secret and lies (1/2)
Title: secrets and lies (1/2)
Rating: PG
Pairing: Xiumin / Chanyeol
Word Count: 9,500
Summary: [high school!AU] All Chanyeol wants is to enjoy his carefree school life but when he becomes the prime suspect in a dog theft, thing slowly begin to change.
- school -
Chanyeol honestly liked school. He was far from being a brilliant student - his grades always being somewhere between kind of good and borderline acceptable-, he didn't join any clubs because it seemed like a hassle and he wouldn't have ever admitted to his friends that getting up every morning to walk to a place where everyone was forced to wear the same stupid blue blazers didn't seem half as bad to him.
Yeah, he liked school. He liked hanging around with his friends during break time, complaining about teachers and the school lunch and life in general.
He liked to be in a place where he belonged, exactly because he wore the same clothes as everyone else. Because he could hide in the mass of blue blazers, the endless faces all occupied with their teenage selves.
That's why he didn't really understand all those kids who ended up as outcasts in school. Sure, it took some effort to fit in the group. It was a game of pretence but to him that didn't seem harder than to constantly swim against the current.
- the lost dog -
It was all actually quite funny at first.
Their middle-aged principal had this cute tiny pet dog he often brought to school and that most people quite adored, whether they liked the principal or not. Personally he didn't really understand why anyone would every harm a tiny animal like that but one afternoon someone stole the dog while the principal left his office for a moment to go to the toilet. Completely in shock, the principal refused to work until the dog was found, so the whole issue got blown out of proportions with all the teachers going around questioning random students. They obviously had no clue where to start looking.
Now the problem was that Chanyeol wasn't all that popular with the teachers because he was known to be friends with the school's worst delinquents and because he had a tendency to be late or fall asleep during class. Also, he didn't have an alibi and that somehow made him the prime suspect.
Thing was, he did have an alibi but talking about that would have been worse than becoming a suspect. Noone could actually prove that he did it anyway and he figured that every good crime case needed suspects like him who lied despite having nothing to do with the actual case. It made the whole thing more interesting. He didn't actually say that out loud of course and he tried hard not too look too amused but he ended up enjoying it and every moment in which he could retell all the gruesome details to his classmates.
"That's bullshit," people like Jongdae would say. "They didn't handcuff you to a chair."
So maybe he exaggerated a little. But fact was that they all did enjoy it, even if or maybe exactly because they probably secretly suspected him.
After a few days it stopped being fun though. The dog was still lost and Chanyeol was slowly finding himself to be the only suspect. Everyone else had alibis, whether it was others claiming to be with them or pictures they had taken of themselves during the time of the crime in places that definitely weren't school. One boy in grade two had been so desperate, he had brought the owner of a video rental who had thrown him out after trying to steal porn. Chanyeol was actually kind of impressed when the boy had cried in the office with all the teachers and the video rental owner watching about how he didn't want his parents to know and he began wishing that he had done something like that. Maybe he just had to think of a really weird embarrassing excuse and then pay someone off? Why didn't he say no when Baekhyun offered to lie about having been together then? Stupid guilty conscience. But who could have known that their teachers took this long to find a dog?
It was during the fifth day of him sitting in the teachers office with his homeroom teacher trying to force him into confessing while he pulled the best devastated facial expression he could produce when another teacher interrupted them saying that some student had just claimed to have been with Chanyeol during the crime time.
Chanyeol jumped off his chair because there were only two possible options, both of which didn't seem too promising: A, Baekhyun foolishly thinking of helping him (noone would believe that because everyone knew they were best friends and it was kind of late now) and B, Kang Hanna trying to do 'the right thing'. He didn't really know what to think when it was none of them but that sunbaenim whose name he didn't even know.
"Okay, let's repeat the whole thing. You're who?" a teacher asked and started scribbling down stuff.
"Kim Minseok, grade three, class two," that sunbaenim said lamely. "And as I said, Park Chanyeol helped me move around some chairs and desks between my classroom and the attic last Thursday."
The teacher wrote it down and looked at him skeptically. "Why would you move around desks?"
That sunbaenim just sighed, obviously annoyed to repeat everything. "I had classroom duties last week. There was a fight and some desks and chairs broke, so I had to get new ones."
"That's the class of Wu Yifan," another teachers threw in helpfully and the interrogating teachers suddenly seemed to remember the incident. People seemed to have forgotten about it after the dog abduction but earlier that day there had been a fight in grade three that had caused the infamous Wu Yifan to be suspended for a week for kicking desks and injuring one of his classmates.
"Is that right, Park?" his homeroom teacher asked and nudged him in the side.
Chanyeol just nooded because it wasn't really a lie either but...
"Did anyone see you doing that?" the interrogating teacher asked, still not sounding too convinced.
That sunbaenim just shrugged. "I'm not sure. Maybe. Most people left the classroom early that day."
"I see. Well, we can still ask your classmates then," the interrogating teacher mumbled, writing some more stuff down and then looked directly at Chanyeol, gaving him a startle and then back at that sunbaenim. "Since when are you two friends?"
"We're not," that sunbaenim just answered and the teacher nodded triumphantly.
"Did he pay you to lie for him?" he grinned. "This just smells like a false testimony to me. You didn't really seem him that day, did you?"
That sunbaenim didn't look impressed. "We're not friends," he repeated, definitely running out of patience now. "But he ran into me while I was carrying a desk and knocked me down. I sprained my ankle then, so he helped me because he probably felt bad. I have medical proof in case you need that."
The teacher gave him a long hard look, then sighed, put down his pen and folded his arms in front of his chest. "So why are you only confessing that now?"
"I almost forgot about it and I didn't know his name anyway because he's not in my grade," that sunbaenim shrugged again. "I only found out today that he's a suspect."
The teacher didn't seem to want to admit it, so he turned to Chanyeol. "Why didn't you say anything then?"
That sunbaenim gave Chanyeol a short glance as if to express that any further mess-up was none of his business, so Chanyeol resorted to what he could do best: making up lies on the spot. "I, uh... I'm kind of broke and I didn't tell him my name, so I hoped I'd get away without having to pay for the medical charges... I mean, you never know if it's sprained or broken or whatever during the first minutes and he couldn't really walk." He grinned foolishly and the teacher held his head in frustration, mumbling something about kids these and their moral standard that made everything just way too hard.
They were allowed to leave, that sunbaenim limping slightly and Chanyeol wondering what the hell had just happened. It was true that he had helped that sunbaenim that day but that was only half of what had really happened. It had only been one single deskhe had carried, minutes after the supposed time of crime. He was sure of that because he had heard the principal running around the school screaming because that had startled him so much, that he would have fallen of the stairs together with the desk, had that sunbaenim not grabbed his arm in time, which had made the whole thing so awkward because it was the moment that sunbaenim had actually hurt his ankle.
A week later it got out that the principal's ex-wife had paid one of the teachers to steal the dog to get back at him since his affair with a dog breeder had caused their whole divorce.
- curry bread -
Chanyeol wasn't really into fighting because he didn't like being hurt and he couldn't see blood without fainting. He was tall enough for people to somewhat respect him but his friends all knew that he actually was nothing but a big wimp. And why fight if you could joke yourself out of dire situations?
It was because of his lack of fighting skills though that there was no actual reason for him to become friends with delinquents and really, throughout middle school no delinquent had ever bothered with him because he was just that harmless tall kid. He really meant to follow that line in high school but that just showed how much he had underestimated that whole school model. High school had even more of those unwritten rules that made life hard for the newcomers, so he didn't even know he had stepped on a mine until it was too late. Who knew that there was a rule about curry bread?
To be honest, it wasn't even that he liked curry bread so much but he was hungry and he couldn't afford anything more fancy, so he had bought one. The last one. And suddenly there was this Chinese kid that he knew was in his grade yelling at him. He knew that the kid had skipped a grade and was thus a younger than him, so he had frankly felt offended and had just eaten the bread. The Chinese kid (his name was something-tao) threatened that Wu Yifan wouldn't let that slide which Chanyeol just shrugged off because he assumed 'Wu Yifan' to be some game character.
Wu Yifan had turned out to be the school's resident mob moss.
Well, that maybe was a bit of an exaggeration but he was still scary enough. Yifan was in grade three and had most of the delinquents under his control, so even students in grade one like that something-tao kid would try to get into his favour by buying him curry bread (his favourite) and milk all the time.
Chanyeol only learned that when it was too late though. He was still munching on his bread, when a mob of scary-looking seniors had entered the cafeteria, lead by an admittedly quite tall guy with an angry-looking face. Something-tao had ran to the guy, almost doing a 90°-bow and had furiously pointed at Chanyeol. Which was the moment when it dawned to Chanyeol that he might have made a mistake.
His palms were sweating and his legs felt wobbly when he tried to be reasonable and think of something on the spot. He had several options that would greatly change the outcome. He could act like it didn't happen and walk off, risking to be beaten up right away unless he acted like he was mentally disabled but that would have been hard to pull of for the rest of the school year. He could of course apologize, maybe even cry but well, he hadn't done anything wrong, had he? There had been no name written on the bread (or so he thought and he didn't want to run to the bin to find the wrapper just to prove that). He could start making awkward jokes, again risking to have his limbs broken. Maybe it was best to apologize after all but-.
"Did you eat the last curry bread?" the angry-looking guy asked in a calm voice that made him sound ever scarier.
This was the moment that would decide everything. It was now all about making the wisest decision, so Chanyeol said "No.", accidentally spitting out some bread crumbs that went flying around, one landing on the angry-looking guy's tie. Chanyeol swallowed hard, partly to get rid of the last pieces of evidence, partly because he was sure that he could kiss his carefree life as a high schooler goodbye now.
Something-tao hurriedly wiped of the piece of bread and glared at him, about to say something but a wave of angry-looking guy's hand stopped him. "So who did?" he asked and it was hard to read his emotion.
"I'm... not sure," Chanyeol slowly said, all the while cursing himself for always talking before thinking. "But I'm sure that whoever did, probably didn't mean any evil." Goodbye friends, goodbye freedom, goodbye life.
He wasn't sure but it looked as if the angry-looking guy snorted. "What's your name?" he asked and it didn't sound as threatening anymore.
"Uh, Chanyeol," he said as innocently as possible. "Park Chanyeol. I'm in class 1-4 and uh, I'm really sorry about the bread. I mean, uh, not that I ate it but, you know."
Something-tao was about to say something again but the angry-looking guy got him to buy some milk instead. "You're funny," angry-looking guy said and started walking off, leaving Chanyeol to be in a state somewhere between utter relief and confusion.
