Food was going around everywhere, laden on plastic plates. Smoke filled the air, as the little junior kid, Changhyun, and more of the junior boys cooked endlessly, grilling beef and pork that just kept disappearing into everyone’s mouths.

The main attraction for dinner was, of course, the alcohol. Crates and coolers filled with beer and Soju were everywhere. None of the Wooju kids acted at all like they were doing anything illegal. Afterall, it was the nature of Wooju MT’s.

Baekhyun and Sungyeol had just pranked Changhyun by feeding him a lettuce wrap full of wasabi and garlic. The poor kid hadn’t known what was coming at all. He whined and fanned his flaming tongue, spastically taking random people’s beer cans and drinking from them only to find that beer had no effect against the spiciness. Still whining, Changhyun ran off to find ice. While Baekhyun and Sungyeol laughed their heads off, an excited looking Hyukjae came bounding toward them, the beer can he was holding spilling liquid onto his hand.

“Sungyeol-ah, I found that 10 girl! I overheard her talking to her friend. She doesn’t drink much,” said Hyukjae.

Baekhyun stopped laughing and snapped his attention toward Hyukjae with wide eyes. They were talking about Naeun. He’d forgotten about his friends and how’d they all tried to call dibs on Naeun before. He’d been too preoccupied thinking of his own priorities to realize he would have competition.

“Sweet! Yah, let’s try to get her drunk,” Sungyeol suggested, “You know those pretty girls always get so wild when they’re tipsy! Yah Byunbi, wanna come?”

“What? No… uhhh, I’m still hungry, I need more food…” Baekhyun muttered. He cursed under his breath. There was no way he was letting these hooligans get to Naeun.

Baekhyun found her sitting on some tree stumps with a group of junior girls. She was drinking water.

“Naeun-ah!” he greeted, sitting next to her on the long stump, his skin tingling as he did so, for being so close to her. He looked around busily for Sungyeol and Hyukjae, who were undoubtedly on their way there. He warned himself to get over his infatuation with Naeun; he had to protect her from his crazy friends first.

“Naeun-ah, can I have some of your food? I’m still hungry,” Baekhyun asked.

She looked at him with an unreadable expression, and chuckled in a way that he couldn’t possibly figure out if she thought he was cute, or nuts. Either way, Baekhyun had successfully earned a chance to use the chopsticks Naeun had been using, which definitely brought his spirit up. Just when Baekhyun’s mouth was stuffed with food he’d stolen from Naeun’s plate, Hyukjae and Sungyeol sauntered over to them, grinning mischievously. In between them, they carried a large blue cooler.

“Hoobae-deul!!” Sungyeol cried in his high pitched voice, “You guys didn’t think you could get away with drinking nothing but water all weekend, did you? This is your first welcoming initiation! None of you get to go to bed until you empty this cooler!” The two guys opened the large cooler to reveal at least two dozen cans of beer. They didn’t even try to hide the fact that all they wanted was get the junior girls drunk. Baekhyun glared at them openly, but they were too busy passing around beer cans to notice.

The girls whined and complained, though it was clearly no use. “Hey hey hey! No complaining!” Sungyeol snapped.

“Hey, Byunbi, get out of the circle! We’re trying to initiate our hoobaes!” Hyukjae demanded, pushing a beer can into Naeun’s hand, giving her a sly smile as he did so.

“Yah, how is this fair?!” Baekhyun argued, pausing a moment to swallow his food, “They should at least be able to have a scapegoat!”

Hyukjae and Sungyeol looked at each other, and exchanged shrugs. “Well, fine then! Why don’t you be it?” Sungyeol replied.

Baekhyun grabbed the can of beer Hyukjae had given Naeun and snapped the top open. “Okay, I will!” he shot back. Without any trace of hesitation, he began to chug down the contents of the can.

The girls around him cheered and applauded Baekhyun, while a few people who’d gathered to see what was happening whistled and urged him on. Sungyeol and Hyukjae, exchanging another shrug, began to pump their fists as they chanted, “Byunbi, Byunbi, Byunbi!”

