Chapter Text
“What do you mean it broke down?” Byeongkwan wasn’t really asking for an explanation. He was asking for a miracle. Like, maybe if he forced Junhee to explain it again then time would somehow rewind to ten minutes ago so that he wouldn’t have to deal with the despair of what he’d just been told.
“Exactly what I told you,” Junhee said over the phone. “She’s dead. One hundred percent dead, like, the engine’s one bad pothole from literally just dropping out of the damn car.”
Byeongkwan groaned. He tangled his fingers into the phone cord, silently counting to ten while he notched the loops around one finger and then the next, turning his whole hand over just to see it stretch the cord from where it was plugged into the wall. In that slow count to ten, he tried not to completely catastrophize even though there wasn’t a single positive that he could pull out of this situation. Junhee was the only one of them with a car. They were supposed to leave for Cali in two days.
Junhee’s voice cut through his thoughts. “Okay but do you want the good news?”
“There’s good news to be had?”
“Don’t be a drama queen.” Byeongkwan found the suggestion deeply insulting. He was planning to major in dance; how could he not be a drama queen? “Do you remember, um. Donghun?”
Byeongkwan was so glad Junhee couldn’t see him smirking. If he were in a better mood, he’d be needling him for hours about that embarrassed little pause before he said Donghun’s name. Even though Donghun had graduated last year, Junhee had still nursed a crush on the guy. He’d gone on a bunch of weekend trips to Brooklyn under the pretense of a ‘college visit’ even though they’d both committed to Pace ages ago.
“Oh, I remember Donghun, why?” Byeongkwan asked, sly and teasing.
“He’s got a friend there who’s actually going to the same concert. He was gonna fly but he said that if we pitch in for gas and take turns driving…he’s got a car.”
Byeongkwan whooped and then clapped a hand over his mouth. His mom was watching TV in the living room and God help anyone who interrupted her fifth Coffee Prince rewatch.
“I mean, I could be good with that,” Byeongkwan said, scowling at the phone when he heard Junhee laughing on the other end. “Wait…why did you hesitate to tell me?”
There was a long pause that made Byeongkwan’s suspicions only rise. “Junhee…” he crooned into the phone. “Junhee, what aren’t you telling me?”
Junhee let out a long sigh. “Do you remember that one girl in drama club? The one you kept going to Pinkberry with?”
“Eunsuh? Yeah, what about her.” He and Eunsuh were friends but he hadn’t heard from her in ages. She’d gotten scouted by some Korean modeling company in the middle of junior year and moved to Seoul or something.
“It’s her brother.”
Oh. That wasn’t good at all.
“Her brother, Junhee!?” Byeongkwan repeated. “Does he know I’m on this trip?”
Junhee’s continued long silences were getting more and more damning.
“He already has a ticket and he’s already promised us his car. And, I mean, he went to the same school as us. He knows Donghun’s my friend and that I’m your friend so…”
“He hates me! Do you remember that time we brought Eunsuh home after that one late rehearsal for Into the Woods? He was staring murder at me.”
“Kwannie. It’s not gonna be that long. And I’m sure Donghun told him. Plus, we all can drive, so he’ll need us. And we have the hotel reservation in San Francisco. I booked it myself, remember?”
“That doesn’t guarantee he won’t bail.”
Junhee gave another long sigh but Byeongkwan had known him for so long that he could read a whole dialect in Junhee’s weird noises. This sigh had a longsuffering tinge of ‘you’re an idiot’ with after notes of ‘shut up, I got this.’
“Okay but consider. His car is almost new. It’s got a music hookup so we can just put playlists on our iPods and Zunes and stuff…”
“We don’t have to burn CDs?”
“No burning a CD.”
“Well shit, I’m in.”
- - -
At least Yuchan was delighted by the change of vehicle. “Okay, when you said you found us a new car, you didn’t say it was so awesome!” He was running toward the car before it was even fully turned in and Byeongkwan had a split-second fear that their road trip was going to end before it began because they had to scrape Yuchan off the windshield.
Junhee reacted faster than he did and grabbed their friend by his backpack strap. “Be cool. You’re gonna have the next, like, two weeks to examine that thing.”
The car pulled to a stop and idled in the driveway. Donghun hopped out first and Byeongkwan had to stifle a laugh at the way Yuchan and Junhee both stood a little bit straighter. To be entirely fair to them, Donghun got super hot from a year of art school. His hair was now bleached a silver blond with dark roots peeking through and he sported a nose piercing. He looked every inch the kind of person who’d drive to an Enfants Sauvages concert cross country. He looked cool.
