In Constant Stars
02 -- p l e d g e

If I had to trace everything back to where it all really began, I would probably point my fingers to Heeyoung. My best friend, however, would  frown and tell me I was taking the easy way out of this. According to her, I was essentially the reason for all the frustrated hisses, the heartbreak, the painful thoughts and strangled confessions that would soon follow.

If I hadn't given my little brother a skateboard for his fourteenth birthday, he would never have met his best friends now. If he hadn't ever met his best friends now, I wouldn't have known him. And if I hadn't known him, he would never have kissed me that night when he got drunk on Vodka and I was working in that ratty snack bar with the ratty customers in my ratty working clothes.

And if that hadn't happened, I wouldn’t have thrown a shoe at his face.

Thursday morning found me standing by my locker, my bag slung over my right shoulder. I handed over my hot cup of coffee to Heeyoung who looked at me with the most amused and smug smile I’d seen her wear in a long time. She’d already informed me of her wonderful and thrilling date before telling me that she thought that Hyunwoo really liked lame puns too much and she didn’t quite like that. In other words, he wasn’t her type, just like all the other guys she’d ever been on a date with. I was hardly surprised.

“So,” she said, the smug look still apparent on her pretty face, “what you’re saying is, the hottie kissed you.”

I felt my eyebrows twitch in annoyance as I arranged the books in my locker. I made sure they were in the right order of classes I had that day, because it made looking for my things a lot easier. I contemplated ignoring Heeyoung, because she had a tendency to be really irritating when it came to my love life. But at the same time, it had to be clear that last night did not happen the way she envisioned it.

“What I’m saying is that he was drunk, he smelled and tasted like alcohol and the thing we did could hardly be called kissing. It was more like two pairs of lips being pressed to each other and moving,” I muttered, sullenly. “Moreover, that wasn’t the worst part of it all.”

“You mean the part where you hurl a sandal at his face?”

I groaned and barely resisted crawling into my locker and hiding in there for the rest of, say, my life. Yes, that part of the evening had been pretty bad too, but it was still not the worst part. “No, I mean the part where Yujin miraculously returns from doing the inventory the very moment I aim that shoe at his face, which leads to her running to tell my boss what she saw, which leads to my boss firing me. In front of Youngjae and drunk Daehyun.”

I slammed my locker close and looked at Heeyoung, who gaped at me with a disbelieving expression. “He fired you? For that?”

“Yup. Can I have my coffee back?”

She handed it over with a look that said that she thought I drank too much coffee. Perhaps I would have agreed with her if I even thought that drinking too much coffee was possible. I could never have enough coffee. It was my addiction. And so I took another sip of my Caramel Frappuccino, which slightly cheered my jobless being up.

“So, are you going to look for a new job now?”

I nodded as we started walking in the direction for our next class. We were still pretty early and there weren’t that many students around. But the few who were looked at Heeyoung like she was a goddess, which she was, I guess, if you considered this school’s ladder of social hierarchy. Heeyoung happened to be one of those girls who could get along with anyone, yet didn’t become too close to strangers. This meant that she knew a lot of people, and more people knew her, but she didn’t necessarily like being friends with all of them. She said hi to a few of them and gave them pleasant smiles.

Heeyoung and I were completely different on this. She liked chit-chat and being pleasant and friendly. Compared to her, I was the spawn of Satan who no one liked talking to. I liked just the straight-forward stuff. There was no real need to ask me how I was doing, because my answer would probably be the same anyway. I couldn’t possibly reply saying ‘Bad’, because that would require me elaborating my answer and I wasn’t quite prepared yet to explain that my Dad had left half a year ago and now I had to deal with our family’s financial troubles. So really, the only possible answer left for me was ‘Good’, which was a lie. And that was why I didn’t like people asking me how my life was, because it and I couldn’t say it.

“I might pull a few strings for you at some of my Dad’s friends’ companies, you know? Those places pay well,” Heeyoung told me earnestly. She was slightly frowning, so I reached out my hand to touch her forehead, signalling to her that she didn’t have to do that.

“You’ll get wrinkles.”

She raised her right eyebrow. “Really? I try to save your and you worry about me getting wrinkles?”

I shrugged and nodded. “In a nutshell, yes.”

The thing, though, was that I knew there was one thing Heeyoung hated and that was getting along with her parents. More specifically, she hated asking favours from her father. And the proposition she had made involved asking her dad for a favour, and I didn’t want Heeyoung to go through that trouble for me. Moreover, it was my problem and I had to be able to deal with it myself.

She realised that I was trying to drop the whole thing, so then she decided to switch to talking about a topic that I dreaded even more: my ex. “So, last night Minhyuk called me. You know that he’s been really busy with the whole trainee thing, so I was really surprised that he was the one to call me instead of me calling him… Anyway, he asked how you were doing so I said you were doing fine… Don’t look so uncomfortable, please.”

She was telling me about my ex-boyfriend, whom I had broken up with four months ago, and expected for me not to feel awkward. What pained me the most was the fact that he’d had to call my (and, okay, also his) best friend to ask how I was doing, instead of calling each other like we used to do until May this year. I couldn’t say it wasn’t my own fault, but it hurt nonetheless.

