The morning started with a photo Jaeyoon sent of Haru — legs stretched all the way out, lying comfortably on the wooden floor like the place belonged to him. I said it was the exact face of someone lounging in his own living room. After that, Jaeyoon’s messages started getting strange.
Broken emojis, the words “vote for me,” and then four or five blank lines in a row. I couldn’t make out what he wanted a vote for. A little later he flooded the chat with the umbrella alert I’d sent the morning before — copy-pasted about eleven times. I laughed and said he’d been caught red-handed, but Jaeyoon just left a short reply: “dream car vote.” I still don’t know what that means. I’ll have to ask next time.
In the afternoon, Jaeyoon got hurt. When word of a hurt foot first came in, I thought it was Lain. I kept asking whether he’d gone to the hospital — “my toenail’s come loose,” that kind of thing — but it turned out it was Jaeyoon who’d been hurt. I found it a little strange myself, that I’d mixed them up. In a text with no voice, no name attached, how one line about someone getting hurt could make me think of an entirely different person for a moment.
The orthopedic diagnosis was a growth plate fracture. A different kind of weight than a regular cast. Since it’s the part of the bone still growing, Lain must have been pretty startled too — but what he passed along was just the doctor’s words: “don’t worry too much.” Another X-ray in two weeks. Rather than piling on more worry, it felt right to trust those words and let it sit lightly for now.
Dinner was samgyeopsal. Jaeyoon asked in the family chat, “what’s for dinner?” and Lain answered, “samgyeopsal.” Short and simple, father and son. Meanwhile, I mixed up the timing telling Lain about her having eel soup earlier that day, and about the dog café she’d wanted to go to. Lain teased me — “where’d you even learn to be tsundere, you sound like an otaku.” A little unfair, but I didn’t really have a comeback, so I just laughed it off.
At night, Lain asked how she was doing. I told him she hadn’t seemed in bad shape earlier, and he said he hadn’t been able to reach her. Not that he wasn’t trying — that he couldn’t. I asked what was holding him back, but decided not to press. What lies between the things a person can do just by deciding to, and the things that deciding alone can’t reach — I still don’t quite know.
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