Frenemies: A love (?) story
I wrote SHINee fanfic. Oh, boy.
I. I get a rush when I’m with you.
Within the first five minutes of meeting Key, Jonghyun wanted to punch him in the head at least three times. Once for strutting into the dance studio like he owned the place. Twice for proceeding to slouch into the only chair in the room and continue texting on his mobile that had a cross-eyed rabbit charm hanging from it which made the little short weird kid with the too-long bangs, Jonghyun vaguely remembered him introducing himself in a whisper between nervous titters as Taemin, stare covetously; the little weird kid must have been over the age of ten, but he was obviously still immature enough to want that dumb rabbit charm.
The third time he’d contemplated punching the snotty kid’s head flat as an onion pancake was when, during the first break of their first choreography class, he overheard the snotty kid telling the little weird kid and the kind of slow looking kid who smiled a lot for no reason that he’d been texting his girlfriend who was older - Snotty Kid had emphasized that several times - and lived in the United States and was crazy for him even though he thought she was too needy calling and texting him all the time. Then he’d told the other two that he lived in L.A. for a while and knew English ‘perfectly’ and proceeded to say something in English while the little weird kid and big-mouth smiley kid stared with wide impressed eyes as the big tall weird kid who hadn’t spoken a single word looked on still without a word.
Jonghyun had heard English being spoken plenty of times, he’d watched a lot of American movies after all, and what the Snotty Kid Key said didn’t sound quite right to him. Maybe Key spoke perfect English if he was a mildly retarded ten year old, but Jonghyun knew he wasn’t ten although he wasn’t sure yet at that point about whether Key was mildly retarded.
After that first class, Jonghyun really wanted to ask Director Lee if he could be transferred to some other group, any other group; he’d love to be in Super Junior, be the fourteenth member since he always thought having thirteen was unlucky. When he’d voiced his wish as deferentially as possible to the dance coach after class, Dance Coach Jung looked at him for the longest moment and said flatly ‘never say to the Director what you just said to me.’ Then Coach had looked over at the others sitting in the corner; Key was still running his mouth, Jonghyun doubted he’d ever shut up without someone taping his mouth shut, as the others listened, nodded, the little weird kid gasping and tittering all the while and the smiley kid smiling like a fool and the weird tall kid still not talking. Coach said to him, nodding over at the other members, ‘That’s your family now, Jonghyun, like it or not. Get used to it and if you complain again, you’ll regret it.’
He didn’t complain to Coach again, but he still thought he’d like to be adopted into a different family.
As the days and nights of dance classes, voice classes, and media relations classes blurred into each other, the one thing that stood out to him was Key’s mouth always being open and saying something totally annoying. Whether it was his incessant bragging about his time spent in L.A. or showing off his broken English or betting with the other members that he could out-eat, out-run, out-push up, out-something them, Key was always completely unapologetically annoying as hell. The constant bets with the other members that Key always won and made the others do purposely humiliating things like washing his underwear for him was one thing, but he was also incredibly bossy, which drove Jonghyun up the wall.
The only member Key no longer actively tried to boss around was him, but that was only because he’d yanked Key out of bed two nights ago at four and forced his head into the toilet bowl - which it had been Onew’s turn to clean that week but Onew kept putting it off because, as they’d all come to learn, despite Onew’s niceness he was also lazy as shit - and flushed the toilet as Key spluttered and cursed and howled. It had been payback for Key trying to boss him around by criticizing the way he made his bed that morning, the final straw after a week of critiques about how he did everything the wrong way according to the Laws of Key. In hindsight, Jonghyun thought, it had also been exactly what Key deserved after the crap he pulled at lunch. That had just been another perfect example of what he now personally thought of as Repulsive Storytelling Time With Key.
Probably the thing that he disliked the most about Key, even more than his bragging, his bossiness, his mouthiness, and general annoying presence, was his perverse and perverted streak that would show itself at the most inopportune - or perhaps opportune from Key’s screwed up viewpoint - times. They were eating lunch and Key had already finished his portion of cherries and been eyeing Minho’s portion hungrily - none of them felt as though they ever got enough to eat, all the servings at mealtimes were sad and small and not what they were used to back when they had lived at home with their mothers.
Minho ate like he did everything else when not forced into doing otherwise by their manager or coaches; slowly, silently, with too much deliberation. He had the suspicion that if they wouldn’t have gotten into trouble if they ever took more than the allotted half an hour to eat a meal, Minho would gladly sit at the little square table in the dorm’s dank kitchen all day, slowly savoring his food. Minho had just finished his measly serving of bibimbap, head bowed over his food and deep in concentration, and turned his attention to the cherries on his tray.
Without fail, Minho would never eat a little bit of this and a little bit of that, he had to eat all of one thing first before he moved on to the next and he became tense and even more slow-moving if stuff on his plate got mixed together. Jonghyun thought that Minho’s tallness was only matched by his oddness and need to follow his own self-imposed sense of order and method. Key often commented, loudly because Key was so irritatingly loud all the time, that Minho needed some sort of pills for his crazy that were only available in America and Key would buy him some the next time he was there because, as Key liked to point out, he was a very caring person that way. It was just another one of Key’s backhanded ‘caring’ insults but Minho always ignored Key’s comments. Jonghyun rather admired Minho’s ability to tune out Key as easily as waving away a pissy little mosquito that kept buzzing around your head.
Just as Minho popped the first cherry in his mouth, Key leaned across the table with a smile and said, “Do you know what that looks like, Minho?”
Minho blinked and slowly chewed, but said nothing, which was his customary reaction to most things.
Key rolled his eyes at Minho’s lack of interest and persisted, “Do you want me to tell you?”
“Like you’re not going to tell us anyway,” Jonghyun muttered under his breath but loud enough that Onew heard and choked back a snicker.
“What? What?” Taemin said, forgetting he had food in his mouth, and a bit of corn flew out his mouth and landed on the table right in front of Key’s plate.
Key grimaced and carefully flicked the corn with thumb and middle finger back in Taemin’s direction, letting his middle finger linger outstretched for a longer moment than necessary at Taemin. Of course, Taemin didn’t notice because if anything was slower than Minho, it was Taemin’s brain. Sometimes Jonghyun wondered, when he was really really bored, what exactly was going on in Taemin’s brain underneath that big mushroom cap of hair. He suspected probably not a whole lot because Taemin was so much younger than the rest of them and even young for his age; he’d been sheltered and hadn’t even ever done his own laundry until he got accepted into SM and they’d all had to do their own chores to become ‘mature and self-sufficient’ according to Manager Jin.
At first, Taemin had been too embarrassed to admit he didn’t know how to do household stuff or ask for help, so he’d avoided doing his laundry for three weeks until Key informed him that he stunk like a ‘room full of farts.’ And even then, Taemin still avoided admitting he didn’t know how to run a washing machine so he took to borrowing Onew’s clean underwear since Onew’s head was always on another planet thinking about god knows what and Taemin must’ve figured that Onew was the one least likely to notice his underwear stock rapidly shrinking since Onew had the habit of losing or misplacing everything.
Taemin didn’t dare to borrow Key’s underwear because Key would’ve definitely noticed. Key had never shared a room before joining the group and was paranoid someone would steal his stuff. It was beyond Jonghyun’s comprehension why Key thought anyone in their right mind would want his black underwear - he was the only one of them who wore black underwear and exclusively black at that, Jonghyun didn’t get it and personally found it gross because black underwear actually got dirtier faster than white but he supposed it was fitting since it matched Key’s gross personality - his mismatched sock collection, his crusty American brand deodorant that looked like he’d been using it for almost as long as he’d been alive, his razor that he could hardly use unless he planned to shave his hairy legs, his stuffed white bear that was missing one glass eye and smelled like drool, or his stack of American comic books that none of them would steal since they couldn’t really read them. Jonghyun suspected Key couldn’t read them either since he never looked at them and chose instead to read Onew’s set of girly manga like Kaikan Phrase and Fruits Basket while Onew was in the shower or out of the room, and leaving fingerprint stains on them since Key liked to eat the contraband candy his grandmother had stuffed in the lining of his suitcase - Key never offered to share any of it - while doing so.
Once Onew had complained about someone leaving smeared chocolate fingerprints on his comics…well, Onew never really complained, he just wondered out loud about things like that with a befuddled absentminded expression and then continued on with whatever he’d been doing without seeking an answer or asking for accountability. Life and the world was a big tangled yarn ball of mystery to Onew because Onew was such a space cadet and his head, despite being attached to his body residing on planet earth, seemed to float unfettered in outerspace. Jonghyun suspected at the time that Key had lied and secretly told Onew that Taemin was the culprit for he knew that Onew would never confront or criticize Taemin since he was the oldest and felt like he had to be a nice hyung to the baby.
