In manner, he was room temperature. Not warm, not cold. It wasn’t like he was totally unapproachable. His smile was learned, but present. His eyes didn’t sparkle with life, but they still crinkled when he laughed and crossed when he was disoriented. He was a master of smalltalk, of turning conversations off himself, of making other people feel like the world revolved around them. He was actually pretty popular for someone who had so many unsolved mysteries and missing pieces.

            In mind, he was a locked door. He protected everything inside himself. But the world was anger, battering his frame with boots and bars and blunt edges. His wood was scarred, and his hinges were bending.

            He still kept himself closed, up until I found his key.

            The day we met – and I mean truly met, met beyond knowing each other’s first name and staring at the same three teachers for hour-long intervals during the day – it was a wet blur of rain and blood. I’d been walking home, cutting through an alleyway shortcut because I had stayed after school too long following one of my various extracurricular clubs, talking to friends until it had gotten too dark for safety, and my parents were going to actually kill me if the sketchy backways didn’t kill me first. I found him hiding out in a dumpster there after he accidentally banged his ripped sneaker against one of the inside walls, causing me to jump and effectively giving himself away. He was cradling his forearm and trying to staunch bleeding from the back of his head that time. He wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. He wouldn’t tell me what to do. He wouldn’t tell me who to call.

            “How can I save you?” I had asked, scooping him up in my young, uncertain arms. They shook a little, but he was shaking worse than I was and bristling even more as my jacket brushed his open wounds. The rain was soaking through my clothes, clogging my eyelashes and dappling my vision. I still somehow managed to see his face and all the sentiments – the joy, the remorse, the fear, the sympathy, the pure capability to feel – that it was missing. He responded in a hoarse voice. It was the first time he’d ever addressed me, just as it was the first time I had ever noticed how damaged drops of water and dim street lamps could make you look.

            “No one wants me saved.”

            That was also the first time I ever noticed how alone Byun Baekhyun really was.

            He wasn’t a childhood friend, or a crush, or even an acquaintance. He had just been Baekhyun, the one in my class with the bad grades and the ADD. When did that change?

            At school, Baekhyun didn’t talk to me. He never mentioned the countless nights before, when I would take him home and sneak him up to my room and press hot washcloths to his wounds – one day, a swollen lip, another, twelve lashes laid perfectly vertical along his back. He always slept curled up on the floor, and by the time I woke up the next morning, he was always gone, window open and a hastily scrawled “thank you” on a half-page torn from a college-ruled, perforated sheet of paper balanced on my pillow. The first few times it happened, he ripped them from wadded paper balls in my trash bin, but at some point, he started carrying his own. I found them one night when I tossed him sweatpants to sleep in and took his jeans, their wispy folds crisp and neat and crinkling in the pockets. I tried to ignore the dried blood that sometimes leaked through onto them and smudged out the words.

            I never attempted to approach him during school hours. After all, he had his own friends. I could only assume they didn’t know about his late nights by the way they laughed and joked with him, as if he wasn’t broken. I couldn’t risk unveiling his secret, exposing the bruises and cuts he kept under clothes and smiles. So I didn’t. I kept my distance, laughed with my own friends, stuck to my own life.

            But I still watched. There was nothing dangerous about that. I saw everything he couldn’t admit in the blank face he molded into when he thought no one was watching. Taut lips, as if keeping back the flood of thoughts he wanted to say. He didn’t slump. His arms weren’t closed, but they weren’t open, either. He kept them pressed into his desk, perpendicular with his chest, just close enough together to look like they were guards protecting the rest of his body. He only ever responded when he was called on, and when the class shuffled to pack their bags and go their separate ways, he’d blink – once, twice – and then he’d half-smile to himself, as if he’d checked out of reality for a while and was just now returning to its embrace. I could usually tell when his happiness was faked, but those brief expressions as he tucked away his notebooks were always inscrutable. Maybe life hadn’t quite settled back into his brain yet. Maybe he hadn’t quite remembered all the things that made him so sad.

            His friends called him a scatterbrain. They when he got questions wrong, when he said “huh?” more than once, and when he got pulled aside after classes for “discussion on his future as a pupil.” A lot of people thought he was a lost cause, especially when he laughed it off afterwards and joked about the teachers all being out to get him.

            I used to hide behind the walls and watch the classrooms he was forced into for conferences, hoping against hope that the adults would notice something was wrong and fix it. The way they shook their heads when he departed as if he were the biggest nuisance on the face of the planet eventually made me decide they never would.

            So I took it upon myself to do what his friends, his peers, and his guardians couldn’t do: I watched. I noticed. I saw. It must have worked, to some degree, because no matter how distant we were at school, when he was hurt, he always came to the same dumpster. He always peered at me with dead eyes, and he always leaned on me during the walk home. And no matter what I had to do, no matter where I had to go, I always walked through the same alley at the same time every dusk and checked for him. Just to make sure.

            I don’t know how grateful he might have been. I don’t know if I ever will know that. But when we walked the streets those nights together, my arm steadying his failing posture and his own slung around my sturdier shoulders, I thought the stars must have gotten a little brighter, because his eyes seemed to be catching more and more of their light each time.

            Sometimes, I tried asking him questions. Nothing too complicated or personal. Never about how he got his beatings. The two times I tried to ask about that, he completely shut down, took my washcloth with hooded eyes, and locked himself in the bathroom to finish cleaning. He ignored my knocks, my feeble apologies, my attempts to erase the inquiries with smalltalk. He ignored me so hard that I’d slink back to bed, head in hands, only to listen to and resent the sound of my own breathing.

            He didn’t spend the night those times – I heard him creep out afterwards, saw him wandering down my street through my window. I couldn’t explain the acute alarm clawing at my chest, the apprehension that caused me to press my fingers to the glass and will him to come back. The clench of cold fingers around my heart the moment he disappeared from sight was too much, and as much as the inability to sleep afterwards , the inability to pacify my racing pulse was far more concerning.

            I stuck with simpler questions after that. Enough to make him talk, but not enough to make him leave. How’s your English project going? Did you hear about Zitao burning himself with chemicals in that one lab? I have banana milk downstairs – do you want some?

            I crafted it into an art: How Much Can I Learn About Baekhyun Without Setting Him Off? It turned out that there were a lot of things he was guarded about, even things that seemed ridiculous. It took twenty minutes of fiddling with phrasing to get him to admit to liking bananas, and that was the most I got out of him all week. One time, I talked him into admitting he liked solitaire, so I bought him a pack of cards to waste time with when I had to convince my parents I was still alive and willing to socialize. Another time, I told him my favorite nursery rhyme was Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, and he told me his was Baa Baa Black Sheep, and we argued about which song was better for a good fifteen minutes before remembering they both had the same tune. I even got him to tell me his report card grades one time (I cringed internally, but externally, I cheered him on for his many D’s because hey, it’s still not failing). All the things I managed to wrench from him seemed mundane and useless in the long run, but I didn’t mind. Everything about him was interesting to me.

            His answers were always polite, if not lackluster. If he was uncomfortable with a subject, he’d skirt around it delicately, trusting me not to push the issue. He put a lot of trust in me, actually. A lot more than my burning curiosity warranted. I kept my more blazing questions to myself, mostly to keep him unscathed in his manually-crafted personal bubble. Sometimes, even with safe topics like math problems and his twenty million untamable cowlicks, he was too tired to answer, though, so I went quiet. It was never awkward, but it was never quite relaxed, either. It was a lukewarm kind of quiet. Not warm, not cold. He was always in between.

            I wondered if that was his problem – being too caught in the middle of everything to really understand what it meant to be on one side or the other.

           One night, after an exceptionally horrendous rendezvous with what looked like a battle axe merged with a butter knife, he fell asleep early, unintentionally, right in the middle of my bed. His arms and legs were stretched out like a star, and even with his short stature, he still managed to take up the entirety of it. I sat at the edge for a while, watching him breathe lightly, an almost tranquil look smoothing out the worried features in his face, cheeks dusted lightly with the beginnings of a bruise. I wanted nothing more than to curl up next to him, press my forehead in between his shoulderblades, and stay there, feeling the rise and fall of his spine against my temples.

            Instead, I rolled him over onto one sector of the bed. He protested sleepily at first, pushing back at my prodding hands. “No, stop, I like pillows,” he’d mumbled (I promptly told him he made no sense and covered his mouth with my hand). With some work, he was on his side, facing the window, and back to snoring quietly into his half of the pillow. I petted the back of his head, surveying how the bed seemed to cave in in just the right places to support his weight. It was as if he belonged on that section, in that exact position. As if the mattress had been tailored to support the exact places where his limbs sunk in, to curve around them and coddle them and conform to them and keep them level with his body. It was as if he fit there.

            I couldn’t help imagining a future where he did. One where I woke up to him instead of a ripped leaflet fluttering in the breeze of an open window.

            I don’t know at what point I started wanting him to stay. I can’t pinpoint when I started playing with his hair while he slept, or when I began to hold his hand when the cleaning stung and he snarled his nose. Maybe it was when he asked me to buy Tigger band-aids instead of Minnie ones for the next time, or when he hooted “CATS GO MEOW” under his breath once when I let my kitten pad in and stare at him with refreshingly unquestioning eyes. Maybe it was the time I fell carrying him up the stairs and got rugburn, and he insisted on treating me, too, even as he was stuffing toilet paper up his nose to stop a waterfall of blood. Maybe it was the time he wrote “P.S. – you drooled on my hand while you slept” on one of his thank-you notes. Maybe it was the first time I found him curled up in trash, so far gone in physical and mental injury that he couldn’t even summon any concern for himself, and maybe it was simultaneously the last time I found him, when he smiled so wide at the sight of my face that I thought his bloodied cheeks would shatter. Maybe it was all the times, all at once, not a stream of occurrences but one gigantic one that led to an inevitable, inescapable, incomprehensible infatuation. Maybe I had always wanted him to, and I just never had the chance to see it until I watched him regularly pass out on my rug, his face pressed so hard into it that the stripes left indentions on his cheeks.

            The pain of the captivation started slowly. A few sniffles after he fell asleep on the floor. A handful of thoughts about things I usually kept smothered within myself so I wouldn’t ask, things like what has he done to deserve this, what happened to cause this, what can I do to stop this. Things that I couldn’t answer, things that I couldn’t control. Things that he wouldn’t address.

            It became a nightly thing after a while, a tidal wave of uncontrollable emotions that toppled onto the shores of my consciousness every time he lost grip on his. Every time I put him to bed, I cried. I cried for all the tears he still hadn’t shed. I cried for every scratch, every swollen patch of skin, every light lost from his eyes and spring lost from his step. I cried because I didn’t understand, and I cried because he didn’t want me to.

            Mostly, though, I cried because as long as he was losing pieces, I was, too.

            Have you ever seen a sun rise, only to have it suddenly fill with the color black, like a pool of stagnant water, and cease to shine?

            I haven’t, really, but then again, I have. I think most people call it a solar eclipse. I called it Baekhyun and his little flip phone.

