BANG. BANG. BANG.
"Ha-neul! Are you up? Breakfast is in ten minutes. Don't make us late."
The sound was like a hammer hitting a gong inside my skull.
I jolted awake, my spine cracking in three different places. I peeled my face off the desk; a sticky sheet of paper was clinging to my cheek. My vision swam. The room was spinning.
I looked down. The paper stuck to my face was the chord progression for "Frequency."
Right. The band. The song.
I looked around. My room looked like a paper factory had exploded inside a tornado. Every flat surface—the floor, the desk, the chair—was covered in scribbles. Lyrics, math equations, bad doodles, and crossed-out names.
The Lightning Strikers? No.The Golden Triangle? Too pretentious.S-Factor? Sued.(my mom actually like Ihor Kondratyuk, so i decided why not ha-ha-ha.)
We had brainstormed until 5:00 AM. At some point, Ha-neul's brain had shut down mid-sentence. I had carried her—surprisingly light, despite the heavy brain inside—over to my bed so she wouldn't wake up with a crick in her neck like me. I'd managed another hour of memorizing the bridge before passing out on the desk around 6:00 AM.
Two nights. Four hours of sleep total. I am going to die.
BANG. BANG.
"Lee Ha-neul?" The voice was deeper. Sterner. Ji-hoon.
"Why isn't she answering her door?" I heard him mutter to himself right outside my room.
My heart stopped. The adrenaline hit me harder than a bucket of ice water.
I whipped my head toward my bed.
Ha-neul was there, curled up in a ball under my duvet, her glasses askew on her face, breathing softly.
If Ji-hoon opened that door. If he saw his little sister in the foreign exchange student's bed...
I wouldn't just be expelled. I would be deported. In pieces.
I scrambled over to the bed, tripping over a pile of calculus textbooks.
"Ha-neul!" I hissed, shaking her shoulder. "Wake up! Red alert!"
"Mmm... five more minutes..." she mumbled, snuggling deeper into my pillow. "Solve for X..."
"The variable X is your brother standing outside the door with a figurative shotgun!" I whispered frantically.
Her eyes snapped open. She sat up, blinking rapidly behind her crooked glasses. She looked at me, then at the unfamiliar room, then at the door.
"Ji-hoon oppa?" she squeaked.
"He's looking for you," I said, grabbing my towel from the chair. "If you walk out now, it looks weird. If he comes in, it looks worse."
"What do we do?" Panic rose in her voice. She scrambled off the bed, smoothing down her wrinkled pajamas. "I can't be seen coming out of here!"
"I'll create a diversion," I said, my sleep-deprived brain firing on all cylinders. "I'm going to the shower. I'll make noise. You wait three seconds, then sneak back to your room while his back is turned."
"Okay. Okay." She was hyperventilating.
I grabbed the hem of my T-shirt.
I pulled the shirt over my head and tossed it on the floor.
Ha-neul let out a strangled noise. Her face went from pale panic to tomato red in 0.5 seconds. She covered her eyes with both hands.
"P-pervert!" she hissed through her fingers. "Why are you taking your clothes off?!"
"I'm going to the shower!" I whispered-shouted, grabbing my toiletry bag. "Who showers in a T-shirt? Get ready to run!"
I didn't wait for an answer. I messed up my hair to look even groggier, summoned my best "annoyed morning zombie" face, and yanked the door open.
Ji-hoon was standing right there, his hand raised to knock on Ha-neul's door again. He turned, startled by my sudden appearance.
I yawned loudly, stretching my arms so my joints popped.
"Morning," I grunted in English, scratching my bare stomach. "Is the bathroom free? I really need a cold one."
Ji-hoon blinked, his eyes scanning my shirtless torso and my disheveled state. He looked slightly uncomfortable.
"Uh. Good morning, San," he said stiffly, adjusting his glasses. "Yes. It is free."
"Cool."
He knocked on her door and turned to leave.
I stepped into the hallway, deliberately blocking his view of my room, and marched toward the bathroom. As I passed him, I heard the faintest swish of movement behind me.
I stepped into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and cranked the handle all the way to blue.
I stood under the freezing spray for ten minutes. The shock of the cold water washed away the fog of sleep deprivation, leaving me awake, shivering, and alive.
We survived.
When I finally wrapped a towel around my waist and walked back to my room, the hallway was empty.
I entered my room.
The bed was made—hastily, the duvet slightly crooked, but made. Ha-neul was gone.
The mess on the floor was still there. But the table...
The table had been cleared of the chaos. In the center of the desk, resting on top of the messy "Frequency" sheet music, was a single, crisp piece of graph paper.
Ha-neul's neat, mathematical handwriting was centered on the page.
It wasn't a formula. It was a name.
H-Wnot
Below it, she had written the Korean pronunciation and the definition she had come up with during the witching hour.
[하우낫] (Ha-u-nat)/[화; 낯] (Hwa-Nat)
And below that, in English, the subtitle that hit me right in the chest:
"How to be fine (When Everything's Not)."
H — How to be fine
W — When everything's
not — not.
I picked up the paper. It was simple. It was ironic. It was exactly what we were—a group of broken people pretending to be okay, trying to find the solution to an unsolvable equation.
H-Wnot
I looked at the paper, and despite the exhaustion, despite the terrifying morning, a genuine smile spread across my face.
I whispered to the empty room. "Let's be Fine."