Byeongkwan was taking a second to fantasize about what it’d be like when he was at school, living in the dorms and free to do all manner of stupid things to his hair. It was a second too long because he didn’t hear the driver’s side door open.
“Jason Kim?” The little-used name dragged him back to reality and Byeongkwan stiffened. When his family had moved to Flushing during his sophomore year, Byeongkwan hadn’t been used to living in a school district where people could actually pronounce his name. He’d spent most of his school career with the less self-esteem-destroying ‘Jason.’
“I use my Korean name now,” he said. Sehyoon looked away, some kind of weird expression on his face. It gave Byeongkwan too much time to notice how Sehyoon’s hair was longer, kind of shaggy. Either the sun or a bottle of dye had turned his hair a chocolatey sort of brown. There was a slight divot in his lip, like there had been a piercing whose jewelry was removed. He looked pretty cool too, actually. The kind of person Byeongkwan might have tried really hard to impress.
Sehyoon nodded but kept his eyes trained on the pile of duffel bags in the driveway. “Donghun mentioned we were driving with Junhee’s friends.”
What a disappointment it must have been to realize which friends those were. Byeongkwan forced a laugh and patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, you’ll hardly notice I’m here!” he promised. Then he breezed past Sehyoon to grab all three duffel bags by their straps in one hand. As he walked toward the trunk, he heard a click as the hatch sprung open. Sehyoon had opened it for him with the key fob.
And, okay. It was a super nice car. It must have been barely a year old (a graduation present?) and one seat in the third row had been unfolded, meaning that no one in the second row was going to be stuck in the miserable middle seat (Yuchan).
Byeongkwan stowed everyone’s bags, tucking them neatly in against a hard case for a guitar while his brain tried to formulate a plan. “I call back row!” Byeongkwan said. It would put the most space between the two of them.
He could hear Yuchan protesting behind him with a loud, “What!? Not fair!”
“We’re going to probably switch around a lot anyway. It’s a forty-hour drive.” There was Junhee, as ever, oscillating between absolute chaos and the voice of reason.
“But I wanted the back row!”
“Channie. You’ll get the back row eventually.”
Before the argument could erupt into Seatgate 2008, Sehyoon put a hand up. “Rock, Paper, Scissors? I’ll take first leg of driving and we can switch around? Winners pick their seats first.”
Rock, Paper, Scissors was the great arbiter of the universe and Junhee and Donghun already had their fists out and Yuchan was quick to follow. Byeongkwan shook his head and added his too.
Donghun won the first round and called shotgun. Junhee and Yuchan both pulled scissors on Byeongkwan’s paper. “Go ahead,” Junhee said. “I wanted the middle row anyway. You’re stuck with me, Kwannie.”
Byeongkwan gave Yuchan his best icy glare and hoped his friend understood that he had betrayed him, without having to explain that a betrayal had happened at all, or why. Yuchan stuck his tongue out at him and climbed into the back row through the hatch door.
“I’ve got to say bye to my parents but if we go soon, we could probably grab coffee or something,” Junhee said, nodding back at the house.
“I brought, like, three boxes of Pop Tarts!” Yuchan added helpfully.
Donghun hung his head. “Pop Tarts aren’t coffee, Channie.”
“But they go with coffee.”
From his spot in the left seat, Byeongkwan looked back and forth from the passenger seat to the back row like this was a game of tennis. If they were actually fighting, he might have been worried about the forecast of their trip but he knew they were just talking shit for the sake of it. Yuchan had missed Donghun, probably more than even Junhee would admit to.
As their not argument devolved into nonsense (“If you think about it, a Pop Tart is really just a ravioli.”) Byeongkwan accidentally caught Sehyoon’s eyes where they looked up into the rearview mirror. From the way his eyebrows raised, Byeongkwan knew he’d seen it.
But it would be okay. All he had to do was make sure he didn’t provoke Sehyoon with…whatever it was that had bothered him so much. It would be…fine.
The door popped open opposite Byeongkwan and Junhee climbed in, slinging his backpack into the space between them. “Okay. Are you ready?”
“Yeah, just gotta start my playlist,” Donghun said. As the door shut, Sehyoon turned the keys in the ignition and they rolled out of the driveway to the opening notes of Green Day’s Holiday to start the trip off right.
