Archive of Our Own ^beta

He’s the kind of boy that definitely doesn’t belong here.

Mark doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with the neighborhood at first. Sure, it’s picturesque, something you would see in a postcard from Stepford but Mark isn’t the kind of boy to stick around and forgive. His brothers, maybe. They’re summer boys, loving the salty crashing of waves and popsicle residue running down their bicycle’s handles.

He sees their home, a little on the bigger side compared to the rest of the neighborhood’s quaint picture perfect homes, the kind with a husband and wife and 2.5 kids and picket fences, but it’s really not so big when he compares it to the house next door. Mark counts two, three, four bikes parked on the driveway, plastic water guns and well-loved toys spread out on the front lawn, forgotten in the summer sun.

They must be a pretty big family. Must be nice, Mark thinks bitterly.

He’s nineteen and he knows that out there, people know he doesn’t mean to be cruel. He’s atomic, he’s grown up loving things, loving people without question. Now his love is anemic, it’s just not the same anymore. He supposes he’s lost his vigor, his unhinged jaw shut right back up, Cain killed Abel and God punished him, but God doesn’t know what to do with the way Mark loves. After all these years, Mark has been waiting. Let him bite.

He leans against their family van and breathes slowly, in and out. It’s hard, it’s going to be hard, to move to a completely different place in your first year of college, but Mark is anything if not persistent. Who cares about some kids from Bumfuck, Monroeville? They’d probably have a fit if they found out what Mark got up to back in the city. The moving truck rumbles on the asphalt announcing its presence and Mark sighs.

His brothers move along while he stays back. He crushes the trimmed grass of their lawn with his worn out canvas sneakers as he watches his brothers from the corner of his eye, a blur of color and laughter.

Jeno, Mark often thinks, is the golden boy this town deserves. Back in the city, Mark often worried Jeno’s light would be snuffed by the dirt and grime that clung to anyone who stayed long enough but Jeno always prevailed like the poster boy for all things good that he was. Jeno would be the perfect prom king, the perfect boy to lend you his letterman jacket with a kiss to your cheek to end the perfect night. He’d look good in white, at the end of the aisle, he’d look good in your bed, he'd look good among the stars. He’s the product of summer.

He decides to help when his fingers start twitching for a cigarette and he huffs as he walks to the second moving truck. His mom is already talking to their new neighbor, a tray of baked goods already tucked safely in her arms. He eyes their neighbor’s mint green mailbox, doesn’t need to get up close or read it to know that they’ve got a typical and common last name. Nothing ever out of the ordinary here in suburbia.

Jeno walks past him to help the movers. He’s a martyr and he’ll have a lovely girl hanging off his arm by the end of his freshman year. If this were the 1950’s, they’d be the kind to go steady and get married and wound up in another neighborhood like this.

Mark shudders. He wants his brothers to be summer boys, to be bitingly young forever.

He helps the movers carry bed frames, couches, TVs, and when he comes back round to grab the last few boxes of personal belongings, he sees movement from the corner of his eye. The blue cotton curtains of the window on the second floor of the house next door, the one with the two, three, four bikes and water guns, shift, as if someone is behind them, peering, looking. Gazing.

Mark doesn’t think he sees a ghost. The boy that pushes the curtains aside definitely isn’t a ghost. The boy blinks down at the scene before him and his gaze lands on Mark staring at him from the middle of the pathway to their house. Mark blinks back up at him.

The boy’s face contorts into a grimace and Mark bites back a chuckle. Definitely not a ghost. He looks young, maybe around Jeno’s age. Mark can’t quite discern the rest of his features but he’s got baby fat on his cheeks and big eyes. Young. So young. Icarus before he fell young. The boy pushes the curtains back and Mark walks away.

Mark can’t assume, but he’s the kind of boy that definitely doesn’t belong here. Stark against the rows of white picket fences, like he was made for so much more.

So Mark eyes the rows of white picket fences and knows that no matter how approachable his newfound neighbors will claim themselves to be, there will always be walls between them. So Mark eyes the colorful mailboxes that line down the front of all the unassuming homes along their street. So Mark sees more than hears his brothers’ laughter from inside the house. So Mark eyes the cotton blue curtains and thinks about the boy with the big eyes and how Mark already feels like he’s going to burst.

So Mark exhales and lets suburbia drown him out.

When Mark was fifteen, he joined the soccer varsity team, wasted summer with mosquito-bitten legs and sweat soaked bangs falling across his young face. Jaemin got as dirty as he did, Mark dragging him up in the early mornings to practice with him.

There was really nothing more that Mark liked during high school than soccer. And maybe the bottle of pills he kept in his locker for those kinds of days, and boy, were those days frequent.

Freshman year was always different for kids, but no fifteen-year-old in any county, in any city, in any neighborhood was quite as life-loving and suicidal as Mark. He supposes that’s why he caught Annie’s attention, towhead blonde, devilish smile and teasing strips of tanned, summer skin. Annie was first kisses at the school parking lot while she wore his varsity jacket and she tasted like apple juice. He hoped she didn’t taste the death wish on his tongue.

He was cruel from the start.

Freshman year was all about driving cross country for games, for all those nights spent up with cicadas, sharing his secrets with them. Freshman year was more and more pills, gold running through his veins. He was a summer boy for a while, but some things you have to give up.

Freshman year was about kissing Johnny Suh behind the pitch of the football field, Johnny quitting and ignoring him for the rest of the year. Mark thinks that’s why he almost overdosed, losing a friend like Johnny. His friends always thought it was about Annie and Mark thought, convinced himself, it was about her, too, for a while. Mark just thinks that the linoleum floors wouldn’t have tasted lovely when he took just one more pill after practice.

(It took until sophomore year for Mark to realize it was about being more than friends with Johnny Suh).

So, if there was any chance Mark could secure himself the doomed future of marrying his high school sweetheart by the end of college while also being a star varsity player, it crashed and burned during sophomore year. Sure, Mark was still in the soccer team but he spent the rest of the year perfectly dissociated. Things just seemed to get worse for him. Johnny had moved away. The cicadas knew, probably gossiped about it with each other. Annie sent him sad looks when she wasn’t busy glaring at him. Mark doesn’t like to think he’s a monster but he supposes he is.

Gold doesn’t circulate in his system rather the blood of everyone else who ever had high hopes for him. There are things you have to give up to be a summer boy but Mark wasn’t willing to give up the biological need to ruin everything he touches.

Senior year felt like it was lived out in the parking lot, from getting a handjob from Dejun from track after school to almost overdosing again. Mark can’t say he was never made of mistakes. He was trial and error the moment he was born.

He’s nineteen and he’s made of mistakes and regrets. He chases off hope and anywhere he goes, cicadas follow, their loud whispers lulling him to a fitful sleep. Sometimes he jacks off to the thought of what might have been with Annie — a future full of apple pie baked from scratch with an apron tied around her tiny waist, electrical posts containing posters for jobs, for lost and found, a daughter in the equation, maybe, who looks just like her mommy. She’ll have the boys fawning after her and all the girls on edge with how effortlessly perfect she’ll be. He hopes one day his kid will never be anything like him. He gets off on the American Dream.

Other times, he jacks off to Johnny. Of his overgrown, long hair and how he was freshly fifteen, younger than dead kings and rib cage clean. If Johnny ever came back for more, Mark would have shown him how good he is at keeping a secret.

“Tell me a secret,” Annie had whispered one night, pushed up against the wall behind the diner, pink skirt and Mark’s letterman jacket making her the very image of temptation. It should have been enough for Mark to get down on one knee but instead, he kissed her, young and unafraid. He’s still as reckless as he was at fifteen, and he had almost whispered back, “I’m not who you think I am nor want to be and I can’t bring myself to feel sorry.” Instead, he said something else, he can’t remember anymore, something sweet, probably, something to coax her into his hands sweetly and easily, melting like summer, like a damn fool.

See, he’s good at keeping secrets.

Secrets in this kind of town, suburb, neighborhood, are a big no, a fact Mark learns only in the next few days since they’ve moved.

They’re still moving things around, putting the couch against the window, in front of the TV, by the coffee table. Jaemin and Jeno are out, making their rounds in the neighborhood, looking for anything to provide them entertainment.

“Do you know Jun?” His mother’s voice says, waking Mark up from his daydream of what could have been. She has Jisung in his little baby blue baby carrier. “The pastor from next door?”

Mark does not, in fact, know him but he’ll bite. “No, I haven’t gotten the opportunity to meet him.”

His mother sounds a little annoyed when she says, “Well you should meet him and his family, they’re lovely, the Lees. Just like us! They have five kids, can you imagine if we had one more of you kooky kids?” Mark can, because he had an older sister before Jeno came around. The light of their lives and they don’t talk about her. Sometimes Mark thinks he can still see her blood on his hands and sometimes Mark remembers it’s not his fault she’s dead.

It’s not a secret they’ve kept, per say, they just never talk about it. Something like that would get out and spread as fast as it’d been told. To the people here, it would be a scandal. They hang around the corner just to catch you at your most vulnerable and spread your secret like wildfire. Mark would be dead in minutes if they found out everything about him.

Like smoking drugs for the first time with his teammates in Hendery’s car in junior year, he wants that all to himself. And if it’s memorable because of the way Jungwoo looked exceptionally cute and Maria from biochem was right outside, waiting with her friends and she was also looking exceptionally cute, they didn’t need to know that. So, instead, Mark thinks of the five Lee kids, of that one kid he saw when they first moved in, the one in the room with the blue cotton curtains. Mark has gone out every morning with the excuse of getting the morning paper and stares at the window, hoping, waiting for the boy to be right back behind the fabric of the curtains.

“Anyways,” says his mom. “Jun’s invited us to go to Sunday’s mass and have lunch at their house afterwards. I thought it would be lovely.” Mark doesn’t mention that they’re agnostic but he’ll amuse her.

“Really? That sounds wonderful.” His mother is trying really hard here, trying to make a better life for them when she’s essentially ruined it by packing up their things and moving them out to the middle of nowhere, but Mark is nineteen now, he needs to live a life he made for himself, but the thing is, his mom has always had love to share. Maybe that’s why she still loves someone like him unconditionally — because she doesn’t think twice about it. Mark wouldn’t know how that would feel. It’s work to love himself.

“Yes, it is,” his mom says, beaming and Mark thinks of scraped knees from scooters on the sidewalk, chalk drawings on the driveway, home economic project aprons, daisies in flower pots growing on the windowsill by the kitchen, thinks of little girls and how when he looks at any girl above the age of two and below the age of eleven he sees his sister and the daughter he never had and is never going to have. Who was he kidding, Annie would have broken up with him by senior year.

Jeno and Jaemin come home, Jaemin scooping Jisung up from the baby carrier and Jeno kissing their mom on the cheek. They’re flushed, and Jeno is wearing Mark’s old soccer kit and he and Jaemin bring in the sunset, their bikes lazily dropped onto the freshly mowed lawn, their bruised-kissed knees still open and purple, chlorine kissed summer boys.

Their mom starts talking about how they’re all starting school soon and Jaemin talks about a weekend job, newspapers thrown haphazardly while riding bikes onto the early morning asphalt road. Jeno pipes up with milk crates and Sunday morning whites, the post office downtown needs some help. With Jeno, others always come first.

Maybe Jeno will find a girl like Annie. This town is probably full of them. Bumfuck, Monroeville practically breeds them, good girls who have only been taught to wait for a guy to sweep them off their feet. Mark would punch whoever taught them not to amount to anything. Maybe Mark will start taking out the pills again.

One would have to be suicidal to get out of this town. Thank God Mark hasn’t changed since freshman year.

So, the first Lee kid is older than Mark. Engaged, in fact. Met his fiancée in sixth grade and had been dating all throughout high school and they stuck together through college until he proposed to her at their graduation. Figures that they ended up going to the same college. Mark almost gags.

The second Lee kid is, in fact, a girl. The only girl. She’s pretty and looks neither like her parents. She’s about to graduate college and if Mark cared enough, he would have flirted with her and charmed his way into her pants. But she’s the kind of girl who wouldn’t have even looked twice his way if they were strangers on the streets and Mark appreciates that.

The third Lee kid, well, Mark might have been a little smitten. He can’t help it, he’s just so handsome, and Mark comes from a pretty big urban city, he’s met his fair share of attractive people. This one has just started university, a little local community college located thirty minutes outside of the neighborhood, pretty near Mark’s new college that he’s starting soon. He’s quiet and drives a beat-up Chevy and gets along preposterously well with Mark’s brothers. Mark has every right to be smitten.

The youngest Lee reminds Mark entirely of a gremlin. He’s all over the place, pretentious and too smug for his age. He has that little-boy-entitlement that his brothers never had and Mark hopes every night that Jisung will never go through something like that. With too-good-for-this-earth brothers, Mark has forgotten little kids like Gyeom exist. But of course, he’s the youngest and he gets away with anything. Mark swears he’ll kill himself the day they’ll ask him to babysit the demon ever comes.

Now, the fourth Lee. If there’s a prize for being both obnoxiously mysterious and moodily pretentious it would go to him. He’s seventeen, young and impressionable, and God — there’s just something so different about him, something so stark against his family, against this neighborhood that he’s grown up in his whole life. Small town boy, boyhood hurts, abducted by normalcy. He’s quiet just like the second brother, but unnervingly so. Long limbs and longing glances, Mark thinks of the public pool at the town square, swimming pools only meant for drowning. A cul-de-sac of corpses, his wide eyes are a little too defiant and centuries old.

Mark should be more unsettled about this kid like he is with this neighborhood but he’s not. He’s the kind of boy that just might know the pain Mark carries around well.

Sunday mass goes well, the Lees sit right behind the front row, white summer dresses and pressed slacks. Little Gyeom knew to behave under God’s watchful eye. Lunch goes well, they fire up the grill in their backyard where there is a swing set and a picnic bench and a tree house. A house that’s been lived in for years, Mark pities them. Jisung tries to walk by himself and the sister, Seungyeon, Mark recalls, coos. The eldest, Dongmin, Mark thinks, goes to pick his fiancée up and Jaemin shares a look with Mark from across the picnic table. Jeno talks with Mr. Charmingly Handsome and Potential Star of Mark’s Wet Dreams (Doyoung. His name is Doyoung) while the fourth kid leans against the sliding door back into the house, looking forlornly at the scene in front of him.

