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Time Leap (Uncut Edition)
O N E
If an outsider were to question any female in this school about why they don’t have a boyfriend, either three things. One, you’re either really ugly. Two, you’re entirely uninterested in guys, ‘you know… swings the other way’. Or three, they’re waiting for the right guy, and I mean literally ‘the right guy’, and who is this ‘right guy’?
None other than Kim Jonghyun. Broad shoulders, perfect jawline, soft red lips, prominent veins that run down his arms, a captivating smile, flawless white skin, beautiful voice, lock gazes with him and you’ll melt on the spot, when he talks… I think he should shut up because all that comes out of there is pride, to get a girl he uses his unbearable corny pick-up lines. He's the type of guy that has his one-week-lasting girlfriend by his side but has his eyes on his next target. Kim Jonghyun the playboy and… I hate him!
"Why do you hate Jonghyun oppa so much, Sica?"
I scoffed. Minjae had the audacity to ask me why I hate Jonghyun ‘oppa’?! Why is she asking when I… can’t even answer it myself? Was it his appeal to girls? Was it his love for ‘sensual’ skinship? He’s just so gross, enough said. ‘Wait…’
"Hold it!” I stuck my hand right in her face, “Minjae, did you just call him oppa?! Yah! Please don’t tell me you’re going out with that jerk! Do you know how erted that guy is?! We’re only in second year of junior high and ever since grade five, he’s been such a playboy!" I slammed my hand down on my desk, staring down Jonghyun’s desk, hoping it would crumble and break down when he walks in the classroom and sits on it.
Minjae laughed and went on talking about how I get so worked up over the fact that Kim Jonghyun is a playboy and yet I haven’t even gone out with him. Which is precisely true. I never understood it myself, but you know—there are things that you can’t question, it just has to be that way. Like when you really want to talk crap about someone who hasn’t done anything wrong besides be annoying.
“Yes, exactly! And I like to keep it that way, besides I think I’m the luckiest girl in the whole school for not being a part of Jonghyun’s ‘collection-of-people-I’ve-dated’.” I stated, straightening my shoulders and smoothing out a crease on my school uniform.
Minjae slapped my arm lightly. “Are you calling me a part of his collection?!”
My jaw dropped. “Eugh! And you went out with Kim Jonghyun?!”
Her facial expression went from furious to flushed in a matter of seconds, her cheeks were tinted crimson. That’s all I needed to answer my question. Minjae rested her chin on her hand and stared into nowhere, as if she was having some type of reverie. I stifled a laugh, not caring if she’ll hear me since she was… busy. Why not have a little fun?
“Ahem,” I coughed in my fist. “So how was the ‘one week of heaven’?” I calmly asked her. I leaned closer to her and rested my chin on my hand.
“It was… so romantic!” Minjae didn’t hesitate to reply, oblivious to the sarcastic value of my question. “He took me out for a walk in the park and then we sat on the swings and then he stood up and walked over to me and then he cupped my face and then he… he kissed me and then he—,” I slapped the back of her head and she immediately snapped out of her fantasy.
“Aish! Jessica!” She whined, nursing the back of her head with a sour look on her face.
I laughed. “And he said on the seventh day, something in the lines of, ‘Hyejin—, no sorry I meant Minjae, I can’t do this anymore, I’m too scared that I’ll hurt you’, or perhaps it was something a little more dramatic like, ‘Minjae, my heart beats for you too much’, then he breaks out into the Heartbeat dance by 2PM,” I start to do my own rendition of the dance in my seat, “‘… so I have to let you go!’” I mimicked in a dramatic tone and turned towards the ceiling, pumping my fist in the air, “—So yeah! What were you saying?”
“Ugh! Never mind.” Minjae laughed at my impersonation of Jonghyun, rolling her eyes and sticking her tongue out in my direction. “You’re such a dork sometimes.”
I can be so mean sometimes. Maybe I’m… turning into a virtuous feminist—whoa-ho, hold on, that doesn’t sound right no matter how many times I’d try to convince myself of that notion.
Speaking of s, here he comes. ‘Ah right, the infamous you-can’t-handle-this-iness walk in entrance through the door.’ Followed closely by his friend, Key. I turned to Minjae and noticed her dreamy smile turned into an annoyed expression at the sight of his friend and I laughed. They found each other’s presence very annoying and unpleasant ever since last year with the white shirt and kimchi incident… and maybe we’ll just leave it at that.
