In Constant Stars
21 -- c l e a r  f i e l d

It was one of those days that had me wishing that the world would temporarily choke on its own spit and leave me alone. Commonly I wasn’t one to wish such gruesome things upon everyone, but it was simply one of those days. Call it an ‘annoy-the-heck-out-of-Nana’ day.

It started the moment I stepped out of bed. A better wording for this would be that I didn’t actually take a step – I dropped out of it. The noise the impact of my body slamming onto the ground created was loud enough to wake up Zelo, who usually slept through his alarm clock. As I fell, I bumped my head to the night stand right next to my bed, which consequently became the reason why I walked around all day with a headache that was neither piercing, nor subdued – it was barely noticeable, but still enough so to remind me constantly that it was there. We also didn’t have anything decent for breakfast except for a handful of cereal that Zelo snagged before I even got the chance to get to the kitchen, so I ended up heading to school after eating only an apple and one slice of toast.

Upon arriving at school I realised that I wasn’t the only one having a bad day. With the strong gusts of wind blowing outside, I wasn’t surprised to find many other students had their hair messed up and looked like they wanted nothing more than to stay in bed just like I did.

It was simply one of those days. No one in particular seemed very happy to me as I walked through the corridors.

Zelo was being especially nasty. Sometimes he just did that, because he wasn’t a perfect sibling. Since I wasn’t one myself either, I honestly had no right complaining about him. But that day was the first day that he’d officially take over my job at Takeyama’s. After a long and heated discussion, I’d ended up agreeing that I should maybe relax a little more. He thought it was a good idea for him to start as a waiter at the Japanese restaurant in my stead. I knew that I’d formerly thought it would be acceptable for him to take on a part time job, but when it actually came to it, I still found myself anxious and not too agreeable.

Of course we worked and we did our best being normal at home, but there was still this tense atmosphere hanging over our heads. He could probably sense that I was less than pleased with this new arrangement. He thought that I didn’t trust him and maybe he was right, but I actually couldn’t tell for sure myself.

To my disappointment my mother had agreed wholeheartedly with Zelo’s idea, even saying that this would be a great experience for him. When I told her that she was too carefree with us, she’d said to me in fiery Japanese: “Well, isn’t that how I’m raising you as well. And you’re doing just fine too, aren’t you?”, to which I hardly could say no, as that would be equal to walking straight into the end of my part time job at Corner.

Other than that there were other factors that made this day just a little bit worse than it already was. The fact that Heeyoung just couldn’t shut up about that party she’d hosted last weekend. (In case you’re wondering, I didn’t actually intend to join it. Instead, I was forced to do the cleaning up afterwards, which was to be expected, really.) How Youngjae and Himchan just couldn’t stop bickering about their parents’ companies, no matter how much people around them tried to get them to quit it.

Not to forget, the fact that I couldn’t quite manage to get Daehyun out of my head, even though I tried my very best to be distracted. After Daehyun and I had just spent a lunch period arguing heatedly over something as tiny as a television show one day, Heeyoung even leaned over to me and said with this irritating, knowing smile: “Taking some distance from him, huh? Not really doing a good job at that, are you?”

And I had to admit, he was making it an especially hard task. Before you start to judge me; I’d actually made several attempts to go out of his way. I tried to sit away from him during lunch, at the very other end of the table. I didn’t really acknowledge him whenever he visited Corner or our house for Zelo. I even went as far that I’d ignored his attempts of getting me to help him with his homework several times, even though I knew Daehyun never did his homework and the fact that he was asking me for help was something I should’ve encouraged for his sake.

Yet somehow, as the days passed and my attempts of ignoring him became more apparent, it was almost as if he became clingier. Not only did he seem to be a lot more often at the places that I frequented than before, it was almost as though my cold shoulder did not bother him the least. The more distant I tried to be, the less he responded in an unfriendly way.

Daehyun knew how to push my buttons and he was only using that to his advantage. There was no way for me to avoid him.

I told myself that it was all in my head. It was hard to imagine that Daehyun could sense I was trying to get out of the grasp he unknowingly had over me. And even if he did, I wouldn’t understand why he’d try to pull me back as hard as I was trying to pull away from him. He had Jinae, after all. This didn’t make any sense to me.

“You seem to have been getting along with Daehyun a lot better recently,” Youngjae had remarked once to me. In that moment, hearing this from Daehyun’s best friend almost got my hopes up. Perhaps Daehyun did value me a lot more than he liked to make it seem. If Youngjae could tell, perhaps it wasn’t just happening in my head? But still I avoided his statement quickly, knowing that such thoughts were dangerous grounds.

I really needed to get him out of my system.

