In Constant Stars
07 -- c h a o s

Have you ever tried Google on how to handle awkward situations? I have. It led me to a WikiHow page that could basically be summarised into three things. 1) Think up an escape route. 2) Excuse yourself. 3) Escape. This might work in some cases. Just not now.

“So, of all the characters, I think Feste would be the wittiest. Despite being the Fool, he seems by far smarter than some of the other characters.”

“I do think Maria is clever too though? It’s just the whole character description of Feste being the clown that brings out the surprise factor that he’s actually smart. But to be honest, I suspect that this makes people overrate his intelligence. I think Maria should be considered at least as smart as Feste, if not smarter.”

“Hmm…” Jinae paged through the script in her hands, her eyes quickly scanning over the lines. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail and was wearing a warm black sweater over her school uniform shirt.

I sat back in the chair in her kitchen, taking a sip of my warm tea and wondering why I felt so uncomfortable despite the fact that I knew I didn’t have to. I was just over at her place to write our English essay on The Twelfth Night, which turned out to be just a slight bit harder than I’d expected it to.

I was just over at Kim Jinae’s place, drinking Kim Jinae’s tea. No big deal, right?

Staring at the open window of Word on my laptop screen, I mulled over all my possible escape plans. I’d already told her before we even got here that I would have to leave at half past five for work, but it was still 3:47. We’d barely gone into this assignment for half an hour and I already wanted to leave. I could tell her that I wasn’t feeling well, but that seemed weak, even for me.

“Hmm, you’re right,” Jinae then said. “At first I couldn’t really think of any examples in which Shakespeare shows that Maria’s smart except for Olivia praising her for it. But then I realised the letter she wrote was very clever. Or at least, for Shakespeare standards that is witty. I suppose nowadays we’d just call her a fraud.”

I agreed with a hesitant smile that I couldn’t help as I typed that in. The word ‘fraud’ echoed in my head.

Jinae was actually surprisingly outspoken. Not that I was one to complain about others being quiet, but it was kind of weird to see how she seemed to snap into a completely different person once we got used to each other. The way she moved around her own house, which was very similar to skipping around, but less bouncy and child-like, but definitely very cute, was very different from the meek yet elegant strides she showed at school.

As Heeyoung had said, Jinae wasn’t a social butterfly at school. Once I’d started paying attention to her, I realised she liked to keep to her friend circle of five girls she hung out with a lot. Other than that, she seemed to feel comfortable enough around Daehyun’s friends and, obviously, around Daehyun himself. But she’d never been like this at school, not even around her friends. I immediately shot down the thought that she was behaving this happy because of me. Rather than that, it seemed more logical that she just felt very comfortable in her own house, which would be the reason why she’d let her guard down.

It was a nice house. Warm colours, cute furniture. Everything was kept quite neat. Even their tea set was really cute, with pretty matching prints on the teapot and the little cups.

“I don’t want to come across as rude, but why did you sign up for this assignment? I thought you were doing really well in English?” she suddenly asked when I finished writing my last sentence.

I blinked at her and I probably looked a bit silly. The truth was, I didn’t make it a point to tell others a lot about myself. Much less to people I hardly knew. But somehow, the fact that she’d so straightforwardly asked me about my reasons made me feel a lot less uncomfortable than I expected

“I need extra points. I actually do this for all of my subjects. If there’s any chance for me to gain more points, I’ll go for it.”

“But… Aren’t you a model student? People say you’re really smart, so I bet you are.”

I raised my eyebrows at this. I had no clue people had been talking about me. I’d always assumed that I was more like Heeyoung’s sidekick, the girl everyone knew existed, but to whom they didn’t really pay any attention. “I’m not really smart, and as far as I’ve heard I’m not considered a model student. I just study as efficiently as I can and do the things I’m told to. Plus, I don’t do any extracurricular activities. I’m just average.”

“But do you get good test scores?”

“I— Yeah, I guess…”

She smiled happily. I had no clue why, but she looked like I’d just handed her a lolly on a silver platter. Perhaps Jinae was one of those people who were just genuinely happy by nature. It really reminded me of Zelo’s friend Jongup, who was always smiling, even if there was no real reason to smile. The world needed more people like that.

