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Donghyuck is the first to break the silence when Jeno is done recording the songs for the tape.
“So—are we ever going to find out more about this girl, Jeno?”
Jaemin elbows him. “Shush,” he admonishes in a whisper, clearly not meant for Jeno to hear. “He doesn’t want to talk about it, Hyuck.”
Jeno watches Donghyuck roll his eyes in his peripheral. “Oh, come on,” he says. “Jeno’s never made a mixtape before because he doesn’t have a CD player and he says it’ll be too much work. So this must be some girl. I mean, why do you think we all showed up here out of interest when Jeno asked Mark if he could use his CD player to record a mixtape?” He sighs. “Mark, do you know anything?”
Mark shakes his head. “Nope,” he says. “I know Jeno met her in the record shop, but that’s really all I know.”
“Better,” Jeno says. “You don’t need to know.”
Really, it’s not a very good mixtape, he thinks as he scribbles down an inscription in all capitals—for Renjun, from Jeno—on the tape. It’s kind of a mess, musically—the only thing it really has going for it is that it comes from Jeno’s heart. He’s not sure what it is—an apology? A goodbye? An eulogy, beating a long-dead horse?—but it’s something and it means something to Jeno and nobody else would ever have to hear it, anyway. He wasn't sure he was brave enough to let anyone else listen to it.
Donghyuck sighs. “Fine,” he says. “Can you at least tell us how you met her, then? If you don’t want to tell us anything about her?”
Jeno shrugs. “She’s—she’s actually a he,” he says, staring at the ground, willing himself to keep his posture straight.
“Oh,” Donghyuck says. He has the grace to look a bit sheepish. He shifts closer to Jeno and slides an arm around his shoulders. “My—my question still stands, you know. Whether it’s a he or a she or—whatever.”
Jaemin nods. So does Mark. “I’d—I’d like to hear the story,” the latter adds. “If you want to tell us.”
So he does.
Jeno looks up from his book when the bell on top of the door rings.
He’s always argued with Taeyong that having the bell is somewhat redundant. After all, there’s really no need for him to look up and get a good one-over of any customer who comes in—a lot of them shoot him a dirty look when he glances at them, and barely any of them ever ask Jeno for help. Generally, the only time any customer in TY Tracks even acknowledges Jeno is when they’re buying. Any other time, he’s invisible.
And he likes it that way.
Another reason why Jeno argued for the removal of the bell is that some customers were the opposite of a sight for sore eyes. If a sight for sore eyes was someone so beautiful that they made your eyes feel better just looking—well, some customers were the ones causing the eye pain.
For example, the boy who’d just walked in. He had brown hair, wide eyes, and wore a yellow sweater bright enough that you could see from space. Everything he wore, Jeno realizes, from the sweater to his jeans to the watch on his wrist, was bright and shiny and new.
In other words, he looks like a douchebag. Jeno picks up his book and continues reading.
“Hi,” the boy says, sounding nervous. “Can—can you help me find something, please?”
With an eye roll, Jeno puts the book back down again. “Shoot,” he says absently, dog-earing the corner of the book. He’s read it before, of course—Jeno only takes books he re-reads to work, because he doesn’t want to be stuck in the still monotony of working in a record store with a book he doesn’t like—and the annoyance at the boy’s question is mostly feigned. Still, it would be nice if Jeno could get his shift’s worth in wages on a day that he was just left to read and mind his own business.
The boy smiles. It’s a ridiculous kind of smile, Jeno thinks, because all Jeno has done is say he can help and it’s made his whole face light up like the sun. (Perhaps he is kind of cute, Jeno thinks. The sweater has to go, though—its garish neonness was just too much to overlook.)
“Do you know if I can get, um, a Madonna album here?”
Jeno raises his eyebrows. “Madonna,” he repeats.
“Yes,” the boy says. “The—the singer? I’m looking for her—”
“I know who Madonna is,” Jeno says.
The boy smiles. “Really?” he says. “Because I don’t.”
Jeno stares at him. “You don’t know who Madonna is?” he says in disbelief. “Madonna? Like, the most famous pop singer right now? Have—have you never watched MTV or something?” The boy stares at him blankly. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“China,” the boy says. And yeah, now that he says it, Jeno can hear a bit of an accent—very slight, but similar to the one his parents have, similar to the one Taeyong has. It’s something Jeno’s painfully used to, but he has a feeling most people hadn’t been so kind about it.
“Well,” Jeno says. “My manager is pretty picky about what stuff we sell here.” That’s why there isn’t any business, he adds wryly in his head. It’s only when the boy stifles a smile that Jeno realizes he’s accidentally said it aloud. “I don’t think he stocks any pop albums, and even if he did—well, it wouldn’t be Madonna. You could try Tower Records, there’s one a few blocks away?”