That day, Daehyun was being particularly annoying. It all started during lunch, with a muffin and too much pride.

Apparently it’s an unspoken rule that once Daehyun’s set his eyes on some kind of food he wants, the food is officially Daehyun’s Food, which leads to the other unspoken rule that No One Shall Touch Daehyun’s Food Except For Daehyun Himself. Well, I begged to differ. The muffin was mine.

“I saw it first!” he argued.

“So what? If I had the right to claim everything I saw before others did I’d be a millionaire by now, wouldn’t I?” I asked sarcastically, consciously throwing my hair behind my shoulder so I could watch him better from the corner of my eye, to make sure he wouldn’t steal it after all. “I had it first. It’s on my tray. You can’t do anything about it.”

“You have muffins every day! Why can’t you give this one to me?” he said, pointedly staring at the muffin, as if staring would suddenly make it float in the air to his own tray.

“What about you? You’ve already got a piece of apple pie!” I motioned at his tray with a disbelieving expression. This guy’s stomach was just an endless pit. “You don’t need a muffin!”

“The muffin’s got chocolate!”

I wasn’t able to stop the disbelieving look from showing on my face the moment he exclaimed this. When I’d recovered from this utter stupidity, I said: “With the risk of sounding like a broken record: so what? Big deal!”

“I swear, Nana–”

But he didn’t get to finish whatever threat he was planning to make, because we’d reached the end of the queue and it was my turn to pay for my food. I stuck out my tongue at him and, happily, I skipped to the canteen lady behind the counter. Needless to say, Daehyun was pissed, which he gladly reminded me of once he and I were seated at our usual table.

Even though I was sitting at the very other end of the table, I could still hear him clearly complaining: “Nana is so cruel. Why do we still let her sit here?”

I could feel myself flare up at this. Turning my head so I could look him straight in the eye, I yelled: “Jung Daehyun! Can’t you stop being such a whiny brat over a muffin?”

To my left Yongguk muttered something that sounded much like ‘no peaceful lunch, ever’, but no one really acknowledged that statement, since he was practically the only one who never joined in on the usual feuds going on at our table.

“Funny how you’re calling me whiny when you and Yongguk were the ones complaining non-stop about being stuck in the Mafia group chat yesterday!”

Somewhere in the middle of the argument Jinae had joined our table as she’d often come to do ever since she and Daehyun reconciled. Immediately her ears seemed to perk up as she nudged Daehyun and asked him about the group chat. Her boyfriend, however, seemed too caught up in his own frustration to notice that she’d asked him a question.

Yongguk, ever the peacemaker, softly asked me to sit down and let it go. At first I’d wanted to stubbornly ignore that suggestion, but one look at his slowly darkening expression told me that I shouldn’t push it, so I slowly sank to my seat. Daehyun’s smug expression as he saw me retreat was beyond annoying.

“Speaking of which,” Youngjae suddenly chimed in, “how did you get Nana to unblock you after she left that convo, Heeyoung?”

I shot her warning glances, telling her not to spill things she didn’t necessarily have to reveal. Still, my so-called best friend happily opened to announce: “Well, it’s easy, really. Just promise her a picture of Zelo curled up on your couch and she comes crawling back to you.”

“No, you didn’t,” Zelo moaned as he covered his face with both his hands.

Youngjae burst out in chuckles as he slapped me on my back, just a bit too hard. He was too busy laughing to notice that I was glaring daggers at him.

Himchan decided that this was the perfect moment for him to join in the fest that entailed embarrassing the life out of me, as he said: “I’m pretty sure she’d do the same if you promised her photos of me half-.”

Thankfully my best friend seemed to agree with me that the mere thought of this was traumatising, as Heeyoung scrunched up her nose in a look of disgust. “No. Unless she would be looking for a valid reason to poke her eyes out with a fork afterwards, I don’t think showing her a photo like that would be a great idea.”

“Apparently seeing Youngjae act all hyper makes her want to poke her eyes out too,” Daehyun added while absentmindedly playing with the salad on his lunch tray. “She told me so during Zelo’s birthday party.”

Abruptly this made Youngjae stop slapping my back like a maniac and he turned to me with one eyebrow raised.

I sighed and prepared myself for what he would say next. It was not my day.

That time when Youngjae got a sugar rush was something he didn’t like talking about. Generally Youngjae did his best trying to maintain a cool image, since he’d talked himself into believing that that was what he really was. Cool and behaved. Essentially he was a nerd at heart, but Youngjae wanted that to be projected as intelligence more than dorkiness. This all meant that he disliked it even more when people mocked him for the way he behaved during Zelo’s birthday. The fact that Daehyun had suddenly brought that up was really not a good thing.

