“I wonder what this terror teacher has in store for us this term,” muttered Taeyeon.

Taeyeon along with Jessica, Tiffany, Yuri and fifteen other students were in a classroom. It was Physical Education and yet they’re staying here, sitting on a chair and confined within the four walls of the room, instead of being outside like the usual.

The man in front of them was wearing a suit, still looking endearing, instead of a tracksuit. He was looking around and his arms were folded.

Jessica didn’t know if she was just imagining things when she saw Professor Henney shivering. It’s not that cold.

She looked at Taeyeon and nudged her. “Hey, Taengoo, is it me or does Professor Henney look—“

“Sick.” Jessica was cut off when the teacher spoke up. “I’m sick so we can’t really do anything today. It’s a shame that I am sick on the first day of class.”

Everyone was nodding sympathetically, pretending that they didn’t like the idea of just staying inside the classroom and doing nothing.

“We were supposed to start our lesson today about Archery but I’m not really feeling well so I’m just going to ask everyone to write a report about Archery. Do your research about it. I don’t want to see things that are taken out from Wikipedia and I want it to be hand written. Submit it before this week ends. Late papers won’t be accepted and will most likely be found in the dumpsters. Lazy students will receive a punishment next meeting. Understood?”

“Sir, yes, Sir!”

Everyone looked at the guy at the back who spoke up. Goldfish, the students from Professor BoA’s class all thought.

Siwon was grinning like an idiot

Professor Henney was looking at him, as well. Everyone turned their attention to him when he cleared his throat. “Very well. Enjoy your lunch.” He went out and left all of his students wondering what just happened.

“Goldfish has balls mocking our terror professor like that,” said Taeyeon, helping Jessica with her things.

“Either that or our professor didn’t know that he was being mocked. I personally think it’s the latter,” Jessica replied. “What do you think, Tiff?” She looked at her sister who had her eyes on a certain tanned girl talking to Krystal.

“Tiff.”

Her sister looked at her and said, “You shouldn’t be calling Siwon ‘goldfish’ all the time. He’s actually a good guy. Annoying most of the time but he’s still a kind person. He’s very cocky though. So cocky it’s not even funny.” When she finished talking, her attention has once again shifted to her roommate and her new found nemesis, Krystal.

She is aware that Krystal hates her for some unknown reason and she doesn’t like Krystal either because the latter is getting too much of Yuri’s attention. As much as she hates to admit, she is indeed jealous of the girl.

“Is she going to have lunch with Krystal?” asked Tiffany, eyes still glued to Yuri and Krystal.

“She didn’t tell us anything about having lunch with her,” answered Jessica.

“She didn’t tell us that she’s going to eat lunch with us either.”

Tiffany nodded and looked away. She grabbed her things and stuffed them inside her bag. Yuri, on the other hand, has finished her conversation with Krystal and was now walking towards her friends.

“Hey, so what are going to eat for lunch? I’m hungry,” Yuri said.

Tiffany smiled inwardly when she heard what her roommate said but she frowned when she remembered that she’s not supposed to react that way.

“Tiff? Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Let’s eat lunch.”


---


“This is bad, Tiffany. Get your head straight. You will do well next week. This is just the first week of your second term. Relax.”

Tiffany was lying on her bed, hitting her head with a toy mallet. She had a disastrous week, tripping, getting caught sleeping in a class and even being in the receiving end of her sister’s glare when she accidentally spilled juice on her. It’s safe to say that the first week of their second term is her worst week ever.

She heard someone giggling and she sat up to see who it was. Yuri.

“Mjolnir. I remembered when you had a hard time pronouncing it.” Yuri chuckled and sat on the edge of her bed.

“What are you doing here, Kwon?” Tiffany grunted, returning to her original position before Yuri came in.

“Well, Little Miss Sunshine, this is our room.”

“I know but aren’t you supposed to be with Krystal ‘The Great’ right now?”

The first week also served as a testament for Tiffany as to how accurate Professor Boa’s nicknames for her students are. That Krystal kid was indeed great at everything she does. I bet she’s greater in breathing than everyone else... I’m going insane. FML.

“We’ve finished what we were supposed to do,” she paused and stared at Tiffany who was still hitting her head with the toy mallet, “Are you okay? I mean, I know you’ve had a bad week but that’s not a reason to be so…down.”

“Are you kidding me?” Tiffany sat up and glared at her roommate who was trying hard not to laugh at her misfortunes.