“So, now that we’ve established that you’re really smart,” she said as I muttered a quick thanks, “why would you be doing an assignment like this one? I mean, I definitely need some extra credits for English since I’m not all that great with memorising vocabulary, but why would you?”

She really needed to stop doing that smiling thing. It unnerved me to the point that I felt like I had to answer to every single question she’d ask me today. “I’m applying for a scholarship at Seoul uni. I can’t afford having insufficient credits for school, because I haven’t done any extracurricular activities.”

“Oh. But I thought that doing activities was the best way to get in?”

“It is. I just realised too late that I needed a scholarship,” I mumbled. She seemed to expect for me to continue talking and I just did. Maybe this house didn’t only have a comforting effect on her, but also on me. “Some stuff happened during the past year and at the end of it all our family didn’t have enough money to finance my tuition fees for university. I mean, I’m working a lot to save up money, but obviously that’s not enough. It would be best if I could get that scholarship…”

She nodded understandingly. “You’re right. I would do the same if I were you. It’s really amazing that you’re able to combine working and studying so well though. I mean, just studying on its own has brought along enough pressure for me.”

“I… Thanks.”

I could’ve been friends with Kim Jinae. She’d shown me how easily that could happen. But how was I possibly to do that without karma backfiring on me? The guilt was gnawing away at me, and I felt myself become more and more distracted as I sat in her kitchen, trying to look anywhere but at her. How she hadn’t realised yet that I was acting weird was beyond me. Maybe she was being nice and didn’t want to make me feel more uncomfortable.

At a point as we worked further on our project, we heard the sound of her front door opening and heels clicking against the tiles of the entrance of the house. Not much later, a woman who looked like she was in her forties entered the kitchen. “Oh, hello! I didn’t know you had a friend over, Jinae.” She held out her hand for me to shake and offered me something to eat. After I introduced myself, she told me to call her Eunjung. I noticed then that she had eyes that were very similar to Jinae’s. Other than that there was something about her appearance that made me feel a bit odd, even though I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly.

“You’re home early,” Jinae remarked to Eunjung.

“Well, you know how the last few months of the year are usually. It’s all very calm, until all the companies send in their files in December. That’s really when all hell breaks loose.”

“My aunt works as an accountant,” Jinae explained to me. So Eunjung was her aunt. That would explain why the description of ‘mother’, which I had thought was most logical, didn’t match up with this situation. There was a certain kind of restrained distance between the two of them, even though I’d hardly seen them interact for a minute. This idea partly had to do with the fact that Jinae was slowly slipping back behind the careful walls she’d built for herself and she always had on at school.

“Don’t ever become an accountant,” Eunjung said drily. “When I was young I wanted to become an astronaut, but look where my life choices brought me. Instead of soaring in space I have papers with too many numbers on them soaring around me in a small, stuffy office.”

“You still secretly love your job now, though,” Jinae said softly, a smile on her face.

“Maybe. I suppose being an astronaut would have been too lonely for me.”

After that we moved upstairs, which was fine by me. Jinae’s aunt insisted we would stay downstairs and that she wouldn’t be a hindrance to our school work, but I think both Jinae and I were more afraid that we would be a hindrance to her. It seemed like we were kind of alike in a lot of ways, even though at the same time all our differences were very obvious. It felt weird to have a person I didn’t even know all that well voice out the same thoughts I had.

Polaroids. That was the first thing that caught my eye when I entered Jinae’s room. It was hard not to notice them, since one of her walls was completely filled with different photographs. She chuckled when she saw my eyes widen in surprise, probably because she had expected for me to react that way. It was a stunning sight to take in.

A lot of the photographs were of her and of Daehyun. Pointing to some of them, I asked: “Did you make these?”

“Mhm. All of them, actually.”

 “You’re a photographer…” I murmured.

“It’s just a hobby I picked up a few years ago. My head is usually a real mess you see. My uncle often tells me I think too much. Hanging my wall full of photographs to represent my chaotic mind was just one of the ways for me to acknowledge that side of mine,” she said as she took a step next to me. Her long hair, which she had let out of its ponytail, fell past her shoulders, like waterfalls of dark brown hair shining in the sun light that fell in through the windows of her room, making them seem like they were a glowing colour of gold.

