Authors: Katie M. Stout
“Sorry, sorry.” Tae Hwa forces a strained smile, bowing his head, then disappears back into our room.
I stare at Sophie and wait for her to explain, my mouth twisting into a disbelieving grin, a momentary respite from my own drama.
She scowls. “Don’t look so smug.”
“I
knew
there was something going on between you two.”
“There was nothing going on then. And there’s nothing going on now.”
“That didn’t look like nothing.”
She scoffs, but I spot the hurt in her eyes. I rest my hand on her shoulder.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” I ask.
Her eyes well with tears, and I pull her into a hug.
“I like him so much,” she says between sniffles, her face pressed into my shoulder. “But he said we should only be friends, that it wasn’t a good idea for him to date his best friend’s sister.”
“Was this before or after you guys sucked face?”
I intended that to be a joke, but it only makes her cry harder. “I—I kind of—” She hiccups. “Kind of attacked him with the kiss.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. It’s impossible for me to envision Sophie planting one on Tae Hwa, but I’ve got to give it to the girl. She took charge.
She pulls away, swiping underneath her eyes with her fingers. Good thing she went with the waterproof mascara.
“Why are boys so dumb?” she asks.
I sigh, unable to give her an answer. “No idea. I’ve been wondering the same thing myself.”
Throwing my arm around her shoulders, I give her one more quick squeeze. We head back to the private room after Sophie has calmed down. But when I open the door, I freeze. Yoon Jae and Jason glower at each other across the knee-high table, both standing and leaning toward the other. His fists clenched at his sides, Jason watches the other boy with disdainful eyes. Yoon Jae barks at him in Korean, pointing at his bandmate with angry jabs.
They both shoot their gazes to the door when I enter. Yoon Jae rearranges his expression to a tight smile, but there’s nothing friendly about the anger brooding in his eyes.
“Excuse me,” he says, nodding at me and Sophie before pushing past us and rushing out.
I stare after him, then look to Jason. He watches Yoon Jae’s exit, his shoulders still tense.
“What just happened?” I ask.
Tae Hwa attempts to blend into the sofa, and I don’t know if it’s because he’s embarrassed that I stumbled upon him sticking his tongue down Sophie’s throat or because of the argument I just interrupted. I glance back at Sophie, but all her attention’s focused on Tae Hwa.
Jason picks up his jacket from the couch and shrugs into it. “I’m leaving,” he announces.
But when he tries to brush past me, I grab his arm and stop him. “Hey, what’s going on?”
He shrugs out of my grip, his gaze lingering on my hand a second too long. “Nothing you need to worry about. You don’t want to be part of my life, remember?”
And with that, he leaves. I glance back and forth between Sophie and Tae Hwa, who studiously avoid each other’s gazes, and I blow out a long sigh. I knew I didn’t want to go out tonight.
Both Yoon Jae and Jason call cabs to pick them up, so Tae Hwa, Sophie, and I take the limo back to school. I watch the city lights blur past, unable to shake my thoughts about Jason and Yoon Jae. There’s always been tension there, but something has changed between them.
And I’m going to find out what.
* * *
The next morning, however, the entertainment news leaks the story and I don’t have to do any digging—Eden is breaking up. After only a few weeks of the band working on their new album, their publicist announced they would no longer be working together and, apparently, the outing to the club was a last-ditch effort to try to fool the press.
Sophie seems just as shocked as I am.
She sinks into her desk chair, eyes glazed. “I just—I can’t believe he would do this. Why would he break up the band?”
“Who?”
“Jason!” She hands me an entertainment gossip magazine, but it’s in Korean, so all I can glean are pictures. “It says that Jason was the one who decided to break up,” she continues. “I just don’t understand why he would do that. Tae Hwa and Yoon Jae are his best friends.”
I almost tell her Jason and Yoon Jae are, in fact,
not
best friends, but I decide to keep that to myself. Her face reddens, her hands ball into fists, and I’m afraid of contradicting anything she says at this point—she might punch me.
“How could he?” she whispers.
I shrug. “Maybe he just decided it was time for them to part ways.”
She shakes her head. “No, that can’t be it. He knows the band is everything to Tae Hwa. Jason can move on from this, still have a career. He’s the front man, so there will always be options for him. But Tae Hwa? He’s just a bassist. Without the band, he has no career.”