Taemin’s hopelessness when it came to doing chores was only revealed when he’d finally lost a pointless bet to Key that he could out-sit up him during one of the fitness hours that ended every single dance practice. Key had probably realized Taemin’s weak spot, because Key was obnoxiously shrewd that way although dumb and uncaring as a rock when it came to schoolwork, and had talked Taemin into washing his clothes for him as penalty for losing the bet. Jonghyun could still remember the shrieking and cursing - swear words so bad that Jonghyun would’ve gotten his face slapped by his mother if he’d ever uttered them at home - that came flying out of Key’s loud annoying mouth when Taemin had shamefacedly handed him a neatly folded stack of his freshly laundered socks, underwear, and undershirts with all the colors bled into each other. He remembered watching with delighted amusement the outraged look on Key’s face as he held up a pair of formerly white socks now ruined with inky black splotches from the black of his underwear and waved them in front of Taemin’s big-eyed fearful face.
It was a typical example of why Jonghyun couldn’t give Key any credit for being a mind game mastermind as Key likely fancied himself to be because Key’s little power plays almost always ended up backfiring on him. Not that it would stop Key from trying because he was persistent in his pettiness.
Key tilted back in his chair and rested one slippered foot against the edge of the kitchen table, a habit that Jonghyun hated because it was unsanitary to put one’s foot on the surface they ate off of, never mind that if one of the other members had done the same Key would’ve delivered one of his acid tongue lashings. Key’s action revealed his ankle and the black-spotted white sock covering it. Jonghyun took a big sip from his glass of water to keep from laughing out loud to see that messed up sock.
His shit-eating grin growing wider, Key sighed and said, “I don’t know, maybe it’s better if I don’t say it. Taemin’s too young and I don’t want to be a bad hyung.”
Of course, that was Taemin’s cue to cry out - Taemin was so predictable that way - in protest. The only times normally cheerful and dense Taemin got mad was when he felt like the others were keeping things from him because he was the youngest.
“What?” Taemin demanded, bottom lip threatening to turn down. “I want to know!”
“Hey-I mean-uh…look, we should probably finish-“ Onew murmured hesitantly, vaguely. Onew tried to be the leader, live up to his role, but it wasn’t really in his nature. He was too much of a daydreamer, too spacey, and too sensitive to be forceful or assertive enough to inspire the rest of them to follow. Key was already talking over Onew; Key had a tendency to talk over everyone.
“The cherries look like -“ Key reached over and poked Taemin in his thin chest, “nipples.”
Taemin stared down at Key’s forefinger on his chest, his mouth dropping open. Minho made a strangled noise, his face going red, and pushed his plate containing the cherries away from him. Key howled with laughter, like a demented evil little monkey.
“Yup, that’s what the ones on American girls look like,” Key declared between hiccups of laughter.
“That’s crap,” he said flatly, “they’re pink.” As soon as Jonghyun said it, he wished he could snatch the words out of the now silent air and swallow them back down. Onew dropped one of his chopsticks, and went red and closed his eyes in shame.
Key sat up arrow straight, letting the feet of his chair snap back to the floor with a sharp noise and leaned against the table, his arms crossed and resting on the tabletop.
“Oh, really?” Key said with another hiccup, chin on his arms, liquid feline eyes wide and gleaming with spite, “Well, you sure told me, Jonghyun.”
It was at that moment he realized just how clever Key could be because while Key might have brought it up so he could get Minho to give up the cherries to him, Jonghyun finally understood that Key’s true intent was to shame him and Onew for the night when he’d caught the two of them up late huddled in the dark in front of the glowing computer screen looking at pictures of naked American girls, awed by the spread of pale thighs, white breasts tipped with pink, golden hair and red-slicked mouths.
Key must have been planning his little revenge since that time when he and Onew had pushed Key away as he tried to pull up a chair to sit with them and look too and told Key he was too young and stupid. He knew Key already had a built-in dislike of mild-mannered Onew since the first day when Director Lee informed them Onew would be the leader because he was the oldest. He’d caught the briefest thunderstorm of jealous fury flash over Key’s face, electrifying his lightning bolt eyes practically green for a second, before it was replaced with the bland compliant smiling mask Key slipped on as quickly and comfortably as donning a well-worn pair of flannel pajamas.
At that time he’d whispered in an undertone to Key as he brushed past him to fall in line to file out of Director Lee’s office, making sure to ‘accidentally’ bump Key’s shoulder with his own -
‘Too bad your mother didn’t have you a year earlier, isn’t it?’
Key had stiffened the barest bit even as his smile grew wider and took on a slightly feral twist of the lips. Since then, Key had disliked him as much as he disliked Onew, although in a different way. Key’s grudge against Onew was against what Onew represented - leader by designation and not merit - and not him personally. Between him and Key, the grudge was personal: North and South Korea with Key’s verbal missiles always pointed towards Jonghyun’s barbed wire-fenced mental shores ready to bomb and destroy, and Jonghyun’s silent standing army of disdain ready to march and raze Key’s emotional city streets and skyscrapers that Key had carefully built into a metropolis of insolence around himself.
Perhaps that was the real reason why Key annoyed Jonghyun - his sheer shameless audacity, the way he carried himself as though the world owed him something from the moment he was born, how he acted like he was already a star even though they hadn’t debuted yet. Jonghyun didn’t know where Key got the damned nerve but it was there and it grated on Jonghyun’s last nerve like sandpaper on glass. So that’s why he’d said what he did the first day and why, several months later, Key decided to verbalize, in his roundabout cunning way, his scorn for him.
“Don’t-don’t-“ Onew started spluttering, his face going from red to pale.
Jonghyun knew exactly what Onew was trying to spit out and he wished he could slap a hand over Onew’s big stupid mouth to stop him. Both of them knew that what they had done was strictly forbidden; they’d been told from day one that they were not supposed to look at things on the Internet that could be ‘distracting and improper to how SM idol trainees are to conduct themselves at all times whether in public or privately in the dorm.’ Jonghyun knew Onew feared the physical punishment that would be sure to follow should it be revealed: a few slaps across the face or a cuff upside the head complete with yelling and threats and forced kneeling for an hour or two. Jonghyun wasn’t afraid of that, as awful and humiliating as it would be because it would be conducted in front of the other members as an object lesson. No, he was frozen deep with the fear of being kicked out and replaced with any of the thirty other boys who had made the semifinal cut, all of whom were ready, willing, able, and dying with ambition to take his spot and Onew’s. After all that grueling work: hours of dancing and singing and interviews grilling him on his commitment and selfless dedication to being part of the SM Family and running around the outdoor track until he’d felt like throwing up from physical overwork and mental exhaustion…he couldn’t lose all that in the minute or two it would take for Key to open his big loud mouth to their management.
Key raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes even further in mock innocence, staring at white-faced Onew who seemed to be grasping on to the lone wooden chopstick in his hand like a cross to ward off a devil like Key.
“What do you mean? Don’t what?” Key said casually and reached over to Minho’s abandoned plate and plucked a cherry from it, holding the stem fussily between thumb and forefinger. “You’re full, right, Minho?”
The cherry was already halfway into Key’s mouth when Minho gave the slightest jerk of a nod in consent. Key’s impudence didn’t have the patience to wait for any person, especially one as slow to react as Minho.
Despite being slow-moving as a turtle with a bum foot, Minho was no fool as Jonghyun suspected all along because Minho’s placid eyes narrowed and went back and forth from Key chewing on the cherry with a satisfied gloating expression to him and Onew sitting stock-still and silent.
“I don’t get it,” Taemin grumbled. “What’s going on?”
Onew’s stuttering had died off into worried speechlessness as he turned begging eyes on Key. Jonghyun refused to look directly at Key, he wouldn’t beg him for his petty mercy.
“It’s nothing, Taemin,” Minho said, startling all of them, even Key who paused in popping another cherry into his mouth and eyed Minho warily. “It’s just Key being weird again.”
A long moment of wordlessness stretched on, thin and chilly, until finally Key said with a bark of laughter, “That’s right, it’s just me being weird.”
He thought he heard Onew exhale with relief. Possible crisis had been averted and it seemed Key would be content with the knowledge that he and Onew recognized Key had the power to screw them over even if he wouldn’t actually exercise it to the fullest extent he could. Key continued talking because he could never shut up or let anything go without getting in the final word, like Jesus intoning a sermon on the Mount - that’s how Key liked to deliver his scoldings.
“I guess I haven’t been getting enough sleep at night. Someone keeps getting up in the middle of night, doing who knows what, and you know I’m a light sleeper. It’s rude.”
“Well, you could wear earplugs or headphones so you won’t be bothered when one of us goes to the bathroom or gets a glass of water,” Taemin advised helpfully, with a note of pride as if he was being so wise although he couldn’t buy a clue even with Minho’s not-so-secret cash stash.