            I used to dread seeing Baekhyun check his phone. When he was with his friends, passing me in the hallway, stealthily checking its little dated analogue clock in the screen corner during class, there would be times when he would look down at that little hunk of plastic and turn to stone. Even his fake happiness managed to waver, and his face would fill with the blankness that I’d deduced was his resort emotional barrier, a blankness so potent I could practically feel it condensing into a wall from my spot in the back. He would stare, deep in thought, as if whatever was on the screen were a question of some sort that he could never answer. I always wondered if he would text back. His fingers lingered on the keys, ghosting over a message that he was unable to send. Then, he would tuck it away, struggle to cover himself back up in a blanket of the Baekhyun everyone else knew, aware of how impossible that was when the façade was already dead.

            The days when he checked his phone almost unfailingly blended into the nights I found him tucked into his refuge like a wrapped-up child. I would always find his phone in the same general area: somewhere on the ground across from his second home with a new scratch marking the blow it took when it was chucked at the wall and the same message from a number without a name: Can’t wait ‘til next time. I always stashed the phone away in my back pocket and returned it when he was clean and nearly, deceptively whole. He’d nod and hide it away somewhere, anywhere where he didn’t have to see it. He hated it. I could tell because it was like him. He could throw it a thousand times, but it wouldn’t break, even if he wanted it to.

            It was because of this that I decided, on those days, that if he couldn’t pretend, neither could I. I stopped pretending to not watch him, stopped faking our established strangerdom. When he looked up while I was staring, I met his eyes instead of averting mine. When we passed each other, I reached out to skim my fingers over his hand. When we left class, I would pause at his desk just long enough to mumble a quiet “Bye, Baekhyun,” before leaving like normal, never looking back. He never acknowledged my efforts where people watched. He didn’t even mention them when we were alone, when he was his most vulnerable, tender wounds under rough washcloths, the only ones my parents had. That was okay. He didn’t have to say anything as long as he knew. I see your everything. You don’t have to hide from me.

            There was a day when I spoke as I handed his phone back to him. I’d bound him with gauze and drowned him in Neosporin, pressed the Tigger band-aids he’d requested to the scratches on his cheeks and brushed out his sweat-tangled hair with an old comb buried under a mass of bobby pins and hairties in my bathroom drawer. He’d sat down softly on my bed, slouching over and inspecting his untouched hands. They looked like the only things on his body that hadn’t been brutally beaten. He had accepted the device with an expressionless face, shoving it underneath his pillow. He had no words to say, so I said some for him. “Why do you always take it back?”

            His only response was a curious look, so I continued. “The phone, I mean. Since you so obviously don’t like it.”

            “Because I need it,” he mused.

            I quieted a moment. “Do your friends ever text you?”

            “Nope.”

            “Why?”

            “I told them my parents won’t pay for it.”

            “Do they call you, then?”

            “If they do, I don’t answer.”

            More silence. Then, “Could I text you?”

            He peered at me. My words seemed to hit no nerves at first. I’m not even sure if he understood them. It must have been so long since someone had asked to communicate with him that he couldn’t make an excuse for. His resort “I can’t” almost fell from him. I saw it hanging there, swinging off his stilled lips, before he withdrew and thought, really thought, about my question. For a second – just a second – he looked precarious. Longing. It was a second of insight, a second where he forgot to hide, and I saw exactly how destitute he was in this life he’d crafted for himself.

            Then, he hardened again, setting his quieted mouth into a hard line.

            “No.”

            He didn’t speak the rest of the night.

            I kept asking him. I tried not to sound like I was pleading, even though I wanted to. He wouldn’t answer, but I felt him wavering in the way the bed would dip under his tense muscles, the way his breathing staggered just a little, the way he’d scratch at his bandaged arm and squirm under my comforter as if it were too hot, but never bothered to remove it. I started asking why. He had no concrete answer, really. He would stare, eyes void of comprehension, mouth half-open as if willing some intelligent, clever, unsuspicious reply to come, but his mind wasn’t having it. So he’d turn away instead, muttering unintelligible syllables under his breath in irritation.

            It was too much after too short a while. I was never good at waiting. After an impatiently asked why and a silence held for too long, I blurted, “Why do you hate it so much?”

            He flinched. I’d never really seen him do that before. He’d always been so slow to react, so unresponsive to everything, that seeing him twitch away from me so quickly threw me off-guard. “I don’t have to have a reason to do or not do anything,” he snapped. I held his glare long enough to feel the heat waves radiating from his dilated pupils. The moon pooled inside them, lighting them up with fraudulent fire, and I thought that maybe, just maybe, behind all that misplaced anger was a plea, too, for something he would never willingly let himself have.

            I calmly pushed myself up with my elbow, looking down at his defiant countenance. Then, I leaned over him, reaching my arm across his chest.

            He froze. His squinted eyes widened, and I felt his lungs stop mid-breath. I slipped my hand beneath his pillow, rummaging around before extracting his cell phone from the cushioned spot he’d placed it earlier. I took advantage of his still-thawing muscles and hopped off the bed, grabbing my own phone off my butterfly-carpeted floor and booking it to the bathroom. He was on the door two seconds after I’d closed and locked it, hissing from the other side of the frame.

            “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

            “I don’t have to have a reason to do or not do anything.”

            I could feel his concentrated agitation balling itself up into fists outside, but he didn’t dare pound on the door with my parents down the hall and asleep. “Just give me back my phone.”

            “In a sec,” I said, flipping the topic of our discussion open. It was silver and black, and his background was of a broken chain link covered in cracks and shadows. I scrolled through the blocky text instructions of his menu and cursed it for being so ancient. I finally found his contacts and thumbed through them, breathing slowly, until I reached one labeled “My Phone.”

            Two minutes later, I opened the door. At some point in between, amidst breathy solicitations and annoyed demands, he must have pressed his back against it and slid down in despair because he immediately spilled through the entryway, banging his head on the floor and letting a pocket of air escape from his throat in a quiet whoosh. He sat up hurriedly, rubbing the back of his head and shooting me a look that was so comically angry that it almost made me want to laugh.

            He held his palm out flat, wiggling his fingers expectantly. I smiled sweetly in response and took his open hand in mine, bowing slightly. A flustered look blossomed on his face for a moment before he regained the sense to shake me off of him and extend his arm again. “That’s not what I wanted,” he huffed.

            I pressed the cell phone into his hand and murmured, “I didn’t look through your messages or anything, you know.”

            He closed his fingers around my hand and tethered me there, squeezing the phone between both our palms. “You wouldn’t have found anything, anyways. I deleted them all.”

            “Cool. Wanna let me go, then?”

            “No.” He held my gaze, searching for some hint in my eyes. Finding none, he slowly released me. “Why, then?”

            I shrugged. “I don’t need a reason to—”

            “Okay, okay,” he interrupted in exasperation. “I get it. No more sassing you out.”

            That was enough to make me smile. I playfully hit his shoulder as I shuffled past, discreetly shoving my phone into my back pocket. “You’d better, son.”

            It was a while after that before he got another text from the mysterious source of all his pain. When I saw his face change this time, though, I didn’t feel the same despondency I usually felt. For once, I was in power, somehow, some way.

            I immediately took out my phone, typed out a little message underneath my desk, and hit send.

            The confusion on his face when he peeked down at his own was unparalleled by anything I’d ever seen. The blatant lack of perception. The actual, tangible idiocy. He didn’t even think to look back at me that time, still entrapped in puzzlement over his anonymous suitor. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyways. My nose was already back in my textbook, as if it had always been there.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

            There are so many flowers outside today. Spring is so nice. Don’t you think?

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

            Maybe it was because by the next time, he had thought about it, but when he received his monthly threat and I sent my own message in response, he turned directly to face me. He was too late. I was already raising my hand to answer the teacher’s question.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

            It smells like honey and lavender in here. I think Mr. Kim uses girl hand lotion.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

            The third time, when he looked down at his phone and saw his usual message, his face didn’t stiffen like usual. He just remained staring at his phone. He’s waiting, I realized, as I tugged my phone out to send him what he was anticipating.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

            Isn’t it sunny out today?

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

            I watched him slowly type out a text. I was suddenly aware that I had never seen him actually do that before. He was always the receiver, but he never replied to any of the ones he got. I figured I knew why, but it made it no less strange to watch him struggle with the old-school keypad, tongue stuck out in consternation. A few minutes later, he finally looked satisfied with whatever it was that he had written. He pressed a button and flipped his phone shut. It snapped, and he nervously looked up at the front of the classroom, expecting the teacher to have heard. Luckily, he was totally oblivious.

            My phone went off a few seconds later.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

            It’s never sunny out at night.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

            So many Negative Nancy vibes with that text.

            I quickly pounded out another one with sure fingers and hit send.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

            Well, that’s because it’s moony at night.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

            The sun emerged from behind the shadow, as brilliant as ever. That was the first time I’d seen an eclipse end. That was the first time I’d seen Byun Baekhyun really, truly smile.

            “Baek, you shouldn’t have!”

            It was a girl’s voice. I found myself wishing I didn’t know him, wishing this wasn’t Christmastime, wishing this was the class where he sat behind me so I wouldn’t have to see him smiling sheepishly and scratching his neck as our mutual classmate squealed and shook her little gold box above her head. The necklace within it jostled, the pendant catching the reflection of the fluorescent overhead lights. A small, perfect conch shell, lined along its ridges with pink metallic glitter. It looked like something you could easily buy for cheap at a gas station or a surf shop, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that she was getting it, a girl I hadn’t even known he knew, a girl who didn’t notice him wince in pain when she bear-hugged him afterward or take the time to look at him, really look at his young face, and see that he was wearing far too much concealer for a boy and far too many years for an adolescent. The point was that he didn’t care about her – not really. The point was that she didn’t actually care about him, either. The point was that I did, and I still had nothing to show for it.

            I knew I shouldn’t expect it, just for housing him of my own free will. I knew I was being unjustifiably bitter. That, unfortunately, was not enough to convince myself of the invalidity of my jealousy. Not even close.

            She wasn’t even the first to receive something, honestly. He’d come to school with a backpack loaded full of Christmas presents, all wrapped in Pooh Bear-patterned paper and tied with majestic store-bought bows. He smiled as he generously passed them out, looking pleased when people thanked him. At some point, someone gave him a Santa hat and called him the Ghost of Christmas Presents, plural. His smile faltered a little at being dubbed an apparition, but then it revitalized ten times stronger, and he laughed too loudly at the pun.

            If he was the ghosts, then I was Ebenezer Scrooge, grumbling about the holidays and existing in perpetual loneliness. The only difference was that I was waiting for him to come around to me, as if there were turns to be taken. In the story, the spirits only appear to one crabby old pennypincher, but in real life, I guess it would make sense that they’d have others to tend to, too. That didn’t help me earn any patience, in any case. I just wished he’d get around to me a little quicker.

            Or that he’d get around to me at all. As the day stretched on, it seemed less and less likely. Okay, sure, we acted like sheer acquaintances at school. When someone said “Baekhyun,” I’d respond with, “Who?” And when people pointed me out to him, he’d nod or shrug or listlessly turn away, never really choosing to comment. But you’d think, even if it had to be in secret, he’d find some way to sneak me something. He could be plenty covert, unnervingly quiet – I had many an open window pouring in cold morning air to vouch for that.