So Mark makes mistakes. This might be one of them.

“Hey,” Mark says. “What’s up?”

The kid, Donghyuck, Mark thinks is his name, shifts his big eyes to him and he’s so young, a round face, sharp cheekbones, pouty lips, the kind of face ready to be beaten up for. “Not much,” his voice is nasally and pitched and Mark should turn and walk away.

He turns to do just that. “Cool—”

“So, do you folks like it here?” His voice has a twang that Mark has heard some of the other people who have lived here their whole lives speak with. Mark shrugs. He can’t be brutally honest, not yet.

“I’m one of those city folks, you know? I’m still getting used to it.” He shrugs, trying to feign nonchalance, clutching his can of coke.

The corner of Donghyuck’s mouth quirks up and it would look good on him if it didn’t make him look just the tiniest bit intimidating. “It seems like you’re the only one in your family who hasn’t.”

Mark can’t say that he doesn’t agree. “Never liked change but I always gotta keep moving, don’t I?”

It should worry Mark how well he’s slowly getting along with the kid that all these suburban folks whisper about, the pastor’s weird kid. He’s trouble and he’s only seventeen, intense and doesn’t play well with others. It’s white picket fence talk for “that boy should have been sent to a reparative therapy camp the moment he was born because he looks like he doesn’t belong here”. See, Mark knows things.

Donghyuck has a pretty smile which reminds Mark that he is too young to be any of those claims he hears, some future arsonist, they’re saying. Like this is the 70’s and he started the second Great Fire of Chelsea. “Yeah, I do,” he then kicks off the wall and nods to the gathering. “If there’s anything my dad is better at than spreading the word of the Lord, it’s making a mean grilled patty. Come on.”

Mark’s fingers twitch for a cigarette and his throat starts screaming for a pill but this time, Mark doesn’t notice.

Suddenly the big house with the four, five bikes and lawn paraphernalia isn’t the big house with the four, five bikes but it becomes Donghyuck’s — “Call me Haechan. Donghyuck’s such a stupid fucking name,” — house. Donghyuck who sleeps with his cotton blue curtains drawn tight at night, who is in Jeno’s grade.

Fresh and smelling of the city and Jeno is immediately flocked by a bunch of other kids, a city boy with a heart of gold only Southern Gothic heroes have, that’s something these suburban kids have never seen before. Mark hears how Jeno and Jaemin’s first day go at dinner when the sky is purple like the bites Mark used to leave on Dejun from the track team’s neck back in junior year. The succulent by the windowsill above the kitchen sink looks like it’s dying. Mark knows the feeling and shares the sentiment.

Jaemin does not speak with his mouth full, learned his manners while he learned his A B and C’s, and says in a leveled voice how the school is really nice, and the kids are even more so and that he’s already made friends, and did you know Chenle actually leaves two streets down? It shouldn’t surprise him, everyone lives next to everyone here. It’s unfortunate, these suburban born-and-raised fucks will never know the feeling of having to venture out in the middle of the night to a friend who lives on the other end of town, having to pass all night DVD rentals, Chinese take-out shops with their flickering neon signs. They’ll never know the feeling of running through the ash splattered pavement of the city because it's too suffocating in your own room, looking at the bottle of pills you promised yourself you would stop taking.

Sometimes Mark wishes he grew up in a place like this, clean cut and safe and controlled. White picket fences and pastel bike helmets with stickers on them. Maybe he would have turned out differently.

Jeno starts talking about how the start of junior year went, how when he walked down to where Jaemin’s locker was so that they could catch up about each other’s day a bunch of freshman girls started giggling, looking at them specifically (because it is a sight to behold, the middle Lee brothers next to each other) and that he’s interested in joining the soccer team, how they’ve got a long history of success and win streaks and Jeno always wins, he’d fit right in and if Mark did not suddenly think of the way Jeno told him to never go back to soccer the first time he got severely injured back in freshman year, he would encourage him.

Jeno smiles widely from across the table and he and Jaemin start talking about how one kid got shoved up against the wall outside of school and how they helped him up and since when was Mark raised with soldiers? Heroes who only ever saw a world needing some saving. Martyrs, they are. If there’s one trait Mark is glad they share is that they like to make sacrifices — it’s just that Mark grew up selfish.

Jisung lets out a burp that they all find adorable and their mom giggles and their father pinches his cheeks and it’s so silly how Jisung has all of them wrapped around his little finger and he doesn’t even know.

Mark hears another story about the start of junior year later that night, nine o'clock on the dot when all the lights of the houses on their street are turned off. Mark sits by the ledge of his window and the blue cotton curtains across from him shift again but the lights in the room are closed.

They’re pulled back and Donghyuck is standing there, skinny in his plaid pajama pants and white shirt. He’s got a light on behind him, was probably kneeling beside the bed with a rosary in hand reciting whatever mystery it is today. Mark’s mouth dries a little at the sight of him.

“Hey,” Mark whispers because it's quiet and everyone is asleep and Mark still isn’t used to it, the silence and the routine of it all.

“Hi,” he drawls, raising an inquisitive eyebrow at him, judging. “Are you trying to kill yourself?” He questions, nodding at Mark’s position by the ledge.

Mark bites back a smile, he can’t let Donghyuck know, not just yet. “It’s just a matter of being unafraid,” he says with a shrug and Donghyuck rolls his eyes.

“How was your first day?” Mark asks. When it comes to Donghyuck, Mark has learned, it has to be him who makes the first move, which is fine with him, as long as they’re talking, you know. Donghyuck slumps against the side of his window, rustling the curtains, looking like he’s settling himself in for a long insufferable conversation, but he has a smirk playing on his lips. He’s seventeen, he shouldn’t look like he’s so above everything and everyone, amused to no end by such simple questions.

“Tiring. I hate these goddamned bumfucks,” he deadpans, inspecting his nails. Mark raises an eyebrow at his language. “I’ve been going to the same school with all the same people since I knew how to walk, there’s nothing fucking special.”

“I take it you don’t like it here that much?” Mark asks. Donghyuck smiles drily.

“Love it as much as you do, but ten times worse. I was born and raised here, you know?” He sighs. “Anything here — and I mean anything — can make or break these fucking white bread people. They all have sticks up their fucking asses and I’m fucking sick of it. I’m sick of them, I’m sick of this town. I want to get out.”

Mark doesn’t say that, unfortunately, he doesn’t see Donghyuck living long enough before he’s able to get out of here. “Don’t think about them. Come on, I asked you about your first day, you better start talking.”

Donghyuck rolls his eyes again and exhales, the fabric of his shirt shifting against the planes of his chest, the jutting bones of his ribcage digging their own grave against his skin. He takes a deep inhale and opens his eyes.

“Okay,” he says, then sighs, taking a deep breath. “Okay.”

And then he starts talking, talks about the people he’s tolerated all these years, the ones he can’t tolerate, the way the quad is freshly mowed every year and by the end Donghyuck could get lost in the overgrown grass, but the soccer team wins with the grass and another thing that’s overgrown and strung out is Donghyuck's patience wearing thin when he walks into a room and everyone acts like he murdered their someone they loved, corrupted their youth, poisoned their breath. Like he was the very reason why they’ll never get out of this godforsaken town. Donghyuck rubs his eyes, veins bursting at the seams of his thin wrists and Mark looks at the blue lines lining the tender flesh. He looks and looks, and he knows he’ll remember it, he will be alone, and he will think about it, how young, hollow, little Lee Donghyuck, the pastor’s son, hates himself.

Or maybe it’s not about hating himself, selling himself to the devil, but rather, making these picket fenced townspeople uncomfortable with the gunshot in his eyes, a forever boy that’s decaying.

It reminds him a little bit of his fifteen-year-old self, alone and tiny, static in his head in the middle of the field, in his bed, sweating every time.

Donghyuck looks at him, scrutinizing, like he knows. Like he knows Mark is recalling things he’s said he’s moved on from.

So what hurts more — the remembering or the forgetting?

So Mark makes mistakes. He supposes him making the first move to talk to Donghyuck is one of them.

Jeno approaches him hesitantly on Tuesday, that of a prey to a surrendering predator. Mark had fallen asleep on the couch, waking up at five am when the only sound in the street then were the crickets and cicadas, throwing on his old soccer jersey for old times sake, because in this hour no one can see him pretend to be the golden boy he could have been, he should have been and walked around the neighborhood. It was cold, autumn was coming near, and the sky was purple like the black eye Mark had gotten sophomore year when he tried to talk to Johnny Suh.

Jeno jostles him from his dream of playground eyes and pretty pink lips, and with the sun shining through the window behind him makes Mark think he’s got such a godly brother, Apollo fallen to earth like Icarus had fallen to the sea’s embrace. Jeno is still in his pajamas, bed head and crusty eyed but that’s nothing to how Mark feels he looks, reminiscent of senior year blues and broken bones and getting by. It feels absolutely shitty.

“What’s wrong?” Mark asks, voice croaky. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Yeah, I just,” Jeno bites his bottom lip, baby milk teeth biting on the dry surface. After pausing, he says softly. “I just wanted to know before I leave, and I didn’t know when a good time would be, and it’s been bugging me but,” Jeno looks at him with his big baby eyes, sees the rust in the playground he thought he loved when he looks at Mark. “You and… and that Donghyuck kid, the one next door — you guys are close.”

“Yes, and?” Mark asks, with just the edge of defiance, voice sounding sub atomic and molten. “Are the people ‘round here saying something?”

Jeno pulls on the bottom of his pajama shirt, uncomfortable and hesitant. “Well, they say he’s just a little… intense for his age.” Another lesson in translating white picket fence talk this early, Mark wants to roll his eyes.

Intense — it’s white picket fence talk for Donghyuck makes them uncomfortable with how different he is from the rest of the people here. Mark keeps in mind to congratulate Donghyuck on that later. The kind of talk that suggests he’s not opposed to hitchhiking into strangers’ cars and sleeping in motels with broken neon signs. Mark understands what Jeno is trying to say but he should know by now that his big brother does not care about what other people, nevermind the people of Bumfuck, Monroeville, think. Mark knows the pressure of fitting in with the status quo in high school is important and his little brother is just caught up in it but Mark is too grown and old to try to fit in with people whose lives end in high school. So, instead, he pretends he doesn’t understand what Jeno is trying to insinuate. “Jen, you’re the same age as him and we say you’re intense all the time.”

Jeno gives up trying to get his point across and just smirks and rolls his eyes. “Get some more sleep, you have a class later.”

So Mark falls asleep to the bustling upstairs, to Jeno singing in the shower, to Jaemin in Jisung’s nursery, cooing and murmuring about rocket ships and baby browns. Their mother passes by the couch and kisses the top of his head, patting his shoulder and muttering about changing out of the sweat-soaked material of his jersey. He falls asleep to the sizzling of the pan and the heat coming into the room, that husky, warm smell of mornings seeping into the living room when his father comes down the stairs to grab the mail, leaves the door open and Mark hears him greeting Jun from across lawns.

Mark falls asleep thinking about that single tear running down the statue of the Virgin Mary during church that Sunday, the way Donghyuck was stark against the marble arch, Judas longing for a second chance.

There are the looks in someone’s eyes, the look of pure, unadulterated want, like the way this one girl in Mark’s ethics class looks at him sometimes when he passes through the door or when he sits near her. She looks at him and Mark is the receiver of those looks from strangers sometimes: sensual, exciting, the promise of a good time filled with adrenaline and thrill, and probably undressing him in their head.

He thinks about her all the way home, leans his head on his hand like Atlas held the world on the bus home, thinks about Emma, he thinks her name is, and her brown eyes smirking at him, eating him up and chewing him out once she finds out just how tasteless he is after all these years.

He thinks of her when he gets back home, gets out of his skin and crawls back into the skeleton in his closet, and he thinks about her and what if he got up and said hello, will she find out after the sweating and silk sheets that he’s not worth it? That he just won’t be into that sort of commitment she might try to find when she spits him out of her spider web fingers and crimson satin lips? Or maybe she’s not into commitment either, maybe they can both fuck each other up. It’s been a while since Mark had felt like drowning, stripped down to his skeleton, licked off the bone marrow and the will to live. So Mark files her away, keeps her brown eyes and dimpled smirk and long lashes away, tucked safe next to Annie and her corn yellow blonde smiles. It’s been so long since he was wanted, Mark loves thinking back to every what if, just loves hurting himself.

It’s ten o'clock, the suburbs just as empty and quiet as it was at five that morning and Mark’s body is having trouble discerning the difference between the times when he looks out his window. He looks at the window across from him, thinks of those little seventeen-year-old boys with eye bags from staying up reading bible passages for show, blue cotton curtains and history boys.

Mark lifts up his window, leans his hips against the ledge. “Hyuck,” he whispers. The window is up but when the curtains don’t shift, when they don’t indicate that Donghyuck is waiting behind them like he always does for Mark, he tries again. “Hyuckie.”

He calls his name one, two, three more times. “Hyuck,” he says exasperatedly. “Dude, come on, I want to hear about your day.”

Nothing. He’s playing hard to get today. Mark huffs. “Donghyuck,” he tries to no response. He sits on the ledge, head leaning back against the white wood, resting his forearm on a drawn-up knee. He knows just what to say to get him to speak up.

“I’ll talk about my day then. So,” he says it with purpose, obnoxious and full of malicious and destructive undertones laced under the faux casualness in his voice. “Today during ethics, this girl — Emma I think her name is? She was looking at me and all. These big, seductive, come fuck me eyes and God, Hyuckie, you should see her, she’s gorgeous, she’s got these big brown eyes and these lashes and her body — I’d start believing in God again if I could get her in bed — should I be telling you this? You’re a bit too young, right?”

The curtains shift. Donghyuck pulls them back aggressively, face sullen and eyebrows furrowed. Mark smirks to himself, he knew that would get him. He takes a breath to continue on all cockily when Donghyuck puts his hands on his hips and continues to glare at him.

