Hung Up On You | KNJ

Freshman Year

Even now as you settled back into the comfort of the silk and cotton surroundings, you avoided the memories of that last year of high school. Of those frantic months of trying everything you could think of to avoid leaving.

You had gotten the approval to delay leaving until after your 18th birthday, but since your birthday was so late in the summer, it barely mattered anyway.

Perhaps the memories of the goodbyes would be something that always stayed buried, especially if all they did was break your heart, even now, nearly a decade later.

Instead, you thought back on those equally horrific first few weeks of being on campus in California. You had been so lost. You smiled to remember Jungkook's constant calls, both before and after his classes. Of Taehyung who could never figure out the timezones, and how Jimin had chided him every time he found Tae calling you in the middle of your night, thinking it was lunchtime instead.

Of how Jin discovered that he could just send you memes instead of conversation and how it became a battle to keep up with him. But never the good without the bad in your life, and you briefly thought of the calls with your Eomma and Appa, reassuring them and Eunji that everything was fine. That you were fine. School was fine. Your dorm was fine.

It was all fine.

Until Yoongi had called that first time, and you'd sobbed for ages, unable to stop. He had had to take the phone to Namjoon's and get him to speak to you before you could begin to calm down. You had been so upset that you had been unable to do it yourself. It had never happened again, but it had shaken the three of you. The worry of your friends doubled, and your intense desire to not be a burden to them went haywire. Insisting that you needed to be able to stand on your own without them.

The ache of missing Namjoon was so strong that even now, you didn't want to remotely touch on it.

Being without all of them made you miserable. And being miserable made you a horrid bitch. It's very difficult to make new friends, when you're also a horrid bitch.

Your freshman year dormmate was thankfully the kind of girl who was local, and was constantly out with her boyfriend, so you at least didn't have the additional trauma of a bad roommate. But it took you several weeks to stop crying every time you thought of your brothers and how they were getting along at university without you.

By October of that first year, you were in a state of enforced Zen. This was fine, you were fine, that was fine, everything was fine. Of course, it wasn't at all, but you had to keep up appearances for your viewing audience.

For you'd discovered the first week of classes that your parents had someone at the university who was "checking" on you. The attorney had notified you that this would be happening, but you'd mostly ignored it in the heartache of packing and leaving Korea.

When you'd arrived at your dorm after the international flight, you discovered there was someone who was going to be assisting you. The attorney had sent someone to the airport to meet you, and you were treated as a minor celebrity for a few moments. Thankfully, not all that uncommon in California, so not too much notice. You moved into the dorms and began to get little notes sent to you about how you looked and how you dressed and what your parents thought.

This part of remembering always made the anger rise up to crush any lingering sorrow, and you laughed again at their audacity.

You had found a little café, away from campus that apparently your "watcher" didn't know how to get to, for none of their reports ever included you going here. In spite of your lingering frustration and on-going depression from being away from your family, you had kind of liked California. You hadn't explored too much yet, but the campus was set near enough to San Francisco that you hoped to be able to see some of the city soon.