shrapnel (kangin/yesung)
Pairing: Kangin/Yesung (side Kangin/Taeyeon, Eunhyuk/Hyoyeon, implied Heechul/Han Geng, maybe others if you squint)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: A beginner's guide to lying to yourself.
A/N: This is part 1 of (probably) 2. The product of 2 weeks in Spain with no internet \o/
“I was supposed to go to private school,” Heechul says, as if it isn’t something they’ve heard a thousand times before.
“What went wrong there then?” Sungmin asks after a few seconds, because nobody else does.
“Well I wouldn’t have fitted in there, would I?” Heechul says, with a strange tinge of pride in his voice. It sounds almost artificial, though, almost rehearsed -- because he brings it up every fucking time they drink, but nobody has the heart (or maybe nobody has the balls) to tell him to shut up.
“What, because you’re gay or because you’re stupid?” Kyuhyun asks, from where he’s perched on the counter near the sink, clasping a bottle of wine (he grimaces in a pantomime fashion at anyone who comes near him lest they ask for a sip: they soon get the picture).
“Fuck,” Heechul says airily, almost musically, “you. You live in the same dormitory as I do, smartass. And besides,” he smiles predatorily, bares his very white teeth, “the hell would make you think nobody here is gay? There’s a guy in my accounting class, and you would not believe…”
***
Kim Jongwoon had taken a place there because his offer to study at a top music college fell through. He wasn’t entirely sure what had gone wrong, either. A few months before he took his final exams his confidence in his voice, in himself, had faltered even though nothing had changed about the way he sounded, no major traumatic event had shaken his very normal and mundane life. He had nothing to “blame” it on, as a consequence, so when he went in for follow-up interviews and was unable to replicate any of the enthusiasm or passion or drive he had delivered so easily, so naturally, in the first round of grillings… He saw the faculty members trade glances even as they shot him consoling smiles and he knew he’d messed up and had nobody to blame it on but himself.
A curious air of apathy had settled on him over that, as though he felt he’d lived his whole life already and saw no point in trying to aim for anything else. He’d caught his mother crying once or twice but when it turned out she wasn’t upset because he’d failed the family, but because he’d lost sight of his own dream…
Well, if that was supposed to make him feel any better, it was doing a pretty sorry job.
Eventually he was offered a place at a standard university to study literature. He’d never been a particularly below-average student, would have little problem getting in wherever he wanted to study his choice of academic subjects… but that hadn’t been what he wanted, had been the whole reason he’d applied to music college in the first place. He took the offer because he couldn’t spend another year in the same house as his mother with her sympathy and his younger brother with his obvious disillusionment (big brothers, as Jongwoon had been told constantly since Jongjin was born, are supposed to set an example).
He packs his bags with little more than a sense of relief and catches a train a matter of weeks later.
***
His dorm room is drab, unfurnished, worn green carpet the unwilling companion to cold beige walls, but it’s not like it would have looked much more welcoming in a place that cost three times as much per year. He’s not sure if that’s true -- he has never, after all, been in a place that cost three times as much -- but telling himself that helps. He thinks that it helps.
Anyway, a few posters on the wall, his own fresh sheets on the bed, his toothbrush in the bathroom… Yeah, it would be fine. Homely. Livable.
When he opens the bathroom door to embark on his plan, there is already a toothbrush on the counter. The bathmat is soaked through from where someone has just gotten out of the shower. Moreover, there is someone standing in front of the fogged-up mirror, squinting at themselves, a towel wrapped around their waist.
“Oh, hey,” the stranger says after he notices Jongwoon behind him in the small, unsteamed patch of mirror he has wiped. “I guess we’re suitemates!”
“I… guess.” In the grip of his utter disinterest in his place of learning, he merely skimmed through the sections in the brochure on living arrangements, hadn’t known he would have a suitemate. He wasn’t exactly a hugely private person but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t sort of socially awkward, and he was already having uncomfortable visions of himself walking in on this guy before he’d gotten a towel on, of dying a slow agonizing death outside the bathroom door while he waited for the toilet to be free… The bathroom lay between their two rooms with a door on each side; there were locks on neither of these doors. For a second or two he considers turning round and heading back to the train station.
“I’m Youngwoon,” the guy presses on, extending a still-damp hand.
(Should he make up a fake name? Say nothing and just turn and head for the door?)
“Jongwoon,” he says instead, taking the proffered hand. Youngwoon beams amiably at him. At least he doesn’t look like a serial killer. There’s always that.
Over the next few days he comes to know the students living on either side of their suite. The room next to his is occupied by Sungmin (who looks fragile at first glance but has an absolutely filthy cackle and can drink ten times anything that Jongwoon can) and his suitemate Ryeowook (ditto; studying chemistry). The room beside Youngwoon’s belongs to Hyukjae, who has a talent for beatboxing but is pursuing some kind of sports course. Hyukjae’s suitemate, Kyuhyun, uses insults as a form of greeting and turns out to be a genius mathematician.
On the very day, in fact, that Youngwoon prises Jongwoon out of his room to meet Hyukjae and Kyuhyun, they end up meeting the people who live across the hall, when one of them slams his bedroom door against the wall of the hallway and makes to storm outside (still wearing striped pyjamas and a fleecy bathrobe) while saying, “I’ll leave my underwear in the sink if I want…”
“But I…” A second person, smartly dressed in a blazer and white shirt despite the warm weather, following close behind, trying to exert some manner of damage control.
The two of them notice Hyukjae, leaning out of his doorway and openly gaping at them, and the smartly-dressed one colours a little, apologises for making so much noise so early in the morning. The bathrobe-clad guy just rolls his eyes.
“I’m Kim Heechul,” he says after a second or two of silence. “He’s Choi Siwon. He is too strait-laced for words.”
Jongwoon and the others introduce themselves in return, not entirely sure where to look. The request for room change form is practically visible on Siwon’s face.
(As it turns out, though, he never puts in a request.)
***
“Where the hell do they get these people from?” Heechul says, critically eyeing a gaggle of students from his place at a table outside the cafeteria.
“China?” Kyuhyun suggests sarcastically.