Yuri sighed and leaned back. “Okay, okay. So maybe you didn’t have such a good week.”

Tiffany raised an eyebrow.

“You had such a bad week, actually. You made such a bad impression on our new Physics professor.”

Flashback

Their professor in Physics just entered the room and has been staring at them for about a minute now but for Tiffany it felt like eternity.

She stood up from her seat and walked towards the teacher’s table. She looked at him closely and huffed. “I think he’s sleeping with his eyes partly opened. I am so bored. Are we going to sit here for two hours and watch him sleep?”

The man stood up from his seat, his eyes still looking like it’s only partly opened, and cleared his throat. “Good morning class. Thank you for acknowledging that my eyes aren’t fully opened, Miss…?”

Tiffany gulped as she backed away and sat to her seat. “Hwang.”

“Kim Jae Dong. I’m your new Physics Professor and yes, I have small eyes. That, however, won’t stop me from seeing the students chatting with their seatmates instead of listening to my lectures.”

He stared at Tiffany and smirked. “I will pay extra attention to you, Miss Hwang.”

“You’ve also been extra clumsy. You almost kissed the floor when you ran in the hallway because you were late, hugged the janitor, Mr. Yoo, when you almost tripped on a banana peel and you almost stab Krystal with a pen when you tripped again.”

Tiffany smirked when she remembered the last part. “Accidentally” stabbing Krystal would’ve been very unfortunate. NOT!

“Why are you smirking?”

“Nothing.”

Yuri stared at her, full of doubts. “To top it off, you failed to submit your homework in PE.”

“That was kind of your fault for not reminding me. What do you want?”

“Whatever.” Yuri puffed her cheeks, hesitating whether to ask for Tiffany’s help or not.

“You see, we have to take this class that involves stuff about computers. I don’t even know why we need to take that subject. It’s not like cooking involves the use of computers.”

Tiffany raised her eyebrow and prompted Yuri to stop talking. “Excuse me? I bet that in a couple of decades, people would be relying on a robot to cook their food instead of letting cocky people like you feed them.”

Yuri shook her head and said, “I beg to disagree, Fany. Even if that happens, all of us would probably be rotting six feet below the ground. I’m not here to argue with you about that. I need your help.”

“Don’t tell me you want me to do your homework for you because I won’t…unless you’ll do my homework in that math subject. I seriously can’t understand it. I’m confused with the mat—“

“No. I just want you to help me catch up. Our professor, Park Myung-soo, he—“

“Sir PMS,” Tiffany giggled.

Yuri narrowed her eyes and realized that Tiffany was giggling about the man’s initials and how the acronym fits the professor’s attitude when he’s teaching. PMS. Pretty clever.

“Yes, Sir PMS. He didn’t want us talking to each other and even reprimanded me when I asked a question. He kept shouting ‘Yah, yah, yah, YAH!’ every time a student would tell him to slow down or to explain it further. I mean, he sort of teaches well but…I was passing notes with Krystal during his class so I really didn’t understand what he taught that day and he taught a lot, judging from my geeky seatmate’s notes.”

While Yuri was talking about her experience in Professor Park’s class, Tiffany was nodding her head in agreement but stopped when she heard something that involved ‘passing notes’ and ‘Krystal’.

“Why were you and Krystal passing notes?” she asked.

“We had to talk about something really important.”

“What was it about?”

It was Yuri’s turn to arch an eyebrow. “Why do you want to know?”

“I want to know what was so important that you can’t even wait after class to talk about it.” Tiffany cleared and continued, “I want to know if the stuff that you two were talking about is actually important. I am not willing to help you if you two were talking about stuff like going out on a date…because…stuff like that should be discussed after class and not during class…”

She continued blurting out senseless things to hide the fact that she was feeling jealous of how close they were. ]She doesn’t even talk to me during class. Well, not that often.

She also dreaded the fact that the two might be more than just friends.

“We were discussing about our final project.”

Tiffany creased her eyebrows. Project? What the hell? Who the heck works on a final project during the first week of the second term?

Just as she was about to speak, someone entered their room and stared at them, grinning.

“Hyo? What are you doing here?”

Hyoyeon skipped her way to Yuri’s bed and sat beside the taller girl. “I need you two for my final project. Our professor discussed it yesterday and I don’t believe in procrastination so I’m going to do it now since I have all the time in the world and there’s not much school work yet.”

