❛ The Prince Test ❜ ━ jjk

PROLOGUE

Ten Years Ago
━━━━━

Jeon Jungkook

Busan, Korea.

Jungkook was supposed to be crying. He knew he was supposed to be crying. Everyone else was.

But his eyes were dry.

If they stung, it was due to the heavy incense fogging the funeral parlors reception room. Was he sad? He thought he was sad. But he should be sadder. When your best friend died like this, you were supposed to be destroyed. If this were a Busans opera, his tears would be forming rivers and drowning everyone.

Why was his mind clear? Why was he thinking about the homework assignment that was for tomorrow? Why was he still functioning?

He looked at his side. His cousin Jeon-Seu-Mi had sobbed so hard she'd needed to rush to the bathroom to vomit. She was still there now— he suspected — being sick over and over. Her mom, Choi-Di , sat stiffly in the front row, palms flat together and head bowed.

Jungkook's mom patted her back from time to time, but she remained unresponsive. Like him, she she'd no tears, but that was because she did cried them all out days before. The family was worried about her. She'd withered down to her skeleton since they'd gotten the call.

Rows of Buddhist monks in yellow robes blocked his view of the open casket, but that was a good thing. Though the morticians had done their best, the body looked misshapen and wrong. That was not the fourteen-year-old boy who used to be jungkook's friend and favorite cousin. That was not Eun-Sop.

Eun-Sop was gone.

The only parts of him that survived were the memories in jungkook's head. Stick fights band sword fights, wrestling matches that Jungkook never won but refused to lose. Jungkook would rather break both of his own arms than call Eun-Sop his daddy; Eun-Sop said Jungkook was pathologically stubborn.

Jungkook insisted he merely had principles. He still remembered their long walks home when the weight of the sun was heavier that their book-filled backpacks and the conventions that had taken place during those walks.

Even now, he could hear his cousin scoffing at him. The specific circumstances eluded him, but the words remained.

'Nothing gets to you. It's like your heart is made of stone.'

He hadn't understood Eun-Sop then. He was beginning to know.

The drowning of Buddhist chants filled the room, low, off-key syllables spoken in a language no one understood. It flowed over and around him and vibrated in his head, he couldn't stop bouncing his leg even though people had given him stares.

A furtive glance at his watch confirmed that, yes , this had been going on for hours. He wanted the noise to stop. He could almost envision himself crawling into the coffin and shutting the lid to clock the sound. But then he'd be stuck in a tight space with a corpse, and he wasn't sure if that was an improvement over his current predicament.

If Eun-Sop was here— alive— they would have escaped together and find something to do, even if it was just going outside to kick rocks around the parking lot. Run-Sop was good that way. He was always there when you needed him.