He thought the whole thing was over when he had something-tao (Zitao, he reminded himself) throwing him a package of curry bread on his table. "Hyungnim told me to give you this," he said and glared at him spitefully. "Cause you seem to like it so much."
Chanyeol assumed that it was Wu Yifan's way of scouting new members of his mob, so he couldn't really say that he didn't actually like curry bread. In the end he was proud to say that he never actually joined Yifan but they did kind of become friends after that. Yifan seemed to think that he was hilarious and Chanyeol actually liked hanging out with someone so powerful, people who didn't know better actually thought he was badass as well.
He had to realize though that being mistaken for a delinquent didn't just mean good things. People like Zitao for example obviously hated him for ignoring ranks and the teachers assumed that a first grader hanging out with the boss in grade three was capable of stealing a dog. He could have explained it of course but the problem with people making assumptions was that they usually didn't spell them out, denying you the chance to clarify anything.
"So, I heard you're hanging out with a kid from my class lately," Yifan said and ripped open the package of his third bread.
Chanyeol meanwhile struggled to get the straw for his milk out of the plastic wrapping. "You mean Minseok-hyung?" Most things in this world were obviously made for dwarves and young children. "Yeah, I guess..." he said and finally managed to throw away the stupid wrapper, triumphantly holding up the straw.
Yifan didn't say anything else, so Chanyeol just continued, "I mean, he doesn't seem to like hanging around others a lot, so it's more me following him around. But he helped me out before, so I thought I should try and be nice and stuff."
"He's a weird kid," Yifan said after a while, munching on his fourth bread. "He always acts like he doesn't care about shit but if not for him, I would have killed that Lu Han kid that day."
- the king of pranks -
It wasn't that Chanyeol hated pranks, far from it really. He was the one responsible for some of the most noteworthy pranks in the history of his middle school, whether it was that time he made half his class believe that they were required to wear helmets in school because the building was in danger of falling apart every minute or the time he had written his teacher a love letter, claiming to be the school nurse (which ultimately resulted in them going out and almost marrying until the teacher found out that the nurse cheated on him with the young part timer in the canteen).
During third grade in middle school though Chanyeol had found his master in Kim Jongdae who had just transferred to their school and who apparently was an evil genius. It wasn't so much that Jongdae's pranks were more creative or effective than his, Jongdae in general was just more ruthless. One time he had stolen an essay Baekhyun had written as a homework and had successfully convinced him into believing that he had never written it to begin with. It would have been fine, had he not handed it in himself and then laughed at Baekhyun for having a minor mental breakdown. Another time Jongdae had sprayed perfume into Chanyeol's eyes because there were no warnings about possible blindness on the package, which had caused him to wonder whether that meant that it wouldn't cause any harm at all. Chanyeol luckily really hadn't gone blind after that but it had stung for hours and he swore to himself that after that he was done with Kim Jongdae for life.
The problem was that Jongdae had a way of making you believe that he really hadn't meant any harm and was thus not to be blamed. Plus, it was the first time Chanyeol had found a capable prank accomplice, so although he did stay angry for at least a week and had made Jongdae pay for some of his meals, they remained friends. It was mostly Baekhyun who fell victim to Jongdae's pranks anyway. Until they entered high school at least.
They had all managed to get into the same high school but the new environment did bring some changes. It started with Baekhyun being in another class than Chanyeol and Jongdae who were placed together, so they naturally had less time to hang out. No matter how hard he tried to stop it from happening, they all found new friends and Baekhyun hooked up with that Kang Hanna girl.
Without Baekhyun around though Jongdae naturally focussed his pranks on others more, others mostly meaning Chanyeol in this case since he happened to be Jongdae's closest friend in high school now.
It really wasn't that Chanyeol minded so much in general because the majority of Jongdae's pranks weren't that big of a deal. The problem were those few pranks of his that just went overboard and the fact that Jongdae just knew too much about Chanyeol he could use against him. Ever since that incident when they had played basketball in middle school for example when Jongdae had fallen and scraped his knee causing Chanyeol to faint, he had known that blood probably was Chanyeol's biggest weakness.
It was really too easy Chanyeol had to admit and if it had been him, he probably would have used that opportunity as well, so he had never really bothered about the tiny blood pranks. Whether it was Jongdae painting his finger red or splashing ketchup over his knee, none of this had been particulary problematic. It was enough for Jongdae to chuckle and for Chanyeol to act like he thought it was funny, even if it secretly always terrified him slightly. He thought Jongdae knew not to overdo it, them being friends and everything but high school made Jongdae more reckless after all.
It was after the lunch break when everyone was going back to their classrooms. Chanyeol was chatting with Jongdae when that Zitao kid suddenly called him out to meet Yifan for a bit, so he told Jongdae to go ahead. It was all really normal and Jongdae just shrugged, so Chanyeol didn't suspect anything. Yifan then had told him to pass on a message to one of his classmates and Chanyeol had returned to his classroom. Before he had a chance to enter though, one of the girls came running to him, shrieking stuff about something having happened to Jongdae. Thinking about it, she did seem weird at that moment. He should have known instead of running blindly into the classroom. He should have known when his classmates all seemed quite calm when he pushed past them to the back of the classroom.
It was weird. Jongdae leaned against the wall in a weird position, his eyes half closed, his chest covered in red liquid, a kitched knife next to him. "Someone stabbed him," the girl muttered, her voice shaking unter the effort of surpressing a laughter.
It was fake. It was so obviously fake and Chanyeol hated how much it affected him anyway. He knew it wasn't real but he just couldn't laugh with his blood rushing through his ears so loudly, he barely heard anything around him anymore. His legs felt shaky when he shoved the girl away, causing her to fall into a desk. He wanted to apologize but suddenly didn't know how to process language anymore. So he ran, ran along the corridor and up the stairs until he just broke down, covering his hands with his mouth to stop hyperventilating. His fingers started to feel numb.
Blood. He just couldn't see blood and he hated himself for it. But he couldn't change it. He didn't want to be this way and he wished he could just laugh it off instead of trying not to cry like an infant.
"Chanyeol?" he heard Jongdae ask but he didn't look up, not because he was angry but because he felt stupid and ashamed.
"Listen, I... I'm sorry, really," Jongdae said and sounded miserable. "This stuff isn't real, it's just..." It seemed as if he realized how stupid it all suddenly seemed because it was barely audible when he added, "a prank".
"Do you really like studying that much?" he asked while trying to balance a pencil on his fingertip.
He sat across from Minseok in the almost empty school library because it had seemed like a cool place to hang out until he realized that Minseok actually studied there.
"So what if I do?" Minseok said impatiently and grabbed the pencil, neatly putting it back into his pencil case. "And anyway, studying is what students are kind of required to do. You should try it some time."
Chanyeol just sighed and put his head on the table. Being in the library was still better than being the laughing stock in class or being the third wheel around Baekhyun and Kang Hanna and Minseok at least didn't have minions that constantly glared at him.
- betrayal -
Chanyeol was getting quite used to hanging around the library. It wasn't that he enjoyed studying, he just liked the place itself. It was its own microcosm outside the hectic school life with all its annoyances and social responsibilities.
He also liked hanging around Minseok for that reason. It was quiet and weird and relaxing and the library apparently was the perfect place to take naps.
It was all going quite well until real life tried sneaking in one day in the form of Baekhyun and Kang Hanna making out in the very back of the library where all the dictionaries stood.
It was actually a good spot he had to admit because there probably weren't many people who actually used physical copies of dictionaries anymore but fate just wanted it that a lot of inconvenient coincidences happened that very day. A day before someone had somehow managed to break down the complete computer system, making all the computers inavailable, just when Minseok had something he needed to look up. He had also forgotten his phone that day and Chanyeol didn't have a smart phone, so instead of asking someone else he just got up to get a dictionary. Chanyeol tagged along, saying that he still owed him anyway and thus could do all the heavy work while pointing at his arm as if that explained anything. Minseok snorted.
They just moved around the corner, Minseok explaining the history stuff he had to look up because Chanyeol had made the mistake of asking about it when they saw the two. Chanyeol didn't even recognize them at first and was about to make a remark, when he met Kang Hanna's eye, causing her to shriek and push Baekhyun off herself as if he had some weird disease.
It took Baekhyun a while to realize what was going on. "Oh," he said and cleared his throat while straightening his tie. "Long time no see," he continued in an awkwardly chatty voice. "I didn't think I'd ever meet you in the library. Oh hey, is that Minseok-hyung?" He gestured towards Minseok.
And Minseok gave Chanyeol a short glance. He knew.
Honestly, it wasn't that he disliked Kang Hanna or the fact that she was with Baekhyun. She was cute and sweet and they looked nice together. He even convinced Jongdae into liking her after his initial scepti cism (he claimed that he was suspicious because she was too pretty to like someone like Baekhyun).
He didn't even know what it was but part of him felt bothered every time he saw them together. It was probably some weird form of jealousy because they spent so much time together and even if he did like hanging out with Jongdae; their friendship just wasn't like the one he and Baekhyun had. Jongdae was fun to be with, Baekhyun he could trust. Maybe it was that. Or maybe it was the fact that Baekhyun suddenly became oblivious of the fact that not everyone was happily in love like him. Chanyeol was sure he never meant to be like that but it felt as if he was trying to shove his happiness into everyone's faces. And it wasn't just Chanyeol thinking that way, seeing that Jongdae repeatedly tried to bait him into pranking Baekhyun in a way that would "get rid of that smirk on that kid's face".
In a way it had all been like a prank. It had never really been about Kang Hanna.
He was just trying to see how far he could get at first when he had approached her that afternoon. It was a rare chance. Baekhyun had already left for cram school and she was still around for some reason.
Honestly, he had thought (or at least hoped) that she genuinely liked Baekhyun for just being Baekhyun but in the end she probably just grabbed the chance when he had confessed to her first. He had whined about her and her pretty eyes and hair and skin and legs for weeks until she had finally given in. And now here she was, her pretty eyes on someone else.
Thing was, Chanyeol knew he looked quite good. His mother had always told him how she and his father were the prettiest couple on campus during their university days and how he would surely steal hearts one day with his good genes. He had always been the winner when it was about comparing the amount Valentine's chocolate or love letters, so he knew that he could have Kang Hanna, although he did feel somewhat disappointed when he did.
He had kissed her that very day, made out with her on other days when Baekhyun was in cram school, slept with her after listening to Baekhyun whine about how he didn't know whether it was okay to just grab her hand whenever they walked home together.
He felt bad about it, of course, but he also felt like doing the right thing in proving that she wasn't good enough for Baekhyun to begin with. There were multiple times when he was about to confess but every time he got scared of what would happen afterwards, so it all continued in secret. It became more like a habit, sneaking off to meet Kang Hanna in empty corridors or classroom.