“Good idea,” Key said and ruffled Taemin’s mushroom of hair, making Taemin laugh.
What was a good idea was if they had Key’s blathering mouth surgically wired shut for life, Jonghyun thought but refrained from saying.
“Our time’s up,” he said, standing up, making sure to push his chair back in - they got reprimanded if they didn’t. He grabbed the remaining few cherries on Minho’s plate, snatched Key’s hand, and smashed the cherries into Key’s palm. “You can finish those on the way.”
Key stared at him and then looked down at the cherry juice dripping from between his fingers in disgust. “Thanks a lot, hyung,” Key said. The way Key said ‘hyung’ he might as well have said dog shit and the tone would have been fitting.
He didn’t say anything back and turned on his heel to walk out of the kitchen, his sneakers squeaking shrilly against the linoleum flooring. From behind him, he could hear the other members get up from the table and follow him out of the room.
‘Do me a favor,” he heard Minho whispering to Key, “next time when you’re thinking about saying something…just don’t.”
Key merely snorted in response and Jonghyun looked over his shoulder and saw him licking the cherry juice from his fingers. Key glanced up and met his gaze. Jonghyun felt an unpleasant burning sensation in his gut when Key’s frown curled up at the edges turning into a smile he couldn’t read except to construe it as taunting. Since the first day he’d met Key, he thought that malice ran through his veins instead of blood.
*****
“Hey, Taemin, check this out.”
For a moment, Jonghyun considered smacking his head against the ceiling to floor mirror covering the entire length of one wall of the studio to hear Key’s voice piping up again. It was too much to hope that Key would take Minho’s sound advice to shut the hell up to heart.
He turned and saw Key open his mouth and stick out his tongue as Taemin and Onew, for Onew always wanted to be included on every joke and everything everyone else did, crowded around Key.
“Woooow,” Taemin said, eyes alight with admiration.
“That’s so cool,” Onew enthused, smiling his big foolish smile. Jonghyun felt like slapping his own forehead in despair at Onew’s complete lack of a short-term memory. Apparently, Onew had already forgotten that just five minutes ago Key had made a veiled threat to get him and Jonghyun in trouble.
The so cool thing that had made their leader lose his memory was a cherry stem tied in a knot resting on the tip of Key’s tongue.
“How did you do that?” Taemin said, still agog.
Key laughed and spat the stem out in the trash can as he raised his thin arms above his head and stretched them. “It’s a secret, but I’ll teach you one day when I have time.”
“Me too,” Onew whispered. If Key heard, he pretended not to, and slung his arm around Taemin’s shoulders. Onew stood there for a moment longer staring at Key and Taemin before he shuffled off and dropped down next to Minho who looked at Onew and blinked his eyes with what could have been sympathy or perhaps just tiredness - who could really tell since it was Minho - but said nothing.
“Come on, time to stretch,” Key ordered Taemin and pulled Taemin down with him as he plopped to a sitting position on the scuffed and battered wood floor and stretched out his legs. Taemin did the same so that the soles of his feet were planted against Key’s feet. Key extended his arms straight ahead and grabbed Taemin’s hands. “Pull,” Key said. Taemin grinned and pulled Key’s arms forward hard until Key was almost howling with pain.
As he went through his own stretching exercises, Jonghyun hid his smile by pretending to yawn when Key started grumbling to see that Taemin was about a thousand times more flexible than him as he pulled Taemin’s arms and Taemin stretched so far down that his chest rested flat against his perfectly straight legs.
“When are you going to teach me?” Taemin said, his voice muffled, his face pressed to his shins.
Key pinched Taemin’s ankle playfully and sing-songed, “When I have time, like I said.”
Typical of Key, Jonghyun thought, to hold out on some knowledge so he could have Taemin under his influence.
In a corner of the studio, Onew and Minho were going through their own exercises, sitting on the floor next to each other but doing their stretches separately. And that was typical too since Minho was intensely independent; he did things his own way, and even though none of them were allowed to be very independent under the circumstances, Minho managed to follow his own path in the little ways he still could whether that meant stretching on his own, silent and lost in his own mysterious thoughts which he hardly ever shared, or huddling in his bed with a pen-sized flashlight late at night reading a novel from his stack of books that nearly matched Jonghyun in height while the rest of them were chatting sleepily in the dark, or looking on wordlessly with his calm measuring expression when the rest of them were goofing around.
Out of all of them, he believed Minho to be the one who could walk away from this at any moment without regret or a backward glance and still continue on perfectly content for the rest of his life - he just didn’t seem to need the recognition or the validation success would bring as badly as the rest of them. That’s what made Minho seem so dangerous to Jonghyun, but when he couldn’t sleep at night and lay in the dark worrying about how their debut would eventually go, whether people would like them or even give half a shit, and what to do about the six-foot potential problem who called himself Choi Minho…he consoled himself with the thought that at least the one most likely to ditch was the one who seemed most replaceable and unknown.
Jonghyun supposed that no one in the world really knew Minho well except for Minho’s older brother whom he idolized and secretly wrote letters to, stealthily palming them off into nearby mailboxes when their manager or staff’s backs were turned as they were being shepherded from vans to rehearsal and recording studios and to vans back to the dorm. He knew that it was one of Key’s main goals in life to eventually get his hands on one of Minho’s letters to his brother so he could read all of Minho’s hidden feelings; Key had pretty much announced his intention to invade Minho’s privacy to the rest of them one day when Minho had been in the shower.
‘I wonder if he writes to his hyung that he’s jealous of me, that he hates me? Because I get more rap lyrics than he does?’ Key had mused aloud with a laugh and self-satisfied grin.
He remembered muttering at the time to Key that everybody being jealous of him or hating him was actually just his nutty delusions of importance and grandeur. Of course, Key hadn’t heard him since Key suffered from selective deafness; he only heard what he wanted to hear and he only believed what he wanted to believe. The only truth in the world was Key’s truth and everybody else’s truth was just supposed jealousy or petty hatred. He glanced over at Key and watched him and Taemin lying flat on their backs playing bicycle, feet to feet as they pedaled their legs faster and faster through the air to see who would give up or lose coordination first until they were both wheezing with laughter.
It was times like that when Jonghyun didn’t quite trust in his own conviction that Key was an unmitigated asshole. There were other fleeting times too, if he could admit it to himself. Like how Key would automatically push the salt shaker on the kitchen table closer to Minho whenever they started a meal because they all knew Minho liked to eat everything oversalted to death. Like how one morning, he had stared at Jonghyun’s earlobe - infected and painful from the nickel in an ear stud - and snapped ‘you’re bleeding,’ and whipped out a tissue from his pocket and smushed it to Jonghyun’s ear. Or how he’d started carrying Onew’s wallet in his messenger bag for Onew since their leader would forget his own head if it wasn’t attached to his body.
Like how Key had given his cross-eyed rabbit mobile charm to Taemin last week. ‘I don’t need it anymore. I don’t even have a cellphone to hang it on,’ he had said, with a trace of some emotion in his voice that Jonghyun hadn’t been able to decipher, over the confiscation of their last ties to the world that existed outside of SM idol training. Taemin had been so happy, he recalled, and had promised to take good care of the charm. ‘What for, who cares?’ Key had said, laughing off Taemin’s effusive thanks, ‘It’s not as though it’s a real rabbit.’
The make-believe bicycle race was over the instant the door banged open and Dance Coach stormed in; he was always in a bad mood and had been ever since SM had taken to hiring foreign choreographers to create dances for its idol groups, so for the past two years, they’d heard from snatches of the staff’s gossip, he’d stormed and stomped everywhere instead of walking.
Dance Coach stabbed the power button of the sound system with a thick forefinger.
“Let’s begin,” he ordered, sitting down in the chair placed right in front and dead center of the wall of mirrors. Dance Coach folded his arms and stared at them appraisingly as though they were cockroaches he’d like to squash beneath the heels of his Nike trainers.
As the all familiar high-pitched beeps started followed by their disembodied voices singing at them - Jonghyun always found this creepy to be serenaded by himself, they grouped together in a tight cluster and bobbed their heads as they bounced up and down on their heels. He could almost hear Choreographer Rino-sshi’s soft voice saying in halting broken Korean, ‘just groove it, don’t make it too technical or precise. Let the music lead your body and forget the steps, you’ve got it in your muscle memory. You need to dance it like you don’t know what the next step is or where it will lead - closer to the girl you’re singing for or away from her?’