He inhales sharply. Mark thinks about his favorite movies from back in the day when he looks at Donghyuck simmering. Their standoff continues, unwavering. Vertigo. Donghyuck exhales through his nose loudly. Paths of Glory. His hand trembles, palms spread across the expanse of his skin through his older brother’s hand me down shirt. Rope. Mark notices there’s a red stain, his eyes trail up to the connected hand, to the wrist that comes along with it, sees the blood and it feels like someone had just ripped Mark's guts out. The Man Who Knew Too Much. Donghyuck, his wrists, the blood —

The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Mark freezes, a gust of wind blows by and Mark wonders if he’s skinny enough to be taken away with it, to fall and to kiss the ground, concrete being the only thing to ever love Mark and Mark loved back. Donghyuck notices that he’s seen what he wanted Mark to see (and that conniving, little toxic bitch — Mark’s not the only one who knows how to push buttons) and smirks, squares his shoulders and puffs out his chest and Mark gets flashbacks of Annie and her longing looks in sophomore year when she thought Mark wasn’t looking. The blood continues to stain and stain.

Men have killed for less but Mark supposes that Donghyuck isn’t much of the killing type, with his hands, anyway. Or maybe he isn’t the killing type at all, he isn’t one for killing others but himself, maybe. That’s why Mark sought him out and kept coming back in the first place. They’re alike, Mark and Donghyuck.

“Yes?” Donghyuck’s voice is clear in the space between them and he sounds a little smug but still wholly annoyed. “What did you want?”

Mark can barely speak, can’t even manage to properly form a sentence in his head, isn’t wrapping his mind around all this, but he does manage to shake his head, close his gaping mouth. “Nothing.”

Dongyuck’s face contorts, “No ‘nothing’,” he practically growls. “Weren’t you talking about that girl in your class you want to fuck?”

“It’s not — no, you’re a little too young to be hearing about that shit,” Mark says and decides that he’s right. “Yeah, I’m — I shouldn’t have bothered you. You were obviously busy.”

“Yeah,” Donghyuck grits his teeth. “Yeah, I was fucking busy.”

Mark swallows the bile rising up when Donghyuck says that, imagines him in his tiny bathroom, tiny like him, curled up and not even there anymore, imagines Donghyuck stealing his big brother’s razor, decides it’s just one of those days — and he wonders what Donghyuck even fucking thinks when the blade makes contact with his skin, when blood comes out after the fresh blooming pain subsides. Do Donghyuck’s eyes sparkle when he lets the blade meet his skin like two lost lovers reconciling after years apart? Wonders if he just loves the smell of iron, of dying on his own skin. Is he that stupid?

“Yeah, you were fucking busy. Are you even trying to live long enough to see eighteen?” Mark snaps. Donghyuck looks at him and there are all kinds of looks in the world, some you will never let go of.

“What does it fucking matter to you?” Donghyuck says quietly and it makes Mark’s heart stop, chills his spine. “So what if I don’t plan to? Just because you’re here, now, at nineteen doesn’t fucking mean you can tell me when I can and can’t fucking live,” Donghyuck presses his other hand to the cuts, squeezes and stops. “I’ve been dead the moment I was fucking born so you don’t have any fucking say.”

Masrk doesn’t know if Donghyuck’s a survivor or the cause of the detonation, but what he does know is that he’s a fucking hypocrite. “I’m sorry,” Mark’s voice sounds tinny to his own ears. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have… I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

Donghyuck looks at him and Mark can’t even read him, he’s just looking and gazing and staring right at Mark, thoughts impenetrable and he’s got it down to a science, probably. Mark feels his throat tighten. Two tired boys sitting by their windows just trying to get by in some way, Mark should have realized that.

“Okay,” Donghyuck finally says and his mouth flattens tightly, nods his head curtly, hand already on his blue cotton curtains, palm a faint red. “Goodnight, then.”

There are the looks in someone’s eyes and then there are the looks in someone’s eyes. Mark will never forget the way Donghyuck looked at him, like the world was ending, like Mark was the one who forced the razor into his hand. When Mark closes his eyes, he sees Donghyuck’s lithe, limp body, lying next to the sink, and even if it looks absolutely horrifying Donghyuck looks so beautiful surrounded by crimson red. When Mark closes his eyes he sees the papers, the headlines that scream: “17-YEAR OLD BOY, SON OF PASTOR, FOUND DEAD IN BATHROOM” and Mark knows, he just knows, just how this little suburbia would react.

Mark blinks and thinks of the look in Donghyuck’s eyes and wonders if it’s too late to apologize. He blinks, and the blue cotton curtains shift with a finality and Donghyuck’s gone.

What Mark remembers about the youngest of the Lee family was that Mark hated him, something about little kid entitlement and wannabe-independent defiance. Mark would rather go back to the pills and hack at his hair with scissors in the dark drunk than babysit the demon.

But here he is, Friday night, babysitting the two youngest Lees because all the older ones went out, something to do with “adult responsibilities”. His own brothers had flaked out on him, Jaemin had a sleepover and Jeno has a project he needs to finish with his groupmates and sometimes Mark wants to smack his brothers for being so lovely and dependable.

Nothing eventful even happens, Mark just brings the two boys over to his house, his mother baking them cookies of all things, makes Donghyuck do his homework, albeit a little awkwardly what with the tension still in the air from the situation that happened last night, lets Gyeom watch his stupid cartoons on the TV, orders them a pizza and that’s about it.

At eight on the dot, Gyeom passes out on the couch, snotty nose and little boy smell. Donghyuck, from the other couch, rolls his eyes and pulls at the sleeves of his sweater to cover his hands. Mark looks from the corner of his eye, knows he’s hiding his wrists and Mark just never stops thinking about them.

When Gyeom's stupid kid movie ends and the next queues up, Donghyuck gets up, going to the kitchen, Mark assumes, so he closes his eyes and thinks about bringing them back to their house in thirty minutes when there’s a shadow, suddenly, the kitchen light being blocked and when he opens his eyes Donghyuck is standing above him, behind the armchair. Mark stares and Donghyuck stares back.

“At five,” he starts quietly. “When you were five what did you want to be?”

Mark is taken aback by the question and contemplates not answering because it’s so sudden, shot right at him from out of the blue, but he does anyway. “An astronaut,”

“And when you were eight?” he rests a hand on the back of the armchair, a few inches away from where Mark’s hand is.

“I wanted to be a singer.”

Donghyuck nods solemnly. “Ten?”

Mark doesn’t know where he’s going with these questions, Donghyuck isn’t even looking at Mark, he’s looking at the TV. “A writer.”

“Fifteen.” He’s not even inquiring anymore — he’s demanding, wanting, needing an answer.

“I still wanted to be a writer.”

He shifts and a silence washes over him, settles on his shoulders, heavy and weighted. “Seventeen,” he says like it’s a countdown and Mark finds it hard to swallow now. “What did you want to be at seventeen?”

Mark looks at him and Donghyuck meets his eyes, grip on the armchair tight. Mark swallows too hard, tries to find air, can’t. “At seventeen I wanted to be dead.”

Mark’s mouth lifts at the corner, and then he smiles, big, bright full set of teeth, dimples and indents. He smiles like he thinks it’s almost too ironic. Mark wants to feign confusion that he isn’t in on the joke but maybe he and Donghyuck are so much more alike than Mark thought.

Donghyuck bends over the chair, doesn’t even care that his little brother might wake up at any moment to see his brother leaning into their babysitter’s space, his nose touching Mark’s cheek, chapped lips pressing against Mark’s cheekbone and Mark suddenly thinks of his freshman year, bruise spreading wide right where Donghyuck is leaving a kiss when he was hit with the ball at soccer practice that day, thinks of Annie and her soft hands cradling his face and her small, pretty pink mouth pressing to Mark’s cheek chastely Mark almost doesn’t consider it an actual kiss. He doesn’t care that Mark can feel him smile sadly against his skin, that the hair on Mark’s arms raise when he feels Donghyuck’s hot breath on his skin. Mark’s body is wound up so tight that when Donghyuck pulls away, the feel of his eyelashes still lingers, and he can’t uncoil himself.

He pulls away and Gyeom doesn’t wake up and maybe Donghyuck and Mark are okay again, at least for now.

The midnight Donghyuck turns seventeen, Mark doesn’t wake him up, lies awake in his bed and thinks of the hurricane living next door, sweet seventeen and never been kissed.

He doesn’t wake him up, but he wants to.

Donghyuck’s parents throw him a party, bright balloons and shiny party hats and all. Donghyuck looks like he’d rather die than be there. In their backyard, sunlight peeks through the leaves of the tree, peeks through the window of the tree house decorated with buntings, flaglets in an array of pastel colors, picnic table with a flannel tablecloth, birthday cake double layered, soft yellow candles on top, the cool breeze extinguishing the fire a couple of times already.

Gyeom runs wild with the little siblings of the kids there, his older siblings standing off at the sidelines, nursing lemonade in red solo cups and looking entirely amused. Donghyuck is off in his own corner holding his little cousin, dimpled smile and crows feet by his eyes.

A boy approaches him, and his smile drops a little, but he lets him hang around for the rest of the party. Jeno is looking at Mark intently from across the backyard where he’s with the other kids in his grade. Donghycuck told him when he woke up earlier that morning the only reason why any of the kids from his school were there was because they didn’t want to be on God's bad side. Mark finds the whole affair ridiculously amusing and embarrassing all the same.

So what if Mark is scowling for the rest of the party and stays in his own corner, ignoring those freshman girls giggling and blushing when they look back and forth between him and Jaemin because of that one stupid kid who keeps hanging off Donghyuck when Donghyuck obviously doesn’t want him in his space. He’s so busy silently glaring at the pair that he doesn’t notice Jeno coming over, hand jammed into the pocket of his jeans and clutching a can of sprite, greeting the ogling group of freshman girls who pass by. Mark thinks Jeno doesn’t even notice them breaking out in giggles in return. Summer skin, summer boy.

“The kid’s name is Sungchan.” Jeno says casually, standing next to him and looking out on the party in front of them. “You gonna do anything about it?” He sounds a little distracted then, eyes glazed over while looking at someone in particular. Mark doesn’t care to find out because the asshole who’s annoying the fuck out of both him and Donghyuck has a name.

“No, I’m not gonna do anything about it.” Because Donghyuck can handle it, Mark reminds himself. He’s handled Mark’s blinded hypocrisy and fucked up ways, they’ve survived each other so far, he can handle this easily.

Donghyuck looks up from where he’s talking to Sungchan by the tree house, looks up and catches Mark’s eyes and he smirks a little and Mark knows that, yes, definitely. Donghyuck can totally handle it.

Mark goes up to his room later that night, not sure if he should go and bother Donghyuck since the kid’s had an eventful day, but when he pushes his curtains aside and lifts his window up he finds that Donghyuck is already waiting for him, arms crossed and leaning against his windowsill.

Mark smiles. “Hey.”

It’s October, the night is chilly and Donghyuck tugs at his sweater and it looks worn out and old, probably one of his siblings’ that was handed down to him. A secondhand boy, he is. Deserves the world, Mark thinks.

“Hey yourself.” Donghyuck answers back after a while of picking off the lint from his sweater.

Mark looks at him and thinks of the bombs people build, the guns they sell, looks at him and thinks of the gentle violence of his shoulders, the dip in his back, the dip in his eyes, dipping his foot in a pool of blood, public pools and lifeguards and lives worth saving and lives worth dying, exchanging breaths and still never being enough.

“You wished for anything when you blew out the candles?” Mark asks because even if the silence is comfortable, even if the company is pleasant and wanted and needed, Mark is still restless and reckless as ever.

“Wished I wasn’t here,” Donghyuck shrugs, staring at the ground below, the potted plants lining the white picket fence between their houses, the green garden hose wrapped around its hook. Mark thinks of hands wrapping around his neck and thinks how good it would feel to just not breathe anymore. “The usual.”

“You’re very peculiar,” Mark notes, the corner of his mouth quirking upward to let Donghyuck know that he doesn’t mean it with any malicious intent. Donghyuck rolls his eyes and his face scrunches up and Mark is all but reminded of the very first time Mark saw him, through his blue cotton curtains, Donghyuck already judging this new, stupid family for staying here because he knows, just like he knows he won’t live long enough to see senior year, maybe, that once you come here you’re never getting out and he’s so full of pity for others he doesn’t even pity himself with how desperate he is, has been since he knew how to walk, since he learned the word ‘hate’ and started seeing the world through war zone eyes, to get out. Perfect Americana — white picket fence America was never for him.

Donghyuck snorts and looks longingly at the ground. “I’m not peculiar. I’m fucking depressed.” Mark would laugh if he didn’t know the feeling so well.

Then, he turns his forlorn gaze to Mark. “Run away with me.”

Donghyuck has got to stop it with the sudden and unexpected declarations because Mark is never ready, never really knows what to say. He thinks maybe this is Donghyuck’s birthday wish and then he wonders how long Donghyuck’s been planning, dreaming, thinking of getting out of here. Maybe he’s been waiting for someone to join him, or maybe he’s —

Sweet seventeen and never lived.

So Mark shrugs and he thinks of begging a drag off of Eric from his tech class next time he sees him, thinks of the cigarette between his lips, death on his tongue, apocalypse in his breath when he mirrors Donghyuck’s position and leans forward, imagines his eyes sparkling when he smiles. “Anytime you want.”

“What do you think?” Jeno asks, hands spread wide, palms out, turning and showing his costume off. His smile is bright when he looks at Mark, even more blinding than the dimmed down lights of the living room.

Mark adjusts Jisung in his arms, baby drool seeping through the shirt he stole from Jaemin. “I think you look like a fucking idiot.”

Jeno doesn’t take it to heart and rolls his eyes instead. He seems to be doing that a lot nowadays, always exasperated and letting it pass over his head. A king without his crown. “Okay, just because you got stuck with babysitting duty and weren’t allowed to go to one of your cool college parties and aren’t getting hit on by some zombie cheerleader.” Jeno levels him with a look. “Or zombie quarterback, right now, doesn’t mean you get to insult my costume.”