Until that day the damn dog had disappeared. They sat on the stairs leading to the attic because no one ever actually went there. Up there was nothing but old furniture anyway, so they didn't even realize that anyone was getting closer until someone cleared his throat on the landing below them. They both jumped up in utter horror and she pushed him away, frantically buttoning up her shirt. Chanyeol looked down and saw a short boy he didn't know.
"Could you let me through? I need to get a new desk from the attic," the boy said and seemed slightly flustered. Kang Hanna seized the moment to run off.
Chanyeol had moved out of the way, not sure what to do or say. He was still standing outside like an idiot when the boy returned. Not knowing what else to do, Chanyeol offered to carry the desk instead. The boy refused at first but had to take a break after two flights of stairs, which gave Chanyeol the chance to just take it instead. He was in the middle of giving a ridiculous explanation as to why he would be extremely grateful if the boy could please not tell anyone about what he saw, when he heard someone yelling and almost fell down.
Whatever reason Minseok had for helping him and for even going as far as to lie about the number of desks he had to carry to make it sound like it took forever and the way he sprained his ankle, he probably hadn't realized that he was covering up for the kind of asshole who slept with his friend's girlfriend.
Chanyeol wanted to explain but he didn't really know how. He hadn't met Kang Hanna after that and he had never meant to hurt anyone. But that wasn't really true, was it?
"Look, I'm not going to tell him," Minseok said and turned around after a long moment of awkward silence in which he had looked up his history stuff and in which Chanyeol had acted like he was reading a book on a table behind him. "I have no idea what's going on between you and it's none of my business anyway, so stop moping around. And if you really want to read that," he pointed at the book. "You should probably start with the first page and not somewhere in the middle."
- the broken desk -
It wasn't a story Chanyeol really knew because he hadn't been there. He just kind of puzzled together the bits he had heard from Yifan and some of the students in grade three, as well as what he had heard during the many hours he had to sit in the teacher's office to be questioned about the lost dog.
He still didn't know how true it all was but the story of the broken desk seemed to have started with a simple argument between Yifan and the boy called Lu Han in his class.
Lu Han wasn't just the top of his class but the whole grade three, which basically made him the school's ace for that year. He seemed to have won some awards and was the class president of class 3-2, so people in general assumed that he had a bright future ahead. It was all especially amazing because he had managed all that in a Korean school despite being Chinese. Like that he helped the school's image even more because their honour student was of foreign origin, so how amazing did that school have to be when even the Chinese had a chance to get to the top there?
His background though seemed to cause Lu Han quite some trouble and it didn't really help to have Wu Yifan, also Chinese, also successful but in a completely different way, in his class.
Yifan said that being Chinese in the same town usually meant that you involuntarily always knew each other, even if not personally. It was for that reason that Zitao had known that getting on good terms with Yifan would help him a lot in the future. They were all part of a small group in a much larger group, so they had two options: either they stuck together or they tried to assimilate to a degree that made them seem like they belonged to the bigger group.
Yifan probably wouldn't have talked about any of that but Chanyeol heard from Yixing, another Chinese student in grade two, that Lu Han had explicitly told them not to mess with him any longer. They would just drag him down with their constant insistence on staying true to their origin. He said they had no chance of getting anywhere if they didn't put more effort into being like everyone else. Yixing tole him that Yifan would say how that was bullshit. People would always be able to tell they were different, so they could as well be proud of it. No matter how hard they tried, they still had their names and passports and birth certificates and accents that would give them away and hiding any of that would be like slapping their families in the face.
It seemed as if the whole issue had been building up for a while until that time during lunch break when Yifan and Lu Han had been fighting. Yifan didn't tell him what had started it but admitted that it was him who punched Lu Han in the face first. Someone said that Lu Han had sneered at Yifan, saying something about how violence was all he was capable of, when Yifan had got out of control and had beat him up like mad. Lu Han had tried to get away, which was what had caused Yifan to kick down all the desks but Lu Han couldn't get out because Yifan's minions were blocking the doors and everyone else was curious enough to stare but too scared to help. Yifan had picked up a desk and was about to just smash it on Lu Han, when Minseok had grabbed the desk from behind, the momentum causing it to fly a few metres and to crash into another desk. It was then that one of them broke.
"I have classroom duty today, so if you kill him, I'm the one who has to clean off the blood," or something similarly weird is what he seemed to have said.
Yifan would say later that he would have probably ended up being expelled or possibly even in jail, if not for Minseok and the dog.
"Lu Han has not always been like that," Yifan had said on another day during lunch when Chanyeol hadn't felt like sitting next to people from his own class and when they saw Lu Han passing by. "I mean, I remember when we hung out in middle school and when he let me copy his notes. And Minseok was really close to him, too, until like a year ago. I wasn't in their class then but I always saw them together. But I guess most career-hungry bastards start out as good guys and then they just ditch everyone who's in their way."
He always wanted to ask Minseok about it but he never really knew how. Minseok had never bothered him about the issue with Kang Hanna either, so it felt wrong to just press him for something he had even less reason to know.
It was one afternoon when he went to the library to look for Minseok. When he saw that his notes and books were on the usual table, he figured he was somewhere between the shelves, so he strolled there.
"Someone said you were hanging out with a boy from grade one lately," an unfamiliar voice said behind a shelf and Chanyeol stopped. "I didn't know you were into kids."
There was a pause and someone snorted, causing the unfamiliar voice to snap, "What?"
"Nothing, just... That kid is so tall, he could spit on your head when he's passing by. I just had to imagine that," Minseok laughed humourlessly.
Chanyeol hurriedly crouched down, suddenly afraid of being seen although there was no way to. He probably shouldn't be eavesdropping but it was obviously about him. Not that ever ever tried spitting on anyone's head before.
"Oh, how nice. Young and tall, is that your type?" the unfamiliar voice sneered. "I guess I'm too old and too short then. Maybe too smart, too? I heard the boy is friends with Wu Yifan."
"I don't see how that has anything to do with smartness," Minseok said flatly and seemed to walk away.
"Oh, true. Probably depends on whether he's just a follower or someone trying to use Yifan. Although both would seem kind of stupid to me," unfamiliar voice said tauntingly and Chanyeol wasn't sure whether he wanted to jump up and justify himself or crawl away and pretend he never heard anything. So maybe he wasn't the smartest, he himself didn't mind hearing that but he suddenly felt bad to think that him being stupid could reflect on Minseok.
Minseok meanwhile sighed. "Honestly, Lu Han, I don't really get what you want me to say right now. What's it to you who I spent my time with?"
"I'm worried about you," Lu Han said quietly.
Chanyeol didn't really know what happened afterwards. There were some muffled sounds and feet shuffling on the ground but the library absolutely had to have pretty wooden shelves with back boards. People in movies never had it so hard when they stalked others in libraries.
"Stop that shit!" Minseok whispered sharply. "It's too late. I've moved on and so should you."
It seemed as if Minseok was storming off and Chanyeol realized too late that he probably should have moved as well. He was probably still quite noticeable, even if he was still crouching because Minseok saw him the moment he turned around the corner, almost stumbling because of the sudden shock. Chanyeol probably looked like a big creep.
Lu Han meanwhile seemed to charge after Minseok, calling out his name, when Minseok loudly said, "Park Chanyeol, what are you doing there?"
"Uh," he said and grabbed a random book. "Reading."
"About, " Minseok moved his head to read the cover, ignoring Lu Han who had turned up behind him, "fatal diseases?"
"Yeah, well," Chanyeol said slowly and tried not to let his glance follow Lu Han who had stared at him wide-eyed for a split second before hurrying off. "It's always good to know about that stuff. As a preventive measure, I mean. Wouldn't want to find myself having cancer without being prepared."
Minseok snorted. "Yeah, I guess that would really be quite unfortunate."
They both chuckled but that didn't really make the situation less awkward.
- misunderstandings -
Chanyeol had almost forgotten about the boy who had stolen porn until he ran into him in the library. If he had been a bit more tactful he would have just ignored the boy but instead he stared at him for a moment, not really sure where he remembered him from, seeing that the boy seemed to recognize him but decided to act as if he didn't.
"You're porn boy," Chanyeol finally said triumphantly, making the boy jump. He shushed Chanyeol and then looked around to see of anyone could have heard him.
"It's you, right?" Chanyeol asked in a slightly more quiet voice which was probably still somewhat loud, he could never tell. "The boy who tried stealing porn." And the boy looked at him in horror. Chanyeol suspected that he was the only student who knew the story.
Porn boy admitted it in the end and introduced himself as Kim Joonmyun. They chatted for a while because Minseok was busy anyway and Joonmyun, after some initial reluctancy, ended up telling him the whole story of his miserable school life.
Kim Joonmyun was the class president in class 2-1 and stealing porn had not really been his idea but was more or less the result of some unfortunate happenings. Joonmyun seemed like a quite nice guy but it seemed as if he was getting bullied. The bullying had started around the beginning of the school year when he had been voted class president but he claimed that he didn't really know why it had started. He thought that it might have been because of envy or boredom. Whatever it was, the bullies weren't the nasty kind who would scribble stuff on his desk, they tried to frame him for things. Once they claimed he had been hitting them, another time they stole money and hid it in his locker and that time they had told him to steal porn, hoping he would get caught. Too afraid to run into them after that, he had started hiding from them lately which had brought him to the library.
Chanyeol has asked for the names of the bullies because he thought he knew someone in that class, when the actual problem for him began.
"It's mainly Zhang Yixing," Joonmyun said desperately. "He is one of those Chinese gang members. I don't know if you know them but their leader is in grade three."
"I mean, Yixing-hyung is a really nice guy, too," he said and pulled a face, his head resting on the table.
"Maybe he only seems nice next to Wu Yifan," Minseok said matter-of-factly, still scribbling down stuff in his text book. Chanyeol frowned at him. Secretly he wondered whether Minseok disliked Yifan for trying to throw a desk at Lu Han but then he thought that even if that was the case, it was nothing he could have argued against. He figured that he would probably be mad, too, if someone threw something at Jongdae, even if they never talked again.
"No, I mean, seriously," he sat up. "I don't think anyone would ever consider him a deliquent if not for his friendship with Yifan-hyung. So, I don't know. Joonmyun-sunbae maybe didn't say the whole truth? But he really seems quite desperate." He burried his head in his hands. "This is giving me headaches."
Minseok finally looked up and shook his head. "Why do you even care so much? They're not even in your grade."
