The Car Crash Club • Monsta X

xx.

"Hyungwon, you were driving."

"No," Hyungwon immediately denied, and suddenly, he was on his feet, pacing in front of the couch. "Father was driving." He looked over at her sharply. "I was in the car. You weren't. I know how it happened, and Father was the one driving."

"You were driving," she corrected him softly.

"That's impossible," Hyungwon said, shaking his head sharply. "I was sitting in the back with Mi-Yeon."

"Hyungwon..." Something about her voice made him look over.

"What?" he asked, his voice coming out sharper than he'd meant it to, but he couldn't force himself to apologize.

"Hyungwon, Mi-Yeon wasn't in the car."

Hyungwon didn't know what to say. His therapist had told him one thing after another, none of which made sense and all of which contradicted what Hyungwon knew to be true. "She was in the car," Hyungwon said, his voice hoarse as he continued. "I saw her, after the crash. They took her to the hospital with me. And then- I heard her die." The gurgling of blood caught in Mi-Yeon's throat. Two machines beeping, then just one.

"I'm sorry Hyungwon, but that isn't true. Only three of you were in the car. You, your mother, and your father. They pulled you out of the driver's seat and rushed you to the hospital like you said, but only you. Your parents were dead on arrival."

Hyungwon forced himself to sit back down, his legs shaking beneath him as he clasped his hands together. He didn't understand how there were two different truths. Unless, of course, one of them was a lie. But if she was speaking the truth... "Then- is Mi-Yeon..." He couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence, to give wings to the hope inside of him. The two urns – only two urns – that he'd seen on the shelf in his house a week ago. Had that been the truth?

But he couldn't finish his question, and she went on. "Hyungwon, your memories from before the crash are vague and unreliable, and from the point of the crash onward, they don't seem to be accurate. The crash didn't happen like you remember it happening. Jooheon doesn't go to your college. In fact, the club you mentioned – I checked with the student life department – doesn't exist. Those other boys don't seem to go to your college, either. They were in your high school, but you wouldn't have seen any of them – including Jooheon – at your college."

Every sentence crashed into Hyungwon like a wave, spilling into his lungs and forcing out the air.

"These episodes you've been having recently – seeing strange things – I think that's your mind trying to bring you back to reality," she said, continuing on even as Hyungwon shook his head. "I think you've been living in a fantasy. Maybe the places are real. Maybe you're going to school or to a restaurant or to the cemetery, but the people around you aren't real. You're afraid of being alone, and you feel guilty for the accident. That's understandable. But to have this severe of a reaction – that can't be all."

"No," Hyungwon said weakly, his eyes falling to the table. "That can't be- no. I talked with them. We went to the restaurant."

"You went to the restaurant," she said.

And Hyungwon remembered the waitress telling him that she'd seen him but that she couldn't remember anyone else with him. Telling him that she'd bring his drink. Had she brought back anyone else's?

Just last week in the club room, sneezing at the dust that had accrued on the piano and the drum set. But Jooheon had been playing the drums, so how had dust formed? Unless no one had played the drums in a long time.

Unless Jooheon wasn't real.

"No," Hyungwon repeated more firmly, and then he remembered that he could prove that everything was real. He pawed at his pocket, scrabbling for the slip of paper that would show her that he wasn't lying, that his truth was the truth. He grabbed the coupon and put it on the table in front of her. "Jooheon wrote that. He gave me his number the first time he stopped by my house. See?"

She leaned forward and slowly picked up the coupon, flipping it over to read the back. She stared at it for a long moment, then reached forward to pick up Hyungwon's sheet of paper listing all the episodes he'd had the past week.

She skimmed the list before setting it back down on the table.

"See?" Hyungwon asked, unsure about why she'd needed to read about the odd occurrences to understand the coupon, but he felt confident in the proof he'd provided. "Jooheon gave that to me. He's real."

She set the coupon down on top of the sheet of paper and pushed both closer to Hyungwon. "Can you look at those for me?"

Hyungwon frowned but did as asked, picking them both up and holding the paper in his left hand and the coupon in his right. "What am I looking for?"

"Just read over both of them one more time."

Hyungwon looked up to try to discern what she wanted to find out, but when she gave away nothing, he looked back at the paper, reading over the dozen entries he'd recorded. Then he looked over at the coupon.

The paper dropped from his left hand as he stared at the scrap of paper, holding it between two hands now, holding onto it so tightly that he could accidentally rip it. "No, no no no," Hyungwon said, feeling his eyes grow hot with tears.

The numbers were on the paper, but the handwriting was his own.

"Can you believe me now, Hyungwon?" she asked, her voice quiet and sympathetic. "Even the scars on your face – according to the attending physician, they predate the crash. We don't know exactly how you got them, but they're a part of your past, too."

"I don't understand," he said, looking down, and a tear spattered across the coupon, but it didn't matter. The numbers had never meant anything. He'd probably made them up. He'd imagined himself getting calls and having fake conversations over the phone. And none of it had been real. It had all been made up, all in his head.

"There are some cases where people have memories so traumatic that they repress them," she said, and her voice was so soft, so gentle. It made him feel worse, even as he stared in horror at the slip of paper. "Hyungwon, I think something like that is what's happening with you, and that you created this fantasy for yourself to avoid facing those memories. But your brain is fighting for you to remember, and it's going to keep fighting you until you do."

"Traumatic memories?" Hyungwon asked. He felt dizzy and unstable, like he might fall over at any minute. "You mean- the crash?"

She pinched her lips together slightly as though she didn't want to have to suggest what she was going to. "This would have happened before the crash, Hyungwon. Why don't we try walking through what you remember, from the very beginning?"

Hyungwon's hands felt limp at his sides.

"Hyungwon, what's the earliest thing you remember?"

--updated 06/23/20 (mm/dd/yy)--

important: the following chapters will be in the form of flashbacks but it should be pretty clear!