“Ha very ha,” Heechul snaps back, but he’s barely paying attention, craning his neck instead for a better view of the exchange students, who look all kinds of nervous and, painfully obviously, out of their depth. “I just don’t know why they come here, of all goddamn places…”
“Korea?” Siwon asks, picking distastefully at a limp salad. “Why not? Life experience, better job prospects…”
“Not Korea,” Heechul says dismissively. “This university.”
Siwon focuses his eyes on the greenish tomato he has just ejected from his salad, and says, “there’s nothing wrong with this university.”
“Maybe for you--”
“You have an authority problem.”
“I didn’t realise you were studying psychology. Armchair psychiatrist, are you?”
Siwon’s father is a respected businessman who owns several chains of high-street stores, wields the power of household names. His family is by far the richest of their group, probably one of the richest among the entire student body. Siwon didn’t fail his final exams or blanch in the middle of an important interview: he simply had wanted to live his own life before he inevitably had to join the family business and sit at a desk for 12 hours a day manning phones and looking at spreadsheets as though they really meant anything to him. He’s taking a course in Chinese language, partly, of course, because it’ll be useful for business… but mostly because it just interests him.
Jongwoon thinks Heechul resents Siwon a little because he’s doing what he wants to do, doing it for himself. Jongwoon thinks maybe he resents Siwon a little for just that.
But maybe that’s just him being an armchair psychiatrist, too. He settles for not saying anything and finishing his sandwich.
***
Heechul, who should have gone to private school. Kyuhyun, whose IQ was off the charts no matter how much he tried to cover it up with sarcasm and white wine, who could solve equations in his head that the most accomplished professors would write out and spend hours puzzling over. Jongwoon himself, who’d had no doubts that he’d get into music college, not because he was vain (if anything, he was the opposite) but because he tried and he knew he was talented and he’d worked hard for it. Donghee, a bright and friendly guy on Jongwoon’s course, who remarked to him one afternoon at the end of a lecture: “this is all sort of boring, isn’t it? I think I was expecting something different… but actually I wanted to be a dancer, go to theatre school…”
I wanted. I wanted. I wanted. I wanted to study maths… but at a specialist college. I wanted to go to private school… but honestly I messed up at the last minute. I wanted to use my talent because that’s what I enjoy… but look at me, wasting away on a literature course.
***
His classes are boring. Entirely manageable, but boring. He dutifully treks to the campus bookstore and buys every volume of classic or modern literature he is instructed to buy, sits in his room and underlines passages, takes notes, memorizes quotes. In classes he sits at the back, never offers to answer questions first but is always ready with an answer if asked.
It’s all painfully mechanical.
He panics in the middle of the night from time to time about what he’s going to do with the rest of his life after this -- a degree he had no real interest in studying, a degree that wasn’t, on the whole, useful for much except teaching or writing endless dull books on the same subject…
(“A degree’s a degree, though,” Ryeowook had told him chirpily one morning when they’d gone for breakfast together. “They’re all just little pieces of paper that slightly improve your job chances, right? Does it matter if you do forensic science or sport science?”
“Are you doing what you want to do, though?”
“Oh, yeah.” Ryeowook’s face was suddenly, uncharacteristically, serious. “It’s always been my dream to…”
My dream, my dream, my dream. He was really starting to hate that phrase.)
… but more often he thinks that maybe he just doesn’t care.
***
“Heechul’s adopted one of those Chinese students,” Youngwoon says, standing in the bathroom doorway.
“I thought he said they were morons.” Jongwoon flicks to the index in the back of the book he has open. He’s pretty sure he’ll throw himself off the roof if he ever has to write another essay.
“Yeah, I think he’s trying to re-educate the guy,” Youngwoon says. “Well, either that or he likes him because he’s pretty. Let’s go out somewhere. Are you busy?”
Incredibly. He’d left writing this to the last second (how many times, after how many sleepless nights, had he promised himself he’d stop doing that?) so now he had considerably less than twenty-four hours to--
“Not really.”
Stepping out into the hallway, they can plainly hear Heechul’s voice coming from his open doorway. He’s shouting at someone about the correct pronunciation of various cocktails. Youngwoon exchanges a glance with Jongwoon before stepping over the threshold of the room, calling Heechul’s name.
“What?!” Heechul snaps, leaning back, looking slightly maddened. There is a rather pitiful-looking boy perched on the edge of his bed. His requisitioned exchange student, clearly.
“You’re a fucking lunatic, you know that?” Youngwoon hisses at Heechul, before smiling brightly at the boy. “Hi, I’m Youngwoon. Sorry about his existence.”
“H-Han Geng,” the boy starts, but Heechul sighs and says “Korean!” The boy says “oh” and then “I mean, Hankyung. And it’s okay,” his Korean is accented but perfectly understandable, “Heechul-hyung has been really helpful.”
“Heechul-hyung,” Youngwoon repeats, slightly stunned. Then, to Heechul, who has arranged his face into a smug mask, “how do you get away with all this shit?”
“Natural talent. Now, go away. We were getting to what to do if someone ugly approaches you in a club.”
“Just remember to feed him,” Youngwoon mutters as Heechul briskly pushes him out of the room.
“Actually,” Heechul says, “he cooks for me.” He waves cheerily and closes the door.
“Where do they make people like that?” Youngwoon shakes his head in disbelief, then turns to Jongwoon. “Whatever, let’s go eat somewhere. Your treat this time.”
Jongwoon punches his shoulder, tells him that treats are usually offered and not dictated.
He already knows he’ll pay, though.
***
They have playfights. Play videogames together into the early hours of the morning. Go to a cheap noodle bar together. Share cigarettes when one or the other of them runs out.
When he tells Youngwoon all about his abandoned music college dream one night, Youngwoon seems genuinely angry with him, takes him by the shoulders and tells him that it’s stupid, cowardly, to ever give up on something you really want. Jongwoon just blinks, taken aback, and mumbles something about it never being too late.
At the time, he just doesn’t realise--
***
Siwon goes home some weekends and when he does Heechul generously throws open both their rooms, providing nobody is sick on Siwon’s bed or tries to use his cologne.
On one such night, Kyuhyun is arguing with Ryeowook over the rules of a drinking game with the result that everyone who had been playing it is forced to sit, bored rigid, with three-quarter-full glasses of alcohol in front of them.
“This is boring,” Youngwoon says. He tugs on Jongwoon’s sleeve. “I wanna talk to you. Let’s go into Siwon’s room.”