"Well, I kind of promised Joonmyun-sunbae to help him but I thought I could just tell Yixing-hyung and be done with it." He wrinkled his nose. "And now I would feel bad to leave that sunbae hanging."
"Tell that Yixing then," Minseok shrugged and Chanyeol felt like he wasn't really taking this whole thing serious. "I mean, you don't know what's going on and neither do I, so what's the point of guessing if you can just ask someone who does know?"
He did have a point there.
The first thing he did the following day was to tell Yifan because, well, Yixing was his friend, so he would know. Yifan seemed a little indifferent while he listening but said he would talk to Yixing which somehow made Chanyeol worried about him now. Yifan considered bullying to be something only cowards would do, so if that was really what Yixing had been doing...
The whole thing was resolved quite easily after that. It had all started with some stupid remark that Joonmyun had dropped some day about how he hated those people who didn't try to fit into a group. He never meant anyone in particular, or so he said, it was just one of those generalized things people would say. That was then heard by another Chinese boy in that class though who someone misunderstood it as Joonmyun being racist and who had told Yixing. Yixing then tried to confront Joonmyun which turned into even more misunderstandings because Joonmyun tried justifying himself although he didn't even really know what Yixing was talking up. That then resulted in Joonmyun thinking that Yixing was questioning his authority. After more arguments, the Chinese boy Yixing was friends with started bullying Joonmyun who then believed Yixing was behind it.
"I'm not sure if they're going to become friends now, but Joonmyun-sunbae says they're at least getting along now," Chanyeol said happily and twirled around a pen between his fingers.
"I guess you're really proud of yourself now," Minseok grinned and closed his text book, just to open the next.
"Well, I mean, I did help them out a lot there," he admitted frankly and tried twirling the pen around the fingers of his left hand, which ended in the pen flying across the table, almost hitting Minseok. "Ah, sorry!" he said and retrieved the pen, deciding that pen tricks were only to be done using his right hand. "But I guess that just showed that arguments are often just based on misunderstandings, so if you just talk it out..."
He had a look at Minseok who had probably stopped paying attention already. He always did that. Sometimes he listened, sometimes he didn't and Chanyeol was slowly able to tell the difference. He talked a lot, he knew that and it was nice enough of Minseok not to tell him to piss off although he constantly disturbed him during his studies but, well, it felt weird. It was as if he was there one moment and disappeared the next, even if Chanyeol wanted him to be there all the time. It was probably childish thinking like that that lead him to saying what ultimately caused a change in their library buddy relationship.
"I mean, like how that Lu Han-sunbae seems kind of hung up on your relationship. So I guess if you just talked to each other..."
- the dynamic duo -
It felt like it had been ages since he last took a nap in his classroom. He scratched the rough wooden surface of his desk and felt the urge press his hands over his ears because everyone was just being obnoxiously loud.
He missed the library and the nice big tables and everyone being quiet and serious and he felt like punching himself for just destroying everything single-handedly.
He didn't even know what he had been expecting but Minseok was getting furious. Well, at least as furious as someone like Minseok would get in a library.
He didn't even want to think about it, so he ended up repeatedly hitting his head on the table in frustration when he noticed someone standing next to him. He looked up.
"You're trying to kill yourself?" Jongdae asked jokingly and looked extremely awkward. It had been weeks and he had tried talking to Chanyeol a couple of times by now. He mostly made jokes, sometimes he tried making awkward apologizes, lately he usually just had Baekhyun tell him whatever needed to be said. Chanyeol just walked away every single time Jongdae tried talking to him directly, which made the approaches less and less enthusiastic with time. But well, it didn't really help that people in class kept painting parts of their skin red lately to startle him.
"Yeah," he said lamely after a while and Jongdae almost jumped in surprise. "It's not working though. Any better suggestions? Your death back then seemed quite creative."
The guilt in Jongdae's eyes was painfully obvious but he still managed to say, "Well, we already had an incident like that now, so I wouldn't suggest that."
"True," he nodded. "Although that would make our class the serial stabbing case class. That sounds kind of cool if you think about it."
Jongdae grinned. "I guess that would make Baekhyun regret he ditched us for a class without any noteworthy criminal record."
They both laughed half-heartedly.
It was a beginning of some sort and if Chanyeol was honest did he miss talking to Jongdae sometimes. He missed the pranks (on others) and the nonsense, although he wouldn't have admitted it. Which was basically the issue.
He had needed Minseok to tell him that it was ridiculous that he of all people would go around trying to fix other people's relationships when he himself just left everything in a mess, seeing that he cheated on one friend and refused to listen to the other despite his constant attempts to apologize. Chanyeol had wanted to explain that he knew Jongdae and his shallow apologies but well, did he?
"Okay, this is awkward, so I'm only saying it once," Jongdae began and took a sip of the juice he had brought, probably trying to look like one of those adults who needed some soju before they could talk about serious issues.
"Go ahead then," Chanyeol shrugged and had a look down wondering why they had to do this on the roof. Jongdae really had a tendency to dramatize things.
"I'm sorry," Jongdae finally said. "I don't know, I guess I was kind of aggravated because of you and Baekhyun and everything..."
"What's that supposed to mean?" he asked bewildered. "I'm not the one who got himself a girlfriend."
"Oh, really? What about all the times you were sneaking off then? Don't tell me you weren't meeting some girl," Jongdae flared up. "You think I'm some complete idiot?"
Well, shit. Chanyeol had almost forgotten about that.
"And it's not just that," Jongdae continued. "You have obviously more than enough friends since it didn't really seem to matter to you that we weren't talking in weeks." He suddenly looked a little lost. "I mean," he said slowly. "I guess that was just a bit much. I don't know. I know I went overboard, so... sorry, really."
This surprisingly made Chanyeol feel really awful. He had never really thought much about Jongdae if he was honest. He never thought that anything he did might have hurt him since he was too absorbed in his own selfish jealousy of Baekhyun and his eagerness to find new friends.
So he apologized as well and was glad that they both found the whole confession thing too awkward to do over an extented period of time, so they walked back to the classroom, planning some minor pranks on Baekhyun who they decided was their real enemy.
- the last confession -
He was about to take a nap on his desk after the last period when everyone was slowly getting out of the room. After all classes had finished the classroom actually was a quite nice place to be.
"Hey, Park Chanyeol," he heard Jongdae yelling from the door. "You have a visitor."
"Tell them to go away," he mumbled and pulled his blazer over his head.
"I can do that if you want me to, of course," Jongdae said. "But it's Minseok-sunbaenim and he says it's urgent."
Chanyeol jumped up. "I swear, if this is a prank," he said and stared at Jongdae looking at him happily through the door. "I'm going to just rip off your whole grinning face and send it to your mother, saying that you're a lying bastard who didn't deserve better," he grumbled and moved towards him.
"You kind of make a bad impression if you're like that, you know," Jongdae chirped. "And I'm sure my mother would cherish my face and put it up on the wall in a frame. She says she quite likes when I smile."
"I bet she does," Chanyeol sneered while having a look through the door. And there he stood. Kim Minseok.
He was too dumbfounded to say anything at first, so it was Jongdae taking the initiative.
"He didn't bother you with anything while I was away, I hope?" he asked in a motherly voice and attempted to pat Chanyeol's head. "He's such a noisy kid sometimes but I can assure you that he means no harm."
"Stop that," Chanyeol muttered and tried shoving Jongdae off. Minseok smiled which he hoped was a good sign. Before Jongdae had a chance to chat Minseok up, Chanyeol grabbed his arm and dragged him away, leaving a protesting Jongdae behind.
It was in front of the door leading to the stairs that Minseok pulled himself free. "There's, uh, something I need to say," he said slowly and avoided his gaze. "I guess there are things I should explain..."
Chanyeol just nodded, suddenly feeling weirdly uncomfortable and they went up to the rooftop. This week seemed to be all about confessing things and it started to wear him out. Sure, he liked being friends with Jongdae again and yes, it was probably a good thing that he now knew what was going on but well, the truth had made him feel guilty and now was constantly worrying about leaving Jongdae out. Like this very moment when already thought of what to say to Jongdae about ditching him for his hyung again. It was bothersome and he kept thinking that it maybe would have been easier, had they just skipped the whole let's talk about our feelings attempt. Jongdae, too, seemed a little awkward after that.
And that had just been a minor problem. He didn't even want to think of what would happen if he talked to Baekhyun. Right now he didn't see Baekhyun so much but afterwards he probably wouldn't be able to talk to him.
So, while he still thought that talking things out was good sometimes, did he regret that moment of reckoning in which he had lead himself to believe that being truthful was anything he wanted in his life. He didn't. He wanted to continue lying and acting like he was too ignorant to understand obvious things.
Which was what worried him right now.
He didn't know what kind of conclusions Minseok had made but he didn't really want to hear any more truth. He wasn't so stupid to not have his suspicions.
"So, I guess that was that infamous Jongdae?" Minseok asked after a moment of silence in which they both were too occupied with their own thoughts.
"Yeah, well," he nodded with what he hoped a blissfully happy facial expression. "Life is quite boring without the constant threat of running into a prank after all."
Minseok smiled at the floor and fiddled with the hem of his sleeve, making it way too obvious that this whole thing had the potential of becoming even more awkward.
"Listen," Minseok finally said, looking up. "I think I need to apologize. I shouldn't have snapped at you. I know you were just trying to be helpful and..."
"No, it's all right," he interrupted. "I mean, you were right. I think I really shouldn't go around judging others." It turned out to sound a lot harsher than intended, so he tried to at least smile but his whole anxiousness turned it into a grimace.
"I'm sorry about that," Minseok winced. "Just this whole thing..." he trailed off. "You know, Lu Han, he..."
And Chanyeol knew he had to cut him off because this was just what he didn't want to hear the most. He was sure that this Lu Han guy had his reasons for doing whatever he did and that he would probably be able to understand them to a degree if he heard them. But why should he even bother to find them out? Why couldn't he just comfortable dislike him without having to worry that there was a chance of Minseok and Lu Han making up and resuming whatever relationship they had been having? Why not just think of him as that guy Yifan had been trying to kill for being to full of himself instead? So maybe that wasn't the full truth but it wasn't his business to care.
So he was acting stupid and started hopping around, claiming that he was freezing to death if they kept standing around on the roof. He was more than thankful when Minseok got the hint and suggested to get back inside then, he had some studying to do anyway and was about to go to the library.
Chanyeol couldn't really tell what they were to each other but he was afraid that whatever there was could just disappear if they tried to put it into words. It was comfortable the way it was, even if they didn't really know the complete truth about each other, maybe even because they didn't know. He just wanted them to hang out and be friends and it was probably horrible of him but he chose to ignore whatever it was Minseok had wanted to say.
