Proof of Bullets (part 1)

[warmboys]

Proof of Bullets
Onew/Jonghyun
~12000 words
NC-17

for pixeltoy, help_japan ♥ Sorry this took so long! The story kind of ran away from me. I sincerely hope you don't hate it. Thanks so much for bidding and being patient.

Jake, by the way, is MC Jake/Kim Jungmin/the most lovable man in the world.



PROOF OF BULLETS

THIS PLACE WAS BUILT FOR MOVING OUT
      2002 - 2006

The house in Sydney, they call it the Castle. Not because it’s formidable and looming-they’ve got a front porch, for Christ’s sake, painted foam-white from the summer-but because of the five-meter radius of agapanthus, blue as a swimming pool--“a MOAT,” Jinki corrects. “Geez, don’t you have any imagination?”

Jonghyun frowns over the notepad. “Nerd,” he says, jotting down Jinki’s suggestion in the margins.

“Boys,” says Jake, raising his spatula. “Who wanted them runny?”

Two hands shoot up. Both belong to Jinki.

“Gross.”

Jinki folds his napkin into his collar. Jonghyun reaches over to steal it but Jinki catches his wrist in mid-air without so much as a glance. Sometimes he’s ninja like that. Jonghyun smiles sweetly at him. “You’re hurting me,” he says through his teeth.

Jinki smiles back. “Sorry.”

He lets go. Jonghyun nurses his sore wrist as if it were an injured baby penguin.

Jinki misses New Zealand. Jake took them to Stewart Island a couple times when he was shooting. He and Jonghyun fought over the binoculars, straining their necks for a better view of the birds. He’d never known that they had yellow eyes. The babies were gray, fuzzy, and larger than he’d imagined.

They called the New Zealand house the Attic, owing to the triangular roof. The fortnight they were there it rained twice and both times the ceiling leaked. Jake used an unwashed ongi instead of a bucket. Whenever they walked by that corner it’d smell of kimchi. Jinki would listen for the drip-drip while lying in bed, like he used to listen for creaks and footsteps at the orphanage, but all he heard was Jonghyun snoring next to him. On the dry, sunny days Jinki sometimes walked by where the ongi had been and peered up at the tiny hole in the roof. The sunlight coming through made a small yellow circle on his foot. He was wearing Keroppi socks. When he twisted his toes it looked like Keroppi was smiling.

They moved everywhere, staying a month tops. Jake made a home out of every house because he didn’t like the idea of three men-men!-living out of rental cars and suitcases, even if Jonghyun and Jinki both thought that would’ve been badass in an old-fashioned cinematic sense. More badass if they’d been criminals on the run, or world-class spies. But Jake was just a Korean guy who had the best job in the world. Every kid would want him for his dad just to show him off at Take Your Dad to School Day. The boys, though, never got to stay at one place long enough to show him off. “My dad wrestles crocodiles,” Jonghyun said anyway, to anyone who’d listen, usually the unfortunately pretty girl sitting at the desk next to his. (There was one at every school, which Jinki thought was very uncanny. Every school.) Jonghyun stretched out “dad” just in case, but only Jinki noticed, because he did the same. Daaaaad. They never got sick of the word, even though they only used it outside of the house (whichever house they were in at the moment). “Daaaaad”’s official title, though, was video journalist. At the moment he worked for the Discovery Channel and had more contact with animals than people on a regular basis.

Jinki used to wonder why Jake would want to haul two kids with him on his globe-trotting adventures when life was probably infinitely more fun without the physical baggage and additional mouths to feed, but Jake cooked eggs for them every morning and made the best-tasting burnt toast with butter and jam. Even the corners were delicious. At the age of fifteen Jinki understood instinctively what escaped many great men before him: appreciate a good thing when you got it. ‘Cause he and Jonghyun definitely got it.

“My boys,” Jake said long before they got used to hearing it.

“Is it because you don’t remember our names?” Jonghyun asked, practicing his pout which had never worked in front of anyone as far as Jinki could remember.

