Chapter Text
renjun 03:05
i’m just tired of being invisible you know?
renjun 03:05
having only one friend, never talking to anyone, never being noticed
renjun 03:06
its…lonely
The truth was, Renjun had always been invisible.
Sometimes, being invisible had its perks. You could sneak in and out of the cafeteria without anyone noticing. If your skin broke out or you got an ugly mouthful of braces, nobody commented on it. And you could easily avoid the petty politics that every high school has, simply because nobody ever asked. It was, in Renjun’s opinion, better that way.
But everything always reached a peak, and for Renjun the peak was waking up on his first day of junior year and realizing that, with his best and only friend Yukhei in Hong Kong on exchange for the year, he had precisely zero friends.
Perhaps that’s what draws him out of the bathroom stall that Monday morning when he hears the disgruntled sigh of none other than Lee Donghyuck, the youngest and unofficial leader of SM High’s brat pack.
“It’s completely ridiculous,” Donghyuck is saying, sitting on the counter flanked by Mark and Jeno. “So I’ve got detention for getting out of class without a note? How does that even make sense.”
“Well, it is the rules,” Jeno says quietly, under his breath. In truth, Renjun doesn’t remember the last time he heard Jeno talk loudly. For the last few years, Renjun has Jeno as kind of the add-on, the extra to make the pack a trio, the personality-less addition.
“I don’t follow rules,” Donghyuck says. “I make the rules.”
Mark laughs coolly. “When my father hears about this, that bat Kang will—”
“That won’t be necessary,” Renjun says. The three boys look at him, confused. “Just—getting one teacher in trouble won’t solve the problem that you can’t sneak out of class. You could try forging a note or something, that’d be more…” He trails off. “More helpful.”
Mark frowns. “Who are you?”
“Oh,” Renjun says. “Uh, Huang Renjun. We’ve—we’ve been classmates for the last eleven years.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Mark says.
“I know Renjun,” Jeno says quietly. “We were friends in elementary school.” He smiles softly, a little forced. “Hi.”
That makes Renjun pause because, in truth, he’d completely forgotten. Back when they were kids until seventh grade, Renjun and Jeno had been practically inseparable. Renjun didn’t remember what changed between them, only that one day they’d been best friends and the next day they’d pretended they didn’t know each other.
“Well, I don’t know how to forge things,” Donghyuck says.
“I do,” Renjun says. “You guys are all in yearbook, right?” (It wasn’t really a question. Every year the yearbook committee took time out of class at the end of the year to put stickers over unfortunate typos and names that had mysteriously been changed. Renjun had always figured one of the trio were behind that.) “And yearbook is run by Ms. Son, and I know her signature because I had her for macroeconomics last year. So if I may…”
He reaches for one of the boys’s bags, which was lying open on the counter, tears a sheet of lined paper out of a notebook, finds a pen, and writes Please allow Jeno, Mark, and Donghyuck to be absent from lessons, they’re aiding me with preliminary material for this year’s yearbook. Slanted, with some of the I’s not dotted and the s’s in cursive. “Here.”
Donghyuck takes the page and holds it up to the light, as if checking for invisible ink or tea stains. “This is impressive,” he says. “Thanks for this, I’ll make photocopies of it at home.”
“Is there anything we can do to repay you?” Jeno asks.
Renjun frowns. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’ll think about it.”
“A favour, then,” Donghyuck says. “Repay it whenever and count yourself lucky you got one.”
The favour isn’t the part that surprises Renjun. The part that surprises Renjun is the way Jeno looks up and shoots him a smile on his way out of the bathroom. To Jeno, he thinks, it must be just a smile. To Renjun, it’s an acknowledgement, proof that he’s been noticed, proof that he’s visible.
Like it or not, he’s on the map now. He has to tell Yukhei.
Jaemin has already made the headmaster’s office home when there’s a knock on the office door. “Come in!” Mr. Lee says, not looking up from Jaemin’s file on his desk as if trying to catalogue every misdemeanour in all six of his previous schools.
The door opens and a boy enters; around Jaemin’s age, dark-haired in a sweater and jeans. He’s cute, Jaemin thinks. A bit too clean-cut, though. “Ah,” says Mr. Lee. “Renjun. What a coincidence, just the person I wanted to see.”
“You…called me to your office, sir,” Renjun says. “It’s not really a coincidence.” Jaemin hides a smile. Maybe not so clean cut, huh?
“Ah, right, yes,” Mr Lee says, clearly frazzled, putting down Jaemin’s file. “Jaemin, this is Renjun. He’s one of the best students we have at SM High. Renjun, this is Jaemin, he just moved here.”
He looks between the two as if he’s expecting some kind of reaction. Jaemin raises a hand casually. “Salutations,” he drawls.
Renjun nods curtly. “Nice to meet you.”
“Renjun, can you please show Jaemin around?” Jaemin bites back a sarcastic comment like well, I wouldn’t want a good student missing class on my sake or wow, I wonder what the tour guide selection process was. “You two are in the same grade, and I wouldn’t want Jaemin to be alone.”
Trust me, Jaemin thinks. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Sure,” Renjun says stiffly, but he doesn’t look at all like he means it. Actually, he looks more like he’d rather be eaten alive by a shark than show Jaemin around the school. “Shall we?”