“You, too? My partner and I are going to work on our final project, too but it’s for a different reason. Our professor said we should work on it as soon as we can since it involves fermenting kimchi and making our own chili paste.”

Oh. So… she was telling the truth.

“Anyways, I really need your help, guys but I’ll talk to you later since I have somewhere to go to with Taengoo and Sica. I needed their help as well.” Hyoyeon stood up and left.

“Where were we?” Yuri asked.

“You needed my help.”

“Right. I thought that since we’re roommates and you’re good at this particular subject, I thought of asking for your help.”

Tiffany huffed and smirked arrogantly. “I’m not ‘good’ at it. I’m great at what I do. A computer is my best friend. I know stuff about computers like the back of my hand.”

“Good to know that, geek. So will you please help me?”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear what you just called me. What do you need help with?”

Yuri got up and grabbed her notebook inside her bag. She looked for the stuff she wrote while passing notes with Krystal and handed it over to Tiffany.

The shorter girl looked at it and then stared at Yuri.

“You do need help. What the hell is ‘Husky’? It’s supposed to be ASCII.”

Yuri stared at her blankly before asking, “A…what?”

“ASCII. A-S-C-I-I. Acronym for ‘American Standard Code Information interchange.’ You don’t know what it is? The word ‘husky’ and ASCII isn’t even that close. What were you thinking about, a dog?”

Yuri pouted. “Well, his pronunciation wasn’t really clear.”

“These things were taught during high school, Yul.”

“No it wasn’t.”

Tiffany gasped. “That’s it. I will run for President and impose a law that involves teaching high school students to at least know what an ASCII is.”

“You’re crazy,” her roommate mumbled.

“Please tell me you at least know how to convert decimal numbers to binary numbers.”

Yuri smiled innocently and shook her head.

“Oh.my.god. It’s pretty simple though.”

“I think I know how to but when I tried doing it, I always get the wrong answer.” She scratched the back of her head and pouted like a little kid.

Tiffany handed the paper back to Yuri. “Convert 23 to binary right now. Hurry up.”

Yuri quickly scribbled the numbers on the paper and did what Tiffany told her to do.

“Hurry up, Yul. Sheesh!”

“So bossy,” the taller girl mumbled again.

As soon as she finished, she showed Tiffany her answer and the latter checked it to see if it was correct. She sighed, finally understanding what Yuri’s mistake was all along.

Decimal ----> Binary
23 ----> 11101

“You’re writing it wrong. You have to start writing 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and so on, starting from right to left. So instead of getting 11101, you should’ve gotten 10111. Get it?” Yuri nodded. “Never forget that.”

“Next up, ASCII,” she grinned when she remembered what she saw earlier, “or should I say ‘husky’? Seriously, were you thinking of a Siberian Husky or something?” She motioned Yuri to sit next to her and all the latter could do was to comply and release an annoyed grunt.

Babo. I was actually thinking about your stupid…y, husky voice.


---


Hyoyeon, Jessica and Taeyeon were on their way to Han River since the couple agreed on helping their friend out. Taeyeon was driving and Jessica was sitting in the passenger’s seat and Hyoyeon was at the back seat.

“I really appreciate your help, guys,” said Hyoyeon.

“No biggie. What’s your project about again?” Taeyeon asked.

“We have to tell a story through pictures. We were given different themes and we could basically do anything we want with it. The professor gave me a theme about ‘Love and Hate’. I want it to look natural so I asked you guys for help.”

Jessica turned her head to look at her and asked, “Love and Hate? That should be easy.”

“I need you guys to just act like you do every day and I’ll take a couple of pictures of you guys. I also asked help from YoonHyun and SunByung couple, as well as YulTi’s help.”

“I have an idea who YoonHyun and YulTi but who the heck makes up the ‘SunByung’ couple?” Taeyeon asked while eyeing Hyoyeon from the rear view mirror.

“Sunny and Hyomin. Don’t ask me how they came up with it because I really don’t know.”

“So you’re using four pairs?” asked Jessica.

“Yeah. I wanted to show that you can’t really compare one couple to the other since the things they go through are different. Some fight so often, some don’t. Some likes PDA a little too much, I’m talking about SunByung, some don’t.”

Jessica nodded.

“We’re here. Oh cool, we get to watch the sunset.”

“You guys go ahead and I’ll catch up,” Hyoyeon said while double checking the stuff she needs.

