it's okay

You laugh. “That little shit. His head doesn’t need any more inflating, that’s what i’ll comment—“ 

“She says your head doesn’t need any more inflating,” Wenjun dutifully reports across, but you can hear how his footsteps speed up, taking him away from the commotion. The next shout (Zhengting?) is noticeably quieter.

“So, babe,” he says casually, once the din has died down and it’s just his voice, reverberating into your ear. You still shiver slightly every time that word comes out of his mouth. It’s just so… un-Wenjun. And you can hear how it doesn’t fit, the way he subconsciously deepens his voice when he says it, getting into character, the way he’s taught to do for performances at Yuehua. 

He’s not aware of it, you think, at how much Yuehua is training him and changing him, but you can see it quite clearly in the nine months or so that you’ve been away. Your tall, gentle boy, with his “please and thank-yous”, you think wistfully, where did he go? He sends you selfies with his face strategically angled, baseball cap on backwards, and you stare into the too-serious eyes, that warm brown, your finger tapping thoughtfully against the phone screen. 

“Yeah, what’s up?” You glance around the university cafe, only half-occupied on a late Sunday afternoon. You make accidental eye contact with the barista, a lanky blond, and you smile at him briefly before turning away.

“When are you coming back?” Wenjun asks.

“You mean, when do I come back after this semester? Or when do I graduate?”

He huffs. “This semester.”

“I finish semester at the end of May,” you tell him slowly, “but I won’t be back until January. I got an internship overseas for the summer—“

“When in January?” he interrupts.

“Like…the 20th? Only for two weeks though, school starts again in February.” Your stomach twists in guilt. It’s been almost a year and you haven’t visited home once since you left.

“Oh. Oh, I have a, a competition that week, I’m going to Beijing,” Wenjun says, and your heart sinks a little. 

“Oh,” you echo. “What competition is it?”

He ignores you. “—look, I’ll talk to Mrs Du, maybe I can come down between filming for a weekend—“

“Filming? They’re filming the competition?” You’re alarmed. This is a much bigger deal than you thought. His career must be almost taking off, how had you not realised?

“Yeah, it’s some kind of reality television show, but they’re just broadcasting it online, look, it’s okay, i’ll figure something out—“

“Wenjun,” you say gently. “Wenjun, it’s fine. I’ll see you in the next holiday, okay? You don’t need to - make sacrifices for me.”

He goes quiet. You don’t say it, and neither does he. Because that would make it two years, then, and it would be another two until you graduated from your overseas university. You don’t say how right now, your biggest dreams and your most detailed plans for post-graduation are those that would lead you more permanently out of the country, into less polluted cities of brighter stars and more dazzling sights, more profitable sectors with pay checks that you can comfortably send home.

“Look, we can Skype,” you offer. “Like we used to.”

“Sure,” he says. He coughs. Silence lies heavy. You open your mouth, but how to say it? Was this the price or the cost of chasing stardom? Is there ever anything that is constant in the universe, or is it all in constant motion?

If you meet anyone, it’s fine, you say, in your imagination. You should chase your dreams without looking back.

...

In fact, he couldn’t really remember a time when he didn’t see you--when you first started existing in his peripheral view, when you became a constant in his orbit. You were always there, throughout the years. There were no flames of an atmospheric entry, just gentle gravitation.

You even appeared at the agency building one day, trailing Mrs Du. 

Wenjun had vocal training, and was actually in the middle of being scolded by Ms. Lee. 

“Again,” she gestured at the music imperiously. She played the starting note on the piano. 

He squinted at the music, concentrating, and when he had just begun singing the exercise, he caught sight of you, peering into the small window in the door. He almost stopped in surprise, voice wavering, but at Ms. Lee’s frown, Zhengting stabbed his thigh with a pencil, and he continued.

When Ms. Lee finally gave them a break, Wenjun turned to Zhengting. “Was that Y/N I saw just now?” he murmured. “At the door?”

Zhengting’s eyes widened. “Really? Are you sure? She didn’t say anything to me about becoming a trainee!”

“Yeah, I thought she was going to university overseas,” added Quanzhe, leaning forwards from the back row. “Business school, or something.”

Wenjun frowned. What a waste of raw talent, he thought.

Zhengting elbowed him again. “Hey, you have orchestra with her tomorrow morning, right? Why don’t you ask?”

“Wait, what? I’ve never spoken to her before, that’s going to be so awkward!”

“What do you mean, you’ve never spoken to her? Don’t you have like, half your classes together? Doesn’t she also play flute in orchestra?”

