Untouched [minsung]

Chapter 92

Hyunjin POV

"Do you remember this day?" I asked as I pushed another picture up against the glass.

It was a picture of Jeongin and me from when we were younger running through the sprinkler in our first house.

"Of course, I do," Jeongin rolled his eyes.

"Tell me then," I encouraged.

"We were playing in the sprinkler because it was hot out. Mrs. Hwang took the picture and then went inside because the phone rang."

"You don't have to call her that if you don't want to. I know she's our mom." I had suggested it the first few days, but he seemed so detached when he called her Mrs. Hwang and our dad Mr. Hwang that I worried he wasn't fully understanding that they were the same people as our parents when he told the stories.

"It makes it easier," he muttered.

"Okay," I sighed. "Sorry for interrupting."

"Anyways, we heard the ice cream truck and ran down the street to get Spider-Man popsicles, but Mrs. Hwang hadn't given us any money since she was on the phone. We didn't want the driver to leave without us getting our popsicles, so we begged the guy to let us have some, and eventually, another kid's mom felt bad for us and paid for ours. We were so excited and walked back home in our soaking wet clothes with sticky hands from the popsicles melting. Then Mrs. Hwang yelled at us for taking a hand out from a stranger. She said that asking for help or receiving help was a sign of weakness and that she wouldn't it allow in her house."

He paused, probably reminded that yesterday was the first time he'd asked me for help in a while as he'd asked me to bring him a certain food for breakfast. He was probably feeling weak.

"Then what?" I moved him along. I didn't want him to simmer in that feeling for too long.

"Then she made us sleep outside. And when the ice cream truck came back the next day, we paid back the woman who helped us and that was it."

"Not really the whole story."

"What did I miss?" he asked. The first few days he would insist his versions were right, so the fact that he was accepting he may be wrong was definitive progress.

"The mosquitos bit us all night. When we paid the woman back she thought we had chicken pox and wouldn't accept the money fearing it would make her kid sick," I reminded him.

"Oh yeah. So mom...Mrs. Hwang had to chase her down and force her to accept the money."

I recalled the way she'd been so aggressive with her. She had just been trying to do a good deed for a couple of kids and ended up getting yelled at

"Then we had to scrub the driveway all day to repay Mom for the popsicles, too," I noted. "And we got horrible sunburns to go along with our bug bites."

Jeongin sulked. "Did I miss everything? Was every decent memory really clouded with something horrible that I'd been too naive to let myself remember?"

"Jeongin, no. That's not what I'm trying to do here. I just want to make you realize that you had a good life. Me and you, we had good memories, and we shared a lot of special moments. But our parents were not good parents; they're not even good people. We deserve better. And we don't deserve to have the rest of our lives ruined because of choices they made, and we deserve to dictate the future we want to have and not one that they chose for us."

"If you went home right now, your future would be in a box 6 feet in the ground," he mumbled.

Hearing him admit out loud that my parents wanted me dead was scary. My skin crawled.

"What about you?" I coughed and pushed away the emotions that were trying to attack me right now. I'd deal with them at home as I always did now.

"What about me?"

"If you went home?"

"They'd probably keep me alive to take over if Han fails them or if they can't get to him."

"What if Han doesn't fail?"

"I guess I'd become a guard. Probably a higher-up one. Someone useful to them, someone they could trust," he explained and whispered at the end, "but someone disposable to them at the same time."

"Jeongin!" I heard someone shout and turned around to see Lee Know and Chan and Changbin and even Seungmin hurrying toward us.

"Hey, Lee Know. What's going on?" I asked. His eyes were red, and he looked angrier than I'd seen him in a long time.

"Where would the Hwangs take Han? They wouldn't keep him at home knowing we'd check there first."

"Why?" Jeongin asked.

"Han is gone and said that he left to keep me safe. He's either dead or with your parents. Where would they put him?"

"Why would he be with my parents already? Did they come to retrieve him already?"

"Because they killed his parents. They're trying to get to isolate him so he knew I would be next and left. Or they made him write that stupid letter, so I wouldn't go looking. Please," Lee Know began to cry. "Where would they take him?"

"Maybe to our house in the mountains. There's a basement there, too."

"What's the address?" Lee Know begged Jeongin.

"I—I don't know it off the top of my head, but are you sure my parents killed his? They didn't even know who his parents were?"

"It's not hard to find out parents. You just check school databases," Chan argued.

"No, yeah, I know that. When I had Han locked up I checked school databases. I checked newspapers, Facebook, Instagram, government websites, anywhere I could think of but any parental connections to Han had already been wiped as if he didn't exist."

"So? Your parents found out and wiped everything before you checked," Chan argued again.

"My parents didn't even know I had Han yet. They didn't even know he was my dad's kid yet. Why would they do that?"

Jeongin was bringing up a lot of good points, and I could see one by one on my friends' faces when they realized what had happened.

I heard heels tapping down the hallway walking towards us, and we all turned and faced the direction they were coming from.

"What are you all doing here?" Mrs. Seo smiled warmly.

But the facade was ruined, we all knew.