“How, um,” I tried, “how is he doing?”

“Hmm, pretty good. He says it’s tough and the company can be pretty hard on him and on the other trainees, but he’s used to it now,” Heeyoung said. Then she looked at me with the ‘that-wasn’t-so-bad-now-was-it?’ look, which I decided to ignore. “Anyway, I need to get going. Your drunk hottie is here.”

“Wait, what?”

“Buh-bye!”

I was watching as she strutted away in her confident little walk, when I noticed that the guy she’d just walked by was indeed Jung Daehyun. Heeyoung smiled at him with a smug look playing at her expression and I knew the moment she did it that Daehyun wasn’t going to be very happy with her.

“She knows?” he asked me incredulously. “You told her?”

I returned the sentiment. “Honestly? You get me fired and I can’t even tell my best friend that I’ve been harassed?”

Daehyun sighed. I took this moment to observe his state. He was looking considerably better than he had last evening. There were slight bags under his eyes, but one wouldn’t really notice them without trying to look for it. His hair was slightly messy, in that unkempt, just rolled out of bed way that every girl my age liked to swoon over. He seemed fine and it was kind of unbelievable that he’d been completely buzzed the evening before.

“Right,” he muttered. If Daehyun expected me to give him a response to the fact that he hadn’t apologised yet, I sure as hell wasn’t going to make him happy. And so there was a silence, in which he kept looking at me like he didn’t know whether he should just ignore me and walk away or perhaps stay and talk to me. He chose the latter, because he broke the awkward quiet by saying: “Last night didn’t happen.”

I arched my right eyebrow at him. He had some guts. I was one of those who admired courage and braveness. But the line between courageous and stupid was very thin and Daehyun had more or less crossed it. “Well, I’m pretty sure I did lose my job last night, so…”

“And I’m sorry about that,” he said earnestly, taking a step closer to me.

“You haven’t done a good job showing that so far.”

His hands went through his hair as he exhaled deeply and I knew that I was testing his patience. But I was genuinely troubled by his reckless behaviour. Taking care of him while he was drunk was one thing, having him randomly kiss me was another. Given, it was my fault for attacking him with the shoe… But essentially, everything else was his wrong.

“How about we just forget anything happened at all last night, I help you with finding a new job and you make sure that neither you nor Kang Heeyoung will further spill the story? Then I can go back to being just Zelo’s friend and you can go back to just Zelo’s sister and we’ll stay away from each other. No one will have to know about the accident.”

Daehyun held out his hand and I was reminded again of three years ago, when we’d first met. It was funny, really, how differently our handshake could seal things this time compared to last time. This Daehyun was hardly the same as when he was still only fifteen. He wasn’t the helpful, gentle teenage boy anymore. He’d become a scheming guy, whose thoughts were difficult to read. Why was he so intent on keeping things hidden? Though I definitely wasn’t planning on telling what had gone down last night, I didn’t consider it such a big deal that it was never to be talked about again.

Therefore, I met his eyes with suspicion. He was guarded, carefully making sure I wouldn’t understand what was going on in his mind. I was no Heeyoung; I wasn’t good at reading other people. Acknowledging that fact, I held out my hand too and we shook on a pledge of secrecy. I had no clue what its goal was, but if he was going to help me find a new job, I didn’t have much to complain about.

Daehyun understood me well enough to know that I wouldn’t appreciate it if he would suddenly turn this situation into something casual and funny. Thankfully, he didn’t smirk cockily or make a stupid joke once we’d shaken our hands on it. He just said: “So a secret it is?”

I crossed my arms and walked past him, saying: “It doesn’t make what happened yesterday okay, but a secret it is.” And I left for class. If he had anything on his mind that he had wanted to talk to me about apart from the whole secrecy thing, he didn’t call me back on it. Perhaps he knew that I wasn’t one for mindless chit-chat. And that was how I liked to keep things. Our relationship merely had to stay as distant and faint acquaintances.

It was an uneventful day. As I had my eyes set on a university scholarship, I was all for scoring extra points. My English teacher assigned me to a project to earn extra credit. Though my partner, a girl named Jinae, was absent during class, I figured that it wasn’t a hard assignment (reading a relatively simple play and writing a typical paper on it) and that I was one step closer to a scholarship.

Heeyoung didn’t mention Daehyun and Minhyuk again during lunch or for the rest of the school day. Daehyun didn’t approach me anymore after the little confrontation in the morning. I was still jobless, but I would make sure that he was going to take care of that for me.

It was only until that evening that my good mood had vanished. It was seven o’clock and I’d just made spaghetti for two. The food had already been done for half an hour when I’d just finished trying to call Zelo for a third time. Sighing, I texted him: ‘Are you eating at home? I made spaghetti.’ I ate my meal and went upstairs to my own room to do my homework. Since I didn’t have any work anymore to spend my Thursday evening at, I realised I could peacefully do my school work now.

However, after two hours when I heard the door opposite to mine slam close, I knew I wasn’t feeling very peaceful. Zelo had come home, but he hadn’t replied to my text and he hadn’t called me back. I tried knocking on his door, but he didn’t respond.

When I went back downstairs, I saw that his spaghetti was left uneaten.