- - -
“Okay but how are we still in Pennsylvania?” The question jarred Byeongkwan awake. Rubbing his eyes, he peeled his face off the window and tried not to make it obvious he’d been drooling. The last thing he needed was for Sehyoon to reproach him for getting spit on his car.
As he rose back to consciousness, Byeongkwan registered that the question had come from Junhee, who had his hands pressed up against the glass on his own window. “Why is this state so wide. This is just unnecessary!”
Donghun twisted around to face Junhee through the gap between the chairs, grinning. “Don’t complain yet, we haven’t even hit, like, the really wide, flat ones.”
“Or Ohio,” Yuchan added. “We’re not even in Ohio yet.”
“Okay but, seriously, we’ve been in Pennsylvania all day!”
“That’s not true,” Byeongkwan said, finally entering the conversation. “We went through New Jersey first.”
“Doesn’t count.”
“How does it not count?” Yuchan leaned forward in his seat to poke the back of Junhee’s head like that was going to give him answers somehow.
“Because we’re from Queens.”
Yuchan flicked the back of Junhee’s head this time. “Please know that if we were in the same row, I would bite you.”
In the front row, Sehyoon laughed and pointed to the little GPS unit that was suction cupped to the windshield. “Maybe wait on making fun of Ohio until tomorrow. Because that’s probably where we’re gonna stop tonight.”
It was the most Byeongkwan had heard from him since they stopped for coffee before heading out for San Francisco for real.
“Besides, there’s nothing wrong with Ohio…” Donghun started, his voice pitching up musically on the last syllables.
Junhee caught on first, grinning at Byeongkwan before they joined in. “Except the snow and the rain!” By the time they got through the ‘Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,’ they’d launched into a whole car singalong.
“So when you’re done doing whatever! And you’re through doing whoever! You know Denton County will be right here, waiting for you!” The five of them bellowed. Donghun was scrolling through his iPod, thumb making frantic circles around the click wheel as he hunted for Bowling for Soup. Ohio (Come Back to Texas) began again and they all took it from the top, scream-singing about the benefits of going back to a state they’d never seen.
By the time they hit the final Besides the Mexican food sucks north of here anyway! they were all laughing and Byeongkwan felt like he was going to actually enjoy this trip. For real.
- - -
Well, there was this to be said in favor of Ohio: the roadside service plazas were pretty nice. Also, kind of UFO-shaped, which Byeongkwan figured was a design choice made as a consolation given to anyone who had to be in this state.
Yuchan had dragged Junhee and Donghun into the local tchotchke shop but Byeongkwan had ducked out. Six hours of driving with only one other stop for gas and snacks made him eager for some fresh air while he could get it. He’d gotten his Starbucks and a pizza slice and gone outside to eat.
Sehyoon, apparently, had had a similar idea. He was at one of the picnic tables just beyond the walkway, feet braced on the bench so that he could sit on the table proper. There was an unopened Burger King bag next to him. His focus was on the sketchbook braced against his knees. Byeongkwan could follow the line of his sight over to the flowers planted nearby. Curiosity drew him faster than caution and he walked over to join Sehyoon, glancing at the sketchbook.
The lines were pretty rough, indicative of the speed of his pencil, but there were several distinct flowers that he’d clearly sketched out. If Byeongkwan stood where he stood, he’d probably be able to match each of the different rosebushes to their flowers.
“You drew all that in five minutes?” he asked.
Even though he’d made no effort to be sneaky, Sehyoon had apparently just been that absorbed in sketching because he startled and almost dropped his pencil. He shot Byeongkwan a Look and then flipped the book closed. The hard cover slapped down like a condemnation.
“I was just sketching. They’re not real drawings.” Sehyoon rubbed a hand over his face and shoved the sketchbook into his messenger bag. He’d gone from seeming angry to just…flustered, something Byeongkwan wouldn’t have expected from him.
“How are they not real? You put pencil on paper and made lines.”
“They’re not finished.”
“So?” Byeongkwan sat down on the next picnic table, putting a little distance between the two of them. “I don’t really draw. So they look finished to me. They looked good.” He spoke more to his pizza slice than to Sehyoon, realizing that he’d forgotten his earlier promise to be barely noticeable.
Sehyoon mumbled something that sounded like a thank you, equally directed more at his burger than to Byeongkwan. “To me, they’re just practice. I don’t want to just forget how to draw over the summer.”