“Well, what made me want to rip my ears off was when Nana tried to do the PokéRap, failed halfway through to recall the correct names of the remaining Pokémon, and then kept retrying until she got it right!”

Youngjae’s confession, essentially, was the great catalyst to the big explosion of embarrassing ‘Nana-did-this’ sketches that my so-called friends and brother enjoyed laying out for everyone at our table and around.

“Nana mistook a lady customer for a mister at Corner two days ago!”

“The first time she got The Talk from our Mum, noona ran away and hid in her closet for an hour…”

“What? Guys, stop this!”

“On their first date, Nana wanted to feed Minhyuk a piece of chocolate but she accidentally poked it into his nose because she ended up checking out another guy who walked by! Can you believe it?”

“Heeyoung! That was supposed to be a secret!”

“If you make her laugh when she’s drinking something, the drink always spills out from her nose.”

“Nana laughs at fart jokes!”

“No, that’s not true! Shut up, Daehyun!”

“Really? And what if I make a fart noise? Wait, lemme try –”

It was actually Yongguk who got them to shut up. His voice very quietly, he commanded to the whole table: “That’s quite enough.”

The effect was instantaneous. Everyone fell quiet and seemed genuinely scared of what Yongguk might do if they continued their jokes. Jongup retracted his hand from his own armpit slowly.

“Thank you, Yongguk,” I squeaked nervously.

“Let’s talk about something else,” he said, without really acknowledging any of us. His voice had taken an almost pleasant tone, but all of us knew better than to go against his suggestions. Not that I minded, of course.

If any of us had paid attention, we would have noticed that during this whole exchange, Jinae hadn’t said anything at all. Of course she couldn’t – she knew nothing about me. But it wasn’t so much her quiet demeanor that would have been worrisome. She hadn’t said anything, but she also hadn’t smiled or laughed. All the while she’d been watching us quietly, almost as though she wasn’t actually sitting at our table.

Daehyun was so caught up making fun of me that he didn’t seem to notice her odd behaviour either. None of us did, really. But as the time had gone on and we’d diverted from our original topic like Yongguk had commanded, she stayed quiet, solemnly observing our interactions and constantly feeling like something wasn't right. Like something was out of place. And it was only until Daehyun spoke up again that she realised what it was.

“Honestly though, my favourite moment is still that time I told Nana that she looked like and she really had to resist screaming at me,” he recounted, all the while looking at me smugly. Despite the fact that we'd all just agreed not to brush this topic again, Daehyun still did. I couldn't help thinking that that was very much like the Jung Daehyun I'd come to know.

“Oooh, yeah,” Himchan joined in, “and she was so convinced that she was playing it off cool too, even though she was itching to slap you.”

“Guys, please –”

I didn't get to finish my tired pleading, because at that moment Kim Jinae stood up from her seat abruptly, all the while decidedly looking away from any of the people sitting at the table. She hadn't said a word during the conversation, and she knew in that moment that she wouldn't say anything at all as she'd leave the canteen.

It vaguely registered to me that Daehyun had clumsily run after her in his flabbergasted state, almost tripping over a plastic chair in the process. She didn't respond to his calls, nor did she stop when her friends tried to ask her what was wrong. Kim Jinae was determined to get away from our school's canteen without speaking to anyone.

In that moment I was as confused as most of my friends were, safe for maybe Heeyoung. My best friend, as usually, didn't seem too surprised by this turn of events, but that didn't mean she really cared to share with us. When I looked at her inquiringly, she turned her gaze down at her food and shrugged her shoulders like nothing was wrong.

“... What was that?” Zelo asked quietly, his eyes still trained on the swing doors that connected the canteen to the rest of the school, through which Jinae and Daehyun had just disappeared.

There was a hushed silence over our table. Himchan was the first to recover as he picked up his chopsticks again and picked up one of his dumplings. “Lovers' spat, maybe? She hasn't said anything since the moment she sat down here. He was kind of ignoring her, you know.”

But I supposed everyone kind of knew that that wasn't the case. Jinae wasn't the type of person who'd throw a tantrum like that, catching the attention of everyone in the canteen in such a way. Despite Daehyun's memories of her as a somewhat spoiled girl once, she clearly didn’t want that attention anymore. Having the spotlight on her made her feel out of her comfort zone. Whatever it was, it had to be more serious than a simple quarrel.

I tried to catch Heeyoung's eye for the rest of the lunch period. It was only before the end of the period, when we were putting our trays away, that she finally sighed at my questioning gazes and told me in a low whisper: “Nana, I have a hunch, but honestly... I think it's better if you ask Daehyun or Jinae about it. It's really not my business nosing into this.”

