to frustrate the hell out of me. She wasn’t usually this ditzy, so the only conclusion I could draw based on seeing her behave like this was that she was absolutely and utterly enjoying my pain.

She giggled softly. “Sorry, I’ll stop that now. It’s just so rare, you know, seeing you like this… So, do I want to know what kept you up last night?” She stopped for a moment, dramatically – you know how she is – and then said with a big, satisfied grin: “Is it love?”

I opened my locker with a roll of my eyes, not even paying attention to the bestie anymore, as she had put it. Heeyoung didn’t do well with being ignored, so she closed my locker door without my consent a few moments later, even though I was still busy getting the books I needed.

I barely stopped myself from slamming my head against the metal surface out of frustration.

“Heeyoung,” I started, hoping this one request for her to leave me would actually lead me to what I needed, which was really some peace and quiet, “could you please stop–”

But, as I was supposed to be used to by now, Kang Heeyoung’s mind was one I couldn’t keep up with. Soon her attention was averted from me to another person. “Oh, look, there’s Himchan!” she shouted as she looked at something over my shoulder, her dark, big eyes glittering in the artificial light. I immediately winced at her loud voice. “Gotta tell him about my parents!”

Upon hearing this exclamation the gears in my brain seemed to turn as I realised that this couldn’t possibly be good. “Wait, wait,” I said as I stopped her by her elbow from running off. “You do realise that the first thing Himchan is going to say when he hears this is that you have to throw a party, right?”

“That actually sounds like a good idea! I mean, it is news worth celebrating, after all.”

And then off she went. As I watched another retreating back going farther and farther away from me, I knew that I couldn’t stop her. The girl was a raging storm. With a long and tired sigh, I opened my old, grey-coloured locker again and returned to what I had been doing before Heeyoung had rudely interrupted me.

I was pretty sure of it now. After my mother and my little brother, now even my best friend was doing it. Everyone was out there to get me.

“Mornin’, sunshine. Heeyoung sure is a handful, isn’t she?”

And add Jung Daehyun to that list too.

Mentally groaning and hoping that this day would soon be over already, I turned around to face the boy and angrily poked his chest with my right index finger, before muttering dangerously: “Now, you listen here, sunshine. I’ve had a rough night and everyone seems to think that it’s hilarious. I beg to differ. If you think that you’re being oh-so witty and oh-so funny here, you are wrong. I’m not in the mood for your weird ways of starting a conversation, so go away. Now.”

Instead of seeing him cowering and fearful like I’d hoped, the only view I got when I looked up to meet his eyes was of him looking at me with an entertained expression. His perfect eyebrows raised and his lips set in a grin, Daehyun seemed like he’d reverted back to the usual, infuriating boy I knew him as. My gaze lingered a tad too long on his eyes, so then I switched and I ended up staring at his lips, which admittedly wasn’t much of an improvement on the situation. It also didn’t help that our faces were awkwardly close.

“Like what you see?” he asked suggestively, still very convinced that he was being the most comical person on earth. If only he knew just how flustered this was making me feel inside.

I faked an annoyed clacking sound with my tongue and took a step back, fully intending on going back to rearranging the books in my locker and ignoring him the best I could, in the hopes that maybe it would stop my heart from beating so furiously against my chest.

“So, you’re really not going to ask me why I’m so happy this morning?” he asked after a moment of silence. “Come on, you asked Heeyoung, so you can ask me the same thing too, right?”

“Why don’t you just tell me?” I retorted, fed up with his way too energetic mood already.

“Because it’s a lot more rewarding if you notice it first and ask me about it!”

Throwing the last book into my bag, I closed my locker and decided that I would go along with his stupid act for a bit in the hope that he would leave me sooner. His presence unnerved me, especially as he was standing so close. I could faintly smell his cologne, and merely the hint of it made me want to take a step closer, and another one, just so I could lay my cheek against his chest and take all of him in.

