we are inevitable | jakehoon

two.

"Soulmate stars are one of the most mysterious extraterrestrial phenomena yet to be observed on Earth!" Mr Jung continues, heading back towards the teachers' desk to pick up a handful of neatly pre-prepared gold nylon string. "With that said, class, pick a partner and sit next to them. I'll be walking around to distribute your materials."

The moment the seat next to Sunghoon is vacated, Jake is there, ready to occupy it. They'd been barred from being seatmates weeks ago, for preservation of most teachers' sanity, but free pair-work was fair game. In any case, Mr Jung was one of the cooler teachers who'd never minded. Science teachers, in general, seemed to all be this way.

Mr Jung hands Sunghoon a clear, spherical bauble. "You two again?" he laughs, stopping to disentangle the bundle of gold string from the others in his hand.

Jake takes the roll of string and grins. "Yup! We won't cause trouble, pinky promise!" He trails off for a moment to wonder exactly how he's supposed to pinky promise two people at the same time, before remembering he has two pinkies for a reason.

"Pinky promise!" Sunghoon agrees, offering his pinky to Mr Jung in a show of sincerity.

Mr Jung only laughs, indicating the materials weighing him down that prevent him from returning the sentiment. "It's alright, I believe you. Start on the project while I distribute the stuff to the rest of your classmates, alright?"

Jake sits up in his seat to better read off the words on the whiteboard. "Loop both loose ends of the gold string around your pinky, one end for each person. Find the middle of the string and tape it to the bauble. Await further instruction when done."

"I'll tie your knot first," Sunghoon says, unravelling the roll of string. "Then you tie mine. We can't tie our own ones properly."

"Right." Jake offers his pinky for Sunghoon to loop the string around, and when Sunghoon's done he returns the favor.

"Do you think we can play tug-of-war with this?"

"We kinda pinky promised we wouldn't cause trouble," Sunghoon objects. "What about we-"

He breaks off as Mr Jung comes back around to check if they're finished. Sunghoon and Jake, with the plastic bauble balanced precariously in the younger's hands, are conducted over to the side of the classroom furthest from the windows, and Mr Jung goes around to carefully hang the individual baubles onto a string high above their heads.

"Everyone, just hold on a second!" Mr Jung runs over to the light switch and flips it off, plunging the room into darkness, and kids immediately begin screaming. "Don't shout! Just wait a moment-"

Within the next second all the baubles light up in white, and the illumination lights up the room with a brilliance they have yet to see before. The glow from the hanging balls of light casts a soft, diffuse radiance over the classroom, and the gold in the nylon strings running from the 'stars' glints as it reflects the flickering light.

"At midnight, on December 31st of 2019," Mr Jung continues, weaving through the pairs of kids to stand under the illumination. "You will witness this phenomenon again, but when that day comes, you'll see a real star, and you'll begin your journey to find your real soulmate."

"Mr Jung!" someone else in class waves their hand in the air and waits to be called on. "Have you found your soulmate?"

"Not yet!" he smiles, holding up his hand as if forgetting no one else can see his string but himself. "In my defence," he begins, amongst the rising chaos in the room, "I'm still young! I've still got time to find my soulmate!"

Jake and Sunghoon don't join in the commotion. They're busy admiring their bauble high up on the ceiling, their star high up in the sky, wondering what it'll look like when the day comes for them to see a real one.

They get to take it home after the project, as promised. The two of them have a brief tussle over who gets to keep it, which Sunghoon eventually wins on grounds of him having a higher ceiling in his room. "Real soulmate stars are way up in the sky," he reasons. "I'll put it high up above my bed, and you can come over to see it all the time, okay?"

As it is, Jake comes over often enough anyway. He insists on escorting the star back to Sunghoon's house after school, to which the younger boy has no objection. They make the five-minute walk together when school ends, and Sunghoon's mom is no more surprised to see two children at the door than she would have been to see just one. "Come in, Jaeyun-ah. Do you need lunch? Does your mom know you're here?"

Jake's mom doesn't, in fact, know, so she excuses herself to make a call and prepare some finger food for them to eat while the two of them run off to Sunghoon's room.

They extricate their pinky fingers from the gold string as carefully as possible; Jake says they should keep the loop intact so they don't have to re-knot the string every time they look at it. Sunghoon finds it reasonable.

"Neither of us can reach the ceiling," Jake says, looking up. "How are we supposed to hang it up?"

"We gotta wait for my dad to come home," Sunghoon replies. "He's got a big ladder he can put up here."

They spend the afternoon on Sunghoon's video game console playing Mario Kart, until Sunghoon's mom calls them down for dinner.

Sunghoon's dad, as promised, gets a big ladder from the garage and secures their star to the ceiling for them when he returns home from work. They slip their fingers into the loops and watch the star dangle in the darkness one more time before Jake is called home by his parents.

Eight years, in reality, can change surprisingly little about people, but surprisingly much at the same time.