Onew and Minho danced past each other, breaking the initial formation, and he was reminded of the first dry run of the routine in front of Dance Coach without the gentle and kind supervision of Rino-sshi who had already returned to America. It had been disastrous; out of nervous awkwardness Onew and Minho had collided, almost smacking foreheads, as they’d tried to weave past each other, and the rest of them had stopped dancing, horror-struck, as Coach had turned purple in the face and thrown his chair at them catching Onew’s legs with one of the chair legs and sending Onew sprawling face-first to the floor. Then Coach had screamed at them that they’d better get their act together if they wanted kids all across the nation to be mimicking their choreography in five months instead of the newest Super Junior, SS501, DBSK, or Big Bang dance routine. Coach had informed them that although those groups were their sunbaes and had debuted before them, they would always be in their shadows unless they worked harder. ‘Right now,’ Coach had screamed, ‘you are a bad investment of time, money, and energy.’
He didn’t think he would ever forget those words ‘bad investment’ and he repeated them over and over in his mind as he danced harder, more full out and with more energy. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Key dance into formation to his right side, doing the technical movements flawlessly while still capturing that elusive fluid ‘groove’ Rhino-sshi had spoken of that he, Onew, and Minho still struggled with while Key and Taemin seemed to have it surging through their limbs.
Although Jonghyun would never tell Key, whenever they were like this, side by side dancing and singing, he got a rush within to see Key in his peripheral vision throwing himself completely into every step, every lyric. It was like feeling and seeing what he could become if he worked harder, just as hard as Key.
As they danced and sang along to the rough cut track, it was like a thousand volts were sparking through him; he could feel it flowing through his body and almost expected to see electricity crackle out through his fingertips. He wondered if Key got the same rush, felt the current, but he couldn’t tell because Key, like he always did, was staring at his own reflection in the mirrors as though posturing for an invisible camera that he loved second to none.
*****
After repeating the routine so many times he lost count and finishing out with an hour of sit ups and push ups, the day’s dance practice was over at midnight.
“Hyung, I think I’ve figured out why our song is called ‘Replay,’” Taemin said, collapsing onto his bunk bed and trying to undo the knot in his earphones. “It’s because we’re going to have to rehearse it over and over, for the rest of our lives, on a constant replay, replay, replay.”
Jonghyun laughed and grabbed Taemin’s earphones from him and methodically picked apart the knotted wires. “That’s funny and true.”
“So true,” Onew groaned, voice sounding strangled since he was currently lying facedown in exhaustion on his mattress set up in the middle space between both sets of double bunk beds. When they had been picking beds, Onew had lost the game of ‘not me’ and didn’t seem to mind having to sleep in the middle where the other members’ arms would fling or legs would kick out at him from all sides in the midst of sleep. “I even dream of singing and dancing it. Sometimes it feels more like a nightmare.”
A snort of amusement came from behind the book Minho was holding up over his face. “So that’s why you cry out ‘no, no, no more, not again’ in the middle of the night,” Minho said.
Onew threw his pillow at Minho’s head but missed and ended up hitting Jonghyun in the face. He had his arms upraised and was just about to throw both his pillow and Onew’s down on Onew’s head when the bathroom door opened and Key came out, mouth open and already delivering a scolding.
“What is this?” Key snapped. “I take a ten minute shower and you all decide to act like stupid babies, throwing pillows around and making a mess? Look at this disaster area, it’s giving me a headache!”
He dropped the pillows and grabbed his stomach, laughing. “You look like my grandmother!” he said, pointing at the towel wrapped turban style around Key’s head. “She dries her hair like that. You’re such an old woman.”
Key let out a yelp of outrage, pulled off his turban and threw that along with his pillow and stinky white bear at him, making even more of a mess than he had told off the rest of them for doing. He raised his arms and successfully blocked all flying objects. The stuffed bear bounced off his forearm and ended up soaring through the air to hit Onew in the head.
“Sorry, Onew,” he said, trying not to laugh even harder.
Onew sighed loudly, again lying facedown on his bed. “Oh, it’s fine, don’t mind me. I’ll just lie here until the missile launch has ended.”
Huffing in indignation, Key stomped around the room, collecting his pillow, towel, and bear. Then he flopped onto his bunk bed and stared over at Jonghyun.
“Aren’t you going to take your shower? Time’s ticking.” Key tapped his bare wrist and clucked his tongue mimicking the tick-tock of a clock.
Realizing the time, he jumped down off his bed and grabbed his towel, practically running into the bathroom. Lights out were always an hour on the dot after they finished their last practice of the day and returned to their dorm room. Their shower schedule was ten minutes each in reverse order of age - youngest to oldest - so Taemin always got to shower first and got most of the hot water, but that was the plan the rest of them had agreed on sticking with from the outset, despite Taemin’s protests that they should switch it up sometimes so he didn’t always get special treatment. ‘How would that make the rest of us look?’ Key would snarl at Taemin to silence his objections. ‘Do you want to make us look like bad hyungs? Is that what you want, ungrateful thing?’
As expected, the water was ice cold even though he turned the hot water knob as far to the left as it would go. He crouched under the showerhead with teeth chattering and goose pimpled flesh as he scrubbed at his hair and skin with Taemin’s dry scalp shampoo that smelled like medicine - he refused to use Key’s body wash that smelled disgustingly of honeydew melon or Minho’s that smelled like, according to the label on the bottle, manly ocean breeze.
“How is ocean breeze manly?” he muttered to himself, stuttering from the cold water sluicing over him as he rinsed.
When he couldn’t take it anymore, and with four minutes left, he got out of the shower and dried himself off and yanked on his pajamas desperate for their warmth. Feeling sorry for Onew, who would also be subjected to a piercing cold shower, he quickly brushed his teeth.
“What the hell?” he yelped around a mouthful of toothpaste when the bathroom door banged open and Key poked his head in.
“Are you done?”
“No,” he said, spitting the toothpaste out so he wouldn’t swallow it. “And you’ve already had your turn so go away and let me finish up in peace.”
“So sad, but I can’t do that,” Key said. He strolled in and crowded next to Jonghyun at the sink. Jonghyun made a move to push Key away with forefinger stabbing at Key’s temple but Key ducked his head away just in time and chortled, “Too quick for you.”
He sighed. “What do you want?”
Key glanced over at the open door; none of the other members seemed to be paying attention. Taemin was curled up in bed listening to his mp3 player with his eyes closed - he often fell asleep still listening to music, Minho was reading under the covers - he could see the flashlight through the cloth, and Onew was asleep snoring - looked like he would forgo his shower.
Lowering his voice, because he was randomly paranoid sometimes, Key hissed, “Did you think about what I said the other night?”
He faked confusion. “What are you talking about?”
Key’s lips tightened and he knew he had won…for the moment. Key would never openly talk about how Jonghyun had pushed his head into the toilet and flushed as he struggled and spat curses, he was too proud.
“Two nights ago…” Key paused then seemed to swallow down bile, “when we had a disagreement. Remember what I said and you said you would think about it?”
“I don’t remember. I was tired.”
But of course he remembered. He remembered Key turning to him, toilet water dripping from the ends of his mussed hair and onto his pajama top. He remembered Key’s mouth hardening and twisting even as he smiled and whispered to him:
‘You would like me much better as a friend than an enemy. I could be a really good friend to you.’
He had rolled his eyes and turned away from Key’s searching gaze, moving to leave the bathroom when Key had grabbed his arm in an iron-hard grip and hissed, ‘Just think about it.’
Jonghyun remembered saying ‘Yeah, whatever.’
“I could be a really good friend to you,” Key repeated. “Seriously…just think about it.”
“You’re so annoying,” he snapped and walked out of the bathroom. He could feel Key’s gaze boring into his back the entire way as he clambered onto his top bunk and crawled under the covers.
Even Minho had finished reading for the night; his flashlight was off and his bunk dark. The only light remaining was from the bathroom. He could see Key standing in the doorway, a dark slender shape with the bathroom light outlining his form. He could see that Key’s pajama pants were too short for him; Key’s skinny ankles shone as white as bone.
Jonghyun pulled the covers over his head so he wouldn’t be able to see Key’s bony ankles and his pathetic high-water pajama pants anymore. Finally, Key snapped off the bathroom light and Jonghyun heard him climbing on to his top bunk directly opposite.
“Jonghyun? Are you still awake?” He heard Key whisper. He pretended as though he hadn’t heard and did not respond.
He wasn’t sure how long he laid awake there in the dark, still as a corpse, with his covers over his head. He didn’t want to move for fear that Key would wake and try to freaking talk to him again about being friends or other crap when he had all but worn a sign around his neck since the first day they’d met that stated ‘Not a Fan of Key aka Kim Kibum.’
After what seemed like three hours of lying tensed and frozen, he relaxed and felt himself drifting off into sleep.
He didn’t know why, maybe later he would blame it on sleep-talking, but he mumbled tiredly, “I guess I’ll think about it.”