But instead of doing something as stupid and reckless and desirable as that, I looked at him with the most sarcastic smile I could muster and said: “Alright. Fine. So, Jung Daehyun, please do enlighten me. What about this terrible, dreadful morning has made you so jolly and – who would’ve thought it possible – even more irritating than usual?”

“I told Jinae.”

“Huh?”

I felt my eyes widen as the words echoed in my mind, like he was standing right by my ear and whispering it over and over to rub it in. Like he was telling me that every single time I thought I’d figured Daehyun out, he would slip right through my fingers and I’d lose sight of him again. He wasn’t the kind of person who wanted to be figured out. Rather, he thought being adventurous and startling was his charm.

I might have thought that Daehyun would chicken out and not be truthful the way he’d promised me to. It was a logical reasoning; even Youngjae had agreed with me. I’d thought that he’d been lying when he told me that he would open up to Jinae. More than anything, I didn’t expect him to tell me the very next morning that Jung Daehyun, for once, had accepted his responsibilities.

In that moment I realised that if I had to explain Daehyun, I wouldn’t be able to find a proper description for the way that I saw him, but that to me, he was the very definition of inconsistency. He would always be in a never-ending process of growth and then falling down, as long as he wouldn’t be standing still. He would always be on the move, making it a point to make everything out of the surprising sides of life, embracing those concepts with energy. And I could only be watching from the side-lines, wondering if I would ever be able to do what he did. I realised the answer was no.

He was too unpredictable for me. I had no clue what to do.

He was Jung Daehyun. Vibrant, witty, flirty, charming, yet unexpectedly kind. Changing, every moment of the day. A troublemaker, an , but also a kind-hearted spirit, all at once. In comparison, I was a dull person whose goals were driven by selfish wishing. I was someone stuck in a past and a present, but never looking towards the future. I could cast careful glances to it. I didn’t rush into it. Even if I could catch up to Daehyun, he would still escape from me in a matter of seconds.

It was painfully obvious from the get-go that there were no victories for me to be gained in this game. I could only lose.

Forcing a smile, I said: “Oh, you did? That’s good. I’m proud of you.”

His happy expression faltered as he seemed to catch on to my lack of enthusiasm. Concerned, he asked: “What’s wrong? Did I do something?”

I opened my mouth, but found that I couldn’t find the proper words to express my conflicting thoughts. As much as I wanted to be his friend, I realised I couldn’t. Perhaps if I were a true friend, I would’ve been able to tell him that I was truly glad that he and Jinae seemed to be fine – because obviously they were, why else would he be smiling? But truthfully, I was a pretty terrible friend.

“You didn’t. It’s just – my stomach’s been a bit weird since this morning. Maybe I ate something bad,” I lied quickly. “Anyway, so you told her… what did she say?”

Daehyun didn’t seem the least bit convinced of my excuse and I slapped myself mentally for being such a terrible liar. To my surprise, however, he didn’t call me out on it. Instead, he launched into a monologue: “Well, truthfully, I was real scared of telling her. Like, almost pissing my pants scared… Okay, not really pissing, but you get the gist. So I went to her house after school and I almost didn’t tell her when she kept talking about how she’d had a really good day at school, you know? I thought I’d ruin her day and I didn’t want to do that. But then I thought: you’ll ruin her day tomorrow if you tell her tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. And every day that passes will probably add more to the pain. So then I explained what happened to her in one breath.”

I bit on my bottom lip and nodding, I prompted him to keep talking.

Daehyun’s hand went through his hair and made it a bit messier than it already was. After that, he clutched the straps of his bag a bit tighter as he said: “She cried, Nana. She cried so hard. And then she got so angry she kicked me out and said she never wanted to see me again.” He was quiet again before he softly snickered, though not happily at all: “Of course she didn’t want to.”

We were rounding a corner. Classes weren’t starting yet, and I supposed he and I would be hanging around, killing time. In the back of my mind I thought that Daehyun didn’t seem like the type of person to get to school early in the morning, yet there he was.