“You’re a zombie soccer player,” Mark argues. “You can’t get any shittier than that.” Jeno had stolen his old freshman soccer kit that was passed onto Jaemin, from which he stole from, painted it brown and red and let Renjun with the baby yellow mailbox two doors down the street paint his face. When Mark looks at Jeno, he thinks about being out on the field again, sweating blood and pumping sweat, hair in his eyes and heart in his throat. Jeno shakes his head. Mark thinks about lifeguards, golden boys, glass windows with light spilling through, baby blues for wide eyed browns.

“I better get going then. Jaem’s already left me.” He walks over and holds Jisung’s tiny head in his hands and presses a big, loud smacking kiss to his head. Jisung laughs, blissfully unaware of everything. He’s getting so old now, starting to grow his hair out, milk teeth falling off, and can walk all by himself. Mark loves without question, evident when he holds Jisung and looks at Jeno and bothers Jaemin. He thinks Jisung won’t be a summer boy but more of a boy that belongs to the sun itself, wings spread, and sun tanned and glorious. Golden comparisons to Mark’s two black eyes soul. “Take care.”

Mark waves him off and closes the door, hoists Jisung up on his hip and makes silly faces all the way up the stairs, trying hard not to trip because he imagines spilled heads and spilled secrets and the best ten months of his life with his little eyes lifeless and glacier cold.

He sets Jisung down in his bed, distracts him with a toy and goes to his window. Donghyuck has his curtains drawn and window up. Mark can see straight into his room, notes the lack of anything there, how it’s blank but so encompassing. Mark wonders if he had the view of the carpet, if he would be able to see the dried-up blood stains there. Donghyuck is touching up his face from the mirror by the wall adjacent to Mark’s view. “Your parents aren’t home?” Mark calls out.

Donghyuck smirks, eyes never leaving the mirror as he puts more fake blood by his lips. “Wouldn’t you like to know? You coming over for a treat if they aren’t?” Mark knows Donghyuck can feel more than see the unimpressed look on his face.

“I thought you weren’t going trick or treating.” Mark questions instead, looking back to see if Jisung’s gotten into any trouble because that’s the kind of boy he seems to be growing up to be now — a trouble-finds-me, not-today-death kind of boy.

Donghyuck looks exceptionally gory when he puts down the bottle of fake blood and checks himself in the mirror. “Parents are at church and I’m not going trick or treating — I’m gonna scare the kids going trick or treating.” He looks at himself in the mirror one last time and turns to Mark. “Okay, how do I look?”

Terrifying enough, Mark thinks. He’s even got the fake blood in his mouth, teeth stained like the blood on the cross Jesus died on. He wants to reach over, reach over the stupid white picket fence in between their houses, wants to wipe away all the blood with his thumb, all the grime, all the pretending, wants to tell Donghyuck that he doesn’t need to put on this whole mask because Mark might be falling in love with him but damn him if he didn’t know jack shit about the boy. And that’s a whole other thing, Mark loves without question, just automatically does, used to pump blood into it like it was a sport but now it seems to be all over Donghyuck, dripping even more stains on his carpet more than the razor ever did.

Rather than saying all of that, Mark smiles instead. “Convincing enough. But sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.”

Once, back in Mark’s sophomore year, the team went for a match being held practically on the other side of the country. They stopped in deserted gas stations, shitty truck stops, run down tourist stops every time the gas threatened to drop. And when it finally dropped, they were outside this motel just a few miles away from an actual city. Their driver and coach went to go find a gas station with an employee while they all decided to raid the bar, even convincing their youngest member, a scrawny little fourteen-year-old (“He’s old enough and come on, what his mom won’t know won’t kill him, right?”) to join and have drinks. Mark was at a limbo that night, Hendery from track told him he was dating Maria from biochem and that they had to stop this whole fag thing and Jaehyun was on anti-depressants and didn’t want anything to do with him and Jaemin was in this stupid phase where he was angry about the sister he never met.

Mark had spotted this guy who claimed he worked at the circus at the end of the bar and he bought him a beer and told him that things will be better, just not right now and that’s okay and they toasted to tragedy and Mark didn’t know if his throat was sore due to the burn of his first alcoholic drink or from him screaming into his hands the bus crashed the third time around but it hurt and Mark lived off of it, won the game for the team because of it and on the trip home, while all their teammates slept and drooled on each other’s shoulders, Dejun had kissed him at the back of the bus and whispered, “This means nothing, okay?” and had tasted like smoke and Gatorade, smelled like the lemon air freshener of his car, and after that, Mark thought a kiss never meant anything. But when they crashed a few ways behind the borders of the city, Mark started thinking about ghosts and pills and dead sisters and angry brothers and people he never wanted to remember and when Dejun had fallen asleep with a hand on his thigh, Mark tried to sneak a pill, fingers shaking as he brought it to his lips, but threw it out of the window before he could realize what he had just done and fell asleep instead.

Seven close calls. In Mark’s life, there had been seven close calls.

Said seven close calls refer to the times he should have been dead by now, but the thing is — he’s a Lee and Lees are born with a shotgun to their head and one in their hands, so he will never give in.

The first close call, if Mark can remember, was that time when he was six and his parents left to sort out hospital bills, leaving him with his dying sister, asleep, probably already dead by how peaceful she looked. The IV and the beeping of the monitor sounded a lot like home, sounded a lot like one day, Mark will be on that bed and it won’t be because of a disease. He was six, he was a fucking idiot, he didn’t even think, but he took the pills by the side table on her hospital bed, doesn’t even remember what kind of pills they were, probably thought they were Tic Tacs, poured half of the bottle into his hand and swallowed the first one raw and couldn’t breathe and panicked. He doesn’t remember much after that, but he stayed clear of pills for years and cried the first time they tried to make him take a vitamin.

How times have changed.

The second close call was freshman year, Mark’s second soccer match when Mark got in a fight with one of the players of the rivaling team and the guy almost bashed his head in, pushed him roughly to the ground which caused him a sprained ankle and filled his mouth up with blood. They were torn apart before anything worse could happen, Mark was taken straight to the clinic and the rivaling team got a penalty and Mark remembers bringing a hand to his bleeding mouth, watching the red spread across his palms and thinking that this was right, that it looked good on him.

What Mark has learned about himself after all these years, all these incidents, is that he loves hurting himself. It gives him the drive to continue living when he’s been a dead man the entire time.

It’s Christmas time, lamp posts outside are decorated with twinkling lights that snake around the structure like the devil around the tree in Eden, tempting, tempting, tempting. There’s a Christmas tree by the town square, and there are lights everywhere. Everyone is infected with the Christmas spirit and Mark would find it stupid if only it didn’t bring out the flush in Donghyuck’s cheeks while he sings along to Christmas carols at Sunday mass, if only it didn’t force him to do some Christmas caroling at his doorstep, standing in the back while singing Joy To The World. Mark would find it stupid if he didn’t adore it a little.

When Jun actually does find out they’re atheist, or agnostic, whatever, and won’t celebrate come Christmas day, well — “It simply won’t do! Come over to ours, I hope it isn’t rude, but we prepare a dinner that could feed the entire neighborhood!” So that’s where Mark finds himself, carrying a wrapped-up toy for Gyeom at the doorway of the Lee’s. There’s a wreath nailed onto the door, Christmas ornaments and bells and snowmen and all. Their welcome mat has a snowman on it and Mark wants to burn it.

The dinner is grand, Jun was right about feeding the entire neighborhood part. They have a vinyl playing in the back, the cool crooners of Elvis singing to every annoying commercial Christmas song being equally annoying, but Jaemin thinks it’s absolutely brilliant. Donghyuck sits right where Mark can see him but Mark doesn’t dare look.

When Donghyuck’s mother tells them all to move to the living room for more space, possibly to play Christmas games, Mark hangs back, says he needs to go to the bathroom but all he does in there is splash his face with water and stare at himself in the mirror. He hears laughter from outside and it is so beguiling how Christmas can bring out so much happiness in so many people, only for a month. A day, even.

Mark would find it stupid, so he does.

Christmas has never really been Mark’s favorite, reminds him too much of his third close call. It was never as impactive as all the other times had been, but it sticks out to Mark, how not looking while crossing the road and not getting run over just makes Mark sad. Jaemin had pulled him back, angrily asked if he was stupid, if he wanted to die that bad. Mark wasn’t looking and was hoping for it. Shame, really. All the Christmas shoppers that time stared, and the snow melted under Mark’s worn out, love empty canvas sneakers. Did Mark want to die that bad? Yes, but no kid in any county, in any city was as desperate as Mark was when he was fifteen.

There are voices out in the hall, shushing and rushed. Mark opens the door as quietly as he can, peeks it open just a smidge to see. The entryway to the kitchen, heavily decorated with fid and baubles that Mark gags, has a mistletoe by the arch. There are two figures underneath it and Mark doesn’t recognize them until he does. Jeno is on his tiptoes, kissing the third Lee kid, Doyoung. They’re both blushing from what Mark can tell, and based on the way they’re facing each other, the way their bodies practically melt into each other, this isn’t their first time being alone. But what the fuck, was Jeno forced into this? Pressured to kiss the hot, older guy because of a fake plant for the sake of Christmas?

But Mark stops to think before he can do anything rash. He would hate the guy, Doyoung, just storm out of the bathroom and bash the guy’s head in, demand what exactly is he doing with his baby brother and if he’s aware of the age difference if he weren’t doing the same thing with Doyoung’s own baby brother, but Mark’s learning how to not be a hypocrite because he’s heard it makes people not like you.

When Jeno pulls away, lands back on his feet, solid and on the ground but still blushing, flushed like he went out into the cold weather, Doyoung envelopes him in a hug, tight and personal and intimate. Jeno clutches back, afraid to let go. But they do, they let go and when they do let go they have tiny, content smiles on their faces and they can’t stop looking at each other and oh.

There is always something.

Mark slumps against the wall of the bathroom, thinks about what exactly he has been missing the months they’ve lived here. Next thing he knows, Jaemin is fucking Chenle from two streets down and Jisung and Gyeom will get along splendidly well.

When their footsteps retreat, Mark goes out and stands by the entryway, glaring up at the stupid mistletoe. Stupid symbolism of enforced romance, stupid holiday season. That’s how Donghyuck finds him, glaring at a fake piece of plant.

“You okay?” Donghyuck leans on the wall opposite Mark, crosses his arms and arches his eyebrow. Mark grunts and never takes his eyes off of the mistletoe. Donghyuck follows his eyes bemusedly. “Oh.”

The tone in Donghyuck’s voice makes Mark look but all he gets is Donghyuck’s mouth smashed awkwardly against his and for all it’s worth — it’s the best kiss Mark has ever had. Donghyuck is gripping his shoulders, standing on the tip of his toes and Mark doesn’t move but it’s so familiar, Donghyuck’s lips on Mark’s, and when Donghyuck pulls away, pupils blown a fraction and lips a little shiny, he says hoarsely. “That didn’t mean anything. Okay?”

Mark furrows his eyebrows. “But you were the one who initiated it,” he shakes his head, confused. “I didn’t even say anything.”

Donghyuck sighs, looks at Mark like he’s the stupidest asshole he’s come across, flustered and blushing all the way down to his neck. “Just forget that happened, okay?” It’s a fucking demand. He’s got Mark wrapped around his crooked little finger and he knows it, the fucker.

But Mark agrees and Donghyuck mumbles. “Happy Holidays.”

The seventh close call, Mark supposes, is when Donghyuck turns and walks briskly back to the living room, shoulders tense and fists clenched. After Dejun, Mark might have thought that any kiss never meant anything, but he has never been this wrong in his life. It’s a testament, really, to how much Mark loves hurting himself because even after Donghyuck just basically crushed his heart, Mark still loves him. He’s a Lee, it’s a default.

Seven close calls. In Mark’s life there have been seven close calls. Mark supposes Donghyuck was the close call that almost worked.

When the body dies it goes through seven stages of death.

The first stage, pallor mortis. Latin, it is, like most words are; pallor meaning ‘paleness’ and mortis meaning ‘of death’. It occurs almost immediately, develops rapidly after death and is useless in determining the time of death of the body.

The second stage, algor mortis, meaning the coldness of death, is the change in body temperature, a generally steady decline.

Rigor mortis is one of the recognizable signs of death, caused by chemical changes in the muscle, it is when the limbs of the corpse stiffen.

The fourth stage is livor mortis or suggillation — the settling of the blood in the lower portion of the body, causing a purplish red, veiny discoloration of the skin. It is when the heart stops functioning that heavy red blood cells sink through the serum by action of gravity.

Putrefaction — the breaking down of a body, the decomposition of proteins, the eventual breakdown of the cohesiveness between tissues, the liquefaction of most organs. The deterioration of the tissues and organs. The deterioration of oneself.

Decomposition. The stage of death almost everyone knows, the process by which organic substances are broken down into much simpler forms of matter. Simple. Almost gone.

The final stage of death, skeletonization. In which the last of tissues of a corpse have decayed and dried to which the skeleton is exposed. By the end of the process, all soft tissue has been eliminated, leaving only disarticulated bones. Forgotten.

By the end of the process, the corpse doesn’t matter, suddenly, but the identity of it. Who were they? What happened? By the end of the process, one can determine the time of death.

When the body dies it goes through seven stages of death. When Mark turns twenty, he goes through the eighth stage — trying to get his body back. Trying to be himself after all the stripping down to the core, licking off the bone marrow and the hurt, but the thing is, after the skeletonization one is nothing. Negative space. Nothingness in space.

The shotgun is warm in Mark’s hand and when he aims at the sky and shoots, fireworks explode, the New Year has come. They reflect in Jisung’s eyes as he squeals in delight and squirms in their mother’s arms. Bursts of fireworks light the steps of the doorway to their house, the path, the mailbox, Jaemin’s face, the bruise peeking out from Jeno’s shoulder.

It’s a little different here in the suburbs, different at the end of the cul-de-sac. Back in the city, Mark never really saw the fireworks in clarity. Light pollution was becoming a problem back in the big, bright city Mark loves and misses. Here, they’re big and bright and there and they burst and explode.

Mark is on the eighth stage, trying to recreate himself. New year, new him. New everyone, new everything.

Upstairs, across his bedroom window, the blue cotton curtains are replaced. With what color, Mark doesn’t know, but it is painted with greens and golds and reds and blues.

Livor mortis. Sinking into the skin due to gravity. The curtains stop being blue for a while when the fireworks stop but it comes back altogether.