The boy sighs. “Ah,” he says. “I think I’ve had a joke played on me.” He shakes his head, a small fond smile on his face. “My—um, my Yeri told me to come here and ask for that album. I think she knew you didn’t stock it.”
“Your Yeri?” Jeno asks.
“I don’t really—I don’t really know what we are,” the boy admits. And yeah, Jeno understands that—not knowing what you are to somebody and not knowing how to refer to them to someone they don’t know. “I was trying to get her a birthday present, though—her birthday is next week, on the fifth—and I asked her what stuff she liked because I don’t really listen to music—”
“You don’t listen to music?” Jeno asks, baffled. “What do you do with your time, then?”
“Studying?” the boy says. “Um—playing video games, sometimes? But—mostly studying.”
Jeno smiles despite himself. He wants to be able to ignore people like this boy, but he’s never been able to manage it. Donghyuck had always said, after all, that he was terrible at being punk because you’re just such a nice person, Jeno, you’re even worse than Mark. “Listen—what’s your name?”
“Renjun,” the boy says. “Huang Renjun.”
“Renjun,” Jeno repeats. He doesn’t know why, but the name suits him—it rolls off the tongue in a strangely melodic way. He’s pretty sure the kind of person the name Renjun promises isn’t too far from the boy in front of him—bright yellow sweater and Swatch watch aside. He likes it. “Your—your Yeri.” Renjun smiles at this, a kind of smile Jeno normally doesn’t like because it promises inside jokes, or memories only they share. “Does she listen to a lot of music?”
“Yeah,” Renjun says. “She’s—she’s like, cool.”
He’s starting to get a picture of this Yeri in his head—it’s not hard to imagine a pretty girl in bright colours at Renjun’s side, a technicolor dream couple. Unconsciously, he moves out from behind the deck and moves towards the rows and rows of records, perusing through until he finds a couple of things that look promising. “Sonic Youth,” he says, “and Heart. These are probably their best albums. I’ve found most girls I know enjoy stuff that’s—that’s actually sung by girls. The sound might be a bit polarizing, if she’s not really into it, but—they’re solid albums.”
Renjun stares at him, wide-eyed. “You’ve listened to all the albums in the store?” he asks.
“Not all of them,” Jeno says. “But a few. Taeyong—the owner, my manager—he’s always playing stuff in the store, so I know a lot of albums.”
Renjun looks away to stare at the albums—Jeno wonders if that’s how he looks at everything, wide-eyed like it’s both the first time he’s ever seen it and the only thing he sees in the world. “I’ll take these,” he says finally with a grin.
Renjun is back in the store a couple of days later. Jeno almost doesn’t notice him—he comes in before Jeno starts his shift, and he only realizes another person is there when he sees a flash of blue moving from one row to another. “Hello?” he says. “Who’s there?”
Renjun’s head pops up. “Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” Jeno says. He can’t see Renjun fully from where he is, but he sees the light-wash denim jacket and decides, once and for all, that the other boy really needs an intervention. He doesn’t think TY Tracks has ever had something this colourful in it since whatever was the last brightly coloured, acid-trip inspired new wave album cover that came in stock. “What’re you doing?”
Renjun raises his hand, showing a sheet of notebook paper that he’s clutching. There’s writing on both sides, neat loopy cursive, and Jeno wonders if that’s Renjun’s handwriting. It’s a lot nicer than Jeno’s, that’s for sure—just like how Renjun’s clothes are a lot brighter than Jeno’s, and how Renjun’s voice is softer and his smiles wider. “Buying music,” he says brightly. “Yeri gave me some recommendations.”
Jeno smiles wryly. “Do you listen to music now?”
“No,” Renjun admits. “Not really. But she assumed I listened to—to the kind of stuff you stock here, when I gave her the albums, and then when I said I didn’t really she gave me a bunch of recommendations.”
“Wanting to impress her?” Jeno asks, smirking at him conspiratorially.
Renjun frowns. “Not really,” he says. “Just curious.”
Jeno glances back down at his book. It’s a new one—he’d taken it out from the library a couple of days ago, and he hadn’t read it yet, breaking his own rules. What with work and school and everything else—it was harder to find time for stuff he wanted to do. Mostly, he just wanted to sleep.
Renjun approaches the counter, placing six records on the desk. Jeno raises an eyebrow, because records are expensive and most people don’t just buy eight within the span of a week. “I’ll take these,” he says, smiling softly.
Jeno wonders if he ever stops smiling. He decides despite himself that Renjun is cute—fashion sense aside. Although he could really do with an intervention, and if his Yeri is the type of girl who shops here, he wonders how she could put up with it.
The next time Jeno sees Renjun, the clouds burst open with rain almost as soon as he steps inside.
There’s a bit of rainwater dampening his hair and the shoulders of his shirt, a God-awful tie-dye fringed monstrosity. Jeno wonders, not for the first time, if Renjun gets dressed in the dark or if he’s trying his utmost best to look like a Eurovision contestant.