Taeyeon and Jessica got out of the car and held hands while walking towards the river. They found a good spot to watch the sunset and sat there. The taller girl leaned her head on Taeyeon’s shoulder.

“Are you tired, Sica?”

“How can I be tired? I haven’t done anything tiring today.”

Taeyeon smiled. She held both of Jessica’s hands and placed them on her lap. Jessica, on the other hand, enjoyed Taeyeon’s warmth and moved closer to the latter.

“How did I end up being like this?” the blonde suddenly asked.

Taeyeon chuckled. “What do you mean?”

“How did I end up liking you too much?”

Taeyeon feigned a hurt expression. “You only LIKE me?”

“Aish, you know what I mean!” Jessica exclaimed, hitting Taeyeon’s leg.

“Well, I think it’s because of my ch—“

Jessica cut her off and said, “Please don’t say any physical attributes. I will seriously disagree and hit your head.”

“What? People like me because I’m charming, undeniably cute and— OW! SIca~”

Jessica glared at Taeyeon. “Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.”

Taeyeon could only tend to the forming bump on her head and pull Jessica back to her original position before her girlfriend hit her in the head.

“I honestly don’t know, Sica but I’m glad you don’t hate my guts anymore. I’m also happy that I had help from Sunny, Hyo and the others.”

“I’m glad I have them as my friends, too and I’m happy being with you, Taengoo.”

Before Taeyeon could even speak, the couple heard someone giggling. They turned around and saw Hyoyeon holding a camera.

Click!

“Sorry I really had to capture that expression you had seconds ago. Anyways, let’s go. We’re done for the day. By the way, the theme given to me defined your relationship. I captured everything from your super sweet moments that would make people without a partner vomit, trust me I almost puked but I held it in, to Jessica hitting your head. I’ll try using the shots I took. You two are such big help.” She grinned and turned around to return to the car.

“Yah! What do you mean we’re done? We haven’t even posed for anything yet. We didn’t even know you were taking pictures of us. Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I told you I wanted it to look natural and the best way to do that is to capture candid moments. Plus, I don’t want my professor thinking that I took photos of a mother and child. He’d think I was talking about love between children and their parents.” Hyoyeon continued walking with an angry couple in tow.

“Did you just imply that I look old?”

“Yah! I do not look like a kid. I look like a grown woman. If the problem is my height, I brought an apple box and stuffed it in my car’s trunk!”

Hyoyeon stopped walking and turned around to face the two. She looked at Jessica and said, “It’s not that you look old, it’s just that your girlfriend looks like a third grader. Do you want the people in my class to think that you’re a pedo?” Jessica shook her head. “Thought so and you,” she shifted her attention to the fuming Taeyeon, “You look like a kid and decades from now, you’d thank your parents for giving you such genes. People would kill to find the fountain of youth but you… the fountain of youth probably runs through your bloodstream. It’s not really a bad thing to have that baby face.”

The couple pondered on what Hyoyeon said and thought that the girl in front of them made sense.

“Do you want to see the awesome pictures I’ve taken at home or do you want to just stand here and grow varicose veins on our pretty but short legs?”

She turned her back on the couple, leaving them with a weird and insulting rhetorical question.

“I don’t like Hyo sometimes.”

“Me too, baby.”

Jessica looked at her with a brow raised.

She mentally kicked herself and said, “It’s weird. I’ll stick to calling you Sica.”

“Yeah…please do.”


---


“So you have to remember four numbers 65, 90, 97 and 122.” Yuri nodded and Tiffany continued, “Write 65 to 90 consecutively on your paper. It doesn’t really matter how you write it but it will be more convenient if you write the numbers on each line rather than writing 65 and then 66 beside it.”

“Done.”

“On the other side of the paper, write the numbers 97 up to 122.”

“Done.”

“Now, write a capital letter A beside number 65.”

“Okay.” Yuri looked at her roommate, waiting for the next instruction.

“Write letter B beside 66.”

“Done.” Yuri looked at her again.

Tiffany glared at the tanned girl. “Sheesh, Yul! Write the alphabet beside the numbers! I assume you memorize the English Alphabet.”

“Of course, I do. You could’ve just said that the first time.”

Tiffany sighed and buried her face in her palm. “When you’re done, write the alphabet beside the numbers 97 to 122 but write the small letters.

After a minute, Yuri looked up and asked, “What’s next?”

“According to the ASCII table, those are the decimal numbers assigned to those letters. That’s why you have to remember those four numbers.”