“How can you forget how to draw?”
“You dance, right?”
“Yeah.”
In the corner of Byeongkwan’s vision, Sehyoon changed position, which he figured was as much permission as any to look at him properly. He was looking in Byeongkwan’s direction, though not quite in Byeongkwan’s eyes. When he spoke, it was still mostly addressed to his burger. “If you don’t dance for a week and then you go into rehearsal, it’s not going to feel like it should, right?”
“Oh. That makes sense,” Byeongkwan said. He took a thoughtful bite of pizza, a little disturbed by how the crappy pizza was somehow comfortingly familiar as they went to new places.
As they ate, they lapsed back into silence and Byeongkwan felt an uncomfortable need to fill it somehow but every conversational topic he could think of sounded stale. How was he supposed to casually ask if Sehyoon liked Brooklyn or if the mark in his lip was from a scar or a piercing? They all sounded stale when what he mostly wanted to ask Sehyoon why he’d looked so pissed off when he drove Eunsuh home from rehearsal. It wasn’t like he exactly posed a threat to his sister’s honor or anything. Byeongkwan had made it known from the second he figured it out in sophomore year. Girls were perfectly nice, as friendly human beings, but nowhere in Byeongkwan’s realm of romantic interest.
And Sehyoon was friends with Donghun, so he was pretty sure it wasn’t homophobia. So, what gave?
Before Byeongkwan could actually formulate a casual, no pressure way to ask Sehyoon why he hated him, the visitor plaza doors slid open. Junhee and Donghun came out, carrying a shopping bag each of odds and ends, plus bags of lunch. Yuchan followed with a cheeseburger in one hand and a bag of nothing but Slim Jims and M&Ms in the other, plus one piece of paper from the pamphlet stand.
“Guys, there’s a restaurant in Cleveland that sells only grilled cheese sandwiches. We have to go and check it out!” Yuchan said, waving the cardstock at them.
- - -
Yuchan’s grilled cheese restaurant was not, in fact, some kind of fever dream. They’d plugged the address into Sehyoon’s GPS and followed it there, cutting through the downtown area and driving over a bridge decorated with massive stone guardians to cross the river.
(“Did you know? This is the river that caught fire, like, fifteen times?” Yuchan had read off the browser on his phone. “This place is famous!”)
Byeongkwan’s stomach had waved the white flag around halfway through his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, because a sandwich with pizza rolls inside of it wasn’t exactly light fixings. Everyone else had made similarly valiant efforts but they were all rolling out of the restaurant with takeout boxes. Yuchan was picking at his fries while Donghun and Sehyoon scrolled through hotels on the GPS unit.
“If we do another hour of driving, there’s a La Holiday Roof Inn situation. Those don’t usually cost much right?” Donghun said, twisting back to check with them.
“By the highway? Nah. Just don’t wave a blacklight at anything we don’t want to know about,” Junhee said. He’d flipped his phone open and was painstakingly typing out a search for hotel prices on the number pad.
Byeongkwan was trying to do the same thing, since his phone had twice the keys and required half the typing. “Probably something like seventy to eighty,” he guessed, clicking down the web results. “I’ve been saving all year for this concert, so I’m good with that.”
If his parents knew how much of his savings he was prepared to dump into this trip, they’d scold him, but it wasn’t every day that his favorite band announced a farewell worldwide tour. Besides, what was the point of going to college an hour away from home if he couldn’t save his quarters by taking laundry home over the weekend?
He was pretty sure they’d all be okay. Byeongkwan knew that Junhee and Yuchan had been doing the same as him, working part time and stuffing all their red envelopes, birthday money, and graduation cash into piggy banks and bank accounts. Sehyoon’s parents were loaded (though he had the decency to be quietly embarrassed about it) and Donghun had been working for forever.
There was a general murmur of assent.
“I’m prepared to blow all of my savings on this trip,” Yuchan said lightly, like it wasn’t going to cost him dearly. “Do you think one of the places we stay will have a pool? I brought trunks, did you guys?”
Their highway-side lodgings for the night did not have a pool, it turned out, but it cost less than they were expecting. They paid up front and piled into their room and that was that. Byeongkwan didn’t want to admit to it but he hadn’t traveled much before and hadn’t expected it to just be that easy.