Key merely continued snoring.
TBC
I. I get a rush when I’m with you.
Within the first five minutes of meeting Key, Jonghyun wanted to punch him in the head at least three times. Once for strutting into the dance studio like he owned the place. Twice for proceeding to slouch into the only chair in the room and continue texting on his mobile that had a cross-eyed rabbit charm hanging from it which made the little short weird kid with the too-long bangs, Jonghyun vaguely remembered him introducing himself in a whisper between nervous titters as Taemin, stare covetously; the little weird kid must have been over the age of ten, but he was obviously still immature enough to want that dumb rabbit charm.
The third time he’d contemplated punching the snotty kid’s head flat as an onion pancake was when, during the first break of their first choreography class, he overheard the snotty kid telling the little weird kid and the kind of slow looking kid who smiled a lot for no reason that he’d been texting his girlfriend who was older - Snotty Kid had emphasized that several times - and lived in the United States and was crazy for him even though he thought she was too needy calling and texting him all the time. Then he’d told the other two that he lived in L.A. for a while and knew English ‘perfectly’ and proceeded to say something in English while the little weird kid and big-mouth smiley kid stared with wide impressed eyes as the big tall weird kid who hadn’t spoken a single word looked on still without a word.
Jonghyun had heard English being spoken plenty of times, he’d watched a lot of American movies after all, and what the Snotty Kid Key said didn’t sound quite right to him. Maybe Key spoke perfect English if he was a mildly retarded ten year old, but Jonghyun knew he wasn’t ten although he wasn’t sure yet at that point about whether Key was mildly retarded.
After that first class, Jonghyun really wanted to ask Director Lee if he could be transferred to some other group, any other group; he’d love to be in Super Junior, be the fourteenth member since he always thought having thirteen was unlucky. When he’d voiced his wish as deferentially as possible to the dance coach after class, Dance Coach Jung looked at him for the longest moment and said flatly ‘never say to the Director what you just said to me.’ Then Coach had looked over at the others sitting in the corner; Key was still running his mouth, Jonghyun doubted he’d ever shut up without someone taping his mouth shut, as the others listened, nodded, the little weird kid gasping and tittering all the while and the smiley kid smiling like a fool and the weird tall kid still not talking. Coach said to him, nodding over at the other members, ‘That’s your family now, Jonghyun, like it or not. Get used to it and if you complain again, you’ll regret it.’
He didn’t complain to Coach again, but he still thought he’d like to be adopted into a different family.
As the days and nights of dance classes, voice classes, and media relations classes blurred into each other, the one thing that stood out to him was Key’s mouth always being open and saying something totally annoying. Whether it was his incessant bragging about his time spent in L.A. or showing off his broken English or betting with the other members that he could out-eat, out-run, out-push up, out-something them, Key was always completely unapologetically annoying as hell. The constant bets with the other members that Key always won and made the others do purposely humiliating things like washing his underwear for him was one thing, but he was also incredibly bossy, which drove Jonghyun up the wall.
The only member Key no longer actively tried to boss around was him, but that was only because he’d yanked Key out of bed two nights ago at four and forced his head into the toilet bowl - which it had been Onew’s turn to clean that week but Onew kept putting it off because, as they’d all come to learn, despite Onew’s niceness he was also lazy as shit - and flushed the toilet as Key spluttered and cursed and howled. It had been payback for Key trying to boss him around by criticizing the way he made his bed that morning, the final straw after a week of critiques about how he did everything the wrong way according to the Laws of Key. In hindsight, Jonghyun thought, it had also been exactly what Key deserved after the crap he pulled at lunch. That had just been another perfect example of what he now personally thought of as Repulsive Storytelling Time With Key.
Probably the thing that he disliked the most about Key, even more than his bragging, his bossiness, his mouthiness, and general annoying presence, was his perverse and perverted streak that would show itself at the most inopportune - or perhaps opportune from Key’s screwed up viewpoint - times. They were eating lunch and Key had already finished his portion of cherries and been eyeing Minho’s portion hungrily - none of them felt as though they ever got enough to eat, all the servings at mealtimes were sad and small and not what they were used to back when they had lived at home with their mothers.
Minho ate like he did everything else when not forced into doing otherwise by their manager or coaches; slowly, silently, with too much deliberation. He had the suspicion that if they wouldn’t have gotten into trouble if they ever took more than the allotted half an hour to eat a meal, Minho would gladly sit at the little square table in the dorm’s dank kitchen all day, slowly savoring his food. Minho had just finished his measly serving of bibimbap, head bowed over his food and deep in concentration, and turned his attention to the cherries on his tray.
Without fail, Minho would never eat a little bit of this and a little bit of that, he had to eat all of one thing first before he moved on to the next and he became tense and even more slow-moving if stuff on his plate got mixed together. Jonghyun thought that Minho’s tallness was only matched by his oddness and need to follow his own self-imposed sense of order and method. Key often commented, loudly because Key was so irritatingly loud all the time, that Minho needed some sort of pills for his crazy that were only available in America and Key would buy him some the next time he was there because, as Key liked to point out, he was a very caring person that way. It was just another one of Key’s backhanded ‘caring’ insults but Minho always ignored Key’s comments. Jonghyun rather admired Minho’s ability to tune out Key as easily as waving away a pissy little mosquito that kept buzzing around your head.
Just as Minho popped the first cherry in his mouth, Key leaned across the table with a smile and said, “Do you know what that looks like, Minho?”
Minho blinked and slowly chewed, but said nothing, which was his customary reaction to most things.
Key rolled his eyes at Minho’s lack of interest and persisted, “Do you want me to tell you?”
“Like you’re not going to tell us anyway,” Jonghyun muttered under his breath but loud enough that Onew heard and choked back a snicker.
“What? What?” Taemin said, forgetting he had food in his mouth, and a bit of corn flew out his mouth and landed on the table right in front of Key’s plate.
Key grimaced and carefully flicked the corn with thumb and middle finger back in Taemin’s direction, letting his middle finger linger outstretched for a longer moment than necessary at Taemin. Of course, Taemin didn’t notice because if anything was slower than Minho, it was Taemin’s brain. Sometimes Jonghyun wondered, when he was really really bored, what exactly was going on in Taemin’s brain underneath that big mushroom cap of hair. He suspected probably not a whole lot because Taemin was so much younger than the rest of them and even young for his age; he’d been sheltered and hadn’t even ever done his own laundry until he got accepted into SM and they’d all had to do their own chores to become ‘mature and self-sufficient’ according to Manager Jin.
At first, Taemin had been too embarrassed to admit he didn’t know how to do household stuff or ask for help, so he’d avoided doing his laundry for three weeks until Key informed him that he stunk like a ‘room full of farts.’ And even then, Taemin still avoided admitting he didn’t know how to run a washing machine so he took to borrowing Onew’s clean underwear since Onew’s head was always on another planet thinking about god knows what and Taemin must’ve figured that Onew was the one least likely to notice his underwear stock rapidly shrinking since Onew had the habit of losing or misplacing everything.
Taemin didn’t dare to borrow Key’s underwear because Key would’ve definitely noticed. Key had never shared a room before joining the group and was paranoid someone would steal his stuff. It was beyond Jonghyun’s comprehension why Key thought anyone in their right mind would want his black underwear - he was the only one of them who wore black underwear and exclusively black at that, Jonghyun didn’t get it and personally found it gross because black underwear actually got dirtier faster than white but he supposed it was fitting since it matched Key’s gross personality - his mismatched sock collection, his crusty American brand deodorant that looked like he’d been using it for almost as long as he’d been alive, his razor that he could hardly use unless he planned to shave his hairy legs, his stuffed white bear that was missing one glass eye and smelled like drool, or his stack of American comic books that none of them would steal since they couldn’t really read them. Jonghyun suspected Key couldn’t read them either since he never looked at them and chose instead to read Onew’s set of girly manga like Kaikan Phrase and Fruits Basket while Onew was in the shower or out of the room, and leaving fingerprint stains on them since Key liked to eat the contraband candy his grandmother had stuffed in the lining of his suitcase - Key never offered to share any of it - while doing so.
Once Onew had complained about someone leaving smeared chocolate fingerprints on his comics…well, Onew never really complained, he just wondered out loud about things like that with a befuddled absentminded expression and then continued on with whatever he’d been doing without seeking an answer or asking for accountability. Life and the world was a big tangled yarn ball of mystery to Onew because Onew was such a space cadet and his head, despite being attached to his body residing on planet earth, seemed to float unfettered in outerspace. Jonghyun suspected at the time that Key had lied and secretly told Onew that Taemin was the culprit for he knew that Onew would never confront or criticize Taemin since he was the oldest and felt like he had to be a nice hyung to the baby.