They’ve been walking the corridors in absolute silence for a few minutes before Renjun nods to a large set of doors and says, “That’s the library. Don’t go in there if you aren’t going to follow the rules, because Irene is a sweetheart and she doesn’t deserve that.”
“I’ve never met a nice librarian in my life,” Jaemin says. “Last time I went into a library the old hag at the counter started hissing at me. Pretty sure she put a witch curse on me.”
Renjun smiles tightly. “Did you do anything to incite that?”
“Knocked over a couple books, but that’s not a big deal,” Jaemin says. Renjun rolls his eyes visibly, not even trying to hide his annoyance at this point. “Anyway, I don’t wanna hear about the librarian. Tell me everything I need to know to survive at this school.”
Renjun frowns. “Depends on what you mean by survive,” he says.
“Give everyone as much hell as I can manage,” Jaemin says flippantly.
He expects Renjun to roll his eyes, look scandalized, or stop talking, but the corners of his mouth quirk upwards. “Well,” he says. “I don’t want to be aiding and abetting, but the best teacher to piss off is Seo because he has a short fuse but doesn’t hold grudges. He’s been teaching for too long and he has a class in pretty much every grade, so he probably doesn’t even remember half his students.”
“And who else,” Jaemin asks.
Renjun considers. “Jung is kind of a dick,” he says after consideration. “He makes fun of his students if they don’t do well. You know? Saying stuff like well, you all had better revise, or you’ll end up like Eunji here.”
“I doubt you were ever one of them, though,” Jaemin says.
Renjun nods. “You’re right,” he says. “I never gave him shit, though, unlike how I feel some people will.” Jaemin is sure he’s not imagining the twinkle in Renjun’s eye as he says it. “And I personally don’t like Kim, but that’s because I got a B- in freshman year English.”
“Your poor GPA,” Jaemin says, amused, smiling.
Renjun frowns. “Are you laughing at me?” he asks.
“Nope,” Jaemin says. “I’m in mourning. R.I.P, Renjun’s freshman year GPA.” Renjun’s frown deepens. “So what teachers are off-limits for me?”
“Oh, man,” Renjun says. “The teachers here are seriously dysfunctional. You can’t mess with Qian, because his husband left him last year. Or maybe his dog died. Really, it could be either. And Lee is a bit all over the place, but he means well. His son Mark goes here, and he’s an…” He lowers his voice. “He’s an asshole.”
Jaemin’s lips quirk upwards. “Elaborate?”
Renjun sighs. “Lee Donghyuck, Lee Jeno, and Mark Lee,” he says. “They make up the inner circle of this school’s popular clique, so to speak.”
“Damn,” Jaemin says. “Are they related?”
“No,” Renjun says. “It’s just something that happened, you know?”
Jaemin laughs. “They give people a lot of shit, then?”
“I’ve never been at the tail end of it,” Renjun admits. “Generally, I stay with my own devices. People don’t really notice me.”
“Face like that, people don’t notice you?” Jaemin blurts out. Renjun frowns. “More likely that people don’t bother you because you intimidate them.”
“I’m not intimidating,” Renjun says, somewhat defensively.
“I mean?” Jaemin says. “You’ve got this whole cheekbones thing going on, and you’re all smart and shit, and apparently you don’t talk to people your age…it really gives off that kind of impression, you know?” He considers. “Do you have a favourite poet?”
“Yes,” Renjun says. “Did that just prove your point?”
“Yep,” Jaemin says. He nods at a set of double doors, wide open, in which he could clearly see long lunch tables and smell the scent of crappy school food. “Is this the cafeteria?”
Renjun sighs. “Yes,” he says. “Come on. I still need to show you to the field.”
“Okay, welcome to world history,” Song says after the rest of Jeno’s class finish filing in. “My name is Miss Song, and I don’t think I’ve ever taught any of you before.” She pauses for a second. “Except you, Jungwoo. Nice to see you in my class for a second time.”
Jeno stifles a laugh as she clicks the remote for the presentation. Mark lowers his voice. “Did he fail or something?”
He takes meager notes as Song goes through the course requirements, wincing at the thought of bi-weekly homework assignments and regular group projects (“Before any of you ask, I will be assigning all groups that conduct projects in this class”). Donghyuck leans over and asks, “Mark, can you make her put the three of us together for every group?”
Song snaps her fingers together. “What’s your name?” she asks, pointing to Donghyuck.
“Lee Donghyuck,” says Donghyuck, unaffected, smirking in that insufferably confident way he always did to lighten a situation. “Happy to be here, Miss.”
“Don’t talk in my class,” Song says coldly. “Okay, can I have some people to hand out copies of the syllabus and the textbooks, please?” She clicks the remote again and the slide changes to a floor plan of the classroom. “In order to avoid this kind of behaviour, I’ve consulted my colleagues to put together this seating plan.” Jeno stares at it blankly. She’d put the three of them on different sides of the room—Donghyuck in the front right, Mark in the front left, and Jeno at the back, next to someone named Na Jaemin.
“Miss Song,” Mark says. “This is ridiculous. It’s affecting our ability to learn.”