Altogether now.

They say the body remembers trauma when the mind suppresses it.

Donghyuck slinks back into his life, he always will. Keeps coming back.

Like they always do.

Sungchan is the kind of boy that is white bread wholesome, boy-next-door heart, toothy smiles and your neighbor’s favorite. Picture perfect Americana. Mark wants to punch his lights out.

He hovers around Donghyuck like it’s his job to be annoying, to pester Donghyck while he breathes down his neck.

Mark bets Sungchan has never been on the receiving end of Donghyuck’s stare, won’t ever know the way his eyes lick fire and the blood is there and, oh, is it there, at the roof of his tongue, on the tip of his tongue as he licks his lips and you’re on fire. When a human being is consumed by fire, they burn to an unrecognizable state, and are turned to ash but sometimes the skull, the teeth may be recognized as a human’s.

Mark bets Sungchan doesn’t know Donghyuck’s desire to get out of here, probably thinks Donghyuck would want to settle down with some girl, name her Marie or Olivia or Diana, here and have 2.5 kids and live in another quaint picket fence. Sungchan probably doesn’t even think about what’s out there, what more could there be besides church on Sundays and school on Mondays. Donghyuck didn’t ask Sungchan to run away with him. Sungchan wasn’t the one. Mark was.

Mark bets Sungchan doesn’t know how Donghyuck’s lips feel, how they taste. Fluttery and abrupt, chapped and insisting. Mark feels like he’s coming up with a fever every time he thinks about it. He bets Sungchan won’t ever fucking know.

Oh, but Sungchan is such a good boy, cleans the car every Saturday morning, does his homework Friday night, goes to sleep at nine. The kind of boy that could change Donghyuck, would be good for him. Fix him. The kind that Donghyuck should — would — want.

But Mark knows, just knows, that Donghyuck has a type — and it’s not Sungchan.

Summer is hot and frustrating. Usually it would just be hot but when you leave your window open, curtains drawn aside and get up to see Sungchan hanging out with Donghyuck in his room, you, too, would start to believe that summer was frustrating as well as it was hot.

It obviously doesn’t get to any of Mark’s brothers, no. They’re summer boys they are, climbs water tanks and licks off the Popsicle residue they left on their bicycle handles when they ride into town to cool off. Doesn’t bother Jisung,either, he sits in the middle of the sprinklers they set off at midday, little curls and eyelashes sticking to his sun kissed skin, a king of the world.

One day he’s watching his brothers play in the lawn, borrowed the water guns from the Lees next door and started chasing each other with the sprinklers set off, when Donghyuck and Sungchan are walking by the sidewalk to Donghyuck’s. Sungchan laughs delightedly, and Jaemin invites him and perfect boys with their perfect lives, Sungchan joins in, makes Jisung squeal and Jeno laughs harder than he ever has in his life.

Donghyuck manages to avoid the water, just one of his many talents, and sits next to Mark on the steps to the house. “You’ve been avoiding me.”

“Have I?” Mark snipes. “Or have you just been busy?” He means it a lot more scathingly than how petty it comes out.

Donghyuck rolls his eyes and rests his hand gently on his knee, a move so far from what he would normally do in this situation that Mark looks at him. He says softly, quietly. “He won’t last for the rest of the summer, you know.” But what he really means is, other boys are boring and you are a burning house I want to live in.

“Is that meant to comfort me?” Donghyuck closes his mouth and deadpans him with a look. “He mean anything to you?”

“Markie, he’s born and bred Monroeville,” like that should explain everything. Mark wants to answer back. “So? That didn’t stop Jeno from fooling around with your brother, it didn't stop Jaemin from dating Renjun from two doors down this March.”

Instead, he says. “Okay.”

“Don’t be like that.” Donghyuck coaxes, tries to get him under his spell again only to push him away. Every time. “You’re just as much of a golden boy as he is.”

Mark used to be. Used to be on the field, used to be before he broke Annie’s heart, before Johnny Suh kissed him back, before he almost overdosed, before he broke his own heart when he looked in the mirror.

Used to be, used to be. Mark used to be a golden boy. It didn’t last very long.

Mark settleson. “Okay. Just don’t forget who to come back to, alright?”

Donghyuck smirks. “How could I?”

Donghyuck learns to drive with his brother in the passenger seat and Mark and Jeno in the back.

“I don’t want to be the only casualty.” Doyoung had said and Donghyuck had flipped him off.

Seven stages of death. Donghyuck is tense as he grips the steering wheel too tight like he either wants to be careful or no one can stop him from crashing his brother’s newly repaired Chevy into a tree. Jeno just leans back in his seat, directly opposite the passenger side and presses his knees into the back of it. Mark has a hand next to the headrest of the driver’s seat. Mark looks at the rearview mirror and he doesn’t think he sees a ghost sitting in the driver’s seat but Mark is only hoping. Decomposition.

Donghyuck doesn’t crash the car on purpose at the very least, so Doyoung drives the car on the way back home and Donghyuck sits in the passenger seat. Mark can see from the corner of his eye Doyoung meeting Jeno’s gaze in the rearview mirror and ignores it.

They’re a match, aren’t they? He and Donghyuck. Your backseat Veritas and your very own passenger side disaster.

Later, when they’re back and safe and sound (but never safe, oh, never safe when Mark still has his bottle of pills out in the open on his dresser and his curtains drawn aside to see Donghyuck’s window every time he gets up every morning), Donghyuck and Mark sit out on on the picnic bench in Donghyuck’s backyard, the sky is orange and purple and pink and blue all at once and Donghyuck is sipping on a lemonade, swatting the flies coming after his legs in his cotton shorts and Mark has heart palpitations every time he looks at Donghyuck’s slender fingers curled around his glass.

“I’m proud of you,.” Mark says, making Donghyuck look up at him lazily. “You didn’t go all James Dean on me. On us.”

The setting: James Dean driving through Cholame, California, when his Porsche hits a Ford Tudor sedan at an intersection, at Route 466/41 junction. Dean was driving at 85 mph, tried to steer away but was too late. Is always too late. Nearest hospital was twenty-eight miles away, was announced dead on arrival.

Shame. Tragic. Twenty-four years old full of what ifs but the crash made him a legend. “The life you might save might be mine,” he had said. Shame. Tragic.

The setting: Donghyuck on the freeway, be it the 405 or somewhere out there.Donghyuck on one of the roads here in the neighborhood, flicking his eyes back and from every other car passing in the opposite lane, hands sweating and heart racing that of a stallion. Tear off, mechanical and human parts on the side of the freeway, someone’s front yard, organs exposed. Donghyuck wouldn’t live long enough to see twenty-seven, would join the ranks of Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain. Just as important as they were, just as tragic as they were.

Donghyuck sniffs. “He was an idiot if he thought he had enough time to do his show pony side-step racing maneuver. And I’m not an idiot.”

Inside Donghyuck’s house, Jeno and Doyoung are in the kitchen, sitting across from each other on the island, a glass of coke between them.

“You’ll get better at the whole driving thing. I believe in you.”

“Do you believe that I won’t take any of my chances and swerve the car into the opposite lane and kill myself?”

I’m going to kill you if you don’t beat me to it Mark thinks, then he swallows and stops himself from imagining it. “No. I think you have more dignity than that.”

Donghyuck laughs, smiles like he’s only amusing Mark. There’s a warning written in the corners of his face. “You have too much faith in me, good sir,” he flickers his eyes up to Mark, flirty and fiery. “That’s some dangerous shit.”

“What can I say? I’m a dangerous kind of guy.”

Donghyuck hums, traces the rim of his half-full glass with his forefinger languidly. “I bet you are. Got all the ladies swooning and all the boys breaking into a sweat.”

Among all the mosquitoes and fireflies that come out, Mark can hear more than see the cicadas. It’s been a long time since he’s spent some time with them. Missed them, he has.

Mark imagines what it would be like if Donghyuck just conformed into what this little suburbia wants, imagines what it would be like when he finally finds a girl who goes to church bright and early, settle down, have a son and daughter, get a dog, trap it all up in white picket fence.

Oh, but he never will. Shame. Tragic.

Donghyuck Lee is a killer. Broke Mark down to his very core, the very fiber of his being, plucked each and every vein, every atom, left him red and gasping and coming back for more only to never be in his mercy, licked the DNA off of him and replaced it with a dead man’s.

Mark isn’t the kind of boy to stay and forgive but when little seventeen-year-old Donghyuck lives in the house next door, one would rethink about leaving.

Donghyuck has got Mark whipped, cranked, flipped, has Mark growling and choking him and softly stroking the hand shaped purpleness around Donghyuck’s neck, saying sorry like one would say hallelujah.

And Donghyuck looks at him like Mark isn’t ready, will never be ready, for what Donghyuck has in store. But he is right, Mark never knows what’s going on in that fucked up brain of Donghyuck’s because his own is fucked over with the way Donghyuck’s shirt clings to his skinny rib cage, highlights his hipbones, untouched, unscathed. To contaminate the very basis of him because he was already born with poison in his bloodstream, evident in his wrists and mouth but some things are always left saved.

He is so volatile, burning with kinetic energy that Mark is ready to explode for him, chemical and boiling. And when summer comes around, you always have to choose: white or dark. White summers full of the sea, rays of light peeking through shut blinds, ice cream and children’s best dresses, water guns and lawn games, linen in your hands, goo in your mouth. Eyelids kissed by summer’s fireflies and everything is disconnected, distant, light. Perfect.

And then there are dark summers, lightning and thunder, dark blankets and pale ankles, black liquorice and honeyed skies, sulky and melancholy, cinematic shadows from the corner of your eye, sitting in the back of the cinema with Pandora’s Box. The perfect damnation. Detached and dissociated.

But Mark was never the kind of boy to follow the rules so when Donghyuck invites him over, he chooses both summers, chooses both because he deserves it, deserves the softness of dandelions, the power outage of summer. He’s been struck by lightning and he doesn’t know how to not be as loud as thunder, so he deserves gentleness, deserves white wine through oxblood lips.

Donghyuck has a record on, Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii, and Donghyuck lies on his bed, bed sheets a pale blue and his curtains a see-through yellow, the sun casting shadows into the room. From Donghyuck’s view, he can see the Lees’ front yard, their driveway and the path to the door. From Donghyuck’s view on the second floor, he can see right into Mark’s room and it should unnerve Mark, how well he’s gotten along with the pastor’s weird kid, suburbia’s black sheep, but it doesn’t. He sits on the floor by the bed and Donghyuck’s hand hanging off brushes against Mark’s nape.

The next song comes on, Can’t Help Falling in Love with You. Donghyuck grins and reaches out to run the nail of his forefinger along the skin of Mark’s neck, his ears, the little part of his back exposed from his loose shirt. He hums along, says, “This is my favorite song,” and then he starts to sing along to it, voice a lovely lilt and Mark thinks of all the stars, all the blood, all the lives he’d give up for Donghyuck.

Wise men say

Only fools rush in

But I can’t help falling in love with you

Donghyuck swings his legs over the bed, slides off and sits next to Mark on the floor. He says, “I want you to be my first kiss.”

Mark whips his head around to look at him. Donghyuck is looking at him insistently, not backing down but of course Mark would never want him to back down from this. “But we already kissed…?” he trails off, a finger motioning between them.

Donghyuck rolls his eyes. So endearing, this boy. “That didn’t count because there was a mistletoe and I didn’t like you then.”

“Oh,” and then. “Wait, so — you like me?” There’s a giddy, sort of school boy playground crush coursing through him right now, he’s trying really hard not to smile.

Donghyuck looks at him with a thinning patience. “Yes,” he mutters. “Now c'mere.” He reaches over with a hand curled around the back of Mark’s neck.

Shall I stay?

Would it be a sin?

If I can’t help falling in love with you

It’s enough to drive a man crazy, drive him to the brink of insanity, no seat belt on and the brake is broken. Over the edge.

Mark has a hand around Donghyuck’s skinny arm, bringing him closer, guiding, shows him how well their mouths fit together. Mark tastes the bomb on Donghyuck’s tongue, hears the ticking in his heartbeat, intertwines their fingers and feels the raw and uneven shape of Donghyuck’s fingernails but Mark thinks it’s so, so perfect.

Like a river flows

Surely to the sea

Darling, so it goes

What is Mark doing with this boy? Corrupting him even more, but he supposes that that’s all Donghyuck, the corruption, how to break someone so easily. Donghyuck presses on Mark’s nape and brings him closer, almost straddling him. He swallows up every little noise Donghyuck makes, soft and warm. The sun is setting, casting orange and pink hues all over Donghyuck’s blank room, their shadows towering over the ceiling, watching.

Some things are meant to be

“I could take you away from here,” says Mark when Donghyuck pulls away, tries to catch his breath and Mark needs to, too, but when Donghyuck is in his lap and his lips are red and soft he doesn’t need any air to help him live. “Run away.”

Donghyuck nuzzles his nose against Mark’s, firm hand on Mark’s cheek, the other around his nape. With Mark’s hand wrapped around Donghyuck’s forearms, never letting him go, he can feel the veins pulsating, blue and red and warm blood.

“Thought you told me, any time I want.” Donghyuck whispers and then presses his mouth against Mark’s before he can reply. It sounds a hell of a lot like a promise. The sun sets but neither of them stop.

Darling, so it goes

Some things are meant to be

Take my hand,

Take my whole life, too

For I can’t help falling in love with you

Jaemin says, “Jeno there’s something different about you,”

Jaemin says, “Oh! Oh — you got laid!”

Jaemin says, “Holy shit, Jen! Who was she?”

Mark walks out of the room, seething.

And so, Donghyuck slips into his hands, softly, willingly. He clings, and he whines,and he looks so beautiful on Mark’s bed, trembling like an earthquake with his mouth open. Mark presses his face into the crook of Donghyuck’s sweaty collar bone, licks the skin, gathers the taste and files it away next to Annie and Johnny Suh and Dejun. He shudders when Mark takes him in his hands and he writhes when his hand starts moving, says Mark, breath catching on the ‘a’ and the entire world can stop, can fall into silence and the only sounds that can be uttered are Donghyuck saying his name.