They’d barely gotten their shoes off before Donghun was hunting through one of their bags. “I’m gonna bleach Sehyoon’s hair. Anyone mind?”
“Nah,” Junhee said, speaking for all of them. From anyone else, it would have annoyed Byeongkwan immensely. “But we get to pick what we watch on TV.” Donghun answered that with a thumbs up and then crooked a finger at Sehyoon to follow him to the bathroom.
As soon as the bathroom door shut, Junhee and Yuchan sat on one of the beds. After silent, inexplicable eye contact, Yuchan not-so-subtly hooked his ankle into the strap of Donghun’s bag and tugged it towards the bed they’d claimed.
“You two are so dumb,” Byeongkwan said. “Also, you’re trying to get me killed.”
Junhee rolled over onto his back, head lolling over the edge so that he looked at Byeongkwan upside down. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Bullshit. I know you both have the hots for Donghun and you want to spoon him or whatever. Super transparent, by the way, but that means Sehyoon has to share with me.”
Yuchan shrugged. “So? It’s not like you kick or anything.” Junhee ruined Yuchan’s faux-innocence by giggling.
“We don’t like each other,” Byeongkwan hissed, genuinely trying to keep his voice quiet because who even knew how thin the walls were. “And he definitely doesn’t want to get this close to me.”
“Dude, we’re gonna be in the same car for two weeks. We’re all gonna get closer than anyone needs to be if they’re not dating,” Junhee shot back. There was something very dangerous about the way his eyebrows waggled, even upside down.
“Do you have to make it worse?”
Yuchan and Junhee exchanged a look that Byeongkwan did not care for at all.
Predictably, Junhee flipped the TV to Cartoon Network, waiting for Adult Swim to come on and watch Death Note or Code Geass. In the meantime, Byeongkwan stuck out his tongue at them and rummaged into his bag for his DS and headphones, so he could avoid the rest of the conversation. Byeongkwan would pull his earbuds out once Adult Swim was properly on. Until then, it was Kirby time.
About halfway through a rerun of Inuyasha, Sehyoon and Donghun finally came out of the bathroom. The chocolate brown color of his hair had been stripped out to a dark blond. It had a slightly orange tone that Byeongkwan knew meant it needed toner, but the change was dramatic nonetheless.
Over his shoulder, Byeongkwan could see the way Sehyoon touched his hair as he looked at himself in the mirror. His smile was wider than anything Byeongkwan had ever seen in high school or on this trip. The shape of his smile was different too, liked he’d been putting up appearances for ages. It was a specific feeling that Byeongkwan knew well. There was the smile he gave because he was supposed to and the smile he gave when he was truly happy, truly feeling like himself.
Sehyoon’s smile, with his dark eyebrows rising under damp blond bangs, was definitely the second kind.
When he turned around and came over to sit on the bed with Junhee and Yuchan, Byeongkwan also realized he had an answer to his question. Two silver rings glinted on either side of Sehyoon’s lower lip, snake bites. He’d only noticed one of them before. The skin around the jewelry looked a little red–he must have taken his out while he was back with his parents for the break. This Sehyoon, with his obviously unnatural hair color and his double piercings, must be closer to the real Sehyoon than who anyone else in Queens–including his parents–was used to seeing.
Was it weird that it felt kind of intimate?
Clearing his throat and failing to clear the thought away with it, Byeongkwan said, “It looks good.”
Sehyoon looked a little startled to hear it but he turned around with a grateful smile. “Thanks.”
Then his eyes slid from Byeongkwan to the two beds and he raised an eyebrow.
“Yuchannie and I claimed this bed and Byeongkwan’s there,” Junhee explained, looking more at Donghun than Sehyoon, despite his being the one to express curiosity about the bed situation. “So, you know, take whichever.”
An evil, internal part of Byeongkwan’s soul laughed when Donghun crossed the room and sat on the bed next to Byeongkwan. “I can take this one. What about you, Sehni?”
“Do you guys mind if I take that one with you?” Sehyoon asked, pointing at Yuchan and Junhee. Byeongkwan tried not to cackle at the disappointment he knew they must be feeling. It was what they deserved for scheming.
“Well, if that’s figured out, I’m gonna brush my teeth!” Byeongkwan said, bouncing up from his seat to go to the bathroom.
By the time he was in the bathroom, his phone buzzed with a text. Byeongkwan looked at the screen and grinned when he saw it was from Junhee.
Tr8tor! D:<