“Yes, but—“ Wenjun tried to justify himself. His cheeks began to heat. “I just—it’s hard, she’s very popular—“

“Ah, I know what it is,” Zeren said, knowingly, stroking his chin. “She smiles and you forget your words, right? You make eye contact in rehearsal, and then you lose track of the music?”

“What, NO—“ 

Zhengting laughed and didn’t even try to get out of the way as Wenjun leant over to smack Zeren. Wenjun knew they were just teasing, but at the same time--

“She’s really nice,” piped in Quanzhe. “You don’t have to worry, she would reject you in a really kind way.”

Wenjun spluttered.

Finally, months later, after the two of you have had enough light, friendly exchanges during orchestra practice (also known as Wenjun saves your ass from getting scolded when you fall asleep), he blurted it out. “Why didn’t you sign with Yuehua?”

You explained. He knew he himself had big, impossible dreams, and sure, it was tough working for them, but he’d never seen someone sacrifice their own dreams for others, and do it all with a smile. He knew you were meant for the stage, truly meant for it in the way that so few people are ever meant for anything, and yet you would give that up in order to live an ordinary life and support your ordinary family. Chasing dreams is a self-centred endeavour. That evening, Wenjun went to Yuehua for dance practice and looked at himself in the mirror, and felt profoundly uncomfortable. 

After he’d gotten over the initial awkwardness, it was only natural that you’d partner together in class assignments, since you shared so many classes. Between his training at Yuehua every evening after school and your numerous sports practices and play rehearsals, you both found that the only time you could work on assignments and revise together was late at night. The first thing Wenjun did when he got home after training would be to text you to see if you were done with rehearsal. Both of you, exhausted in different ways, would chat about your day and support each other. 

He admired how hard you worked, and understood that feeling of having a small fire burning inside your soul, driving you forward. He had that too. But there was a difference between tending to your fire and going out in flames. He started Skyping you until late, ostensibly to do assignments together, but in reality to make sure you didn’t stay up too late revising for exams. 

Wenjun would inevitably sleep before you, and before he left to sleep, he would leave you encouraging messages.

“Y/N, jiayou, jiayou!” he would say into his phone, accompanying the voice message with a cute sticker.

“I want to die,” you’d reply immediately, moaning about the essays you had to write.

For some reason, that caused a twinge somewhere. He hesitated, but his finger’s already pressed the record button on the voice message function, so he said quickly, “No, don’t do that, what would I do without you then?”, voice light and nonchalant.

“You’d just go on doing whatever it was you were doing before I interrupted your wonderful life.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Wenjun replied, a little too quickly. It wasn’t a confession, just honesty. “Please get some rest, Y/N.”

The two of you just kind of end up together, in the opposite way of how some things just fall apart. The opposite of natural entropy. It just makes sense, after Wenjun finds himself falling asleep every day with you on Skype, the white-blue light from the laptop more of a comfort than a burden, like falling asleep by starlight.

Wenjun sees you first, but his smile disappears when he approaches you at your locker. “Y/N, when did you sleep last night?”

“3am,” you say, pulling out your music folder. “Can I check what you got for 4(d)?”

He chews on his lip, frowns a little. “You have dark circles,” he says softly. “You look exhausted.”

“Well, no shit,” you snap, irritable. it’s cold and your head aches. “If only classical music theory came naturally to us all.

He sighs and you feel guilty immediately, but before you manage to apologise, he’s already taken the folder from your hands and flipped to the correct page. He settles in by your side, sitting back against the lockers, a warm, reassuring weight. You press closer for the warmth.

“Mm, here,” he says, and you both lean in, your heads together, and it’s all forgotten for now.

II. Adagio.

This was you, before Bi Wenjun:

You were in your final year, and college applications were looming.

You were terribly busy. you were the loud, spirited, popular one, life of every party. Female lead in the school musical, captain of the soccer team, first desk flute in school orchestra, baking cookies for charity.

Things were a bit off because you’re quickly realising that high school was ending and that what you enjoyed doing was perhaps different from where life and your parents were nudging you.

You enjoyed people, you liked volunteering your time, making people smile, performing, you chase that adrenaline high, you were restless, you didn’t like sitting still.

You had that contract in your hand, from that agency you interviewed with secretly after the nice lady came to find you after the last night of your show. Your parents didn’t know.

You visited the agency building once, for your interview, and that’s also when they showed you around all the practice rooms and studios. You’d peeked into a few rooms: a music room, where a tall boy sang, eyes closed, perfectly, through E minor arpeggio, a dance studio, full of boys and girls younger than you, calmly working their way through a synchronised ballet routine.