“It’s raining,” Renjun says breathlessly.
“I can see that,” Jeno says conversationally, not looking up from his book. “Came out of nowhere, huh?”
“I was going to get some—some stuff,” Renjun says vaguely. “Actually, I don’t know what I was looking for, I was just going for a walk and—and it started raining.” Somewhere in the middle of his statement, he’d started giggling uncontrollably, and now he couldn’t stop.
It’s stupidly infectious. Jeno can’t help himself from smiling, and then laughing along, even though he’s not sure what’s so funny. “As long as you don’t drip water onto the vinyl, you can hang out here until the rain stops.”
Normally, he wouldn’t offer something like that, but Renjun, he’s starting to learn, is an exception to a lot of Jeno’s rules. Like don’t talk to customers unless they talk to you and never talk to someone who dresses like he’s been dipped in a lava lamp.
“How old are you, Jeno?” Renjun asks.
“Eighteen next month,” Jeno says. “I’m a senior. In high school, not in college.”
Renjun brightens. “Oh!” he says. “I thought you were a bit older than me. It’s probably because you’re always scowling, though.” Jeno glares at him. “Yeah, like that.” He grins, and Jeno struggles to hold onto his glare and prove that Renjun’s smile doesn’t have a huge effect on him at all. “Where do you go to school?”
“Neo High,” Jeno says.
“Ah,” Renjun says. “I go to SM Prep.” And yeah—that makes sense, but Jeno can’t help but feel a little annoyed. He’d known since the start, pretty much, that Renjun was the kind of rich person who went to SM Prep and dressed in the brightest things he could find and could afford to splurge on records that he wasn’t even sure he’d liked, but it makes Jeno feel oddly uncomfortable. Like there’s an ocean between them, and Jeno is just a little fish—not even a saltwater fish, a little trout swimming in some nondescript stream far, far away.
“I see,” says Jeno, which isn’t really much of an answer at all. Renjun blinks, and then looks away, glancing outside the window as if to look and see if it was still raining. (It was.) Jeno almost feels bad, except that he doesn’t—he doesn’t have any friends who go to SM Prep, and it’s because of a lot more than his social ineptness.
Besides, it’s not like he ever planned on pursuing a friendship with Renjun. It’s not like it could exist, anyway, outside of this store—and once Renjun got tired of being in here, or once he realized he didn’t even like this music, there wouldn’t be any need for them to ever interact again.
Renjun sighs. “What are you gonna do when you graduate?” he asks.
“Leave, probably,” Jeno says. He shrugs. He’s saving up for college, but he doesn’t want to talk about his shitty financial situation with Renjun, nor does he want to talk about how he has no idea what he wants to do with his life. He knows, deep down, that thinking something like there’s nothing for me in this town sounds like a stereotype, the quintessential angst-ridden punk that suburban parents feared more than anything else. But stereotypes came from somewhere—and there really wasn’t anything in this town for Jeno.
He doesn’t ask what Renjun wants to do, and Renjun never says it. When the rain stops, he leaves. Jeno doesn’t want to admit that he feels a pang when he sees him go.
The next time Renjun comes in, he’s actually dressed for the weather. Sure, dressed for the weather apparently means a horrible neon windbreaker, but it’s better than freezing to death in torrential rain.
“Are you looking for something?” Jeno asks. Renjun nods, his nose red from the cold. “Well, I’m closing up, like, right now—and Taeyong will literally kill me if I keep the store open too long—so you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
Renjun shivers. “Y-you’re going home?” he asks, stammering because of the cold. “I-in this weather?”
Jeno shrugs. “Wouldn’t be the first time,” he says, drawing his jacket closer together. TY Tracks doesn’t have central heating, so when Jeno works during the winter he’s pretty much dealing with almost the same weather as it is outside, for hours on end.
Renjun shakes his head. For a second, Jeno thinks it’s just an involuntary movement to keep the heat, but then he says, “N-no.” Jeno waits expectantly for him to continue, picking up his school bag and sliding his book inside. Renjun’s eyes widen. “I-is that your school bag? You—you came here straight from school?”
Jeno shrugs again. “What were you saying?”
“You—where do you live?” Renjun asks.
“Half an hour away,” Jeno says. Renjun’s eyes widen even more—they’re comically wide now, too wide for someone like his’s eyes to be, Jeno thinks bitterly. There’s no reason Renjun should care about him—not like that. “But if I walk fast I’ll make it twenty.”
“I live really close to here,” Renjun says. “And—and my dad finishes work in half an hour. Just—come back with me, and I’ll ask him to drive you back.”
Jeno scoffs. “No way.” He doesn’t want to accept charity—doesn’t want a gesture that’s false and contrived and just comes because Renjun pities him.