“Explain?” Song says. Jeno begins to slide his books into his bag.
“I can’t focus if I’m not next to Donghyuck or Jeno,” Mark says. “If you want me to be able to pay attention in class, you should reconsider this.”
“Interesting proposal,” Song says. “That sounds an awful lot like codependency, Mr. Lee. That’s caused by either a dysfunctional family, which I know you don’t have, you can’t let go of your childhood, which I’m not sure any of you have done, or you have deep set emotional problems that you struggle to express. Perhaps I should schedule you a visit to the counselor.”
Mark flushes red. “That won’t be necessary,” he begins.
“No, I insist,” Song says. Jeno bites back a smile. “Mr Moon is very helpful. He’d be able to help you with these problems of yours.” Mark opens his mouth when she continues, “Or you could move to that seat in the corner over there and stop giving ridiculous excuses.”
Hiding a smile, Jeno moves to the back and settles his bag down next to a now-empty seat. “Are you new to the school?” he asks the person who is apparently named Na Jaemin.
“You don’t have to pretend this isn’t funny,” says the boy, running a hand through his hair. Jeno stares, confused. “What just happened. It’s fucking hilarious. You don’t have to hide that you’re laughing because it’s Mark.”
Jeno swallows. “I’m—it’s not—it’s not like that, I just don’t want to cause a disturbance.”
The boy smiles. “I’m Jaemin,” he says. “I am new, I just moved here.” He picks up his pen. “We probably shouldn’t talk, huh?”
It all leaves Jeno two things: firstly, slightly unsettled, and secondly, somewhat intrigued.
For as long as Renjun has lived with his aunt, he’s learned to associate the sound of her humming under her breath with chaos.
“Do you really think this is enough, Renjun?” she asks, her lips pursed. “I wouldn’t know, of course, but you have so much potential and you wouldn’t want to waste it, right?”
“I think it is,” Renjun says through gritted teeth. “I have enough extracurriculars, my PSAT grade is really good so when I do the SAT later this year I think I’ll do fine, and my GPA for the last two years has been fine so if I keep it up for the next while then I’ll be fine.”
Renjun’s aunt nods. “Yes,” she says. “Of course. You’re such a smart boy, Renjun, I wouldn’t want you to be wasting your talents on stupid things.” She smiles at him, but it doesn’t reach her eyes, as her smiles generally do. “Have you decided what you’re going to major in yet?”
Renjun looks away. “No,” he lies. “I—I’m not even close to deciding.”
She clicks her teeth. “Sicheng knew what he wanted to be from when he was in freshman year.”
Yeah, but Sicheng’s dorm room doesn’t smell of weed because of her roommate, Renjun wants to say, but he bites it back. He likes his cousin—ever since Renjun had showed up at the Dong household fourteen years ago because his parents had been involved in a car crash, they’d taken him in like family. He wasn’t bitter about them—they were the only family he’d ever known.
It was just that Renjun was having a very hard time dealing with anyone, let alone his aunt, who for all her good traits was extremely neurotic.
“Your father always wanted to be a dentist,” she continues. “He would’ve wanted you to carry on his dream. He wanted to start a family practice.”
Although, Renjun considers, he probably would’ve had the exact same problem no matter who in the family his guardian was.
“I’ve thought about it,” he says finally. “But I don’t really think I want to go into medicine?” He winces, preparing for impact, and adds hurriedly, “Not that it’s not a very noble practice and all, but it’s not something I can see myself doing as a career for my entire life.”
Renjun’s aunt frowned. “Renjun,” she says. “Your father—my brother—died before he could finish his dream of completing dental school and being a practicing dentist. Don’t you want to make him proud?”
And God, if there’s one thing Renjun wants, it’s for his aunt to stop bringing up his dad whenever she felt Renjun was being difficult, or whenever she wanted something from Renjun that he wasn’t willing to give. Especially since he never knew his father well enough to argue against it.
“I do,” he lies finally. “It’s just—he was my father, wouldn’t he have been proud of me regardless?”
Renjun’s aunt sighs deeply. “But your science grades are so good,” she says. “What did you get in chemistry last year? Ninety-six?”
“Ninety-three,” Renjun says. “I had to work really hard for that, though, Auntie.” She looks at him, questioning. “It wasn’t easy.”
“Well, life isn’t easy, Renjun,” his aunt says. “You have to go through challenges to be able to live a good life. Me and your uncle have been through challenges to provide for not one but two boys, and your father and mother would’ve gone through challenges for you as well. And when you get married and have children, you’ll happily go through challenges for them too.”
Renjun swallows. I won’t have children, he wants to say, or maybe I want to enjoy my life in the future. But instead he meekly answers, “Okay, auntie. I’ll think about it.”
Jaemin doesn’t talk to his foster parents after school.
There’s a lot of them in the house, his foster parents being the type to take in dysfunctional older kids and give them away when they became “too much”. And if his file was to be believed, Na Jaemin was the definition of “too much”. Jaemin is the fourth one there, having replaced someone who’d just graduated from the foster system so to speak.
Jisung is sitting at the top of the stairs when he makes his way to his room, reading a book that looks too much like a textbook for Jaemin’s tastes. “Hey,” he says, squinting up from his book through his frail round glasses. “How was school?”
