When Shadows Fall | BTS Kim Namjoon

Chapter 37: Time to Think

After nearly a week of waiting, during which I'd spent my time in history class staring at the power point half hearing the lecture and half mentally rewriting my abysmal test, my history professor had finally posted the grades. I'd woken up early on a Saturday, decided to check the class webpage one more time, and gotten quite the jumpstart (jumpscare, even?) to begin my morning.

I stared at the percentage on my screen in absolute horror. I'd gotten used to lower grades since the incident, accepted that maybe my standard had to be a little more realistic. But this?

This was cataclysmic.

It was so low that I couldn't even bring myself to say the number in my head. Another grade like this and I would fail the class. Fail.

I found myself gripping my phone and unlocked it, scrolling through the open tabs in an agitated search for something that would stop that terrible number from being stamped into my brain. I tried a few videos, but my mind wouldn't stop racing.

Finally I sighed and put my phone aside, heading for the shower. If I wasn't going to be able to relax and go back to sleep, I might as well get busy.

I'd like to say the hot water helped. At the end of it, though, I was still anxious – just clean and fresh-smelling now.

I tried to sit down to read the textbook for one of my classes, but I found myself either staring blankly at the page or reading the same paragraph five times without understanding anything.

So, apparently study was not the first thing I should try to do after an early-morning shock.

Instead I rolled up my sleeves and dug into deep-cleaning the apartment. Digging an old tie-dyed T-shirt out of my drawer (remnants of a terrible impromptu project with Areum in our last year of high school), I attacked the various surfaces of the apartment to eradicate the dust. Then of course I had to sweep to get rid of the dust that had fallen on the floor, and then I sat on the couch with an off, dissatisfied feeling in my stomach as I looked around at the apartment.

The textbooks prodded at my mind, but I was in no way ready to try studying again quite yet. I reached out to the hardcover book I'd left next to the couch instead. A few paragraphs later I slapped the open pages to my face, sighing into them and breathing back in the sharp smell of new paper. This was not working.

Bringing the book down and snapping it shut, I looked at it for a moment, then quirked a smile. As silly as it was, I lifted it and put it on my head, balancing it after a few tries. Then I kept my chin up, head still, as I rose from the couch and walked toward the kitchen, smiling.

I'd done this a lot as a kid, balancing hardcover books on my head (and sometimes even paperbacks, but those were more difficult). The focus it took to keep the book stabilized was just what I needed to keep me out of my head, so I continued to try balancing the book as I found something to eat.

Munching on my sandwich and catching the book whenever it started to slip off my head, I wondered what to do next. I couldn't just walk around with a book on my head the whole day; it would start to get annoying, and Jisuk would be waking up and coming out here at any moment with a surefire "what on earth are you doing, you're embarrassing me and there's not even anyone here" attitude.

My eyes landed on my car keys, hanging from a magnetic hook on the fridge and gathering dust. I needed to take care of that hunk of metal at some point – why not today? I'd been apprehensive about it, but what was the dread of car talk and expensive repairs when compared to the dread of failing my history class?