stardust | park seonghwa ✓

11

"SO, do you want to talk about it yet?"

Yeosang lowers his head. His fingers trace the fabric of my sheets with my blanket thrown over his shoulders as he hugs a pillow to his chest. The soup he had was long gone now, his bowl empty in the kitchen sink and we both sit on top of my bed, facing each other.

I could tell the gears in his mind turning, probably debating whether he should tell me or not. But he sighs before collapsing back on the bed, letting himself buried under my blanket.

"Donghoon hyung came home last night," Yeosang begins, voice a little muffled but I hear him clearly. "With another girl."

My eyes widen. Another one?

Kang Donghoon, Yeosang's infamous brother was... one of a kind. I've known him for almost as long as I've known my best friend. The two of them are only two years apart, hence why they were pretty close when we were smaller. Wherever Donghoon went was also where Yeosang went, whatever Donghoon did was also what Yeosang did — it was as if they were conjoined twins. The three of us were inseparable, along with my other best friend at the time, Lee Saera. So it was the four of us against the whole world.

However, in year eleven, Yeosang and I got into a pretty big fight with Saera for getting involved with the wrong people. She never talked to us ever again afterwards, and I'm guessing Donghoon was on her side. So our friendship split into two, with Donghoon slowly following Saera close behind. Yeosang and I watched them from the sidelines, each day getting more and more ruined by who knows what destructive things they did. One time when I was over at Yeo's house, Donghoon came home drunk and started to violently throw things around and another time, Donghoon almost broke my arm for stopping him meeting this 'acquaintance' of his.

I guess it reached its worst when Saera got into an accident and that broke Donghoon into pieces. She was in a comatose for a very long time, Donghoon started to lose hope. Yeosang and I were also extremely worried, she was our best friend too. Every day we would watch Donghoon watch her and sometimes holding his breath whenever her breathing slowed down. In early year twelve, Saera passed in her sleep and that was Donghoon's breaking point.

He yelled at me, he yelled at Yeosang, blaming us for not staying by her side after the fight. "This is all. Your. Fault! If you'd been on her side all this time, she would still be here!" I can still hear his shouts sometimes. He yelled at his parents, got involved in a lot of endless arguments and it seemed as if he was angry at himself too.

I've never seen anyone as broken as Donghoon at the time. He was never smiling, he came home drunk a lot and got into a lot of fistfights, he brought girls, a different one every time and his temper, oh my Goodness his temper. Yeosang's parents got very worried — Donghoon was obviously depressed and he had a hard time moving on. He was a very different person to the one we knew as kids.

Donghoon managed to graduate (trust me, I also don't actually know how), barely even making it out of high school and he started to work instead of heading to university like all of his friends are. He moved out of the house but got evicted from his new motel-like apartment room because he missed rent payment for almost 6 months. But he went out often, even until now, rarely going home. He'd even go as far as only coming back once every 3 months or so, would cause a huge fight in the house only for him to leave the very next day.

"Where did he stay this time?" I ask Yeo quietly.

"Somewhere hours from here, I guess," my best friend answers, "the girl wasn't even bad. Oh my God, Shin, she was so nice."

"But I think mum accidentally set him off and suddenly he was screaming, dad was screaming and Jinah was crying," he continues, almost sobbing now. "I was so scared..."