“Good,” Jaemin says. He doesn’t stick around to chat, though. Jisung had been the foster child of the Moons forever; Jaemin never stayed in one place long enough to integrate into the group, not for the last two years. There was no use making friends with his foster siblings when he’d be moving away soon enough.
He closes the door of his bedroom behind him and starts to consider, glaring at the open suitcase that he refused to properly unpack, the clothes in a haphazard heap rolled together in a way that could somehow fit them.
There wasn’t even much use making friends at school, he reminds himself. But he wanted to give people hell—it made him memorable. The Jaemin of two years ago would’ve tried to make friends—the Jaemin of now was too troubled to.
Jisung raps softly on the door frame. “Can I come in?” he asks.
“No,” Jaemin says.
Jisung ignores it, walking into the room and sitting down on Jaemin’s bed. “You haven’t unpacked,” he says.
“What an astute observation,” Jaemin says. “One would think you had already graduated middle school, what with that level of deduction.”
“It’s been a month since you arrived here,” Jisung continues. “Why are you refusing to talk to anyone?” He sighs deeply. “Me, Chenle, Herin—none of us have even spoken a full conversation with you. Mom and Dad don’t even bother saying hello because they know you won’t say it back.”
“There’s the problem,” Jaemin says. Jisung frowns. “I can’t talk to you, because I’m not like you. I’d never treat my foster parents like they were my own mom and dad.”
“You don’t plan on staying,” Jisung says.
“Ding ding ding,” Jaemin answers. “How are you still in middle school, Jisung? Mind like yours should’ve skipped three grades by now.”
Jisung stares at him. Jaemin almost feels bad. The Jaemin of two years ago would’ve felt bad. “Why are you such an asshole?” he asks finally, standing up and storming out of the room.
“Mind your language!” Jaemin calls behind him. Then he silences the guilt inside him and starts to scroll through his Instagram feed.
“Jeno.”
Jeno doesn’t look up from his notebook, focusing on the math textbook, trying his hardest to answer the problems in his homework the way he needed to answer them.
“Hello? Jeno?”
He turns up the volume on his phone, currently playing some crappy classical music playlist that was meant to stimulate brain function. As if listening to violins automatically made stats more understandable.
“Lee Jeno, I’m talking to you.”
Jeno presses pause on his music and looks up, feigning surprise when he sees his father standing irritably in the doorway. “Oh, hi, Father,” he says. “I didn’t see you there.”
“Really,” his father says. “And you didn’t hear me asking you three times to talk to me.”
“Nope,” Jeno says. He taps the page of his notebook with his pencil. “Can you make it snappy? I’m trying to do my homework.”
“I’ve seen your report card,” his father says. “Your grades are abysmal, Jeno. I don’t think you really care that much about doing your homework.”
“Is that what you came in to talk to me about?” Jeno asks. “Because if it is, first of all, it’s super late to be giving me the lecture about working hard three months after that report card came out, and second of all, Mr. Moon has already given me the speech about applying myself.” His father stares confusedly. “You know. Mr. Moon. The school counselor.”
“You never told me you were seeing the school counselor,” his father says.
“Didn’t want to make you jealous of the functional male role models in my life.”
Jeno’s father crosses his arms. “Can I come in?” he asks curtly, and Jeno can feel the annoyance radiating from him in just those words. “Or are you going to tear my head off for suggesting it?”
“Why?” Jeno asks.
“I want to talk to you,” his father says. “We haven’t talked in so long, Jeno. And you’re my son. I don’t like that you’re always ignoring me, and I don’t like that you’ve started to fall down at school, and I don’t like that you’re always disappearing with those boys that you refuse to introduce me to.”
“I don’t want to introduce you to my friends because I don’t want to be embarrassed,” Jeno says. His father’s face falls—crushed, on the worn carpet of the doorway. “I don’t want to have to answer the questions of why I have a stepmother that I never talk about. I’m not doing well at school because it is difficult, and I don’t want to waste my energy away on statistics. And I ignore you because you cheated on my mom.”
“Jeno,” says his father. “I loved your mother. But I love your stepmother too.”
“You got remarried pretty fast, huh?” Jeno says. “If you really loved her, if you really loved my mother, you would’ve respected her memory.”
“You were in seventh grade when she died!” his father says angrily. “You didn’t know your mother like I did, Jeno!”
“Would that have helped me to understand?” Jeno asks.
“Yes,” his father said. “Yes, it would. Your mother would want me—would want us to be happy. And your mother wouldn’t want you to be deprived of a mother if she couldn’t fill that role. She loved you more than anything, Jeno. I know she would’ve encouraged me to move on, and she wouldn’t want you to be harbouring all this bitterness towards me and towards Soonkyu—”
“Well, I’m really sorry to let her down,” Jeno says. “Because I’m not happy. And accepting you and accepting her wouldn’t make me any more happy!”
His father sighs. An uncomfortable silence passes between them. Jeno turns back to his homework. “I came up here to ask you if you wanted to come out with us,” he says finally. “But clearly, the answer is no.”
“Clearly,” Jeno echoes.
