the conversations go on around him like there isn’t a teenage boy sitting at his desk and ing crying

 

It’s the second day of school. Not that it makes that much of a difference for Minseok.
It’s also the day that Cross Country starts.
Minseok doesn’t really like sports. In middle school, she ran Cross Country. She was last every time. She could see it in their eyes; the people who cheered her on from the sidelines pitied her for having a body like her’s. They were glad that it wasn’t them embarrassing themselves at the end of every race.
People think others will feel better if they’re nice and give them special attention. But the truth is, someone like Minseok just wants to blend in. She doesn’t want sympathy or cheers. She wants to be a normal person.
Minseok avoided school sports like that plague last year. Sometimes, she would see the athletes running past the classroom window (Minseok always stayed after school), and she would wait until the last person came into view. Then she would wonder to herself how much further she would be behind the last person had she been running.
But this year, Minseok had no choice.
Doing school sports made up for physical education. Minseok has no time in her school schedule to fit in gym, and she isn’t going to spend hundreds of precious dollars to slave away during the summer. So she joined Cross Country.
It’s easier now, Minseok notices. Even though she’s still in the back, she feels like she isn’t carrying as much of a burden. She doesn’t feel as many stares on her as before.
Still, Minseok feels like she stands out in any crowd.
High school cross country is different from middle school. She still starts off fairly confident, and returns wheezing and dying from thirst. However, the distance is longer, which means more time for the faster runners to put space between Minseok and them. When Minseok finally huffs into the school entrance, even the coaches are gone. And they’re supposed to make sure every athlete gets home safe.

There’s really nothing much to running, Minseok discovers.
She stares at the ground, her worn sneakers coming into her view and then disappearing. She doesn’t notice the trees around her, just the neverending concrete in front of her and the darkening sky.
Even Minseok is tired and thirsty and she thinks she sees a snail pass her out of the corner of her eye, she doesn’t stop. No matter how slow she is, Minseok never stops running. Even though Minseok can’t say she’s accomplished much in her life, she has never walked during a run. It’s the kind of thing she believes in.
Always doing your best no matter what.
Not that it did Minseok much good.
Minseok is satisfied in the fact that she will have a fuller college application when the time comes. She thinks the people messing around now are wasting their time. They’ll regret it later.
Cross country isn’t very bad, Minseok realizes. As long as she minds her own business, nobody really bothers her. She runs by herself, with nothing but the concrete path in front of her and the woods around her. She thinks of it as an after school gym class that she has to do.
It’s the partnering up that she hates.
One day, the coach announces that they’re going to do some strength training instead of the usual run your own run. He also announces that they are to get into groups of three with people who are your own speed.
Minseok doesn’t really know what to do. As far as she knows, there’s nobody who is her speed. She’s the only one. She smiles slightly as she realizes this. She’s special.
But the coach won’t budge. Before she knows it, he has her in a group with two very tall boys.
Very tall.
Minseok never really realized it, but her height of 163 centimeters is actually very short. She squints up into the sun to look one of them in the face, and she feels like he must be at least 200 centimeters tall.
“Hello! I’m Chanyeol,” one of the giants says brightly, holding out a hand. Minseok stares at it dumbly before gingerly touching his hand, only to have her hand be pumped up and down enthusiastically.
“How tall are you?” Minseok blurts out, and Minseok blames the amount of human interaction she has had lately.
Chanyeol looks confused for a moment, before grinning and stating,”185 centimeters!” Minseok gapes at him. It isn’t quite 200, but still a whopping 22 centimeters taller than her. “How tall are you?” Chanyeol asks, going along with the flow.
Minseok shrugs.
“Hey! I answered you!” Chanyeol pouts.
Minseok panics, her lack of talking to others making her unable to tell the difference between seriousness and playfulness. She doesn’t know, can’t tell whether Chanyeol is being serious or not, so she quickly replies, “160.” To her immense relief, the smile blooms in Chanyeol’s face again.
That was close, she thinks to herself.
Then she turns around and takes a deep breath. This is more than she has said in the last couple of years. The stress is getting to her.
Just then, the coach announces a new development. “You guys will be running 200 meter relays! Each person must do at least ten!”
Relays. Uh oh.
“I’m not very fast,” Minseok mutters, focusing her eyes on the letters on Chanyeol’s t shirt, because his chest is at her eye level.
“That’s okay!” Chanyeol leans down, and Minseok instinctively leans away. “I’m not very fast, either,” he whispers like it’s a secret, eyes big. Minseok nods and hopes Chanyeol straightens up faster.
He does, and Minseok only realizes that the other boy hadn’t said a single word, or even made eye contact, when he’s halfway across the field and Chanyeol is getting ready to start. By some unspoken vote they had agreed to let Minseok go last.
To Minseok, it feels like only a couple of seconds has passed when she glimpses the other boy in her group running up. Then she widens her eyes, because he is extremely fast and Minseok doesn’t understand how the coach could have put them in a group together. He steamrolls down the track, passing at least five people and handing the baton to a shocked Minseok.
Then Minseok recovers and starts off, at least a third slower than the boy’s speed. The people that the boy passed catch right up to her, and more.
By the time she hands the baton to Chanyeol, she’s gasping and her face feels tomato red. Chanyeol gives her a sympathetic look as he starts off, loping along slowly, looking completely carefree next to the red faced, serious runners beside him.
It goes on like this. The still unnamed boy, the human bullet, passes lots of people. Minseok lets some people by. Chanyeol lets some people by. Then the other boy passed them all over again. In the end, they finish among the average.
That wasn’t too bad, Minseok thinks.
Until Chanyeol shouts goodbye to her and she hopes that he doesn’t think that they’re actually friends just because they know each other’s name and height.

