Junho gets a late start the following morning, but that’s fine. He works an evening shift on Mondays anyway and won’t be due in for another couple of hours. Knowing this, he doesn’t bother to get out of bed. He spends his free time on his phone, sliding and tapping away at the screen with a distinct feeling of dread each time he looks at the clock.

He likes work. The owners are nice and understanding, his co-workers all like him even if they don’t always like each other, and the customers are mostly pleasant. This is all great to him.

Except, Junho works as a pizza delivery boy, which means he spends the majority of his time in his car with the GPS on. Sometimes getting lost on the streets of Pittsburgh. Alone.

Ugh.

Junho realizes how weird he is for his aversion to driving alone, especially because he spends a good deal of time facing that fear, so shouldn’t he be over it by now? Not so, apparently. Each time is enough to send his heart into a panic and he honestly has no idea why.

Generally, Junho has separation anxiety, a bit in the way a dog would, maybe.

He doesn’t like being on his own, doesn’t like not having someone to turn to. Ciana is the only person who ever understood this and it had been her idea to call him during work hours, where they’d leave each other on speaker phone and go about their day. No one else had ever been so understanding before, and it’s with a constant sinking feeling that he knows that no one else ever will.

He’s on his own.

When all is said and done, Junho always feels a bit silly when the fuss he makes over his anxieties turns out to be alright.

From an outside perspective, he’s often teased for the way he is. Nicely, by friends, and flat out antagonistically by those who can’t be bothered understanding why Junho is the way he was. High school had been a nightmare for this very reason. Over the years, he's been called a great many things: clingy, whiny, spoiled, bratty—and Junho isn’t too sure they’re wrong.

For sure, he's grown up having things handed to him, grown up with the metaphorical silver spoon in his mouth. His grandparents dote on him, and his father, despite his busy schedule, always makes time for him, buying whatever Junho’s heart desires, even going so far as to give him a credit card for emergencies as early as third grade. Not that he ever used it for anything but food.

Even his mother, all the way across the ocean in South Korea, makes sure to call often and send care packages that are really just cute knick knacks that fill up the shelving space in his room as well as clothes and snacks that can’t be bought in the states.

It helps that he doesn’t have siblings he competes with for attention, at least no siblings he's grown up alongside.

Jihye and Yeonhee, his half-sisters, are more like cousins he never talks to unless his mother manages to get them on the phone with him. They aren’t comfortable speaking in English, and Junho gets it. Both of them are under a lot of pressure academically to learn it, but struggle to speak conversationally. To make matters worse, both are also at the age where they spend most of their day in school, and the rest of it in the hagwon his mother’s husband has them enrolled in.

And as far as Junho’s Korean goes, even with all the studying he's done over the years and the assistance he gets at home, Junho still isn’t fluent enough in Korean to speak without needing help from his dad or relying on translation apps to explain every other sentence, something that has always bothered him. Nothing more demotivating when everything he’s studied vanishes when he goes to put it to use—story of his life, really.

Friends have always regarded him as a rich boy, an immature goofy kid who came to school with the nicest things and was the envy of most for wearing the trendiest clothes and using whatever the latest tech was. Strangely, they always expected him to be more selfish. But Junho likes sharing, and likes making other people happy.

And yet, Junho can’t pinpoint exactly why he’s anxious in the way that he is. 

In the past, he attended therapy and stopped going. Not because he wanted to, but because his senior year was coming up and his dad wanted him to focus on his grades. Wanted him to focus on getting into a good college. And while therapy is good, it didn't really give him the answers to everything.

Sometimes Junho tries to content himself by acknowledging that sometimes people are just weird, they have quirks, and there doesn't need to be some big reason to explain it.

But even thinking that, Junho is self-conscious about his quirks, has always been and a reason would be nice. Just to know.

The funny thing is, his dad expected him to go to college straight out of high school, bought him a brand new car and everything for it. Junho also expected to go to college straight out of high school, had even been accepted into his father's alma mater, Penn Med, where he'd presumably begin the long, arduous journey of becoming a doctor and follow in his father's footsteps.

Except, when push came to shove, Junho chickened out. Not because he doesn’t want to become a doctor—a part of Junho was always earnest about that—but because the thought of starting his life, of being on his own, living away from home even if remaining in the same state, scared the shit out of him.

So, instead, he got a job at Papa Julio’s Pizzeria as a delivery boy with the idea that he’ll use it as exposure therapy to the worst of his fears. That it’ll be for a short time, and that he’ll still attend Penn Med in the Fall.

The promise of those intentions is still yet to show any results.

. . .

“Junho!” Papa Julio himself calls just as Junho is stalking towards the time cards. “Don’t punch out just yet—ay, Matteo, watch it—”

Matteo bobs his head with a grin and with his pizza stack held above his head, he maneuvers around Julio’s large form to get out the back door for deliveries.

“—Junho, kid, can you cover for Rebecca? You’d just have to stay until closing.”

Closing is midnight.

“Ain’t she a waitress?”

“Yeah, her kid is at home sick,” Julio explains, the roll of his eyes expressing exactly what he thinks of that. “Can you?”

“Sure,” he chirps, figuring it’s a lot better than going home.

“Good, use that boundless energy of yours to keep these fine folk’s night happy. Ask Denise if you need help,” Julio says and then steps away to bark at some other employee.

Denise is a middle-aged single mother who Junho sometimes babysits for when he has the time. Her kids, Will and Roy, are elementary school kids who like to destroy him in first person shooters, and much to their utter glee, he bought them birthday and Christmas presents. And now that he thinks about it, it’s been a while since he last looked after them. Which is really too bad—he likes to pretend he’s their big brother.

A part of Junho is always looking for a sibling.

Shrugging the miscellaneous thought off, Junho busies himself with work, calling on Denise for advice when needed and then very animatedly showing customers to their seats, refilling drinks, writing down orders and taking them to the kitchen, wiping down tables, delivering pans of steaming pizza out and cracking jokes with the clientele.

It’s hell on his feet to be walking around so much, a reminder that he really should exercise more, but at least it’s fun getting to joke around with Denise and the other staff.

Time passes by very quickly after that.

The dinner rush fades an hour in and then slowly dwindles until the only customers walking in are the various sorts of people that can’t be bothered to get dinner earlier, night owls, or folks who are coming off late shifts at their own jobs. 

Then, soon, there isn’t anyone sitting in the booths or at tables.

When midnight hits, he punches out, waves goodbye to everyone, gets into his mini-cooper and finds himself... not heading home.

For some odd, indeterminate reason, Junho sets his GPS to St. Mary’s cemetery, and even if he’s afraid, apprehensive to be driving alone at night, something keeps his hand on the wheel, something keeps him from turning back around.

Much later, he’ll have a name for what it is.

Serendipity.