Nobody says anything as they stand up and walk into the next room, nobody says anything when Youngwoon (who is incapable of drinking one beer without drinking six beers) trips over thin air and sits down heavily beside Siwon’s bed: Jongwoon would have thought the resulting crash would be a cause for concern but the only sound from Heechul’s room is the faint ongoing dispute.
Jongwoon kneels beside him, not particularly expecting anything important. Most of what Youngwoon really “needed” to talk about after a few drinks involved some actress he’d seen on TV or a baseball game he’d been disappointed by.
Slinging an arm around Jongwoon’s shoulders, he says simply, “if you were a girl,” snaps his fingers, “like that.”
Well, that’s a new one.
“You’re drunk,” Jongwoon says uneasily, because he has no idea what else to say.
“So what? I’ll say it sober too. Ask me tomorrow.”
Jongwoon laughs: it’s forced, but it’s a laugh. “No way. You won’t even remember this.”
Before Youngwoon can even open his mouth to reply, he adds, “and anyway, I’m not a girl, so it doesn’t matter.”
Something flits over Youngwoon’s face, a frown, an uncertainty, but at that second Donghae, a slightly baby-faced friend of Ryeowook’s, comes in through the bathroom to tell them that the game is starting again.
***
In early December, it becomes fashionable to sneak over to the girls’ dorms at every opportunity. Sungmin happens to be close friends with a pretty law student named Sunkyu who happens to have a group of similarly attractive female friends. It doesn’t take a whole lot of effort on Sungmin’s part to convince a few of them to make their way to Sunkyu’s dorm room one night, armed with a few six-packs of beer and a healthy amount of bravado.
Sunkyu meets them at the door with a smile, ushers them in: she’s obviously done some of the same coaxing as there are four or five girls already in the small room, dancing, laughing, drinking.
Jongwoon has fun at first -- a tall girl named Sooyoung jovially spends a good twenty minutes trying to show him how to play a card game, except she keeps forgetting the rules, and he charts with amusement Hyukjae’s faltering progress around the room trying to keep the attention of a girl wearing shorts and a black hoodie. (It’s obvious, though, that she likes him too and they’re just enjoying this facsimile of a “chase” until it gets boring.)
He’s in the middle of a bark of laughter at the latest utterly perplexed look on Sooyoung’s face when his gaze happens to rest on Youngwoon and the petite, brown-haired girl who is sitting on his lap with her arms around his neck.
“No, I’ve got it this time, look,” Sooyoung is saying, but he just doesn’t hear her, watches instead as the girl stands up, takes Youngwoon’s hand, leads him towards the bathroom. Youngwoon’s eyes are slightly glazed (because of the alcohol? Or something else?) and there is a smile playing about the girl’s flushed lips.
“Taeyeon! You know the bathroom door doesn’t lock,” Sunkyu shouts at her, laughing, as they disappear into the room.
“Don’t come in then!” Taeyeon sticks out her tongue, closes the door firmly. Sunkyu, still giggling, heads over to the stereo to turn up the music.
To drown out any noise from the bathroom. Of course. Jongwoon feels a little sick but he doesn’t know why. He’s barely even had anything to drink.
“You better hope he doesn’t take her back to ours,” Sungmin remarks, wandering over with his fifth or sixth beer of the evening, “they’ll keep the whole corridor awake…”
“I’m not bothered,” Jongwoon laughs, or tries to laugh. Sungmin raises an eyebrow.
“Do you want me to hook you up with Stephanie? Korean-American, you know. Bilingual,” he finishes with a grin. When Jongwoon shakes his head, he tries, “What about Yoona? Live a little.” He gestures to a quietly pretty girl sitting in the corner, deep in conversation with one of her friends. She has a beer in one hand but she’s taking only the tiniest of sips; perhaps, in fact, not taking any at all but just trying to maintain some sort of illusion.
“I can get girls myself, you know,” Jongwoon says, but it’s playful rather than resentful and Sungmin’s grin doesn’t slip.
“I don’t doubt it, but you never do, is all,” he says. “I’m just concerned about your personal development.”
“I’m so sure. You just want something to gossip about.”
“Hey, it’s good for the soul. Just talk to her, go on. For my sake.”
“Actually, I was just thinking that I should get back. I have… something I forgot to do.”
The fake plaintive look disappears from Sungmin’s face, replaced with one of genuine concern. He asks Jongwoon if he’s okay, if he feels sick, if he wants somebody to go back with him.
“No really, I’m fine. It’s nothing. I just have to… I have that thing to do, you know? Sorry. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
Sungmin doesn’t fall for it, not even for a minute, but he’s also graced with enough tact to know when it’s a good idea to ask questions and when it’s a good idea to keep quiet, nod, and pretend you believe the lie. He settles for sitting with Sooyoung when Jongwoon leaves. Sooyoung tells him he looks a lot shorter than he did five minutes ago.
***
By February, Hyukjae is dating Hyoyeon, the girl he’d pursued at Sunkyu’s party. She’s nice, sociable, clearly in control of the relationship but never demanding or unkind. Everyone likes her, everyone is happy for Hyukjae. Jongwoon is certainly no exception.
So he wonders why he finds it so difficult to feel the same about Taeyeon.
Sunkyu calls Sungmin to fill him in on the news that Taeyeon and Youngwoon are dating now, but Jongwoon hadn’t needed anything so complex as a phonecall.
Youngwoon had stopped asking him out to eat so often, had started making excuses as to why he couldn’t do this or go to that, and would Jongwoon mind telling Heechul or Sungmin how sorry he was that he couldn’t make it?
Jongwoon minded. Jongwoon minded very much, but what could he possibly have said?
He might have been able to lie to himself for a few weeks but one night Youngwoon brings her back to his room and they sure as hell aren’t discussing mahjong. Jongwoon opens the bathroom door on his side and then slams it shut with all the force he can muster. He gets a certain grim satisfaction out of hearing her giggling get cut off as sharply as if he’d done it with a knife.
(Youngwoon actually tries to apologise to him the next morning but he says, “sorry, I have class now” and sweeps out of the room.)
***
He sleeps with Yoona out of spite, which is both stupid (is it really revenge if the person you’re wreaking vengeance on couldn’t care less?) and not fair to her (he has the horrible feeling that it might have been her first time).
