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When Mi-reu opened his eyes, he thought he was home. He had probably slept in again because the light shining through his bedroom window was much too bright. His mother had made sure to give him extra thin curtains so that at least the sun would wake him but what she had not calculated was how easily he got used to things. If he had to, he could sleep under floodlights.
It took his eyes a few seconds to adjust. The ceiling lamp was gone. He blinked. Still gone.
“Partial blindness?” he asked and his voice came out as a hiss. His throat was parched. His head was heavy on the pillow, so he only attempted to raise his hand enough to touch his face. Something made it hard to move. A tube came out of his arm. He tried to reach it with his other hand but that was stuck in something warm.
He turned his head. And snorted a laugh because there was another error in the room.
“Choi Chi-hoon,” he said. “What happened to the lamp?”
Choi Chi-hoon’s face didn’t move but that did not necessarily mean anything. His looking like a moai was his natural state. Just in case, Mi-reu squinted to check whether it was a picture, but instead of the expression, only the distance changed. Choi Chi-hoon’s face became smaller and then turned to say gibberish into the world outside Mi-reu’s vision.
“It’s just a lamp but I miss it,” Mi-reu said and again looked at the white ceiling that moved around him in a circle.
When he woke up again, he was in pain. It throbbed and filled his head until there was nothing but it left. Pain, pain, pain in a white room that missed a lamp.
His mind, however, slowly made sense of what he saw.
There were sounds he had not heard before. Coughing, beeping, voices outside. Instead of a wall, a curtain cut through the room next to him. It was not too hard to figure out that he was in a hospital bed but he couldn’t remember how he had ended up there.
People in white gowns looked down on him as he drifted in and out of sleep. The pain came in waves and ebbed away whenever someone tampered with his IV.
He had been stabbed. He couldn’t remember why, only that he had been mad when someone had pulled the knife from his side because that was what had caused the bleeding to start. The memory of the blood made him queasy. Wounds had never bothered him. He thought he was immune to stuff like that. But he had never been worried about bleeding out like a gutted pig before.
Blood, blood, blood. Pain, pain, pain. Cold liquid running into his veins like a magical cure that made him feel numb. It was a cycle that never seemed to end.
People walked in and out. His mother cried. His father’s voice boomed through the room. Someone shouted in the distance.
White light changed to orange and blue.
One thing bothered him. One thing still wasn’t right. The missing lamp was correct because this wasn’t his room at home. The IV and the curtain between his bed and his neighbor’s bed also were supposed to be there. But Choi Chi-hoon wasn’t.
He tried to turn his head whenever he thought he saw Chi-hoon but the moment he said something, Chi-hoon disappeared. He only stayed when Mi-reu settled for glaring. It probably made sense that he could will Chi-hoon into existing like that. That was what their whole dynamic was like. He just didn’t understand what part of his brain thought that he needed to have him around. Probably a primordial one. Probably the one he had excavated and then buried a few months earlier.
Maybe it was karma.
He didn’t know how much time passed until his body stopped being a blob of pain. But as he slowly felt a little more mobile, he also became a lot more aware of dream and reality.
Chi-hoon was real. Which made no sense but was a fact Mi-reu found harder and harder to deny. Chi-hoon sat at the window on the left side of the bed with a notepad and moved the curtain and talked to nurses and sat on the right side of the bed with a laptop propped up on his knees. He never actually got close, as if he lived in a parallel world and as if Mi-reu only watched him through a one-way mirror. When Mi-reu was still, it stayed like that. When he stirred, Chi-hoon got up and a nurse appeared. He was a watchdog. Mi-reu didn’t know why.
He had a headache but felt less light-headed than before when he tried to establish contact again. The light around him was orange. He didn’t know if that meant that it was morning or evening.
“So I guess the tables have turned,” he said. His voice was hoarse but it still startled him to hear it coming from his throat. It boomed.
Chi-hoon looked up from the book on his lap and narrowed his eyes.
“You know, since you were in the hospital before and I was the one who…” Mi-reu said and trailed off because he figured that Chi-hoon wasn’t the kind of person who was interested in reminiscing. “Whatever, forget it. How long have I been out?”
Chi-hoon didn’t reply and for a moment, Mi-reu wondered if he was imagining him after all. Maybe he had completely lost it. Maybe he would have to spend the rest of his life being followed by a mute Choi Chi-hoon, like a reminder of all the mistakes he had made along the way. Being stabbed only was the latest one in a series.