It was a joke that Jake took to heart. He grilled them for days afterwards, teasing out their likes and dislikes, the quirks in their respective as-yet rather underdeveloped personalities. “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up,” Jinki wailed, cracking under the pressure. He was thirteen and he thought astronauts were pretty cool, but he didn’t want to go to the moon now that he finally had a home, mutable as it was. “I don’t know.”

“I want to be a musician,” Jonghyun said. “And then I want to be a pimp.” Jonghyun had just discovered one of Jake’s old Notorious B.I.G. albums.

Everything changed in North Carolina. Like a highway juncture, or the dip of a spoon. They don’t talk about North Carolina, not even their little blue house with its isosceles roofs and dirty red brick base. The thing is, they had a flower bed. Jake had wanted to plant marigolds and begonias. While he scuffled through the soil the boys played with the hose, which, much to their feigned horror, quickly assumed a life of its own. Jonghyun’s white t-shirt clung wetly to his thin frame, and Jinki mused aloud that his nipples and belly button together made a face, of a girl rounding her mouth to say, “Oh!”

The stupid flower bed.

It happened while Jake was napping, one otherwise brilliant summer afternoon. Jonghyun felt too fidgety in their air-conditioned living room, and in retrospect he would compare it to an omen. “I knew something bad was gonna happen,” he’d say, and his face would look sullenly back at him in the bathroom mirror. (Of course he could never say this to Jinki.) At the time he only knew that his legs did not know how to be still, so while Jinki headed to the bathroom during a commercial break, Jonghyun snuck out into the garden and stretched his legs in the flower bed.

He didn’t see it at first, until he did and it made him jump. His buttocks were suspended in midair for the briefest of nanoseconds while he considered the long gray coil lying between the begonias, like a tube of dull metal save for its diamond-shaped head and small beady eyes. Jonghyun had seen snakes before, once when Jake wrapped a python around his shoulders for an elementary school demonstration at the zoo, but never up close like this. He swallowed a couple times, more excited than scared because summer was beginning to feel like a long unbearable stretch of heat and boredom. He was sixteen, almost seventeen, had visited twenty-four different countries, seventy-five cities in the past three years, and could boast of only one real friend to his name. And technically they were brothers now. Jonghyun was beginning to watch movies religiously, old films that normally escaped boys of his age and maturity, but he found himself engrossed in the onscreen chemistry of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. Flirting with the pretty girl in his math class only to be relocated to the other side of the world a month later was starting to feel sad and repetitive. He even sympathized with Eliza Doolittle’s placelessness in society after her dramatic transformation from lowly flower girl to respectable lady. Maybe he was approaching that age of self-awareness, learning to draw parallels between life and art. Whatever. Jonghyun watched the snake and felt his heart rise to his throat.

“What’re you doing?”

Jinki closed the front door behind him and crouched down beside Jonghyun on the balls of his sandaled feet. “What’re you looking at?”

If he was being entirely honest with himself, Jonghyun would have to admit that at the time he was also learning to be annoyed. Jinki was his best friend and always would be, Jonghyun grudgingly accepted, but as they grew up they were also beginning to grow apart. Where Jonghyun was anxious, Jinki was complacent. Where Jonghyun yawned, Jinki widened his eyes. Jinki didn’t tire of this moving castle of theirs, nor was he bothered by the constant displacement, the floating and unsettledness. Everything was new to him. He never complained of wanting friends besides Jonghyun. He was just so-content. And in comparison Jonghyun felt like a monster.

Maybe that was why.

“It’s a snake,” he said without looking up. Then he had an idea. “Maybe you should pet and tame it, and we can adopt it into the house.”

Jinki’s eyes brightened at the word ‘adopt.’ “That would make me Jake.”

“You bet.”

Jinki grinned. “Can I call the snake Jonghyun if I’m its master?”