He knows that afterwards he is supposed to ask her to stay but he doesn’t say anything at all so she starts getting dressed. He’s supposed to say he’d like to see her again, or ask for her telephone number at least, but he just lies there and watches her get back into her dress. She doesn’t cry, which is impressive because to be honest he sort of wants to himself, but he wonders if she’ll tell Sunkyu or Sooyoung or Stephanie or any of the others. They’d all hate him, and they’d have every right to, all things considered, but what if Taeyeon found out, told her boyfriend to stop hanging out with someone who could be so horrible for no reason?
Well, it’s not like he saw Youngwoon all that often anymore, anyway.
***
Yoona, as far as he can ascertain, never tells anyone. Maybe she was embarrassed, afraid that she’d sound like an idiot for giving in so easily to someone like that.
Someone like that. He’d never been that kind of person. He was pretty ashamed, really, Yoona was a perfectly lovely person who’d never done anything wrong to him, didn’t deserve to be tossed aside like a sweet wrapper… but how could he apologise? She’d probably just say it didn’t matter and hurry away when obviously it did matter.
Because Sunkyu and the others didn’t know what had happened, Jongwoon was still invited to every party and get-together, still warmly welcomed and treated as a friend as much as any of the other boys. But if Yoona had been quiet before, she was practically mute now, and he knew it was his fault.
Eventually he can’t bear to look at her anymore and starts inventing his own excuses for why he can’t go to the girls’ dorm anymore. Phantom assignments, imaginary essays. Ridiculously early new class times that mean he has to be snug in bed by 10PM at the latest.
Hyoyeon, who still attends things with Hyukjae, doesn’t cling but is nevertheless effortlessly by his side, puts two and two together around the same time that Sungmin does, and they talk about it a few times, both frustrated for their respective friends and the seemingly perfectly normal chain of events that shook up a select few lives while nobody else notices so much as a ripple.
***
He’s coming back from class one day when he hears voices coming from Heechul’s room, where the door is closed over but ever so slightly ajar. This in itself is hardly anything out of the ordinary: Hankyung practically lives there now, and Siwon flits in and out from time to time to politely ask why such and such has been left in his personal mini-fridge or why his mattress smells faintly of vomit.
He’s pulling out his key to unlock the door to his own room when he recognises one of the voices as Youngwoon’s. The distance Jongwoon had managed to put between them when they lived mere feet apart was sort of impressive: he couldn’t really remember the last time they had a conversation that wasn’t strictly necessary and businesslike.
He knows, therefore, that what he should do is go on into his own room and pull out his notepad and take down more and more and more notes until he felt sleepy and then he could go to bed and he’d have gotten through another day without having to have the conversation he wanted to have, or think much about it at all.
Whether or not all that was healthy, he’s not sure, but it seems a lot better than the alternative.
What he does instead is inch over to Heechul’s door, hyper-sensitive to every minimally creaking floorboard, and get as close to the gap in the doorway as he dares.
“-- just sex,” Youngwoon is saying, and Jongwoon fervently hopes that Heechul isn’t giving him some bizarre tips to spice things up with Taeyeon, because all that would serve would be to imprint images in his mind that he could never scour away.
“Well that’s not what she thinks,” Heechul replies, tiredly, as though he is explaining something to a five-year-old. “Honestly, you all look down on me but I’m the only honest one among the lot of you. If you just want to sleep with someone, then you tell them that. If that’s not what they want, you say sorry and go on your way. You don’t build up a relationship that you’re not serious about and you certainly don’t promise things you have no thought of doing. I mean, how is that difficult? Look at the mess you’re in now because you just couldn’t be honest for once. She is going to be absolutely crushed when she finds out,” Jongwoon isn’t sure if he actually hears Youngwoon wince, “and no, I have no intention of sparing your feelings here. What were you thinking?”
“I guess I wasn’t,” Youngwoon mumbles. Heechul just tuts disapprovingly.
“I guess that’s not going to cut it. What’s changed all of a sudden, anyway? You’ve been doing this for months. Did she suddenly start demanding something unreasonable like regular phonecalls?”
This time Jongwoon can practically see the wince.
“No! Look, I might have… if things had been different… Don’t think I don’t feel bad about it too!”
“If you felt bad about it you wouldn’t have done it in the first place,” Heechul says briskly. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Well I just… there’s someone else.” Stammering, pausing, sounding uncertain, it was all so unlike Youngwoon.
“If it’s one of her friends, no,” Heechul says, firmly. “Just no. You still have to tell her the truth about how things are between you and her, but if it’s one of her friends don’t you dare go near them.”
“No, it’s… she doesn’t really know them.”
“Then I don’t care who it is, but for once try to do something right with this, will you?”
There is a second or two of silence and then Heechul, exasperated: “Why did you ask me for advice at all if you’re just going to ignore me and sit there looking miserable? You know what you’ve done wrong, you know what you have to do, I’m not going to sit here and repeat it to you all afternoon. If you were looking for someone to tell you that you’ve been behaving perfectly well then you wouldn’t have come to me.”
A chair scrapes across the floor -- Heechul, presumably, getting ready to stand up and throw him out -- and Jongwoon scoots back across the hall in a hundredth of a second, opens his door in less time but terrified of the key making the slightest noise as it scratches the lock.
He listens attentively as someone comes out of Heechul’s room and walks down the corridor, out to the stairwell, and since nobody had gone into Youngwoon’s room he assumes he’s safe, waits ten minutes just to make sure, and creeps across the hall to Heechul’s room. (If Youngwoon is still there then of course he’s just looking for some spare paper, or a book Heechul borrowed, or something. Anything.)
He knocks once, twice, Heechul, sounding irritable, calls: “it’s open”. He nudges the door open, notices with relief that the room is completely Youngwoon-free, and then realises that he had no plan for that eventuality. Heechul is lying face-down on his bed; clothes that have recently been (probably somewhat dramatically) swept off said bed cover the floor.
“Kim Youngwoon, if that’s you I swear you’d better just turn around and--”
Jongwoon just coughs.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Heechul says, lifting his head off the pillow with a Herculanean effort. “What is wrong with all of you? I’m not a relationship guru and I’m sure as hell not your personal agony aunt. Well sit down, sit down!”
