"WHEN THE WORLD AROUND YOU IS BURNING, LOOK AT THE STARS."
Transfer student Minni Lee has a premonition. Not all is right at Newhurst University. Between a hateful blog post and the strange death of campus mean girl, Somin, exists a tangled mystery...
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IN RETROSPECT, THIS WAS A BAD IDEA.
Minni was beginning to see most things that way. In retrospect, the party had been a mistake and her nosiness when it came to Somin's death had been a death sentence.
In retrospect, Minni may have completely gotten Yeosang wrong.
That was what made him so uniquely frustrating. He was the only outlier in The Night. Unreadable. Unpredictable.
He acted out of character so much that it spurred her to do the same, just to up the ante. To stick her neck out for someone she had once been so certain didn't deserve it.
Now, she couldn't be so sure.
The brick wall against her spine was rough enough to scrape at her even through the fabric of the dress. She let it, too afraid to give up her position where she was crouched behind the narrow end of a dumpster.
There was a lot of unnecessary vitriol and aggression to be found in Newhurst. Any scholarship student with a lick of sense knew that, be it from experience or spectating.
Yeosang was not a scholarship student.
He found himself surrounded like one anyway.
Unpredictable, like she said.
She counted four figures—all of them dark smudges just out of reach of the streetlights. Paces ahead, three men formed a circle around the lone outlier—Yeosang.
The violinist had been literally backed into a corner, leaned against a wall. On the surface, he seemed calm. She could not make out his face, but the lazy set of his limbs made him look untouchable. Unreadable.
Minni knew better than that. Even if she couldn't parse it out now, she'd seen his fear, knew it always lurked somewhere within him just as it did in everyone else.
"What do you want?" he spat, voice impressively stable despite the circumstances. The silence grew heavy, broken apart only by the distant sounds of traffic and then, a cold laugh.
Something was swung upward in a split second, clattering against the wall and narrowly missing the side of his skull. The sound bounced off the walls, loud and metallic, ringing in her ears. The tallest of the strangers loomed over Yeosang now, his shadowy form almost swallowed by the others.
"Let's get one thing clear, yeah?" The stranger, decidedly male and very obviously infuriated, hissed. "You don't get to ask questions. Got it?"
Yeosang laughed mockingly, but his voice wavered with each word as if he couldn't get enough air. "A baseball bat? Really?"