            There came nothing. The entire day passed, slowly turned to night, and eventually melted into the next day, then the next, then the next. At some point, I stopped expecting something to show up on my windowsill, and I finally managed to quit compulsively checking my locker. Nothing’s coming. Get over yourself.

            Even then, in the of my disappointment and jealousy and self-deprecation, I never stopped checking his dumpster. That was one thing that I could never bring myself to do.

            It wasn’t until a week later, after the last day of school had come and gone, that I found him there. He was beaten so badly that he didn’t even bother to look up when I shifted the lid and peeked down at him. I tugged on his sleeve tiredly. He didn’t move.

            “Get out. I can’t carry you.”

            No response.

            “Seriously. My parents are going to rip my throat out if I’m not home within the next ten minutes.”

            I thought I saw his finger twitch – the only sign that he was even alive at all. His eyes, locked on a long scratch along the dumpster’s inner wall, definitely weren’t telling that story.

            I shook him by the shoulder, a little harder this time. He didn’t act like it hurt or like he wanted me to stop, which were the only two responses I’d been prepared to get. I frowned. Baekhyun had been like this before, yes, but he always roused at my call and allowed himself to be half-helped, half-dragged to my house. Never before had he looked so lifeless, so completely void of movement. It was almost as if he really were dead, and for a minute, my heart caught in my throat, my fingers froze tangled in his jacket sleeves, my legs turned rubbery, my soles almost lost traction with the ground—

            “Something really important got taken from me.”

            I stopped mid-panic at the sound of his voice. “What?”

            “Lost,” he corrected quickly. “It got lost.”

            I quieted a moment. “What was it?”

            He shrugged, and the shrug seemed to inspire him to move the other parts of his body, because suddenly he was sitting up and dusting himself off. “I just…needed it. For something.”

            “What was it?” I repeated, giving him my hand as he delicately stepped out of his hole, wincing as his feet touched the ground. Good. Even if it was pain, at least his feeling was returning. That was a promising sign.

            What was decidedly not a promising sign was his heavy, reluctant silence in response to my question. Another secret in the midst of a swell of mysteries, I supposed. I didn’t bother asking again, knowing it would only serve to thicken the wall of air already ballooning between us. I tugged his arm over my shoulder instead and steadied him, asserting myself as his support the way I felt I would always have to, no matter how many things he kept quiet about, no matter how many things he didn’t give me.

            Even if I could do nothing else for him, even if I was never worthy of his secrets or his gifts or his affection, I always had this. I was the only one who could do this.

            “I want to go to college one day.”

            I don’t know why I said it. I don’t even know why I thought it. I glanced sidelong at Baekhyun, who had raised his head a couple inches off the floor to acknowledge he’d heard me. His face flashed panic for a split second, and he quickly fell back onto the floor to conceal it.

            “A lot of people do,” he replied coolly. It was fake, just like every other part of him, it seemed. “So?”

            “So college is really far away from here.”

            He drummed his fingers impatiently on the floor. “…Yeah.”

            I stared at the ceiling. Five minutes passed. Ten.

            “Do you really want to leave?” he finally murmured.

            “I want to go to college. That doesn’t mean I want to leave.”

            “Are you sure?”

            I thought for a moment. “There’s at least one reason why I wouldn’t want to.”

            He scoffed. “Is one reason really enough?”

            I didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely.”

            He fell asleep shortly after, but when I woke up and checked my note in the morning, I found a little more written than usual.

            Thank you.

            P.S. I don’t want you to leave, either.

            It’d been a while since he’d last been here. Months without hitches. No late nights out, no refugees bleeding out on my bedroom floor. No laundry stained red to sneak into the washing machines, no depletions of my bandage stash in the closet. No half-sheets of paper scribbled on in purple Sharpie pens, weighed down on my pillow with pennies raided from my bedside drawers. Sometimes, it felt strange going home without him, to stay up nights knowing he was somewhere else. Sometimes, it was lonely.

            I saw Valentine’s Day coming, but I couldn’t find it in me to care too much. It wasn’t like I could execute any of the grandiose gestures that popped in and out of my head. I couldn’t pelt him with chocolate pieces or drop a giant teddy bear on his desk, like normal couples. I couldn’t even stop in front of him and wish him a happy Valentine’s Day without it looking weird, without him shifting uneasily and glancing away, maybe coughing for added effect, just to hammer the nail in my heart a little deeper. I couldn’t expect anything, either, considering how successful Christmas had been. No bouquets of flowers hidden in my locker or notes of longing slipped into my desk, no flamboyant announcement of our engagement to the class. I couldn’t even bring myself to count on a card, a whisper under the breath, a simple “thank you.”

            So the day came, and so I consequently ignored it, tried not to wonder about it, or imagine things, or, God forbid, hope. I avoided him all day at school, physically and mentally, not allowing myself to watch him like usual or let his every move consume my thoughts as they would every other day. I wouldn’t let my mind linger too long on what he was doing, what he was wearing, who he was talking to, when he was faking versus acting deplorably real. (Not thinking about him was actually impossible.)

            I noticed him that day only in my peripherals – when he lingered by my desk as he was leaving one class, when his footsteps fumbled as we hunched past each other in the cafeteria. I didn’t even look up, didn’t let myself stop to think of the way my head was pounding with the sound of my pulse.

            When the day ended, I wasn’t sure what to do. I had a routine: locker, friends, Baekhyun-watching. I’d always stay until he left, stay even longer than that, stay until dusk fell, even when I had no reason to. I’d hide out by the basketball courts, shivering as it got darker and pulling my light jackets tighter around my torso for the same amount of time every day, right up until the street lamps came on and the sun went off. Then, I’d set off, and some days I’d be rewarded with a boy wrapped in garbage, although most would only find me cats scavenging through the trashbags for scraps.

            Today was strange, though. I felt so out of order, so untraditional, so strangely mundane that it almost seemed like I could just go home like every other normal kid. I could walk back while the sun was still shining, greet my parents with a story about my day that wasn’t half-fabricated, go to sleep in my own bed, alone, like other kids my age, and wake up without staring out the window, wondering what it was like for him every time he jumped. I could like other boys, boys who snorted ketchup up their noses or boys who wore flatbilled hats and rapped on buses or boys who liked socks with sandals and watched the cheerleaders instead of the games. I could be a highschooler, a legitimate highschooler, with her mind in her studies and her eyes on scholarships, college, careers, families.

            I could be ordinary. I could feel the possibility tingling underneath my fingertips.

            Then, I caught a glance of him by his locker, back turned to me. I saw his tense muscles, the way his fingers flexed around his books, the way his mask was smiling, but the rest of his body screamed dejection. I remembered that I was the only one who could see this, the only one who realized just how deep his distress ran, and I knew that abandoning him now would be the most selfish thing I could ever do.

            I camped out in the basketball courts again.

            Because even on sappy days like today when it was better to have no one at all than him, I couldn’t erase him from my thoughts.

            Because I couldn’t not think of his bruised face, curled up in trash and blanketed with sadness so broken, it looked more like death than sadness.

            That’s how he knew to find me, I guess. He knew I’d come because I always did, because I hadn’t really given him a reason why I wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, or couldn’t. When I rounded the corner into the familiar shortcut, he was there, leaned against the dumpster instead of trapped inside it. He was upright, unharmed, busying his fingers with twirling some object I couldn’t make out in the faltering streetlights directly outside the alleyway. I stopped in uncertainty, grabbing my backpack straps with both hands and rocking back onto my heels.

            He noticed me and quickly tucked his hands to his sides, looking slightly embarrassed. After a moment’s deliberation, he awkwardly waved with the hand that was not clenched tight around a mystery item.

            I waved back, cocking my head. “You look surprisingly healthy,” I managed, which only served to strengthen the practically impervious wall of discomfort towering in the space between us. I’d forgotten our integrated etiquette, probably in consequence of the off-day full of off-moments and off-thoughts. Rule number one: never mention the injuries. Even if he’s ripped open and bleeding from the eyes, always pretend he’s just a sleepy child who needs to be carried to bed.

            “I’m okay,” he hurriedly answered. “I just wanted to give you something, but you were kind of distant at school today, so…”

            I thought I heard an explosion, a train crashing, and a tornado hitting the ground all at once. It turns out it was actually my heart thundering in my ears.

            “Okay.” It was all I could say.

            He seemed taken aback by my abrupt answer, but he responded bodily nonetheless. He pushed himself off the dumpster (nearly toppling at the change of gravity), took a step forward (managing to accidentally step into a discarded takeout box full of teriyaki sauce), and sheepishly held out his fisted hand (fumbling the object as he tried to cede it to me and almost dropping it). I daintily removed it from him, making sure our hands didn’t touch, for his benefit and mine. I studied the little token, inhaling deeply as I held it up to the light pouring in behind me.

            It was a shell on a pendant, hung from a shimmering strand of silver. It almost looked like the one that he had gotten that girl months ago, except that one had been a silly store-bought conch on a rope. This one had been found. You could see it in its glossy finish, polished by years of being rolled by the sea, and its almost perfectly circular shape, save for a few miniscule bumps and a chip on the side where it curved inward. It had one long, natural brown stripe stretching diagonally along the middle against a backdrop of cream, and even though it didn’t have the pink glitter glued to its surface, it sparkled in its own right, sparkled because of the way my breath caught as I turned it around and around in my hands, sparkled because of how he was looking at it, looking at me looking at it, with the shyest of smiles plastered on his face.

            “Is this…is this really for me?” I asked, still it in awe.

            He shrugged in response, toeing at his to-go-box-turned-shoe. “If you want it.” He paused, and I thought I saw him change colors, red brushing his cheeks like a doting mother. “It’s a late Christmas gift. A really, really late one. Just in case you didn’t know that, or thought something else, or something.”

            I peered up to see him fiddling with his hood and looking determinedly up at the cloudless sky, and I didn’t believe him for a second. “Obviously. It wouldn’t be a proper Valentine’s gift unless it was heart shaped and made of chocolate or glitter glue.”

            I could say it was a trick of poor lighting, but I like to think his shade darkened even more. “Late Christmas,” he repeated again, his voice growing smaller.

            I tried holding his eyes, but he broke the contact too quickly, turning back to the sky. I twisted the necklace between my thumbs. “Why was it so late?”

            His face softened. “Because I had to find it.”

            I thought back to the last time I found him, here, hurt, lifeless and torn up, missing some inextricable piece of him, something important, something he needed, and I finally understood what he had lost. All the days I’d spent brooding and bitter suddenly seemed ridiculous beneath the astounding weight of implications in the imperfections of this pendant, luminescent against my dirty palms smudged with dust from the basketball courts. I held it up one more time, trying to bite back the dense grin swimming up to my face. Then, I unbuckled it, tucked it around my neck, and clasped it there. It fit just below my collarbones, and there seemed no more appropriate place for it to rest.

            “It’s perfect.”

            And as much as the necklace really was perfect, I found the words less about the perfect little shell hooked around my throat than the perfect little shell of a human being scuffing his shoes on the concrete across from me – the shell that seemed more and more full every day.

