All My Friends are Dead [Weak Hero]

Dawn

She is like the sun—warm in her kindness and blazing in her fierceness. Young and full of dreams, unlike them. She reaches out a hand to him, but he bats it away, because adults aren't supposed to care about him. Her name is Hannah Kim. She is named after her grandmother and their middle school is her first teaching experience outside of tutoring.

Nancy Oh hates her at first. So does Wolf Keum. Sam Lee's a bit nicer than they are, but he doesn't think much of her either.

Still, she stays.

She doesn't ask for much.

Just an opportunity to teach.

To teach them about the world, and to teach them how to dream, because they are young and that's what they should be doing.

"Do you like reading?" Ms. Kim asks him one day, when she finds him hunched over a book he stole from another kid. She's used to his behavior, thinks he can learn to grow out of it, and he looks up at her, warily.

"No," he says. "This book sucks." It does. It's a dumb story about some kid saving the world from alien invaders and he's only reading it so he can make fun of it later.

"Let me find you some better ones, then," she offers.

Ms. Kim stops by his classroom each day even though she isn't his homeroom teacher. With her, she always brings a haul of books from her house or the local library. There's so much to read and so much to absorb that he has to begrudgingly invite Nancy and Sam over at lunch so they can help him finish it all before Ms. Kim brings the next batch along.

After a few weeks, Nancy huffs and puts her book down. "Why are we doing this? She never said you had to finish all of it. You don't need to humor her, Wolf."

"Shut up," he snaps. "This is the good part."

"Whatever. Me and Sam are gonna go to the roof to smoke. You should come join us."

He ignores them.

When Ms. Kim finds him again, the sun is setting and he's asleep on the table in an empty classroom, drooling on an open book. She laughs to herself, quietly, and drapes her shawl over him so that he won't be cold.

xXx

The thunder splitting the skies and a persistent ringing wakes him up. Wolf opens his eyes to the ceiling and a crick in his neck. His body is sore all over, but it feels good. Reminds him that he's alive despite everything. His arm is hanging off the side of his bed before he lifts it to fumble around on his nightstand for the phone. "Who is it?" he mumbles into the speaker, blearily.

"Jake? Is that you?"

Jake? Jake Ji? No, it isn't. Wolf grumbles, one hand reaching under his nightshirt to scratch an itch on his chest, "Mm'no. Who the fuck are you?"

"Why do you have his phone?" the stranger interrogates, and Wolf feels his temper rising.

"Wolf?" Beside him, Jake stirs, eyelids fluttering as he is roused from slumber. The blanket is twisted haphazardly around his bruised, bandaged body. Immediately after they finished treating themselves, they collapsed into Wolf's bed without a care. "Who is it?"

"That's what I want to know."

"Is that Jake?" says the stranger on the phone. "I heard him—that was Jake, wasn't it? Can you put him on please? Tell him that it's his brother—Kenny."

Wolf tosses the phone on the blanket. "It's Kenny."

Jake yawns, sitting up. He's wearing one of Wolf's bigger shirts—one of the few that fit his broader stature. His hair sticks up like straw on one side of his head. He feels around for the bed for the phone, his eyes still adjusting to the dark. "Kenny?" He clears his throat when his voice comes out raspier than normal. "Kenny."