Dear Sputnik

IV

- TAEHYUN -

Taehyun stared at the clock on the wall in the classroom. Only ten more minutes until he was out of class for a short lunch break. The more he focused on the clock, the slower it moved. He even began to count up to sixty seconds in his head to try and distract himself.

Lunch time couldn't come soon enough. It had already been a very long day for Taehyun. To begin with, his first day of school in his freshman year had started awfully when the school bus driver had gotten mixed up on his routes, making them late to school by almost twenty minutes. Secondly, he found out that the school administration had a misunderstanding with his locker and his locker number was nowhere near the underclassmen's core classes. Instead, his locker was actually in the upperclassmen block of core classes almost three hallways away. Taehyun knew that he would have to bust ass every morning in order to make it to class on time. Not only that, but in between classes as well, as he wouldn't be able to have time to make it all the way over to his locker in between classes.

Luck did strike though when he found out that he had the majority of his classes with Huening Kai. That was at least one thing that he could be thankful for. Taehyun was glad that Huening Kai was going to be in the majority of his classes. The two of them meshed well together and seemed to have a great friendship already. For whatever reason, Taehyun seemed to miss out on this instant connection from when they were friends back in eighth grade. It wasn't too surprising, though. Back then, he wasn't in the right headspace and was trying to do everything possible to get out of the public school. Taehyun had changed a lot over the summer, more than he ever would've expected. Part of it was what he wanted, but other aspects he wished were left alone.

All morning, all he heard from teachers were about each student's summer vacation and what they did. It put him in an uncomfortable spot, because Taehyun had lied to Huening Kai about going on a whole bunch of trips overseas. Also, Taehyun hated thinking about his summer vacation. It had to be one of the worst experiences of his life so far. With everything involving his family's drama and aspects of his personal life and self-actualization, it had to be one of his most painful periods of times in his life. He never considered self-harm until over the summer. Everything that he knew was ripped away in an instant, and there was nothing that he could do about it.

Despite losing a lot of money, Taehyun's father had still been able to force him to go to a group therapy in an effort to change himself. It pained him to think about the therapy and how he had spent the rest of the summer trying to forget everything that had ever happened there. It worked some of the times, but when he was alone in his room during the night, he couldn't help but think about it. Insomnia was a friendly neighbor to him nowadays. His restlessness seemed to become more and more prominent. It was almost like it didn't seem like a regular night if he didn't have trouble trying to fall asleep.

"Don't think about it," Taehyun accidentally murmured to himself out loud.

Huening Kai glanced over at him from his desk, shooting him a puzzled look. Taehyun chuckled a bit and shook his head, holding up the syllabus their math teacher had handed out.

"Just saw something interesting on here is all," Taehyun told him, trying to cover up for his outburst.

Their syllabus was a load of shit, like usual. He heard the same guidelines all morning, and he was tired of it. Wouldn't there be a point in time where teachers expect you to follow the rules without having to brief you on them at the beginning of every school year? It wasn't like the rules changed that much.