Jonghyun sat down at his desk straight away. That’s weird, being who he is, I thought he’d be on another girl by now. While on the other hand, Key approached Minjae… uh-oh.
I covered my mouth as I giggled, knowing what was about to come. Seemingly, so did Minjae as she turned to me and gave me a pleading look. I held my hands up, a gesture that says ‘don’t drag me into this’ and just turned back around in my chair to face the front.
"Well hello there fugly, it’s nearly Valentine’s Day and I bet you have heaps of admirers!" Key sat on her desk and brought his face close to hers. “You know… there’s just so many pigs in Korea—bet you’ll have a hard time choosing who to accept.”
"Oh shut up, you !" Minjae scooted away from him and they just went on and on shouting comebacks at each other. Oh how I love their arguments.
"Key." Jonghyun called Key and gestured him to come over to where he was. ‘Ugh, I’ve reached my quota of how long I can look at him for a day.’ As I was about to turn away from Jonghyun, he turned his gaze to me, making eye contact. And as a result from all my definite disgust towards him, you would’ve thought I turned away immediately—heck I would’ve thought I’d do that but… I just didn’t.
There was something about the way he held his gaze on me that gave me the impression that something wasn’t right—‘Whoa-whoa-whoa, hang on a second’, I scrunched my nose and turned back to the front, averting my eyes elsewhere. ‘We just had a moment…’
‘… Just, ew.’
Every time Minjae and Key decide to shut up and end their arguments, which is like never, unless Jonghyun calls Key over, Minjae always asks me this one question—
"—Agh! Why does he always bother me?! Can’t he do something more worthwhile?!"
I patted Minjae on the back.
"Aw! Why do you hate Key ‘oppa’ so much, Minjae?"
Minjae pouted. “Oh shut up!”
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“Time leap? It just isn’t possible!”
My cousin, Hyomin, sighed at my incredulity, continuing to observe the bottle of liquid. I stared hard at the bottle in her hand. The longer I stared, the more the contents of the bottle seemed to look like it was glowing. The stained glass of the bottle was a peculiar shade of emerald with a silver sheen overlaying the surface so it looked pristine. But that was the bottle itself, it was the liquid that it contained that looked strange and hazardous to me, due to the indescribable colour it had to it. Honestly, if this was an unidentified colour, I would name it unicorn. And you know, anything that claims it’s a unicorn… ‘stay away’.
“Hey don’t look at me like that, I’m just reading from the bottle,” Hyomin observed the messy handwriting on the bottle, “apparently it claims it’s a potion that will allow the human anatomy to teleport itself to the future in one piece, that is, hopefully in one piece.”
If it was a possibility, my jaw dropped even further. Who would have thought that a bottle I found sitting in the middle of the welcome mat of my front door, and which I thought was a fruit drink, was actually a bottle that allows you to leap into your future? It’s entirely impossible!
“How are you so sure that consuming the contents of that bottle has the ability to do that?!” I question the notion, finally finding my voice. “And a ‘potion’? Who uses that word in such serious circumstances?! In fact, we should be laughing our heads of right now! Why aren’t we laughing our heads off?!”
I start to flail my arms everywhere, obviously panicking, and yet my cousin just ignores me and walks calmly to another section of her peculiar laboratory, bottle in hand. I frantically follow her, watching as she holds the bottle delicately in her hands and places it down gently on her observation table.
“So?” I prompt, getting impatient with her lack of response. “How do you know?”
My cousin slowly averts her focus away from the bottle and gives me a look of genuine confusion. “Uh,” Hyomin drags out the word, “it says it right on the bottle…”
She points to the engraved letters.
“Ugh!” My shoulders slump dramatically. “I’m not stupid you know?! Why do you think I brought it to you if it didn’t have the words ‘Time Leap’ and the not-so-discreet description of what it does on the bottle in the first place?!”
On the bottle, it literally says—"Drinking this potion will allow you to time leap into your future."
Hyomin just shrugs and starts to observe the bottle again.
‘I give up.’ I slump down on a stool situated next to the observation table.