Jonghyun frowned. “Hey-“

It happened in a flash, as life-altering events often do, but the slow play-by-play went something like: Jonghyun’s eyebrows knitting up two hairs at a time, Jinki’s arm dashing out, side-squashing a row of orange begonias, an incomprehensible hiss like water hitting a burnt pot on the stove, a stripe of gray arching across the grass, and the result-a horseshoe of tiny red dashes on the inside of Jinki’s elbow.

He didn’t even cry.

BUT THE SUN CAME OUT TODAY
      1999 - 2002

The other boys had gone to the park.

Jonghyun was on the 46th page of Matilda with his back against the wall, sitting cross-legged on his mat, when the door creaked and opened slightly ajar. It could’ve been the wind, but their room was windowless. From where he sat he could detect nothing in the crack between the hinges of the door, so he turned back to his book.

Fifteen seconds later, a set of fingertips emerged around the edge of the door, and, just as slowly, a head of prickly black hair. The door swung open carefully, revealing a chubby-faced boy with squinty eyes and ears that flapped outwards like the famous cartoon elephant Jonghyun couldn’t remember the name of. Attached to his waist was a large fanny pack labeled “Marlboro.” Silently he surveyed the room, taking in the sight of the orderly mats lined up in two rows of fours, and the plain, undecorated beige walls, while Jonghyun surveyed him. He was normal-looking, as they all were. Or else they might not have ended up here, Jonghyun reasoned, because extraordinarily good-looking kids could be made into celebrities or at least do juice commercials until they lost all their baby teeth. Unwanted kids were usually ordinary at best, deformed or debilitated otherwise.

Without saying anything the boy unbuckled his fanny pack and rested it on the mat next to Jonghyun’s.

“Someone’s sleeping here,” Jonghyun said. “This room’s full.”

It wasn’t true, of course. All eight mats in the room were taken except for the one next to his-but he liked pushing them together to make one giant mat, because it made him feel bigger and more powerful, like he was sleeping on a king-sized bed and not on the floor.

The boy looked at him for the first time, and Jonghyun saw that his eyes were not little black beads of evil as he’d first thought. “They told me to come here,” said the boy slowly, “and that I’d have to sleep next to the kid who wets his mat every night. They said he was probably here because the other kids never invite him to play when they go out.”

Jonghyun made a face. “It’s not every night.” He set down his book and pointed at the big white “Marlboro” label. “Why do you have that?”

“All my possessions are in there.” He pronounced it like he just learned the word, which Jonghyun had already learned last week because at the age of eight he was already a literature buff. “It smells like apples in here.”

Jonghyun knew he meant to say pee instead but was trying to be nice. Which was nice. And when he realized that he thought the new kid was nice, it became clear to him that he was going to have a friend in this place after all, whether he liked it or not.

“What’s your story?” He asked Jinki-that was the boy’s name-later, at dinner, which they took to the bathroom to eat together. It was a small, cramped space but allowed for more freedom and privacy than the old cafeteria where Ms. Lee and Ms. Ahn were always hovering and eavesdropping on conversations. Jonghyun took frequent trips to the bathroom, complaining of diarrhea so no one would bother him. Now he had a bathroom buddy.

“Story?”

“Yeah, like how did you get dropped off here?”

“Oh.” Jinki fished out the pickles in his sandwich. “My mom got a new boyfriend, and he hates me.”

Jonghyun opened his mouth, though he hadn’t finished chewing. “Moms do that?”

Jinki shrugged. “Mine did.”

“But I thought moms were supposed to be the best-dads are the mean ones who beat you, right?”

“My mom used to hit me with her bathroom slippers,” Jinki said, sticking a pickle into his mouth. “Wow. It’s weird to say ‘used to’ like she’s dead or something.”

Jonghyun sat deep in thought. “That sucks.”

Jinki shrugged again. “What about you?”

“I don’t have a mom.”

“How come?”

“They said she died having me. My dad gave me up immediately.”

Now Jinki was quiet. “Wow.”

“Not really,” Jonghyun said. “I don’t remember anything about either one of them. It’s almost like I gave birth to myself. Or I woke up one day and just, was. My destiny is probably to become a superhero.”