            “It’s nothing,” he mused. “Just something I found a long, long time ago.”

            “And by that, you mean ‘something perfect.’”

            He smiled then. It wasn’t fake, and that made all the difference in the world. “To you. Which…makes it perfect for you, too.” He bit his lip. “Thank you. You know. For always hanging around.”

            A voice in the back of my head reminded me of the conviction I’d had to walk out of his life earlier that day. The only thing I could do to keep from tearing my own hair out in response was to throw my arms around something else, so I closed the gap between me and Baekhyun and did just that. I breathed in his scent, imprinted it in my mind’s eye, and as he enclosed me in his arms, I could almost imagine us staying there forever. I closed my eyes, leaned into him, and dropped my voice to a whisper.

            “No, Baekhyun. Thank you.”

            I have a sweatshirt with Eeyore on it. I wear it every night when I go to sleep nowadays – it says, “Rainy days are a time for reflection.” I was dressed in that one of the only times he talked to me within the confines of school.

            “Nice sweatshirt!” he’d chirped in passing, waving a friendly hand as his friends trailed behind him and stared at me in the most unintentionally unsubtle way ever. I nodded in response, pulling on my sleeves and offering him a smile hidden behind them. That was it. That was the extent of our interaction. It was so short, so sweet, that, when I wore the sweatshirt other days and admired its ill-fitted form, baggy and yet somehow snugly fitted around my waist and wrists, I almost thought I might have made it up.

            But then, there was that day, the one where I came to school crying because my parents had fought for some reason or another and my dad, in his emotional hurricane, had blindly run over one of my kittens. I’d dabbed my eyes and powdered my raw cheeks with cover-up before class, but I know now that you can never hide sadness from sadness. He saw me as I shuffled into our first class, sniffling quietly and hiding half my face behind my jacket sleeve, and although he didn’t approach me or say anything, his posture changed. His arms opened a little wider, exposing more of his sweatered chest, and he chose to meet my eyes for once. Anyone who could have chanced to see this interaction would have said he was giving me his signature half-aware stare. I recognized concern where the emptiness would have normally been instead.

            The next class, he wasn’t there. When asked, his friends shrugged nonchalantly. “We’re not his keeper,” one had joked, the others nodding in unison.

            That’s right. You’re not. Because I am.

            I spent the entire class period turning around to check the clock in the back of the classroom, so frequently that my teacher stopped class to ask me to cut it out (I didn’t). Ten minutes late. Twenty. Half the class was over, and he still hadn’t showed. He’d been there just before – how could I have missed him leaving? Did he ditch of his own free will or was he carried out? Were they getting braver, kidnapping him from school now, too?

            I didn’t know how to react. The day had been going too badly already for this to happen. I thought about skipping my next class to look for him, but I wasn’t sure what I would do if I did. My fists were bony at best, powerless at worst, and even though my backpack was filled with the kind of heavy books you could crush heads with, I doubted I could swing it hard enough to do any lasting damage. I’ll just go to the dumpster early today. He’ll be fine. Even if he isn’t. Even if he never will be.

            It was a fortunate thing that I’d stayed because upon walking into my last class of the day, I immediately noticed him, sitting in his normal spot as if he’d never disappeared and laughing jovially with his friends, who’d surrounded him in a curious semi-circle and tsked at him for playing hooky.

            The next thing I noticed was a giant plush Eeyore sitting on my desk in front of his, a giant red ribbon around his collar and a note pinned onto his removable tail.

            I walked up shyly, inspecting it without touching, before hesitantly running my fingers over his silky manufactured fur. One of Baekhyun’s friends turned to me suddenly and caught me in mid-gasp. He gestured to the gift and then to my awestruck face, snorting.

            “Do you have a secret admirer?” he grinned, elbowing another boy next to him.

            I braved a look at Baekhyun, but he wasn’t paying attention – or, rather, he was trying not to make it obvious that he actually was. He was making a face at someone else, puffing out his cheeks and crossing his eyes, but the tips of his ears, poking out from tufts of hair on either side of his head, were Valentine pink. I smiled to myself before pulling Eeyore to my chest and binding him tightly with both arms.

            “Nah. But if I did, he’d be a real angel.”

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *         

            His note was as short and sweet as his compliment.

            Eeyore loses a piece of himself every day. And every day, he looks for it so hard that he finds it again. You’re sort of the same. It’s my favorite thing about you.

            The last day of our beginnings was in the springtime, when the world was supposed to be at its peak of radiance but somehow wasn’t there yet. There was a film over everything I saw, like smudged glasses. I felt the air around me gradually warming up, hugging my body with tendrils of sun and willing my heart to heat up, too, but unable to reach it past my stony bones, my worry-tight muscles, my prickling skin. Something was wrong that spring. Something was wrong with how the flowers peeled back like worn band-aids, and he only looked past them, into the woods, where nothing but shrubs grew. I wanted to pick him a dozen of the most beautiful ones I could find, but each time I’d start, I’d notice how the flowers seemed less attractive after they’d been cut. They more resembled weapons, their petals curling outward in sharp edges, the stems in straight lines that looked like they could puncture any heart. Every time I picked a dandelion, I pictured him blowing it out like a fuse and turning away. This Baekhyun never made silly wishes on such ugly weeds. But when I picked sunflowers instead, I saw him saying it wasn’t tall enough, and sunflowers are supposed to be tall, aren’t they, and how could you cut a sunflower so short, knowing it was meant to be so tall?

            None of these Baekhyuns were the real one, of course. But I’d always been one to fret. It went like this for every flower I chose.

            In any case, spring couldn’t be pretty to me – not when he didn’t see it. Not until I saw flowers in his eyes, blooming in the sunshine glinting off his smile – the real one, not the other.

            I made a decision, and by that, I mean my body decided the best idea was to text him some indirect command while my mind was still processing the pros and cons. I only realized when my phone was in my hands, shining cheerily as it displayed the message my vagabond thumbs had written.

            For the sake of my sanity, meet me in the basketball courts today.

            The response was a bit choppy, with some strange phrasing and errant capitalization. It certainly looked like something a technologically-challenged person would write, and I snickered at the thought.

            I Cant. Am busy bad Ideal to go now

            A second message vibrated my phone a second later.

            I swear Im not dumb Stupid flip phone key board

            And then a third.

            Autocorrect

            I waited to see if he’d try again. Apparently, he’d given up on technogadgets (dang 21^st century), so I typed up my reply.

            Bad excuses are bad. Meet me or I’m giving Eeyore a Barbie makeover and marrying him to my dog.

            No reply. I decided not to press it. I trusted that he would make whatever decision he thought was best, so I paid attention in class, took studious notes, and tried not to notice the faraway look he was wearing, cheek in hand and eyes turned toward the window facing the basketball courts.

            I found him out there two hours later, after the last bell had echoed proudly through the hallways.

            He was shuffling nervously, one hand in his pocket, the other on the one strap of his backpack that he was actually wearing. I called to him.

            “You should get one of those across-the-chest backpacks with one strap, since the other one isn’t getting any use.”

            He turned, startled, before shifting his backpack thoughtfully. “Maybe you should get me one.”

            “Maybe you should give me money first.”

            He giggled. “As if I’ve got any of that.”

            “Job?”

            “If begging on the streets for change counts.”

            He sounded almost serious. I looked at him, and he coughed, offering an awkward smile. “Kidding,” he assured half-heartedly.

            I gestured for him to follow me. He did so curiously, without forgetting to ask the golden question, “Where are we going?”

            “Where aren’t we going?” I singsonged back, leading him across the courts and into the grassy stretch of field adjacent to them.

            “Europe? The bottom of the ocean? Probably not space, either.”

            I snorted. “Jokes on you, smartass. We’re going to the moon.”

            “My dreams, realized!”

            “And here we are!” I exclaimed with a flourish of my arms. I gave him jazz hands. He responded with a dumbfounded look.

            “We’re literally, like, ten feet away from the courts.”

            “No. We’re on the moon.”

            “There’s no mooncheese.”

            “Have I squished your childhood realities yet?” I crouched down, weaving a finger through feathery strands of grass. I lowered my voice. “This is prettier, anyways.”

            He pursed his lips, peering down at the vegetation and then up at the sky, as if somehow comparing the two. “I never thought grass was all that pretty.”

            I balked at him, rolling my eyes. “Sure it is!” I plucked a blade and held it to his nose, tickling it with a grin. “This grass is where all the spring flowers will grow out of.”

            “Flowers don’t grow out of grass. They grow out of dirt.”

            “Irrelevant details.” I pointed to a patch of dandelions, shooting up like a plant stalk and striding forward. “Look, there’s some already sprouting!”

            He hurried after me, but just as I stopped to admire them, I spotted a daisy and hopped towards it. “There’s more! So many!” And as the daisy raced toward me, a bushel of hand-planted tulips lining a sidewalk caught my eye, and I modified my direction yet again, stringing him along like a hook on a fishing line. I darted after a grove of clovers next, but this time, I threw myself down into it and breathed in. It smelled like leaves, like fresh water, like stirred dirt and flower petals that had fallen from nearby posies. It was one of the loveliest smells to ever exist, and the thought crossed my mind to scoop that pocket of clovers up and stick them in a bottle. I could tie it with a bow and give it to Baekhyun, I thought, and he would understand why it was special if I explained it to him, and then he’d see why spring is beautiful and why the sun is brighter and moods are a little less sad when flower buds open and robins come around.

            Of course, I couldn’t do that. But I felt him hesitantly kneel next to me, touching the ground with unsure fingers, and I thought it was a start.

            I flopped over onto my back and spread my arms out, counting the clouds. One. Two. Three. Do the dumb little puffs count? Eh, four seems fine.

            “I like clouds,” he commented distractedly, matching my eyes and searching the expanse of sky for more. I peeked at him, smiling softly, before turning my face back to the ground.

            “I like springtime,” I answered sagely, closing my eyes. “I like sunshine. And warm air. And flowers that totally grow out of grass.”

            He looked down and around, slowly lowering himself onto his stomach. Somewhere, a phone went off, but neither of us were much concerned.

            “I forget that I like flowers sometimes,” he mused, pressing his chin into the ground and staring levelly at a trefoil blossom. “Then, I see again, and I remember how nice they look in the background.”

            Another sound of a muffled generic ringtone. Another consensual decision to ignore it.

            “Hey, Baekhyun.”

            “Yeah?”

            “What’s your favorite flower?”

            He opened his mouth to answer. I almost saw it written in his eyes – he hadn’t even needed to think about it. It was a solid truth in his head, an opinion he’d developed on his own, over time, that was uniquely his. The kind you feel strongly about, but you don’t really know why. Your favorite color. Your favorite food. Your favorite cartoon. Why is it my favorite? Well, because it’s good, of course.

            He opened his mouth, but instead of words, a ringtone came out of it.

            Frustrated, he held up his finger in a “one moment and I’ll transfer your call” sort of gesture. He rolled over long enough to retrieve his phone from his back pocket, and I admired the way lost shards of grass clung to the back of his t-shirt. They like him. He took a solitary glance at his phone.