Mark growls and brushes his thumb against the extra skin, the barely-there hair and Donghyuck’s whine is high in Mark’s ears. He says don’t stop, God, don’t stop, Markie, so he doesn’t and when Donghyuck opens his mouth next, a low groan emits, hoarse and tired and fucked out. Donghyuck arches into Mark’s hands, moves his hands appreciatively up and down the planes of Mark’s chest, his stomach, traces his Adam's apple with wonder, shudders when Mark rubs his thighs, says “Does that feel good, baby?” and Donghyuck’s pupils are blown, widening a fraction, his breath catches and he says please so sweetly Mark gives in. He squirms at the cold intrusion, young face contorting obtusely that Mark kisses him because he looks too good not to. And then Mark makes an experimental thrust with his fingers and Donghyuck moans, jaw unhinged and says breathily “There”.

Two thoughts that occur to Mark at that moment: one, being that this is the only time one could ever see Donghyuck vulnerable, never commanding and scheming, frighteningly open and vulnerable for Mark’s eyes to see and two, Mark would do it all again, rewind, make this his first time, too, who cares about that one girl he lost his virginity to in his junior year.

And then he’s inside and Donghyuck says in a small voice, “Kiss me,” and Mark does, holds his face in his hands tenderly and presses their lips together softly, lets their lips meet in a way James Dean never saw twenty-seven like Jimmy and the rest of the club did. They sweat and they moan into each other’s mouths and when Donghyuck’s toes curl and his bitten to the core fingernails dig into the muscle of Mark’s shoulders, his mouths open in an inarticulate cry and his nose scrunches up and Mark kisses him through it, licks his neck up to his ear, he gasps and they fall into each other, bodies obscenely fitting so well together. Donghyuck’s hips slot together so well with Mark’s own, fingers intertwined together. Cain killed Abel and God punished him but here is Mark, wanting to both destroy and nurture. Who needs Emma when he and Donghyuck can fuck each other up as much as they want because they will always come crawling back to each other.

Donghyuck looks properly debauched, filthy and all used up and instead Mark kisses the mole on his cheek, cradles his head.

Sometimes, when Mark looks back on their first conversation, he wishes he just turned back and answered briskly, or never approached him even. Sometimes he wishes he never even let his mother get away with trying to make a better life for them, should have told her that they didn’t believe in no God and he would’ve fought with her, anything and he never would go to Sunday mass, never have lunch in the Lee’s backyard and approach the fourth Lee kid, but Mark just loves fucking himself over. Despite all of Mark’s hopeless wishing, this isn’t one of those times he wishes he never met Donghyuck, let his brain make the decision that yes, this is the boy that’s going to fuck you over seven ways ‘till next Sunday.

Donghyuck smiles and it’s such a big contrast from his volatile, violent disposition that Mark kisses him again, caresses his thighs and Donghyuck whines and Jeno and Doyoung be damned, hypocrisy and decency be damned, this is the only thing that matters.

Summer has never been more worthwhile.

But summer only lasts so long. Before Mark knows it, he’s a college sophomore this year and Jaemin is graduating high school and he and Renjun from two doors down are still avoiding each other’s eyes and Jeno is still so bright and attune to his and everyone’s emotions and Jisung is starting preschool and Donghyuck —

Donghyuck has a growth spurt. Not noticeable, but like Jeno is attuned to everyone’s emotions, Mark is attuned to Donghyuck, his bleeding organs, the curve of his elbows, the piercing of his dimples, to everything. He’s gotten taller, as tall as both of his brothers now and taller than his sister. His voice is the slightest bit deeper, still nasally and with the accented suburbia as ever. Got darker, too, grew his hair out and buzzed it off all over again. Mark wants to know if the rest of the kids in his grade will notice, drool and only look, never touch because Donghyuck is all Mark’s.

Jeno gives him looks, like he’s reminding him he should be careful, like Mark needs to be reminded that Donghyuck should have been sent to a reparative therapy camp the moment he was born, sent away and locked away. Like Mark needs any reminder. Every time Donghyuck isn’t looking at him, every time he isn’t touching him and sending him aflame, he knows. He will never forget. The scars on Donghyuck’s wrists had started to fade in summer. Mark used to pin them above his head, had the excuse of kissing the snappy comeback away to brush his thumbs against the thin skin, the veins healing and tissues recovering. But school is beginning again and Mark is not sure because they cannot have a moment alone this time. Donghyuck has never been as predictable as Mark had thought.

But the summer was so perfect, Blue Hawaii on repeat, Doonghyuck singing the words into Mark’s mouth as he leaned over the hamper in the Lee’ laundry room, cleaning both his and Mark’s sweat-soaked sheets, a labor of their love or something Donghyuck had said mockingly when he took a look at his last clean sheets, soaked to the bone with traces of them, face contorting into disgust Mark had kissed him, pushed him up against the dryer and debauched the fuck out of him. And then there were late nights, the air conditioning turned up high as Donghyuck snuck Mark in through the sliding door in the back, crickets and lizards tutting, those reckless and love-struck teens, think they’re gonna last but they are just like summer, always has to end.

But it doesn’t have to, not for Mark. They can have whatever they have any time of the goddamned year, Mark can take him away, take each other away. Those senior girls and sophomore boys can go cry him a river. He’s only got eyes for Donghyuck.

In 1973, a fire alarm was struck at 3:56 pm in Chelsea, Massachusetts, saying that a blaze had begun on Spruce and Summer streets and showed no signs of letting up.

It took them twenty-four hours to stop the fire. Miraculously and curiously, no one had died but three hundred buildings were burnt to the ground and one thousand people were displaced. It was chaotic, said firefighters, said it was a fast-moving fire and took them days to finally quell the remnants of the conflagration. But the Second Great Fire of Chelsea did not match the spectacular blazing glory that was the Great Chelsea Fire 1908. Reports even said that the Boston fire could not keep up.

When a human being is totally consumed by fire, they burn to an unrecognizable state, and are turned to ash but sometimes the skull, the teeth, the pelvis may be recognized as a human’s. In another life, really, Mark might have been an arsonist.

When he sees the article about the second great fire in the papers when he’s fourteen, sees the headline: “Anniversary of The Great Fire of Chelsea 1973” he cuts it out, cuts out every image he can find, steals his dad’s newspapers and hands Jaemin safety scissors and makes him cut clippings with him, frantic. He pastes it to his wall, spindly fingers red and quivering, and he marvels. His parents had gotten worried, asked in hushed whispers if they should call in a specialist or not because honey, our baby boy can’t be an arsonist. They don’t know, they never know that people can be what you don’t think they can be.

First day of freshman year he took all those articles down, embarrassed about how he related to it — how can someone relate to a wildfire? How can someone be so catastrophic and chaotic and intense and unrelenting? Instead, he only posted one clipping to his wall, stayed there right until senior year — Time magazine: ‘The Most Beautiful Suicide’: A Violent Death, an Immortal Photo. When he used to wake up in cold sweat, he’d find that he had been clutching, crumpling, the photo of Evelyn McHale, beautiful and dead. Once you look it is hard to look away so Mark had spent his high school life staring at the picture, sometimes tearing it off his wall only to tape it back up again. Mark is still bitter about it, thinks a lot about it — if he ever killed himself it wouldn’t be beautiful, it would be fucking devastating, ugly, death’s violence and composure never sorry, never gentle. “At the bottom of the Empire State Building the body of Evelyn McHale reposes calmly in grotesque bier her falling body punched into the top of a car.”

Wildfire or fire in general has never been a leading and common cause of death but it is not unheard of. Surveys from the past years have shown that the number of people dying from combustion have decreased and decreased. But it is not uncommon to be lit aflame, trapped in a burning house and inhaling all the smoke. It is more often that smoke inhalation and asphyxiation kill a person before the flames do. But not always.

It is the fire in the person’s eyes that can get to you before their hands do.

Donghyuck and Mark fight and then they make up and they do it all over again.

Donghyuck screams, “Do you actually expect me to settle down? I’m only seventeen, who the fuck do you think you are?”

Donghyuck screams, “It’s all in your head that I love you back! This is just a thing to pass the time, it has zero meaning to me, get that shit through your thick fucking skull!”

Donghyuck screams, “Don’t be fucking delusional, you wouldn’t be fucking saying these things if you heard the goddamned news that I was rushed to the hospital — that’s when you’d start fucking caring. Fuck you.”

And Mark says back, “If you act as mature as you think you are and how above everyone else you think you seem to be then yes I’d expect you to take this a little more seriously.”

And Mark says back, “Fucking newsflash: you initiated everything. You started it and continued it and I only did what you wanted me to do, it’s all I’ve been doing! Stop being fucking selfish.”

And Mark says back, “You’re the only one who thinks that I don’t care. Anyone can fucking see that I do. I care, and I love you and I do all that I fucking can. I fuck up, you fuck up, but don’t you ever say I never loved you because that’s all I do. “

To say “I love you” is to say I want to tear your heart from your chest and drink the blood from the yawning cavity.

Donghyuck has a way with words, it’s obvious. When he spits his venom at Mark, it goes right past him. It is the hate in Donghyuck’s eyes, how Mark is still blind to see he is the only one who’s loving anyone here, how Mark grew up selfish with his sacrifices but never with the way he loves and Donghyuck was clearly the opposite, everything and everyone bending to his will, that makes Mark freeze and get on his knees and ask for forgiveness, a sinner asking for repentance from God.

So Mark and Donghyuck fight and they fall back into each other, Chelsea, Massachusetts burning and screaming in the background.

Jeno comes crying home and Donghyuck pushes Mark up against the tree house wall, whispers, “Your brother fucked my brother up,” chuckles and licks the roof of Mark’s mouth, says. “If only they knew.”

Mark sneaks back into the house with red lips, softly swollen from Donghyuck biting down and pulling like a fucking animal Mark fell even more in love. Jeno is blasting Armed Forces from his room and it is eleven in the evening so Mark leans against Jeno’s closed door, can pick out the crying from Elvis Costello’s lofty voice, singing, There's so many fish in the sea, that only rise up on the sweat and smoke of mercury, but they keep you hangin' on, they say you're so young, your mind is made up but your mouth is undone.

Mark wants to say that he’s sorry, that he can still try Chenle, try Renjun, even. That he’s eighteen, it’s not the end of the world even though Mark thought it was when he was his age. Mark wants to say that Jeno can still have his 2.5 kids and a dog and marigolds growing in the slots between white picket fence if he wants to. Join soccer, football, baseball, basketball whatever fucking sport, wear his goddamned varsity jacket and get the senior girls looking twice his way.

Mark wants to say he’s sorry but he can’t, so he doesn’t.

Donghyuck turns eighteen and the centuries weigh even more in his eyes, Caesar’s death, Roman empires falling, the great depression, little girls being burnt at the stake, blood in the hands of men who would never be accused, an eye for an eye, a broken boy for a golden boy, make him look older. Eyebags dark with the thunder storms of the days when people feared their gods, ichor and immortality only ever being a figment of their imagination. The fall of history in the knob of his spine, the curve of his back retelling history, says Brutus loved Caesar and that’s why he betrayed him, says the great depression was only in the form of a young boy whose momma never loved him. If only that were possible.

Donghyuck turns eighteen and his brother lets him drive his Chevy around, inviting Mark along. Mark says scathingly, “Now I know we’re both suicidal but please, I actually want to graduate college,” and Donghyuck laughs and they have their windows rolled down and the trees are red and orange and the public pool at the town square is empty and it’s cold, spine chilling cold and Donghyuck is wearing a sweater of Mark’s that he swears he didn’t steal from him. Donghyuck leans over the center console, kisses the life out of Mark and Mark laughs into his mouth but when Mark later tries to do that, car parked at what Donghyuck claims to be ‘makeout point’, he gets a pinch to the neck and a punch to the arm.

Donghyuck turns eighteen and he is still as moodily pretentious and obnoxiously mysterious, as impenetrable and damned as he was the day Mark first saw him, first met him. Nothing has changed except the way he only wants Mark to touch him, no talking, shoves his tongue down Mark’s throat and smears him with the chemical properties of him, lips insistent and eager. Still as unpredictable. He’s ready to get out of this town, Mark can tell. Still the kind of boy that doesn’t belong here, still stark against the pews of the church, wound still fresh like Eden’s collar bones. Ready to tear out of his own skin screaming.

Donghyuck turns eighteen and Mark’s heart is off the center of gravity, earthbound, and satellites all point to Donghyuck.

Come Monday morning, Mark passes for normalcy so well Donghyuck might never speak to him. He joins the lines of commuters, black tie, law firm, briefcase nine to five average Joes, does not jaywalk, stops at a red light, doesn’t occupy the empty seat next to him with his bag on the bus even though no one ever sits next to him. He goes to the library and studies, does his work, sleeps sometimes. Begs a smoke off Kun from the medicine building.

Come Monday afternoon, Jeno, fresh from his swim meet, hair damp and stinking of chlorine that it is obvious summer is still clinging to him, grabs his forearm when he comes through the door and says in a low voice. “Your boy got called to the principal’s office today.”

Mark is still too tired for this kind of conversation, the last thing he wants to talk about is anything about Donghyuck with Jeno, but it is very peculiar. Jeno had told him that Donghyuck doesn’t talk much and keeps to himself, seems to not have any friends, so what did he do to get him in trouble?

“Talked back to a teacher, I think. Was doin’ some unethical shit in the bathroom when a teacher came in, too. That’s what I heard.” Jeno supplies.

Mark nods. It’s really none of his business, he’s just — well a whatever to Donghyuck and he’s certainly not his parent so it shouldn’t bother him, per say, but it does have him concerned.

It’s almost midnight when Donghyuck decides to grace him with his presence, pushes his curtains, the rings catching, making a shrill noise, aside with a simultaneous stormy and smug face, smirks when he sees Mark.

“Hey, troublemaker,” Mark greets. “How was the Old Man?”

“Woman,” Donghyuck corrects, sitting on his ledge coyly. “Said she couldn’t believe I’d do any of that shit. Always been a good, quiet boy. Like she’s never seen my report card — has true potential, high intellect but poor communication skills and lacks effort.” He snorts and rolls his eyes.

Mark cocks his head to the side. “What did you do exactly?”