Jinki laughed. He was missing one of his canines. “What would you do if you were a superhero?”

“Probably eat all the kimchi in the world.”

“That’s unfair. I like kimchi too.”

“Too bad,” Jonghyun said. “Well, okay, maybe I’ll share some with you. But only if you turn out to be useful.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, like if you also have a superpower.”

“Oh. Like,” Jinki paused. “. . . if I had giant hands?”

Jonghyun smacked him on the shoulder. “No, you retard. Like-“

Something in Jinki’s face changed. “That’s what he called me.”

“What?”

“My mom’s boyfriend. He kept calling me that.”

Jonghyun didn’t know what to say but he felt his face redden. It was the first time he felt this way-a little like he was sick, but not because of food or bad weather. Sick because of himself. “I’m sorry.”

Jinki looked at him closely and then without warning gripped his shoulders. “I’m not, okay? I’m not retarded.”

Jonghyun could see his pupils. They were larger than he thought pupils should be, but they didn’t scare him. Jinki’s face was a nice face up close, even when it was currently mad at Jonghyun.

“I know,” Jonghyun said. “You’re a superhero, just like me.”

As early as he could remember, Jonghyun has always had one consistent, frightening, recurrent dream. In the dream he is falling down a dark and noiseless well. He tries to scream for help, but his throat can only make ineffectual attempts at sound. Down he goes, falling and falling, until he is woken by the seven AM alarm for morning exercises in the courtyard.

At the age of eight, however, the dream shapeshifts. Sometimes, just before waking, a hand slithers out of the darkness to pull him up by the collar. The hand is soft and small, and he feels himself suspended in midair for a moment before being reeled out of the cold, dark well. Before he can turn to say thank you, he always finds himself jolted awake, often to the image of an eyelid-fluttering Jinki in the mat next to his.

H o w  t h e  D a d  w a s  W o n

When the man finally came, and for a while they weren’t sure he would, but he did, and when he did he was tall, with a slight but sturdy build, eyes that crinkled, and the kind of friendly dark complexion that told you every line of his life story would eventually be written across his skin. He would probably die at the age of ninety-two with two pet alligators and his sons playing poker in the backyard. Three hundred people would come to his funeral, and every one of them would have a different flower in their pocket and song to sing to the urn holding his ashes (to be spread not over the Pacific, which he crossed at least a hundred times while living, but the garden to which he tended so diligently in his firmer years and which was then bestowed upon his children).

“Call me Jake,” he said with a blinding smile. He extended a hand for Jonghyun to shake.

Jonghyun didn’t take it. He’d grown into a wary and distrusting pre-adolescent. “You don’t look foreign.”

Jake had a deep, infectious laugh. “It’s just a nickname. I travel a lot.”

“Doesn’t that mean you’ll never be at home?”

“That means,” Jake corrected, “You’ll be coming with me.”

“I’m not leaving without him.” Jonghyun pointed at Jinki, who’d been peering at them through the crack in the door for the past five minutes.

Jake had been a trust fund baby who set out to make a name and life for himself separate from his family. He worked as a video and photo journalist specializing in wildlife, a job that took him to jungles and rainforests and deserts across the globe, and now, pushing his mid-thirties, the only thing he lacked was a brood of his own. He wasn’t sure he’d be a great father, but he was going to try. If there was anything Kim Jungsu loved more than a pride of lion cubs, it was the human equivalent-the world’s most dangerous animal, bite-size.

He looked at the acne-speckled boy who looked back at him shyly from behind the door. He’d come prepared. “Ms. Ahn told me you two were inseparable.”

“We’re practically Siamese,” Jonghyun said.

Jake rubbed his chin. In a rush to grab his suit from the dry cleaners he’d forgotten to shave in one particular place this morning. “Why not?” He grinned. “It gets awful lonely on the road.”

And then they were three.

THE REST OF THE STORY
       2006

“We’re going to Seoul.”