I keep silent. She’s right. I’ve seen it with some of the bands my dad produced—they’d break up, but the singer would get a future gig with another group or go solo. Sometimes, bands break up just because the lead singer wants to go solo, but I can’t see Jason giving up his friendship with Tae Hwa for a new career direction, even if he didn’t like working with Yoon Jae. There has to be another explanation.
“We don’t know the whole story,” I say. “Why don’t you ask him?”
She scoffs, throwing a pencil across the room. “He doesn’t deserve the opportunity to explain.”
Slamming her school books closed and shoving her desk drawers shut, she mutters under her breath in rapid-fire Korean. I watch her throw on a jacket and wince when she yanks our dorm-room door closed behind her. Grabbing my room key and phone, I tail her.
As I expected, she heads to Jason and Tae Hwa’s dorm. She pounds her fist against the door until Jason pulls it open. Dark semicircles beneath his eyes and hair sticking up like he either just rolled out of bed or had a rough night, he pokes his head out to see her.
“Get out of my way,” she snaps. “I’m not here to see you.”
He glances at me, and I shrug. With a sigh, he lets us into the messy room. Clothes are strewn all over the floor, furniture is pulled away from the wall, and books are stacked in piles across the room. I peek into the bathroom and spot toothpaste, hair gel, and other toiletries all sitting out on the counter. Tae Hwa stands at his desk, throwing books and pictures into a suitcase.
Sophie helps Tae Hwa, but I hang back, standing beside Jason. He won’t look at either of them, just leans against the wall with his arms folded across his chest and eyes downcast.
“Sophie’s pissed at you,” I tell him.
“Noticed,” he mumbles.
“Why did you do it?”
But he doesn’t answer.
Sophie whirls around to face her brother, throwing angry Korean words at him. I have no idea what she’s saying, but judging by her tone, it can’t be pretty. Jason has the decency to at least look chagrined.
“Grace.” Sophie turns to me. “I’m sorry you had to see this.”
After a few more seconds of glaring at her brother, she takes Tae Hwa’s hand and they exit, leaving me alone with Jason. We stand there in awkward silence a few moments before he begins to toss clothes into Tae Hwa’s bag.
I bend down and help him pick some up, then fold them before placing them into the suitcase. Jason watches me with wary eyes, like he expects me to scream at him the way Sophie did.
“I’m not going to get mad at you, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I say. “If I had to guess, I’d say Sophie already said enough.”
He doesn’t respond.
With all the clothes packed, I move to the stacks of books. “I’ll be honest—I would like to know why you did it, too. But that’s none of my business. This is between the members of the band, not anyone else.”
He’s quiet a long while, then murmurs, “I just couldn’t do it anymore. I hated it. All of it.”
“What? Being in Eden?”
He scrubs his face with both hands. “You don’t understand. I never wanted to be a part of Eden. I wanted to make my kind of music. But then we signed the contract, and the producer made us change everything.” His voice sharpens. “Then they added Yoon Jae.”
“You really dislike him, don’t you?”
He scowls but doesn’t deny it.
“I just don’t understand why you dislike him so much.”
“He wasn’t supposed to be in our band!” he cries, then slumps against the wall with a long exhale. “It’s not fair. Tae Hwa and I worked hard for our debut, but he just waltzed in after one audition. I’d thought we could be friends, but we just—we just can’t. He ruined the band.”
I consider mentioning Jason’s distaste for his music but change my mind with a sigh, standing. “Look, just let Sophie take some time. She’ll get over it. I mean, you’re her brother. She can’t be mad at you forever.”
I make to leave, but Jason stops me with, “Grace?”
“Yeah?”
His face melts into a half smile. “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For understanding. Or trying to, anyway.”
Even though you said you didn’t want to be a part of my life
. It goes unsaid because he doesn’t have to say it. We both know he’s thinking it.
“I’m not letting you off the hook. I just don’t think it’s my business to judge you when I don’t know the circumstances. Maybe you
are
a jerk, I don’t know. But it’s not my place to tell you that. You need to figure it out yourself.”