“But I didn’t--”
“I can see it in your eyes, the lot of you. You’re like frightened rabbits.” Heechul snorts. “Frightened, dishonest rabbits who take up a lot of my very valuable time…”
Rating: PG-13
Summary: A beginner's guide to lying to yourself.
A/N: This is part 1 of (probably) 2. The product of 2 weeks in Spain with no internet \o/
“I was supposed to go to private school,” Heechul says, as if it isn’t something they’ve heard a thousand times before.
“What went wrong there then?” Sungmin asks after a few seconds, because nobody else does.
“Well I wouldn’t have fitted in there, would I?” Heechul says, with a strange tinge of pride in his voice. It sounds almost artificial, though, almost rehearsed -- because he brings it up every fucking time they drink, but nobody has the heart (or maybe nobody has the balls) to tell him to shut up.
“What, because you’re gay or because you’re stupid?” Kyuhyun asks, from where he’s perched on the counter near the sink, clasping a bottle of wine (he grimaces in a pantomime fashion at anyone who comes near him lest they ask for a sip: they soon get the picture).
“Fuck,” Heechul says airily, almost musically, “you. You live in the same dormitory as I do, smartass. And besides,” he smiles predatorily, bares his very white teeth, “the hell would make you think nobody here is gay? There’s a guy in my accounting class, and you would not believe…”
***
Kim Jongwoon had taken a place there because his offer to study at a top music college fell through. He wasn’t entirely sure what had gone wrong, either. A few months before he took his final exams his confidence in his voice, in himself, had faltered even though nothing had changed about the way he sounded, no major traumatic event had shaken his very normal and mundane life. He had nothing to “blame” it on, as a consequence, so when he went in for follow-up interviews and was unable to replicate any of the enthusiasm or passion or drive he had delivered so easily, so naturally, in the first round of grillings… He saw the faculty members trade glances even as they shot him consoling smiles and he knew he’d messed up and had nobody to blame it on but himself.
A curious air of apathy had settled on him over that, as though he felt he’d lived his whole life already and saw no point in trying to aim for anything else. He’d caught his mother crying once or twice but when it turned out she wasn’t upset because he’d failed the family, but because he’d lost sight of his own dream…
Well, if that was supposed to make him feel any better, it was doing a pretty sorry job.
Eventually he was offered a place at a standard university to study literature. He’d never been a particularly below-average student, would have little problem getting in wherever he wanted to study his choice of academic subjects… but that hadn’t been what he wanted, had been the whole reason he’d applied to music college in the first place. He took the offer because he couldn’t spend another year in the same house as his mother with her sympathy and his younger brother with his obvious disillusionment (big brothers, as Jongwoon had been told constantly since Jongjin was born, are supposed to set an example).
He packs his bags with little more than a sense of relief and catches a train a matter of weeks later.
***
His dorm room is drab, unfurnished, worn green carpet the unwilling companion to cold beige walls, but it’s not like it would have looked much more welcoming in a place that cost three times as much per year. He’s not sure if that’s true -- he has never, after all, been in a place that cost three times as much -- but telling himself that helps. He thinks that it helps.
Anyway, a few posters on the wall, his own fresh sheets on the bed, his toothbrush in the bathroom… Yeah, it would be fine. Homely. Livable.
When he opens the bathroom door to embark on his plan, there is already a toothbrush on the counter. The bathmat is soaked through from where someone has just gotten out of the shower. Moreover, there is someone standing in front of the fogged-up mirror, squinting at themselves, a towel wrapped around their waist.
“Oh, hey,” the stranger says after he notices Jongwoon behind him in the small, unsteamed patch of mirror he has wiped. “I guess we’re suitemates!”
“I… guess.” In the grip of his utter disinterest in his place of learning, he merely skimmed through the sections in the brochure on living arrangements, hadn’t known he would have a suitemate. He wasn’t exactly a hugely private person but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t sort of socially awkward, and he was already having uncomfortable visions of himself walking in on this guy before he’d gotten a towel on, of dying a slow agonizing death outside the bathroom door while he waited for the toilet to be free… The bathroom lay between their two rooms with a door on each side; there were locks on neither of these doors. For a second or two he considers turning round and heading back to the train station.
“I’m Youngwoon,” the guy presses on, extending a still-damp hand.
(Should he make up a fake name? Say nothing and just turn and head for the door?)
“Jongwoon,” he says instead, taking the proffered hand. Youngwoon beams amiably at him. At least he doesn’t look like a serial killer. There’s always that.
Over the next few days he comes to know the students living on either side of their suite. The room next to his is occupied by Sungmin (who looks fragile at first glance but has an absolutely filthy cackle and can drink ten times anything that Jongwoon can) and his suitemate Ryeowook (ditto; studying chemistry). The room beside Youngwoon’s belongs to Hyukjae, who has a talent for beatboxing but is pursuing some kind of sports course. Hyukjae’s suitemate, Kyuhyun, uses insults as a form of greeting and turns out to be a genius mathematician.
On the very day, in fact, that Youngwoon prises Jongwoon out of his room to meet Hyukjae and Kyuhyun, they end up meeting the people who live across the hall, when one of them slams his bedroom door against the wall of the hallway and makes to storm outside (still wearing striped pyjamas and a fleecy bathrobe) while saying, “I’ll leave my underwear in the sink if I want…”
“But I…” A second person, smartly dressed in a blazer and white shirt despite the warm weather, following close behind, trying to exert some manner of damage control.
The two of them notice Hyukjae, leaning out of his doorway and openly gaping at them, and the smartly-dressed one colours a little, apologises for making so much noise so early in the morning. The bathrobe-clad guy just rolls his eyes.
“I’m Kim Heechul,” he says after a second or two of silence. “He’s Choi Siwon. He is too strait-laced for words.”
Jongwoon and the others introduce themselves in return, not entirely sure where to look. The request for room change form is practically visible on Siwon’s face.
(As it turns out, though, he never puts in a request.)
***
“Where the hell do they get these people from?” Heechul says, critically eyeing a gaggle of students from his place at a table outside the cafeteria.
“China?” Kyuhyun suggests sarcastically.
“Ha very ha,” Heechul snaps back, but he’s barely paying attention, craning his neck instead for a better view of the exchange students, who look all kinds of nervous and, painfully obviously, out of their depth. “I just don’t know why they come here, of all goddamn places…”
“Korea?” Siwon asks, picking distastefully at a limp salad. “Why not? Life experience, better job prospects…”
“Not Korea,” Heechul says dismissively. “This university.”