“And clearly, I shouldn’t ask you anymore,” his father continues. Jeno doesn’t look away from his homework, but he can see the hopeful look on his father’s face, as if he’s hoping Jeno will deny it.
“Finally, you’ve figured something out,” Jeno says instead. He doesn’t watch as his father walks away.
The display of his phone screen lights up. Donghyuck, it reads, the sound of his ringtone playing in his headphones. Jeno lets it ring.
Renjun wipes away his left eye and ducks into the corridor he knows by heart, confident that nobody will notice him going in the wrong direction. The mass of students are headed to the field, or the cafeteria, or somewhere else—not deeper into the school building to a classroom that hasn’t been allocated to any teacher.
The school building was built bigger than it had to be, Renjun reminds himself, trying to focus on the facts—focus on things that keep you grounded, focus on things that you know are real, rationalize the problem but only once you’re calmed down. Back when being a teacher was a good option, this school had been over-staffed, but as long as Renjun had attended SM High there’d always been a couple classrooms that were never used.
Ever since freshman year, Renjun had slipped away to them when he wanted to be alone, when he wanted to be somewhere where nobody could see him and nobody would find him. Huangs never let people see them upset—but, then again, Huangs didn’t fail biology quizzes, and yet here he was.
He pushes open the door to one of them, expecting it to be empty—not expecting to see a figure leaning out of the open window as if scoping the room out.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh, I’ll—I’ll find somewhere else to go if this is—important work—or—whatever it is you’re doing.”
The figure moves back in and Renjun realizes it’s Jaemin—the new kid. It had been a few weeks since the beginning of term and Renjun hadn’t spoken to him since he’d shown him around, but he’d definitely heard the name. (You know that new kid, Jaemin? I heard he got expelled from his last school for selling weed brownies at a bake sale. Or oh my god, did you hear about what that new kid Jaemin said to Nakamoto?) He’d never witnessed anyone become a minor celebrity at SM High so fast, but he supposed Jaemin’s edginess was somehow charming to people who didn’t have any regard for the rules.
“Ah,” says Jaemin. “Renjun.”
“Hi,” Renjun says. He swallows. “Normally when I come here, I’m all on my own,” he adds.
“Are you hinting that you want me to leave?” Jaemin says. “I was scoping this place out. Wanted a place to spend my time at school seeing as they caught me for forging nurse notes to sneak out every other day.”
“Every other day?” Renjun asks, mildly scandalized, wondering how poor Nurse Luna had reacted when they asked her if the notes were real. Then he reminded himself that she probably dealt with that kind of thing regularly.
“A bit more than that,” Jaemin concedes. “The security here is insane.”
Renjun swallows. “Well, I would like to be alone, yeah,” he says. “But I can’t force you to do anything, and from what I hear you don’t like to be restrained.”
“From what you hear?” Jaemin repeats, moving away from the window and towards Renjun. “Am I some kind of celebrity around here? Are my dashing exploits romanticized and told as tales of charisma and—”
“Don’t inflate your own ego,” Renjun says, cutting him off. “People just talk about you, quote unquote, roasting Choi’s ass in chemistry the other day.”
“Jinri and I are actually on quite good terms,” Jaemin says, crossing his arms. “I’ve gotten to know her quite well over all the detentions she’s given me. I call her by her first name.”
“Does she react well to that?” Renjun asks.
“No,” Jaemin admits. “Generally it just gets me another detention.” He steps closer to Renjun, and something Renjun doesn’t recognize passes across his face for a split second, before it’s replaced by something Renjun is pretty sure is thought. “You look like you got run over by a truck,” he says finally. “Everything okay in Huang-land?”
It takes Renjun a couple of seconds to realize that Jaemin isn’t mocking him—he’s asking him if he’s alright. And it takes him a couple seconds more to recognize his thought for what it was—deliberation. Like he was trying to figure out just how to ask the question. “You took a long time to ask that,” he says. “Trying to think of a way to say it that doesn’t sound like you care?”
“Nah,” Jaemin says. “Trying to figure out what could possibly make you upset.” Renjun frowns at him quizzically. “I see you in the corridors, you know. You don’t blend in as well as you think you do. It’s pretty obvious, actually, that you think you’re too good for this school.”
“I don’t,” Renjun begins.
“Nothing wrong with that,” Jaemin says. “If it was up to me, I’d be on a yacht right now that I bought through my genius entrepreneurship, but instead I’m in this shithole.”
Renjun laughs nervously. He’s not sure how to react to Jaemin, and he wonders if that’s an affect he has on everyone or if it’s just Renjun. “Is it true you got expelled from your last school for selling weed brownies at a bake sale?”
“Is that the rumour that’s going around?” Jaemin asks. “Damn, I want people to think I’m a badass, not stupid.” Renjun frowns at him again, nodding for him to elaborate. “Well, for one, I wouldn’t sell weed at a nice school fundraiser, it’s not like I want to get caught, and for two, why would I sell them at the price of a random bake sale brownie? The weed adds value, you know.”
“Entrepreneurship,” Renjun repeats sarcastically.
“Well, if the cost of production is higher, then so is the price,” Jaemin says. “Basic economics.”