Rating: PG
Pairing: Xiumin / Chanyeol
Word Count: 9,500
Summary: [high school!AU] All Chanyeol wants is to enjoy his carefree school life but when he becomes the prime suspect in a dog theft, thing slowly begin to change.
- school -
Chanyeol honestly liked school. He was far from being a brilliant student - his grades always being somewhere between kind of good and borderline acceptable-, he didn't join any clubs because it seemed like a hassle and he wouldn't have ever admitted to his friends that getting up every morning to walk to a place where everyone was forced to wear the same stupid blue blazers didn't seem half as bad to him.
Yeah, he liked school. He liked hanging around with his friends during break time, complaining about teachers and the school lunch and life in general.
He liked to be in a place where he belonged, exactly because he wore the same clothes as everyone else. Because he could hide in the mass of blue blazers, the endless faces all occupied with their teenage selves.
That's why he didn't really understand all those kids who ended up as outcasts in school. Sure, it took some effort to fit in the group. It was a game of pretence but to him that didn't seem harder than to constantly swim against the current.
- the lost dog -
It was all actually quite funny at first.
Their middle-aged principal had this cute tiny pet dog he often brought to school and that most people quite adored, whether they liked the principal or not. Personally he didn't really understand why anyone would every harm a tiny animal like that but one afternoon someone stole the dog while the principal left his office for a moment to go to the toilet. Completely in shock, the principal refused to work until the dog was found, so the whole issue got blown out of proportions with all the teachers going around questioning random students. They obviously had no clue where to start looking.
Now the problem was that Chanyeol wasn't all that popular with the teachers because he was known to be friends with the school's worst delinquents and because he had a tendency to be late or fall asleep during class. Also, he didn't have an alibi and that somehow made him the prime suspect.
Thing was, he did have an alibi but talking about that would have been worse than becoming a suspect. Noone could actually prove that he did it anyway and he figured that every good crime case needed suspects like him who lied despite having nothing to do with the actual case. It made the whole thing more interesting. He didn't actually say that out loud of course and he tried hard not too look too amused but he ended up enjoying it and every moment in which he could retell all the gruesome details to his classmates.
"That's bullshit," people like Jongdae would say. "They didn't handcuff you to a chair."
So maybe he exaggerated a little. But fact was that they all did enjoy it, even if or maybe exactly because they probably secretly suspected him.
After a few days it stopped being fun though. The dog was still lost and Chanyeol was slowly finding himself to be the only suspect. Everyone else had alibis, whether it was others claiming to be with them or pictures they had taken of themselves during the time of the crime in places that definitely weren't school. One boy in grade two had been so desperate, he had brought the owner of a video rental who had thrown him out after trying to steal porn. Chanyeol was actually kind of impressed when the boy had cried in the office with all the teachers and the video rental owner watching about how he didn't want his parents to know and he began wishing that he had done something like that. Maybe he just had to think of a really weird embarrassing excuse and then pay someone off? Why didn't he say no when Baekhyun offered to lie about having been together then? Stupid guilty conscience. But who could have known that their teachers took this long to find a dog?
It was during the fifth day of him sitting in the teachers office with his homeroom teacher trying to force him into confessing while he pulled the best devastated facial expression he could produce when another teacher interrupted them saying that some student had just claimed to have been with Chanyeol during the crime time.
Chanyeol jumped off his chair because there were only two possible options, both of which didn't seem too promising: A, Baekhyun foolishly thinking of helping him (noone would believe that because everyone knew they were best friends and it was kind of late now) and B, Kang Hanna trying to do 'the right thing'. He didn't really know what to think when it was none of them but that sunbaenim whose name he didn't even know.
"Okay, let's repeat the whole thing. You're who?" a teacher asked and started scribbling down stuff.
"Kim Minseok, grade three, class two," that sunbaenim said lamely. "And as I said, Park Chanyeol helped me move around some chairs and desks between my classroom and the attic last Thursday."
The teacher wrote it down and looked at him skeptically. "Why would you move around desks?"
That sunbaenim just sighed, obviously annoyed to repeat everything. "I had classroom duties last week. There was a fight and some desks and chairs broke, so I had to get new ones."
"That's the class of Wu Yifan," another teachers threw in helpfully and the interrogating teachers suddenly seemed to remember the incident. People seemed to have forgotten about it after the dog abduction but earlier that day there had been a fight in grade three that had caused the infamous Wu Yifan to be suspended for a week for kicking desks and injuring one of his classmates.
"Is that right, Park?" his homeroom teacher asked and nudged him in the side.
Chanyeol just nooded because it wasn't really a lie either but...
"Did anyone see you doing that?" the interrogating teacher asked, still not sounding too convinced.
That sunbaenim just shrugged. "I'm not sure. Maybe. Most people left the classroom early that day."
"I see. Well, we can still ask your classmates then," the interrogating teacher mumbled, writing some more stuff down and then looked directly at Chanyeol, gaving him a startle and then back at that sunbaenim. "Since when are you two friends?"
"We're not," that sunbaenim just answered and the teacher nodded triumphantly.
"Did he pay you to lie for him?" he grinned. "This just smells like a false testimony to me. You didn't really seem him that day, did you?"
That sunbaenim didn't look impressed. "We're not friends," he repeated, definitely running out of patience now. "But he ran into me while I was carrying a desk and knocked me down. I sprained my ankle then, so he helped me because he probably felt bad. I have medical proof in case you need that."
The teacher gave him a long hard look, then sighed, put down his pen and folded his arms in front of his chest. "So why are you only confessing that now?"
"I almost forgot about it and I didn't know his name anyway because he's not in my grade," that sunbaenim shrugged again. "I only found out today that he's a suspect."
The teacher didn't seem to want to admit it, so he turned to Chanyeol. "Why didn't you say anything then?"
That sunbaenim gave Chanyeol a short glance as if to express that any further mess-up was none of his business, so Chanyeol resorted to what he could do best: making up lies on the spot. "I, uh... I'm kind of broke and I didn't tell him my name, so I hoped I'd get away without having to pay for the medical charges... I mean, you never know if it's sprained or broken or whatever during the first minutes and he couldn't really walk." He grinned foolishly and the teacher held his head in frustration, mumbling something about kids these and their moral standard that made everything just way too hard.
They were allowed to leave, that sunbaenim limping slightly and Chanyeol wondering what the hell had just happened. It was true that he had helped that sunbaenim that day but that was only half of what had really happened. It had only been one single deskhe had carried, minutes after the supposed time of crime. He was sure of that because he had heard the principal running around the school screaming because that had startled him so much, that he would have fallen of the stairs together with the desk, had that sunbaenim not grabbed his arm in time, which had made the whole thing so awkward because it was the moment that sunbaenim had actually hurt his ankle.
A week later it got out that the principal's ex-wife had paid one of the teachers to steal the dog to get back at him since his affair with a dog breeder had caused their whole divorce.
- curry bread -
Chanyeol wasn't really into fighting because he didn't like being hurt and he couldn't see blood without fainting. He was tall enough for people to somewhat respect him but his friends all knew that he actually was nothing but a big wimp. And why fight if you could joke yourself out of dire situations?
It was because of his lack of fighting skills though that there was no actual reason for him to become friends with delinquents and really, throughout middle school no delinquent had ever bothered with him because he was just that harmless tall kid. He really meant to follow that line in high school but that just showed how much he had underestimated that whole school model. High school had even more of those unwritten rules that made life hard for the newcomers, so he didn't even know he had stepped on a mine until it was too late. Who knew that there was a rule about curry bread?
To be honest, it wasn't even that he liked curry bread so much but he was hungry and he couldn't afford anything more fancy, so he had bought one. The last one. And suddenly there was this Chinese kid that he knew was in his grade yelling at him. He knew that the kid had skipped a grade and was thus a younger than him, so he had frankly felt offended and had just eaten the bread. The Chinese kid (his name was something-tao) threatened that Wu Yifan wouldn't let that slide which Chanyeol just shrugged off because he assumed 'Wu Yifan' to be some game character.
Wu Yifan had turned out to be the school's resident mob moss.
Well, that maybe was a bit of an exaggeration but he was still scary enough. Yifan was in grade three and had most of the delinquents under his control, so even students in grade one like that something-tao kid would try to get into his favour by buying him curry bread (his favourite) and milk all the time.
Chanyeol only learned that when it was too late though. He was still munching on his bread, when a mob of scary-looking seniors had entered the cafeteria, lead by an admittedly quite tall guy with an angry-looking face. Something-tao had ran to the guy, almost doing a 90°-bow and had furiously pointed at Chanyeol. Which was the moment when it dawned to Chanyeol that he might have made a mistake.
His palms were sweating and his legs felt wobbly when he tried to be reasonable and think of something on the spot. He had several options that would greatly change the outcome. He could act like it didn't happen and walk off, risking to be beaten up right away unless he acted like he was mentally disabled but that would have been hard to pull of for the rest of the school year. He could of course apologize, maybe even cry but well, he hadn't done anything wrong, had he? There had been no name written on the bread (or so he thought and he didn't want to run to the bin to find the wrapper just to prove that). He could start making awkward jokes, again risking to have his limbs broken. Maybe it was best to apologize after all but-.
"Did you eat the last curry bread?" the angry-looking guy asked in a calm voice that made him sound ever scarier.
This was the moment that would decide everything. It was now all about making the wisest decision, so Chanyeol said "No.", accidentally spitting out some bread crumbs that went flying around, one landing on the angry-looking guy's tie. Chanyeol swallowed hard, partly to get rid of the last pieces of evidence, partly because he was sure that he could kiss his carefree life as a high schooler goodbye now.
Something-tao hurriedly wiped of the piece of bread and glared at him, about to say something but a wave of angry-looking guy's hand stopped him. "So who did?" he asked and it was hard to read his emotion.
"I'm... not sure," Chanyeol slowly said, all the while cursing himself for always talking before thinking. "But I'm sure that whoever did, probably didn't mean any evil." Goodbye friends, goodbye freedom, goodbye life.
He wasn't sure but it looked as if the angry-looking guy snorted. "What's your name?" he asked and it didn't sound as threatening anymore.
"Uh, Chanyeol," he said as innocently as possible. "Park Chanyeol. I'm in class 1-4 and uh, I'm really sorry about the bread. I mean, uh, not that I ate it but, you know."
Something-tao was about to say something again but the angry-looking guy got him to buy some milk instead. "You're funny," angry-looking guy said and started walking off, leaving Chanyeol to be in a state somewhere between utter relief and confusion.