Donghyuck shrugs, like it's the same old same old. “Told the history teacher to go fuck himself and got caught smokin’ by The Woman in the bathroom,” he turns to look at Mark, expression playful. “Stole your pack by the way.”

Mark smiles momentarily. “Fucker,” but then he sets himself straight. “Hey, don’t do that shit again, okay? Or, I mean, don’t get yourself expelled, you never know what your parents would do.”

Come the early hours of Tuesday, Donghyuck swings his legs back and forth from his position on the ledge and says not so promisingly, “Okay.”

For some twisted, stupid reason, Donghuck keeps getting himself into trouble — cutting classes on Tuesday, cutting himself in the bathroom on Wednesday, flipping off teachers on Thursday, rolling his eyes in between passages of the word of the Lord on Friday. Mark has no idea what’s going on, tells him on Saturday when they’re hiding in the tree house that he should be more careful.

Donghyuck presses his lips to Mark’s softly, balancing his weight on his hands on Mark’s thighs. Mark whimpers, holds Donghyuck’s hips bringing him closer. “Just because you turned eighteen doesn’t mean you can get away with that kind of shit.”

Donghyuck laughs, settles into Mark’s lap and doesn’t go away, nuzzling his neck almost shyly. “I can do whatever I fucking want, actually.”

Mark raises his eyebrows, leans back to look back at Donghyuck when he tells him, “Oh? Why do you say so?”

Donghyuck smirks and looks at him like Mark isn’t ready, will never be ready, for what Donghyuck has in store. Donghyuck doesn’t answer, kisses him instead, lets his hands slip under Mark’s shirt, strokes his stomach. Mark forgets what they were talking about.

At dinner, Mark’s mom says worriedly to their father, “Have you heard about Jun’s kid? The boy is giving his poor parents a heart attack, he’s been consistently getting into trouble,” she then drops her voice, avoids looking at any of her kids but Mark knows, just knows what she’s saying. “He was caught with a razor at school.”

Their father shakes his head, tuts. “He needs help. God ain’t gonna save that kid right now.” Their mother looks troubled and when she notices that all her sons are looking at her, even little, innocent, unaware Jisung, she puts on a bright smile. “I love you kids; did you know that?”

Jeno chirps in, “We love you, too!” Jaemin leans over to kiss their mom’s cheek. In this house, everything is normal. Mark's got both of his parents, has got a great relationship with his siblings, has food to eat, a bed to sleep in. Inside, there’s nothing wrong. But out there, out there is where Mark doesn’t want to be.

Eight close calls. In Mark’s life there have been eight close calls where he should have been dead.

Of course, the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth calls don’t matter — never did, situations where Mark just tried to overdose or something but couldn’t. It is not important anymore as the eighth — the eighth close call is what almost drives Mark to hell.

One morning, Saturday, to be exact, nine am, Mark is on the couch with Jisung, watching cartoons when the doorbell rings. Mark answers the door to, low and behold, Jun Lee, wringing his fingers worriedly. He says good morning and Mark says it curtly back. And then,

“Is, by chance, Donghyuck here?” His eyebrows furrow. “I don’t mean to worry you, son, but when we woke up he wasn’t in his room and I know he’s friends with you and—”

Mark stops listening. Donghyuck isn’t home? Where the fuck could he be? He doesn’t even go outside, where else could he go? He evens out his breathing, isn’t gonna start having a relapse in front of Donghyuck’s dad and so he interrupts him. “No, no, God no, I haven’t seen him. I am so sorry. I can help later when my parents are awake.”

Jun smiles tiredly. “Thank you,” he puts a firm hand on Mark’s shoulder, holding the way Donghyuck holds, strong and holding one down. “You’re a good man. God bless you.” He waves as he walks away.

The eighth close call is one Saturday morning, at nine am, Donghyck is not found in his bed, in the bathroom, anywhere in his house. They’re a match, decaying boys, dead boys. Donghyuck could be anywhere in this small town, the graveyard, the public pool, at school — may have already hitchhiked his way out, ran as fast as his thin legs could go and took the first bus out, six dollars to his name.

Little Hyuckie, not so little anymore, the pastor’s son, breaking his family’s heart, doing all this crazy shit for attention, is what Mrs. Na from across the street says to Mark's mom, “Didn’t get enough attention. But no worries, God and a little therapy can fix that boy right up.”

Mr. Na then tells Mark’s father. “That kid’s always been a little… weird. Was quiet and mad all the time. Antisocial, too. Didn’t talk to the other kids and spit on the ground we all walked on. Some kids go through phases but this one ain’t a phase, I think.”

Mark wants to tell them that once, Mark loved a boy who didn’t love himself and once, Mark was wrong, so wrong because it was never about loving himself but himself, once, Mark loved a boy who never really cared for anyone else but himself, this stupid suburbia be damned and that they are all wrong, Donghyuck couldn’t give a jack shit about attention and phases — this has been him, him and his plan, the entire time. The moment he was born he had a bomb set to his heart and a timer in his hand, already wanting to get out, out of the womb, the hospital, the house, the neighborhood, out of any form of emotional bond with Mark. Mark is good at keeping secrets but Donghyuck was the one secret he never wanted to keep hidden.

Secrets in this kind of town are a big no, a fact Mark learns when Renjun from next door walks over to him smoking on their front porch and asks if he knows any place, has got a lead to where Donghyuck could be since they’re “close”.

“Why don’t you ask Jaemin?” Mark snaps and Renjun shuts his mouth, gives him a glare and walks back to his house. People know Mark doesn’t mean to be cruel, but he means it, he means it, means to be so much.

But they do find Donghyuck eventually, lighting his fourth consecutive cigarette in the back of the diner that’s next to the library in the town square.

Donghyuck’s parents ground him but it obviously doesn’t matter, it won’t stop Donghyuck any time soon.

One of the leading causes of death, surveys conducted over the years say, is cardiovascular disease.

Though preventable and slowly decreasing, it is still the most common cause of death. Cardiovascular disease is a general term, since it is a class of diseases that involve the heart or blood vessels. Hospitals have reported that there has been an influx of heart surgery, increased by twenty seven percent, even though there have been reports that people having a heart disease have decreased through the years.

It is not unusual to be rushed to the hospital due to a heart disease, stroke and heart attacks being the most common types.

In this case, it is not the reason why Donghyuck was rushed to the hospital.

Mark’s mother says, “It’s so sad, his brother found him in his bathroom bleeding out.”

Mark’s mother says, “I hope he gets better and knows that he doesn’t have to deal with this alone.”

Mark’s mother says, “Multiple injuries, doctors think he tried to kill himself, but he won’t talk. Poor kid.”

Jeno sneers, “Your little boyfriend is worrying the shit out of everyone.”

Mark shoves at Jeno’s chest, his chest that’s not so skinny anymore, reminding Mark he isn’t a kid anymore, so he’s allowed to do this. “You’ve been on my fucking ass ever since you and Donghyuck’s brother broke up.” Jeno stumbles back a step or two, mouth hanging open and eyes wide. From the shove or Mark admitting that he knows about their relationship, he doesn’t know, but he feels a little pleased that this is the reaction he got. His mouth forms into a sneer, “Yeah. Yeah, I fucking knew. Thought you two were subtle? No, God no.”

“You think he still cares about you, Nono? You definitely care about him. Get a fucking grip, he isn’t your endgame, you’re eighteen. Now don’t fucking blame me if Donghyuck is stressing your wittle boyfwend out and you can’t do anything about it. Fuck. Off.” Mark manages. Jeno is still gaping at him, staring and Mark doesn’t know what to do, drops his gaze, a little ashamed. “Sorry for shoving you.”

“No,” Jeno croaks out, shaking his head slowly, as if realizing. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’ve been directing my anger at you. Like it’s your fault but it’s not, I’m just — I’m still not over him.”

But it is Mark's fault. Maybe he didn’t love Donghyuck enough? He has lost his vigor for loving, after all. Maybe Mark shouldn’t have? All he knows is Donghyuck is in the hospital and Mark didn’t interrupt him this time, wasn’t the receiver of what could have been Donghyuck’s volcanic anger, righteous fury and all. Mark would have interrupted him, distracted him twenty-four seven, a million times over if this could never happen. But it happened and Mark doesn’t know who to blame so he blames himself.

Mark is so scared, full of fear, practically oozing it, could fill cathedrals with his fear, pray to a god and sacrifice his fear for anything other than fear, bring on the pain and the misery and the tragedy of it all. Radio plays about the hole in his heart. In his head, he is in the hospital, too. The bed next to Donghyuck’s, just a curtain separating them. Donghyuck will ask what he’s doing there, an IV injected into his veins, angry red slashes on both hands, not dead yet but could be, pallor mortis. Mark ruins everything he touches and destroys everything — anyone he loves. Mark would say. “Hey, doc. Can these stitches actually make me feel like me again?”

The radio plays on and on but it’s only static.

Donghyuck’s sister — her name on the tip of Mark’s tongue, but he doesn’t remember. Mark never cared to remember it, didn’t impress her on the first day they met or anything, so she was immediately not important. She isn’t Donghyuck. All Mark is sure of is that she’s different from all the other suburban girls by doing the exact opposite of what these dime a dozen, mundane suburban girls are doing. Didn’t marry a one-time jock who now excels like a fucking champ at being another stock broker, live out in a perfectly boring little life at the end of the block, house exactly like the one she grew up in. No, this girl, she’s a smart cookie, she is.

Today marks Donghyuck’s fourth day in the hospital. “I heard he’s going to get discharged soon, oh, I do hope so, all he needs is to spend a little time with family.“ His mother had said at the dining table last night. When their doorbell had rung, Mark pretty much expected it to be a member of the Lee family but not who he expected.

Mark remembers her name now. Seungyeon. Seungyeon Lee. She is still as unimpressed with him as the first day they met, she has on a pink sweater over a collared top and Mark wants to roll his eyes. Suburban girl who thinks God has the answers is what she is. Not so different from everyone else as she thinks she is.

She crosses her arms and settles her bored gaze onto Mark. “Donghyuck wants to see you,” she then rolls her eyes. “Been demanding that you come see him. Not so subtle, he is.”

When Mark manages to make his heart stop beating, engine pumping, churning, 225 horsepower at 80 mph, he says, “Oh — um, I-I’ll try.”

“No offense,” she says, meaning full offense, voice sounding a lot like Donghyuck’s, the way he speaks, pitched and drawled and suburbia rooted right to the core. “But you’re a fucking idiot like Hyuck is.”

Mark looks at her sharply, inhales pointedly. “You just gonna come here and insult me then?” he snaps. “Okay, alright, I can practically smell what your high school life was like. Would you like a recap? A feeling you thought you’ve forgotten? Don’t fucking try me today.”

She rolls her eyes. “Calm the fuck down,” she uncrosses her arms. “I can tell, you know. He may have stopped talking to us or the likes when he turned twelve, but I know him. That kid’s in love with you,” she eyes him warily. “And you are, too.”

So she’s not just another unconventional girl. Donghyuck’s not the only one in the family who is just full of surprises. But Mark wants to laugh, wants to let it rip out of his throat, desperate and exhausted and boneless. “Yeah. I’m a little fuckin’ in love with your brother. But I think there’s a reason why he hasn’t properly talked to you since he was twelve because you are dead wrong,” Mark tells her in a low voice. “Your brother doesn’t care about anyone but himself. No use to let him stay in that damned hospital, you know, no use saving him with those fucking IV’s and wires and tubes. He’s been a dead boy the moment you all held him in your arms.”

Seungyeon blinks, eyes wide. “Oh.”

Mark sighs, runs a hand through his hair, remembers the way Donghyuck grips it, pulls on it, plays with it and it sparks something terrifying, coiling, disgusting in Mark’s gut. “I’ll visit. I’ll come by tomorrow, will you tell him that?” he closes the door on her before she can respond but he knows she’ll tell him.

The door shuts and Seungyeon's voice rings in Mark’s ears. Donghyuck would be wasting his time, loving Mark. But isn’t Mark doing the exact same thing, too?

“About time,” Donghyuck says when Mark knocks on the hospital room door. He doesn’t look any different, definitely a little pale, but still as skinny and destructive as ever. “Don’t you owe anyone an apology?”

“‘To whom do I owe the biggest apology? No one’s been crueller than I’ve been to me.’” Mark recites as he closes the door behind him, just to hear Donghyuck laugh. The room feels a little lighter now. There’s a smell that Mark can’t quite put his finger on, bleach, formaldehyde, pills. Donghyuck reaches his hand out, Mark walking slowly over to the bed, intertwining their slender fingers together.

“You think we can fuck here?” Donghyuck wiggles his eyebrows, smile mischievous. “Wanna test if the bed is stable enough?”

“Hyuck,” Mark says, almost scolding. “What was the shit you pulled a few days ago? How did it end up with you here?”

Donghyuck’s smile drops and he manages to look at Mark with disappointment, at Mark. If he thought they were not going to talk about this, that Mark was just here to distract Donghyuck, he was wrong. His hand falls limp but Mark holds on. Is the only one at this point who is holding on. When Donghyuck doesn’t answer, Mark goes on. “Is this what you wanted? When you holed yourself up again in your bathroom with your stupid razor? Went too far and ended up in the hospital? Got angry when you came to and realized you were still stuck here? What, Hyuck, fucking tell me. “

“Here we go with this again.” Donghyuck mutters angrily, “Does it actually fucking matter to you? It’s none of your goddamned business. What? Do you wish you had interrupted me this time, started going on about some fucking whore just to get my attention? Wish you could have stopped me this time like you did last time? You can’t fucking save everyone all the goddamned time, Mark. Look at you, you can’t even save yourself, Jesus.”

Mark looks down and notices that they’ve bandaged up Donghyuck’s thin wrists, white against white, stark, like blood on one’s teeth. Donghyuck sees what he’s looking at and nudges his arms outward, like he’s showing them off. “Blood, Mark. You can’t fight blood.”

Mark exhales noisily, stares out the window of Donghyuck’s room, shoves his hands in between his crossed arms, finding warmth around Donghyuck’s cold hostility.