“You are a walking eighties movie stereotype,” Renjun says. “I feel like you’re the sixth person who was missing from The Breakfast Club.”
“Oh, can John Hughes’s ghost direct a movie about my life?” Jaemin asks wistfully. “I could be like the more badass version of Ferris Bueller.” He pauses for a second. “You never told me why you look so distressed.”
Renjun laughs. “Well, if you really want to know, I failed this biology quiz.”
“Oh, come on,” Jaemin says. “You got an A-? A B?”
“More like a D+,” Renjun says.
“Damn,” Jaemin says. “Well, if you want, I’ll give you a call when I drop out and we can do it together. You know, like, a friendship thing.”
Renjun laughs. “I don’t think we count as friends,” he says.
“We definitely don’t,” Jaemin says. “But it looks more dramatic that way, huh? When all these people graduate and have 2.5 kids in the house down the street from their parents, they’ll find a bag of weed in their baby’s room and tell them all about Na Jaemin, the awful drug dealer with no concept of added value.”
“And what will they say about me?” Renjun asks.
“They’ll use your tragic story as a consolation for when their kid has a 1.3 GPA,” Jaemin says. “See, you’re failing, but Renjun was a genius and he still dropped out so grades don’t mean anything.”
Renjun doesn’t want to laugh. He doesn’t. Laughing at that would be an acknowledgment, he thinks, of their easy chemistry, the way they fell into this weird disjointed banter so fast. Laughing means that he finds Jaemin funny—that they click, in a way Renjun doesn’t want to accept.
He laughs. “What a sad story,”
As it turns out, Huang Renjun is not the neurotic nerd Jaemin had him pegged for.
Well, he was neurotic. And he was intelligent. And he carried himself like he hated this school because he did. But as days go by with them quietly sharing the empty classroom, not talking most days but hyperaware of the other’s presence, Jaemin realizes two things that come as a surprise.
The first thing is that Renjun is a surprisingly multi-layered person. Normally, he studies, which is what Jaemin had assumed someone like Renjun did on his lunch breaks, but not every day. He plays his music out loud some days (because my headphones are broken and I don’t want to ask my aunt for a new pair) and it’s not whatever Jaemin expected someone like Renjun to listen to: there’s more bass than your average Mozart symphony, there’s more synths than any Beethoven he’s ever heard.
The second thing is that, Jaemin realizes one day with a shock, that Renjun is the closest thing he’s had to a friend for months. They aren’t truly friends; they don’t talk about anything that isn’t superficial, they don’t talk about their home lives, they don’t acknowledge each other outside that classroom. Jaemin thinks he likes it better that way—maintaining that distance between them, drawing lines with their friendship because they didn’t want to get too close. He knows Renjun lives with his aunt and uncle, and he’s mentioned his foster parents off-handedly, but he doesn’t know anything else about who Huang Renjun is outside of this classroom and the same goes the other way.
But whatever they have, a weird pseudo-friendship born out of sharing the space of that classroom, persists despite Jaemin’s desire to stay alone and isolated. Renjun comes to the classroom a lot, spending most of his time buried in a textbook doing homework or studying. (“The library is too loud,” he explains once. “None of the freshmen listen to Irene when she tells them to shut up.”)
Jaemin knows he doesn’t come because of Jaemin’s presence, but he also knows that his presence isn’t enough to push him away either. And despite himself, somewhere deep inside him, he takes that as a win.
“Jeno, can I see you after class?” Qian asks him one day as he makes his way into the classroom, looking hopefully at him as if seeing a teacher after class was something he could reject.
He stops by his desk when the bell rings, waving on Mark and Donghyuck. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about, sir?”
Qian sighs. “You’re failing stats, Jeno,” he says. “At this rate, it’ll be very difficult for you to keep up for the rest of the year if this is how you’re doing with the most basic part of the syllabus.”
Jeno winces. “Oh,” he says, even though he knew this—he’d known he was going to do badly in stats since the first day of class. “I—what is there for me to do?”
“I don’t think you’re stupid,” Qian says. Jeno frowns at him. “I think you’re capable of this. I pulled up your records—the standardized test that they gave you in middle school, your score suggests you would be able to cope with this easily. I think you just need some extra support.”
“Right,” Jeno says. “Okay. Cool. What do you have in mind?”
“I’ve asked one of my students from last year who passed with flying colours to check in and help you out,” Qian says. “Do you know a Huang Renjun?”
Despite himself, Jeno’s heart speeds up slightly. “We’ve met,” he says. “Is—is he going to be tutoring me?”
Qian nods. “Do you have any issues with him?”
Jeno considers. What he thought about Renjun was inconsequential here, because if he brought it up he knew Renjun would want to know what the problem was and Jeno didn’t know a simple way to say back when we were best friends I had a crush on you and that never really went away. And it wasn’t like he wanted to explain that to Qian, either. So he shakes his head. “No, I’m just not really that close with him so I’m worried he’ll find it a burden.”
Qian shakes his head. “Not Renjun,” he says. “Seriously, he can help you out if you want him to. He did very, very well last year.”
