How to Be Human [EDITING]

35 | fixing the fragments

35

❥ ❥ ❥

THE SUMMER OF 2007
Indefinite Sleepover

❥ ❥ ❥

Jisung lies awake, eyes glossed over with a sort of lazy glaze. There's a lump of guilt burrowed in his stomach, threatening to consume him alive. A part of Jisung feels like he's a dead man walking, pacing back and forth across a guillotine, waiting for the blade to drop.

Minho's bedroom is illuminated by the moonlight and starry, glow-in-the-dark stickers peeled onto the ceiling. It's a miracle that some of them have lasted so long to share their light.

The curtains are drawn closed and the door is locked shut. Still, Jisung feels his mother's eyes scoped to his body. She can see him. Jisung knows she can. His mom's icy glare sears holes through Minho's cartoony bedsheets and into Jisung's flesh.

Jisung wonders what she'll do to him—rather, what she'll have John do to him. The thoughts make the hairs on his neck stand up.

A flash of images pop into his mind, and Jisung cannot force them to go away. There's a low buzz of an electric current blasting into his brain waves as his wrists erratically try to burst free from impenetrable cuffs. Jisung can feel John's fists knocking the air out of his lungs, see the way his eyes roll to the back of his head, and taste the metallic flavor of blood in his mouth. He can hear the crunch of his ribs shattering into pieces.

Jisung doesn't dare to breathe.

Jisung doesn't want it to happen again. He'd rather be dead.

As Jisung lies in Minho's bed (as Minho decided to take the floor), listening to the monotonous tick-ticking of the clock, he can't help but feel a sense of despair pulling him under.

Jisung's eyes drift to the window, curtains open to the starlight night sky. He longs to escape, to run far away from his troubles and start anew. But where can he go? What can he do? Where can he go where his mother will never find him?

Jisung's chest combusts after not breathing for an extended period of time. His lungs are set ablaze. Jisung takes a sharp inhale and sits up straight. The springs beneath him creak in response to the sudden movement.

He waits to hear the deafening shrill of his mother's voice booming through the walls, scolding him for failing to fix himself; for being the same homosexual he left as; for intertwining himself with Minho Lee once more. Jisung prepares for John to storm into the room with liquor on his tongue and beat him senseless. Jisung readies himself for the hands that will drag him into a chair, strap him in, and let him suffer another session with Miss Soo.

Jisung braces himself for the electricity to course through his veins, the liquids of his brain to boil and simmer, and the beating of his heart to stop.