Taemin’s hopelessness when it came to doing chores was only revealed when he’d finally lost a pointless bet to Key that he could out-sit up him during one of the fitness hours that ended every single dance practice. Key had probably realized Taemin’s weak spot, because Key was obnoxiously shrewd that way although dumb and uncaring as a rock when it came to schoolwork, and had talked Taemin into washing his clothes for him as penalty for losing the bet. Jonghyun could still remember the shrieking and cursing - swear words so bad that Jonghyun would’ve gotten his face slapped by his mother if he’d ever uttered them at home - that came flying out of Key’s loud annoying mouth when Taemin had shamefacedly handed him a neatly folded stack of his freshly laundered socks, underwear, and undershirts with all the colors bled into each other. He remembered watching with delighted amusement the outraged look on Key’s face as he held up a pair of formerly white socks now ruined with inky black splotches from the black of his underwear and waved them in front of Taemin’s big-eyed fearful face.
It was a typical example of why Jonghyun couldn’t give Key any credit for being a mind game mastermind as Key likely fancied himself to be because Key’s little power plays almost always ended up backfiring on him. Not that it would stop Key from trying because he was persistent in his pettiness.
Key tilted back in his chair and rested one slippered foot against the edge of the kitchen table, a habit that Jonghyun hated because it was unsanitary to put one’s foot on the surface they ate off of, never mind that if one of the other members had done the same Key would’ve delivered one of his acid tongue lashings. Key’s action revealed his ankle and the black-spotted white sock covering it. Jonghyun took a big sip from his glass of water to keep from laughing out loud to see that messed up sock.
His shit-eating grin growing wider, Key sighed and said, “I don’t know, maybe it’s better if I don’t say it. Taemin’s too young and I don’t want to be a bad hyung.”
Of course, that was Taemin’s cue to cry out - Taemin was so predictable that way - in protest. The only times normally cheerful and dense Taemin got mad was when he felt like the others were keeping things from him because he was the youngest.
“What?” Taemin demanded, bottom lip threatening to turn down. “I want to know!”
“Hey-I mean-uh…look, we should probably finish-“ Onew murmured hesitantly, vaguely. Onew tried to be the leader, live up to his role, but it wasn’t really in his nature. He was too much of a daydreamer, too spacey, and too sensitive to be forceful or assertive enough to inspire the rest of them to follow. Key was already talking over Onew; Key had a tendency to talk over everyone.
“The cherries look like -“ Key reached over and poked Taemin in his thin chest, “nipples.”
Taemin stared down at Key’s forefinger on his chest, his mouth dropping open. Minho made a strangled noise, his face going red, and pushed his plate containing the cherries away from him. Key howled with laughter, like a demented evil little monkey.
“Yup, that’s what the ones on American girls look like,” Key declared between hiccups of laughter.
“That’s crap,” he said flatly, “they’re pink.” As soon as Jonghyun said it, he wished he could snatch the words out of the now silent air and swallow them back down. Onew dropped one of his chopsticks, and went red and closed his eyes in shame.
Key sat up arrow straight, letting the feet of his chair snap back to the floor with a sharp noise and leaned against the table, his arms crossed and resting on the tabletop.
“Oh, really?” Key said with another hiccup, chin on his arms, liquid feline eyes wide and gleaming with spite, “Well, you sure told me, Jonghyun.”
It was at that moment he realized just how clever Key could be because while Key might have brought it up so he could get Minho to give up the cherries to him, Jonghyun finally understood that Key’s true intent was to shame him and Onew for the night when he’d caught the two of them up late huddled in the dark in front of the glowing computer screen looking at pictures of naked American girls, awed by the spread of pale thighs, white breasts tipped with pink, golden hair and red-slicked mouths.
Key must have been planning his little revenge since that time when he and Onew had pushed Key away as he tried to pull up a chair to sit with them and look too and told Key he was too young and stupid. He knew Key already had a built-in dislike of mild-mannered Onew since the first day when Director Lee informed them Onew would be the leader because he was the oldest. He’d caught the briefest thunderstorm of jealous fury flash over Key’s face, electrifying his lightning bolt eyes practically green for a second, before it was replaced with the bland compliant smiling mask Key slipped on as quickly and comfortably as donning a well-worn pair of flannel pajamas.
At that time he’d whispered in an undertone to Key as he brushed past him to fall in line to file out of Director Lee’s office, making sure to ‘accidentally’ bump Key’s shoulder with his own -
‘Too bad your mother didn’t have you a year earlier, isn’t it?’
Key had stiffened the barest bit even as his smile grew wider and took on a slightly feral twist of the lips. Since then, Key had disliked him as much as he disliked Onew, although in a different way. Key’s grudge against Onew was against what Onew represented - leader by designation and not merit - and not him personally. Between him and Key, the grudge was personal: North and South Korea with Key’s verbal missiles always pointed towards Jonghyun’s barbed wire-fenced mental shores ready to bomb and destroy, and Jonghyun’s silent standing army of disdain ready to march and raze Key’s emotional city streets and skyscrapers that Key had carefully built into a metropolis of insolence around himself.
Perhaps that was the real reason why Key annoyed Jonghyun - his sheer shameless audacity, the way he carried himself as though the world owed him something from the moment he was born, how he acted like he was already a star even though they hadn’t debuted yet. Jonghyun didn’t know where Key got the damned nerve but it was there and it grated on Jonghyun’s last nerve like sandpaper on glass. So that’s why he’d said what he did the first day and why, several months later, Key decided to verbalize, in his roundabout cunning way, his scorn for him.
“Don’t-don’t-“ Onew started spluttering, his face going from red to pale.
Jonghyun knew exactly what Onew was trying to spit out and he wished he could slap a hand over Onew’s big stupid mouth to stop him. Both of them knew that what they had done was strictly forbidden; they’d been told from day one that they were not supposed to look at things on the Internet that could be ‘distracting and improper to how SM idol trainees are to conduct themselves at all times whether in public or privately in the dorm.’ Jonghyun knew Onew feared the physical punishment that would be sure to follow should it be revealed: a few slaps across the face or a cuff upside the head complete with yelling and threats and forced kneeling for an hour or two. Jonghyun wasn’t afraid of that, as awful and humiliating as it would be because it would be conducted in front of the other members as an object lesson. No, he was frozen deep with the fear of being kicked out and replaced with any of the thirty other boys who had made the semifinal cut, all of whom were ready, willing, able, and dying with ambition to take his spot and Onew’s. After all that grueling work: hours of dancing and singing and interviews grilling him on his commitment and selfless dedication to being part of the SM Family and running around the outdoor track until he’d felt like throwing up from physical overwork and mental exhaustion…he couldn’t lose all that in the minute or two it would take for Key to open his big loud mouth to their management.
Key raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes even further in mock innocence, staring at white-faced Onew who seemed to be grasping on to the lone wooden chopstick in his hand like a cross to ward off a devil like Key.
“What do you mean? Don’t what?” Key said casually and reached over to Minho’s abandoned plate and plucked a cherry from it, holding the stem fussily between thumb and forefinger. “You’re full, right, Minho?”
The cherry was already halfway into Key’s mouth when Minho gave the slightest jerk of a nod in consent. Key’s impudence didn’t have the patience to wait for any person, especially one as slow to react as Minho.
Despite being slow-moving as a turtle with a bum foot, Minho was no fool as Jonghyun suspected all along because Minho’s placid eyes narrowed and went back and forth from Key chewing on the cherry with a satisfied gloating expression to him and Onew sitting stock-still and silent.
“I don’t get it,” Taemin grumbled. “What’s going on?”
Onew’s stuttering had died off into worried speechlessness as he turned begging eyes on Key. Jonghyun refused to look directly at Key, he wouldn’t beg him for his petty mercy.
“It’s nothing, Taemin,” Minho said, startling all of them, even Key who paused in popping another cherry into his mouth and eyed Minho warily. “It’s just Key being weird again.”
A long moment of wordlessness stretched on, thin and chilly, until finally Key said with a bark of laughter, “That’s right, it’s just me being weird.”
He thought he heard Onew exhale with relief. Possible crisis had been averted and it seemed Key would be content with the knowledge that he and Onew recognized Key had the power to screw them over even if he wouldn’t actually exercise it to the fullest extent he could. Key continued talking because he could never shut up or let anything go without getting in the final word, like Jesus intoning a sermon on the Mount - that’s how Key liked to deliver his scoldings.
“I guess I haven’t been getting enough sleep at night. Someone keeps getting up in the middle of night, doing who knows what, and you know I’m a light sleeper. It’s rude.”
“Well, you could wear earplugs or headphones so you won’t be bothered when one of us goes to the bathroom or gets a glass of water,” Taemin advised helpfully, with a note of pride as if he was being so wise although he couldn’t buy a clue even with Minho’s not-so-secret cash stash.
