bipolyjack

“Jin! Have you finished your homework?”

“Not yet!” Jin shouts down the stairs, returning his pencil immediately to his mouth afterwards. He’s developed a habit of chewing on the metal thing that holds the eraser on - not even really chewing, just clicking his teeth against it. Nibbling. It’s a stress thing, he suspects. Some of the kids in his grade have taken up smoking, which would be a lot more intriguing of a concept if he thought he could ever in a million years get away with it.

Taking the pencil out of his mouth, Jin scratches his temple with the damp eraser and copies out the calc problem onto a fresh sheet of notebook paper. Four more problems. The last one took him seven minutes. These last few look a little harder. Maybe half an hour, if he really bears down on it. Dinner was three hours ago, at six-thirty sharp. He should be in bed by ten if he wants eight hours of sleep. But he’s got another round of edits on this English essay left, and a fresh set of notecards to make for the bio reading, and it takes six minutes precisely to get into his pajamas, brush his teeth, take his hormones, and get into bed.

He knows he won’t be in bed by ten.

Jin leans back in the ergonomic office chair his parents got him for Christmas and blows out a sigh. Outside the window of his bedroom under the eaves, clouds scuttle aside to reveal the moon, as if the moon blew them out of the way, also sighing.

Jin is tired. He can’t remember the last time he slept more than six hours in a night. But his grades are impeccable, and he does well at math bowls on weekends, and sometimes when she thinks he’s not looking, he catches his mother watching him with pride in her eyes.

That makes it all worth it, right?