NOT CLOSE 

For the record, it was Minah's younger sister that had approached me saying that she wanted for me to tutor her. 

I thought that it was kind of weird that she wanted to drive all the way from Gangnam to Hanyang once a week just so that I could help her with her Calculus homework for ninety minutes, but Minah's family was rich and they were all pretty weird, so I'd accepted. 

From what I knew about Krystal and Minah, they weren't all that close as far as sisters went. Or they were close and just fought a lot. I don't know. But I was very reluctant to tutor her at first but she'd insisted that she'd pay me and promised that it wouldn't be awkward because of everything that's happened in the past year. It seemed like she was being sincere enough and I was good at Calculus, so I took her offer. 

So the next day when she'd shown up for our session, I immediately wanted to ask her if Minah had been talking about me. 

But the problem was that Minah and I had never directly spoken about Minah before. Like, we'd never even said the M-word out loud. 

Also, I don't think that Krystal liked me. 

Although I don't know if Krystal liked anyone. Well, no, I knew that she'd had a thing with Jongin at some point in her life and that she was pretty hung up on it still and last year she got mad at me because she thought I had a crush on him. Which was really gross because that's one of those things that would just never happen. Anyways, Krystal just seemed to have a natural disdain for the human race, but she was still a teenager and teens are generally pretty moody and hard to please. 

"I'm never going to understand how Rome fell," she whined. She'd only been in my apartment for ten minutes. She did not have a good work ethic. 

"Sure you will!" I assured her because that was my job as a tutor. "I mean, you already know the end result, right? The story ends with Rome's demise. You can basically just say that anything was the cause of it as long as you provide enough solid examples and evidence to back it up." 

"Maybe Rome just deserved to fall because it was built on a foundation of secrecy and lies," Krystal mumbled.

Um, okay, moving on then. 

Thankfully, I was saved by a knock on the door. 

"I'm going to go get that," I told her, standing up from my kitchen table that we were sitting at and walking over to the front of my apartment. 

"Hey, Avery," my boyfriend greeted me easily, leaning down and quickly kissing my lips. "What are you doing?" 

Squash. I knew that Kyungsoo was going to be at Hanyang that day, but I guess that I was praying that we wouldn't have to talk about the night before so often that I'd actually believed that he'd made up his own excuse and canceled on me. Like, I'm so bad at having important conversations with people that it was a miracle that I'd made it this far in my life. I couldn't even do it over e-mail. I have no social skill. I am like a turtle. Or a vegetable. Or a loser. 

Kyungsoo pushed past me and walked into my apartment, probably thinking that my being weird was just a normal extension of my already weird personality. God, Avery, say something. 

"I'm tutoring Krystal," I said. That was a good start. I was tutoring Krystal and he'd probably want to know that if he'd been there to make plans with me. And that also meant that I couldn't have that conversation with him because Krystal was there and we couldn't talk about private things in front of her because that'd be weird! This day was getting better already! 

"Krystal?" Kyungsoo asked me. He couldn't see over the wall and into the kitchen to where she was sitting or else he obviously wouldn't have been asking me that question. I mean, he had once been engaged to her sister. 

"Minah's Krystal," I explained quietly. Kyungsoo knew that I was tutoring someone, but I'd never mentioned that it was her. I didn't want to make things awkward between the two of us. But now it was just another thing that I had to add to the list of things that we had to talk about and I highly regretted my lack of social skills. I wished that my parents would've sent me to more playdates as a child. Instead, they just encouraged me to hand out with Luhan and that probably severely hampered my ability to form solid relationships. 

"Minah's Krystal?" Kyungsoo repeated, his eyebrows going up in surprise. "Why are you tutoring Minah's Krystal?" 

Darn it, Kyungsoo, couldn't you ask me these questions after I'd had enough time to practice my answers without panicking and turning red in the face? And could you also do it when the person that we were talking about wasn't around? 