Jeno nods. “Okay,” he says. Internally, he’s laughing at himself, at the irony of the whole situation—after pushing Renjun away after his mom died, he’d had to fit him back into his life for however temporary a time anyway. He tries to imagine his dad’s reaction to Jeno becoming friendly with Renjun again. He always had been popular at the Lee household, after all. “I’ll talk to him later, set up a time.”
Qian nods. “I know that things can be complicated, Jeno, but I think with a bit of work you could ace this subject.”
Jeno shrugs. He doesn’t want Qian’s pity—he doesn’t want people to believe in him when there’s nothing to believe in.
Lee Jeno 13:26
Hey.
Lee Jeno 13:26
I haven’t messaged this number in years but Qian said he’d asked you to tutor me in stats?
Huang Renjun 13:29
Yeah, he did.
Huang Renjun 13:30
Should I go to yours after school? I remember the address.
Lee Jeno 14:15
Sure.
Lee Jeno 14:15
See you then.
Being in a place that you hadn’t been in for years fills you with a feeling that’s hard to name.
It’s not nostalgia, Renjun thinks, because he’s not looking back on anything with wistfulness or rose-coloured glasses. It’s unsettling. Renjun almost feels as if the second he steps on the lawn, as he walks up to the door, he’ll be twelve again heading around to Jeno’s to hang out.
In actuality, when he makes his way up to the door and knocks, a woman he’s never seen before opens the door and frowns at him. “Hello,” she says. “Are you asking for someone?”
“Is Jeno in?” Renjun asks. “I’m Renjun, I’m—his stats tutor.” The house looked exactly as it had in seventh grade; the same carpeting, the same layout. But as he stepped inside he noticed some things were different—the ornaments on the windowsill, the photos hanging up, the pattern of the wallpaper. It felt uncomfortable—like meeting an old friend for the first time in years and finding out they’re a foot taller without watching them grow to that height.
“Ah, yes, he never said someone would be coming around asking for him but he never says anything to me,” the woman said. “I’m Soonkyu, I’m Jeno’s—stepmother.”
Oh, Renjun thinks. That explains a lot. He hadn’t known that something had happened to Jeno’s mother, but, then again, he hadn’t really been Jeno’s friend for the past few years either. “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he says, and nods towards the stairs. “Should I—”
“Yeah, Jeno’s is the second door on the landing,” Soonkyu tells him with a smile—as if Renjun already didn’t know that, as if his muscle memory hadn’t ingrained this house into his bones.
When he reaches the top of the stairs, he raps on Jeno’s door frame. He’s sitting in his room in front of a very messy desk, scrolling idly through his phone. “Hi,” he says. “Can I come in?”
“Make yourself at home,” Jeno says absently.
Renjun perches himself on the side of Jeno’s bed, something in his subconscious willing him to take up as little space as possible. “I didn’t know you had a stepmother,” he says as Jeno rifles through his papers.
Jeno visibly tenses at that—pausing in his shuffling of papers to turn to Renjun. “It’s—yeah. My mom died a few years back.”
“Oh,” Renjun says. He remembered Jeno’s mom—she’d doted on him, as if he was her own son, giving him the nurture and affection that Renjun had never really gotten from his aunt. “I’m sorry. I—I didn’t know.”
“Nobody does,” Jeno says. “Donghyuck and Mark have never been around here. I—I didn’t tell anyone when it happened because I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me.” He crosses his arms. “I forgot you knew her.”
“When was it?” Renjun asks.
Jeno shrugs. “Middle of seventh grade,” he says, flippantly.
Something re-orders itself in Renjun’s mind—a question he never knew he wanted the answer for just got closed up. Oh, he thinks. Seventh grade was when everything changed—when Jeno had suddenly disappeared into a totally different orbit than Renjun’s—hell, a totally different solar system. Renjun had forgotten about it until this year, but he remembered being upset at how Jeno didn’t even acknowledge him when he smiled at him in the corridors anymore, let alone talk to him when they didn’t have to.
“Ah,” he says. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Jeno waves a hand. “It’s whatever,” he says, passing Renjun a sheet that he recognizes as one of Qian’s homework assignments. “We’re here to do math, right? Not talk about my dead mom. So here’s some math for you.”
And Renjun doesn’t know why he feels betrayed that he didn’t know, and annoyed at Jeno’s changing of the subject. But, he supposes, things would always be weird when it came to Jeno. After all, how were you supposed to navigate the line between total stranger and former childhood friend without it being weird?
“It doesn’t make sense!” Renjun says suddenly, glaring at the textbook as if it had personally wronged him.
Outbursts aren’t uncommon for Renjun. He thinks out loud a lot, especially, Jaemin thinks, when something is especially difficult. But Jaemin feels obligated to stop trying to smoke out of the window and ask, “What’s up?”
Renjun sighs. “I’m tutoring Lee Jeno, right? In stats. And it doesn’t make sense. I’ve tutored people before, and there’s always a point of understanding—a point where they stop understanding, but there’s always some kind of basic level, or a couple things they get right, or whatever—but there’s nothing here to even suggest that he got the answer right out of luck.”
“I don’t get it,” Jaemin says.