            The colors of the world drained much similarly to how his face did in that second between times, and it was almost like watching peace blend into war – because I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that I knew he was about to leave, but I knew it was somewhere in the confines of the second caught in the middle of his ignorance and his understanding. He lit up in all the worst ways, like he’d just caught on fire, and before I knew it, his sneaker-clad feet were on the ground next to my head instead of his body.

            “I’ve got to go.” It was an anxious sort of sentence, and his quick steps reflected as much. I leapt up and bounded after him, grabbing his arm. He spun around so hastily that I almost fell, and I met his eyes in bewilderment. I just then noticed that he was crying. My grip tightened.

            “Baekhyun,” I whispered.

            Something flashed across his face. Panic. Panic, panic, panic. His tears were running full force now, and he looked uncomfortable in my grasp, but he didn’t protest, and I didn’t let go. “I’ve got to go,” he repeated flimsily.

            “Tell me you’re going to be alright,” I pressed, my voice breaking. He didn’t reply. I clenched my teeth together. It felt like I could crack a nut between them. Or a head. “Tell me.”

            He wrenched his arm away from me, then thought better of it, taking my hand in his and squeezing the tips of my fingers. “Meet me at the dumpster tonight. Normal time. If I’m not there, wait for me, just long enough for the sun to go down.”

            Then, he was gone.

            That was the day I didn’t find him in the dumpster. Not because he was fine. Not because he was blowing me off. Not because he was wherever his home was, eating popcorn and watching Pooh’s Heffalump Movie for the thirty-second time. It was because he didn’t make it there.

            I waited until the sun went down, like he told me to. Then, I got restless. Going home wasn’t an option. Waiting wasn’t, either. So I started walking. I walked every alleyway between there and school, and when I got back to the cement block of a building, noting that some of the lights were still on and giving it the appearance of having crude, uneven eyes, I went back.  When hysteria started flooding my system and adrenaline filtered into my brain, I began taking chances. I ventured into places I didn’t recognize. I poked around in areas where (I’m fairly sure) trespassing was punishable by law. I got myself lost several separate times, and I noticed people following my twice before managing to shake them off by wandering along busy roads and brightly lit places. As it got later, I became acutely aware that that would be a significantly less effective strategy, but without him around, proving his livelihood with his working lungs and beating heart, I could care less about the potential future of mine.

            So this is what it feels like to not care. So this is what it’s like to be him.

            I stopped walking near a corner marked by a remarkably dim streetlight. I was knee-deep in despair, and I could feel it beginning to impair my ability to move. My hands were shaking. The wind was whipping my hair into an unflattering bouquet of knots, but I couldn’t be bothered to fix it because there was only one thing that I wanted to fix right then and there.

            A text tone broke the air around me. For a second, I thought I’d imagined it, that my mind was torturing me with some sort of flashback to the last time I’d seen him. A singular, painful shudder wracked my body, even as I realized it was coming from my back pocket.

            I almost dropped my phone with my trembling fingers as I tried to check it. It was from him.

            School

            One word was all I needed.

            I found him collapsed and unconscious a few paces away from where we’d stared at the sky and talked about the spring, in the woods outside our school. His phone was by his still hand, sitting dark and silent. He hadn’t chucked it anywhere this time – probably because he was too busy with not moving. I wondered, were I to boot it up, if it would read the familiar message.

            Can’t wait ‘til next time.

            It was only as I tried and failed to rouse him that it occurred to me that there could only be a limited number of “next times.” As I felt for his pulse, so weak and staggered that it almost wasn’t there, and noticed that his fingers, long, with untrimmed fingernails and soft pads, were gnarled and bent into unnatural shapes, I realized that “next times” were ticking time bombs, finite and bound to eventually expire. I saw his “next times” fizzling out when his eyes rolled back into his head as I peeled back the eyelids, and I was almost certain that, were I to check is phone, there would be no message promising a “next time.” Only a blank, empty carcass of technology, lit up by the background of the chain.

            I tried to fix him, tried with everything I had, but there’s only so much you can do when you’re in the middle of the woods with nothing but your hands and tourniquets made of ripped skirts. I sobbed into his wounds, subconsciously hoping it would heal him, like in the movies, although I knew it wouldn’t.

            I felt liquid running through his shorts. Alarmed, I hurriedly removed them. I dizzied at the sight of his marred legs. There were tally marks. Dozens of them, lining his thighs. Some were white, worn scars. Others were pink and healing. Some were still scabbed over, and one – a long, jagged slash along four other ticks – was brand new and still soaked with blood.

            When I finally decided the only thing I could do was call the paramedics (on his phone – there were no new messages), I held his head in my lap, his smooth cheeks and kissing his damp brows as I told them where we were. I kept nearly blacking out as I took his hands gingerly in mine and noted all the swollen bumps where his fingers were broken in half. To keep myself calm as I waited, I counted his tally marks. Over and over again. Once, I counted 46. Another time, I counted only 42 – I probably missed a few when his breathing went quiet for too long a moment, and my eyes had swum with tears in the midst of my screaming. The consensus of most of my calculations was 45. 45 in total. 45 little, ominous lines.

            And even though I knew they’d find them anyways, I covered up his secret stripes as the ambulance came and stole him away.

            “Hey, can I talk to you?”

            I froze, stunned. It had been weeks since Baekhyun had been hospitalized. Broken fingers, broken toes, broken sternum, broken ribs. Maybe a bit of a broken head. No one really paid mind to the broken spirit. He had almost fully recovered and had finally returned to school, only to be barraged with questions and demands from his friends. He smiled at them. Car accident. I’m fine.

            His ability to lie was scary good.

            Now, he was in front of me, speaking to me, boring into my eyes in the middle of a crowd of classmates. I could almost feel their whispers pounding in my ears – who is she? Why is Baekhyun talking to her? Do they know each other? – but I nodded and followed him anyways, head lowered to avoid their inquisitive stares. We rounded a few corners and stopped in the middle of an empty hallway. Everyone had dispersed into their respective homerooms by then. We were missing class, but I was pretty sure that wouldn’t matter. He regarded me impassively and dropped his voice to a whisper.

            “I can’t come to you anymore.”

            If my stomach was a pond, then my heart was a thrown rock, heavy and solid. It sank right through my body, settled at the bottom, stayed there. Can’t come anymore? My chest was tight with its absence, and I felt like crying, but I was too scared that doing anything would make him leave, would anchor my heart underwater forever. “Why?”

            “Because it’s not safe.” He shifted his backpack and tilted his head. As if it were a normal conversation. As if it were no big deal. “Calling the ambulance last time… That was the worst thing you could have done. They asked too many things. They tried to know too much. I always came to you because you were quiet about it, but it’s over now.”

            I swallowed thickly. It made sense. How could I have ever thought coming to me would be any different for him than the convenience of never having to tell anyone else, if he only told me? How could I have thought I was special to whom nothing about life was special anymore?

            Even with this, I didn’t want him to go. I didn’t want him to hate me for trying to help or to get himself into more trouble without me there on the sidelines to take care of him afterwards. I wanted him to understand, so I tried to speak. “Baekhyun, you were dying—”

            “Then you should have let me.”

            I halted completely. Should have? Let him…die? “I couldn’t. I can’t.”

            “That was the whole point. That night, I was supposed to die. It was my turn.”

            That was when his look of casualty melted. That was when I started trembling because it just occurred to me how full of vitality his eyes were, right then, right there. I couldn’t decide whether to draw him into my arms or back away, and I couldn’t find it in myself to meet his withering glare, even though I really, really wanted to, even though I craved nothing more than to see his face sparked with life. He was clenching one of his fists as if he hurt, and I had a feeling it wasn’t because of his healing body this time. We were talking about his death – him, ceasing to exist, not breathing, not moving – and yet I had never seen him so full and fiery and alive.

            “Why would you want to die?” I whispered, rubbing nervously at my wrists and staring at the string of lockers at our side. He straightened, probably realizing how he’d disquieted me, and tried to compose himself. It didn’t matter by then. When I mustered the courage to look up, I could still see the coals of his eyes smoldering. He quieted for a moment.

            “That doesn’t matter.”

            “It does matter.”

            “Why do you even care?!”

            I recoiled from his raised voice, and he noticed. He looked sorry, but he didn’t say it. He only looked down, pressing a fist into his leg. “I never understood why you did,” he admitted in a murmur. “I never understood why you always came back.”

            Broken, torn, and shattered. Those seemed to be the anthem of Baekhyun’s life. I saw the words written in the curves of his veins, sketched in single strands of hair and bubbling up every time he opened his mouth, caught behind his teeth, in his throat, in his mind. I saw them in the way he held his backpack – half on, half off – and the way he had only one hand curled tight into a white ball. I saw them in the lightlessness of his eyes, and in their concurrent luster, as if wanting to burn bright with his spirit but unsure of whether it was worth it. I saw them in his mismatching shoes, in the droop of his tired face, and in the splints wrapped tight around his fingers that looked more like constrictions than anything. And in that moment, I understood, in ways I wasn’t sure he ever could.

            I braved a step closer to him, using all my focus to stop my limbs from shaking. It was his turn to flinch away, to retreat, to be afraid of me, as if he could see all the new comprehension dawning across my face. I reached slowly and deliberately to take the hand that wasn’t clamped shut. He tensed, but ultimately let me, curiosity winning out over his incertitude.

            “I want you to live,” I said, deadpanning into his face.

            He snorted. “I haven’t been living for a long time now.”

            I looked pointedly at his hand in mine. “You’re living right now.” He didn’t say anything. I cocked my head, trying to peer up at him. “You know why?”

            He only frowned in response. I hesitantly lifted his chin up to look at him. His eyes were a pond, pooling at the corners. The same pond my heart had sank into, I realized. I could almost see its silhouette, somewhere beneath the brown of his irises. He wouldn’t stop shaking his head, biting his lip, mentally begging me not to say it, not to confirm what he already feared. I held his shuddering form with both hands and looked, wholly and meaningfully, into his visage. There was a pause. I wanted him to understand. I wanted him to understand, so I waited until I had gathered exactly the right sentences I wanted to say.

            “Because right now, you are exactly in this moment.”

            A defiant shiver.

            “You’ve always been in between, but right now, you’re not. You see? This anger—V”

            I gestured to his still-balled fist.

            “This…sadness.”

            I ran a finger beside his eye, freeing a few unstable tears.

            “Don’t you get it? They’re feelings. The real kind. Not the kind you put on for school or for your friends or for the world. Not the ones that are masks. The ones that are part of you.”

            I stopped. His shaking had slowed. He was observing me with something new on him this time, some kind of emotion I couldn’t quite place. It was almost disconcerting. I almost wanted to cover it up with my hands, to halt the fluttering of my heart in his little basin-eyes, especially because I could have sworn if I had used any word to describe it, it would have been wonder.

            “Baekhyun. Do you know what feelings are?”

            He didn’t answer me at all this time, but the softening of his features gave away that he already knew. I said it anyways.

            “They’re your will to live.”

            “Can I come over?”

            It was quiet, beneath his breath, almost beneath my hearing. “Why?” I whispered back.

            “You two,” the teacher said sternly. I sensed Baekhyun look up from his seat behind me. I followed suit.