He thought the whole thing was over when he had something-tao (Zitao, he reminded himself) throwing him a package of curry bread on his table. "Hyungnim told me to give you this," he said and glared at him spitefully. "Cause you seem to like it so much."
Chanyeol assumed that it was Wu Yifan's way of scouting new members of his mob, so he couldn't really say that he didn't actually like curry bread. In the end he was proud to say that he never actually joined Yifan but they did kind of become friends after that. Yifan seemed to think that he was hilarious and Chanyeol actually liked hanging out with someone so powerful, people who didn't know better actually thought he was badass as well.
He had to realize though that being mistaken for a delinquent didn't just mean good things. People like Zitao for example obviously hated him for ignoring ranks and the teachers assumed that a first grader hanging out with the boss in grade three was capable of stealing a dog. He could have explained it of course but the problem with people making assumptions was that they usually didn't spell them out, denying you the chance to clarify anything.
"So, I heard you're hanging out with a kid from my class lately," Yifan said and ripped open the package of his third bread.
Chanyeol meanwhile struggled to get the straw for his milk out of the plastic wrapping. "You mean Minseok-hyung?" Most things in this world were obviously made for dwarves and young children. "Yeah, I guess..." he said and finally managed to throw away the stupid wrapper, triumphantly holding up the straw.
Yifan didn't say anything else, so Chanyeol just continued, "I mean, he doesn't seem to like hanging around others a lot, so it's more me following him around. But he helped me out before, so I thought I should try and be nice and stuff."
"He's a weird kid," Yifan said after a while, munching on his fourth bread. "He always acts like he doesn't care about shit but if not for him, I would have killed that Lu Han kid that day."
- the king of pranks -
It wasn't that Chanyeol hated pranks, far from it really. He was the one responsible for some of the most noteworthy pranks in the history of his middle school, whether it was that time he made half his class believe that they were required to wear helmets in school because the building was in danger of falling apart every minute or the time he had written his teacher a love letter, claiming to be the school nurse (which ultimately resulted in them going out and almost marrying until the teacher found out that the nurse cheated on him with the young part timer in the canteen).
During third grade in middle school though Chanyeol had found his master in Kim Jongdae who had just transferred to their school and who apparently was an evil genius. It wasn't so much that Jongdae's pranks were more creative or effective than his, Jongdae in general was just more ruthless. One time he had stolen an essay Baekhyun had written as a homework and had successfully convinced him into believing that he had never written it to begin with. It would have been fine, had he not handed it in himself and then laughed at Baekhyun for having a minor mental breakdown. Another time Jongdae had sprayed perfume into Chanyeol's eyes because there were no warnings about possible blindness on the package, which had caused him to wonder whether that meant that it wouldn't cause any harm at all. Chanyeol luckily really hadn't gone blind after that but it had stung for hours and he swore to himself that after that he was done with Kim Jongdae for life.
The problem was that Jongdae had a way of making you believe that he really hadn't meant any harm and was thus not to be blamed. Plus, it was the first time Chanyeol had found a capable prank accomplice, so although he did stay angry for at least a week and had made Jongdae pay for some of his meals, they remained friends. It was mostly Baekhyun who fell victim to Jongdae's pranks anyway. Until they entered high school at least.
They had all managed to get into the same high school but the new environment did bring some changes. It started with Baekhyun being in another class than Chanyeol and Jongdae who were placed together, so they naturally had less time to hang out. No matter how hard he tried to stop it from happening, they all found new friends and Baekhyun hooked up with that Kang Hanna girl.
Without Baekhyun around though Jongdae naturally focussed his pranks on others more, others mostly meaning Chanyeol in this case since he happened to be Jongdae's closest friend in high school now.
It really wasn't that Chanyeol minded so much in general because the majority of Jongdae's pranks weren't that big of a deal. The problem were those few pranks of his that just went overboard and the fact that Jongdae just knew too much about Chanyeol he could use against him. Ever since that incident when they had played basketball in middle school for example when Jongdae had fallen and scraped his knee causing Chanyeol to faint, he had known that blood probably was Chanyeol's biggest weakness.
It was really too easy Chanyeol had to admit and if it had been him, he probably would have used that opportunity as well, so he had never really bothered about the tiny blood pranks. Whether it was Jongdae painting his finger red or splashing ketchup over his knee, none of this had been particulary problematic. It was enough for Jongdae to chuckle and for Chanyeol to act like he thought it was funny, even if it secretly always terrified him slightly. He thought Jongdae knew not to overdo it, them being friends and everything but high school made Jongdae more reckless after all.
It was after the lunch break when everyone was going back to their classrooms. Chanyeol was chatting with Jongdae when that Zitao kid suddenly called him out to meet Yifan for a bit, so he told Jongdae to go ahead. It was all really normal and Jongdae just shrugged, so Chanyeol didn't suspect anything. Yifan then had told him to pass on a message to one of his classmates and Chanyeol had returned to his classroom. Before he had a chance to enter though, one of the girls came running to him, shrieking stuff about something having happened to Jongdae. Thinking about it, she did seem weird at that moment. He should have known instead of running blindly into the classroom. He should have known when his classmates all seemed quite calm when he pushed past them to the back of the classroom.
It was weird. Jongdae leaned against the wall in a weird position, his eyes half closed, his chest covered in red liquid, a kitched knife next to him. "Someone stabbed him," the girl muttered, her voice shaking unter the effort of surpressing a laughter.
It was fake. It was so obviously fake and Chanyeol hated how much it affected him anyway. He knew it wasn't real but he just couldn't laugh with his blood rushing through his ears so loudly, he barely heard anything around him anymore. His legs felt shaky when he shoved the girl away, causing her to fall into a desk. He wanted to apologize but suddenly didn't know how to process language anymore. So he ran, ran along the corridor and up the stairs until he just broke down, covering his hands with his mouth to stop hyperventilating. His fingers started to feel numb.
Blood. He just couldn't see blood and he hated himself for it. But he couldn't change it. He didn't want to be this way and he wished he could just laugh it off instead of trying not to cry like an infant.
"Chanyeol?" he heard Jongdae ask but he didn't look up, not because he was angry but because he felt stupid and ashamed.
"Listen, I... I'm sorry, really," Jongdae said and sounded miserable. "This stuff isn't real, it's just..." It seemed as if he realized how stupid it all suddenly seemed because it was barely audible when he added, "a prank".
"Do you really like studying that much?" he asked while trying to balance a pencil on his fingertip.
He sat across from Minseok in the almost empty school library because it had seemed like a cool place to hang out until he realized that Minseok actually studied there.
"So what if I do?" Minseok said impatiently and grabbed the pencil, neatly putting it back into his pencil case. "And anyway, studying is what students are kind of required to do. You should try it some time."
Chanyeol just sighed and put his head on the table. Being in the library was still better than being the laughing stock in class or being the third wheel around Baekhyun and Kang Hanna and Minseok at least didn't have minions that constantly glared at him.
- betrayal -
Chanyeol was getting quite used to hanging around the library. It wasn't that he enjoyed studying, he just liked the place itself. It was its own microcosm outside the hectic school life with all its annoyances and social responsibilities.
He also liked hanging around Minseok for that reason. It was quiet and weird and relaxing and the library apparently was the perfect place to take naps.
It was all going quite well until real life tried sneaking in one day in the form of Baekhyun and Kang Hanna making out in the very back of the library where all the dictionaries stood.
It was actually a good spot he had to admit because there probably weren't many people who actually used physical copies of dictionaries anymore but fate just wanted it that a lot of inconvenient coincidences happened that very day. A day before someone had somehow managed to break down the complete computer system, making all the computers inavailable, just when Minseok had something he needed to look up. He had also forgotten his phone that day and Chanyeol didn't have a smart phone, so instead of asking someone else he just got up to get a dictionary. Chanyeol tagged along, saying that he still owed him anyway and thus could do all the heavy work while pointing at his arm as if that explained anything. Minseok snorted.
They just moved around the corner, Minseok explaining the history stuff he had to look up because Chanyeol had made the mistake of asking about it when they saw the two. Chanyeol didn't even recognize them at first and was about to make a remark, when he met Kang Hanna's eye, causing her to shriek and push Baekhyun off herself as if he had some weird disease.
It took Baekhyun a while to realize what was going on. "Oh," he said and cleared his throat while straightening his tie. "Long time no see," he continued in an awkwardly chatty voice. "I didn't think I'd ever meet you in the library. Oh hey, is that Minseok-hyung?" He gestured towards Minseok.
And Minseok gave Chanyeol a short glance. He knew.
Honestly, it wasn't that he disliked Kang Hanna or the fact that she was with Baekhyun. She was cute and sweet and they looked nice together. He even convinced Jongdae into liking her after his initial scepti cism (he claimed that he was suspicious because she was too pretty to like someone like Baekhyun).
He didn't even know what it was but part of him felt bothered every time he saw them together. It was probably some weird form of jealousy because they spent so much time together and even if he did like hanging out with Jongdae; their friendship just wasn't like the one he and Baekhyun had. Jongdae was fun to be with, Baekhyun he could trust. Maybe it was that. Or maybe it was the fact that Baekhyun suddenly became oblivious of the fact that not everyone was happily in love like him. Chanyeol was sure he never meant to be like that but it felt as if he was trying to shove his happiness into everyone's faces. And it wasn't just Chanyeol thinking that way, seeing that Jongdae repeatedly tried to bait him into pranking Baekhyun in a way that would "get rid of that smirk on that kid's face".
In a way it had all been like a prank. It had never really been about Kang Hanna.
He was just trying to see how far he could get at first when he had approached her that afternoon. It was a rare chance. Baekhyun had already left for cram school and she was still around for some reason.
Honestly, he had thought (or at least hoped) that she genuinely liked Baekhyun for just being Baekhyun but in the end she probably just grabbed the chance when he had confessed to her first. He had whined about her and her pretty eyes and hair and skin and legs for weeks until she had finally given in. And now here she was, her pretty eyes on someone else.
Thing was, Chanyeol knew he looked quite good. His mother had always told him how she and his father were the prettiest couple on campus during their university days and how he would surely steal hearts one day with his good genes. He had always been the winner when it was about comparing the amount Valentine's chocolate or love letters, so he knew that he could have Kang Hanna, although he did feel somewhat disappointed when he did.
He had kissed her that very day, made out with her on other days when Baekhyun was in cram school, slept with her after listening to Baekhyun whine about how he didn't know whether it was okay to just grab her hand whenever they walked home together.
He felt bad about it, of course, but he also felt like doing the right thing in proving that she wasn't good enough for Baekhyun to begin with. There were multiple times when he was about to confess but every time he got scared of what would happen afterwards, so it all continued in secret. It became more like a habit, sneaking off to meet Kang Hanna in empty corridors or classroom.