Jake looks like he’s aged thirty years overnight. And the snake bite wasn’t even poisonous! It was a stupid gray rat snake. Jonghyun folds his arms, feeling a mixture of anger, shame, and fear. He gets the shame part but angry at what, afraid of what? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to look at Jinki.

Jinki, though, has gotten over it already. “I’m fine,” he keeps saying. “It’ll make a cool scar.”

“My friend introduced me to a photographing job for the local paper there. I thought it would be. . . a good idea, for two boys to live out this stupid life with me.” Jake pauses, running his hand through his hair. He looks at Jinki first, then Jonghyun. “But what you need now is something stable. No more dangerous games. You both need to make normal friendships and-“

“Normal is boring,” Jinki points out. “I like our life right now.”

Jonghyun doesn’t say anything.

“No,” Jake says sternly. “Normal means being well-adjusted and being around people instead of wild and potentially dangerous animals.”

“But nothing’s ever happened before-“

“This is not up for debate, Jinki,” It’s the first time that they both can remember that Jake’s put his leather-booted foot down. Ever. “We’re moving to Seoul.”

Jonghyun doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t deserve to feel relieved or happy right now. He doesn’t deserve anything, because this was all his fault.

And the worst part is Jinki, with that huge bandaid on his elbow, standing in the middle of the kitchen in his favorite plushy frog slippers-the worst part is Jinki looking so sad to leave their moving castle behind.

Later Jonghyun might look back and, in an attempt to map out how it all got so convoluted, consider this moment the beginning of it all.

M y  F a i r  G e n t l e b o y

“It’s weird,” Jinki says the night before their first day at the new school, “when I think, we’re not really brothers.”

Jonghyun is in the middle of pulling his pajama t-shirt over his head. His face is obscured by the dinosaur-print. His arms tangled, but through the fabric Jinki sees that they’re not the thin twigs they’d been just a summer ago. Since he turned seventeen he’s taken a newfound interest in working out and muscle definition. Jinki doesn’t have anything for or against it, but sees it as another widening chasm between them.

“Why do you say stuff like that?”

“No, ‘cause we aren’t. Like, there’s no blood relation between us.”

“Just because we had different mothers doesn’t mean we aren’t brothers.”

“We had different fathers, too,” Jinki reminds him.

Jonghyun tugs the shirt down enough so Jinki can see his eye-rolling. “C’mon.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Spiritually, emotionally, you and I are forever bound to each other-“

“Oh, c’mon,” Jonghyun wrinkles his forehead. “Gross.”

Jinki’s standing in front of the mirror, examining the newly birthed pimple on his chin. It kind of resembles razor burn, only he’s got no facial hair to shave. To the left of his reflection Jonghyun’s stripped to his boxers with one leg on the ladder to the top bunk. He’s wearing just that T-rex shirt and flannel underwear. Jinki is wearing Donald Duck and boxers with little yellow stars on them. Jonghyun, as if waiting, watches Jinki’s eyes flit back and forth between them like matrix ping pong balls.

“From this angle we kind of look-“

“Alike.”

“Yeah,” Jonghyun says, stepping off the rung.

When they’re standing side by side, their physical differences are clearer. Jonghyun’s shorter, his face more occupied by angles, his nostrils tenser, with overall more potential to be a looker sometime in the near future. Jinki just looks loose and silly, like God drew him with a shaky hand. Maybe He saved him for last.

He examines Jonghyun again, with his hands this time, pulling at Jonghyun’s cheeks and jaw with his fingers, trying to see him as a stranger.

“Stop being jealous of my perfection,” Jonghyun complains. “You’re ruining it.”

Jinki drops his hands. “Okay, but stay still.”

One of Jonghyun’s eyes is smaller than the other, because he’s tired right now. In the morning, Jinki remembers suddenly, sometimes his double eyelids disappear. His hair is flat now and still kind of wet from the shower. If he sleeps like this he will wake up with it sticking up funny in the morning, but he’ll deal with copious amounts of wax. Jonghyun looks better, Jinki thinks, with messy, flat hair. He looks just like how he should.