            “It was bad enough that you were half an hour late to class. Don’t make it any worse by disrupting your classmates’ study time.”

            I nodded sheepishly, and the teacher looked back down at her desk, cluttered with papers and staplers and “You’re the best!” plaques from overachieving students. I pretended to study, shuffling through sheets of half-assed notes covered in sketches of giant arrow-pierced hearts and mosaics made of five-point stars. Baekhyun immediately whispered to me again, unabashed. “I just… I want to be okay tonight. I don’t want to hurt.”

            I knew what he meant before he even finished saying it. I knew because it was what I’d always wanted to do for him, what I’d always been too afraid to ask.

            I nodded without another thought about it.

            We didn’t speak for the rest of the day, but at that point, our silence was irrelevant. The entire school knew how we’d unstealthily snuck off together, and it was buzzing with potential reasons – secret lovers, drug deals, the real cause of Baekhyun’s broken everything. I doubted anyone could guess the truth, but I also resigned myself to the fact that in some aspects, they weren’t too far off. Baekhyun didn’t like me, no. He hadn’t confessed. He hardly had enough feelings to cry, and as much as he faked it for everyone who was questioning, he had no room in him for silly, lovestruck smiles. But me? Well, I’d always been a er, and as far as I could tell, for Baekhyun, I always would be. If anyone asked, I’d deny it to the grave, but I held the thought to me, examined it like a goldrusher would inspect potential gold, and knew it was no pyrite.

            As the last bell rang, I watched him with his friends, unsure of whether to approach him or let him nonchalantly follow me home. It was new territory, having people know our connection. I still wasn’t sure of how secretive he wanted to be about it, or of how many bridges he wanted to burn between our then and our now before this day was over.

            When he saw me, though, he immediately excused himself and padded to my side like a puppy. He looked nervous, reserved, apprehensive, grateful, all at once, and I felt an unnerving urge to hug him, as if I could shield him from the world that pained him with my tiny body. Instead, I gestured to the door. “Ready?”

            He took a deep breath and glanced back at his friends, who were still attempting and failing to discreetly observe us. He nodded. He waved. He fake-laughed as one hooted at him to get it and the others piled onto him, trying to shut him up. When he turned back to me, though, he kept the smile, and something about the way he held it, the way he looked almost bashful about it, shuffling his feet and shrugging his bookbag back onto his shoulder, made it feel strangely real.

            I took a chance and ruffled the fringe of hair falling over his eyes, grinning back softly. He didn’t wince. The only thing he managed was a delayed swat at my hand. There was nothing delayed about the subtle stretch of his lips, though.

            “Let’s go, then.”

            When we got to my house, I stationed him outside the fence of my backyard and told him to stay put until further instructions were given. I went inside, greeted my parents as normally as possible, and looked around for some sort of distraction. I was surprised they didn’t detect my offness, how I’d ask questions more than once and respond in short, absent-minded syllables when they inquired about my day. Then again, they’d never been the most observant people around. They never knew about my unrequited love for a boy in trouble, after all. Not until the end, anyway.

            It was no plot of my own that got Baekhyun inside in the end. His presence just beyond the wooden trap of fence was making my dog go mad with jealousy. My parents went out to check on him, irritated and confused, and I hurried out the other way to coax Baekhyun in through the front door. When he was safely in my room, I went back down to ease their suspicions, chat a little, and convince them I wasn’t losing my marbles just yet. By the time I came back up, he was sprawled belly-up along my bed, head turned towards the window. He didn’t stir when my door clicked shut, didn’t react when I gently sat myself next to him. I would have shaken him, called to him, tried to get his attention, if I hadn’t known the kind of trance he was in like the back of my hand.

            He was watching. Just like me.

            He didn’t move when he spoke. It was unclear whether he was addressing the night outside my house or me. “Do you ever wonder about death?”

            I answered honestly. “Sometimes. But… Not about mine.”

            That’s when he chose to look at me, eyes unreadable and face stony. I met him unflinchingly, trying to telepathically send him my sincerity. He only turned away again. “You shouldn’t worry about mine. It’s inevitable.”

            “Everyone’s is. That doesn’t mean we don’t worry.”

            “You don’t even know me.”

            “You won’t let me.”

            “You don’t want to.”

            “I do.”

            He turned fully this time, regarding me with his entire body. I breathed slowly, trying to calm my accelerating heart. “Do you know why I’m watching that window?”

            I shook my head. “I don’t know much of anything.”

            He propped himself up onto one arm and pointed with the other. “Because somewhere out there right now, they’re looking for me.”

            My eyes widened, but only slightly. Only enough for me to register. It wasn’t that I was surprised that there was a “they” behind his beatings. That was never really a secret – no one could make such perfectly etched marks on their own back, or break all their own fingers, or send themselves their own messages. He couldn’t, anyways. He could say I didn’t know him all he wanted, but I did. I knew him better than I knew anyone else in the whole wide world. Because I watched him. And the him I saw would never do that, just for funsies, just for a rush, just to show off his boo-boos. Because the him I saw hid them away. He was ashamed of them. He was ashamed of himself.

            No, I was more surprised because he was bringing up the “them” in the first place – the them that he’d kept curtained behind his locked door, rippling just beneath the surface of his smile. He was telling me, only me, the whole truth, and I hadn’t even asked this time. It seemed too good to be true. All the questions I kept buried inside me rose up in my throat all at once, but I didn’t ask a single one of them. He waited for me to say something, to respond, to show some sign that I’d been listening when he’d torn the last piece of his heart out and thrown it on my floor. When I didn’t, he burst out in frustration, “Aren’t you going to ask?”

            I cringed away from him. Too good to be true. It must be too good to be true. “I didn’t think you wanted me to,” I answered quietly.

            “Why else would I be here right now?”

            I drew my legs up and hugged them to my chest, pressing my face into the space between my knees. Too good to be true. “To not get hurt.”

            “That’s not the whole reason.”

            “Baekhyun,” I wheezed. He stopped, holding a breath. I held mine, too, and for a second, I thought we’d both suffocate together. “I don’t want to ask again.”

            The absence of our breath filling the room seemed louder than any noise we could have made taking it into our lungs. “Why?” he rasped.

            “I don’t want you to leave again,” I mumbled. He went silent, so I continued. “I don’t want you to leave the way you did the other times I asked. I don’t want you wandering around on your own, or saying you can’t come anymore because I’m too nosy, or disappearing in the middle of the night, just because I was too meddling to let it go.” I tightened my grip on my shins. “I don’t want them to find you anymore.”

            He didn’t speak for a while. He didn’t make any sounds at all, actually. Then, at some point, I took a breath, and he did, too, and in between our quiet puffing, he turned back to face the window. “They won’t stop looking until they do.”

            I had to go down and eat with my family after that. I didn’t really want to leave him alone, but I also didn’t want to stay sitting there after he turned away and went silent. I was scared he would be gone by the time I came back with only a ripped sheet of paper in his stead, the only proof he was even there at all. I was scared that this would be the last time, the last straw, the last breath of him I would ever receive. I was mostly scared that he really would tell me all the things that he had been holding back all this time. It wasn’t as if I didn’t want to know – God knows that wasn’t true at all – but I was terrified of what it entailed. What was different that made him want to open up? What was changing? Was this the beginning of something or was it him putting an end to everything we had built up to this point?

            This felt like the last time. I was sure of it. And I didn’t want to go upstairs to find him, whether he was there or gone or somewhere in between, because no matter what, it felt like it could only end badly.

            When I came back and cautiously creaked open the door, he was still there.

            So were the paper pieces. All of them. Spilled out over my bed. He looked up at me from his seat in the middle of the paper sea with the strangest mixture of bewilderment and somberness I’d ever seen on his face. He rose, took one step forward, two, closing half the distance between us before pausing and lingering.

            “You kept them all,” he managed, half accusatory, half in awe.

            I stared at my toes. It wasn’t something I was particularly proud of. It felt kind of obsessive, a bit paltry, but I’d always imagined I’d keep it to myself until he liked me the way I liked him, and I could show him without him turning away with that familiar look of discomfort in his eyes. I guessed I couldn’t get out of it then, anyways. Even if he left, if he stayed, if he spoke, if he didn’t, I was dreading it all the same.

            “I wanted to count them up one day, when you stopped coming around hurt. So I could give you that many ‘you’re welcomes.’” I shut the door behind me, shrugging. “It was a dumb idea.”

            He shook his head violently. “No,” he said, voice quivering. “No, it wasn’t.”

            I leaned back against the door. “I just…” Pause. I swallowed hard, but not hard enough to stop the words from coming. “I just didn’t want you to forget me. You know… After you got better.”

            Something must have ruptured in him then because he was moving, moving fast, as if he’d been trembling over a gas pedal for too long and just decided to floor it. Within three strides, he was on me, chest meeting chest and lips tangling with lips. I was against the door, the knob digging into my back like a dull blade, but then his hands found my waist and my hands found the nape of his neck and suddenly I couldn’t feel it anymore past all of his skin brushing against mine. When we parted, I felt a piece of me part with him. My mouth felt cold and jealous without his breath filling it as he saturated the air with his panting instead. He rested his forehead on mine, pressing both his fists into the door behind me, and I withdrew my hands from him, lowered them chastely to my sides and stared at the bridge of his nose. We stayed like that for a while. Then, he was off again, crossing the room and settling back down in my bed, facing the window. I could only stand awkwardly, watching him watch and resisting the urge to run my fingers along the point where his lips had met mine.

            He turned around suddenly. “Come here and lay with me,” he ordered softly. “I want to tell you who they are.”

            “Did you know I had a brother?”

            That was how he started when I finally made my stiff legs move me to my bed. He reminded me that he’d asked me to lay, so I did. He’d turned to face me again, hugging his pillow to his body with one hand and laying casually on the other. I to my side, sticking both my hands underneath my pillow. I remembered the time he’d said he liked pillows. I thought about giving him mine, too. “No. I didn’t know you had any siblings.”

            He nodded distractedly, peering into my face. Studying me. I thought of ice cubes and polar bears and glaciers. Cold things would make my burning cheeks feel better. “I did. My brother was seven years older than me. And I loved him.”

            “What happened to him?” I breathed, knowing whatever it was, it wasn’t good. I saw a light flicker from his eyes. A star going out. He smiled anyways.

            “He’s not exactly alive anymore.”

            I didn’t reply for lack of things to say. All the so-called comforting “I’m sorry” and “He’s in a better place” bull seemed all too ineffective right then and there, so I opted to wait for him, instead, and eventually he continued, taking an unsteady breath. “See, I loved my brother. I really did. But he… He did some really stupid stuff. Not funny stupid, or ignorant stupid, or even stupid you can forgive. He was dangerous stupid. The kind…” Pause. “The kind that gets you killed.”