“Good idea,” Key said and ruffled Taemin’s mushroom of hair, making Taemin laugh.
What was a good idea was if they had Key’s blathering mouth surgically wired shut for life, Jonghyun thought but refrained from saying.
“Our time’s up,” he said, standing up, making sure to push his chair back in - they got reprimanded if they didn’t. He grabbed the remaining few cherries on Minho’s plate, snatched Key’s hand, and smashed the cherries into Key’s palm. “You can finish those on the way.”
Key stared at him and then looked down at the cherry juice dripping from between his fingers in disgust. “Thanks a lot, hyung,” Key said. The way Key said ‘hyung’ he might as well have said dog shit and the tone would have been fitting.
He didn’t say anything back and turned on his heel to walk out of the kitchen, his sneakers squeaking shrilly against the linoleum flooring. From behind him, he could hear the other members get up from the table and follow him out of the room.
‘Do me a favor,” he heard Minho whispering to Key, “next time when you’re thinking about saying something…just don’t.”
Key merely snorted in response and Jonghyun looked over his shoulder and saw him licking the cherry juice from his fingers. Key glanced up and met his gaze. Jonghyun felt an unpleasant burning sensation in his gut when Key’s frown curled up at the edges turning into a smile he couldn’t read except to construe it as taunting. Since the first day he’d met Key, he thought that malice ran through his veins instead of blood.
*****
“Hey, Taemin, check this out.”
For a moment, Jonghyun considered smacking his head against the ceiling to floor mirror covering the entire length of one wall of the studio to hear Key’s voice piping up again. It was too much to hope that Key would take Minho’s sound advice to shut the hell up to heart.
He turned and saw Key open his mouth and stick out his tongue as Taemin and Onew, for Onew always wanted to be included on every joke and everything everyone else did, crowded around Key.
“Woooow,” Taemin said, eyes alight with admiration.
“That’s so cool,” Onew enthused, smiling his big foolish smile. Jonghyun felt like slapping his own forehead in despair at Onew’s complete lack of a short-term memory. Apparently, Onew had already forgotten that just five minutes ago Key had made a veiled threat to get him and Jonghyun in trouble.
The so cool thing that had made their leader lose his memory was a cherry stem tied in a knot resting on the tip of Key’s tongue.
“How did you do that?” Taemin said, still agog.
Key laughed and spat the stem out in the trash can as he raised his thin arms above his head and stretched them. “It’s a secret, but I’ll teach you one day when I have time.”
“Me too,” Onew whispered. If Key heard, he pretended not to, and slung his arm around Taemin’s shoulders. Onew stood there for a moment longer staring at Key and Taemin before he shuffled off and dropped down next to Minho who looked at Onew and blinked his eyes with what could have been sympathy or perhaps just tiredness - who could really tell since it was Minho - but said nothing.
“Come on, time to stretch,” Key ordered Taemin and pulled Taemin down with him as he plopped to a sitting position on the scuffed and battered wood floor and stretched out his legs. Taemin did the same so that the soles of his feet were planted against Key’s feet. Key extended his arms straight ahead and grabbed Taemin’s hands. “Pull,” Key said. Taemin grinned and pulled Key’s arms forward hard until Key was almost howling with pain.
As he went through his own stretching exercises, Jonghyun hid his smile by pretending to yawn when Key started grumbling to see that Taemin was about a thousand times more flexible than him as he pulled Taemin’s arms and Taemin stretched so far down that his chest rested flat against his perfectly straight legs.
“When are you going to teach me?” Taemin said, his voice muffled, his face pressed to his shins.
Key pinched Taemin’s ankle playfully and sing-songed, “When I have time, like I said.”
Typical of Key, Jonghyun thought, to hold out on some knowledge so he could have Taemin under his influence.
In a corner of the studio, Onew and Minho were going through their own exercises, sitting on the floor next to each other but doing their stretches separately. And that was typical too since Minho was intensely independent; he did things his own way, and even though none of them were allowed to be very independent under the circumstances, Minho managed to follow his own path in the little ways he still could whether that meant stretching on his own, silent and lost in his own mysterious thoughts which he hardly ever shared, or huddling in his bed with a pen-sized flashlight late at night reading a novel from his stack of books that nearly matched Jonghyun in height while the rest of them were chatting sleepily in the dark, or looking on wordlessly with his calm measuring expression when the rest of them were goofing around.
Out of all of them, he believed Minho to be the one who could walk away from this at any moment without regret or a backward glance and still continue on perfectly content for the rest of his life - he just didn’t seem to need the recognition or the validation success would bring as badly as the rest of them. That’s what made Minho seem so dangerous to Jonghyun, but when he couldn’t sleep at night and lay in the dark worrying about how their debut would eventually go, whether people would like them or even give half a shit, and what to do about the six-foot potential problem who called himself Choi Minho…he consoled himself with the thought that at least the one most likely to ditch was the one who seemed most replaceable and unknown.
Jonghyun supposed that no one in the world really knew Minho well except for Minho’s older brother whom he idolized and secretly wrote letters to, stealthily palming them off into nearby mailboxes when their manager or staff’s backs were turned as they were being shepherded from vans to rehearsal and recording studios and to vans back to the dorm. He knew that it was one of Key’s main goals in life to eventually get his hands on one of Minho’s letters to his brother so he could read all of Minho’s hidden feelings; Key had pretty much announced his intention to invade Minho’s privacy to the rest of them one day when Minho had been in the shower.
‘I wonder if he writes to his hyung that he’s jealous of me, that he hates me? Because I get more rap lyrics than he does?’ Key had mused aloud with a laugh and self-satisfied grin.
He remembered muttering at the time to Key that everybody being jealous of him or hating him was actually just his nutty delusions of importance and grandeur. Of course, Key hadn’t heard him since Key suffered from selective deafness; he only heard what he wanted to hear and he only believed what he wanted to believe. The only truth in the world was Key’s truth and everybody else’s truth was just supposed jealousy or petty hatred. He glanced over at Key and watched him and Taemin lying flat on their backs playing bicycle, feet to feet as they pedaled their legs faster and faster through the air to see who would give up or lose coordination first until they were both wheezing with laughter.
It was times like that when Jonghyun didn’t quite trust in his own conviction that Key was an unmitigated asshole. There were other fleeting times too, if he could admit it to himself. Like how Key would automatically push the salt shaker on the kitchen table closer to Minho whenever they started a meal because they all knew Minho liked to eat everything oversalted to death. Like how one morning, he had stared at Jonghyun’s earlobe - infected and painful from the nickel in an ear stud - and snapped ‘you’re bleeding,’ and whipped out a tissue from his pocket and smushed it to Jonghyun’s ear. Or how he’d started carrying Onew’s wallet in his messenger bag for Onew since their leader would forget his own head if it wasn’t attached to his body.
Like how Key had given his cross-eyed rabbit mobile charm to Taemin last week. ‘I don’t need it anymore. I don’t even have a cellphone to hang it on,’ he had said, with a trace of some emotion in his voice that Jonghyun hadn’t been able to decipher, over the confiscation of their last ties to the world that existed outside of SM idol training. Taemin had been so happy, he recalled, and had promised to take good care of the charm. ‘What for, who cares?’ Key had said, laughing off Taemin’s effusive thanks, ‘It’s not as though it’s a real rabbit.’
The make-believe bicycle race was over the instant the door banged open and Dance Coach stormed in; he was always in a bad mood and had been ever since SM had taken to hiring foreign choreographers to create dances for its idol groups, so for the past two years, they’d heard from snatches of the staff’s gossip, he’d stormed and stomped everywhere instead of walking.
Dance Coach stabbed the power button of the sound system with a thick forefinger.
“Let’s begin,” he ordered, sitting down in the chair placed right in front and dead center of the wall of mirrors. Dance Coach folded his arms and stared at them appraisingly as though they were cockroaches he’d like to squash beneath the heels of his Nike trainers.
As the all familiar high-pitched beeps started followed by their disembodied voices singing at them - Jonghyun always found this creepy to be serenaded by himself, they grouped together in a tight cluster and bobbed their heads as they bounced up and down on their heels. He could almost hear Choreographer Rino-sshi’s soft voice saying in halting broken Korean, ‘just groove it, don’t make it too technical or precise. Let the music lead your body and forget the steps, you’ve got it in your muscle memory. You need to dance it like you don’t know what the next step is or where it will lead - closer to the girl you’re singing for or away from her?’