Yixing doesn’t know what happens to him.
He’s fine, really. It’s been so long that he’s almost used to it.
Almost.
Then there are the times when he breaks down. He’s sitting there, perfectly fine, as invisible as usual. Nobody pays him any mind, and he almost enjoys it, when suddenly a wave of loneliness and sadness and remembrance of before hits him and he feels that sting in his nose and then he just sits at his desk while tears stream down his face.
Even then, nobody notices him. There he is, tears spilling down his cheeks, you’d think that someone would come over and hand him a tissue and pat his back. But no. The conversations go on around him like there isn’t a teenage boy sitting at his desk and ing crying.
This is one of those times. It’s study hall, the teacher is out and the students are grouped in clusters around the room, chatting. Yixing sits in the middle of the room, and suddenly he’s crying again.
Yixing used to hide his face and sniffle, embarrassed. But over time, he realized that nobody cares, anyway. So now he just sits there, a pool forming on the desktop.
Yixing’s head clouds with despair and he wonders why he does this to himself. Come to school, do homework. What the reason for all this is.
And then suddenly he feels a gaze on him.
It shocks Yixing. He hasn’t been so much as glanced at since middle school, and he immediately feels the spark.
He whips his head around and makes eye contact.
Yixing blinks rapidly, unused to that feeling of connection and understanding you get when you lock eyes with someone. It’s been too long, and Yixing finds himself falling into the dark pupils, unwilling to look away. He is drunk on the feeling of the gaze.
Yixing’s head spins, and he feels like the brown circles are getting larger and larger, until he realizes that they literally were, and the owner of the eyes is pressing a tissue into his hand. Yixing tears his eyes away and looks down dumbly at the tissue. The person sighs and Yixing feels the tears on his face soaking away, some of the pain in his heart dissolving into the soft white paper.
Yixing’s heart aches because he knows the person is going to leave and he’s going to have to deal with it all alone again, but the girl (Yixing finally noticed more about this person) simply sits on the desk next to him and looks at him.
It’s silent. At least in the world that is Yixing and the girl. He doesn’t care to break the silence, choosing to drown in the girl’s chocolate colored eyes. It’s closer than Yixing has ever felt to a person since four years ago, since sixth grade, since J...
And then Yixing’s cursing himself because his eyes betray him and he feels them well up again. He tells himself it’s not worth it, he isn’t worth it, he was never worth it if he was going to leave Yixing like that. But the past several years of hurt all flow back into Yixing, multiplied because of the kindness of one girl, and Yixing wants to dig a hole and disappear because this girl must think he’s such a burden. He looks away and lets his tears soak into his sweater sleeve.
Then he feels warmth on his shoulders, and he sits there and cries while his classmate holds him gently.
Yixing’s heart swells until he thinks he might burst.