Chi-hoon looked at his watch and then said, “It’s been three days.” His voice was perfectly even and devoid of any discernible emotion but that in itself was the most comforting thing Mi-reu had heard in what felt like an eternity. He was real. This was real. Life was more than eternal pain.
He laughed and accidentally choked which caused Chi-hoon to flinch. He turned around, probably about to call a nurse. Mi-reu wasn’t in extreme pain, so he didn’t want to be knocked out again now that he finally felt a little saner. He quickly cleared his throat. “So you can respond after all,” he said, still croaking.
Chi-hoon did not look convinced that he was fine but said, “There was nothing to respond to before. You slurred.”
Mi-reu grimaced because that made it only worse. It was as if the universe had decided to pay him back for all the times he had taken advantage of Chi-hoon’s immobility when he had broken his leg. Getting stuck in corners with a wheelchair and nearly sliding down a flight of stairs wasn’t cool. Mi-reu had sufficiently laughed at him for that. But repeatedly trying to chat someone up without being able to say anything intelligible? That was pitiful to a painful degree.
“Good thing it was you and not someone pettier who would use that against me,” Mi-reu said and tried to lift himself up a little. His side hurt but he thought he could manage. His back also felt stiff from lying for so long, so he figured he would have to be in some kind of pain anyway. If he moved, he at least avoided bed sores.
Chi-hoon stood up but seemed unsure what to do. He turned towards the curtain and then finally helped elevate the head of the bed a little and prop the pillow up behind Mi-reu’s back. Normally, Mi-reu would have made a fuss about not wanting to look helpless but found himself too exhausted to bother. There also was something else. Something he had convinced himself he wouldn’t ever miss.
For a few seconds, Chi-hoon was very close.
For a few heartbeats, Mi-reu felt that ache again. Wanting to be close. Not caring about what any of that meant. Just living for those moments when touch felt right.
“Why is it you anyway?” he asked when Chi-hoon leaned over him to adjust the blanket.
Chi-hoon halted for a moment with his hand very close to Mi-reu’s side, as if it was a question that needed some deliberation. He smelled. Not necessarily bad. Not unclean. Just a lot less sickening and sterile than the rest of the room. Enough that Mi-reu had to fight the urge to try and hold onto him.
“I was the only volunteer,” Chi-hoon said when he finally moved away and sat back down on the chair.
“Right,” Mi-reu said because he doubted that Chi-hoon would lie. But unless everyone else outside the hospital had perished, he didn’t see how it could possibly be the truth.
The afternoon turned into night and Chi-hoon went away. All he left was his notepad on the nightstand. Mi-reu nearly rolled off the bed when he tried to retrieve it and ended up panting from exhaustion, just to look at calculations in what might have been the world’s ugliest handwriting.
“So I guess not everything you do is neat,” he said to the notepad.
He found himself tracing some numbers with his fingers and felt stupid about it, so he tried to fling the whole thing back on the nightstand. He missed. It clattered to the floor. Behind the curtain, someone groaned.
The next morning, the nurse allowed him to call his mother with an old-fashioned mobile handset because his phone probably was in the drawer in his dorm room where he had left it.
He wasn’t sure whether she even knew that he was hospitalized. He thought he had heard her but at some point, he had also thought that the ceiling was caving in.
“We had to hurry back because we couldn’t close the store for that long. Sun-hee quit because your father argued with her again. You know what he is like. We will visit you as soon as we can. I’m just so glad that your friend said he would take care of you.”
“Right,” he said because most of it made sense. His parents ran a grocery store in the countryside where people actually depended on them. There was no time to sit at the bedside of a son who most likely was fine. He wasn’t in the intensive care unit, so they had probably deduced that he would be up and running soon. Everyone knew that the people in his family were indestructible like weeds.
But it did strike him as negligent to assume that Choi Chi-hoon could be anyone’s friend.
“There were ten in total,” Chi-hoon said in an eerily calm tone, like a newscaster squeezing the summary of a gruesome murder in between the weather forecast and traffic updates. “Most only had superficial cuts. You and one of the PE teachers were the only ones who were hospitalized. He had a punctured lung and a concussion from falling down a flight of stairs, so he needed surgery and currently is in a vegetative state.”