I blinked, but my eyelids felt heavy, as did my footsteps. Daehyun didn’t notice anything about me as he walked next to me. He was very much absorbed in his own world. I couldn’t expect him to take notice of me all the time, could I? After all, I wasn’t that much to him.

“Of course I couldn’t just leave things that way, so I stayed on her porch the whole afternoon until she caved and let me in again. I told her my side of the story and explained how I’d felt every year during her parents’ death anniversary, and I also apologised about a billion times. And in the end… I guess what I wanted her to know the most was the fact that it doesn’t have to be just her by herself, you know? I just thought in the future… I could be by her side, even when she’s hurting the most. I’ll be there for her. It won’t have to be like how it was in the past. And I think she understands now.”

Trying my hardest not to look broken, I still couldn’t help but cast my gaze down at the floor. He didn’t notice that his strides went farther than mine and that I had to work to keep up with his fast pace. Sounding like everything to leave my mouth that day would be a lie, I said: “I’m happy for you, Daehyun. It’s awesome that you got to tell her.”

“It’s thanks to you. To you and Jae,” Daehyun admitted genuinely. He halted his pace and turned to look at me. “I really think I would be screwed if you two hadn’t been pushing me in the back. I think I really needed it. So, I just wanted to say, I really appreciate it.”

I looked up to his eyes and forced myself to smile. “It’s fine, Daehyun. It’s mostly your own doing. Telling you what to do isn’t hard. In fact, it’s just being bossy.”

“But really,” he argued, “it helped me. I know we didn’t get along well before, but honestly, Nana… I think of you as a friend now, and I just hope you know that. So if there’s anything that’s bothering you, just know that I’ll be here and I’ll listen to whatever is on your mind.”

I had no idea whether to laugh or to cry upon hearing this. Just moments after I’d told myself that I was a bad friend, he came around telling me that he saw me as his friend. And even so I felt dissatisfied. Nothing was really cutting it.

“Yeah, thanks, Daehyun. I’ll keep that in mind.”

I just hoped he didn’t hear how forced that sounded.

During the rest of the day, everyone seemed to catch on to that I genuinely wasn’t happy with anything. I felt very frustrated and very, very angry at everything. It wasn’t like it was their fault. Essentially, it was just mine. But somehow I still couldn’t help but feel that everything surrounding me was being unfair. This world was unfair.

Heeyoung didn’t dare pulling any jokes on me for the rest of the day. Occasionally she would ask me if I felt okay, to which I could only grunt. Himchan was the only one left who tried to tease me, but soon he too discovered that it was probably for the better to leave me be.

The only one who didn’t seem fazed by my bad attitude was Youngjae. Even during lunch, when I was at my most antisocial as I just ate and glared at anyone in the canteen making too much noise, he continued to behave the way he usually did to me. He occasionally asked me if I was enjoying my food and if classes were okay. My off-handed replies didn’t seem to surprise him at all.

You would almost think that my mood couldn’t possibly get any worse than it already was. Obviously, you would’ve been wrong.

After my last class of the day, English, I accidentally met eyes with Kim Jinae.

It wasn’t like I could look away and pretend like I hadn’t seen her. I just couldn’t do that. At the very least, I owed it to her to at least acknowledge her existence. If what Daehyun had told me was true, she’d been heartbroken yesterday after her boyfriend had told her the truth. And I had been such a big part of that truth.

“Hey,” she greeted in restrained manner.

“Hi,” I said, equally controlled.

An awkward moment passed. Other students walked past and shot us curious glances, but none of them stopped to talk to either of us. Eventually, the room was empty except for Jinae and me.

“Listen, Jinae,” I started, my chest feeling very heavy. I couldn’t put my finger on the exact feeling. Except for the mixture of guilt, the feeling of being rejected and a bit of bitterness, it was almost as if there was something else also making all this even worse than it already was. “I’m really sorry for not telling you. I know I should have, but the truth is that I chickened out. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you, especially not when Daehyun seemed to be in so much pain too.”