Soon, everyone in the small crowd that had gathered were chanting Baekhyun’s nickname. The alcohol burned as Baekhyun swallowed gulp after gulp, but he clenched his eyes shut and drank it all down to the last drop. Once he was done, he made a pouring motion on top of his head with the empty can to show that all of it was gone.

The crowd whooped and hollered at Baekhyun, the girls around him clapping, Sungyeol coming over to punch Baekhyun lightly on the shoulder.

“Just because Baekhyun played scapegoat once, that doesn’t mean any of you are off the hook!” Hyukjae persisted, turning to the girls again. The crowd around him began to chant out loud, “drink, drink, drink!”

Chulyong and Kwanghee had joined them, and were urging all the junior girls to drink, their own cheeks already reddened from countless shots of Soju. Hyukjae came over to Naeun, offering her another, opened can, with two hands.

“Hey Hoobae! What’s your name and class number?” Hyukjae asked, his voice low and greasy.

Naeun hesitantly took the beer. “Class 2-4, junior, Son Naeun,” She answered, in the proper underclassman way. Baekhyun had to admit he still couldn’t get used to her speaking; it was like hearing and seeing a statue talk.

“Your name’s pretty, and you’re even prettier!” Hyukjae remarked, winking at Naeun and making Baekhyun want to gag. Eunhyuk popped open his own can of beer and raised it to swish the liquid inside, asking, “Cheers?”

Naeun bit her lower lip slightly, but did as Hyukjae wanted, clinking cans with him. Baekhyun watched as they pulled their cans back, and Naeun took a long sip from hers. Her perfect complexion never faltered as she swallowed the alcohol, and afterward, she gave Hyukjae her signature, mysterious smile. Even when drinking, she was as beautiful and faultless as ever.

Hyukjae stared at Naeun stupidly, momentarily dumbfounded, no doubt suffering from the same effects that her beauty had inflicted on Baekhyun before. Baekhyun took this chance to grab the can of beer in Naeun’s hand and take a large gulp. “I get to be the scapegoat, remember?” he said, smiling at her impishly. She looked from him to Hyukjae with a puzzled expression, but didn’t protest when Baekhyun again took two long gulps of her beer, emptying almost half the can.

“Yah! What are you doing?! Get your own beer, that’s hers!” cried Hyukjae, finally having come to his senses.

Baekhyun just shrugged his shoulders as he handed the can back to Naeun. Inside, his brain was working on full gear again, coming up with ways he could keep Naeun from getting drunk, away from Hyukjae, and maybe a little closer to him. He had a lot to do that night.

All of Baekhyun’s friends, with the exception of Jungsoo, were drunk as heck. Baekhyun had hoped that by now, Hyukjae and Sungyeol would have given up on their plans to get Naeun drunk, but the two were very persistent even in their drunken states. It did turn out to be much easier for Baekhyun to lure them away from Naeun, convincing them to go pour beer on top of some poor junior boy’s head, or play a round of beer pong, or come up with new hybrid drinks consisting of mixtures of Soju, beer, coke, and whatever else they could get their hands on.

Baekhyun leapt around the MT site, pranking the junior boys with his friends, losing in games that resulted in more absorption of alcohol, and downing any hybrid drinks someone dared him to take on. He had long given up trying to manage his alcohol levels, but he felt fine, not at all over the edge like his friends.

He always lagged somewhere near Naeun, no matter what he was doing. He couldn’t keep her out of his sight, not with his lunatic friends swarming all over her.

Some type of alcoholic drink was always in his hand, and on top of that, Baekhyun took every opportunity he could to steal from Naeun’s drinks Hyukjae or Sungyeol or Chulyong always offered her. He was keeping count of how much she was drinking: he always drank about half of every can she did, and she was now on her fourth can. Baekhyun was all too aware of his body heat rapidly rising from the effects of alcohol, but he could handle being drunk. Because he wasn’t going to allow his hooligan friends to get their way with Naeun.