“Fuck,” Mi-reu said because that put his own wound into perspective, but also triggered his memories to a certain degree. A boy from first grade had gone on a rampage the day the results of a big test were announced. It had probably been the first time he had been faced with his own mortality. Mi-reu had not exactly gone around trying to physically hurt people but he couldn’t blame anyone in that situation. In first grade, he himself had lost his footing, too. The school had that kind of effect.
“That was the last time I try and play the hero,” he said and knew that he fooled himself into being more heroic than he really had been. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had tried to wrestle the knife from the boy after he had seen a girl with a bloody leg, but had he not walked down that corridor by chance, he wouldn’t have been involved at all. It was the winter holidays all over again. He had ended up in the middle of something he wasn’t supposed to be a part of.
“That’s unlikely,” Chi-hoon said. “There are people who avoid confrontations and others who don’t. It’s a matter of natural disposition.”
Mi-reu scoffed and wiggled because the pillow behind had slipped away. Only pillows could cause that kind of level of minor discomfort. “Thanks for thinking of me as a confrontational kind of person but I think I’ll opt for the personality makeover. Cowards seem to live the better lives, so cowardice it shall be.”
Chi-hoon didn’t respond and instead leaned forward to help with the pillow. He held it until Mi-reu sighed in relief because the position was finally right. When Chi-hoon retrieved his hand, it grazed Mi-reu’s back in a way that did not seem completely accidental. Mi-reu tried not to see it as more than it was.
There was another memory, too. One that opened more questions.
The boy who had stabbed Mi-reu had also pulled the knife which had caused the blood to gush out of him like a bizarre fountain. He had been the victim but people had jumped out of his way as though open wounds were contagious, so he had stumbled a few steps into what he thought was the direction of the nurse room. His vision had become blurred and he had fallen into something. Someone. Someone who caused him to gasp in pain when he had pressed against the wound. Someone who had told him to stop moving. Someone who just couldn’t be nice in moments like that but whose presence had been painfully reassuring.
He wanted to joke about it. He obviously wasn’t the only one who constantly plunged into dangerous situations like a fool.
But instead, he asked, “Did you bring any games?” It was the safer topic.
“No,” Chi-hoon said.
“Not even on your phone?” Mi-reu asked.
Chi-hoon seemed to ponder about that for a moment and then said, “No.”
“Wow,” Mi-reu said and shook his head in mock exasperation. “You give me no choice but to deduct points when I rate your qualities as a hospital visitor. If getting stabbed doesn’t kill me, the boredom will.”
It was a joke but Chi-hoon didn’t react and that was probably what it was supposed to be like.
Later that day, Chi-hoon handed him a pack of cards. It was an old set, so the outside felt a little grimy.
“You want to play?” Mi-reu asked and couldn’t decide if he was more confused at the idea of them sitting together for a friendly card game, or because Chi-hoon had actually followed his request.
“No,” Chi-hoon said and turned away to leave again.
Mi-reu scoffed. “Then why bring me a set of cards? What do you think people do with this?”
Chi-hoon chose to pretend not to hear him and disappeared behind the curtain.
He opted for playing solitaire on the overbed table one nurse had helped him set up. It was boring but better than staring at the wall, so he succumbed to that new fate of his.
Instead of Chi-hoon, a young nurse appeared to hook him up to a fresh IV bag. She probably wasn’t that much older than him and hummed a melody when she connected the tubes. The first few seconds, when he could feel the cold liquid dripping in his veins, always made him uncomfortable and she probably sensed that because she sounded very kind when she asked, “Oh, is that the card game?”
He looked at the cards on the table. It struck him that he had no idea where Chi-hoon would have even found them. They obviously weren’t freshly bought.
“It was really cute when your boyfriend asked about that in the nurse’s station,” the nurse said. “He wanted a game but didn’t seem sure what kind, so the head nurse gave him one another patient left behind.”
Mi-reu was too stupefied and could only stare at her for a few seconds. She clearly misunderstood and said, “It wasn’t a patient who passed away. In fact, he probably was the most lively 90-year-old I ever met. Had a bit of a gambling problem, so we constantly had to seize his cards. He left five sets of go-stop cards but we can’t give that to-.”
“Sorry but,” Mi-reu said before she could prattle on. “My what asked you for the cards?”