But then he looks from Renjun’s stupidly earnest eyes to the rain outside, beating down on the path like hailstones, and decides that maybe a little charity isn't a bad thing. And it's cold, and Renjun looks so honest and real, and Jeno doesn't have the guts to say no to an offer like that.
“Make yourself at home,” Renjun says, flopping down on his bed after hanging up his windbreaker. They’re both shivering and soaking wet from the walk, though Renjun was smart enough to figure out most of the walk by going under canopies from shop fronts. Jeno had felt bad, at first, but Renjun’s mother had insisted that there was no problem, dear and had nodded with certain agreement when Renjun told her of the plan.
It was all odd, really. Jeno was pretty sure he should be thrown out. This house had three stories.
Jeno’s bedroom at home was ridiculously generic, something that could belong to anyone his age. He never stays in it, anyway. The only thing that really stands out is his record player—four years old and faulty, but his and his alone. (He named her Martha. She’s done a great job so far and he never wants to replace her.)
Renjun’s isn’t like that. Jeno barely knows Renjun, really, but Renjun’s room feels like it’s undeniably his—it looks and feels like Renjun looks and feels, which is to say bright and cheery but also oddly introspective, somehow both loud and quiet. Jeno rather likes it—rather likes the idea of living a place that looks like him, that feels like him.
One day, he thinks. One day I’ll skip town and figure this out.
He nods towards Renjun’s closet. “I’m curious—do all of your clothes look like they were either doused in highlighter fluid or taken straight out of a Ralph Lauren catalogue, or are they just the ones you wear because you know it gives me a tangible reason why I shouldn’t associate with you?” he asks.
“Better than wearing the same leather jacket every day,” Renjun says teasingly, grabbing hold of a Rubik’s cube from his bedside table and absently switching the faces.
Jeno rolls his eyes. "You literally look like you're visible from space. You know how they're always saying they're going to put up a forcefield in space to keep the missiles out? The people in that forcefield will be able to see you." Ge spots something plugged into the square TV that sits in Renjun's room, on top of a wooden bench, dented in the edge. (It has the grace to be an old TV. Jeno doesn’t know how he would deal, emotionally, with anything else.) “Oh, man,” he says. “Is that an NES?” He kneels down to have a look through the cartridges. “My friend Mark got one of these for Christmas, but I’ve never had a chance to use one yet.”
In a flash, Renjun is kneeling next to him, plugging in a second controller. “You could—we could—” he says, trailing off, passing Jeno the controller, smiling blindly. “Dad’ll be back soon, but—” He slots in a cartridge. “I could teach you to play Super Mario. To—to pass the time.”
Jeno glances again from the controller to Renjun, and nods. “I’d like that,” he says. “Sounds—sounds fun.”
And, really, Jeno wishes he could say that was the only time he found himself crashing at Renjun’s after work—that he’d only managed to be convinced by Renjun’s earnest smile and insistence that he couldn’t possibly walk home in this once.
It was a lie, though. For some reason, it kept happening, and if Jeno didn’t know that was completely fucking impossible he’d say that Renjun did it on purpose. But it wasn’t like someone would walk up and down through the rain just to make sure Jeno didn’t catch hypothermia.
The weirdest part about all of this, though, is how Renjun and Jeno actually seem to click. Their lives are so different, run on two completely separate planes, and yet for that short time they spend in each other’s company they find strange amounts of common ground. Jeno listens as Renjun tells him some anecdote about someone he knows—Yeri, his neighbour and his best friend in America (who Renjun gets starry-eyed when he talks about, and who Jeno doesn’t really like the idea of for reasons he can’t quite articulate), or Sicheng, his older brother, who had defied all expectation by enrolling not in any American or British university, but in Peking University in Beijing.
“My parents were furious,” Renjun says. “They’d spent a lot of money on English tutoring and enrolling us in international schools so we could learn English, and they thought Sicheng studying in China was below them.” He laughed. “When he said he was going there, they had a big fight, and Sicheng said the founder of China was the librarian at Peking University once, and Mom said yes, but the founder of America wasn’t!”
“Is that why you guys moved here?” Jeno asks.
“Kind of,” Renjun says. “They kept encouraging me to apply to as many major college as possible. I got into Cornell, but I kind of want to go to MIT instead.” He smiles at Jeno. “Are—are you going to college?”
Jeno shrugs noncommittally. “Don’t know,” he admits. “I’ve applied to places, but…” He trails off.
Really, he doesn’t know. He’d gotten into a lot of places—places he’d never expected to get into, including Harvard—but God only knew if he’d be able to afford going. The minimum wage was $3.55 an hour, after all, and Taeyong gave him a little bit extra but Jeno didn’t know if he could find something as flexible as working at TY Tracks all the way in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And there was his mom to think about—she’d never paid much attention to him in between all her new boyfriends who drank too much and new jobs after getting fired from a lot of them, but Jeno knows she would lose her mind if he even brought up college. (He’d tried once, and it hadn’t ended well—it had involved an angry boyfriend yelling at him that his mother wasn’t made of money, and that he was getting too many ideas and that he was good-for-nothing. Jeno wasn’t keen on repeating that.)