Jonghyun’s got an average-sized mouth, but it hides a rather big set of teeth. Out of self-consciousness he smiles more carefully around teachers and pretty girls. Around Jinki, though, he laughs so hard you can see his tonsils jiggling.

In the mirror Jonghyun’s staring intensely at Jinki’s arm. At the scar, Jinki realizes. “It doesn’t-“

“Course not. It healed eons ago,” Jinki reassures him.

“Just making sure,” Jonghyun says, his lower lip relaxing. He swings an arm around Jinki’s shoulder and knocks their heads together. “If I ever forgot your face, I’m pretty sure I’d still remember that scar. It’s gonna stay with me forever.”

Jinki can smell the black sesame shampoo that Jake’s been using for hair loss prevention. “It’s not a big deal. I don’t even remember what the snake looked like,” he says, which is sort of a lie and also not, because he has tried to block it out before but still has nightmares occasionally.

Nightmares which Jonghyun’s probably aware of.

“Well, it was about this big, and-“

There comes a time in a boy’s life when the world suddenly unfurls at his feet and he, in taking the step he must, will uncover his true destiny. Do those yellow bricks piece together a road to success or doom its traveler to failure?

In Jonghyun’s case, the shiny crimson shoes were replaced by a pair of red Nike hightops.

“Nice sneakers.”

It’s the third time someone he doesn’t know has complimented him. Jonghyun twitches his head to look at the boy. His appearance is above average, which Jonghyun takes to be a good sign.

“Thanks.”

“How’d you get them?”

Jonghyun closes his locker. “My dad’s a millionaire,” he says casually, testing the waters. He read something like this in a book before.

“No way. You’re lying.”

Jonghyun shrugs. “Believe what you want.” He slings his backpack over his shoulder and walks away with what he hopes is an appropriate amount of nonchalance.

By sixth period word’s spread that the new kid Kim Jonghyun is the only son of an oil tycoon, and his mother a princess of a small European country. “He was a real snot when I talked to him in the hallway just now,” Kim Kibum says authoritatively. “Probably bathes in diamonds.” Everyone goes whoaaa. In the back of the room Jessica Jung turns her head slightly. She has a cramp in her neck from the nap, broken short by Kibum’s grating pitches. (In reality it was probably “diamonds” that woke her up.) She hates taking classes with sophomores, but Home Ec was the only elective that didn’t interfere with her otherwise perfect schedule. Every day she has eighth period free before cheer practice.

She rubs her inner thigh absentmindedly.

A boy she doesn’t recognize walks in the door. He’s on the short side but has promising bone structure. He looks as though he is trying very hard to keep his backpack on one shoulder. She almost starts laughing. Is he carrying a dictionary in there?

Inexplicably, even to herself, she decides to sit up straighter.

He takes a quick survey of his surroundings, sees Kibum, and immediately-nervously?-moves down the aisle past him. Jessica taps her foot against the leg of her chair. They make eye contact, and his eyes widen before his face settles into a smile. This is good. She thinks, this is familiar territory. She knows how this goes.

“Hi.” He’s introducing himself, with an awkward grin. “I’m Jonghyun.” Nice, steady voice.

“Jessica,” she says, making sure each syllable sounds frighteningly American. “I’ve never seen you in this class before.”

He lets out an embarrassed laugh. “I just moved here. Why do you have a foreign name?”

“I’m not from around here either.”

“Oh yeah?” Grin widening. “I guess we have something in common then, Jessica.”

She looks at him evenly. “I guess so.”

If Jessica Jung looked at Jonghyun and thought here was another boy she could fluster who would provide some much-needed entertainment in this otherwise mindless droning sad excuse of a school, Jonghyun looked at her and thought, Holy--!! He didn’t have to look too hard to get that she was beautiful and possibly perfect. Finally, he thought, he would be Casablanca. He felt the canvas paper unfurling under his trusty red sneakers. His life was expanding. He checked his cell phone. His destiny had begun at approximately 1:56 PM.

