strawberry planes
strawberry planes
3,563w; g (dahyun/chan)
chan's learned several things over the past ten years of living next to kim dahyun.
a/n: after starting <33 (sixteen/seventeen) a year ago with the lovely kurdoodle, i've finally finished one of my many wips! this was supposed to be a drabble what even happened, i wish i knew (i also wish i knew how to end fics). also dedicated to kirakirashahida for thinking of dino as my son ♥♥♥
Dahyun's always been a crier. She's also always been the girl who flew paper planes through his open window on summer evenings with strange, almost undecipherable drawings on their wings, inked in and weighing them down; the girl whose door he knocked on every morning because she was always oversleeping her alarm and running out of the house with her backpack unzipped as they booked it to the bus stop.
Chan's learned several things over the past ten years of living next to Kim Dahyun. One of the more trivial things - never tell her how much you've grown since summer started (his growth spurt after eighth grade resulted in her refusing to talk to him for a month). Two - she cares more than you'd expect. And even though Dahyun's likes (he always saves her the strawberry flavored snacks) and dislikes (he does his best to help her with her math homework) have practically become second nature to him, he's never learned what quite to do when she starts to cry.
He has a girlfriend, she hiccuped when he first came into her room, arms full and aching due to all the study materials he lugged over. He stood there in the doorway for a minute, frozen, arms still aching, and wondered whether it'd be better to backpedal back to his house or stay paralyzed before a crying Kim Dahyun.
Chan sucks in a breathe. Puts down the study materials on the foot of Dahyun's bed. What did his mom usually do whenever he cried? (which was not often. really.) Across the room, Dahyun chokes out a watery sigh and it sounds so painful that he can feel a tightness in his own chest, threatening to crush his heart. This must be what heartbreak sounds like, he thinks, and he remembers how warm his mother's hand felt against his shoulder as he cried against her when he didn't make the high school dance team the first time around.
"Hey," he whispers, working up the courage to put an arm around her shoulders, stiffly. She hiccups again and he hopes he doesn't sound as awkward as he feels. "It's okay."
Dahyun leans her head against his shoulder. In all their ten years of being neighbors, Chan's never done anything but watch as she cried her eyes out - whether it be from scraping her knee on the concrete or because the girls she thought were her friends had told the rest of their class that her feet smelled like cheese. It's kind of a weird feeling - having Dahyun's face so close to his, her tears pressed into his shirt - that makes his ears heat up not unpleasantly, but in a way that makes something in his gut feel like it's doing flips, the kind that Minghao likes to include in his routines.
"I'm such a mess," she laughs a little, in between her tears. Her eyes find his for a moment before she settles back against his shoulder. "But thank you, Chan."
He blushes. She always says that, even when all he does is listen to her cry.
A summer evening. It's been a few months since Dahyun last cried - probably the longest drought in all the years they've been neighbors. She's been trying to get his attention for the past twenty minutes from where they're both sitting at their desks facing their open windows of their respective houses, even after Chan texted her that he wouldn't look up until he finished his practice exam and she her math tutoring homework.
He's in the middle of the last section of the test when a paper airplane lands in his booklet. He does his best to glare ("You're never going to be intimidating to me," she always laughed when he tried. "I'll just remember how you peed in the sandbox in first grade.") but she's just smiling at him expectantly when he looks up, chin resting against her palms, waiting.
No use to ignore her now. Chan sighs and unfolds the plane, the wings decorated with stripes this time, pink and green, like she had too much time on her hands. On the blank space of the paper is a question and two answers with checkboxes drawn next to them.
Do you like being Kim Dahyun's neighbor?
He draws in a new checkbox with the option Lee Chan cannot answer this question right now because he's in the middle of a timed practice test and throws it back over. It almost hits Dahyun in the forehead.
He's on the last question when a new plane arrives. You're no fun ): is written on the inside. He shakes his head, guilt-tripped into scribbling in another note before throwing the plane back.
Then why does Kim Dahyun hang out with me? ㅋㅋㅋㅋ
By the time Chan finishes grading his test, Dahyun's window is closed. He wonders if she's gone downstairs to eat dinner with her family when his dad calls him down to eat. After lingering for a moment, he decides to leave his window open, just in case Dahyun sends the airplane back, setting his calculator on top of the loose leaf papers on his desk to make sure the evening breeze doesn’t blow them away.