Renjun drops the topic. He was awfully good at that—at dropping a topic when he sensed that Jeno didn’t want to talk about it. He’s sensitive in a way Jeno was never allowed to be, pays attention to people painstakingly—Jeno didn’t know when he stopped finding Renjun’s wide eyes cute in their naivety, and when he realized that they’re actually cute in the way they take in everything around him, holding onto it like one of those fancy digital cameras.
“What do you want to do?” Renjun had asked another time. “When you grow up?”
Normally, Jeno didn’t dignify that question with an answer—he didn’t know, and he never liked to admit that he didn’t know something. But the fact of the matter was that Jeno did know—he just didn’t want to say it. Dreams were so ephemeral—they were blown away by the wind like the seeds on a dandelion, and speaking them made them tangible, and therefore breakable.
But talking to Renjun is different. Renjun wouldn’t blow away his dream like that—and it’s not like Renjun could ruin it, either, because Renjun doesn’t know anyone else in Jeno’s life and even if he didn’t, Jeno doubted he would tell them.
“I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” he says. It’s the first time he’s ever said it out loud. “I write stuff, sometimes, but—but it never goes anywhere. I’m always too busy.”
“Is that why you’re always reading while you’re working?” Renjun asks teasingly. Jeno nods. “Well, you’re good with words. So I think you can do it.” He pauses, and then adds in a tone that could almost be described as affectionate, “Nerd.” As if it was as easy as just being good with words. Jeno wishes it was.
Or maybe, says a voice in Jeno’s head, it is that easy. And you’re just making excuses because you’re scared of failing.
Thanks, brain-voice, he thinks. He didn’t remember signing up to be psychoanalyzed by his own subconscious, but to each their own. Besides, Jeno hadn’t been born with the helpful trait of bravery.
“I want to work on the space stuff,” Renjun says. “To study about space. Astrophysics, I guess. Cosmology.”
Jeno raises an eyebrow. “And I’m a nerd?” he asks.
Renjun laughs. “Fair enough,” he says, nodding towards his bookshelf. For the first time, Jeno looks at it, and realizes the battered paperbacks aren’t just novels as he’d assumed them to be, but scientific titles. A couple of them Jeno recognizes from passing, but most of them he doesn’t—Cosmos, The Moon, A Brief History of Time, Galactic Dynamics. “They’re not all about space, but—most of them are. Sicheng bought me my copy of Cosmos back when it was new and I was hooked ever since.”
“Hooked,” Jeno repeats. “Weird word to use about astrophysics.”
Renjun laughs again. “Don’t be mean,” he says. “It is, actually, really cool.” He leans back. “If you want to be a writer, why do you know so much about music?”
Jeno doesn’t actually have a smart answer ready for this question—he’s never been asked it before. Jeno likes music, he knows music, it’s one of his favourite things. He likes listening to it, likes to hear the lyrics and feel the meaning behind the beats.
But, he thinks, a good song does the same thing a good book does, and a good album does the same thing a good series does—tells a story, sets a feeling, leaves you in a catatonic state afterwards as you run through it over and over in your head, trying to figure out just what it means and just how it makes you feel. He’d once argued in English class that song lyrics were another form of poetry, and that music was just as important as the written word—he’d gotten detention for being insolent, but he liked to think that he’d proven his point.
“They’re not so different,” Jeno says finally.
Renjun shook his head. “That doesn’t even answer my question,” he complains. “What the—” He trails off. “Yeah.”
“What the?” Jeno prompts, smiling expectantly.
“What the—what the hell,” Renjun says. He ducks his head, bursting out laughing, the corner of his ears turning red. “I meant—what the—what the hell, you didn’t even—answer.”
“Do you not swear?” Jeno asks.
“I can totally swear,” Renjun says. “I just said what the hell.” Jeno cracks up laughing, because Renjun is definitely blushing and it’s stupidly cute, how flustered he is over this.
“Oh yeah,” Jeno says. “I totally believe you.”
“Fuck you,” Renjun says. There’s a sudden silence, something so tangible it could literally be torn in two, before they both burst into uncontrollable laughter. Renjun swearing sounds like a kitten trying to be intimidating—normally, something like this would just remind Jeno just how far apart they were.
But maybe he can get used to that distance between them.
Except things are never that easy.
They’re on their way to Renjun’s one night when Jeno bumps into someone in the street. “Oh, Jeno!” says the person—Lucas Wong, the closest thing Jeno knew to a celebrity and the kind of person everyone at Neo High liked. It really was impossible to hate him. He’d been in the local newspaper once for saving a cat from a tree and then buying the cat’s owner, a very distressed six-year-old girl, a Popsicle from an ice cream truck.
