Dear Diary,

It’s Youngjae. Today hasn’t been that good (actually it wasn’t good at all, but I’ll proceed with explaining about that later). I have never been a fan of the whole idea of “fate”, of someone otherworldly having the power to control the flow of our lives and dictate our actions by pulling at the strings behind the curtain as though we were puppets. This was something that my dad taught me as a child, too. Besides the bike-riding lessons, the father-son boating trips and the “Why did you make your umma angry again, son…” talks we had, he also believed strongly that our actions were solely and completely our own, and thus we were the only ones responsible for it.

The word of today has something to do with bad people. “Bad” didn’t seem like a bad enough word, so I asked Mark for a more flourishing word instead. I kind of like how it sounds, even though it has a negative meaning. It sounds elegant, but still dark enough to cause the air around me to feel slightly more still when I practised pronouncing it.

The day started off like any other. The alarm had been ringing continuously for at least five minutes, but somehow I had managed to tune the annoying chiming out by throwing the covers over my head. When I stretched my arm out to smack Jaebum and ask him to turn the damn alarm off, I’d realised that he was no longer on the bed. Groaning, I forced myself to walk across the cold marble tiles, taking nimble and soft steps towards the alarm clock, and slamming my hand down on the “off” button.

Jaebum had probably woken up the first time it began ringing, and left it on the drawer closest to the door so that I would have no choice but to get out of bed to switch it off myself. That conniving jerk.

He made up for it though, because when I walked into the kitchen after my shower as the last person to wake up, I saw a muffin on the table and a packet of orange juice.

“Thanks, hyung.” I told him and sat in my chair, leaving the towel around my neck as I shook the droplets of water out of my hair.

“Aish, you’re getting water all over my shirt!” Jinyoung complained loudly, and sauntered out of the kitchen while grumbling about how he had to make a change of clothes.

I rolled my eyes. He had been wearing a dark t-shirt, so I highly doubt that the water would have left an impressionable stain or anything like that. Jinyoung just loved to be dramatic, even at the start of the day.

We ate up and left in twenty minutes, milling into the large car waiting outside the dorm. Jaebum sat next to the manager, Jackson, Bambam and Jinyoung sat in the second row, and I sat in between Mark and Yugyeom in the back row. Unlike most days, our manager had not the radio, so it was awfully quiet – even with the eight of us in the vehicle. There was a strange tension in the car, and even if I had no idea what was going on, at least I was not as oblivious as Bambam.

The younger boy had whipped out the camera, to film our car ride for what was possibly Season 3 of Real Got7.

“Hi, everyone, it’s Bambam and I’ll be a one-time VJ today!” Bambam greeted brightly, holding the camera from a high position so that he could use the camera angles to his advantage. He was in the middle of shooting a wink at the camera when our manager spoke up, his voice harsh enough to flatten all of Bambam’s positive spirit at one go.

“Bambam-ah. Stop filming.”

The younger boy frowned, but he placed the lid over the camera lens, effectively shutting off the device before inquiring, “Hyung, why?”

“Just stop. It’s annoying today.” Our manager sighed, and from the rear mirror, I saw Jaebum’s eyebrows twitch. He must have felt extremely curious too, but his great deal of self-control won over, and I saw him pull his bulky headphones over his head, getting immersed in the lyrics and the beat of his own music, swaying along and lip-syncing as he stared out of the window intently.

The other members took Jaebum’s silence as a cue to just quietly do their own business as well. None of them pestered the manager to turn up the radio, or offer an explanation to his peculiar behaviour. Yugyeom plugged in his earbuds, and shut his eyes as he wrapped his pillow around his neck. I could faintly hear the ostinato bass pulsing, and the techno music above the low undertones. Beside me, Mark placed his phone on my lap, the screen illuminated with the background of a notepad. I turned to Mark questioningly, but just like Jaebum, he was fixated on watching the passing surroundings as the car weaved its way through heavy traffic. Picking up the phone and holding it at eye level, I squinted until the brightness adjusted itself.

You should rest. It’s probably nothing big – don’t concern yourself about something that’s out of your hands.

My lips turned up wryly at Mark’s short note. If it were not for the fact that I recognised his subtle, washed red phone case, or the dorky round sticker with a cartoon fish in the middle pasted over his home button, I would have never imagined that Mark (who had been acting indifferently) had bothered typing out the note.

I placed his phone back onto his lap, and patted his shoulder while trying to control the smirk on my face. Mark never liked showing emotions, but when he tried so imperceptibly not to get caught, it was too difficult not to laugh at his awkward attempts. He made eye contact with me, then made a face when he realised that my smugness was directed at him.

I sniggered, and folded my arms over each other as I slid slightly forward in my seat, aligning my neck with the headrest. After hanging my jacket loosely over my frame, I closed my eyes and fell asleep to Jackson and Bambam’s hushed conversation, as well as the lingering house music that seemed to be put on loop from Yugyeom’s MP3 player.

We arrived at the broadcasting station in about another hour, and the first thing I smelled when I woke up was hair products. I barely contained the sneeze that had begun to build up after the soft but gelled strands were poking at my face, tickling my nose, but when I realised Mark had draped his body over the centre seat (with myself strapped safely in) to shake Yugyeom by the shoulder and wake the maknae up, I brought my hand to my face and pinched my nose.

“Oh, you woke up faster than I thought you would.” Mark commented, his face just inches from mine, before he pulled back and fell against his seat.

I unbuckled my seatbelt, slightly huffed from the itch on my nose. “That’s because your hair was attacking my face.”

Mark rolled his eyes, not bothering to reply as he crawled out of the seat and to the middle row, which had been vacated some time ago judging by how we were the only three members left inside the vehicle. Both Yugyeom and I followed Mark’s lead, and jumped onto the ground lightly. The other four were a few metres away, getting briefed by our manager. Because we had been quite a bit further from the group, I only managed to catch the last sentence he had been saying.

“If anything out of the ordinary happens, tell me immediately afterwards.” Our arrival did not go unnoticed by him, and he turned around to face us, an unexplained urgency evident in his voice as he reiterated his point. “I’m dead serious, guys. This is important.”

Jaebum was the first to respond with a concise and dependable “Y