Two weeks before school starts again, they're sitting on the couch in Dahyun's living room with sweating ice cream bars in their hands ("I call the strawberry one!" Dahyun had called from where she was flipping channels, and Chan just rolled his eyes and yelled back an exasperated, "I know, I know!"), staring at the television screen without processing whatever images were flashing before their eyes. It's too hot to focus on anything - like the summer homework that Dahyun hadn't started until this week even with her parents' constant nagging that Chan could even hear sometimes through his open window. They were supposed to be working on that, which is why Chan even came over in the first place, but after an hour in Dahyun's un-air conditioned house, whirring fan doing nothing to fight the heat, even Chan couldn't keep concentrating on helping an easily distracted Dahyun solve for x.
Dahyun catches a dribble of ice cream ungracefully by sticking out her tongue a good two seconds before actually reaching the site. Chan makes a face at her about it and she kicks him in the shin in response.
As he's thinking about how much his shin is stinging, Dahyun starts talking. She never was good at holding prolonged silences, always being the first one to fidget or concede whenever they gave each other the silent treatment. "Mingyu works at the convenience store now. He was the one who recommended this ice cream to my mom," she says, very matter-of-factly, and Chan wonders if the girl sitting next to him is really the same girl that had cried her eyes out several months ago over the boy she's talking about now without even batting an eyelash.
"Oh," he replies, not quite sure what to say. He glances at Dahyun out of the corner of his eye. She's glancing back at him in the same way, and they make eye contact through their peripherals. Chan looks away quickly, blinking away the strain of shooting a sideways glance her way.
Dahyun finishes the last bit of the chocolate shell of her ice cream bar. "I don't like him anymore. Or, at least not like that," she confirms, answering Chan's silent question. "I was pretty surprised, you know? But it wasn't awkward at all."
"That's good," he says, admiring how she was so honest and open about it all, as always. Dahyun tended to have whirlwind crushes on seniors that she'd only spoken to a few times at most, that ultimately ended with her crying her eyes out and getting over it to the point that she'd ask Chan why did I like him so much, anyway? a few months later. Dahyun pops the rest of her ice cream bar into her mouth and gets up to throw the stick away. Chan, suddenly self-conscious about still having half his bar remaining, starts eating faster.
When Dahyun settles back on the couch again, they go back to blankly watching whatever's on early afternoon television in relative silence - Chan trying to polish off his ice cream with a fierce determination (he wasn't going to let her point out his slow eating habits again) and Dahyun shaking the leg that was dangling off the couch in a lazy, uneven rhythm (her mom was always telling her to stop, but old habits die hard). Someone on screen was crying, but neither of them knew why, and thus continued staring, stone-faced, at whatever dramatic event was unfolding.
"Hey!" Dahyun exclaims after another period of silence. She turns toward him, completely neglecting the television. "Why don't you ever tell me about your crushes, Chan?"
Chan blinks, thinking about it. There had been Yewon, he guessed, but that was before high school. And after high school started, there had been advanced classes and dance practice and making sure Dahyun made it to school on time most days of the week. Chan briefly wonders what his youth is amounting to. "Uh," he starts, unintelligibly to Dahyun's sparkling eyes. There's so much hope in them that Chan wishes he had an answer that she wanted to hear. "Because I haven't really had any?"
She pouts. "You're totally lying right now," Dahyun sulks, deflating and sinking further into the couch. "Come on, Chan, there's gotta be at least one girl at school you think is cute!"
"Uh..." he starts again. Dahyun sits up, looking at him in all seriousness.
"You can tell me," she tells him, holding up her right hand. "I won't tell a soul, I swear on all the strawberry ice cream in the world!" Dahyun's eyes are staring right into his and when Chan averts his gaze down to look at the stick of his finished ice cream in his hand, he notices that their knees are almost touching from the way they're both sitting cross-legged. His face suddenly feels hot - hotter than the summer sun hitting the sidewalk outside - and Dahyun's still staring at him with those expectant eyes of hers, kind of like the way she stared at him when she asked for his opinion on the essays she wrote for class or when he'd ask for her opinion on the newest dance he choreographed. It made Chan feel like he was the only person on the planet that really mattered - though that obviously wasn't the case, he always reminded himself - but sometimes, he really wanted it to be.
