misfits. → pjm | ✓

02.

chapter two: a joke

MY LIFE WAS bound to be an absolute joke from birth. It's just how it is, I guess.

I was born in a house with the whole family inside. Grandma, great-grandma, aunts, uncles- you name it. Everyone. Everyone jam-packed like sardines in a tin in our small flat in Busan.

Everyone was either drunk or pre-retarded when my mother went into labour. She gave birth to me in the bathtub with zero assistance whatsoever.

My father took one look at my mother's bloody mess, left to get 'milk' for the baby and never came back.

I guess that was where she came to her senses because as soon as I took my first step, every family member (booze and weed included) was kicked out, leaving my mother, Grandmother and favourite uncle.

My mother went to rehab to get clean again and came back a changed woman. She even started going to church.

It was all perfect until I entered high school and Grandma died. It felt like I'd died. She was my all and what I lived for.

It changed a lot.

It may be lame to some, and to this day, I still find it quite stupid, but I met Jimin at this time. He was notoriously in and out of juvi thanks to his inability to be in close proximity with any gender without starting a physical fight. But I saw beyond that, and truly like his personality or the one he'd let me see. His life was a product of his verbally-volumized father and timid mum who couldn't stand up for herself. It frustrated him, so he took it out on others.

So we became little partners in crime. I was suspended for a grand total of three times, the last one a proper expulsion sending me to the same correctional centre Jimin was at. All of them were accidents, I swear.

The one that got me expelled was when I'd managed to set the senior chemistry lab on fire. That's when I broke up with Jimin. It was all because he was too busy beating up Mark Tuan to notice that he's shifted the bunsen burner. It was a dumb reason, I know. But it changed my life for good.

After waking from my two-week-long coma thanks to smoke inhalation, I was immediately thrown into the slammer.

It was a weird place. Everyone had their groups. Fighters with fighters, junkies with junkies, assaulters with assaulters and so on.

Jimin was in the group for fighters, being the ring leader because of his increasingly horrid anger issues.

I walked into the cafeteria that day with my head high, hoodie up and covering most of my face and nicotine pads littered the inner parts of my elbows. He'd stared me down till I reached my table and asked someone to call me over. Me being me, I ignored him and threw out my meal, leaving immediately. That was my silent method of cutting him off.

That day was the start of a lot of things. It was how I made some of the biggest mistakes of my life, how I met my current boyfriend and how I was able to grow.

It didn't get the tattoos off though, that's for sure. Jimin hated them all. He hated most things I had done but stayed regardless. He just nagged for a while.

Then Ha Eun happened and we were all free to go. Lots occurred afterwards, which was something I don't feel like revisiting, but long story short I never saw him again.

Not until today.