The Broken Cane, the Broken Phone
"Ah, dressing up as a girl? Yeah, well. I have to. I mean, I do have to do it, but haaah..."
A long, heavy sigh slipped from Jaemin's lips.
It wasn't as if the viewers had been hounding her into it. Jaemin was a girl to begin with, so the word "crossdressing" didn't even apply — and besides, she was going to keep the promise either way. That part didn't worry her.
What sat wrong in her chest was Noel, the person the whole promise had been built around.
If Noel had been anyone ordinary, Jaemin would have thrown herself into the event without a second thought, sitting back to watch her chat lose their minds trying to decide whether she was actually a girl or just a ridiculously pretty guy. But the Noel who had walked in with Kancho was not anyone ordinary.
No — even if she had simply been disabled, that would have been one thing. She was missing an eye and a leg, and on top of that she had shown up with neither crutches nor a wheelchair. She said her cane had snapped on the way over. And when Jaemin looked it up afterward, even that "cane" had just been a tree branch she'd picked up somewhere. It was already making the rounds on social media. An article about an old man who had forced a disabled girl to give up her seat had even run on the nine o'clock news. Jaemin didn't watch the news, but the viewers wouldn't shut up about it, so she couldn't not know.
The kid was that destitute. Maybe that was why she spent all day in-game. Because there was nothing else she could do.
In Jaemin's head, Noel had already become a child all but abandoned by her parents. If anyone had paid her even a little attention, she wouldn't be walking around looking that haggard. Maybe she had lost them entirely.
Jaemin's eyes stung. She muttered under her breath, grateful — not for the first time — that she wasn't on camera.
"You know Noel, right? The way I see it, I think she lost her parents in the same accident where she lost her eye and her ankle. Don't you think?"
"That is not what I meeeant!"
A streamer's suffering was always the chat's entertainment. The viewers knew perfectly well she hadn't said it out of malice — that was why they piled on. Jaemin knew that too, but a trash reputation could get screenshot and locked in forever if she wasn't careful, so she denied the teasing with everything she had.
Once she'd talked herself down, she circled back to what she had actually meant to say.
"Anyway. I have a feeling Noel is just going to keep walking around on some stick she picked up off the ground instead of ever using crutches or a wheelchair, and that's going to break my heart. So I was thinking — what if I talked it over with Kancho and we bought her a pair of crutches?"
"Cough it up? What's that even supposed to mean. Anyway — should I message Kancho?"
Truthfully, the thought had been sitting with her ever since she left Kancho's Studio and came home. She found even walking on two feet to be a chore — so how hard must it have been, getting around on a single leg? Noel had insisted on taking the bus, and Jaemin had all but forced her into a taxi. She hadn't ridden along to see her to the door, worried Noel might take her for a stalker, and looking back she half wished she had just gotten in the cab with her.
That was the part that wouldn't leave her alone. How much must it have hurt, walking home on that foot?
She had even looked up the price of crutches. The expensive ones were expensive, sure, but a cheap pair you could actually plant your weight on ran about ten dollars. A prosthetic went for hundreds; even a wheelchair started at over eighty. Crutches, at least, were supposed to be the affordable option. Which meant Noel was so hard up she couldn't even manage that.
Gifting her the bargain-bin version felt wrong, so Jaemin had looked up something sturdy with a decent feel to it, and that came out to around a hundred dollars. It was a little steep even for her — but not a sum she wouldn't spend for Noel.
The only reason she wanted to loop Kancho in first was image. If she bought Noel crutches on her own, it could chip away at the reputation of the man she had just streamed with. Celesty bought her crutches. Kancho, the big-name streamer, didn't buy her a thing. That was exactly the kind of nasty rumor this industry loved to grow. So Jaemin, in her own way, was looking out for a colleague.
Of course Kancho might not welcome the suggestion. But the Kancho she had come to know was a saint who never stopped calling himself selfish — the kind of man who believed that doing good made his image better, and a better image brought in viewers. Whether he bristled at the offer or not, she was going to throw it out there.
The answer was a no. Jaemin was just starting to deflate when the messages kept coming.
Without the explanation that came first, she might have assumed he was just dumping the whole thing on her because he couldn't be bothered. She would have gone along with it anyway. Kancho really did make more money off streaming than she did, and a wheelchair-shopping trip could be content in its own right.
The problem was the reason he was busy. If he was preparing lawsuits, that meant there were people harassing Noel badly enough for it to be a legal matter.
Jaemin already knew, from her own chat, that a lot of people had put bets on Noel. That was how she had ended up promising to dress as a girl in the first place. But for Noel to actually go and collect on all of them... she had more resourcefulness than Jaemin had given her credit for. Or maybe the people running their mouths on the boards had more honor than expected.
Kancho, who had been chatting along just fine, left that single syllable hanging and went silent.
Ah. In any line of work, nothing good ever followed that sound. Jaemin's face went just as grim.
Jaemin knew people who tossed around I want to die and I should just kill myself the way other people talked about the weather. Some of them were starving for attention. Most were just inflating how hard things felt. But every so often, it was a real warning sign.
And the Noel she had seen on stream was someone for whom an extreme choice would not have been surprising at all.
Jaemin tore through her contacts, hunting for any way to reach her. She had never gotten a phone number — but that didn't mean there was no way through. The CocoaTalk group chat was still sitting there, and she could place a one-on-one call from it.
She was about to hit call when she remembered. Noel's phone was broken. There was no way to reach her at all.
Kancho wasn't friends with Noel in-game, which meant it had to be her. Jaemin opened the client again with her heart in her throat and tried to reach her.
The one mercy was that Noel was online. The thing that made her stomach drop was the status next to the name: Away.
Whenever Noel was logged into the game, she was always either in a match or in queue. So why was she AFK? Unless she had left the client running, read those vicious comments, and then, crushed—
Hope and dread crashed into each other in Jaemin's chest all over again. A reply coming back that fast meant Noel was alive. A reply that was complete nonsense made her heart seize.
The image of Noel's feet, dangling from a noose, tap-dancing across the keyboard flashed through her mind.
"Haaah. Of all the places for the cola to go, it had to be the keyboard."
I must have gotten too absorbed in the pizza. I'd been chugging cola straight from the bottle when it went down the wrong pipe, and I sprayed a little — and of course it landed on the keys. At least I hadn't dumped the whole thing. Regretting that I hadn't poured it into a glass was already too late.
"Haaah. I was trying to cut down on dishes and now I've made more work for myself..."
I pulled off the shirt I was wearing and gave the keyboard a rough wipe-down. That would do for first aid. Next I'd have to pop the keycaps and get a dishcloth under there.
A notification popped on the League of Champions client I'd left running to collect the gift vouchers — someone had whispered me — but I didn't have time to answer. Cleaning the keyboard came first.