Chan stands up before the blush can spread to his ears. "No one," he blurts, running to the kitchen to throw the popsicle stick away. Over the sound of his beating heart, he hears Dahyun whining in the living room, saying things like but I always tell you! and this is so not fair, Chan! It makes him feel a little guilty, but Chan decides he'll take it over almost answering Kim Dahyun.
After dance practice one night, Minghao offers Chan a ride to school on their first day back. "I can drive around non-relatives now," he says, proudly, to an impressed Chan. "I mean, not until next week. But you can sleep in a little more, and your house is on the way to school."
"That's awesome, hyung!" he says, about to accept the offer. And then he remembers Dahyun. "But I think it's better if you don't. I have to make sure Dahyun makes it to school on time, especially for the first day back. She's been nocturnal this whole break, I doubt she'll wake up in time by herself - "
Minghao laughs. "You two are like an old married couple," he comments, clearly amused. Chan feels the blush starting on his cheeks.
"We are not!" Chan insists. Minghao just shrugs, still smiling. "She just never wakes up when her alarm goes off!"
"Sure," Minghao agrees, a little too easily to be taken seriously. Chan huffs instead of trying to explain himself further. "Sure," he repeats, drawing out the vowels and along with it, Chan's patience.
It's the evening before the first day of school and Chan is sitting at his desk with another timed practice exam. He hasn't opened his window since that night with Minghao and hasn't gone over to Dahyun's to give her much-needed help with her summer homework. Chan felt pretty guilty about it all - he knew Dahyun had basically been under house arrest, not allowed to do anything fun until her homework was done, and he hadn't offered to help her with it (using the excuse passed from his mom to Dahyun's that Chan has so much to do, studying for his classes in advance, when he actually just hid under his bed covers playing games on his 3DS) nor had he kept his window open for Dahyun to send him notes of distress and boredom. But there was also that weird fluttering feeling in his stomach and burning on the tips of his ears whenever Chan thought about Dahyun these days - especially after hearing Minghao's comment. Did other people at their school think the same? he wonders between tricky algebra questions and reading comprehension.
Chan wasn't planning on opening his window today, either, but the air conditioner in his house had broken down earlier that week and the heat was particularly stifling today, the hottest day of the week so far. By the second section of the test, he was already sweating buckets, pencil slipping between his fingers. When four questions were left uncharacteristically unanswered at the end of the twenty-five minutes, Chan decided he couldn't live like this anymore.
With a quick glance over to Dahyun's room - it didn't seem like she was there, probably engaged in the last minute scramble to finish her homework downstairs instead - he cracks open the window. The evening breeze rushes in immediately, and though hot, makes his room less stuffy. The next eight sections of the exam suddenly seem feasible again.
He's reading a passage in the exam booklet when a paper plane lands right in front of him. Bullseye. Dahyun didn't get these often, and when she found that she had, she'd grin at him cheekily from her room mouthing an excited, did you see that? Today, when Chan looks up, she's pouting, tapping her pinky against her cheek impatiently.
Chan sucks in a breath, wondering if Dahyun's angry with him. Or upset. He isn't sure which would be worse. Unfolding the plane right away, he decides, swallowing the guilty lump forming in his throat, is probably the best option.
The wings are blank today, the only thing scribbled down on the paper a very hastily written Where have you been? >8(. He sighs and writes down a response beneath it before throwing it back. The plane sticks to his sweaty fingers and almost misses Dahyun’s open window.
Busy. Chan averts his eyes before he can see Dahyun’s disappointed expression. The returning plane barely misses his left eye when she throws it to him again.