Oh yes. Kang Heeyoung acquired a conscience the moment I actually needed her to be nosy for once.

As Heeyoung turned away from me and made her way to her next class, I felt someone nudge my side softly. Turning to my left, I found Youngjae staring after my best friend's retreating back, his expression set in one of curiosity.

“Does Heeyoung know what's going on with Jinae and Daehyun?”

I nodded. “I'm pretty sure she does. You know how sharp her intuition is.”

“So?”

“She doesn't want to tell,” I muttered with a shrug.

Various students walked past us. By now, their minds had long strayed away from the sight of Kim Jinae storming out of the canteen with her boyfriend chasing after her. An odd mix of laughter and grumbling sounded around us. Youngjae and I felt the occasional bump from people walking by. Some of them looked back at us curiously for standing still.

When it was as if he and I were the only ones left in the now empty, big canteen, I finally asked: “Do you think that it's our fault that she got upset?”

He seemed to contemplate this question for a long while, before he voiced, sounding as unsure as I felt: “I don't think so.”

What Youngjae essentially meant by that was that it was probably entirely my fault instead. He never really told me that, yet I could still tell that he was thinking just that.

After school Himchan told me that Daehyun didn't go to any of his afternoon classes. I, too, had noted that Jinae was absent during English. Expectantly, we looked at Youngjae as he held his phone at his ear. We were disappointed when the hand holding the phone dropped to his side and Youngjae shook his head.

“He's probably at home, though,” a deep voice sounded to our right. Yongguk and Heeyoung slowly approached where we were standing, outside the school gate. Heeyoung's lips were set in a thin line; her expression was almost grim. Yongguk continued: “According to Jongup, Daehyun was online on his gaming account just an hour ago.”

“Well, let's go raid his home then!” Himchan suggested, hoisting his bag over one shoulder.

Heeyoung rolled her eyes at this as she made an annoyed clicking sound with her tongue. “Are you stupid or what? Did you forget that we promised your sister that we'd help making the invitations for her wedding?”

Himchan's sister would be getting married in three months and according to Himchan, she had turned into a complete Bridezilla. As she wanted all to be perfect for her wedding, she'd opted for everything to be a difficult task. The invitations, little cards with a vintage design and gold ribbons, would be handmade. It happened that Himchan, Yongguk and Heeyoung were over at Himchan's place the very moment she made that decision. Logically, they were harrassed into making those cards.

“Someone please shoot me,” Himchan whined, his face contorting to an expression of dread.

For the second time Heeyoung rolled her eyes. Though Heeyoung's height was something she often heard teasing comments about, she still managed to reach up to Himchan. In the blink of an eye, she had him in a headlock. Her jaw set tensely, she said: “Kim Himchan, you managed to get us in this mess, so you'd better suffer with us.”

Before she turned away, Heeyoung quickly gazed at me. Something about her told me that she was worried. Whatever it was, I had the feeling that it had nothing to do with wedding invitations. And then she looked the other way. Just like that, she walked off, pulling Himchan with her.

“Don't worry too much,” Yongguk told me when he saw me gnawing at my bottom lip. “Knowing Daehyun and Jinae, they've probably already made up by now.”

I smiled nervously but didn't respond. He gave Youngjae and me a nod as he followed the other two.

“C'mon,” Youngjae said, guiding me the other way with his hand on my back.

All the way we made small talk, but neither of us seemed to be fully aware of the words leaving our mouths. Youngjae and I both didn't feel reassured at all by Yongguk's predictions and the fact that Heeyoung had been so vague didn't help either.

As we stood in front of Daehyun's door, I kicked a small stone on the pavement around between my two feet, while Youngjae rang the doorbell. To my surprise it wasn't Daehyun opening the door, but his older brother. He nodded to Youngjae in a way of greeting and introduced himself to me as Jung Joohyun. In contrast to Daehyun, Joohyun didn't seem as if he liked to waste his time on chit-chat. He was a rather straightforward person. Immediately he pointed to the living room, muttering that he was slowly being driven crazy. He left us like that.

Youngjae and I exchanged a Look before pulling off our shoes and shuffling into the house. It didn't take us long to find Daehyun. After all, he was sprawled over the carpet, books open on the floor. He didn't even look up when we came in.

One sweeping glance over the state of the living room said enough. He’d left the television on and the volume was too loud for casual watching activities. Daehyun himself was still dressed in his school uniform, but he’d loosened the tie and thrown it over the back of the black couch.

Daehyun didn't feel like beating around the bush. Coolly, not once averting his eyes from the printed letters in front of him, he said: “Hey guys. Jinae dumped me.” As if it were nothing.

As I said, it was one of those days when nothing went well.