"Why do I have to Minah's Krystal?" Krystal called out from the kitchen and Kyungsoo and I looked at each other in surprise. So maybe we hadn't been whispering. "Why can't I just be Krystal? I am my own person, you know." 

Great, Avery, now you'd just murdered a young girl's self-confidence. She was already crying out for help if she wanted to date Kim Jongin. 

"Hey, Soojung-ah," Kyungsoo quickly avoided the awkward-conversation-that-could've-been and walked over to the kitchen. I guess that he had known Krystal for longer than he'd known me and it'd be weird if he'd pretended like he didn't remember her. Oh, god, was I the third wheel now? I mean, I knew that I was the one that was dating Kyungsoo, but the two of them had had a solid relationship before either of them even knew that I'd existed and that's pretty horrifying. 

Get a grip, Avery. Krystal was too young for anything like that to have happened and he'd also been dating/engaged to her sister and Kyungsoo had his own friends. I needed to calm down. 

"Hey Oppa," Krystal replied easily, not at all fazed by the fact that this easily could've been one of the most uncomfortable conversations in her life. How could I be more like her? What was her secret to not freaking out? Was I the only one that saw how awkward this truly was? 

"What are you learning?" he asked her, pulling a water bottle out of the fridge and leaning against the counter. 

"Calculus. It's so stupid. When am I going to need this in the real world?" Krystal groaned again. I had never met a person that was so determined to not learn. It was kind of impressive. 

"You've chosen a great tutor. Avery knows quite a bit about Calculus." Even though I was kind of mad at Kyungsoo and I was being the sketchiest person on the planet, it didn't mean that my heart didn't flutter each time that he said my name. 

"Thanks," I said, but no one was paying attention to me. 

"So, did you guys have fun at Unnie's party last night?" And then Krystal had to go and drop the freakin' atomic bomb on us. Did she not appreciate how smoothly this was going? Did she want to see me nervously projectile vomit all over myself? 

The colour drained out of my face. That was a new feeling. Normally I had the sensation of all the blood rushing to my fact at once and my body warming up by nine-thousand degrees per second. But it wasn't like either of those feelings were appreciated because they only happened when something absolutely terrible was happening. Like, now I couldn't even look at Krystal. This was definitely a time for some more of those big-girl words. you, Krystal. you. 

But then I felt bad immediately afterward because there was always a chance that Krystal was just dumb since she did not seem to notice how Kyungsoo and I had suddenly gone stiff. But not stiff in that sense, if you know what I mean. Please know what I mean. 

"Unnie was excited that both of you showed up. She didn't think that that would happen," Krystal kept rambling on like everything was okay. 

"Can I - can I talk to you?" I mumbled to Kyungsoo before Krystal could say anything else. 

And then Krystal stopped talking. "Did I do something?" 

It broke my heart because she really didn't know that she'd opened up a gigantic can of worms and I obviously couldn't tell her that I kind of hated her because that was rude. Minah hadn't actually done anything that was all that rude to me. Like, she called me out for kissing her boyfriend and that was the right thing to do because I did kiss him while she was still engaged to him. And, I mean, yeah, she ended up sleeping with that other guy multiple times but that was between her and Kyungsoo. 

Plus Minah had been really nice to me when I first got to South Korea and I still really appreciate that because I highly suspected that I wasn't going to make any friends while I was over here. 

"No, not at all," I lied, shaking my head at her. She probably didn't believe my lie. Kyungsoo didn't believe my lie and I'd known him less time than I'd known her. I turned to my boyfriend. "Can I talk to you for a moment?" I repeated. 

Kyungsoo looked stiff (but not in that sense) but he was holding up a lot better than I was. Did that sound dirty as well? Because it wasn't supposed to sound dirty. "Yeah, sure," he nodded.

"Super." Ugh, there was me and that stupid word again. I really needed to do better. In a lot of areas of my life, really.

He followed me to the empty bedroom where Chorong used to live. I would've taken him to my room, but hers was closer and mine was also a mess and I always felt bad having company ove