“Hi, Lucas,” says Jeno airily. “What’s new?”
Lucas glances at Renjun. “Who’s this?”
Jeno bites his lip. On one hand, Renjun goes to SM Prep, and there’s really no reason why two people like that would even be friends, let alone hanging out like this. Jeno has an image he likes to cultivate, the type of image that says he’s not approachable, and being friends—acquaintances? Slightly more than strangers—with someone like Renjun? That would shatter it.
In other words, he's not brave enough to say the words. This is Renjun, he's my friend, he goes to SM Prep and he's really, really great.
On the other hand, Renjun is his friend—acquaintance—slightly more than a stranger. And he’s gazing at Jeno, eyes slightly wide, as if waiting for an answer.
“Just a friend,” Jeno says airily. He doesn’t look at Renjun—Renjun looks away from him.
Lucas nods. “Cool,” he says. “Oh man, I’ve held you up in the rain, huh? Sorry, dude, I’ll let you go to wherever you were going.” He moves on up the street, but not before stopping and yelling, “See you Monday, Jeno!”
“Who was that?” Renjun asks. His voice is very small. Jeno tries his best to ignore it.
“Just a person from school,” he answers. “He’s pretty cool. I think when he graduates he’s going to California and becoming a professional surfer.”
“Is that a thing?” Renjun asks, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. His voice sounds kind of far away—like he’s not paying full attention, or like he’s retreated into his head.
“Not sure,” Jeno says. “But even if it isn’t, I’m pretty sure he would make it a thing.” He grins at Renjun—Renjun takes a couple of seconds to blink and stare at him blankly, before grinning back. It doesn’t reach his eyes, though.
Jeno definitely tries his best to ignore that. He doesn’t want to think about this—doesn’t want to have to blame Renjun’s face falling on himself. Still, it’s much harder to ignore the frosty way Renjun talks to him, and the way his smiles never quite manage to light up his face in the way they usually do.
And then Jeno snaps.
Renjun had come in, actually found something he liked, and placed it on the counter with his typical sunny smile and his stupid bright polo shirt. “It’s quite cold out,” he says conversationally. “I felt like my hands were freezing over.”
“Buy gloves then,” Jeno says, scanning the barcode of the record.
Renjun rolls his eyes. “I meant,” he says, “do you want to hang out when your shift is done?”
And Jeno wants to—he does. At some point it had stopped feeling like charity and started feeling like friendship, some strange kind of friendship. It doesn’t feel like what Jeno has with Hyuck, or Mark, or Jaemin—it was no better or no worse, but there was none of this will-they-or-won’t-they tension in the air. Sure, Donghyuck was very physically affectionate, and Jaemin complimented Jeno all the time when he actually cleaned up nicely, and Mark was always giving them fond looks courtesy of being the oldest of their group and only in their grade because of a mistake on the system back in kindergarten, but that was all it was—actions and words and looks. They didn’t have all this implicit meaning behind them, somehow both achingly casual and impossibly meaningful.
Jeno is pretty sure he knows what this means, but he doesn’t want to put it into words. Feelings are like dreams—brittle, quick to fly away. They’re like flies—obnoxious and annoying and somehow always manage to fly before you can swat them to death. Jeno wishes there was bug spray for feelings.
Besides, Renjun is dating Yeri. Jeno’s never met Yeri, but he’s figured out why he doesn’t like her, even if that knowledge is deep down in his subconscious, hidden away with bright yellow tape.
“Why?” he says. It’s not the answer he wants to give, but it comes out without any notice, before Jeno can even think. “Why do you always want to—why do you always want to make an effort? I don’t need your pity—I managed just fine walking home in the cold before you came along, so if you think you’re making a difference with this then—then you’re wrong!”
Renjun blinks. It’s the first time he’s ever seen Renjun so rattled—the first time he’s ever seen an emotion other than smiling confidence on his face. Sure, he’s seen Renjun at times where the smiling confidence was blatantly false, but he’s never seen Renjun so rattled that it just goes away. For a second, it almost feels satisfying.
For a second.
Renjun finally speaks. “I wasn’t pitying you,” he says quietly. “I was trying to be your friend.”
“Why?” Jeno asks. “Why me? Why did you look at me, probably the poorest person you’ve ever met, and go oh, him, I’ll give him all the charity I can give?”
Renjun looks at the ground. “My mom and dad were childhood friends. They went to the same school and they both enrolled in Jilin University and were together throughout.”
“Wow,” Jeno says, barely able to keep the bitterness from his voice. “How great. I’m so happy that you grew up with two parents who actually liked each other, who had money and privilege and a big house.”
“Actually, they grew up in the poorest part of Jilin,” Renjun says. Jeno stops. “In China. My dad—he worked hard for all of this, and yet it’s still not enough, because we have a giant mortgage on this house and I got into SM Prep on a partial scholarship.” He doesn’t say the words with any inflection. It’s not something he wants Jeno to pity—it’s just a fact. “They wanted me and Sicheng to do well because we’ve always been taught how fleeting money is. I don’t pity you, Jeno. You’re not just some commodity I string along.”
