crack in the mirror | gayeon 🪞

-6-

When Jooyeon first picked up Romeo and Juliet, it was heavily raining outside, and he felt too sick to see Seungmin that day. The mentioned boy was at Oasis, doing whatever he wished, and Jooyeon, who had nothing better to do, planned on reading something new that day.

Romeo and Juliet seemed to be the most appealing. He had had the copy of the book for too long not to touch it, and strangely, he felt as if the book had chosen him, rather than him choosing the book. It seemed to radiate a bluish colour towards him. It begged to be taken into his hands.

Rain, a burning candle, and his body wrapped in a blanket were everything that towered over the slight note of uncertainty sprouting in the back of his head.

There was a sentence that caught his attention the most; There's an old saying that applies to me: You can't lose a game if you don't play the game. It also seemed to be applying to him.

He had to close the book for a few seconds, think of it, and then go back to turning the pages like crazy.

He thought that if he was in such a game, he would have known. He thought that he knew about everything—controlled everything. He was pretty much terribly wrong.

The game had started a while ago, and he was stepping towards some of the hardest tasks yet he had no idea about it.

It was hard for him to understand that he had been playing a game all along, almost to the end. Only right before the horribly executed final task did he realise what had been going on all along.

But that was not what was on his mind at the present time. At that moment, he wished something could cool his headache down, because it's been tormenting him for the past few hours.

He could swear that he caught the cold, after all, whenever he left the Hut to go to school, to go to Oasis, or to the nearby shop, it snowed, rained, or blew.

Normally, he would have gone to Oasis today as well, but that was not going to happen. He was still mad with Jiseok, and even if Jiseok looked emotionless around him, Jooyeon knew that he also felt uneasy about him.

After that one quarrel they shared on the stairs, they stopped talking, and instead of spending evenings at Jiseok's workplace, they were everywhere else, but there.

Somehow, Jooyeon made his way to Jungsu's room, which was upstairs, on the third level. Despite the rumbling pain, something else was bothering him and he knew that Jungsu would tell him everything, especially since Jooyeon looked so poorly at that moment.

"Is Jiseok even friends with any of you?" He asked as Jungsu made him sit down in his bed, swaddled in a blanket—or rather, in two blankets. "You know, I don't see him hanging out with you, Gunil, or any other."

Jungsu sighed, sitting down on a chair across from where Jooyeon was.

So there was some story behind it, Jooyeon thought, noticing how flushed Jungsu's cheeks became.

"Listen, Jiseok may not be very friendly now, but he used to be close to some of us." He explained scratching the back of his neck. Jooyeon didn't know if it was okay to insist on telling him more, but he was too curious—he couldn't stop.

"Who?"

"Junhan," Jungsu responded. "They were quite close."

Jooyeon could only assume what it meant. Quite could either be very or a little, and Jungsu seemed not to want to reveal that.

In Jooyeon's opinion, it felt strange to be close to Jiseok—if he could even say they were close—Jiseok was specific and he couldn't imagine Hyeongjun being friends with him—or any other boy for that matter. Especially when the first thing he heard about Jiseok, or painters in general, was that they were strange, and if he were Jooyeon, he wouldn't get close to most of them.