It looked nothing like the messy, wild, impulsive way you lived your life then. So the contract was still at the bottom of your schoolbag, unsigned. You carried it with you everywhere you went.

You knew your limits. You weren’t born with any particular talent or genius, you knew that. Your successes were from the time you put in, from the enjoyment and the laughter and the fun you had in what you do. (This was clearly reflected in your grades—every year, your teachers wrote, “she has great potential”, meaning, she would do better if she worked harder). You also felt the weight of your parents’ gaze upon you. You, the eldest child of three. You, daughter of a father who’d had a stroke not six months ago. You, who dutifully collected the mail every evening when you trudged home from school, carefully sorting it into thick stacks of various overdue household bills. In contrast, your manila envelope from Yuehua Entertainment seemed pathetically thin.

III. Minuet.

January, senior year. You’d sent off applications to a dozen or so colleges, for liberal arts degrees in the humanities. Your parents were mollified, you guessed, but everything still lay contingent on your final exams.

You weren’t really an exam person.

Studying made you feel soulless, and you didn’t seem to be able to learn intuitively, gracefully, you seemed to require brute force and sheer bloody determination to drill things into your head.

It’s okay though, you knew you weren’t stupid. You weren’t. You just needed to put more time in, maybe a bit more than the average person.

At your 7am soccer practices, the frosted grass and pre-sunrise darkness seemed chillier and darker than they did at the same time last year. You found yourself resting your eyes during orchestra rehearsal, when the conductor was busy drilling the string section.

“Um, Y/N?” A warm hand landed on your knee, fingers tapping lightly. You jolted awake, just in time.

“Y/N!” barked the orchestra conductor. “Your solo, from the downbeat in Section D, with strings, 1 and 2 and 3 and—“

You played, and after the conductor was satisfied, you turned to the second desk flute player. You’d never really talked to him much, him not being very chatty, and you likewise at 8am in the morning. His name was Bi Wenjun, you thought? It was his first year being on second desk, so he must have been an underclassman, although he looked kind of familiar: soft sweep of brown hair, sunshine smiling through his eyes like a shot of caffeine, straight to the heart.

“Dude, thanks so much,” you said, flashing him a smile. “Saved me from another lecture like last week’s.”

He laughed softly, brown eyes sparkling. “I don’t know, I think you escaped pretty well last week. ‘Mr Zhang, I wasn’t asleep, I was just visualising the notes with my eyes closed!’”

His imitation of your voice surprised a laugh out of you. “I don’t sound like that!”

“Hey, I, uh, need to get my laundry!” You open the door again, neatly sidestep where Zeren is standing (whatthefuckishedoingthere), and begin taking long strides down the corridor. 

“If you want to talk, just give me 10 minutes, okay? I’ll be back!” Your voice is falsely bright, and you look and sound normal, as if abandoning your friend post-break-up to get laundry is normal. But you’re halfway out the front door already, escape is so close, and then Zeren says, “I’ll come with you!”

“-oh you really don’t need to—“

“Uh, no, I want to—“

“Uh, okay!” you say, but your steps don’t slow down as you dash down the stairs (two at a time) until you realise that Zeren is running a little to catch up. When you look back, he has a strange expression on his face, like the one he gets when a dance step is still eluding him or an economics problem is particularly hard. You’ve always appreciated that Zeren is perceptive, and attentive, and very quick to put two and two together, but—

“I guess we can talk on the way!” you say, slowing down. You put on your gentlest voice, perfect for soothing ruffled feathers. It’s not hard, because this is Zeren, and it’s the day before Valentine’s Day, and in a million years you can’t fathom how anyone could be heartless enough to do what she did. “So, how are you feeling? You still haven’t told me what happened exactly.”

His face closes off a little, and your heart twinges. He’s always been so easy to read, for you, and you know that’s because you spend all your waking moments together attuned to his every movement, inevitably looking towards him first whenever you enter a room, like a flower that always turns towards the warmth of the sun.

“Okay, we don’t have to talk about that, we can talk about something else,” you say quietly.“No, I, wanted to ask you,” Zeren begins. You reach the laundry room. He opens the door for you. You scan the room for your stuff as if your heart’s not about to drum out of your chest at any moment.

“I wanted to ask you…about what you said.”

“Hmm?” Your clothes, your clothes, where are they? Ah, there they are. Clothes!

“You said… ‘unrequited feelings won’t kill you’.”

“Oh, did I?” Why do you have so many clothes? The wet pile from the machine seems to be never-ending, you pull at one T-shirt and it’s followed by another, and another, and another.

“And I guess…” Zeren is still finding his words as you haul the basket from the washers to the dryers. You pray that you haven’t dropped any underwear in the transfer. “Y/N, I’ve always thought of you as a very loving person…”

“Uh-huh.”