And even though I want to tell him off, to yell at him about how he snubbed me and how introducing me to some famous guy doesn’t erase him ignoring me all Christmas break, I leave. I shut the door and try to think of the way Momma talks to me, like I purposefully screw up everything I touch. No one deserves a guilt trip, especially when they’re already hurting.
I know that from personal experience.
The gossip surrounding Eden’s breakup doesn’t die down, and by the beginning of March, I’m fed up with hearing about it. At first, I scoured every Korean entertainment blog on the Internet and read all I could about the rumors swirling around the band—with the help of my browser’s translator tool. A lot of sources claim Jason’s the instigator, but others say Yoon Jae wanted to go solo. I don’t know what to believe, and Jason isn’t forthcoming with information, so I’m left wondering.
One thing is for sure, though—Jason and Yoon Jae haven’t gotten along since they met. Unnamed sources from the record label came forward and talked about how the two boys would argue in the studio and refuse to spend time together except at publicity events and concerts. Most of the articles lay the blame on Jason, but one mentions that Yoon Jae didn’t care about being in the band in the first place and he made that clear early on because he wanted to be in a different kind of band, where he could dance instead of play an instrument. I can see how the two would butt heads.
I’d have thought everybody at school would be super interested in the recently deceased band, but our classmates give the boys wide berths. I also suspected Yoon Jae and Tae Hwa would ditch school now that Jason’s no longer keeping them here, but they stay. Sophie says it’s because it’s too late in the year to transfer without huge hassles, but I suspect it has more to do with their label wanting to maintain an image of civility between Jason and the other two.
Sophie still hasn’t forgiven Jason. Every time I try to bring him up in conversation with her, she changes the subject or laughs away my questions. Tae Hwa moved to another dorm, and the only time I see Jason is in class. But, as the weeks pass by, I can see him withdrawing any interest in school. He comes into class just as the bell rings, his clothes and hair disheveled, and he never turns in homework.
When he skips three days of school, in good conscience I have to investigate. But when I ask Sophie about it, she responds, “How would I know what’s going on with him? I’m not talking to him.”
I bite back any criticism, though I wish she realized how petty she’s being. He’s her
brother
.
Before dinner, I text him. But he doesn’t answer, and as I’m picking at my broccoli, all I can think about is him.
On my way to his dorm, I call, but he doesn’t pick up. Muttering choice words under my breath, I climb the stairs to his floor. I beat on the door. If he’s taking a nap or studying, he can deal. I’ll be honest—I’m worried. I just need to make sure he’s still breathing, still eating. And once I surmise that, I can go back to thinking he’s a terrible person.
I wait a few seconds at the door before knocking again. No answer. I call him again. And then three more times. On the fourth try, he finally answers.
“Grace?” he says, but his voice is muffled by a static of insanely loud noises in the background.
“Where are you?” I press my hand over my other ear to hear him better, heading back down the stairs.
“Grace!” He sounds uncharacteristically excited to hear my voice.
“Umm … are you okay?”
“Of course I’m okay!” he cries. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
I’m officially scared now. “Jason, where are you?”
He laughs, and the phone crackles like one of us is losing service. “I’m at the bar.”
“Which one?”
“Umm…” His voice trails off, and he calls to someone in Korean.
“Jason!”
My heart pounds against the inside of my chest, my mind flipping back to another phone call. One with Nathan. Oh, God, please don’t let this end up like it did with Nathan.
That old anxiety threatens to assert itself, and I struggle to get it back down. I can’t freak out right now. I’ve got to find Jason. I’ve got to help him. Like I couldn’t do with my brother.
“Grace?” he says, like he’s forgotten he’s on the phone with me.
I force my voice to stay level. “Jason, which bar are you at?”
“The Lotus? I think. In Incheon.”
“Okay, well, stay there. I’m going to meet you.”
I hang up before he can respond, then do a Google search for a Lotus bar in Incheon and I scroll through my phone contacts in search of the driver Jason’s management company employs. Once I find both, I call the driver, and after a few minutes of mixed English and Korean, he agrees to pick me up.
I meet the driver out front, and as we head down the highway, I mentally scream at him to go faster. I’m probably overreacting, but my mind keeps going back to Nathan. Where I found him that night. He’d called me, and I brushed it off as a drunk dial. I had no idea it would end the way it did.