Liar ㅠㅠ. I StreetPassed you yesterday! He flips the paper around to start a new message - something along the lines of that was the only free time I had! - when he sees more of Dahyun’s large, rounded handwriting. Did something happen? Do you not want to hang out with me anymore? ):
That’s not it. Quite the opposite, really. Chan taps his pencil on his cheek, considering. The timer on his phone tells him he only has five minutes left in the section he’s not even halfway done with. This entire practice exam was a lost cause, anyway, because his mind kept wandering - thinking about whether or not Dahyun was close to finishing up her homework, if she’d pull an all-nighter instead, only to wake up when Chan ran up the stairs to her room the next morning. If Dahyun would cry over the last page she didn’t get to finish before falling asleep on the bus ride to school or if she’d shoot Chan a tired, self-satisfied smile for actually doing most of her homework without his help this time around, nodding off as the bus threaded through traffic, her head finding his shoulder and resting there somewhere along the way.
His cheeks flush. He sends the plane back to Dahyun before burying his head in his arms, willing it to go away. The timer goes off next to his right elbow.
The plane bounces on top of his head before falling onto his floor. ...Do you not like being Kim Dahyun’s neighbor anymore??? Her face is scrunched up in confusion when Chan glances up from beneath his arms. Chan wishes he understood how he was feeling, too, wishes there was some way to send every thought he thought about Dahyun over to her in neatly folded paper airplanes, pretty designs covering their wings.
Of course I like it, Chan writes instead. Dahyun’s eyebrows furrow more as she looks at the note, back at him, then back at the note again. Before she can scribble down a response, her dad’s voice calls her down for dinner. She shoots him a look that says, this isn’t over, Lee Chan, before disappearing down the stairs, her window still open.
Chan leans back in his chair, timer still going off, giving up on his practice exam even though there would be no distractions until Dahyun came back. It was weird not telling Dahyun what exactly was on his mind, but it would also be weird telling Dahyun what was on his mind this time. They probably wouldn’t be friends anymore if he did tell her, but then, they might not stay friends if he kept hiding it from her.
I’ll tell her, Chan thinks in the silence between the beeping of his timer. I won’t tell her, he thinks when the timer beeps. I’ll tell her, I won’t tell her, I’ll tell her, I won’t tell her, he continues thinking, back and forth in time with the beeping until his dad asks him to turn it off.
Does Kim Dahyun like Lee Chan? followed by two checkboxes: yes and no.
Chan stares at his own small handwriting on the plain white printer paper before folding it carefully into a paper plane. He was the one who taught Dahyun how to fold paper planes in the first place, in order to get her to stop crying over the toy she lost after bringing it to school in first grade. The sun is fading beneath the horizon now, and Dahyun’s room is still dark.
If this plane makes it, then I’ll tell her, Chan thinks. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. He counts to three and throws it without aiming.
It hits the frame of Dahyun’s window before falling into the darkness between their houses, where the Kims put their trash can. Chan laughs, glad and disappointed all at once. It’s better this way, he tells himself, resolving to keep things the same between them, but lets himself close his window for the night.
The blinds to Dahyun’s room are still closed when Chan runs back to his room to grab his backpack the next morning. Not awake yet. Chan sighs, wondering what he was expecting after all these years of having to wake up extra early to make sure Dahyun got to school on time.
He checks the mailbox on his way out for the newspaper - one of his household chores, so the actual mail would have space to fit inside when it came later in the day. When Chan wrestles it out, a white, folded paper flutters to the ground next to his feet.
Something in his head buzzes in half-excitement and half-fear as he bends over to pick it up. Sunday was the day Dahyun did the dishes and took out the trash. Chan’s fingers fumble as he tries to unfold the plane. Yesterday was Sunday.
He sees his own handwriting first. Does Kim Dahyun like Lee Chan? Then, the next line - a checkbox with a yes next to it. The one with no below that. Neither of them has been filled in.
Chan has to straighten out the entire page before he sees it. There, at the bottom of the paper, in large, rounded handwriting that he’d know anywhere - hardly different from when they were in primary school, when Dahyun always had to struggle to keep her characters within the allotted lines - is another checkbox with yes, a lot next to it. That checkbox is filled in.
He throws the newspaper onto the doorstep of his house before running up the sidewalk to Dahyun’s, plane clutched in his right hand, grin that probably looked so big that it was goofy on his face, hoping Dahyun would brush her teeth in time for them to catch the seven-thirty bus.