            His voice was so painstakingly monotone that it grated against my ears and fluttering heart to hear it. More than one star was dying now – an entire galaxy. I reckon now that it was his sort of defense mechanism. He’d made himself numb so he wouldn’t remember it, wouldn’t have to go through it all over again. Of course. It was Behavioral Psychology 101 – suppression. It was there, and it always would be, but when he couldn’t feel it, it must have seemed so much farther away. I almost wanted to let him recede back into his shell, so it wouldn’t hurt. So he’d stop trembling and crying and dissecting himself into pieces for me. But letting him do that meant he couldn’t smile, either. Couldn’t touch and feel it. Couldn’t kiss. Couldn’t love. It would go back to how it was, when he’d come and go without thought, wandering on broken legs and bloody noses and not caring whether he lived or died. I wasn’t sure if it was out of concern or my own selfishness, but I lifted myself up and pushed my pillow towards him.

            He looked at the offering curiously. “What is this?”

            I didn’t answer, rolling over to my edge of the bed and reaching to the ground beside it. I brought up Eeyore from his place by my dresser and plopped him on top of the pillow, too, looking at him expectantly. He didn’t look like he got it then, either, so I took a last measure and pressed my palms against his cheeks.

            His eyes cleared, and he looked at me. Fully. And just like that, the fire was back, the stars blooming like spring flowers, as if they had never faltered in the first place.

            “Don’t stop here,” I whispered, running my thumbs in circles around his skin.

            He looked unsure. I couldn’t blame him. But he finally spoke again. “He joined something. I don’t know what exactly. Something like a gang, but not. Worse. It’s just full of a bunch of high-strung sickos with lots of needles and nosebleeds who’ll turn on each other for some change and a plastic bag full of powder. I don’t even know where he met them – how, when, why. Sometimes, I wondered if he went to school with them. If people like that sat through English classes and did homework and complained about heavy backpacks, like he did.” He lowered his eyes. “Like he did. Before he stopped bringing his backpack to school at all. Before he stopped giving a about classes, education, family, anything but getting high. Before he started changing.”

            He stopped again. Struggling, like a puppet with its strings cut. Like Pinocchio before his fairy brought him to life. He hesitantly reached up to cover one of my hands with his before continuing this time. As if he was feeding off me. As if I was somehow strong enough for him, for the both of us. As if I was not exactly the puppeteer, but maybe the strings that connected him to movement. I could only grip him harder. If it was my strength he wanted, he could have all of it.

            “He started coming home hurt and high and angry. Him and my mom screamed all the time. One time, he hit my dad. He hit him a lot and then left. He came home later, all bloody and beaten, and he cried so much and said sorry so many times that you could almost forgive him for it. But he put my dad in the hospital. You should have seen him hooked to those respirators. They sure do a good job of making a person look feeble, you know?”

            I didn’t. But I nodded as if I did, petted his hair down empathetically. He breathed quietly. “My brother took one look at him and couldn’t handle it. He ran out. The next day, we went looking for him and found him in a dumpster.” An apologetic look in my direction. “Not like me. Not still breathing. Dead as anything else in the world. He looked sort of like a fall leaf – he still had all the color to him. But he wasn’t part of his tree anymore.

            “There was still crusted blood in his hair, dried tears in his clothes. The doctors said it was overdose, but they couldn’t tell us if it was accidental or intentional. No one can ever really tell you that except the dead person, and their lips don’t move anymore. They never will again, you know, but you don’t really think that, and when you do, it drives you so mad, you feel like you could die, too.” He went quiet again and tethered himself that much more securely to my hand. “And sometimes, you do, actually.”

            I almost asked, but I wasn’t entirely sure of the social dynamics of a situation like this. Holding a conversation with someone about their deceased brother isn’t a thing most people are prepared for. It crossed my mind that there should be classes on it. I wondered if that’s what was taught for clinical psychology, or if it was something some people inherently knew. I chose to wait again for an explanation. He didn’t fail me.

            “We didn’t know if my brother’s death was on purpose, but there was no question about my dad’s. He was in our tree in the backyard. Our lemon tree. He’d written that it was his fault. He wrote sorry so many times that you almost wanted to forgive him, too. But you can’t. You can’t ever forgive the dead.”

            “Baekhyun…” His tears were hot and full of anger in my hands. I almost whispered for him to think of ice cubes and polar bears and glaciers, too, to cool down his boiling insides, but I held myself back. He was gripping me so hard that it hurt, but I let him, because it could never hurt as much as he did.

            I freed myself from him just long enough to tug his head into my shoulder. He let me, wrapping his arms around me so tightly that I thought he’d squeeze me into halves. My waist would be sore in the morning. His sobs were silent and still, but I still felt them along every nerve ending, crawling up and under my skin. “Baekhyun,” I started, then stopped, unsure of where to go with it next. He didn’t respond, only clung to me, like Velcro on wool. I pressed my cheek into his hair and breathed him in. He didn’t quite smell like leaves or fresh water or stirred dirt and flower petals, but he smelled very much like Baekhyun. I tried again. “Baekhyun. What does this have to do with what’s happening to you now?” I hoped it didn’t sound too callous.

            It didn’t, apparently, because his hands along my stomach didn’t shift. He mumbled into my neck. “Before my brother died… He stole a lot of drugs. Like, a lot. Forty-five thousand dollars’ worth. He used enough to kill himself and burned the rest, maybe as some dumb final act of retribution or some self-sacrificing bull like that. Except he’s an idiot for thinking he could just do that and get away with it. As if there’d be no repercussions, just because he was dead.” He was crying again. It was all I could do not to cry with him. “That idiot. The repercussions were just saved for us, instead.”

            It should have clicked for me earlier, but sadly, it didn’t sit right with me until just then. “You mean… He stole from—?”

            “Yes.”

            “And they’re hurting you now as punishment?”

            “Yeah.” He went silent a moment, then muttered, “They killed my mom.”

            “I’m so sorry, Baekhyun.” As much as I resented it, sometimes, that was all there could be said.

            “Don’t be. I’m glad they did.”

            I opened my mouth to speak, but I had even less to say to that.

            There was a tell-tale dampening of my shoulder. “I’d be scared of what they’d do to her if they kept her alive. I don’t want her to be me. I couldn’t handle her being the revenge doll.”

            “…Baekhyun.” It seemed to be a theme, saying his name that night. I let it roll off my tongue, holding out the “n.” It was sort of like satisfaction, the sound you make after you’ve had just enough chocolate cake, or slept in the perfect amount.

            He didn’t move, only wiped at his nose, shiny with tears. He snorted, then sniffled pathetically. “I haven’t cried this much in ages.”

            I didn’t know whether to be thankful or afraid, so I ignored both feelings and pressed on. “What do they do to you?”

            His grip didn’t exactly loosen, but it got much stiffer. The following silence implied that he didn’t want to tell me. I nudged him – he’d already gotten this far, after all. He tucked himself deeper into my collarbone. “They said I was going to serve in my brother’s place. ‘We’ll come forty-five times, once for every thousand dollars we lost.’ That’s what they told me. And on the forty-fifth time…” He trailed off.

            Forty-five. Why did that number seem so eerily familiar?

            And then it hit. The night I found him last. The marks on his legs. The tally marks. They were really tallies.

            “Last time was your forty-fifth time,” I nearly choked.

            His resulting lack of reply was reply enough.

            “Those marks on your legs, then—”

            “You saw those?” he interrupted in horror, subconsciously crossing his legs together.

            “They were calculations, weren’t they? Some kind of messed up poll? They were how those sick bastards kept track of all the times they’d—”

            I couldn’t finish. If I did, I would have surely passed out. I always knew there was a method to this, this him coming and me staying, but suddenly, knowing it, seeing it tangibly there, all the missing pieces in place and displaying a disgustingly palpable picture, it was occurring to me that all of this was really happening. It had always felt like a dream, like a patch between realities that I was floating in, like a mind-conjured fantasy that I’d eventually wake from into a world where Byun Baekhyun was a normal human being and I was just his classmate.

            For the third time that night, he didn’t have much to say. Except that wasn’t exactly true – he had a lot to say, but not much desire to say it.

            His words came rushing back to me. That night, I was supposed to die. It was my turn. The paranoia seized me all at once, and I couldn’t breathe for too long a second, so I didn’t talk, either. He must have noticed the change because he was loosening himself and crawling up my body like a spider, and I was acutely aware of puffs of air brushing against my forehead. He pressed kisses to my hairline, and I felt my throat constrict again, for a different reason this time. He paused at my temple. “I was ready to die for so long, you know.”

            My loss of vocabulary was becoming terrifyingly common.

            “But…” A halt, just long enough to make me want to look up at his face, too close to mine, but not quite long enough to make me actually do it. “I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘She’ll be looking for me tonight.’ I couldn’t stop remembering how I told you to meet me there, as if I’d be able to crawl away from them and see you one last time. I couldn’t stop panicking over not seeing you again. So I kept trying to live. I kept breathing, even after I couldn’t feel my lungs and they dropped me out in the woods to bleed out. I remember, I was holding my phone, thinking, ‘It would be so easy to let go right now.’ But then I thought of you. I thought of you, and you see where that got me.”

            “It got you saved.” I felt the tears coming, one by one. I’d been fighting them back all night, but this time, one slipped down the slope of my cheek, catching in the bow of my lip. I could taste it. I didn’t care. “I got you saved.” It sounded conceited, almost, but it was a wonderful thing to say out loud, a wonderful thing even just to think, and he was nodding hesitantly in affirmation, gauging my reaction and seeming okay with it.

            “But the hospital… They told me a girl brought me. I knew it was you, and I got scared, and they wouldn’t tell me where you went, and they asked so many questions I couldn’t answer—”

            “Why not? They could protect you. They could find them.”

            The headshake that followed was so rapid, I thought his head might spin off his body like a dreidel. Dreidel dreidel dreidel, I made you out of clay. “No. It doesn’t work like that with them. Even if I was protected, that would only make them target the people I’m closest to. People they could use to get to me. I can’t cop out like my brother. I have to do what my brother didn’t, or else everyone I know could be in danger. Even now, if they knew I was alive, if they knew I was here—“

            “Baekhyun.” There were no drawn-out syllables this time. Just his name, crisp and short and assertive.

            He shut up momentarily.

            “Stop putting your brother’s burden on your shoulders.”

            Quiet. Then, “What else can I do?”

            “You can live.”

            He pressed his nose against my hair, and I unconsciously lifted my head up towards him. “You know, I was so incredibly okay with my life being over before I met you. Now, I’m not so sure anymore.”

            Cold thoughts were fruitless for the warmth flooding me now. I tugged at his hand, thought for a moment. “Are…you leaving tonight? Like normal?”

            He shrugged. “I assumed I’d have to be gone when your parents got up, anyways. Besides, we both have school.”

            “You could stay and walk me there.”

            He smiled sadly. “There’s…things I need to take care of first. Before I can be seen with you a lot. But I’ll stay until you wake up this time. I swear.”

            My heart was a kite, fluttering in the breeze of his airy breaths. “Are you saying you’ll be able to sometime?”

            He smiled again. This one seemed less tragic. Less pretend than the one he shared with his friends at school, too. When he smiled at me, it almost felt like it was real, like he was real, and not some ventriloquist doll replaying what the world wanted him to say. “If I can help it.”

            I wrestled with my last question for a while, trying to fight the urge to say it and ultimately failing. “Will you be safe?”

            He scooted towards me and pulled me to his chest. That was his only answer.