Until that day the damn dog had disappeared. They sat on the stairs leading to the attic because no one ever actually went there. Up there was nothing but old furniture anyway, so they didn't even realize that anyone was getting closer until someone cleared his throat on the landing below them. They both jumped up in utter horror and she pushed him away, frantically buttoning up her shirt. Chanyeol looked down and saw a short boy he didn't know.
"Could you let me through? I need to get a new desk from the attic," the boy said and seemed slightly flustered. Kang Hanna seized the moment to run off.
Chanyeol had moved out of the way, not sure what to do or say. He was still standing outside like an idiot when the boy returned. Not knowing what else to do, Chanyeol offered to carry the desk instead. The boy refused at first but had to take a break after two flights of stairs, which gave Chanyeol the chance to just take it instead. He was in the middle of giving a ridiculous explanation as to why he would be extremely grateful if the boy could please not tell anyone about what he saw, when he heard someone yelling and almost fell down.
Whatever reason Minseok had for helping him and for even going as far as to lie about the number of desks he had to carry to make it sound like it took forever and the way he sprained his ankle, he probably hadn't realized that he was covering up for the kind of asshole who slept with his friend's girlfriend.
Chanyeol wanted to explain but he didn't really know how. He hadn't met Kang Hanna after that and he had never meant to hurt anyone. But that wasn't really true, was it?
"Look, I'm not going to tell him," Minseok said and turned around after a long moment of awkward silence in which he had looked up his history stuff and in which Chanyeol had acted like he was reading a book on a table behind him. "I have no idea what's going on between you and it's none of my business anyway, so stop moping around. And if you really want to read that," he pointed at the book. "You should probably start with the first page and not somewhere in the middle."
- the broken desk -
It wasn't a story Chanyeol really knew because he hadn't been there. He just kind of puzzled together the bits he had heard from Yifan and some of the students in grade three, as well as what he had heard during the many hours he had to sit in the teacher's office to be questioned about the lost dog.
He still didn't know how true it all was but the story of the broken desk seemed to have started with a simple argument between Yifan and the boy called Lu Han in his class.
Lu Han wasn't just the top of his class but the whole grade three, which basically made him the school's ace for that year. He seemed to have won some awards and was the class president of class 3-2, so people in general assumed that he had a bright future ahead. It was all especially amazing because he had managed all that in a Korean school despite being Chinese. Like that he helped the school's image even more because their honour student was of foreign origin, so how amazing did that school have to be when even the Chinese had a chance to get to the top there?
His background though seemed to cause Lu Han quite some trouble and it didn't really help to have Wu Yifan, also Chinese, also successful but in a completely different way, in his class.
Yifan said that being Chinese in the same town usually meant that you involuntarily always knew each other, even if not personally. It was for that reason that Zitao had known that getting on good terms with Yifan would help him a lot in the future. They were all part of a small group in a much larger group, so they had two options: either they stuck together or they tried to assimilate to a degree that made them seem like they belonged to the bigger group.
Yifan probably wouldn't have talked about any of that but Chanyeol heard from Yixing, another Chinese student in grade two, that Lu Han had explicitly told them not to mess with him any longer. They would just drag him down with their constant insistence on staying true to their origin. He said they had no chance of getting anywhere if they didn't put more effort into being like everyone else. Yixing tole him that Yifan would say how that was bullshit. People would always be able to tell they were different, so they could as well be proud of it. No matter how hard they tried, they still had their names and passports and birth certificates and accents that would give them away and hiding any of that would be like slapping their families in the face.
It seemed as if the whole issue had been building up for a while until that time during lunch break when Yifan and Lu Han had been fighting. Yifan didn't tell him what had started it but admitted that it was him who punched Lu Han in the face first. Someone said that Lu Han had sneered at Yifan, saying something about how violence was all he was capable of, when Yifan had got out of control and had beat him up like mad. Lu Han had tried to get away, which was what had caused Yifan to kick down all the desks but Lu Han couldn't get out because Yifan's minions were blocking the doors and everyone else was curious enough to stare but too scared to help. Yifan had picked up a desk and was about to just smash it on Lu Han, when Minseok had grabbed the desk from behind, the momentum causing it to fly a few metres and to crash into another desk. It was then that one of them broke.
"I have classroom duty today, so if you kill him, I'm the one who has to clean off the blood," or something similarly weird is what he seemed to have said.
Yifan would say later that he would have probably ended up being expelled or possibly even in jail, if not for Minseok and the dog.
"Lu Han has not always been like that," Yifan had said on another day during lunch when Chanyeol hadn't felt like sitting next to people from his own class and when they saw Lu Han passing by. "I mean, I remember when we hung out in middle school and when he let me copy his notes. And Minseok was really close to him, too, until like a year ago. I wasn't in their class then but I always saw them together. But I guess most career-hungry bastards start out as good guys and then they just ditch everyone who's in their way."
He always wanted to ask Minseok about it but he never really knew how. Minseok had never bothered him about the issue with Kang Hanna either, so it felt wrong to just press him for something he had even less reason to know.
It was one afternoon when he went to the library to look for Minseok. When he saw that his notes and books were on the usual table, he figured he was somewhere between the shelves, so he strolled there.
"Someone said you were hanging out with a boy from grade one lately," an unfamiliar voice said behind a shelf and Chanyeol stopped. "I didn't know you were into kids."
There was a pause and someone snorted, causing the unfamiliar voice to snap, "What?"
"Nothing, just... That kid is so tall, he could spit on your head when he's passing by. I just had to imagine that," Minseok laughed humourlessly.
Chanyeol hurriedly crouched down, suddenly afraid of being seen although there was no way to. He probably shouldn't be eavesdropping but it was obviously about him. Not that ever ever tried spitting on anyone's head before.
"Oh, how nice. Young and tall, is that your type?" the unfamiliar voice sneered. "I guess I'm too old and too short then. Maybe too smart, too? I heard the boy is friends with Wu Yifan."
"I don't see how that has anything to do with smartness," Minseok said flatly and seemed to walk away.
"Oh, true. Probably depends on whether he's just a follower or someone trying to use Yifan. Although both would seem kind of stupid to me," unfamiliar voice said tauntingly and Chanyeol wasn't sure whether he wanted to jump up and justify himself or crawl away and pretend he never heard anything. So maybe he wasn't the smartest, he himself didn't mind hearing that but he suddenly felt bad to think that him being stupid could reflect on Minseok.
Minseok meanwhile sighed. "Honestly, Lu Han, I don't really get what you want me to say right now. What's it to you who I spent my time with?"
"I'm worried about you," Lu Han said quietly.
Chanyeol didn't really know what happened afterwards. There were some muffled sounds and feet shuffling on the ground but the library absolutely had to have pretty wooden shelves with back boards. People in movies never had it so hard when they stalked others in libraries.
"Stop that shit!" Minseok whispered sharply. "It's too late. I've moved on and so should you."
It seemed as if Minseok was storming off and Chanyeol realized too late that he probably should have moved as well. He was probably still quite noticeable, even if he was still crouching because Minseok saw him the moment he turned around the corner, almost stumbling because of the sudden shock. Chanyeol probably looked like a big creep.
Lu Han meanwhile seemed to charge after Minseok, calling out his name, when Minseok loudly said, "Park Chanyeol, what are you doing there?"
"Uh," he said and grabbed a random book. "Reading."
"About, " Minseok moved his head to read the cover, ignoring Lu Han who had turned up behind him, "fatal diseases?"
"Yeah, well," Chanyeol said slowly and tried not to let his glance follow Lu Han who had stared at him wide-eyed for a split second before hurrying off. "It's always good to know about that stuff. As a preventive measure, I mean. Wouldn't want to find myself having cancer without being prepared."
Minseok snorted. "Yeah, I guess that would really be quite unfortunate."
They both chuckled but that didn't really make the situation less awkward.
- misunderstandings -
Chanyeol had almost forgotten about the boy who had stolen porn until he ran into him in the library. If he had been a bit more tactful he would have just ignored the boy but instead he stared at him for a moment, not really sure where he remembered him from, seeing that the boy seemed to recognize him but decided to act as if he didn't.
"You're porn boy," Chanyeol finally said triumphantly, making the boy jump. He shushed Chanyeol and then looked around to see of anyone could have heard him.
"It's you, right?" Chanyeol asked in a slightly more quiet voice which was probably still somewhat loud, he could never tell. "The boy who tried stealing porn." And the boy looked at him in horror. Chanyeol suspected that he was the only student who knew the story.
Porn boy admitted it in the end and introduced himself as Kim Joonmyun. They chatted for a while because Minseok was busy anyway and Joonmyun, after some initial reluctancy, ended up telling him the whole story of his miserable school life.
Kim Joonmyun was the class president in class 2-1 and stealing porn had not really been his idea but was more or less the result of some unfortunate happenings. Joonmyun seemed like a quite nice guy but it seemed as if he was getting bullied. The bullying had started around the beginning of the school year when he had been voted class president but he claimed that he didn't really know why it had started. He thought that it might have been because of envy or boredom. Whatever it was, the bullies weren't the nasty kind who would scribble stuff on his desk, they tried to frame him for things. Once they claimed he had been hitting them, another time they stole money and hid it in his locker and that time they had told him to steal porn, hoping he would get caught. Too afraid to run into them after that, he had started hiding from them lately which had brought him to the library.
Chanyeol has asked for the names of the bullies because he thought he knew someone in that class, when the actual problem for him began.
"It's mainly Zhang Yixing," Joonmyun said desperately. "He is one of those Chinese gang members. I don't know if you know them but their leader is in grade three."
"I mean, Yixing-hyung is a really nice guy, too," he said and pulled a face, his head resting on the table.
"Maybe he only seems nice next to Wu Yifan," Minseok said matter-of-factly, still scribbling down stuff in his text book. Chanyeol frowned at him. Secretly he wondered whether Minseok disliked Yifan for trying to throw a desk at Lu Han but then he thought that even if that was the case, it was nothing he could have argued against. He figured that he would probably be mad, too, if someone threw something at Jongdae, even if they never talked again.
"No, I mean, seriously," he sat up. "I don't think anyone would ever consider him a deliquent if not for his friendship with Yifan-hyung. So, I don't know. Joonmyun-sunbae maybe didn't say the whole truth? But he really seems quite desperate." He burried his head in his hands. "This is giving me headaches."
Minseok finally looked up and shook his head. "Why do you even care so much? They're not even in your grade."
"Well, I kind of promised Joonmyun-sunbae to help him but I thought I could just tell Yixing-hyung and be done with it." He wrinkled his nose. "And now I would feel bad to leave that sunbae hanging."