“Everybody, attention!” Jungsoo shouted, standing on top of a plastic chair in the middle of the crowd, when dinner had long winded down and people had resorted to just drinking. It took a few moments for all the chattering and hollering of drunken teenagers to quiet down, but eventually, all eyes looked up toward the MT Master.

“It’s time for the beauty contest!!” He announced. Cheers immediately erupted from all the seniors in the group. The beauty contest of the Summer Wooju MT was a contest where junior boys were forced to wear girl clothes and model in front of everyone, being judged by the seniors. With Jungsoo’s announcement, people began to move so that an empty space was set out for the models to present themselves.

In the midst of the beauty contest preparations, Baekhyun became aware that a stumbling, blabbering, red faced Sungyeol had urged a fifth can of beer into Naeun’s hand. Baekhyun was impressed; even if he had been helping her empty each of her cans, she showed no signs of drunkenness, whatsoever. Most of her friends were already long gone, running around like drunken maniacs or knocked out in slumber inside, but Naeun was still the perfect, impeccable beauty, her skin glowing unfailingly with radiant, dazzling light in Baekhyun’s eyes.

“Naeun-ah, you’re having fun, right? You don’t look like you’re even a little tipsy at all, do you know that? No worries, I’ll help you drink that,” Baekhyun said to her, after the red-faced Sungyeol had stumbled away. He d for Naeun’s hand, feeling how cool her skin was compared to his own burning body heat. He downed more than half of Naeun’s can in one swish and handed it back to her, letting out a small burp. “Oops, sorry,” he muttered, and left the girl to join his friends at the front of the crowd, where the MT Masters introduced the first contestant. A tall kid in a green skinny strap dress and black heels that seemed about to break under his weight was posing with a blank look on his face, earning screeches and whistles from the crowd.

The junior boys dressed in various girls’ clothes flashed by Baekhyun’s vision in a flurry of colors. He remembered shouting out something along the lines of “Do a SNSD dance!” to the kid wearing a lacy white dress he had picked out himself, because he had leapt up and did the Gee dance along with the kid. And then Kwanghee had cried out, “Baekhyun should win the beauty contest! He’s prettier in guy clothes than any of those juniors in girl clothes!” while Hyukjae had also added, “Byunbi, you y mama!”

Baekhyun also recalled that he and his friends had drenched Changhyun, the baby-faced junior kid, in a bucket load of beer, because the kid had won the beauty contest. Poor Changhyun even got a slobbery kiss from Chulyong, much to everyone’s disgust.

He didn’t believe he was that drunk, even as he watched Jungsoo haul an unconscious Sungyeol into the boys’ house. Just because his head was spinning and he was seeing everything in twos, that didn’t mean he couldn’t function, Baekhyun told himself. He was vaguely aware of looking for Naeun again after the beauty contest. And then, in some odd twist of events, he was throwing up in some woods a little ways from the MT houses. Someone was rubbing his back as he was bent over, helping him to empty out all the bad stuff in his system.

When he finally finished throwing up, he had been helped to the house by someone he couldn’t remember, the same person who’d rubbed his back while he puked. All that the person had said to him at the door before his memory went blank was, “Good night Sunbae, thanks for today.”

[A/N:]

I hope you all didn't mind the crazy drinking. Believe it or not, actually, underage drinking is much WORSE in Korean adolescents than American adolescents. I mean, overall, underage drinking is just, you know, a thing everywhere, but there are really less enforcements against underage drinking in Korea than in the U.S. With that being said, guys, drinking is NOT GOOD and if you're not into that kind of stuff, I SWEAR I AM NOT PROMOTING IT HERE IN THIS STORY. X)

PREDEBUT VID WARNING. Oh, Baekhyun. You inspire me so, so much.

Hahahaha, ohhhhh mannnn, It's too too sad that this video cuts off right when the emcee lady asks Baek, 'Does he have a girlfriend?'~ I would've really liked to know!! :3

Thank you as always for reading!