we smile at the moon

TWENTY | WITH NOTHING BUT LOOSE ENDS

"I LOVE HOW they still haven't removed Clark's stuff from the school email. Or the register. Or literally anything at all. It's almost like he's still here." Yunji pretended to be teary eyed as her hands flew to her heart. "Though he'll always be here in our heart, really."

I coughed. "I'd suggest you quiet down. We're walking by a few of his friends, you know."

"Oh, fuck them. What are they going to do? Break my arm? I'm not one of the day students or the local weeklies. I'm a full boarder. My parents are going to go to the end of the world to make sure they get punished."

"And another one bites the dust?" I suggested hesitantly.

"And another one bites the dust," Yunji said with mock grimness. "I'm such a vengeful bitch."

"Is this meant to be revenge for something?"

"I'm sure it is. I'm sure they've pissed me off at some point and I just forgot." Yunji flicked her ponytail in the air. "It'll be justified, somehow."

"Technically speaking," I said gently, "you'd have been the one inciting the argument in the first place."

"But they'd be the one throwing the first punch, isn't that right? By that logic, Clark did nothing wrong. Kai fucked with his girl first. And let's be real. We all think Kai kind of deserves it."

"But we don't say it out loud."

"No, we blame it all on Clark, because he's the one who got expelled and otherwise it just puts Kai in an uncomfortable position too. Though I doubt they actually thought that far."

Yunji and I had agreed long ago that the kids here were pure. Not in the sense that they were all angel-like obedient children, because they were the opposite of that, but in the fact that they rarely went into hostility that the competitiveness back in China caused. At my old school, for example, it was so common for girls to talk shit about each other and try to pull each other down in more ways than one. But while people still talked behind people's backs, it was rarely because of true menace.

Yunji said they were obnoxious. I thought they just didn't have the need. They weren't half as competitive as my old school, especially since half the kids didn't give a shit about their grades.

If there was jealousy here, it was about who was dating who. Who was prettier. Who had the nicer clothes. It was so much simpler than my old school, where everyone was watching out for everyone and anyone could stab you in the back. It was a nice change of scenery, being able to make friends for once in my life without my mum giving me her extremely unwanted (but usually helpful) input about whether or not the newest friend I made was after something or genuinely wanting to be friends. And whether she'd betray me or if she'd actually stick through with me.

It was fucking exhausting. But it also meant everyone here felt almost... dumb. Immature. They didn't notice half the things I did. Adelina was one example of that. She had no idea that Yunji and I felt mistreated by Nadia until we said it ourselves.

It was a kind of blessing, in a way, but also extremely annoying for those of us like me and Yunji. Because if we pointed things out, it made us seem bad. It made us seem petty. And so we had to keep all our little opinions to ourselves.

God knew it was annoying. But Yunji and I could just blabber away our annoyances in Mandarin, since almost no one else spoke it anyways. Most of the Hong Kongers were quite bad with it, or so they said.

It didn't matter. We weren't bitching about them anyways.

We made our way back to house, Yunji ranting about what had happened during her lessons today and how someone had been extremely rude to her and fucked her entire group project up, and how she'd managed to save the entire group by doing everything by herself. Apparently, all her group members had been very impressed with her and now considered her their god.