She frowned at first, but then her eyes quickly widened. “Oh,” she said and put her hand in front of her mouth. “I’m so sorry. That’s what all the nurses call him. Your friend. It’s just so rare to see someone so young who cares so diligently about someone his age. You sometimes see that with children and their parents, or well, with…” She paused. Lovers. That was probably the word.
“Because he asked for a game?”
“Oh, no,” the nurse said. “I think the name popped up when we had to get him a hospital smock because he refused to return to the school and insisted on waiting until you were awake. We told him that it might take a while but he didn’t care and his clothes were covered in blood. That’s what started it I think. Some nurses assumed his girlfriend was hospitalized. Not that, you know, it would make a difference. He could have a hospitalized boyfriend. That’s not unusual today, I suppose. But anyway…” She trailed off because she probably realized that she started rambling.
The words only slowly sunk in. It was like trying to analyze an ancient Chinese poem in class. Mi-reu didn’t know what to make of it.
“He’s not,” he said. “He’s just…”
He didn’t know what Choi Chi-hoon was. Not a friend. Not a rival. Just…
He was in the middle of swinging his legs over the edge of the bed to try and stand up when Chi-hoon returned from whatever journey he had been on for the day. The late afternoon light dyed him in a warm glow that was completely uncalled for.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that yet,” he said.
Mi-reu clicked his tongue. His side hurt but it was nice to properly air his back. It felt sweaty and dull from lying. He looked at his toes wiggling on the linoleum floor. “Makes me sick to be cooped up here all day though.”
Chi-hoon came a little closer and Mi-reu half expected him to manhandle him back into a lying position. The thought was funny. But instead, Chi-hoon handed him a phone. He looked up but it was probably stupid to assume that Chi-hoon’s expression would give him a clue. “What’s that for?”
“Stay here for the moment and play games,” Chi-hoon said. For someone supposedly so smart, he had a knack for throwing answers into the room that only caused more questions.
“What else am I supposed to do other than stay here?” Mi-reu asked. Chi-hoon already walked away again. “And you said there were no games on your phone. Is that even your phone? Is that another thing a patient left behind?”
“There were no games. Now there are,” Chi-hoon said. And was gone.
“What the hell?” Mi-reu muttered and turned the phone around in his hand. It was just a regular, possibly very expensive phone but the whole thing seemed like a trap. It also made him vaguely uncomfortable to hold something that belonged to Chi-hoon. It was like the notepad. Like a glimpse at the inner workings of someone he couldn’t understand anyway.
He sighed.
The phone was unlocked, and the home screen hilariously looked like that of a burner phone. The calculator app was right to KakaoTalk. Instead of a wallpaper, the background was just a dull shade of blue. The games were in a folder called ‘Kang Mi-reu’ and entirely seemed like something a ten-year-old would pick. Maybe that was what had happened. The great Choi Chi-hoon had consulted a boy and had then spent all day chasing him down because he had stolen his phone.
It was stupid. And yet. Yet it was nice. But that was the problem. Chi-hoon wasn’t supposed to be nice and Mi-reu wasn’t supposed to be confused because of a folder with his name on the phone of someone like that.
“Better have embarrassing photos on there I can blackmail you with,” he said because it made him feel in control to be petty.
Most photos were of whiteboards and scales and textbook pages. Black letters in an ocean of white. That was probably what he should have expected. If a psychopathic serial killer had found nothing to blackmail him with, Mi-reu wouldn’t either. At the very end, there was a group selfie. Mi-reu had met Chi-hoon’s parents in the hospital after the winter holiday, so he recognized the smiling person who had obviously taken the photo as his mother. She and two girls looked happy while Chi-hoon had the decency to at least vaguely look into the direction of the camera.
Mi-reu realized that he was looking at the photo for too long, so he instead opened KakaoTalk. There was even less to see. There were three chats, one of which was about software updates, another was from someone called ‘Professor Jung’ and was filled with even more whiteboard pictures. The last message was from his mother. Two weeks earlier she had informed him that the curtains in his rooms had accidentally been stained pink when she had washed them. He had replied that it didn’t matter, so she had sent a picture with the billowing pink curtains in front of a window somewhere in the city. ‘Are you sure??????’ she had asked. He had not bothered to react after that.
It was so whimsical that Mi-reu had to laugh, and nearly hurled the phone across the room when the orange curtains of his hospital room moved.
