Stealing the Moon - Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Wen Yuan and I used to be high school classmates.

Because of his outstanding looks and musical talent, he had been scouted by an agency in middle school and became a trainee.

In our senior year, his agency started preparing for his debut. To make his future schedule easier to manage, he transferred to our school.

During that brief time we were classmates, our desks were one in front of the other.

At eighteen, I was under enormous academic pressure and had fallen into the habit of binge eating. Since I was still growing, I quickly became the chubby girl in everyone’s eyes.

At that awkward, sensitive age, no matter how thick-skinned I tried to be, after being mocked for my weight by the boys in class over and over again, I finally couldn’t hold it in anymore and lay on my desk, crying.

As I cried, something suddenly poked me in the back-not too hard, not too lightly. The cap of a pen.

Then Wen Yuan, who sat behind me, leaned forward. In a gentle voice, he whispered by my ear, “Don’t listen to them…”

A slight weight settled on my head. He had reached out and softly patted me.

“You’re really wonderful. Really cute.”

Those words saved eighteen-year-old me.

In that brief, bleak stretch of senior year, his presence had been my light.

I had never imagined I would have anything to do with him. He was so perfect, inside and out, that he hardly seemed real. In our painfully ordinary high school, his existence felt so out of place.

Even during that tense, fleeting year, there were still countless boys and girls trying to get close to him.

Everyone likes beautiful things. And Wen Yuan himself was exactly that-a beautiful existence.

He debuted at eighteen. During his trainee days, he received an S in every evaluation and was called an all-round trainee by his teachers.

After debuting, he shot to fame, becoming the undisputed center of the stage, the stage king in his fans’ eyes.

Five years since debut with zero scandals. Not a single stage mistake. A one-hundred-percent perfect idol. A genius idol.

That boy named Wen Yuan had once been the moon I could see but never reach.

But now, he had taken his own life.

That night, I lay in my cramped rental room, hugging my pillow and crying until I could barely breathe.

I couldn’t accept it. Wen Yuan, someone so good, had died by suicide just like that.

There had been no sign of it at all.

Even at an event just two days earlier, he had interacted with his fans in that same gentle tone as always, reminding everyone to be careful on their way home.

He had always been mild-tempered. Even when facing attacks from haters, he responded with reasoned, polite rebuttals. When obsessive fans cornered him in a restroom, all he did was apologize for causing a public disturbance. Back in high school, when so many people confessed to him, he had rejected each and every one of them seriously and politely…

And yet such a good person was revealed after his death to have suffered from severe depression.

So you were never as happy as we imagined, were you?