            I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I couldn’t remember anything beyond the color red, bright and commanding and impairing my vision the way it does when you face the sun with your eyes closed or press your knuckles against your eyelids. I sat up in my bed and looked around. A memory of Baekhyun beside me flashed through my mind, followed shortly by a memory of him saying he wouldn’t leave, that I’d wake up to his face rising like the sun – the closest, most brilliant star we can see. There was no wilting boy there to confirm it.

            Instead, there was a ripped piece of paper on his side. I picked it up with quivering hands.

            I never thought I’d live to get to kiss you. I’m sorry I couldn't give you more that.

            I was out the window within the next thirty seconds.

            THINK, DAMMIT, THINK.

            I looked everywhere for Baekhyun. I screamed his name into traffic, wandered darkened alleyways, checked in every dumpster instead of just his. No signs. It was as if he’d dematerialized into nothingness. If you didn’t know what was happening, you could probably pretend he’d just stopped existing, snapped his fingers and – poof! – was gone. Like his friends, the day he went and got Eeyore, who’d just shrugged and laughed it off. We’re not his keeper. The problem was that I knew.

            Where did he come from every night, before he crawled into his hideout and waited for me? Where had he been? I had never bothered to find out. I wanted to bash my head into a door until I was as mangled as he was the last time I’d found him. I wanted to lie down and just stop breathing, stop thinking, stop being.

            Except then, I’d have given up, the way he hadn’t when he was near death behind the school.

            I stopped, racked my brain for clues. And then it dawned on me. I remembered.

            The lights that were on when I walked by the school parking lot, looking for him. The lights.

            School

            I had a direction, and I took it.

            Blood. Everywhere. Smeared in shadowed corners, wiped haphazardly on the floor, in puddles down the corridor, clinging to particles of dust kicked up in struggle.

            Doorways, an endless maze of them, each leading to a room more horrifying than the previous. Doorways that held foot presses and Catherine wheels and thumbscrews and other hellish medieval torture instruments that made me pause mid-stride to retch. School doorways. Doorways I’d been down a thousand different times. Doorways that seemed a little smaller, a little tighter a fit, with every consecutive one.

            Screams that sounded like forests burning, like children being taken from their mothers, like the ringing in your ears after a loved one dies. His.

            Masks. Masks with zippers for teeth, with gauze over the eyes, with two holes cut like nostrils, stitched together in pieces with iron-colored thread.

            And finally, his face. So terrifyingly fractured, caved in at the temples and sporting a nose sunken into his face with blows. His face that he continued to lift, even as steel bars bludgeoned him again and again. His face, barely capable of rendering any expression at all past its disfigurement, that saw me and still managed to break into a smile brighter than all the stars caught in the folds of his soul.

            Screams that sounded like a supernova, a world collapsing in on itself, a universe being born in the light of his eyes. Mine this time.

            The news story that came out later was pretty straightforward – “STUDENT AND FAMILY KILLED BY DRUGLORDS.” It detailed how “Byun Baekhyun, age 17” had been living alone in an old, mildewy barn (untrue – no one knew where he lived, even Baekhyun himself) for years after his parents had passed away (lumping his dad in with his mom and completely ignoring the fact that he’d ever had a brother). It didn’t know much about the “specifics of the accident,” but it mentioned a girl who’d broken into the “lair of the barbarians” outside of our high school, though it avoided calling me by name. There wasn’t too much speculation about this heroine, but an open-ended statement of “How the girl knew of his whereabouts is unclear” was an indicative highlight in the story that many people seemed stuck on. He became moderately famous online. Many spectators who read the story dubbed us a sort of Romeo and Juliet. Most believed I died later somehow. That it had been covered up. That I couldn’t possibly have gone on without him. They weren’t exactly wrong.

            There was a picture of him in the hospital, hooked up to the respirators that would eventually fail to save his life. He’d been right; they do do a good job of making a person look feeble.

            Although my name hadn’t been released, the authorities knew who I was, and because Baekhyun hadn’t been close to anyone else, they came to me with the last of his belongings, stuffed in his old backpack, one strap worn and coming apart with use, the other practically brand-new.

            I found his last note to me there. It was on a half-page torn from a college-ruled, perforated sheet of paper, and it was so long, he had to fit two lines of writing on every one printed stripe, front and back. The ripped corners matched up suspiciously with his final thank-you letter – the one I found on my pillow the morning after he told me his life story. Nowadays, I keep them both under the pillow he used to hide his phone beneath, back in his bad days and my good days.

            So I’m bad at emotions and stuff. You know that by now, I guess. But you’re giving me practice. A lot of it.

            I used to not think that being alive was important. I used to think I was only breathing to be some weird sort of voodoo doll for those people to get to my brother, even after he was dead. I used to think I was a criminal, that I’d done something terribly wrong in another life that stuck me to the one I have now. But you came in with your optimism and your springtime and your moon-y nights and your entire self, and that all changed for me. Every day, I find myself wanting to live a little more. For you. And not just that. You make me want to live for me, too, to see what kind of person I can become. I don’t have much of a direction right now – not college, like you, or jobs, like other people, or even anything besides being beaten and tired – but I do know now what I want to be, and that’s a guy who’s not a chew toy, revenge puppet, whatever. I want to be the guy that’s good for you. I want to be the guy you should want, not just the guy that you do. Assuming you even do. Assuming I even can. I just want to be yours, in public, in private, in heart and mind and body and life. How long have I been wanting to say that? I can’t even count the days.

            My dad gave me that Eeyore back when we were younger and happier. My mom gave me that seashell back when the beach wasn’t so lonely. I gave them both to you because I feel like you’ve given me my family back, anyways. You’ve given me back, too.

            I don’t know if I’ll ever give you this note, but basically, I think I’m in love with you.

- Baekhyun

            In the span of time in which I knew Baekhyun, there were a lot of things I didn’t get the chance to learn.

            I never knew what he did in the time that wasn’t spent in school or in trash mountains. I didn’t know what place he called home, or even if such a place existed. I didn’t know if he ever slept, or if he sat up awake, ruminating about his life, or if he finally allowed himself to slip into the in-between, the place he was most comfortable, the place he wished he could stay in, permanently. I never figured out what he felt like when he pushed himself out my window every morning, what he felt like when he looked into the faces of his family’s murderers and felt their weapons cut into him, what he felt like when he wrote my thank-you notes in his loopy handwriting and left them behind.

            One of the things that I regret the most was not determining his favorite flower. It felt wrong, coming to his little stone marker, one day with lilies, another with chrysanthemums, some with the most elaborate of bouquets and some with nothing but hand-picked clovers and my heartache. A real lover would have known something as simple as that, something that would make all the difference to him if he was peeking down from heaven and admiring the view. A real lover could have done him at least that justice. I was no real lover. I wasn’t even the high school romance that could become the real lover. I was just the vessel he used to reach the other side of existence. It could have been anyone, really – someone like his closer friends, the ones who weren’t his keeper, maybe even the girl that he gave the seashell necklace.

            But then, I’d recall all the things I did know. I knew that he liked cartoons better than real people shows, and I knew if there was anything he could keep on loop forever, it was Winnie the Pooh. I knew he only knew lyrics from old, retro tunes (and he only ever bothered to learn half of any given song before he’d grow disinterested and move onto another one). He picked apart his sushi before he ate it, and when he got sick (which was far more often than it should be), he liked black tea with honey, but not fruit, because he thought fruity tea was gross and unnatural, even though he was a fruit fanatic (except for lemons – he hated lemons). He also hated coffee, but he still drank a cup every morning, especially after his friends noticed, dubbed him a coffee connoisseur, and bought him bags of it for every holiday.

            He didn’t know how to kiss girls. He told me his first kiss was with a grasshopper he caught when he was six, and it was so repulsed by him that it promptly kicked him in the nose with its spindly leg and hopped off. He tried to chase after it, but it eventually deterred him “with its sad buggy eyes.” (His brother squished it immediately after. It was his first heartbreak.)

            He loved the beach because it reminded him of his family, back before it fell apart, and he used to love sad movies, but then he hated them, too, because they reminded him of all the feelings he didn’t have. He also liked sheep. I never really understood why, because whenever I’d ask, he’d simply reply with, “I don’t know. They look like clouds and pillows had a baby and it grew a head.”

            He actually loved all his friends. Every single one of them, even if he barely knew them, even if he’d only talked to them twice, even if he never clued them in on what was going on in his life. They loved him, too, to my surprise. I never gave them enough credit. Not one of them skipped his funeral, and by the end, not one of them was dry-eyed, either, and I felt myself love them, too, as an extension of him, still on Earth.

            Out of all the things I learned, though, I think the most important was his longing to be an older brother. So he could rub off on someone else. So he could be an inspiration. “So I could show someone how to be strong,” he’d whisper. “So I could prove to myself that I wouldn’t mess up the same way my brother did.” I wish, more than anything else, that I could have given that to him. I knew he would raise his younger brother right, the way he hadn’t been raised. I knew he would play baseball with him, that he’d shelter him when he’d been bullied, that he’d show him how to like people in the awkward beginning phases of pre-adolescence. I knew, but he didn’t know, couldn’t know, would never know, and that was the worst part of him being gone. I could only pray that he was told, wherever he was, that he would have been a fine example of a sibling, that he never needed to prove it, that he’d already shown it.

            You see, when it comes down to it, I didn’t know a lot about Baekhyun. He kept too many things to himself, put too little interest in his own life to share it. At the same time, though, I knew more about him than anyone else. People cried for him who only knew the fabricated world’s smile of his. Imagine if they’d seen his real one, like I had – if they’d had it directed at them, like I did. Imagine if they all knew what I knew. Imagine the pain they would have felt, loving him the way I’d grown to.

            Because I did. Even with all the holes and empty spaces in my knowledge of him, I knew all the things I needed to love him. He was room temperature, but that was okay. I’d never liked the cold, and even the springtime heat got tiresome sometimes.

            That understanding, that acceptance – that, yes, everything I felt was real, everything was valid, everything was pure and untainted and directly from my heart – was all I needed, and it still remains as much. Knowing his reciprocation hurt, at first, as every fluttering thought of kisses almost experienced and touches almost shared reminded me of his absence; but ultimately, it’s healed more than anything else, knowing he could love me, even at his worst, and knowing what his love would have been like at its best. And even though his lips don’t move anymore, never will again, I’m not letting it drive me mad. I’m not his father, just like he isn’t his brother. He told me once that you can’t forgive the dead, but the more I think about him, the more I think this can’t be true.

            I know Baekhyun’s favorite part about me was how I never stopped looking for things I lost. Just like Eeyore. It’s because of this that I could never consider him lost. I still see him in honey bears and tea, both black and fruity, in grasshoppers and coffee beans and lemonade and wool jackets. I hear him in the sound of the ocean and in the beach wind blowing against concave seashells. I feel him stirring in me when I see little boys clinging to their older siblings, pulling at their jacket sleeves and pointing to various objects of interest, like fountains, or stuffed animals the size of small boulders, or sidewalk pennies.

            And in the end, one of the best things was not determining his favorite flower. Because now, I see his smile – his genuine, rectangular smile – in every flower instead of just one.