Chapter Text
A shop sells bicycles and tricycles. In total there are 7 cycles and 19 wheels. Determine how many of each there are, if a bicycle has 2 wheels and a tricycle has 3.
Mark read the words on his quiz without really taking them in. He had a vague notion that the word problem could be solved with linear equations, but he’d skipped a fair amount of math classes over the past couple of weeks, so he really couldn’t be positive. Around him, the sounds of pencils frantically solving problems and papers rustling as students hurried to finish the quiz were starting to irritate him. To his right, Jackson was doodling on a corner of the quiz paper. Mark could see that Jackson had attempted some of the problems, but the majority of the page was blank, much like his own. Next to Jackson, Jin had only written his name at the top before laying his head on his desk and closing his eyes.
Two rows ahead and one to left, Park Jinyoung sat hunched over his paper, biting his lip in concentration. His pencil flew over the quiz, as if he didn’t even need to think before beginning to solve the problems. Mark watched him for a few moments before a sound to his right distracted him. Jin was standing up, though the bell had not yet rung, and was gathering his book bag. With a slight tilt of his head, he indicated for Mark and Jackson to follow him. Jackson stood up immediately, but Mark hesitated. He looked down at his quiz and the unanswered questions in front of him and thought he might be able to attempt at least a couple more. He looked back up at Jackson, who shrugged, and let out a short puff of breath before following suit and standing. He followed his friends to the door.
“Where do you think--?” Their math teacher began.
Jin boldly held up a hand, showing his five fingers, and began counting down, putting down one finger at a time. When his last finger was down, the bell rang.
“Class is over,” he said. He bowed his head in a feigned sign of respect and exited the classroom. Jackson and Mark hurried after him.
In the hallways, people went out of their way to avoid the three boys. Some of the more timid kids scurried around corners or ducked into classrooms, not wanting to be noticed, while others merely turned their backs and avoided eye contact while waiting for them to pass. Jackson, cocky bastard that he was, wore a permanent smirk on his face when they weren’t alone, and Mark knew it was because of the attention they received everywhere they went. Jin, on the other hand, looked nowhere except straight ahead, paying no mind to the students around him. Mark tended to keep his head down
It had been fun in middle school, Mark thought. It was fun to show the other kids that he wasn’t weak anymore. That he was someone they should have thought twice about messing with.
When he was younger, Mark had been kind of a scrawny kid, and quiet, too, so some of the bigger kids had pushed him around a bit. But then he met Jackson, and while the boy wasn’t exactly the strongest, he definitely had a mouth on him. He could out-swear anyone by the time they were eleven years old, and he was a lot tougher than he looked. Mark never could figure out how they became best friends, since they were so different, but he was grateful all the same.
When Jin was added to their class in 7th grade, it was obvious why he was transferred out of his old school—he quickly gained a reputation for being a bully. But he was assigned to be Jackson’s deskmate, and Jackson, given enough time, could befriend a mop if he tried hard enough (which he always did), and so really, it was just a matter of time before he wore Jin down.
Thus, their trio was born: Jin, the automatic ringleader; Jackson, the loud-mouth; and Mark, the one who didn’t quite know how he’d ended up in a gang.
Jin—Seokjin, but he’d always been called Jin—wasn’t your typical steal-your-lunch-money, shove-kids-into-lockers bully. Not since he was about fourteen, anyway. He’d outgrown that behavior by the time he reached high school, but that didn’t mean he’d turned over a new leaf. Rather, his body language gave off an eternal don’t-fuck-with-me vibe, and everyone who was smart respected that. Even teachers had long since given up attempting to discipline him as long as he wasn’t disruptive, so he spent the majority of his time in school either sleeping or skipping class altogether.
This meant that by extension, Mark and Jackson did the same. Jackson didn’t seem to mind much—it wasn’t like he’d been planning to go to university anyway. His uncle owned an auto-repair shop that he would help out at after he left school. That there might be bigger and better things out there hadn’t really occurred to him ever since he’d quit fencing.
Mark, on the other hand... Mark used to get straight A’s. Science was his favorite; he’d even had thoughts of studying engineering in university. But his grades had been in a steady decline over the last couple of years. At this rate, he’d be lucky to get into a university at all, much less a top-tier school where the applicants were likely to be people like Park Jinyoung, who’d never missed a day of school in their lives and who had never made anything less than an A on any assignment they’d ever been given.
Being friends with Jin and Jackson had put Mark’s life on a trajectory it might otherwise have never taken. Without Jackson, he would have been the kid in class who never spoke unless he had to, who shuffled along behind the popular kids hoping someone would make the first move and befriend him. But without Jin, Mark would have been, well….boring. He would have been the type who never made waves or fussed about anything, who never picked fights or who had fights picked with him. Jin, however, was the opposite. He was a bite-first alpha male who didn’t stand for anyone crossing him or his friends, which garnered for Mark a certain amount of respect. People didn’t fuck with Jin, and by extension, they didn’t fuck with Jackson and Mark.