At 1:56 PM Jinki, on the way to his sixth period class, trips over the shoelaces of his left sneaker, which had mysteriously come undone already three times that day. He suspects a conspiracy. A couple of people give him strange looks as he bends down to retie his shoe. And it is strange indeed-this never happened to him before. Not the tripping, as that happened quite frequently, but this feeling. . . of . . . what was it exactly? (How could he know, if it’s “never happened to him before”?) The thing is, not one person has said hi to him all day, not even after his compulsory self-introduction in every class. The girl he sat next to in World History had even moved her chair an inch away from him and spent the entire class leaning in the opposite direction. He sniffed his armpits in the bathroom-they weren’t too bad. So it wasn’t body odor or anything physically obvious.

What Jinki failed to understand, and what Jonghyun instinctively grasped, was that people are quick to judge and that once they do, they hardly ever change their minds. Jinki trips into first period class, colliding headfirst with the endearingly plump Mr. Oh, and before he’s even had a chance to dust himself off and tell everyone his name, where he’s from, and what his hobbies are, everyone in the class already has a pretty good idea of where he fits into the high school social hierarchy. They’ve painted a big fat L on his head already, and three guesses as to what that stands for. Bet you only need one.

From the bed Jonghyun snatches a glance at Jinki’s back, hunched over a passage for Chinese class. The knobs in his spine make small indentations in the t-shirt. Jonghyun cringes, tightens his jaw, and opens his mouth.

Jinki shifts. “Wo shi ta de da ge ge.”

Jonghyun closes his mouth. Better to wait it out, he thinks. Jinki’s working now. He turns back to his notebook.

Jinki swivels in his chair. “Are you staring at me?”

“What? No.”

“It felt like you were. My back is itchy.”

Jonghyun gives him an unresponsive stare. Then he has an idea. “Want me to scratch it for you?”

“Uh-“

Jonghyun is faster. In less than a second he’s leapt from the bed to the desk. Jinki, with the instincts of a leopard, desperately grabs for a pillow to shield himself but, unable to get past Jonghyun’s guarding, uses his arms to protect the back of his neck instead. Which still leaves a lot of uncovered area for Jonghyun to tackle.

When Jonghyun’s tickling fingers of doom finally lose their power and fury, Jinki lowers his elbows and emerges red-faced and breathless. He looks like he’s been holding his breath. “I concede. What do you want?”

Jonghyun pretends to think about it. “I think we should start walking to school separately.” He examines Jinki’s reaction, which is still blank and expectant. “Because,” he continues, “this is a new chapter in our lives. We don’t need to do everything together like before.”

“But we go to the same school.”

“I know.”

“I mean, we take the same way to school every morning. And we both have first period.”

“I have Korean Lit and you have Chinese, on the other side of the building,” Jonghyun points out.

“But there’s only one entrance into the building,” Jinki says.

“Fine,” Jonghyun tries not to sound exasperated. “I’m just saying-I don’t know. Fine. We can stick to each other like glue. For the rest of our lives.”

For a moment neither of them moves or speaks. Then Jinki gets up from his chair and sits down on the bed beside Jonghyun. Jonghyun watches him warily as he moves over an inch, then another, until they’re pressed shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow.

“Like this?”

Jonghyun feels like he should be mad, or Jinki should be, but neither of them is. In fact what he really wants to do is laugh, so he does.

“Like this. It’ll be even better if we marry the same girl.”

“Two for the price of one,” Jinki adds. “She should consider herself lucky.”

The next morning Jonghyun’s still picking at his cereal when Jinki gets up from the breakfast table and starts putting on his shoes. Jake looks momentarily confused. “You two aren’t-“

“Bye dad. See you later, Jonghyun,” Jinki says cheerfully, and then he’s gone.

It’s trickier than Jonghyun imagined, timing it so that they arrive at school separately, because as Jinki pointed out, they both had class at the same time, which meant one of them had to leave a little earlier so the other could still get to class without being late. Sometimes, though, if Jinki left a little later than usual, Jonghyun would trail twenty or so meters behind awkwardly, stopping at red lights when Jinki stopped, starting again when he did. It was an uncomfortable affair.