“You know what?” he says so quietly that he doesn’t actually recognize his own voice at first. “I forgive you. I forgive everything. The blood on the pavement, on your carpet, on my favorite pair of jeans. I forgive the headaches, the chest pains, the migraines. Doctors gave me a new heart, but it doesn’t work much because it’s still loving you. Your sister says you love me, but I think she’s wrong, they’re all wrong. You’re not like that, you’ll never be like that. But you don’t care for that shit, right? I’ll take you away from here, I’m promising you that. Cairo, Rio, they’ve got your names burned on their ground. This is an apology for the both of us for fucking each other up even more. I’m sorry it ended up like this.” Mark manages to look at Donghyuck this time. “I forgive you now, but I don’t know about the next time, Hyuck.”

Donghyuck clears his throat, casts his eyes downward on his lap, examines his hands, hands that have held Mark, that have touched Mark, that have hurt Mark. Skeletonization. “You can go now. If you want.”

There’s a chemical deficiency in Mark’s head that makes him wish he was dead even more so than he already is, even more so than he already does. Maybe the screaming, the resonating in his head is his body’s way of saying here, right here, would be the perfect place to just get a taste of what despair feels like.

When Mark walks out of the room, walks away from Donghyuck, it is his destruction, the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, crumbling like powdered dreams. When Mark walks away and learns how to breathe again, it is his birth.

Donghyuck is let out and Mark is the one to fall back, to slip right back into Donghyuck’s life, stays and goes but will always come back.

He’s nothing without Donghyuck, but he can’t tell him that. Donghyuck knows this but he allows it.

Mark will always come back.

Donghyuck’s antics go on for a while longer, but it’s the same old things that rile the neighborhood up. Mark keeps having to buy more Camels, Marlboros and when he wakes up they’re gone, one lone cigarette left in his drawer for him. Even his lighter is gone. When Donghyuck kisses him nowadays, they both taste like nicotine.

The Lees have thrown away all their disposable razors, replaces the lock on Donghyuck’s door, which, if Mark can recall is a violation of Donghyuck's privacy—he’s got a right to that somewhere in the law, actually hides anything sharp but that just makes Donghyuck get creative. Donghyuck tells Mark they’ve established a bible night every Friday and where is little Donghyuck when that happens? When Friday rolls around, where does he go? Where could he be now? He smiles like he’s proud of himself with his disappearing act and Mark doesn’t have the heart to pester him about that.

So Donghyuck continues his stupid act of scaring the town shitless. Mark believes he’ll get over it, he’ll calm down and get out of here with his dignity and head intact. They’ll both get out of there, get out into the world. They can steal Doyoung’s Chevy, giggle into each other’s mouth in cockroach infested motel rooms, neon sign blinking 24 hours slanting in through their hastily closed curtains. As long as love is blind.

Donghyuck has his head on Mark’s lap, has one hand curled around Mark’s ankle, the other flicking a lighter. He’s singing a church song, Mark wouldn’t know, never went to church a day in his life until they moved here, but Mark can decipher a “glory be” somewhere in there. It’s like a siren singing, dragging and being pulled under only to be eaten alive. Mark closes his eyes and listens, sees red and coffins, sees himself in every photo of a dead person, sees himself looking back. Mark doesn’t know what Donghyuck believes in, but there’s definitely no heaven or hell. Maybe a limbo. Maybe not. Mark was never good with being religious, never believed in a power higher than him so may God smite him.

Donghyuck plucks Mark’s cigarette out of his fingers and sucks in a drag. Bring on the rapture.

It’s Sunday. Another disappearing act from Donghyuck.

Mark doesn’t worry anymore, just sighs when he hears the news that Donghyuck isn’t in his bedroom because nowadays, Mark has stopped checking. He’s always going to disappear and appear again, appease suburbia even though that’s the last thing he’d want to do.

But when it’s starting to get dark and Donghyuck’s oldest brother’s fiancée is the only one in the Lee household, the entire family out looking, Mark knows something is wrong.

So he grabs his brothers and they ride out into town, looking for Donghyuck. Mark’s bike is rusty, hasn’t been used since he turned seventeen but the cheap adrenaline he gets from staying out past six gives his fifteen-year-old self some satisfaction. It’s cold, it’s fucking cold and Donghyuck is so reckless — what if he didn’t bring a jacket? What if he wanted to freeze himself to death? Hid in corners and watched amused as everyone called out his name, shivering himself to the bone that all he’s left with is a skeleton with some scars.

But he’s still nowhere, a police report is filed but they’re hesitant, the goddamned idiots are hesitant because Donghyuck is a legal adult anyway and he could be crashing at someone’s house and Mark wants to shake some sense into them, wants to say that Donghyuck is a lost boy, a boy, not a fucking man. Donghyuck has no friends because from day fucking one he didn’t need any attachments, that him going missing was going to be inevitable.

Jeno puts a hand on his shoulder when Mark stops at the side of the chain linked fence of the public pool, takes a deep breath. Jaemin sets his shoulders back, confident as ever in his little letterman jacket. “We’ll find him.”

It’s nine and it’s just getting too dark, they didn’t bring flashlights with them but the rest of the adults out looking for Donghyuck have and Mr. Kim pats all of their shoulders and says, “We’ve got this, boys. You should go rest.” When they turn their bikes, he mutters something akin to. “Those Lee boys, righteous as they are stubborn.”

Mark is pumping on the pedals, getting off on these suburban thrills, wanting to go home and see that Donghyuck has just been hiding in his room the entire time. Mark will punch his arm and Donghyuck will laugh and kiss him and everything will be fine. But Donghyuck’s mother is out on their front porch, face in her hands and Mark all but drops his bike onto the sidewalk and marches into the Lee household, ignores the photographs of Donghyuck staring right at him, ignores Donghyuck’s mother and Jeno’s protests as he climbs up the stairs and into Donghyuck’s room.

He knows, he knows, he knows — if it’s not there —

Mark pulls Donghyuck’s closet open, sees that all of his clothes are at least still there, a pack of Mark’s Marlboros actually there out in the open on his desk. Blue Hawaii is still set in the record player, but the sleeve is missing, and the sheets haven’t been done. But those shouldn’t indicate that Donghyuck is around because the only way to know is that if Donghyuck’s fucking emergency backpack is not in his closet (and Mark so fondly remembers the time Donghyuck had shown him, tone jocular as he showed it off. “Any time I want, right? Get your ass ready when I wake you up in the middle of the night.” and Mark had laughed and pushed him onto his floorboards, whispered something that he can’t remember to coax him into his hands, his mouth, sweetly) and Mark is frantically searching, pushing clothes and old bags and old shoes and posters aside and it’s not there but it should be, it needs to be, but it’s not —

Donghyuck’s mother and Jeno and Jaemin all stand by the doorway, staring at Mark. Mark is still kneeling by the closet, head hung, taking shuddery breaths. Jeno pushes past him, sees something taped to the window, blue cotton curtains pulled off the beam this time. Jeno shakes his head when he reads the note, puts his hand gently on Mark’s shoulder like he’s the bearer of the bad news that somebody fucking died, and passes the note to Mark. Mark doesn’t want to read it but he does, and he wants to dissolve into the earth, wants to explode with how nuclear he fills, sink into the floorboards, bury himself six feet under and stroll right into hell. He throws it away, throws it in the general direction of the door. This can’t fucking be, it can’t.

Donghyuck’s mother gasps and Jaemin catches her before she falls onto the floor. He’s shushing her, trying to calm her down but she’s bawling and Mark looks back in the closet, finding any signs that this is a joke but it’s fucking not. In place of Donghyuck’s emergency backpack is a fucking bible. Mark’s always told Donghyuck he would make a great runner in the track team, always running off whenever he can.

It can’t be, but it is.

“you can find me in route 666. so long.”

They say, “Let’s not bother the poor Lees. They’ve got to be going through a rough time.”

They say, “That Donghyuck kid ran and bolted the first opportunity he got. He won’t make it out there.”

They say, “Depressed. Probably a fag. Livin’ with that kind of environment, who wouldn’t run away?”

They say, “He won’t make it out alive and he’s only eighteen, right? Have you seen him? He’s already bones, the vultures would spit him back out.”

Mark wants to say, “I loved him and that wasn’t enough to make him stay.”

Mark wants to ask Donghyuck which promise was the easiest to break but knowing Donghyuck, it was all of them.

Jeno says, “I am so sorry, this must be so difficult but he’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”

But Jeno’s eyes say, “So what hurts more? Him choosing to go off alone to places he doesn’t even fucking know over you, his only chance of making it out alive or the fact that he really just up and left?”

Mark wants to say it aches, it aches, and it hurts and when Mark looks up at Donghyuck’s window he thinks he sees a ghost but he is only hoping. When he blinks it’s gone.

Mark had been right the moment he stepped foot in here, knew he was never going to leave, knew that Donghyuck didn’t seem the type to be tied down here forever.

Mark misses Donghyuck like he’s mourning, but he supposes it is almost like that.

Some days Mark fully blames Donghyuck for everything, for being so alluring, for drawing him in and shutting him right back out, for thinking he never needed anyone, for making Mark think he needed some saving, some fixing, made Mark want to be a summer boy, a martyr like his brothers but only inevitably embarrassing himself because he grew up selfish, making sacrifices for his own personal gain but never as selfish as Donghyuck. He blames Donghyuck for being so selfish that Mark gave it all up for him. He blames Donghyuck for making him so blind to see that he never cared back. For making him drop Emma, Johnny Suh, Dejun, Annie, everyone else because they could never amount to Donghyuck the second Donghyuck had shown him his scars. He fully blames Donghyuck for making him quit smoking because nicotine doesn’t taste like poison anymore but more like Donghyuck. How he can’t look at blue the same way he used to anymore. Kiss soft like a car crash, going as fast as James Dean on the 466/41 junction, soft like Caesar’s assassination. What part of you are you trying to kill? Mark is trying to kill the part of himself that Donghyuck has changed, has touched, two black eyes soul churning and simmering from the hole Donghyuck left. Mark supposes the hardest part of living is the breathing part, the fighting to stay alive when it’s just so, so easy not to. He blames Donghyuck because he cannot blame anyone or himself anymore. Mark doesn’t like to think he’s a monster but he supposes he is.

When Mark remembers Donghyuck’s face, he thinks young, he thinks eternal, he thinks fucked.

He’s the kind of boy that definitely doesn’t belong here.

Three months pass and Donghyuck hasn’t popped out of the tree house, from behind the diner, from under his bed, yelling “surprise!” because that is just delusional to think so.

Mark is twenty-one and he knows that out there, Donghyuck is walking the earth, still breathing the same air as Mark, looks at motels in the middle of the desert and thinks of the song Mark’s body thrums when he thinks of what could have been, if he ran away with Mark, woke him up at one am and told him to grab his shit and run because Mark would have done it, would have done anything for that boy.

Jaemin is graduating soon, state wide championships linked to his name. He is prom king, brings home a crown and a girl, name her Marie or Olivia or Diana because they are all the same here in suburbia, it doesn’t matter because Jaemin brings her home, his letterman jacket with the big bold LEE on the back catching the light hanging off her shoulders, kisses her on her front porch. It doesn’t matter because it is not going to last — Jaemin is a summer boy, a forever boy, your local teenage pipe dream, breaking hearts left and right and still they are left longing for him.

Donghyuck’s oldest brother gets married, a one-time jock who is starting his job at a law firm soon, bought a house at the end of the cul-de-sac, white picket fence for their Jack Russel Terrier who will love their daughter, who will look just like her mommy, will have all the boys swooning and the girls kissing, marries his high school sweetheart, will tell the tale that they met in AP Science and fell in love. The bride is beautiful, admittedly. Glowing with love and a PHD in forensics science which makes Mark question her life decisions— who needs to settle down with 2.5 kids and a second-hand car when you can put the years of struggle to good use? But love is blind and Mark is still trying not to be a hypocrite. It’s hard not to love a Lee, he and Jeno can justify that. Donghyuck would have hated the wedding, he could have snuck out and meet Mark halfway, they could have fucked in the storage closet and have a better time than the newlyweds but Donghyuck isn’t there and they leave a space for him in the pews at the ceremony, left a chair for him at the family’s table at the reception.

But Mark. Mark misses missing Donghyuck, misses the idea of Donghyuck actually loving him back, misses the thought of Donghyuck actually wanting Mark to kiss him because he actually liked him rather than checking off the bucket list or something stupid like that because it is Donghyuck. Struck by lightning and loving without the sweet taste, suckling blood with nitroglycerin flowing along the stream. Mark misses the perfect match that was him and his gunpoint smile and Donghyuck’s runaway scars.

Mark is home alone with Jisung one Wednesday, is waiting for his mom to get back from her shift so he can go catch a bus to endure five painful hours of classes when the phone rings. Jisung makes a “guh” sound, turning to look at Mark with wide eyes from his position on the floor and Mark smiles and ruffles his hair. He picks the phone up, twirls the cord around his finger and leans against the wall, staring at a picture of him and Jeno, Jeno still as young and chubby cheeked as ever, a picture of their sister and her angelic eyes and haunting smile right next to it.

“Hello?” he says, distracted.

“Hey,” the end of the line is static-y. Mark barely makes out the voice, can’t even hear what the other line is saying, “So.”

And then it hits Mark, oh God, does it hit Mark. The voice, that fucking voice, he’d know it anywhere, singing songs for God, singing to Elvis Presley, moaning his name, screaming at him, he’d know it anywhere after all this time.

“Bad news,” his voice sounds deeper or maybe that’s just Mark. He can feel the fucking grin from Donghyuck, can picture it with his eyes closed, like Donghyuck is right there on his bed, across from him, sitting on his lap. It is so easy to imagine it.

“What?” Mark swallows, dreads what Donghyuck has to even fucking say.

“I’m alive.”

Mark doesn’t know what to do, to laugh, to cry, to scream at him. So instead he hangs up the phone and slides down the wall, taking in a breath like he has never breathed before. A feeling you thought you’d forgotten. He’s alive. Mark doesn’t know where he is, but he’s alive and that’s enough. He’s been a dead boy since forever, but he is alive. Mark shouldn’t have been surprised, actually. He’s a survivor, survived Mark, survived each other, tuckered out the nuclear bomb. Decomposition and then rebirth. A dead man on his feet. It’s a start.

So Mark exhales and let’s suburbia drown him out.