“…because you always look after us so much, you know? You’re always there. You always know the perfect things to say. You’re like a constant in our lives, like, more than a best friend, like a sister, almost—“

If he could have reached into your chest, taken out your heart, and thrown it into the washing machine to be thrown around and wrung dry, it couldn’t have hurt more than what you felt at that moment. 

“I guess, what I’m trying to say is, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, there’s nothing you need to be sorry for--“ 

“No, I think there is,” he circles around, so it’s harder for you to avoid his gaze. He’s stuck his hands in his pockets, his cap is on low over his eyes, but he’s peering at you intensely, eyes brighter than the fluorescent light of the laundry room. “I’m quickly realising that there’s been something I’ve been missing, something I never noticed all along.”

Well. You face him, you try to smile, to convey that it’s no big deal, really. He doesn’t have to apologise for the fact that you were stupid enough to go and catch feelings. “Zeren, really. It’s fine.”

“No, but then I come back tonight, right, and I’m upset, and then you’re upset, and then Zhengting looks at me like I’ve done something wrong--”

“No!” You’re going to murder Zhengting. “No, you haven’t, really please don’t, just don’t.”

You’re not sure what it is you’re asking him to stop doing, all you know is that this hurts. 

“Hey!” Zeren looks alarmed. “Y/N, I’m sorry, please don’t cry, I’m sorry, okay, I didn’t mean it like that.”

And, as you knew he would, because he’s always done it since you were kids and you would cry whenever you found a small animal by the side of the road that had been run over, he wraps his arms around you and puts his chin on your head, making soothing noises and rubbing your back. 

All this does is make you cry harder. Because this is what he’s always done since you were young, and this is what he’s always done for his best friend, for someone who’s like a sister.

“I never meant to make you cry,” he says, his voice softer now that he’s almost speaking into your ear. “I always… you have so much love for everyone, for everything, you know? And then we came to college, and no one was good enough for you, because, well, you’re you, and then I thought—Well then. That’s it. That’s it for me.”

“What do you mean,” you say into his shirt, but maybe it’s too muffled because he ignores you.

“And then I met Guan Guan, and then you told me, and I quote, ‘Oh, she’s lovely! You should go for it!’, and that, Y/N, that broke my heart for months—“ he breaks off into a chuckle.

Wait what.

“And then Guan Guan never thought you were lovely, so I didn’t hang out with you that much, and then later Zhengting, I thought, you and Zhengting, that seemed like it would make a lot more sense than the alternative—“

“What alternative.” You try to disentangle yourself from Zeren to get a better look at his face, but he won’t let go of your shoulders. You stare at each other, nose to nose.

“Wait a second, Ding Zeren.” For some reason, you’re infuriated. “You stop right there. You are two-hours-freshly-dumped by Guan Guan, love of your life, you don’t get to give me this crap right now.”

He smiles. How dare he have the gall to smile when he’s telling you that actually, all along, all this time--

“Oh, I know,” he says. “I have issues, I know. I’m going to have to sort that out, before we…”

He smiles wider at the expression on your face, his eyes brighter than you’d ever seen before. 

“Just let me be happy for a bit, okay?” He whispers. “I had no idea. I’m a bit of a mess, I know. But you’ll fix it.”

Because you’re determined to bury it, whatever it is. Never mind that Zeren is single (single!!) now. You’re the best friend, the group mom, the one always on the sidelines, to mend other people’s broken hearts with the tissues and hugs. Best friend duties call.

“Love is real but it’s transient. Love comes and goes. People change, and love changes, and sometimes the person you loved doesn’t love you anymore, and sometimes the person you thought you loved doesn’t exist anymore, but what matters is that it happened, y’know?”

You do your best, but it sounds like empty cliches and platitudes even to your own ears. You try again: “You might still love her for a while, and she might not love you back. That’s okay. Unrequited feelings won’t kill you.”

You don’t know why but your chest is tight and your voice has started shaking a little. you remove your hand from his tight grip, you stand up. his eyes follow your movement. He hasn’t said anything, but there’s a new considering look in his eyes. ok great, job done--

“Believe me when i say though, Zeren, it’s her loss.” 

And then you flee, because that’s all you can manage.

The tears come later, when your room door has been safely shut and you can hear that Chengcheng and Justin have taken over trying to cheer Zeren up with exuberant renditions of Mariah Carey songs. 

You scrub at your eyes furiously, because why are you crying it’s not like anything’s happened or you’ve lost anything

(It’s not like you’ve been half in love with your best friend since forever.)