“Does this mean that big letter A when converted to binary is 01100101?”

Tiffany shook her head. “The decimal numbers should be converted to hexadecimal first before you convert it into binary.”

“Hexadecimal. Base 16, right?”

“Yes. It includes the letters A, B, C, D, E and F which is equivalent to 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 respectively. Let’s use letter K, upper case. The first thing you should do is to look at the table you made earlier. The number assigned to letter K is 75. We have to convert this decimal to hexadecimal. Divide 5 to 16 since hexadecimal is…?”

“Base 16.”

“What would you get?”

“4.6875. Can I round it off?”

“No. Write the whole number on the left side of your paper and multiply the remainder which is .6875 to 16.”

“11.”

“Write that on the right side of your paper. Now, the number on the left side of your paper, number 4, should be dived to 16 again.”

Yuri punched the numbers on her calculator and said, “0.25.”

“You don’t have anything to write down on the left side so just proceed on multiplying it to 16 again.”

Yuri has already pressed the numbers and was about to press the ‘equal’ button when she heard Tiffany chuckling. “Come on, Yul. Did you really have to use a calculator to know the answer? You divided 4 by 16 so if you multiply the answer to 16 again, you’ll get what?”

“4,” Yuri mumbled as she wrote down the number below number 11.

“You can now convert those numbers to binary. Keep in mind that the first number you get will be written first and on the right side and since the first number is 11, that means the hexadecimal number equivalent to K would be written as 4B.”

Yuri nodded and started converting it. “So 4 is 0100 and 11 is 1011. K, upper case, would be 01001011 when converted to binary.”

Tiffany smiled widely and said, “Correct! See how easy that was? Now convert everything to hexadecimal first and proceed to converting them into binary.”

Yuri quickly started on doing it while Tiffany lay down and grabbed her phone to see if someone messaged her. 1 message from Soo? What the heck? Why can’t she just go here and tell me?

From: Soo
Fany, want to watch a movie later and eat dinner after?

She quickly typed in ‘Sure’ and sent it to her girlfriend who was also inside the house, a room across her room.

She chucked her mobile phone under her bed and decided to just doze off.

She was starting to fall asleep when she hear Yuri calling her.

“Fany-ah, wae~~?” she whined.

“What?”

“Why didn’t you just tell me that hexadecimal numbers are consecutive, too? I was halfway done before I realized it.”

Tiffany couldn’t help but laugh, “You babo! I thought you’d realize it sooner. Use your common sense, Kwon. Try practicing it with your name. That’s what I did when I first learned how to do it.”

Yuri watched as her roommate turned her back on her. She did what Tiffany suggested and when she finished doing it, she couldn’t help but be proud of herself because now she knows other stuff besides cooking. She got bored and started scribbling stuff on her notebook again.

Y=59
01011001
U=55
01010101
L=4C
01001100
T=54
01010100
I=49
01001001

0101100101010101010011000101010001001001

“YULTI,” she mumbled and smiled.

She was ready to keep her notes and arrange her things when she heard a knock on their door.

“Come in.”

“Tiff?”

“Your sister’s sleeping, Sica,” said Yuri in a hushed tone.

Jessica nodded but continued to walk towards her sister’s bed. She sat down and placed her hand on Tiffany’s leg. She stared at her for a while before she started tickling her sister like a mad woman. Tiffany, being the ticklish person that she is, bolted up and moved away from her sister.

Tiffany glared menacingly at the blonde while the latter grinned and said, “Can you please help Taengoo? She’s having problems with—“

“Sir PMS’ subject?”

“How did y—“

“Yuri had the same problem.”

“Tok, tok.” Taeyeon made a sound effect before entering the room. She was welcomed by a grinning Yuri.

“I’ll teach you, Taeng.”

“Teach me what?”

“Converting letters into numbers and other stuff.”

Taeyeon shook her head vigorously. “No way! I saw you passing notes with Krystal. I probably know more stuff than you do!”

“Tiff said she’s already taught Yuri.”

“I did. If you’ll excuse me, I have a date.” She shoved Taeyeon away and went out of the room.

“Aish! Kwon Yuri, I swear if I fail this, I will certainly blame you.”

“Oh please. I’m an expert already.”

Jessica yawned and started heading to the door. “I’ll go ahead and sleep.”

“Again?”

“You say it like all I do is sleep all day. Good night. Good luck with the…whatever it is that you’re doing.”