3,563w; g (dahyun/chan)
chan's learned several things over the past ten years of living next to kim dahyun.
a/n: after starting <33 (sixteen/seventeen) a year ago with the lovely kurdoodle, i've finally finished one of my many wips! this was supposed to be a drabble what even happened, i wish i knew (i also wish i knew how to end fics). also dedicated to kirakirashahida for thinking of dino as my son ♥♥♥
Dahyun's always been a crier. She's also always been the girl who flew paper planes through his open window on summer evenings with strange, almost undecipherable drawings on their wings, inked in and weighing them down; the girl whose door he knocked on every morning because she was always oversleeping her alarm and running out of the house with her backpack unzipped as they booked it to the bus stop.
Chan's learned several things over the past ten years of living next to Kim Dahyun. One of the more trivial things - never tell her how much you've grown since summer started (his growth spurt after eighth grade resulted in her refusing to talk to him for a month). Two - she cares more than you'd expect. And even though Dahyun's likes (he always saves her the strawberry flavored snacks) and dislikes (he does his best to help her with her math homework) have practically become second nature to him, he's never learned what quite to do when she starts to cry.
He has a girlfriend, she hiccuped when he first came into her room, arms full and aching due to all the study materials he lugged over. He stood there in the doorway for a minute, frozen, arms still aching, and wondered whether it'd be better to backpedal back to his house or stay paralyzed before a crying Kim Dahyun.
Chan sucks in a breathe. Puts down the study materials on the foot of Dahyun's bed. What did his mom usually do whenever he cried? (which was not often. really.) Across the room, Dahyun chokes out a watery sigh and it sounds so painful that he can feel a tightness in his own chest, threatening to crush his heart. This must be what heartbreak sounds like, he thinks, and he remembers how warm his mother's hand felt against his shoulder as he cried against her when he didn't make the high school dance team the first time around.
"Hey," he whispers, working up the courage to put an arm around her shoulders, stiffly. She hiccups again and he hopes he doesn't sound as awkward as he feels. "It's okay."
Dahyun leans her head against his shoulder. In all their ten years of being neighbors, Chan's never done anything but watch as she cried her eyes out - whether it be from scraping her knee on the concrete or because the girls she thought were her friends had told the rest of their class that her feet smelled like cheese. It's kind of a weird feeling - having Dahyun's face so close to his, her tears pressed into his shirt - that makes his ears heat up not unpleasantly, but in a way that makes something in his gut feel like it's doing flips, the kind that Minghao likes to include in his routines.
"I'm such a mess," she laughs a little, in between her tears. Her eyes find his for a moment before she settles back against his shoulder. "But thank you, Chan."
He blushes. She always says that, even when all he does is listen to her cry.
A summer evening. It's been a few months since Dahyun last cried - probably the longest drought in all the years they've been neighbors. She's been trying to get his attention for the past twenty minutes from where they're both sitting at their desks facing their open windows of their respective houses, even after Chan texted her that he wouldn't look up until he finished his practice exam and she her math tutoring homework.
He's in the middle of the last section of the test when a paper airplane lands in his booklet. He does his best to glare ("You're never going to be intimidating to me," she always laughed when he tried. "I'll just remember how you peed in the sandbox in first grade.") but she's just smiling at him expectantly when he looks up, chin resting against her palms, waiting.
No use to ignore her now. Chan sighs and unfolds the plane, the wings decorated with stripes this time, pink and green, like she had too much time on her hands. On the blank space of the paper is a question and two answers with checkboxes drawn next to them.
Do you like being Kim Dahyun's neighbor?
He draws in a new checkbox with the option Lee Chan cannot answer this question right now because he's in the middle of a timed practice test and throws it back over. It almost hits Dahyun in the forehead.
He's on the last question when a new plane arrives. You're no fun ): is written on the inside. He shakes his head, guilt-tripped into scribbling in another note before throwing the plane back.
Then why does Kim Dahyun hang out with me? ㅋㅋㅋㅋ
By the time Chan finishes grading his test, Dahyun's window is closed. He wonders if she's gone downstairs to eat dinner with her family when his dad calls him down to eat. After lingering for a moment, he decides to leave his window open, just in case Dahyun sends the airplane back, setting his calculator on top of the loose leaf papers on his desk to make sure the evening breeze doesn’t blow them away.