One such day Jonghyun’s two traffic lights behind Jinki, focusing his gaze on a tree in the distance rather than Jinki’s back, when he notices out of the corner of his eye another boy walking up to Jinki and stopping right beside him. He’s wearing the same uniform but manages to look better than the both of them in it, probably owing to his height. Jonghyun looks at them a couple times, wondering if the boy lives in the same neighborhood and if they should be more careful about the timing from now on lest the boy catches them and starts spreading rumors that Jonghyun and Jinki are friends or, worse yet, related! and that Jonghyun has been hiding it all along.

When the light changes the boy walks a few steps ahead of Jinki, and Jonghyun calms down. He’s probably overthinking it, he tells himself.

Then, strangely, the boy turns around to look back at Jinki. No doubt about it: that is definitely a smile on his face. He is smiling at Jinki, as though they are friends. His face is just as handsome as Jonghyun feared.

Jinki picks up his pace until they’re walking side by side.

From that day onwards Jinki begins walking with the boy to school while Jonghyun continues his long trek alone.

E l i a s

If Elias Choi rolled around in white paint, he would look something like a Greek statue come to life. In fact when Jinki first saw him he thought about putting his fingers on his face just to make sure he was really a boy and not carved out of stone. That was in gym class, with Elias wearing an ill-fitting pair of shorts under a ratty jersey that could’ve been picked out of a garage sale. Jinki did not actually touch him, only gaped, because they hadn’t yet been introduced. Then Mr. Song paired everyone into doubles for badminton, and Jinki had the misfortune of playing against Elias with a girl of slight build. The birdie smashed into Jinki’s nose three times with a vengeance that seemed uncharacteristic of inanimate objects.

“Sorry,” apologized the tall, handsome boy in the locker room after class. He pulled his jersey over his head and swung his hair around, beads of perspiration flinging onto the surrounding lockers and Jinki’s face. Jinki wiped off the sweat that didn’t belong to him with the back of his arm.

“It’s okay,” he said. “But aren’t you a sophomore? Why are you in this class with seniors?”

Elias looked embarrassed. “Whenever I play with the sophomores they all complain that I’m too good for them.”

“Oh.” Jinki tried not to notice his nipples. They were dark and flat. “I’m Jinki.”

“I know,” Elias said. “I remembered you during roll call.” He stuck out a hand. “I’m Minho.”

“But Mr. Song called you-“

Minho laughed, showing off his nice teeth. “That’s just-Mr. Song is weird. My parents gave me an English name, but no one actually uses it except for him. He just likes singling me out, for some reason.”

Minho was a lot more normal-sounding than Elias, Jinki thought. “He probably thinks of you as his prize racehorse.”

It turned out Minho was just as much of a loner as Jinki, if for entirely different reasons. Everyone was too intimidated by his stature and smoldering good looks to befriend him. The few who tried often had ulterior motives-roping him into photo shoots which inevitably involved stripping into just a pair of boxers, which he did quizzically a couple times and stopped when he spotted himself on the banner of a new porn site, forwarded to him by a longtime anonymous admirer-and naturally none of those exchanges blossomed into a real friendship, for which Minho had been starved for a very long time. Growing up as the second child of a famous ex-soccer coach, he had felt the pressures of stepping out of his father’s shadow and, as a result, grown up with a thirst for competition contrasted delectably with an eager desire to please even the strangest of strangers. Inexplicably he sensed in Jinki a potential ally, or a doting hyung. Maybe it was something in his mild demeanor in which Minho could detect not the smallest iota of a threat. We don’t really know for sure, but from that fateful encounter on they could be spotted walking to school together, laughing and talking as friends often do.

(If we zoom in carefully on this snapshot, we may also observe the small black-haired speck in the background. That there is likely Jonghyun, judging by the blur of a frown on his face.)

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