Her lips thinned for an instance, before she quickly regained her original expression. That was fine. I didn’t expect her to forgive me like that. I knew I probably wouldn’t.

“It didn’t mean anything,” I said quietly when she didn’t seem to know what to do.

Jinae nodded. “He said so too.”

That hurt, the feeling resembling a stone scratching against your skin and each time it went across your flesh, it would carve a deeper wound. I knew that it hadn’t meant anything to him. Back then, it hadn’t meant anything to me either. But in retrospect I’d wished it had meant something. Anything.

“I’m not angry at you, Nana. I know that he told you not to say anything to me. Moreover, I actually feel bad that our arguments dragged you in as well. I really had no idea that things could get so out of hand. In some way, I put you in a difficult position too, so I wanted to apologise to you as well.”

I shook my head. “No, you shouldn’t. In no way is the wrong I did you comparable to that. Please don’t.”

She smiled, though hesitantly. She let her left hand go through her hair while looking for the right words to say. However, just like I had, she found that there was nothing.

Perhaps we’d coated it up with pretty words, both sounding like we were understanding and mature girls. I wasn’t saying we weren’t, but up to an extent the exchange had been forced. There was no way that Kim Jinae didn’t have her own opinion of the fact that I’d stayed quiet all along, just like how I had my own views on the way she’d handled her conflicts with Daehyun.

This situation was, after all, a mess. There was no use in making it worse by breaking out in a fight.

But even as both of us knew that, we still couldn’t help that remaining feeling of awkwardness lingering in between us as we stood there, trying to figure out what to do. She’d once said to me that we could be friends and that she saw me as one. Back then, I had genuinely liked the idea. I still did, but now it didn’t seem possible anymore.

Even as she bade me goodbye in a friendly manner, it didn’t go by us unnoticed that the tense atmosphere was still present. In that moment, we both realised that, even though neither of us had meant for things to be this way, Jinae and I would probably never be friends.

“Cheer up, Nana,” Heeyoung had said to me later that night on the phone, as I walked home from work. “It’s not your fault. It’s just that you’re in a difficult situation right now, both of you. But that doesn’t mean it can’t work out in the future, does it?”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I’d said softly, even though part of me couldn’t help but think that this was just wishful thinking, or thoughts originating from guilt. More than anything, I wished I could’ve helped Jinae by becoming her friend, but that seemed impossible now.

“And I don’t think you did anything wrong,” my best friend continued. “I mean, this was Daehyun’s problem to begin with. You just did what you did because you didn’t really have a choice. I don’t blame you.”

But was that really the truth? Had I not had a choice? I could’ve told Jinae, easily. At some points I even almost had told her, the only thing holding me back being the pleading look on Daehyun’s face the first time he asked me not to tell her. And even if I hadn’t had the choice, did that automatically make what I’d done okay?

Heeyoung saw this situation as a black-and-white one, meaning with only two extremes. It was either good or it was bad. In her eyes, I hadn’t done anything wrong and the one to blame was Daehyun. But I didn’t feel comfortable assuming things that way.

Between black and white, there’s always an area of grey. Depending on the situation, that area could be a tiny one, or a vast one. Just like numbers, colours are infinite, to the point that there are even ones that we can’t see. And so it happens that there is an infinite amount of grey shades in between the white and black. These were the in-betweens. Not-quite-but-still-very-close.

If Heeyoung hadn’t been just a slight bit biased for my sake and just plain asked me what I thought of my own role in this messed up situation, I would have seriously taken my time to think about it. About where in that series of white to black I would be.

And you know what? I had been just as guilty as Daehyun was. By shutting up, I’d been as much a bad guy as he was. I realised that I would probably have been the first one to admit that I was a dark shade of grey, so dark that it could easily be mistaken for black.

Only, I wouldn’t be forgiven. After all, I was but the person in between. All that ever mattered was either black or white. Kim Jinae would make no exception to that rule.