Onew and Minho danced past each other, breaking the initial formation, and he was reminded of the first dry run of the routine in front of Dance Coach without the gentle and kind supervision of Rino-sshi who had already returned to America. It had been disastrous; out of nervous awkwardness Onew and Minho had collided, almost smacking foreheads, as they’d tried to weave past each other, and the rest of them had stopped dancing, horror-struck, as Coach had turned purple in the face and thrown his chair at them catching Onew’s legs with one of the chair legs and sending Onew sprawling face-first to the floor. Then Coach had screamed at them that they’d better get their act together if they wanted kids all across the nation to be mimicking their choreography in five months instead of the newest Super Junior, SS501, DBSK, or Big Bang dance routine. Coach had informed them that although those groups were their sunbaes and had debuted before them, they would always be in their shadows unless they worked harder. ‘Right now,’ Coach had screamed, ‘you are a bad investment of time, money, and energy.’
He didn’t think he would ever forget those words ‘bad investment’ and he repeated them over and over in his mind as he danced harder, more full out and with more energy. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Key dance into formation to his right side, doing the technical movements flawlessly while still capturing that elusive fluid ‘groove’ Rhino-sshi had spoken of that he, Onew, and Minho still struggled with while Key and Taemin seemed to have it surging through their limbs.
Although Jonghyun would never tell Key, whenever they were like this, side by side dancing and singing, he got a rush within to see Key in his peripheral vision throwing himself completely into every step, every lyric. It was like feeling and seeing what he could become if he worked harder, just as hard as Key.
As they danced and sang along to the rough cut track, it was like a thousand volts were sparking through him; he could feel it flowing through his body and almost expected to see electricity crackle out through his fingertips. He wondered if Key got the same rush, felt the current, but he couldn’t tell because Key, like he always did, was staring at his own reflection in the mirrors as though posturing for an invisible camera that he loved second to none.
*****
After repeating the routine so many times he lost count and finishing out with an hour of sit ups and push ups, the day’s dance practice was over at midnight.
“Hyung, I think I’ve figured out why our song is called ‘Replay,’” Taemin said, collapsing onto his bunk bed and trying to undo the knot in his earphones. “It’s because we’re going to have to rehearse it over and over, for the rest of our lives, on a constant replay, replay, replay.”
Jonghyun laughed and grabbed Taemin’s earphones from him and methodically picked apart the knotted wires. “That’s funny and true.”
“So true,” Onew groaned, voice sounding strangled since he was currently lying facedown in exhaustion on his mattress set up in the middle space between both sets of double bunk beds. When they had been picking beds, Onew had lost the game of ‘not me’ and didn’t seem to mind having to sleep in the middle where the other members’ arms would fling or legs would kick out at him from all sides in the midst of sleep. “I even dream of singing and dancing it. Sometimes it feels more like a nightmare.”
A snort of amusement came from behind the book Minho was holding up over his face. “So that’s why you cry out ‘no, no, no more, not again’ in the middle of the night,” Minho said.
Onew threw his pillow at Minho’s head but missed and ended up hitting Jonghyun in the face. He had his arms upraised and was just about to throw both his pillow and Onew’s down on Onew’s head when the bathroom door opened and Key came out, mouth open and already delivering a scolding.
“What is this?” Key snapped. “I take a ten minute shower and you all decide to act like stupid babies, throwing pillows around and making a mess? Look at this disaster area, it’s giving me a headache!”
He dropped the pillows and grabbed his stomach, laughing. “You look like my grandmother!” he said, pointing at the towel wrapped turban style around Key’s head. “She dries her hair like that. You’re such an old woman.”
Key let out a yelp of outrage, pulled off his turban and threw that along with his pillow and stinky white bear at him, making even more of a mess than he had told off the rest of them for doing. He raised his arms and successfully blocked all flying objects. The stuffed bear bounced off his forearm and ended up soaring through the air to hit Onew in the head.
“Sorry, Onew,” he said, trying not to laugh even harder.
Onew sighed loudly, again lying facedown on his bed. “Oh, it’s fine, don’t mind me. I’ll just lie here until the missile launch has ended.”
Huffing in indignation, Key stomped around the room, collecting his pillow, towel, and bear. Then he flopped onto his bunk bed and stared over at Jonghyun.
“Aren’t you going to take your shower? Time’s ticking.” Key tapped his bare wrist and clucked his tongue mimicking the tick-tock of a clock.
Realizing the time, he jumped down off his bed and grabbed his towel, practically running into the bathroom. Lights out were always an hour on the dot after they finished their last practice of the day and returned to their dorm room. Their shower schedule was ten minutes each in reverse order of age - youngest to oldest - so Taemin always got to shower first and got most of the hot water, but that was the plan the rest of them had agreed on sticking with from the outset, despite Taemin’s protests that they should switch it up sometimes so he didn’t always get special treatment. ‘How would that make the rest of us look?’ Key would snarl at Taemin to silence his objections. ‘Do you want to make us look like bad hyungs? Is that what you want, ungrateful thing?’
As expected, the water was ice cold even though he turned the hot water knob as far to the left as it would go. He crouched under the showerhead with teeth chattering and goose pimpled flesh as he scrubbed at his hair and skin with Taemin’s dry scalp shampoo that smelled like medicine - he refused to use Key’s body wash that smelled disgustingly of honeydew melon or Minho’s that smelled like, according to the label on the bottle, manly ocean breeze.
“How is ocean breeze manly?” he muttered to himself, stuttering from the cold water sluicing over him as he rinsed.
When he couldn’t take it anymore, and with four minutes left, he got out of the shower and dried himself off and yanked on his pajamas desperate for their warmth. Feeling sorry for Onew, who would also be subjected to a piercing cold shower, he quickly brushed his teeth.
“What the hell?” he yelped around a mouthful of toothpaste when the bathroom door banged open and Key poked his head in.
“Are you done?”
“No,” he said, spitting the toothpaste out so he wouldn’t swallow it. “And you’ve already had your turn so go away and let me finish up in peace.”
“So sad, but I can’t do that,” Key said. He strolled in and crowded next to Jonghyun at the sink. Jonghyun made a move to push Key away with forefinger stabbing at Key’s temple but Key ducked his head away just in time and chortled, “Too quick for you.”
He sighed. “What do you want?”
Key glanced over at the open door; none of the other members seemed to be paying attention. Taemin was curled up in bed listening to his mp3 player with his eyes closed - he often fell asleep still listening to music, Minho was reading under the covers - he could see the flashlight through the cloth, and Onew was asleep snoring - looked like he would forgo his shower.
Lowering his voice, because he was randomly paranoid sometimes, Key hissed, “Did you think about what I said the other night?”
He faked confusion. “What are you talking about?”
Key’s lips tightened and he knew he had won…for the moment. Key would never openly talk about how Jonghyun had pushed his head into the toilet and flushed as he struggled and spat curses, he was too proud.
“Two nights ago…” Key paused then seemed to swallow down bile, “when we had a disagreement. Remember what I said and you said you would think about it?”
“I don’t remember. I was tired.”
But of course he remembered. He remembered Key turning to him, toilet water dripping from the ends of his mussed hair and onto his pajama top. He remembered Key’s mouth hardening and twisting even as he smiled and whispered to him:
‘You would like me much better as a friend than an enemy. I could be a really good friend to you.’
He had rolled his eyes and turned away from Key’s searching gaze, moving to leave the bathroom when Key had grabbed his arm in an iron-hard grip and hissed, ‘Just think about it.’
Jonghyun remembered saying ‘Yeah, whatever.’
“I could be a really good friend to you,” Key repeated. “Seriously…just think about it.”
“You’re so annoying,” he snapped and walked out of the bathroom. He could feel Key’s gaze boring into his back the entire way as he clambered onto his top bunk and crawled under the covers.
Even Minho had finished reading for the night; his flashlight was off and his bunk dark. The only light remaining was from the bathroom. He could see Key standing in the doorway, a dark slender shape with the bathroom light outlining his form. He could see that Key’s pajama pants were too short for him; Key’s skinny ankles shone as white as bone.
Jonghyun pulled the covers over his head so he wouldn’t be able to see Key’s bony ankles and his pathetic high-water pajama pants anymore. Finally, Key snapped off the bathroom light and Jonghyun heard him climbing on to his top bunk directly opposite.
“Jonghyun? Are you still awake?” He heard Key whisper. He pretended as though he hadn’t heard and did not respond.
He wasn’t sure how long he laid awake there in the dark, still as a corpse, with his covers over his head. He didn’t want to move for fear that Key would wake and try to freaking talk to him again about being friends or other crap when he had all but worn a sign around his neck since the first day they’d met that stated ‘Not a Fan of Key aka Kim Kibum.’
After what seemed like three hours of lying tensed and frozen, he relaxed and felt himself drifting off into sleep.
He didn’t know why, maybe later he would blame it on sleep-talking, but he mumbled tiredly, “I guess I’ll think about it.”
Key merely continued snoring.
TBC