“The notion is just too impossible you know?” I say, a little calmer now. “With how serious you look, it just took me by surprise.”
I hear a sigh from her.
“Look baby girl,” Hyomin starts, twisting the bottle around to make sure she didn’t miss a detail, “you saw me right? I tested the liquid substance, and I got back results that didn’t make sense—nothing matched up, as of now I have no idea of what it’s made of. It’s a mystery.”
“But—”
“—No ‘buts’, why conclude when you haven’t even tried it?”
My eyes widened in their sockets.
“Don’t tell me you actually believe this stuff will work?!” I exclaimed, jumping off the stool to look over her shoulder at the bottle.
“Well, to tell you the truth, with the results I told you I got it’s really too early to say,” she looked over her shoulder at me and gave me a grin, “why not… try it? It doesn’t look that harmless.”
“Oh yeah, sure—not!” I stared at her in horror, snatching the bottle out of her hands. “Are you trying to kill me?!”
Hyomin smirked, a hand on her hip. “You see? You’re indirectly saying it yourself, that this will have some type of effect, right?
I huffed in annoyance and unscrewed the lid. ‘Effect? Yeah whatever.’ Gripping the bottle in one hand, I start to pour the contents in my mouth and swallow it. I slam the bottle back down on the observation table whilst swallowing the last mouthful.
The look on my cousin’s face was priceless, her arm outstretched and suspended in mid-air towards me.
I gave her the biggest grin my mouth was capable of. 'Ugh,' I internally cringed, 'that did not taste right, from the packaging you would've thought it tastes like sunshine and rainbows.'
“You—”
“—Hyomin. Don’t worry,” I cut her off whilst turning away from her expression of disbelief and started for the exit of the laboratory. “You’ll see, I’ll come to your laboratory tomorrow after school and I’d be one hundred percent fine!”
“Yah! Come back here so I can check your vitals!”
I give her a wink over my shoulder before skipping out through the double doors.
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Upon arrival at my front door, I felt the uncanny need to lie down on a bed full of fluffy pillows. ‘… Side effect of the potion?’ I shook my head sharply, ‘nah! It can’t be’. I proceeded to unlock the front door and was greeted by the sight of my brother, Jinki who was four years older than me, lounging in front of the television, like he always does after a day of school.
“Sooyeon,” He calls out to me by my Korean name, he didn’t even need to look away from the television. “It’s late and eomma wants to talk to you.”
Jinki finally averted his attention off the television screen and looked over his shoulder towards me.
I was in the midst of removing my shoes but froze when my brother mentioned my eomma, my eyes widening. “Oh crap! Is she angry?!”
I ran up to Jinki and shook his shoulders. If I come home late without permission and my mother realises, I’m as good as fried chicken.
“Yah! Calm down!” He pats my head in what he probably thinks is a gesture of comfort. “I’ll take care of it, just go have a shower then have a rest because you look hung over and you smell like egg.”
“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” I give him a hug and pretended to wipe all of my sweat on him.
“Yah!”
He takes the pillow beside him and hits me with it, chasing me up the stairs. Fortunately for me, I get to my room and lock the door before he could get in, he was never a fast runner. My stomach hurt from laughing too much.
Sighing, I left the lights off and crawled under the covers of my bed, not bothering to do my daily night routine. I stared at the ceiling and I immediately felt the weight of a month’s worth of physical activity on my body, what with everything that happened concerning the potion and time leaping situation, it was both physically and emotionally draining.
Right before I closed my heavy eyelids, I thought I saw glitter floating down from the ceiling.
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revamped: 2347 w / original: 1410 w
next update: 13th November, 2013
AUTHORS NOTE / HI! CHRISSY HERE, WITH THE NEWLY REVAMPED CHAPTER ONE. OLD READERS OF THIS STORY WOULD HAVE NOTICED THAT I COMBINED CHAPTERS ONE AND TWO, DUE TO CHAPTER TWO BEING SO SHORT. ANYWAY YES, THIS IS ONLY A PREVIEW BECAUSE I WAS PLANNING ON CHANGING IT TO 'SUBSCRIBERS ONLY'. BUT THAT DECISION IS NOT OFFICIAL, WE'LL SEE HOW IT GOES!
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