Two weeks before school starts again, they're sitting on the couch in Dahyun's living room with sweating ice cream bars in their hands ("I call the strawberry one!" Dahyun had called from where she was flipping channels, and Chan just rolled his eyes and yelled back an exasperated, "I know, I know!"), staring at the television screen without processing whatever images were flashing before their eyes. It's too hot to focus on anything - like the summer homework that Dahyun hadn't started until this week even with her parents' constant nagging that Chan could even hear sometimes through his open window. They were supposed to be working on that, which is why Chan even came over in the first place, but after an hour in Dahyun's un-air conditioned house, whirring fan doing nothing to fight the heat, even Chan couldn't keep concentrating on helping an easily distracted Dahyun solve for x.
Dahyun catches a dribble of ice cream ungracefully by sticking out her tongue a good two seconds before actually reaching the site. Chan makes a face at her about it and she kicks him in the shin in response.
As he's thinking about how much his shin is stinging, Dahyun starts talking. She never was good at holding prolonged silences, always being the first one to fidget or concede whenever they gave each other the silent treatment. "Mingyu works at the convenience store now. He was the one who recommended this ice cream to my mom," she says, very matter-of-factly, and Chan wonders if the girl sitting next to him is really the same girl that had cried her eyes out several months ago over the boy she's talking about now without even batting an eyelash.
"Oh," he replies, not quite sure what to say. He glances at Dahyun out of the corner of his eye. She's glancing back at him in the same way, and they make eye contact through their peripherals. Chan looks away quickly, blinking away the strain of shooting a sideways glance her way.
Dahyun finishes the last bit of the chocolate shell of her ice cream bar. "I don't like him anymore. Or, at least not like that," she confirms, answering Chan's silent question. "I was pretty surprised, you know? But it wasn't awkward at all."
"That's good," he says, admiring how she was so honest and open about it all, as always. Dahyun tended to have whirlwind crushes on seniors that she'd only spoken to a few times at most, that ultimately ended with her crying her eyes out and getting over it to the point that she'd ask Chan why did I like him so much, anyway? a few months later. Dahyun pops the rest of her ice cream bar into her mouth and gets up to throw the stick away. Chan, suddenly self-conscious about still having half his bar remaining, starts eating faster.
When Dahyun settles back on the couch again, they go back to blankly watching whatever's on early afternoon television in relative silence - Chan trying to polish off his ice cream with a fierce determination (he wasn't going to let her point out his slow eating habits again) and Dahyun shaking the leg that was dangling off the couch in a lazy, uneven rhythm (her mom was always telling her to stop, but old habits die hard). Someone on screen was crying, but neither of them knew why, and thus continued staring, stone-faced, at whatever dramatic event was unfolding.
"Hey!" Dahyun exclaims after another period of silence. She turns toward him, completely neglecting the television. "Why don't you ever tell me about your crushes, Chan?"
Chan blinks, thinking about it. There had been Yewon, he guessed, but that was before high school. And after high school started, there had been advanced classes and dance practice and making sure Dahyun made it to school on time most days of the week. Chan briefly wonders what his youth is amounting to. "Uh," he starts, unintelligibly to Dahyun's sparkling eyes. There's so much hope in them that Chan wishes he had an answer that she wanted to hear. "Because I haven't really had any?"
She pouts. "You're totally lying right now," Dahyun sulks, deflating and sinking further into the couch. "Come on, Chan, there's gotta be at least one girl at school you think is cute!"
"Uh..." he starts again. Dahyun sits up, looking at him in all seriousness.
"You can tell me," she tells him, holding up her right hand. "I won't tell a soul, I swear on all the strawberry ice cream in the world!" Dahyun's eyes are staring right into his and when Chan averts his gaze down to look at the stick of his finished ice cream in his hand, he notices that their knees are almost touching from the way they're both sitting cross-legged. His face suddenly feels hot - hotter than the summer sun hitting the sidewalk outside - and Dahyun's still staring at him with those expectant eyes of hers, kind of like the way she stared at him when she asked for his opinion on the essays she wrote for class or when he'd ask for her opinion on the newest dance he choreographed. It made Chan feel like he was the only person on the planet that really mattered - though that obviously wasn't the case, he always reminded himself - but sometimes, he really wanted it to be.