Being friends with Jackson had made Mark visible. Being friends with Jin had made him feared.
“Yah, yah, yah!” Jinyoung scolded Mark. “You need to rewrite this conclusion! You have to include that the photons interfere with each other and act like waves or else we just wasted a week working on this! The whole point is show how light is both particles AND waves. And you need to tie it back to the competing theories of Newton and Huygens and talk about how even their ideas were derived from Aristotle.”
“If you don’t like it, you do it then,” Mark grumbled, pulling the paper towards him and beginning to cross things out and rewrite.
“I did the introduction and I described the procedure,” Jinyoung reminded him.
“Yeah, and I did the research on Einstein and the photoelectric effect.”
(In another time and place, they might have been friends.)
Class rankings were posted at the end of the quarter. Mark could practically smell the tension in the air as everyone waited for the bell to ring so they could rush into the hallway and see where they stood. Some, like Yerin and Jinah, were anxious to see if they had maybe, finally, ousted Jinyoung from the top spot. Others, like Jimin and Taehyung, were merely hoping they still fell somewhere in the top half. Mark himself had no desire to see his own ranking. He was sure he’d be towards the bottom somewhere, right along with Jackson and Jin.
Sure enough, as soon as the bell rang, there was a mad dash out to the lobby. Jin, his face impassive, strolled by everyone without bothering to look for his name. Mark decided to wait for the crowd to disperse a little bit, and Jackson, being uninterested in the class rankings, followed Jin out the door. Mark would know where to find them later, if he wanted.
After stopping by his locker and a vending machine, Mark finally approached the rankings list. Number one, Park Jinyoung, as expected. Baek Yerin and Choi Youngjae followed. Jinah must be in hysterics, Mark thought, spotting her name at number five. His scanned down, skipping to the bottom half where he knew he’d find his name. Number one hundred, dead last, was Kim Seokjin. Ninety-nine: Wang Jackson. Ninety-eight, however, did not say Tuan Mark. Nor did ninety-seven.
He took out his phone and texted Jackson.
Congrats. 3 straight semesters you’ve stayed consistent at 99.
The reply came moments later: stfu. Jin’s 100?
Yeah , Mark typed back.
And wht did u get?
Mark read the text but didn’t reply right away. He didn’t know why he was hiding it—Jackson would either nag until he told or just see it when he walked into school the next day. As he stood there, he felt rather than heard someone’s presence behind him.
Jinyoung glanced at the list without looking at Mark.
“Fifty-four?” He asked, his quiet voice startling Mark. “That’s about twenty spots higher than last semester, isn’t it?”
“Twenty-two,” Mark corrected him, too surprised by the fact that the shorter boy had initiated conversation to remember that they weren’t really friends. That they never actually had been.
“Right. Congratulations.”
“Yeah.”
Jinyoung seemed to be waiting for Mark to say something else, but Mark’s mind was blank. The seconds stretched on and Mark could think of nothing. When nothing came out of Mark’s mouth for several more moments, Jinyoung let out a short puff of breath.
“Yeah,” he said softly, his lips turning up in the slightest smile. “See you around, Mark.”
Pure force of habit steered Mark to Jinyoung’s table at lunchtime. They’d spent almost all their spare time together working on their project for the last three and a half weeks, and now that it was over, Mark had quite forgotten that he and Jinyoung didn’t usually eat together.
He grinned at Jinyoung as he sat down. “I snuck into class when Ms. Jang was out,” he said triumphantly. “She left her computer on.”
Jinyoung, interested, looked up from the book he’d been reading. “What did you do?” He asked warily.
“I didn’t do anything,” Mark said, feigning offense. “I just wanted to see if she had graded our research project yet.”
“Are you serious?” Jinyoung hissed. “If anyone had caught you snooping through a teacher’s computer do you know much trouble you’d be in?”
“But they didn’t catch me. Besides… it turned out she has, in fact, graded our project, but if you’d rather not know—“
“What did we get?” Jinyoung asked immediately.
“Mark-ah.”
Mark looked up when he heard Jin’s voice and frowned in surprise. “Oh, hey.”
“Aren’t you done with your project?”
“I… yeah, I was just—“
“Then aren’t you going to sit with me and Jackson?” The implication was clear: come now, or don’t come at all.
Mark looked back at Jinyoung, his mouth dry as he tried to stutter an apology.
Jinyoung smiled easily, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “It’s fine, Mark. You should go with your friends. I have chemistry to study anyway,” he said, indicating his book.
They were yelling again.
It was kind of a common occurrence now—the same routine that circled every other week or so, and Mark had gotten surprisingly good at blocking it out. It was the same argument every time, more or less, and he was almost to the point of wishing they would just get a divorce already and spare everyone’s sanity.
After his uncle had died suddenly a few years ago, Mark’s aunt had remarried quickly. Not because she was in love or anything, though she would never admit that to Mark. The truth was, they wouldn’t have been able to support themselves alone, so she had gotten married after a few blind dates to a man who owned a dry cleaning shop. He wasn’t rich, but he made enough money to take care of them. When he wasn’t drinking away entire paychecks.