Minseok is usually never the type that goes up to people on her own and talks to them.
She didn’t know, and still doesn’t know, what had compelled her to walk up to that guy, or what had made her notice him in the first place.
Even stranger than the fact that she had taken initiative is that nobody noticed. Nobody even glanced at the fifteen year old boy sitting at his desk with tears streaming down his eyes. Something in Minseok’s heart had wrenched at the sight, and before she knew it, she had been standing up, pressing a tissue into his hand, and wiping off his face when he didn’t move. In his eyes she saw her own loneliness, her own sadness, a sadness that she barely noticed anymore, like it was already inbedded in Minseok’s soul and was a part of her very personality.
Maybe we can be friends.
A single thought shocked her so much that she sat upright as the teacher continued lecturing. She glanced down at her perfectly penciled notes; notes that she never used anyway.
Friends. Minseok knows better than to trust friends. Friends leave you as easily as a snap of fingers. She’s heard about the difference between friends and family; friends can leave you whenever, but you’re stuck with your family forever.
She wonders if that is true. She’s never experienced it before. In her opinion, family is even more distant than friends.
Not that Minseok had any experience in either matter.
Now that she thinks about it, Minseok really is alone. Just as alone as that boy.
Minseok smiles slightly to herself and for the first time, she feels extremely sad and tired. It’s been so long since she’s felt her sadness, simply felt it, that she is slightly overwhelmed. She’s always carried it with her; like a slumbering beast; huge, there, but never noticeable.
Until now.
And then before she can regret it or change her mind, she makes her decision.
She’s just going to open and move her vocal chords, but somehow Minseok feels more nervous than she ever had in her life. The sight of her former friends simply turning their backs on her flashes through her mind and Minseok almost backs down, until she tells herself that she’s Kim Minseok and she’s never gone back after making a decision.
So here she is, after class is over, sitting down in the seat next to the boy from cross country the other day, the boy that had been crying in class.
And she’s tapping his shoulder, and trying to form a smile that must look more like a grimace, but the boy cracks a smile of his own once meeting Minseok’s eyes, and Minseok almost melts because the smile looks so much more at home on his face than tears.
“Hello. My name is Kim Minseok. It’s nice to meet you.”

Being friends with Yixing is definitely different.
He isn’t much of a talker, and Minseok isn’t, either. Which, normally, would be awkward, but the only thing between them is comfortable silence.
To an outsider, it wouldn’t seem like anything has changed. Minseok is just as quiet, Yixing doesn’t talk to anybody. But to the people who did notice, Yixing no longer cried as much. Sometimes, he would stare into space and smile, and then the people near him would notice him for the first time and wonder who that angelic looking boy was.
As for Minseok, her days go on as usual. She wakes up, packs lunch, goes to school, comes back home, does homework, and sleeps. And repeats the cycle.
But at lunch she sits with a friend. If she forgets her water bottle during cross country, Yixing is always there. And somehow she feels like some kind of hole in her heart has been patched up, even though she never felt it in the first place.
It’s been three weeks, and already the students feel like they’ve been going to school forever. Minseok doesn’t feel any different. Except, in her case she is happy, because school is predictable. School gives her something that she needs to focus on, that makes her other thoughts go away. School is also Yixing.
It’s like a monotone song, going on forever, always the same. Until the new boy comes.
Minseok didn’t even know that there is a new boy until she hears the girls next to her locker whispering excitedly.
“Hey, did you see the new boy?”
“No, I didn’t, but I heard he’s supposed to be in my homeroom and he is really cute!”
“Seriously? I can’t wait to meet him!”
And then Minseok sighs because she’s misplaced her pencil pouch, which is very unlike her.
She’s still searching when the hallways clear. She pops her head into homeroom and tells Donghae that she just needs to find something and she’ll be right back.
She’s searching at the opposite end of the hall, looking high and low, when a timid voice pipes out behind her in accented Korean, “Um, excuse me?”
Minseok considers ignoring it but for some reason it’s like she’s softer since she became friends with Yixing, so she turns around.
She doesn’t think she’s seen this boy before, but Minseok doesn’t really pay attention to her surroundings, so she doesn’t know. She does notice, however, that he looks slightly foreign and has more than a little bit of a resemblance to a female deer.
“Yes?” Minseok asks.
The boy flushes. “I can not open locker. Please help,” he says slowly and haltingly. Minseok thinks she places the accent so she talks in Chinese.
“Hao ba,” she says, and the boy’s eyes widen.
“Oh! You speak Chinese?” He asks. Minseok nods, eyes trailing towards his paper, impatient and ready to get a move on. She doesn’t want to be late to first period as well.
“Wow! I’m so glad. It’s really hard to understand everyone here, and I really don’t know what to do.” The boy rambles on, and Minseok resists the urge to start tapping her feet.
“I see,” she says, just to be polite. “What’s your locker number?”
“Oh! Um, 284,” he says. Minseok immediately walks over to the said locker and looks up, waiting for the combination.
Minseok turns the dial as the boy reads them aloud. When she finishes, the lock clicks, and she pulls it open. It’s clean and empty inside. “You have to turn it twice to the right,” she tells the boy. He nods.
“Thank you so much! You really helped me out!” He says. Minseok nods, attention elsewhere. She thinks she spots something under the recycle bin two doors down.
“My name is Luhan!” The boy says as she walks down the hall.
“Minseok,” Minseok replies just loud enough to hear, just to be polite.

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