“I mean, when you do a multiple choice paper and you’re completely lost, generally you pick up a couple marks out of just being lucky and shading in the right answer. Because you have a one in four chance of getting it right,” Renjun says. “But this? It’s like—it reads like Jeno knows how to do it, and does everything wrong.”
“Murphy’s law,” Jaemin says. “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
“Murphy’s law was formulated to lead to more efficient defensive design practices to account for worst-case scenarios,” Renjun says. “It’s not a life philosophy.”
“Buzzkill,” Jaemin tells him, putting out his cigarette and tossing the butt out of the window. “Has anyone ever told you you’re cute when you do your whole smart person thing?”
Renjun glares at him. “Don’t be like that,” he says. “Anyway, I swear—this doesn’t make sense. It’s like, you’d have to have slept through not only Qian’s lessons on stats but also every other math lesson you’d ever had to have this little knowledge. And Jeno was good at math when we were kids.”
“You knew Jeno as a kid?” Jaemin says. “Damn, this place really is suburban and sleepy. Everyone is childhood friends with everyone.”
Renjun rolls his eyes. “I doubt any place you ever lived in was any better,” he says. “I did know him as a kid. We were pretty close, actually.”
“Damn,” Jaemin repeats. “And now he’s him, and you’re you. One of the three shining same-named stars of this ever-so-esteemed high school.”
“Shut up,” Renjun says. His eyes widen suddenly. “Oh my God, I just remembered something. I don’t know how we all forgot.” Jaemin frowns at him. “When we were in middle school, they made us do this standardized test. It was supposed to tell us our raw ability, and predict what subjects we’d be good at.”
“I’m guessing you got the highest mark in your middle school class?” Jaemin asks.
“No,” Renjun says. “Jeno did.”
Jaemin stares at him blankly. “I sit next to him in world history,” he says. “I always figured he was just, like, a dumbass.”
“He’s not,” Renjun says. “No—he’s not stupid. He just wants to seem like it. Because—”
“Oh my God,” Jaemin says. “It’s because he doesn’t want to be associated with people like you.”
“No it’s not!” Renjun protests. But then his face falls. “You might actually be right. Donghyuck and Mark aren’t the type to string along a third person who could outdo them in anything.” He lowers his voice. “Mark failed fourth grade.”
“Tragic,” Jaemin says. “I always figured he was like the addition to the group, right? Like, he always pretends to be blindly following the other two, but I see things. First day of class, Song told Mark to go see a counselor and I saw him trying to pretend he didn’t find it funny. He’s not subtle.”
“Or maybe our school are just terrible at observing things,” Renjun says idly. “People take other people at face value. Not everyone spends their time looking for things to criticize like you do, Jaemin.”
“You’re right,” Jaemin says. “My observational skills are envied by many. Maybe I’m the one who’s cute when I do my smart person thing.”
Renjun sighs and drums his pen against the table. “I feel bad for him,” he says. “Jeno, I mean.”
“I don’t,” Jaemin says. Renjun frowns at him. “Life is too short to feel bad for affected smart people who think playing dumb is edgy or unique or whatever.” He leans against the wall, eyes shut. “School is hard. And those of us who are actually struggling don’t get any support because people think we’re just trying to be edgy, or that we want to stand out, when it’s humiliating to do badly in school. Someone like Jeno who does badly on purpose will never understand that.”
Jaemin opens his eyes. Renjun’s mouth is slightly parted in shock, his eyebrows halfway up his forehead. “I—” he begins, clearly taken aback, and Jaemin almost feels bad about ranting. (That’s a lie. He does. He feels like he’s broken one of the cardinal rules that keeps their weird semi-friendship from becoming something too close to permanent.) “I can tutor you too, if you want?”
Jaemin laughs. “Renjun, it’s fine,” he says. “I don’t need your help. I just don’t think you should feel sorry for people who can achieve, but choose not to.”
“Maybe,” Renjun says, but Jaemin can tell he doesn’t agree with him. “I think he’s worried, you know? About how people will react to him, about how people will think of him.”
And Jaemin thinks back to two years ago, looking into his file when his social worker wasn’t in the room and reading the notes about the family that had just let him go. Troubled, bad influence on a child, want to let go before baby is born. And he thinks about how that word, troubled, had stuck with him—how it hadn’t applied then, but he’d made it work, he’d made it apply—out of pettiness or fear, he didn’t know. All he remembered was thinking that, if that was what people were going to think of him, he was going to be in control of it.
“Don’t we all?” he says. “Don’t we all care what people think about us?”
“I don’t,” Renjun says. He frowns. “I would have thought you, of all people, wouldn’t either. You always act like you don’t care what people think, like you aim to defy expectation at all cost.”
“Defying expectation doesn’t mean I don’t pay attention to expectation,” Jaemin says quietly. He feels like he’s just been turned inside out under Renjun’s watchful eye, and it’s a disconcerting feeling because Jaemin is normally the one to do that to other people. It’s Jaemin’s signature move, to observe the facts about someone that they refuse to acknowledge themselves—that doesn’t mean Renjun has a right to do it to him.
“I can’t figure you out,” Renjun murmurs quietly, in a tone that suggests he wants to, in a tone that Jaemin doesn’t want to think of the reasoning behind.
“Good,” Jaemin says. “Keep it that way.”