“Oh, shit, that startled me,” he said and held his side with one hand while closing KakaoTalk with the other. He looked up. And wondered just how much more bizarre the day was going to get.
Chi-hoon had brought the young nurse who looked very unhappy holding a blanket, as well as a wheelchair.
“Am I being abducted?” Mi-reu asked.
“Please don’t stay longer than thirty minutes. It’s still relatively warm outside but we can’t risk him getting sick when the temperatures drop,” the nurse said to Chi-hoon who walked to a closet next to the window. He took out a knit cardigan that Mi-reu recognized as belonging to his father. Most of his clothes were in his dorm room, so his mother must have brought it from home.
“We’re going outside?” Mi-reu asked. “Why?”
“You said it makes you sick to stay here all day,” Chi-hoon said and handed him the cardigan. When Mi-reu fumbled with it because he couldn’t really bend his torso, Chi-hoon helped him put it on as if he was the parent of a very little child.
“He said that if we don’t let you go now, you’d try to escape later,” the nurse said with a grimace.
Mi-reu didn’t mean to laugh because she seemed genuinely distressed. But that did sound like him, and not giving her any choice was something Chi-hoon would do. The whole thing made him laugh so hard that his sides hurt enough to mask the mayhem of emotion that burst out somewhere underneath it all.
The sun had almost set when they reached the small park behind the hospital. It was late spring but a chilly breeze made him pull the cardigan a little tighter. Only a few people were still outside. But it was nice. He had almost forgotten how good fresh air felt.
Chi-hoon wordlessly pushed him forward until they reached a group of benches. It smelled of blossoming flowers. A flock of birds flew across the orange sky.
“Okay, this is peaceful and shit but I have to ask,” Mi-reu said. He had accidentally brought Chi-hoon’s phone. It was in the pocket of the cardigan like an anchor that pulled him down. “Do you want to be my boyfriend or what is this?”
“What?” Chi-hoon asked. It wasn’t a flustered ‘what’, or an angry ‘what’. It was a question he asked because he was irritated due to a conclusion he couldn’t follow. Like a result without the calculation path.
“Why are you here?” Mi-reu asked. “Why do you keep staying here rather than going back to school? You’re probably the only person who doesn’t hate it there, so it makes zero sense for you to haunt a hospital and borrow hospital gear and a card game a gambler left behind to humor me. What is it? Guilt? Duty? Revenge? Do you even feel any of those things?”
He was probably going too far. He knew that it wasn’t so simple. But Chi-hoon’s condition was supposed to make him rational and Mi-reu didn’t see anything rational about the way he acted.
“Do I need a reason?” Chi-hoon asked.
Mi-reu scoffed. “You? Yeah. Others can do stupid shit but you’re supposed to be the one who has a reason for everything. Isn’t that the whole point of you? Choi Chi-hoon, the boy genius who faces a serial killer, and the first thing he thinks to do after narrowly escaping death is supper. Why? Because he has hypotension and it’s not healthy to skip meals. That’s who you are. Not whatever parallel world version of yourself you’re being right now.”
Chi-hoon looked at the sky. “I’m human, too. Humans are illogical.”
“Are you though?” Mi-reu asked. He badly wanted to joke away the strangeness of it all. But this was probably what Chi-hoon had meant. He wasn’t great at avoiding confrontations. He couldn’t just go with the flow and not understand why something was happening.
He had a suspicion. But that was something he had not planned to ever talk about again.
“Is this about what happened before?” he asked and wrapped his hand around the phone in his pocket. “After the thing in the music classroom?”
It was uncomfortable to think about because he had acted like an idiot then. They had made out a total of three times. Always in blind spots in empty rooms. Always because Mi-reu had initiated it. Wanting to be close to Chi-hoon had become a weird sport.
“Why did you stop?” Chi-hoon asked.
The answer to that was supposed to be easy. They had almost been caught the third time. A class representative had spotted Chi-hoon in the gym and had obviously had the right idea because his shirt had not been buttoned up right. People had wondered for weeks who he had been with. Mi-reu had only barely made it out by crawling out of a very narrow window and ripping open the sleeve of his best school shirt. He couldn’t risk being found out. There were a dozen good reasons for that. Because the school was a nest of gossip. Because he was supposed to hate Chi-hoon. Because he was already constantly on the spot for being the only one who had ever beaten Chi-hoon in a test. Because they were guys. Because that wasn’t right.
