"I just couldn't resist."
"Only sacred things deserve to be messed with."
It all ended with a dead kid near the train tracks.
Six years later, the story repeats itself and two long-forgotten friends might find out that when death tries to play match...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Taehyung's POV
Cold seeps in at night, slithering in until I wake up with my teeth chattering. I keep hearing noises coming from inside of the walls and the air is damp and humid, smelling just like the abandoned brick factory.
I like it though, being here alone. I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner.
Shut up.
Alright, maybe I should stop lying to myself. I always knew I had this option; I just didn't want to resort to being such a disgusting cliché. Like I'm not already the definition of the miserable orphan overused trope. It's almost like I was hand-picked from a Lemony Snicket novel.
Poor little Taehyung. Taehyung with the fucked-up parents and too many sisters. Taehyung the gigolo. Taehyung who got his friend shot. Taehyung and his best friend who ran away from him to another continent. And the newest add-on: Taehyung who gets to squat in his school like a rat so he doesn't have to die of hypothermia by sleeping in the quarry under the snow with the other feral cats in the neighborhood.
If only the others at school knew. They think I'm so cool with my cigarettes and my don't-give-a-damn attitude. Well, it finally happened, I am the true king of the fucking school now, or at least of the rotten closet I chose to sleep-in.
But the truth is, I love it. Maybe I was destined to be a banished refugee, as I find myself being in a relatively giddy mood these days. I get to steal food from the cafeteria every night, smoke in the locker room with no one to give me detention and have scorching hot showers in the women's locker rooms, where it doesn't smell like pee and the lockers are full of granola bars instead of sweaty overworn socks.
The pool is my favourite spot. I swim every night around 2am, sometimes waiting later just to be sure the Brothers are asleep.
The ritual is always the same: get fully naked, choose a playlist, turn on the audio system used by the synchronized swim team so I can hear my favorite beats under the water, blast it to the max volume. These days I'm into Nirvana or anything grunge enough to fit my death fantasies.
I think about it a lot, dying. The idea that I could just disappear and cease to exist if I really wanted to holds a certain fascination.
Last year, they made us read this book about suicide in English class. What was a botched effort by the school to seem 'woke' about teenage mental issues was of course just an attempt at protecting themselves against repercussions in case one of us decided to off themselves just like a kid from the next town's public school did two years ago by jumping off the rooftop.
At least they've made us read a book to make us understand killing ourselves is so, SO very bad.
Yeah, because making a bunch of kids read a story detailing in great specifics how a fifteen years-old drowned herself in her school's pool is such a good idea.