Jinae looked up at a few of the polaroids hanging directly in front of me, her eyes lingering on one particular photo of Eunjung, a man I assumed was Jinae’s uncle and Daehyun smiling at the camera. It looked like a vacation picture, and that made me wonder just how close Jinae was to her aunt and uncle that they were the ones she and her boyfriend went on vacations with. And that made me wonder where Jinae’s parents were.

As if she could read my mind, Jinae pointed to one photo that looked really old hanging in the precise middle of the wall. From my position, I couldn’t tell what it showed, so I took a few steps closer to see a man and a woman smiling at the camera, a toddler girl in the arms of the woman. “My parents. They died when I was ten.”

I looked at it in awe, suddenly feeling a terrible hollowness in my stomach. Kim Jinae was an orphan and no one had a clue. She was so silent that no one knew what kind of things had happened to her. I opened my mouth to say something – but then again, what was there to say? There was a certain reflex in me to apologise, because apparently it’s common to say sorry upon hearing news like this. But I never really understood what the point was to that. As if the fact that you’d just apologised would miraculously bring back the dead. It was such an empty word.

“It’s okay to ask, you know. I could tell that you wanted to know where my parents were. They died in a car accident eight years ago. I’ve been living with my aunt and uncle ever since. Aunt Eunjung is my mother’s younger sister.”

The silence that followed had me wondering if I should say sorry. Just to show that I cared – because I did. But then again, I felt like a half-assed sounding apology from me was undeserving of Jinae’s sad smile. I opted for something that seemed like a better thing to say that moment: “The three of you have the same eyes.”

“Yeah…” She looked at the picture again, her expression apparent with nostalgia.

“They must have been really kind parents.”

There was a silence again. The sun had hidden behind the clouds. Jinae’s hair wasn’t an ethereal, glowing waterfall anymore, but just really long, pretty dark brown hair. She looked especially sad when she said: “Yes. They were.”

After that sombre exchange we worked in a tense atmosphere. She tried to cheer things up a few times by making light-hearted jokes about Shakespeare’s characters, but I couldn’t find myself freely laughing along with her. To make matters worse, just a few minutes before I had to leave for work, her phone went off and she picked up after excusing herself to me. The one person who could possibly make me feel even worse about everything was calling.

“Hi Dae,” Jinae said, a bright smile on her face. The happiness and love sounding from the way she greeted him made me want to jump up and run out of this house the quickest I could. I just didn’t have the guts to.

Daehyun said something I couldn’t and probably didn’t want to hear. Even through the phone I could recognise his distinct, oddly deep yet clear voice.

“I was actually working on my English assignment with a classmate. We’re almost done for today… Ah, my partner is Choi Nana. She’s really smart and nice, so I lucked out!” At that last part, she winked at me playfully.

Jinae was so happy she probably didn’t notice the way I started feeling more and more awful to the point I wanted to vomit. Nor did she notice the way the other end of her phone was silent too for a moment that seemed to drag on forever in my world. I could notice all that, though, and the awful feeling that was eating up all of my insides multiplied in strength with at least a hundredfold.

I could imagine Daehyun recovering on the other side of the line. I could imagine him sitting on his bed in his room, staring with a frown at his walls while asking himself what he’d done to deserve this kind of situation. He might have been cursing himself for calling right that moment. He might have been cursing me for being chosen as Jinae’s partner for all I knew. I could imagine him pulling a hand through his dark hair as he faked a normal voice and faux-pleasantly said: “Oh, that’s nice. I hope you guys will do well. What's the assignment about?”

Whatever it was that kept him from telling Jinae the truth, it was far beyond my imagination. He’d made it clear that it was a complicated matter and that my seeing things as black and white was a too easy way of thinking about the problem. Despite the fact that I’ve always prided myself on my lack of nosiness when it came to other people’s business, I hadn’t been able to help the feeling of curiosity wash over me when that Friday morning, Daehyun had revealed his pain to me. I had wanted to know what his reasons were; I wanted to understand.

But now, at the end of it all, I wasn’t so sure anymore. I didn’t really know if I still wanted to hear the reason why he was willing to live with this absolute sense of guilt anymore. If I could choose, I’d follow the first exit sign I’d find and leave this mess he and I had made.

Too bad I was already so entangled in this maze of hidden truths that there was no way out.