Words like stupid, pathetic, and good-for-nothing broke through the wall he was trying to build in his consciousness and Mark clenched his jaw.
“…tired of that little bastard lying around on his ass!”
Mark sighed and closed his eyes again. If I had anywhere to go, believe me, I’d be there, he thought. The more he thought about it—and he’d been thinking it for nearly a year now—the more convinced he became. He was going to get into a university, get a good job, and then take his aunt somewhere where she’d never have to rely on anyone ever again. He’d have a housekeeper and a gardener and they’d never have to listen to drunken angry rants or clean up the broken glass that had been heaved at walls.
But a rank of 54 wasn’t going to get him into university. Not into a good enough one.
“Fifty-four?” Jackson said loudly when he burst into the classroom, startling nearly everyone.
Mark rolled his eyes. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Is so. You’re trying to up your rank, aren’t you? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why do you care? Are you gonna help me study?”
“Of course not,” Jackson scoffed.
“That’s why I didn’t tell you. Anyway, I’m not skipping class anymore this week.”
“Suit yourself.”
Jackson pulled out his phone to send a text and Mark faced forward as the bell rang. He did his best to pay attention during the period, scribbling notes and definitely not getting distracted by Park Jinyoung and the way he scratched the back of his neck or ran his fingers through his hair.
Mark started when his phone buzzed in his pocket.
Take a picture. It was from Jackson. Puzzled, Mark looked at the boy next to him and found his best friend with a smirk on his lips. Jackson typed another message and hit send. Mark’s phone vibrated a second later.
It’ll last longer ;)
Mark sent a glare towards Jackson and didn’t dignify him with a response, instead resolving to ignore both him and Jinyoung in favor of actually learning about polynomials or whatever the hell it was that they were studying this week.
Jackson, unfortunately had no plans of being ignored. After class, Jackson slung his arm around Mark’s neck (something of a feat, given how much taller Mark was), and guided him outside.
“Spill,” he said once they were out of earshot of the rest of their class.
Mark took out a pack of cigarettes and stuck one in his mouth. “Spill what?”
Jackson plucked the white stick from Mark’s lips and put it between his own, lighting it and taking a long drag before Mark could protest. “If you stared any harder at the nerd you would have developed x-ray vision and seen through his skull,” he said pointedly. “You like him or what? Don’t think that’s the first time I’ve caught you looking at him.”
“I was not staring,” Mark said sullenly.
“Yeah, okay,” Jackson agreed, smirking.
“Jin-ah,” Jackson whined. “We always hang out at my place! Let’s go to your house for a change!”
Jin shook his head. “You can’t.”
“Why noooot?”
“You just can’t,” he snapped.
“Are you secretly rich?” Jackson asked. “You don’t want to bring us over because you don’t want us to mooch off you?”
Mark snorted. “If he was rich he could afford to hang out with someone way cooler than you.”
Jackson threw a pillow at Mark’s head. “You hang out with me,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, but I’m not rich either.”
Jinyoung had always known being ranked first in class would put kind of a target on his back. The way people would openly glare at him, whisper not-so-quietly behind his back about being teacher’s pet, tripping him in hallways, or how he’d come back to his desk to find all his pens had been taken, or pages ripped from his notebook.
It used to really get to him, when he was younger. All he wanted was to fit in and make friends, to not care so much about his grades, but his parents would accept nothing less than perfection from him, and saw to it that everything that could be seen as a distraction from his studies was removed from his life. He learned how to deal, eventually, and realized that the other kids only treated him that way because they were jealous. As if it had come so easily to him.
Mark had been the first person who made Jinyoung think he could be normal. For that brief, shining period, it had been like having a friend. And then just like that, it was gone. One word from Jin and Mark had abandoned him, leaving Jinyoung to remember why it was that he had stopped trying to make friends long ago. Mark went back to the self he was when he wasn’t with Jinyoung—the self-absorbed, cocky bully who intimidated his classmates and sometimes even his teachers.
The thing about having no friends, Jinyoung thought bitterly, was that it gave you a lot of time to observe people. The way they acted around their friends, around their teachers, and the way they acted when they thought no one was around. Because when Mark was around his friends, he was just like them. Rude and uncaring, as if the school revolved around them. But Jinyoung knew that deep down, Mark was different. He had seen it during those three weeks they’d worked together, and he saw it sometimes now in short flashes, when Mark would apologize to someone he bumped into in the hallway, or when he’d pick up a pen someone else had dropped, or when he would catch himself taking notes in class and then glance towards Jin and Jackson, who inevitably would be napping or spacing out, as if worried they’d notice he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to.
Jinyoung saw these things in Mark, even if he didn’t see them in himself, but he knew, probably better than anyone else, that Mark was lost to Newton’s first law:
An object in motion will stay in motion, unless acted on by an external force.