Siwon focuses his eyes on the greenish tomato he has just ejected from his salad, and says, “there’s nothing wrong with this university.”
“Maybe for you--”
“You have an authority problem.”
“I didn’t realise you were studying psychology. Armchair psychiatrist, are you?”
Siwon’s father is a respected businessman who owns several chains of high-street stores, wields the power of household names. His family is by far the richest of their group, probably one of the richest among the entire student body. Siwon didn’t fail his final exams or blanch in the middle of an important interview: he simply had wanted to live his own life before he inevitably had to join the family business and sit at a desk for 12 hours a day manning phones and looking at spreadsheets as though they really meant anything to him. He’s taking a course in Chinese language, partly, of course, because it’ll be useful for business… but mostly because it just interests him.
Jongwoon thinks Heechul resents Siwon a little because he’s doing what he wants to do, doing it for himself. Jongwoon thinks maybe he resents Siwon a little for just that.
But maybe that’s just him being an armchair psychiatrist, too. He settles for not saying anything and finishing his sandwich.
***
Heechul, who should have gone to private school. Kyuhyun, whose IQ was off the charts no matter how much he tried to cover it up with sarcasm and white wine, who could solve equations in his head that the most accomplished professors would write out and spend hours puzzling over. Jongwoon himself, who’d had no doubts that he’d get into music college, not because he was vain (if anything, he was the opposite) but because he tried and he knew he was talented and he’d worked hard for it. Donghee, a bright and friendly guy on Jongwoon’s course, who remarked to him one afternoon at the end of a lecture: “this is all sort of boring, isn’t it? I think I was expecting something different… but actually I wanted to be a dancer, go to theatre school…”
I wanted. I wanted. I wanted. I wanted to study maths… but at a specialist college. I wanted to go to private school… but honestly I messed up at the last minute. I wanted to use my talent because that’s what I enjoy… but look at me, wasting away on a literature course.
***
His classes are boring. Entirely manageable, but boring. He dutifully treks to the campus bookstore and buys every volume of classic or modern literature he is instructed to buy, sits in his room and underlines passages, takes notes, memorizes quotes. In classes he sits at the back, never offers to answer questions first but is always ready with an answer if asked.
It’s all painfully mechanical.
He panics in the middle of the night from time to time about what he’s going to do with the rest of his life after this -- a degree he had no real interest in studying, a degree that wasn’t, on the whole, useful for much except teaching or writing endless dull books on the same subject…
(“A degree’s a degree, though,” Ryeowook had told him chirpily one morning when they’d gone for breakfast together. “They’re all just little pieces of paper that slightly improve your job chances, right? Does it matter if you do forensic science or sport science?”
“Are you doing what you want to do, though?”
“Oh, yeah.” Ryeowook’s face was suddenly, uncharacteristically, serious. “It’s always been my dream to…”
My dream, my dream, my dream. He was really starting to hate that phrase.)
… but more often he thinks that maybe he just doesn’t care.
***
“Heechul’s adopted one of those Chinese students,” Youngwoon says, standing in the bathroom doorway.
“I thought he said they were morons.” Jongwoon flicks to the index in the back of the book he has open. He’s pretty sure he’ll throw himself off the roof if he ever has to write another essay.
“Yeah, I think he’s trying to re-educate the guy,” Youngwoon says. “Well, either that or he likes him because he’s pretty. Let’s go out somewhere. Are you busy?”
Incredibly. He’d left writing this to the last second (how many times, after how many sleepless nights, had he promised himself he’d stop doing that?) so now he had considerably less than twenty-four hours to--
“Not really.”
Stepping out into the hallway, they can plainly hear Heechul’s voice coming from his open doorway. He’s shouting at someone about the correct pronunciation of various cocktails. Youngwoon exchanges a glance with Jongwoon before stepping over the threshold of the room, calling Heechul’s name.
“What?!” Heechul snaps, leaning back, looking slightly maddened. There is a rather pitiful-looking boy perched on the edge of his bed. His requisitioned exchange student, clearly.
“You’re a fucking lunatic, you know that?” Youngwoon hisses at Heechul, before smiling brightly at the boy. “Hi, I’m Youngwoon. Sorry about his existence.”
“H-Han Geng,” the boy starts, but Heechul sighs and says “Korean!” The boy says “oh” and then “I mean, Hankyung. And it’s okay,” his Korean is accented but perfectly understandable, “Heechul-hyung has been really helpful.”
“Heechul-hyung,” Youngwoon repeats, slightly stunned. Then, to Heechul, who has arranged his face into a smug mask, “how do you get away with all this shit?”
“Natural talent. Now, go away. We were getting to what to do if someone ugly approaches you in a club.”
“Just remember to feed him,” Youngwoon mutters as Heechul briskly pushes him out of the room.
“Actually,” Heechul says, “he cooks for me.” He waves cheerily and closes the door.
“Where do they make people like that?” Youngwoon shakes his head in disbelief, then turns to Jongwoon. “Whatever, let’s go eat somewhere. Your treat this time.”
Jongwoon punches his shoulder, tells him that treats are usually offered and not dictated.
He already knows he’ll pay, though.
***
They have playfights. Play videogames together into the early hours of the morning. Go to a cheap noodle bar together. Share cigarettes when one or the other of them runs out.
When he tells Youngwoon all about his abandoned music college dream one night, Youngwoon seems genuinely angry with him, takes him by the shoulders and tells him that it’s stupid, cowardly, to ever give up on something you really want. Jongwoon just blinks, taken aback, and mumbles something about it never being too late.
At the time, he just doesn’t realise--
***
Siwon goes home some weekends and when he does Heechul generously throws open both their rooms, providing nobody is sick on Siwon’s bed or tries to use his cologne.
On one such night, Kyuhyun is arguing with Ryeowook over the rules of a drinking game with the result that everyone who had been playing it is forced to sit, bored rigid, with three-quarter-full glasses of alcohol in front of them.
“This is boring,” Youngwoon says. He tugs on Jongwoon’s sleeve. “I wanna talk to you. Let’s go into Siwon’s room.”
