all my nights taste like gold / purinz

11

THEN.

Chaewon is good at pretending.

Chaewon is good at pretending, but she doesn't want to be doing it her whole life. This secret she's been carrying around, a part of herself that she only really became aware of after Halloween, it's beginning to weigh her down, starting to feel less like a secret and more like an anchor.

And with this anchor comes the awful feeling of guilt, because she's not being honest with anybody. Yunjin, Jiwoo, Heejin, Haseul, Soeun, her parents; they can all proclaim to know Chaewon the best, but they don't. Not really. They know most of her, the bits and pieces that Chaewon lets them see, but not all of her.

It's scary, living with a secret like this. Terrifying, really. Every time someone mentions crushes or boys, fear seeps in, mixing with the guilt and curdling until she feels sick. She hates having to hide such a large piece of herself but she's too scared to show anyone that part, because what is she supposed to do if they don't like it?

That's what scares Chaewon the most. Not that she's different, but that the people she loves might stop loving her because of it.

Once she says it out loud, it's real. It's not just an abstract thought in the back of her mind. Once she says it out loud for someone else to hear, she can't take it back. She can't keep hiding from herself, trying to outrun this shadow that's always lurking right behind her.

But the thing is, as scary as that shadowy secret is, Chaewon is tired of hiding.

A week before the school year starts — Chaewon's second and Yunjin's third; and Chaewon is trying very hard not to think about how in a year's time they'll be separated by seventy miles — Yunjin shows up one afternoon to drag Chaewon out for a walk in the sunshine. It's a surprisingly warm day for late February, so they get the bus downtown, stop off at a convenience store to get a selection of snacks and drinks, and head towards the nearby botanic gardens.

Which, normally, would be fine; getting food or hot chocolate or boba and going for a walk through the botanic gardens is something they've done together a hundred times before. Except the universe has a funny sense of humour, because this time Yunjin will not shut up about boyfriends.

Back when Jiwoo and Heejin first caught the crush bug, Yunjin never seemed particularly interested in joining in, but now that Haseul and Jungwoo finally got over themselves and started dating just before Christmas, Yunjin suddenly seems much more interested in a potential romantic relationship of her own.

Yunjin had made some joke about wanting to spend some one-on-one time with her best friend before school starts, since Chaewon is apparently going to be spending all her time fending off your new harem of admirers with a stick now that Chaewon has dyed her hair blonde and she therefore won't have any time for poor little Jindori anymore, and it just sort of spiralled from there.

She talks about the boys in school, and then about what she thinks the boys in Seoul will be like when she moves there next year, and then how once Chaewon follows her to Seoul the year after she'll have her pick of the male population as well.

Chaewon just stays quiet, shoving a piece of gimbap in her mouth every time Yunjin looks at her for a reply, because she can't say anything. If she opens her mouth and tries to speak, nothing will come out. Yunjin's still rambling away, still talking about double dates with her and her future boyfriend, and Chaewon and her future boyfriend. She doesn't seem to have noticed the way Chaewon has fallen silent, frozen in terror.

Chaewon is so tired of not being able to breathe around this thing in her throat, the thing that she can never quite spit out. She's so tired of hiding part of herself; she has to tell somebody, before it eats her alive from the inside.