"Tell that Yixing then," Minseok shrugged and Chanyeol felt like he wasn't really taking this whole thing serious. "I mean, you don't know what's going on and neither do I, so what's the point of guessing if you can just ask someone who does know?"
He did have a point there.
The first thing he did the following day was to tell Yifan because, well, Yixing was his friend, so he would know. Yifan seemed a little indifferent while he listening but said he would talk to Yixing which somehow made Chanyeol worried about him now. Yifan considered bullying to be something only cowards would do, so if that was really what Yixing had been doing...
The whole thing was resolved quite easily after that. It had all started with some stupid remark that Joonmyun had dropped some day about how he hated those people who didn't try to fit into a group. He never meant anyone in particular, or so he said, it was just one of those generalized things people would say. That was then heard by another Chinese boy in that class though who someone misunderstood it as Joonmyun being racist and who had told Yixing. Yixing then tried to confront Joonmyun which turned into even more misunderstandings because Joonmyun tried justifying himself although he didn't even really know what Yixing was talking up. That then resulted in Joonmyun thinking that Yixing was questioning his authority. After more arguments, the Chinese boy Yixing was friends with started bullying Joonmyun who then believed Yixing was behind it.
"I'm not sure if they're going to become friends now, but Joonmyun-sunbae says they're at least getting along now," Chanyeol said happily and twirled around a pen between his fingers.
"I guess you're really proud of yourself now," Minseok grinned and closed his text book, just to open the next.
"Well, I mean, I did help them out a lot there," he admitted frankly and tried twirling the pen around the fingers of his left hand, which ended in the pen flying across the table, almost hitting Minseok. "Ah, sorry!" he said and retrieved the pen, deciding that pen tricks were only to be done using his right hand. "But I guess that just showed that arguments are often just based on misunderstandings, so if you just talk it out..."
He had a look at Minseok who had probably stopped paying attention already. He always did that. Sometimes he listened, sometimes he didn't and Chanyeol was slowly able to tell the difference. He talked a lot, he knew that and it was nice enough of Minseok not to tell him to piss off although he constantly disturbed him during his studies but, well, it felt weird. It was as if he was there one moment and disappeared the next, even if Chanyeol wanted him to be there all the time. It was probably childish thinking like that that lead him to saying what ultimately caused a change in their library buddy relationship.
"I mean, like how that Lu Han-sunbae seems kind of hung up on your relationship. So I guess if you just talked to each other..."
- the dynamic duo -
It felt like it had been ages since he last took a nap in his classroom. He scratched the rough wooden surface of his desk and felt the urge press his hands over his ears because everyone was just being obnoxiously loud.
He missed the library and the nice big tables and everyone being quiet and serious and he felt like punching himself for just destroying everything single-handedly.
He didn't even know what he had been expecting but Minseok was getting furious. Well, at least as furious as someone like Minseok would get in a library.
He didn't even want to think about it, so he ended up repeatedly hitting his head on the table in frustration when he noticed someone standing next to him. He looked up.
"You're trying to kill yourself?" Jongdae asked jokingly and looked extremely awkward. It had been weeks and he had tried talking to Chanyeol a couple of times by now. He mostly made jokes, sometimes he tried making awkward apologizes, lately he usually just had Baekhyun tell him whatever needed to be said. Chanyeol just walked away every single time Jongdae tried talking to him directly, which made the approaches less and less enthusiastic with time. But well, it didn't really help that people in class kept painting parts of their skin red lately to startle him.
"Yeah," he said lamely after a while and Jongdae almost jumped in surprise. "It's not working though. Any better suggestions? Your death back then seemed quite creative."
The guilt in Jongdae's eyes was painfully obvious but he still managed to say, "Well, we already had an incident like that now, so I wouldn't suggest that."
"True," he nodded. "Although that would make our class the serial stabbing case class. That sounds kind of cool if you think about it."
Jongdae grinned. "I guess that would make Baekhyun regret he ditched us for a class without any noteworthy criminal record."
They both laughed half-heartedly.
It was a beginning of some sort and if Chanyeol was honest did he miss talking to Jongdae sometimes. He missed the pranks (on others) and the nonsense, although he wouldn't have admitted it. Which was basically the issue.
He had needed Minseok to tell him that it was ridiculous that he of all people would go around trying to fix other people's relationships when he himself just left everything in a mess, seeing that he cheated on one friend and refused to listen to the other despite his constant attempts to apologize. Chanyeol had wanted to explain that he knew Jongdae and his shallow apologies but well, did he?
"Okay, this is awkward, so I'm only saying it once," Jongdae began and took a sip of the juice he had brought, probably trying to look like one of those adults who needed some soju before they could talk about serious issues.
"Go ahead then," Chanyeol shrugged and had a look down wondering why they had to do this on the roof. Jongdae really had a tendency to dramatize things.
"I'm sorry," Jongdae finally said. "I don't know, I guess I was kind of aggravated because of you and Baekhyun and everything..."
"What's that supposed to mean?" he asked bewildered. "I'm not the one who got himself a girlfriend."
"Oh, really? What about all the times you were sneaking off then? Don't tell me you weren't meeting some girl," Jongdae flared up. "You think I'm some complete idiot?"
Well, shit. Chanyeol had almost forgotten about that.
"And it's not just that," Jongdae continued. "You have obviously more than enough friends since it didn't really seem to matter to you that we weren't talking in weeks." He suddenly looked a little lost. "I mean," he said slowly. "I guess that was just a bit much. I don't know. I know I went overboard, so... sorry, really."
This surprisingly made Chanyeol feel really awful. He had never really thought much about Jongdae if he was honest. He never thought that anything he did might have hurt him since he was too absorbed in his own selfish jealousy of Baekhyun and his eagerness to find new friends.
So he apologized as well and was glad that they both found the whole confession thing too awkward to do over an extented period of time, so they walked back to the classroom, planning some minor pranks on Baekhyun who they decided was their real enemy.
- the last confession -
He was about to take a nap on his desk after the last period when everyone was slowly getting out of the room. After all classes had finished the classroom actually was a quite nice place to be.
"Hey, Park Chanyeol," he heard Jongdae yelling from the door. "You have a visitor."
"Tell them to go away," he mumbled and pulled his blazer over his head.
"I can do that if you want me to, of course," Jongdae said. "But it's Minseok-sunbaenim and he says it's urgent."
Chanyeol jumped up. "I swear, if this is a prank," he said and stared at Jongdae looking at him happily through the door. "I'm going to just rip off your whole grinning face and send it to your mother, saying that you're a lying bastard who didn't deserve better," he grumbled and moved towards him.
"You kind of make a bad impression if you're like that, you know," Jongdae chirped. "And I'm sure my mother would cherish my face and put it up on the wall in a frame. She says she quite likes when I smile."
"I bet she does," Chanyeol sneered while having a look through the door. And there he stood. Kim Minseok.
He was too dumbfounded to say anything at first, so it was Jongdae taking the initiative.
"He didn't bother you with anything while I was away, I hope?" he asked in a motherly voice and attempted to pat Chanyeol's head. "He's such a noisy kid sometimes but I can assure you that he means no harm."
"Stop that," Chanyeol muttered and tried shoving Jongdae off. Minseok smiled which he hoped was a good sign. Before Jongdae had a chance to chat Minseok up, Chanyeol grabbed his arm and dragged him away, leaving a protesting Jongdae behind.
It was in front of the door leading to the stairs that Minseok pulled himself free. "There's, uh, something I need to say," he said slowly and avoided his gaze. "I guess there are things I should explain..."
Chanyeol just nodded, suddenly feeling weirdly uncomfortable and they went up to the rooftop. This week seemed to be all about confessing things and it started to wear him out. Sure, he liked being friends with Jongdae again and yes, it was probably a good thing that he now knew what was going on but well, the truth had made him feel guilty and now was constantly worrying about leaving Jongdae out. Like this very moment when already thought of what to say to Jongdae about ditching him for his hyung again. It was bothersome and he kept thinking that it maybe would have been easier, had they just skipped the whole let's talk about our feelings attempt. Jongdae, too, seemed a little awkward after that.
And that had just been a minor problem. He didn't even want to think of what would happen if he talked to Baekhyun. Right now he didn't see Baekhyun so much but afterwards he probably wouldn't be able to talk to him.
So, while he still thought that talking things out was good sometimes, did he regret that moment of reckoning in which he had lead himself to believe that being truthful was anything he wanted in his life. He didn't. He wanted to continue lying and acting like he was too ignorant to understand obvious things.
Which was what worried him right now.
He didn't know what kind of conclusions Minseok had made but he didn't really want to hear any more truth. He wasn't so stupid to not have his suspicions.
"So, I guess that was that infamous Jongdae?" Minseok asked after a moment of silence in which they both were too occupied with their own thoughts.
"Yeah, well," he nodded with what he hoped a blissfully happy facial expression. "Life is quite boring without the constant threat of running into a prank after all."
Minseok smiled at the floor and fiddled with the hem of his sleeve, making it way too obvious that this whole thing had the potential of becoming even more awkward.
"Listen," Minseok finally said, looking up. "I think I need to apologize. I shouldn't have snapped at you. I know you were just trying to be helpful and..."
"No, it's all right," he interrupted. "I mean, you were right. I think I really shouldn't go around judging others." It turned out to sound a lot harsher than intended, so he tried to at least smile but his whole anxiousness turned it into a grimace.
"I'm sorry about that," Minseok winced. "Just this whole thing..." he trailed off. "You know, Lu Han, he..."
And Chanyeol knew he had to cut him off because this was just what he didn't want to hear the most. He was sure that this Lu Han guy had his reasons for doing whatever he did and that he would probably be able to understand them to a degree if he heard them. But why should he even bother to find them out? Why couldn't he just comfortable dislike him without having to worry that there was a chance of Minseok and Lu Han making up and resuming whatever relationship they had been having? Why not just think of him as that guy Yifan had been trying to kill for being to full of himself instead? So maybe that wasn't the full truth but it wasn't his business to care.
So he was acting stupid and started hopping around, claiming that he was freezing to death if they kept standing around on the roof. He was more than thankful when Minseok got the hint and suggested to get back inside then, he had some studying to do anyway and was about to go to the library.
Chanyeol couldn't really tell what they were to each other but he was afraid that whatever there was could just disappear if they tried to put it into words. It was comfortable the way it was, even if they didn't really know the complete truth about each other, maybe even because they didn't know. He just wanted them to hang out and be friends and it was probably horrible of him but he chose to ignore whatever it was Minseok had wanted to say.