Before we start, I have a challenge for all you readers!  Try reading this story without laughing out loud.  If you lose, comment the chapter you lost it on!

Happy reading :D

Dear Luhan,

Thanks for the coat.  After what you’ve put me through, I think I’m going to keep it, because it’s definitely the warmest coat I’ve ever had.  That said, I don’t want to keep your phone: I want mine back.  If you know what’s good for you, you’ll hand it over before my friend Abbie discovers there’s a K-pop star on the other end when she tries to ring me.

Thanks,

Leigh

There’s this saying that there are, like, five or six other people in the world who look exactly like you.  You get the jokes going around the internet all the time – that it means there must be twenty-five One Direction lookalikes in the world up for grabs and stuff, or that there’s another six sets of that boyband EXO wandering around somewhere on the planet.

For some reason, only girls appear to have this fixation.  And for some totally god-forsaken reason, one of my six lookalikes turned out to be – a guy.

I met him in Hyde Park.

Gee, this sounds like the beginning of some kind of romance story.  I mean, it is a romance story, but the romance comes later.

It was dark.

No, we weren’t on a date.  This was the first time I met him.

Anyway, so, I was wandering around Hyde Park quite late at night after an argument with my mum over the new boyish haircut I’d got.  I needed time out of the house to cool down, and I needed time away from my mum so that she couldn’t turn me into a target for her best china plates – one had caught me a glancing blow above my left ear and left a bleeding gash.  I’m still not sure why she got so angry about my haircut.  Maybe because I’d dyed it pink.  Maybe because she had some kind of precognition and knew what was going to happen.  I mean, I stormed out of the flat at eight in the evening, and forty-eight hours later I’m ringing her from a K-pop star’s phone in Seoul to tell her I’ve somehow ended up in South Korea without my passport.  And it didn’t particularly help that the North Koreans had been forecasting rivers of blood and rains of mortars just the week before.  So yeah.  I think my mum might just have psychic powers.

Professor Trelawney-style mums aside, Hyde Park in the dark in winter is cold, and I sadly know this from a little too much experience.  Not to mention that Hyde Park isn’t exactly the safest place for a young woman to be after dark, even if she’s armed with house keys and a hazy knowledge of judo from primary school.  London’s not that bad safety-wise for a big city, but you stumble across the odd needle from time to time and you do get the occasional creeper trying to hit on you or mug you after hours.

Which was what I initially mistook him for when he came tearing up to where I was blowing on my hands under the bandstand at around quarter to ten and debating over whether or not it would be safe to go home or if it was worth risking staying out for another hour or so.

He was yelling “hey, hey, hey!” like somebody had stolen his wallet and waving his arms over his head frantically.  I looked around for the thief, but I couldn’t see anybody disappearing into the darkness and I was pretty sure that nobody had come running past me recently except that old man and his dog who lived several doors down from me, and that had been nearly twenty minutes ago.

A little concerned about the imaginary thief – I mean, this guy was a fast runner, so it wasn’t like he would have been far behind somebody who’d stolen his wallet – I stopped chafing my hands together and looked down at him as he came skidding to a halt in front of me and bent over, trying to catch his breath.  Maybe it was the light, but it looked like his hair might just be the same shade of light pink as mine.

“Are you all right?” I demanded.

He looked up at me and grinned, panting.  “Yeah, yeah.”

His English accent sounded a bit off.

“What’s the fuss?” I asked him.  Something about his face and smile seemed familiar.  I squinted at him, trying to place him.  I knew it would click in a moment, courtesy of a photographic memory, but something felt really wrong about the context.  He wasn’t from school and he wasn’t from the neighbourhood – had I met him at youth group or had I seen him on TV?  He looked about my age….

“You will help-uh me?” he said, although it sounded much more like a question.  I scratched my head, looking him up and down, and reached into my pocket for my keys just in case.

“Do you want me to help you or are you telling me I’ll help you whether I like it or not?” I asked.

He raised a hand and waved it hastily.  “No, no, no.  You help me?”

The sensible part of my brain, which had told me not to get a haircut, which had told me not to piss my mum off, and which had told me that I oughtn’t really to be out in the park alone at night – and which I had been ignoring all evening – thought that now might be a good moment to back off and run.

Unfortunately, years of teenage rebellion had cemented a bad habit of overriding the sensible part of my brain, and the fact that I couldn’t place the guy was beginning to bug me.  He was clearly foreign, and not just from his accent: I mean, there was light enough for me to see that he was Asian, and that probably meant that he was also able to see that I was Asian.  In heritage, at least.

“What with?” I asked, reaching into my ot