Jeno opens his mouth. Renjun raises a hand. “No you don’t. I’m not done.” Jeno gapes at him. “Something else my parents always told me? When my dad was going into business, as he was rising in the ranks, he told me and Sicheng that the only reason he didn’t go crazy, that he didn’t lose his soul, was because he had people around him. He had friends, and he had my mom, and that made everything worth it.” He sighs. “Just because you’re too bitter to accept an offer of friendship—”
“I don’t need you to preach at me!” Jeno says. “I don’t need you—someone who has everything, no matter how long you’ve had it—to tell me that I need friends! I have friends!”
Renjun shakes his head. “You know,” he says finally. “I didn’t pity you at all. I barely knew anything about you when I offered the first time. I asked you to come around because you seemed cool, and I’ve never been good at making friends but you—you had this way about you. And I really, really liked you.”
Jeno’s mouth goes dry. “Liked me?” he says. “Like—as a friend? As someone you wanted to be friends with?”
Renjun laughs impassionately. “No,” he says. “Like how someone else would like a girl. Like how my parents liked each other, back when they were teenagers in Jilin.” He laughs again, without any mirth in it, and it’s a horrible sound, not like anything Jeno has ever heard from Renjun. “I really should have known, huh? That day when you refused to acknowledge me, when—when you made the decision that saving face was more important than our friendship. I should’ve known that you didn’t care about me the way I cared about you then.”
Jeno blinks. “But—but what about Yeri?” he asks. “How can—how can you just say that you—that you have a crush on me? Had a crush on me? You’re dating someone!”
“Dating who?” Renjun asks blankly.
“Yeri!”
Renjun bursts out laughing. For a second, it looks like this is normal Renjun getting amused by it, but then he stops laughing and his bitter glare returns. “I’m not dating Yeri,” he says slowly. “I’ve had a crush on you since I first came in here. You seemed cool and confident and assured. And then I got to know you and I realized you weren’t any of those things, that you weren’t as certain as you liked to make yourself our to be and that you were funny and caring and interesting—but that wasn’t a bad thing. I thought I might want to get to know you.”
“Thought?” Jeno asks. “Thought—past tense?”
“Yeah,” Renjun says. “Thought—past tense. Because no matter how funny and interesting you might be, I figured out that you didn’t really care about me. You weren’t caring at all. All you saw me as was—how much money I had, and the house I lived in.” He swallows. “You’re a dick, Lee Jeno.”
And normally, Renjun swearing was the least intimidating thing Jeno had ever seen. But Jeno supposes that swearing is, in itself, an art. And just like books and music felt bleak and meaningless and unimportant when the creator didn’t mean it, so did swearing. Renjun swearing when he didn’t mean it was something like a foreign language, akin to Jeno randomly speaking French, but Renjun swearing when he did mean it—that was something else.
“Renjun,” Jeno begins.
Renjun shakes his head. “You know what?” he says. “I don’t wanna hear it.”
“I do care about you!” Jeno blurts, but even as he says it it sounds flimsy. Had he? Or was Renjun right—had he just been overthinking everything, his brain focusing on all the wrong things and not even thinking about the boy in front of him?
His friendship with Renjun was something faraway, that Jeno struggled to grasp. Just like college, and his future, and all the things he wanted to have and all the things he wanted to do. But Jeno thinks that maybe his subconscious was right—maybe all those things were in reach, and all he needed to do was to build a ladder, was to build up compromises and climb the rungs past all the uncomfortable roadblocks that stood in his way.
Maybe he was afraid.
“Fuck you,” Renjun says. He opens his mouth again, and then shuts it, shaking his head and leaving the store. The bell rings as he leaves.
Jeno watches him go. He lets himself feel the pang.
“And that brings the story up to now,” Jeno finishes, sighing loudly. Mark’s room had been silent as Jeno was telling the story, not even punctuating it with questions or commentary. “That was two weeks ago.”
Jaemin picks up the completed cassette tape. “Are you going to give him this?” he asks.
“No,” Jeno says. “No, why would I—no. It’s just something I made to get my feelings out. It’s stupid and obsessive and weird to make a whole mixtape about someone who doesn’t even think you—care about him.” He trails off.
“Bingo!” Jaemin says. “You want to prove to Renjun that you care about him? Just—give him this. And let him play it. He’ll figure out everything you want to say, and then it’s up to him whether he wants to accept it or not.”
“I want to tell him,” Jeno says. “With words. My words.”
“And you’ll be able to,” Mark says. “If he accepts what you want to say, you’ll be able to, because it sounds like he cares about you too and if you can prove it—then you’ve got a space to say it in.” He smiles. “Where’s the Lee Jeno who argued for song lyrics being just as important as poetry? Who said that music is an evolved version of the written word?”