Nobody says anything as they stand up and walk into the next room, nobody says anything when Youngwoon (who is incapable of drinking one beer without drinking six beers) trips over thin air and sits down heavily beside Siwon’s bed: Jongwoon would have thought the resulting crash would be a cause for concern but the only sound from Heechul’s room is the faint ongoing dispute.
Jongwoon kneels beside him, not particularly expecting anything important. Most of what Youngwoon really “needed” to talk about after a few drinks involved some actress he’d seen on TV or a baseball game he’d been disappointed by.
Slinging an arm around Jongwoon’s shoulders, he says simply, “if you were a girl,” snaps his fingers, “like that.”
Well, that’s a new one.
“You’re drunk,” Jongwoon says uneasily, because he has no idea what else to say.
“So what? I’ll say it sober too. Ask me tomorrow.”
Jongwoon laughs: it’s forced, but it’s a laugh. “No way. You won’t even remember this.”
Before Youngwoon can even open his mouth to reply, he adds, “and anyway, I’m not a girl, so it doesn’t matter.”
Something flits over Youngwoon’s face, a frown, an uncertainty, but at that second Donghae, a slightly baby-faced friend of Ryeowook’s, comes in through the bathroom to tell them that the game is starting again.
***
In early December, it becomes fashionable to sneak over to the girls’ dorms at every opportunity. Sungmin happens to be close friends with a pretty law student named Sunkyu who happens to have a group of similarly attractive female friends. It doesn’t take a whole lot of effort on Sungmin’s part to convince a few of them to make their way to Sunkyu’s dorm room one night, armed with a few six-packs of beer and a healthy amount of bravado.
Sunkyu meets them at the door with a smile, ushers them in: she’s obviously done some of the same coaxing as there are four or five girls already in the small room, dancing, laughing, drinking.
Jongwoon has fun at first -- a tall girl named Sooyoung jovially spends a good twenty minutes trying to show him how to play a card game, except she keeps forgetting the rules, and he charts with amusement Hyukjae’s faltering progress around the room trying to keep the attention of a girl wearing shorts and a black hoodie. (It’s obvious, though, that she likes him too and they’re just enjoying this facsimile of a “chase” until it gets boring.)
He’s in the middle of a bark of laughter at the latest utterly perplexed look on Sooyoung’s face when his gaze happens to rest on Youngwoon and the petite, brown-haired girl who is sitting on his lap with her arms around his neck.
“No, I’ve got it this time, look,” Sooyoung is saying, but he just doesn’t hear her, watches instead as the girl stands up, takes Youngwoon’s hand, leads him towards the bathroom. Youngwoon’s eyes are slightly glazed (because of the alcohol? Or something else?) and there is a smile playing about the girl’s flushed lips.
“Taeyeon! You know the bathroom door doesn’t lock,” Sunkyu shouts at her, laughing, as they disappear into the room.
“Don’t come in then!” Taeyeon sticks out her tongue, closes the door firmly. Sunkyu, still giggling, heads over to the stereo to turn up the music.
To drown out any noise from the bathroom. Of course. Jongwoon feels a little sick but he doesn’t know why. He’s barely even had anything to drink.
“You better hope he doesn’t take her back to ours,” Sungmin remarks, wandering over with his fifth or sixth beer of the evening, “they’ll keep the whole corridor awake…”
“I’m not bothered,” Jongwoon laughs, or tries to laugh. Sungmin raises an eyebrow.
“Do you want me to hook you up with Stephanie? Korean-American, you know. Bilingual,” he finishes with a grin. When Jongwoon shakes his head, he tries, “What about Yoona? Live a little.” He gestures to a quietly pretty girl sitting in the corner, deep in conversation with one of her friends. She has a beer in one hand but she’s taking only the tiniest of sips; perhaps, in fact, not taking any at all but just trying to maintain some sort of illusion.
“I can get girls myself, you know,” Jongwoon says, but it’s playful rather than resentful and Sungmin’s grin doesn’t slip.
“I don’t doubt it, but you never do, is all,” he says. “I’m just concerned about your personal development.”
“I’m so sure. You just want something to gossip about.”
“Hey, it’s good for the soul. Just talk to her, go on. For my sake.”
“Actually, I was just thinking that I should get back. I have… something I forgot to do.”
The fake plaintive look disappears from Sungmin’s face, replaced with one of genuine concern. He asks Jongwoon if he’s okay, if he feels sick, if he wants somebody to go back with him.
“No really, I’m fine. It’s nothing. I just have to… I have that thing to do, you know? Sorry. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
Sungmin doesn’t fall for it, not even for a minute, but he’s also graced with enough tact to know when it’s a good idea to ask questions and when it’s a good idea to keep quiet, nod, and pretend you believe the lie. He settles for sitting with Sooyoung when Jongwoon leaves. Sooyoung tells him he looks a lot shorter than he did five minutes ago.
***
By February, Hyukjae is dating Hyoyeon, the girl he’d pursued at Sunkyu’s party. She’s nice, sociable, clearly in control of the relationship but never demanding or unkind. Everyone likes her, everyone is happy for Hyukjae. Jongwoon is certainly no exception.
So he wonders why he finds it so difficult to feel the same about Taeyeon.
Sunkyu calls Sungmin to fill him in on the news that Taeyeon and Youngwoon are dating now, but Jongwoon hadn’t needed anything so complex as a phonecall.
Youngwoon had stopped asking him out to eat so often, had started making excuses as to why he couldn’t do this or go to that, and would Jongwoon mind telling Heechul or Sungmin how sorry he was that he couldn’t make it?
Jongwoon minded. Jongwoon minded very much, but what could he possibly have said?
He might have been able to lie to himself for a few weeks but one night Youngwoon brings her back to his room and they sure as hell aren’t discussing mahjong. Jongwoon opens the bathroom door on his side and then slams it shut with all the force he can muster. He gets a certain grim satisfaction out of hearing her giggling get cut off as sharply as if he’d done it with a knife.
(Youngwoon actually tries to apologise to him the next morning but he says, “sorry, I have class now” and sweeps out of the room.)
***
He sleeps with Yoona out of spite, which is both stupid (is it really revenge if the person you’re wreaking vengeance on couldn’t care less?) and not fair to her (he has the horrible feeling that it might have been her first time).