But the truth was that he wouldn’t have cared about anything others might have said if only this wasn’t about Choi Chi-hoon.
“I’m not like you,” Mi-reu said. “I easily get attached to people. There’s nothing to be gained from getting attached to you.”
Chi-hoon didn’t immediately reply but looked at him with a solemn expression. It made him feel exposed. But that was probably better than to drag out something that likely wasn’t more than a free trial period for being human to Chi-hoon.
“My father is like me,” Chi-hoon said after a long pause. “He became a neuroscientist because he wanted to understand what made him different. That made it easier for me. He just had to explain it.”
“Right,” Mi-reu said because he didn’t see the point.
“My mother is different,” Chi-hoon said. “He told her about himself, so she decided that she would have to make up for him. No decision she makes is rational. She changes jobs every three years because she easily gets distracted. She likes everyone. From most people’s viewpoint, she probably feels emotions more strongly than my father does. But they’re not just married because of something she decided but because he needs her, too. Maybe he even needs her more than she does. I didn’t think I would ever understand that. But now I’m not so sure anymore.”
Mi-reu raised his brows. “Wow,” he said after a moment of having his brain short-circuit. “Now that’s giving me goosebumps. You sometimes say the most awkward shit with a completely straight face.”
Chi-hoon did not look amused at that reaction.
“All right,” Mi-reu said and finally let go of the phone to scratch his head. “So you’re saying you might need me? Isn’t that just hormonal talk?”
“Is you easily getting attached any different?” Chi-hoon asked.
Mi-reu shrugged. “Fair point. Probably not. I’m hormones all the way.”
He didn’t know what else to say and Chi-hoon made no further attempts to explain himself. Something had changed but Mi-reu couldn’t really put his finger on it. He wasn’t sure how to proceed either. Even if there really was some kind of messed-up need Chi-hoon felt, it was still more likely that Mi-reu would be the one to plunge into something he wouldn’t be able to crawl out of. He wasn’t just the demure love interest of some cold-hearted douche in a TV show. He was supposed to have more pride than that. But…
Chi-hoon looked at his watch and stood up from the bench. “Half an hour is over,” he said when Mi-reu threw him a questioning glance.
“Right. Time to get back to the den.” It was getting chilly but he dreaded the idea of the stuffy room. It would be nighttime soon and he could already picture his mind stewing in his wrecked body until morning. The thought wasn’t appealing.
Chi-hoon strolled over to maneuver the wheelchair back inside. When he put his hands on the handles, Mi-reu leaned back to look up to him. Chi-hoon was still, so Mi-reu reached out and touched his face with his fingertips. The feeling was still there. Skin against skin. It still felt right. Maybe that was enough.
“What?” Chi-hoon asked.
“So you actually want to be my boyfriend then?” Mi-reu asked. “Is that the conclusion of your story?”
Chi-hoon looked irritated. “Is that necessary?”
Mi-reu snorted a laugh and slapped his cheek. “Wow, what an asshole. Wants all the benefits and none of the responsibilities. I feel used.”
Chi-hoon didn’t reply, probably because Mi-reu kept laughing, and just pushed the wheelchair. Mi-reu used the time to adjust the blanket and stretch his back as far as he could without causing himself any pain.
“I hope what you’re really trying to say isn’t that I remind you of your mother because that would be amazingly creepy,” he said when they reached the elevator door.
Chi-hoon moved to the side to hit the elevator button for the third floor and Mi-reu used the moment of having him close and yet not right behind him to take his free hand. Chi-hoon looked at for a moment that felt like waiting for the verdict of a jury, and then wrapped his fingers around Mi-reu’s.
“You don’t remind me of anyone,” he said. It was probably not more than a neutral assessment, but Mi-reu chose to take it as a compliment.
“Has your friend left?” the young nurse asked when she came to change the bandages. The wound already looked a lot better but every time Mi-reu saw the stitches, he felt like a science experiment gone wrong.
“Yeah,” he said and tried to focus on the window instead. “I convinced him to go back to school because I was afraid they’d blame me for the resident genius gone rogue.”
“Oh, he’s very smart then?” she asked and sounded surprised. She probably didn’t mean it in a judgemental way but it was funny to be faced with someone who did not immediately assume Chi-hoon to be the most intelligent person on earth. He was smart in a scholarly way but the nurses would have only seen his poor social skills.