Chan stands up before the blush can spread to his ears. "No one," he blurts, running to the kitchen to throw the popsicle stick away. Over the sound of his beating heart, he hears Dahyun whining in the living room, saying things like but I always tell you! and this is so not fair, Chan! It makes him feel a little guilty, but Chan decides he'll take it over almost answering Kim Dahyun.
After dance practice one night, Minghao offers Chan a ride to school on their first day back. "I can drive around non-relatives now," he says, proudly, to an impressed Chan. "I mean, not until next week. But you can sleep in a little more, and your house is on the way to school."
"That's awesome, hyung!" he says, about to accept the offer. And then he remembers Dahyun. "But I think it's better if you don't. I have to make sure Dahyun makes it to school on time, especially for the first day back. She's been nocturnal this whole break, I doubt she'll wake up in time by herself - "
Minghao laughs. "You two are like an old married couple," he comments, clearly amused. Chan feels the blush starting on his cheeks.
"We are not!" Chan insists. Minghao just shrugs, still smiling. "She just never wakes up when her alarm goes off!"
"Sure," Minghao agrees, a little too easily to be taken seriously. Chan huffs instead of trying to explain himself further. "Sure," he repeats, drawing out the vowels and along with it, Chan's patience.
It's the evening before the first day of school and Chan is sitting at his desk with another timed practice exam. He hasn't opened his window since that night with Minghao and hasn't gone over to Dahyun's to give her much-needed help with her summer homework. Chan felt pretty guilty about it all - he knew Dahyun had basically been under house arrest, not allowed to do anything fun until her homework was done, and he hadn't offered to help her with it (using the excuse passed from his mom to Dahyun's that Chan has so much to do, studying for his classes in advance, when he actually just hid under his bed covers playing games on his 3DS) nor had he kept his window open for Dahyun to send him notes of distress and boredom. But there was also that weird fluttering feeling in his stomach and burning on the tips of his ears whenever Chan thought about Dahyun these days - especially after hearing Minghao's comment. Did other people at their school think the same? he wonders between tricky algebra questions and reading comprehension.
Chan wasn't planning on opening his window today, either, but the air conditioner in his house had broken down earlier that week and the heat was particularly stifling today, the hottest day of the week so far. By the second section of the test, he was already sweating buckets, pencil slipping between his fingers. When four questions were left uncharacteristically unanswered at the end of the twenty-five minutes, Chan decided he couldn't live like this anymore.
With a quick glance over to Dahyun's room - it didn't seem like she was there, probably engaged in the last minute scramble to finish her homework downstairs instead - he cracks open the window. The evening breeze rushes in immediately, and though hot, makes his room less stuffy. The next eight sections of the exam suddenly seem feasible again.
He's reading a passage in the exam booklet when a paper plane lands right in front of him. Bullseye. Dahyun didn't get these often, and when she found that she had, she'd grin at him cheekily from her room mouthing an excited, did you see that? Today, when Chan looks up, she's pouting, tapping her pinky against her cheek impatiently.
Chan sucks in a breath, wondering if Dahyun's angry with him. Or upset. He isn't sure which would be worse. Unfolding the plane right away, he decides, swallowing the guilty lump forming in his throat, is probably the best option.
The wings are blank today, the only thing scribbled down on the paper a very hastily written Where have you been? >8(. He sighs and writes down a response beneath it before throwing it back. The plane sticks to his sweaty fingers and almost misses Dahyun’s open window.
Busy. Chan averts his eyes before he can see Dahyun’s disappointed expression. The returning plane barely misses his left eye when she throws it to him again.
