Twisted Life, Thorny Love

22. Life.....

"I lost my job"

There was pin drop silence for a couple of minutes as Jungkook and his mother stared at Mr. Jeon with open mouths. 

"How?" his mother asked. "Remember how I said a few days ago that the company was running into losses? Many employees were fired because of that. Unfortunately, I am one of them" his father said, rubbing his eyes with both of his hands and holding his head in frustration. 

Jungkook thought about their situation. They were already soo burdened with the three day visit of his grandmother that they could hardly make two ends meet. Now his sister was back pregnant and his grandmother was staying at the hospital. 

To top of all of this, his father lost his job. Jungkook was literally standing at the fork of the road as he thought of his next step. He was going to graduate from BTech in two weeks. 

He either had to go right and enroll himself for campus selection and get a job and help his father with the financial condition, or he had to go left and continue pursuing MTech, adding college bills to his already burdened and currently jobless father. 

The answer was pretty obvious for him. The first thing that he did when he stepped into his college the next day was to enroll himself into campus selection. 

With his good marks and reputation, he got a pretty good job with a good salary at Dell. But even though the salary was pretty good, it was nowhere close to being enough to ease their situation. 

His father kept trying for a new job, but considering his age and outdated resume, no one was ready to give him a job. And thus, the entire burden fell onto Jungkook's shoulders.

As the company's salary wasn't enough, he took up a part time job in a cafe nearby so that he could work there in the evenings, and started taking online tutions for high school and BTech students on the weekends. 

His parents' guilt kept piling up, but they couldn't do anything about it. They weren't exactly in a position to tell him to loosen up a bit as none of them could get a job. 

Namjoon, Jin, Yoongi and Jimin had offered to help him a bit. In fact, they even promised to let him pay them back in the future, but Jungkook's pride wouldn't let him take private loans or help from others. Even from his close friends. 

Thus, the four could only watch him from a distance, feeling bad for the way Jungkook and his family was suffering. Jungkook barely met any of them anymore. 

They sometimes went to the cafe where he worked so that they could meet him, but they soon realized that Jungkook was feeling bad when they went to see him work in a cafe and thus stopped doing it. 

Instead, they just waited for the day that came once in a blue moon when one of Jungkook's students couldn't make it to the class and he would be free for two hours. 

In January, after seven months of overworking himself, a tiny fluff ball  joined their family. Even though the fluff ball wasn't actually his, just a look at the ball in the night before sleeping made him forget all about his stress. 

Even though the addition of the fluff ball into the family added to the expenses, he didn't mind it. He was already filling up the empty 'father' role in the ball's life. It gave him a new motivation to work harder. 

They named the ball of fluff 'Jeon Junha'. After Junha's birth, his parents started loosening up a bit and eventually talked to Jennie a few times. 

But they never forgot to make her feel miserable for her mistake. As it was, she was already feeling extremely embarrassed and ashamed about her teenage pregnancy.