“So I’m told,” Mi-reu said.
He only realized that he was smiling when the nurse threw him a glance and then grinned as though she was in on a joke.
The days went by like that. The stitches came out. His mother visited and brought him clothes that he knew had come from his dorm room. He slowly became more mobile and could roam the hospital with the speed of a newborn snail. The games on Chi-hoon’s phone were becoming dull, so he instead started to take pictures of the hospital and the sunrise from the window and the nurses and the group of old guys who sneakily taught him how to play go-stop.
The day he was discharged, Chi-hoon reappeared. He wore his school uniform and looked cleaner than he had been when he had stayed in the visitor’s room of the hospital. Mi-reu wore unwashed clothes, so he felt like a war hero in comparison.
“You could have brought my school uniform,” Mi-reu said and watched as Chi-hoon looked through the closet to check if he had missed anything. Mi-reu had properly shoved all his belongings in the bag his mother had brought and had barely managed to close it, so he could only hope that Chi-hoon would not find any stray socks.
“I mean, how lame,” he said and sat down on the bed for the last time. “Not only do I have to enter the school in the company of my biggest adversary, I also look homeless.”
Chi-hoon closed the closet. “I’m your adversary?”
Mi-reu shrugged. “That’s the narrative people see anyway. School is nothing but a big performance act. We go back, I cause trouble, you do your science stuff. No one sees what’s going on behind the scenes.”
Chi-hoon sat down next to him and looked at his feet with his hands in his pockets. “I’m not acting.”
“Sure you aren’t,” Mi-reu said and grinned.
He looked at Chi-hoon who looked back with that usual bored expression of his. He wasn’t an idiot. Everyone knew that. But that did not mean that he always chose the safest path. Mi-reu hadn’t been there most of the time, but he knew all the stories from the winter holidays. Trying to overwhelm someone holding a gun. Walking into the snowy, avalanche-prone mountains to make a call. Calmly confronting a potential murderer with a self-made taser. Bluffing someone with an empty gun despite barely being able to stand. All that had filled Mi-reu with vague respect. But logically, it meant that Chi-hoon was not unlikely to make very reckless decisions at times. Calculated risks were still risks.
“Okay, but seriously,” Mi-reu said. “Let’s just lie. People suck and it’s no one’s business anyway.”
Chi-hoon frowned.
“I still would have preferred to go back in my school uniform though,” Mi-reu added.
Chi-hoon looked down at Mi-reu’s sweatpants and the sweater with the duck print he usually wore at night. They were the cleanest clothes Mi-reu had available and he suspected that the ducks, in particular, would make up for the notoriety he had missed while he was hospitalized. He practically owed the school some kind of grand entrance. But it was strange for Chi-hoon to look at his clothes from up close.
“Do you want to swap?” Chi-hoon asked.
And it really wasn’t the right time or the right place but Mi-reu leaned in to kiss him. It was maybe the idea of him in the duck sweater. Or of Mi-reu walking around in a sweater vest with his name tag. Or of finally having something to look forward to again in that last year in a school that was filled with so much unhappiness that it constantly attracted incidents. Whatever it was, for a moment he was overwhelmed and Chi-hoon holding onto the back of his head did not help in the least.
But then he moved his upper body too quickly and a sharp pain shot up his side. He gasped and had to lean his head against Chi-hoon’s shoulder. “I swear, that’s the last time I’m getting stabbed. Fucking shit,” he said when he finally caught his breath a little.
Chi-hoon lifted the hem of his sweater and Mi-reu badly wanted to joke about it but the idea of bleeding again made him sick.
“It looks fine,” Chi-hoon said.
Mi-reu put both arms around him.
“There’s a car waiting downstairs,” Chi-hoon said and pointed towards the door.
“Give me a second,” Mi-reu said into the crook of his neck. “I’m having a dramatic moment.”
Chi-hoon made a strange disgruntled sound and wiggled a little to look at him, but then gave up and just opted for putting a hand on his back.
It probably was a stupid decision. There were a hundred reasons speaking against being close to Choi Chi-hoon. The outcome could not possibly be happy.
But as that very Choi Chi-hoon held Mi-reu’s hand in the back of that car that brought them back to their hellhole of a school, Mi-reu figured that he had come all this way thanks to the power of stupidity, so he might as well continue.