My name. Test. Give it.

I was sure that I was sweating profusely. My dampened palms were a sign of that. But as I watched the teacher call out names and return the last test that we took, I discovered that I really did not care for how active my sweat glands might have been.

The rest of my classmates lazily got to their feet when their name was called. It irritated me to no end – the longer they took to get their stupid paper, the longer it would take for me to get mine.

“Shin Hye-”

I jumped to my feet. “Here! Here; I’m here!”

The teacher took a short step backward to avoid me as I darted up to him with speed that I didn’t even know I possessed. “Um, yes,” he said, appalled. He handed me the paper, hurriedly drawing his hand back as soon as it touched my fingers. “Good job. Glad to see that you’re living up to your title.”

What? I looked at the number at the top of the test: 100.

The paper crinkled between my hands as I difficultly stifled my joy from showing. A perfect paper. Could I be anything but first?

It was only the first test out of too many that I’d have to be the best on, but it brought me a huge amount of confidence…despite what was going on with Minwoo’s family.

I left class with the paper still in my hand. It was far too early to tuck it away. I wanted to throw it into the air and let it float over to the Mun household, where Eric’s mother could see it and discover that I had no intention of dropping my side of the deal.

Wait until the children hear about this.

I burst in through the door to the dorm building, my hands shaking and making it harder to take off my shoes, especially with one hand holding onto the test.

“Guys!” I called, skirting around the furniture and toward my room. “Eric!”

I opened the door to find myself stepping right in the middle of a conference. Minwoo, Dongwan, and Eric were gathered inside the room. I halted awkwardly in the silence. Minwoo glanced briefly at me before turning back to Eric. The upset look on his face was what set me off.

“What’s going on?” I asked carefully.

“My dad’s already going through candidates to replace your father in the company,” Minwoo said to Eric, not bothering to address me directly. “He’s damn pissed, dude. And he’s being serious. He makes a point of asking me who would be the best replacement.”

“So that you’d come here and tell me, and then have my father watch out,” Eric finished. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the bedpost. Minwoo answered with a silent nod for confirmation. Eric sighed and shut his eyes. He didn’t seem particularly bothered – or at least, he put on that kind of uninterested guise. “What to do, though?”

No one had an answer for that. Dongwan, standing next to Minwoo, cleared his throat to try to alleviate the silence. “How are your parents?” he asked.

“My dad’s already gotten the tension because of Minwoo’s,” Eric answered, his eyelids still closed. “So he’s angry. And then the mom-ster went off to tell him that it was because I made things worse by breaking off my relationship with Hyori. Even though she was the one told me to go to Minwoo’s family and report to his dad about it.”

Hushed. Minwoo’s lips flattened into a stiff line. “What else?” he prompted.

Eric looked up at me, expectant. Shoving aside Minwoo’s question, he said, “Did you have something to tell us?”

I moved the paper behind my back, crumpling it slightly. Now wasn’t the time to be overly jubilant.

“No.”

His eyes took in the arm that was connected to my hidden hand. He stared at it with a look of doubt from my response, but didn’t say anything.

“What else?” Minwoo repeated, with more edge to his tone this time.

Eric chuckled, and Minwoo visibly tensed. Eric faced the ground when he said, “You’re persistent today.”

“Because I don’t know how much of this we can salvage!” Minwoo snapped.

“My dad’s mad at me, that’s all,” Eric relented.

Minwoo must have sensed something else, because he didn’t accept Eric’s ‘that’s all’. His eyes narrowed, and then he said, “Did your mom tell him about…?”

The two stared at one another. Eric was the first to look away.

“Yeah,” he said. “She did. Basically everything she knows: Hyesung and I, the criteria she set up for him. My dad’s in this mess even worse than your pa is. That’s why my dad’s even angrier. Ignorance is bliss, and he doesn’t have that pleasure.”

Minwoo crossed his arms and moved to support his weight on his left leg. “You should be thankful my dad doesn’t know that Hyesung’s involved in this.” He looked over at me with a pained expression. “He’d march right down to this school and kill both of you.”

I didn’t reply. Why was it, though, that the fathers were the scary ones? I knew that my mother wasn’t very reliable, but when I was growing up she told me that pleasing the mother was always a more difficult task than pleasing the father. So what was with this?

Eric’s phone rang. He didn’t give it a single glance. “And now my dad’s calling me nonstop to tell me to hurry up and break up with ‘that son of a bitch’.” My face flushed hotly. Wow. His father really was not light on the insults, considering he had only seen me once in both of our lifetimes. Eric held up his wailing phone towards us, the caller ID reading Dad. “Just like now.”