He knows that afterwards he is supposed to ask her to stay but he doesn’t say anything at all so she starts getting dressed. He’s supposed to say he’d like to see her again, or ask for her telephone number at least, but he just lies there and watches her get back into her dress. She doesn’t cry, which is impressive because to be honest he sort of wants to himself, but he wonders if she’ll tell Sunkyu or Sooyoung or Stephanie or any of the others. They’d all hate him, and they’d have every right to, all things considered, but what if Taeyeon found out, told her boyfriend to stop hanging out with someone who could be so horrible for no reason?
Well, it’s not like he saw Youngwoon all that often anymore, anyway.
***
Yoona, as far as he can ascertain, never tells anyone. Maybe she was embarrassed, afraid that she’d sound like an idiot for giving in so easily to someone like that.
Someone like that. He’d never been that kind of person. He was pretty ashamed, really, Yoona was a perfectly lovely person who’d never done anything wrong to him, didn’t deserve to be tossed aside like a sweet wrapper… but how could he apologise? She’d probably just say it didn’t matter and hurry away when obviously it did matter.
Because Sunkyu and the others didn’t know what had happened, Jongwoon was still invited to every party and get-together, still warmly welcomed and treated as a friend as much as any of the other boys. But if Yoona had been quiet before, she was practically mute now, and he knew it was his fault.
Eventually he can’t bear to look at her anymore and starts inventing his own excuses for why he can’t go to the girls’ dorm anymore. Phantom assignments, imaginary essays. Ridiculously early new class times that mean he has to be snug in bed by 10PM at the latest.
Hyoyeon, who still attends things with Hyukjae, doesn’t cling but is nevertheless effortlessly by his side, puts two and two together around the same time that Sungmin does, and they talk about it a few times, both frustrated for their respective friends and the seemingly perfectly normal chain of events that shook up a select few lives while nobody else notices so much as a ripple.
***
He’s coming back from class one day when he hears voices coming from Heechul’s room, where the door is closed over but ever so slightly ajar. This in itself is hardly anything out of the ordinary: Hankyung practically lives there now, and Siwon flits in and out from time to time to politely ask why such and such has been left in his personal mini-fridge or why his mattress smells faintly of vomit.
He’s pulling out his key to unlock the door to his own room when he recognises one of the voices as Youngwoon’s. The distance Jongwoon had managed to put between them when they lived mere feet apart was sort of impressive: he couldn’t really remember the last time they had a conversation that wasn’t strictly necessary and businesslike.
He knows, therefore, that what he should do is go on into his own room and pull out his notepad and take down more and more and more notes until he felt sleepy and then he could go to bed and he’d have gotten through another day without having to have the conversation he wanted to have, or think much about it at all.
Whether or not all that was healthy, he’s not sure, but it seems a lot better than the alternative.
What he does instead is inch over to Heechul’s door, hyper-sensitive to every minimally creaking floorboard, and get as close to the gap in the doorway as he dares.
“-- just sex,” Youngwoon is saying, and Jongwoon fervently hopes that Heechul isn’t giving him some bizarre tips to spice things up with Taeyeon, because all that would serve would be to imprint images in his mind that he could never scour away.
“Well that’s not what she thinks,” Heechul replies, tiredly, as though he is explaining something to a five-year-old. “Honestly, you all look down on me but I’m the only honest one among the lot of you. If you just want to sleep with someone, then you tell them that. If that’s not what they want, you say sorry and go on your way. You don’t build up a relationship that you’re not serious about and you certainly don’t promise things you have no thought of doing. I mean, how is that difficult? Look at the mess you’re in now because you just couldn’t be honest for once. She is going to be absolutely crushed when she finds out,” Jongwoon isn’t sure if he actually hears Youngwoon wince, “and no, I have no intention of sparing your feelings here. What were you thinking?”
“I guess I wasn’t,” Youngwoon mumbles. Heechul just tuts disapprovingly.
“I guess that’s not going to cut it. What’s changed all of a sudden, anyway? You’ve been doing this for months. Did she suddenly start demanding something unreasonable like regular phonecalls?”
This time Jongwoon can practically see the wince.
“No! Look, I might have… if things had been different… Don’t think I don’t feel bad about it too!”
“If you felt bad about it you wouldn’t have done it in the first place,” Heechul says briskly. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Well I just… there’s someone else.” Stammering, pausing, sounding uncertain, it was all so unlike Youngwoon.
“If it’s one of her friends, no,” Heechul says, firmly. “Just no. You still have to tell her the truth about how things are between you and her, but if it’s one of her friends don’t you dare go near them.”
“No, it’s… she doesn’t really know them.”
“Then I don’t care who it is, but for once try to do something right with this, will you?”
There is a second or two of silence and then Heechul, exasperated: “Why did you ask me for advice at all if you’re just going to ignore me and sit there looking miserable? You know what you’ve done wrong, you know what you have to do, I’m not going to sit here and repeat it to you all afternoon. If you were looking for someone to tell you that you’ve been behaving perfectly well then you wouldn’t have come to me.”
A chair scrapes across the floor -- Heechul, presumably, getting ready to stand up and throw him out -- and Jongwoon scoots back across the hall in a hundredth of a second, opens his door in less time but terrified of the key making the slightest noise as it scratches the lock.
He listens attentively as someone comes out of Heechul’s room and walks down the corridor, out to the stairwell, and since nobody had gone into Youngwoon’s room he assumes he’s safe, waits ten minutes just to make sure, and creeps across the hall to Heechul’s room. (If Youngwoon is still there then of course he’s just looking for some spare paper, or a book Heechul borrowed, or something. Anything.)
He knocks once, twice, Heechul, sounding irritable, calls: “it’s open”. He nudges the door open, notices with relief that the room is completely Youngwoon-free, and then realises that he had no plan for that eventuality. Heechul is lying face-down on his bed; clothes that have recently been (probably somewhat dramatically) swept off said bed cover the floor.
“Kim Youngwoon, if that’s you I swear you’d better just turn around and--”
Jongwoon just coughs.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Heechul says, lifting his head off the pillow with a Herculanean effort. “What is wrong with all of you? I’m not a relationship guru and I’m sure as hell not your personal agony aunt. Well sit down, sit down!”
“But I didn’t--”
“I can see it in your eyes, the lot of you. You’re like frightened rabbits.” Heechul snorts. “Frightened, dishonest rabbits who take up a lot of my very valuable time…”