Jeno laughs. “He’s right here,” he says.
“Then show it to Renjun,” Mark says. “Show him that that version of you exists, and that you want him to know it.”
“I believe in you!” Donghyuck adds. He raises his hand in a fist, grinning, and Jeno thinks that he’s wrong when he calls Jeno bad at being punk for being too nice. Donghyuck is nice—Mark is nice—Jaemin is nice. They’re all nice, in their own way, all lovable and caring and nice, and Jeno thinks maybe he could be all of that, too, if he just gave people a chance.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll—I’ll give him the tape.”
Renjun doesn’t open the door, though, when Jeno reaches his house. Rather, a girl does—pretty, her hair dyed platinum blonde and in some complex hairstyle that Jeno was pretty sure defied gravity.
“Can I help you?” she asks.
“Uh, yeah,” Jeno says, sliding the tape out of his pocket. “I’m looking for Renjun?”
“And who are you?” the girl asks.
“I could ask you the same question,” Jeno says.
“Yeri,” she answers. Things start to make sense. Yeri doesn’t look like Jeno had imagined her—she’s wearing black, her jeans have rips in them, and her hair is dyed. Another jigsaw piece fits into place; or rather, Jeno realizes a jigsaw piece he had desperately tried to fit in doesn’t even belong to the same puzzle. This is the person who is Renjun’s best friend—she’s not some technicolour all-American dream girl, she’s real and different and giving Jeno a glare. “And you?”
“Jeno,” Jeno says.
Her face falls slightly. “Ah.” Jeno realizes that, just as he was talking to Mark and Donghyuck and Jaemin, Renjun was busy talking to Yeri. The look on her face makes him think he didn’t get a very good portrayal. “Well, he’s not here.”
“Okay,” Jeno says. “Okay, that’s—that’s fine.” He raises the hand that holds the cassette tape. “Can you give him this, though? I made it—it’s for him, and if he wants to—to listen to it…”
Yeri glances at him skeptically, and then to the tape. “Alright,” she says finally, a suspicious look not leaving her eyes. “I’ll take it.” She takes it from his hand and moves to close the door, and then stops, the door mostly closed. “You know you fucked up, right?”
“Yeah,” Jeno says. “But I’d like to make amends for it.”
He’s closing up when the bell atop the door rings. Jeno had never before been more thankful for getting a little noise to notify him when someone walked in—even when the person was wearing a bright shirt with an even brighter sweater wrapped around his shoulders, the combination of which could probably be seen from space.
“I know you’re closing now,” Renjun says. “But I listened to your tape.”
Jeno exhales. “Ah.”
“It answered a lot of my questions,” Renjun says. “But it also gave me a few more.” He sighs. “If that’s how you felt, why did you react like that? Why did you spend all that time pushing me away?”
Jeno shrugs. “I don’t know.”
Renjun tilts his head to one side. “I think you do,” he says. Calm, conversational. Jeno knows that the Renjun he knows, the shy sweet clever Renjun he knows, is somewhere below all of that—but that that’s not all Renjun is, and that this version of Renjun who knows what he wants and knows how he’s going to get it is just as much Renjun as the version he knows. There’s layers in both of them—there’s layers in most people, just like the books that Jeno reads and the universe that Renjun is fascinated by.
“I’m scared,” Jeno says finally. “I’m scared of failing. I’m scared of—of heartbreak.”
“You know, I get it,” Renjun says. “But—being scared doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything out of fear of falling.”
Jeno nods. “I’m not going to stop being afraid if I go out with you,” he says.
Renjun nods back. There’s a little smile on his face, small but threatening to grow, his eyes already lightening up with that familiar smile. It’s not a sunny smile, Jeno realizes—Renjun isn’t like the sun. Instead, he’s like the stars that he so desperately wants to study—so far away but each their own personality, following the rules of physics but always managing to bend them.
“I know,” he says. “I don’t want to just—go out with you right now, anyway. But I want to at some point. Because despite everything—I really like you, and I want to get to know you, and I want to be there for you. Because you’re funny, and interesting—and caring.”
Jeno smiles. He lets it reach his eyes. Renjun smiles back.
And things aren’t okay, really. Jeno’s problems aren’t solved because of a boy with his head in the stars, a boy who was pretty much an entire galaxy himself. He’s still going to go home and he still doesn’t know what he’s doing with his life and he still doesn’t even know if he can pay his way through college.
But he thinks he can do them. He thinks he can force himself to be brave enough to try. His entire life he’d thought bravery was something you were born with, but just like everything else it wasn’t. It was something you worked for, something you held onto—something you had to grasp onto for dear life, like the bars in the carriages of a rollercoaster.
Things aren’t okay, but it feels like they might become okay. And Jeno's ready, he thinks—ready to try.