As Eric tossed the phone onto his bed, letting it ring away, Minwoo said, “What does he want? You to get back together with Hyori?”

“Nah. I think he’s just angry that I chose someone else over her while knowing the relationship between our families. My mom’s keeping him under control for now.”

“It’ll only last so long,” Dongwan commented. “Ever hear the term ‘calm before the storm’?”

“That’s what this is,” Minwoo agreed regretfully. Finally, Minwoo actually held a gaze with me. “Do you think you’ll be okay? I have to say, my dad’s a pretty scary dude when he gets angry.”

“Despite the fact that he has practically zero relation to me?” I mumbled. Because it was true.

A curt laugh escaped Minwoo’s lips. “True enough,” he told me. “Hopefully that’ll do something for you.” His tone told me that if I ever did meet his father, it would do nothing for me. He walked past me to the door, giving me a pat on the shoulder before leaving.

“That’s my cue to go,” Dongwan remarked, energetically following after Minwoo. “Bye-bye!”

The door clicked and locked behind me and I approached Eric, dropping onto the floorboards next to him. He had taken his phone and was in the process of turning it off.

“Why are you so calm?” I asked as he placed the device next to him.

He tossed me a grin, clamping his arms around me and burying his head in my shoulder. “Because I have you,” he said.

How pleasant. I fidgeted in his hold. “You’re disgusting.”

“Right,” he said brightly, tightening his embrace. I was persuaded that he was doing this sort of thing both to be able to touch me and to annoy me.

He tilted his head upward. “Have you called your ‘rents to tell them about us?”

My parents? I hadn’t been in contact with them since…that time when I went sobbing back to Mom because of heartbreak. The memory made me want to smash my head into the wall.

“I’ll call my mom right now,” I offered, hoping that whoever picked up was in an open-minded mood. Because truthfully, we were both in need of some shred of support, considering the hostility between Eric’s and Minwoo’s families.

Then again, in my family I was the only one that would ever possibly be in a not-open-minded mood. I took out my phone and dialed the house number.

Eric spotted the nearly destroyed paper in my hand and drew away from me to take it from my fingers. “Hey, what’s this?” he asked, trying to smooth out the wrinkles. “Is this what you wanted to show us?”

I stifled a smirk from forming. Feigning apathy, I said, “It’s a test; what do you think it is?” I activated the speaker on my phone, the monotonous ringing sound surfacing.

I kept my vision on him as a pleasantly surprised look draped over his features. “You got a perfect score!”

“Yeah. Nothing special.” The ringing tone ended to a click. “Mom!”

My mother’s voice came clearly through the receiver. “What’s going on, for my beautiful son to call on such an unassuming day of the week?”

“Um…” I gave a nervous glance over to Eric, who had abandoned the test on the floor and scooted closer to me to listen to my mother. “I just had something to tell you…”

I called her almost thoughtlessly…would my mother freak out about this? My toes curled on their own. If she did, we’d have heaps more trouble than we already did.

“Are you coming home?” she asked. “Did that school kick you out?”

What? Why would she assume that? “No!”

“Are you hurt or something?”

“Mom, I –”

“Wait, wait. Let me guess.” I scowled while Eric smothered his rising laughter. My mother was the one person in the world who would ‘guess what’ even if she was never asked to. “One of your teachers is being rude, am I right?”

“Can I –”

“Or are you dating someone?”

Bingo.

I stayed silent when I realized that I had no idea what to tell her. ‘Hi Mom, while you were away I started dating someone whose parents both kind of want to screw me over’? Wouldn’t that be just what she wanted to hear.

“So you are!” she said, sounding even more content. “What is she like? Is she pretty?”

Oh…yeah. I gave a dull look to Eric. ‘She’ was a real killer. Eric put on an expression overflowing with fabricated cuteness and did a hair-flipping motion with his hand. I raised an arm to hit him. Was he trying to make a joke out of this?

“It’s a he, Mom,” I blurted out before I could stop myself.

“Oh.” It was a soft ‘oh’, one of mild surprise – but, not an upset one. My relief only increased as she followed up with: “Oh…I see! You’ve been doing some self-discovery while you were at that school!”

Eric jabbed at my arm with a finger and gave me a thumbs-up. And for such a common display of my mother’s personality, I felt a rare sense of appreciation for it.

“I wouldn’t call it self-discovery…” I replied.

“Please, dear; if that school offered you education alone, I wouldn’t have let you go there. Studying is not life.” Uh, for the first eighteen years of her older son’s life it was. “By the way,” she said, “your father and I are planning on repainting some rooms of the house. For the living room, do you think dark blue or turquoise is better for the walls?”