Liar ㅠㅠ. I StreetPassed you yesterday! He flips the paper around to start a new message - something along the lines of that was the only free time I had! - when he sees more of Dahyun’s large, rounded handwriting. Did something happen? Do you not want to hang out with me anymore? ):
That’s not it. Quite the opposite, really. Chan taps his pencil on his cheek, considering. The timer on his phone tells him he only has five minutes left in the section he’s not even halfway done with. This entire practice exam was a lost cause, anyway, because his mind kept wandering - thinking about whether or not Dahyun was close to finishing up her homework, if she’d pull an all-nighter instead, only to wake up when Chan ran up the stairs to her room the next morning. If Dahyun would cry over the last page she didn’t get to finish before falling asleep on the bus ride to school or if she’d shoot Chan a tired, self-satisfied smile for actually doing most of her homework without his help this time around, nodding off as the bus threaded through traffic, her head finding his shoulder and resting there somewhere along the way.
His cheeks flush. He sends the plane back to Dahyun before burying his head in his arms, willing it to go away. The timer goes off next to his right elbow.
The plane bounces on top of his head before falling onto his floor. ...Do you not like being Kim Dahyun’s neighbor anymore??? Her face is scrunched up in confusion when Chan glances up from beneath his arms. Chan wishes he understood how he was feeling, too, wishes there was some way to send every thought he thought about Dahyun over to her in neatly folded paper airplanes, pretty designs covering their wings.
Of course I like it, Chan writes instead. Dahyun’s eyebrows furrow more as she looks at the note, back at him, then back at the note again. Before she can scribble down a response, her dad’s voice calls her down for dinner. She shoots him a look that says, this isn’t over, Lee Chan, before disappearing down the stairs, her window still open.
Chan leans back in his chair, timer still going off, giving up on his practice exam even though there would be no distractions until Dahyun came back. It was weird not telling Dahyun what exactly was on his mind, but it would also be weird telling Dahyun what was on his mind this time. They probably wouldn’t be friends anymore if he did tell her, but then, they might not stay friends if he kept hiding it from her.
I’ll tell her, Chan thinks in the silence between the beeping of his timer. I won’t tell her, he thinks when the timer beeps. I’ll tell her, I won’t tell her, I’ll tell her, I won’t tell her, he continues thinking, back and forth in time with the beeping until his dad asks him to turn it off.
Does Kim Dahyun like Lee Chan? followed by two checkboxes: yes and no.
Chan stares at his own small handwriting on the plain white printer paper before folding it carefully into a paper plane. He was the one who taught Dahyun how to fold paper planes in the first place, in order to get her to stop crying over the toy she lost after bringing it to school in first grade. The sun is fading beneath the horizon now, and Dahyun’s room is still dark.
If this plane makes it, then I’ll tell her, Chan thinks. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. He counts to three and throws it without aiming.
It hits the frame of Dahyun’s window before falling into the darkness between their houses, where the Kims put their trash can. Chan laughs, glad and disappointed all at once. It’s better this way, he tells himself, resolving to keep things the same between them, but lets himself close his window for the night.
The blinds to Dahyun’s room are still closed when Chan runs back to his room to grab his backpack the next morning. Not awake yet. Chan sighs, wondering what he was expecting after all these years of having to wake up extra early to make sure Dahyun got to school on time.
He checks the mailbox on his way out for the newspaper - one of his household chores, so the actual mail would have space to fit inside when it came later in the day. When Chan wrestles it out, a white, folded paper flutters to the ground next to his feet.
Something in his head buzzes in half-excitement and half-fear as he bends over to pick it up. Sunday was the day Dahyun did the dishes and took out the trash. Chan’s fingers fumble as he tries to unfold the plane. Yesterday was Sunday.
He sees his own handwriting first. Does Kim Dahyun like Lee Chan? Then, the next line - a checkbox with a yes next to it. The one with no below that. Neither of them has been filled in.
Chan has to straighten out the entire page before he sees it. There, at the bottom of the paper, in large, rounded handwriting that he’d know anywhere - hardly different from when they were in primary school, when Dahyun always had to struggle to keep her characters within the allotted lines - is another checkbox with yes, a lot next to it. That checkbox is filled in.
He throws the newspaper onto the doorstep of his house before running up the sidewalk to Dahyun’s, plane clutched in his right hand, grin that probably looked so big that it was goofy on his face, hoping Dahyun would brush her teeth in time for them to catch the seven-thirty bus.