“Dark blue,” I answered on impulse. Wait, walls? “I mean, hold on a second! Don’t you care at all about what I’m telling you?”

“Of course I do,” she said, using that tone all mothers use to try and persuade their children that they care – when in actuality they don’t. “But lately the living room walls have just been peeling and it is utterly the ugliest thing I have ever seen in my whole life.”

I sighed. Typical Mom. The fact that Eric was shuddering from laughter and only hiding it by burying his head against his knees wasn’t helping.

“Fine,” I said. “I’m hanging up.”

“Wait!” she exclaimed before I could hit the red button.

“What?”

“Let me just remind you; I may seem like a nice person, but I have standards for my future son-in-law!”

Ugh. “Of course you do.”

“That’s right!” She sounded completely indignant about it, too. “So I’m telling you right now; if that boy you’re dating isn’t like Eric, don’t even bother introducing him.”

A snort came from beside me. Eric had teetered onto the ground, desperately trying to cover up his laughter. “Uh…what?” I said weakly. Was this funny or amazing? Or it could be both.

“Don’t be so shocked!” Mom continued astutely. “Believe it or not, you’re still my son regardless of how old you are or where you might be living. I want a nice third son! Do you hear me, Hyesung?”

At this point, Eric shoved himself upright and called, “Hello, mother-in-law!”

“Who was that?” Mom demanded, surprised.

“It’s me, your future son-in-law!”

Oh, no. I slapped his shoulder with all the strength I had, my face burning. “Shut up!”

He stuck his tongue out at me, and of course, my mom heard him loud and clear. “Well, that voice sounds mighty familiar…” She gasped, an actual gasp. “Is that Eric? Calling me his mother-in-law?”

“Dear lord,” I mumbled.

Enjoying himself, Eric replied, “Yes, mother-in-law!”

She squealed. My mother, nearly into the fifth decade of her life, squealed. “Hyesung!” she said. “The first time since I gave birth to you, I finally feel completely proud of you!”

“Excuse me?” That wasn’t nearly the compliment she thought it was. What was I, a failure before I dated someone she considered perfect?

She disregarded me and said, “How are you, Eric?”

“I’m wond –”

I cut in, “I’m hanging up, Mom!”

“But I wasn’t done talking to –”

“Bye!” I said, hanging up and throwing the phone on the bed. I liked that my mom was okay with the two of us…but did she have to so blatantly show her preference of talking to Eric instead of me? Rude, I thought with a sniff. But, that was my mother for me.

“You know,” Eric said, grinning at me cheekily, “your mother’s cool.”

I grimaced. They were of the same type; that they got along so easily should have been no surprise to me. “I can tell. But, what are you going to do about your family?”

He crumpled his face up. “Always have to ruin the good atmosphere, dontcha?” I shrugged. That was me, after all.

“I don’t know, though,” he said honestly. “What else is there to do except try to not make the situation worse? It’s not like talking to people now is going to help.”

True enough. “How’s your brother doing?”

He looked at me suspiciously. “Why are you suddenly so interested in my brother?”

More than interested, I found it more amazing that Andy hadn’t made a single peep throughout the whole drama. “Think about it a little,” I said. “He’s a part of your family too. Is he getting caught up in all of this?”

Eric shrugged his shoulders. “You know Andy. He doesn’t care about what’s going on, and the parents are leaving him out of it. It works.”

“He doesn’t really get involved in much, does he?”

“He doesn’t want to. A good thing this time around. He’s being spared because he doesn’t have much anything to do with this, and he’s not trying to have anything to do with it.”

We sat without speaking for a number of moments.

“Everything will turn out okay, right?” I said.

“I don’t know” was his reply. Reassuring.

“If worse comes to worst, I’ll just dump you,” I said jokingly. Although, there was indeed a cloud of foreboding hanging over my head. How was I supposed to know what would happen? How was anyone?

“You wouldn’t,” he told me. “For one thing, mother-in-law wouldn’t let you.”

I couldn’t stop from fidgeting. “Can you not call her that?” It felt too strange coming from his mouth.

“If worse comes to worst,” he brushed me off, “we’ll worry about it then.”

I accepted it with a nod. But, even if things didn’t get to their absolute worst, I prayed that we wouldn’t have to worry.

A little longer than usual, so I hope you like it! It's summer break! ^.^ Hopefully I can have more time to update! I actually hope to finish up before I must leave for China next week, so I can add the chapters while I'm there (we'll see ^.^") As usual, please comment and I'll try to update later~!