Deer Luhan,

I think I now understand why your manager refuses to live with you.

Leigh

The kitchen, I kid you not, had a proper football goal in it.  And the bathroom, on the opposite side of the (enormous) apartment, had one fitted in over the bath.  For starters, I wasn’t quite sure how you could get a decent shot at either goal when your angle was limited by the doorframes into each room, but the idea of bathing with a net hanging over me wasn’t exactly scintillating.  It kind of sounded like a nightmare from Agamemnon’s death in the bathtub.  And third of all, I was pretty certain they shouldn’t have been playing football indoors anyway.

“Challenge,” Lay had joked when I’d written out my opinion on the subject, and I decided that perhaps it was just best if I didn’t know.

Chatting to Luhan that evening was a little awkward as he was the only one able to speak.  I had to lock myself away in the bathroom in order to do it, too, and we eventually struck up a rhythm in which I typed through whatever I wanted to say on the IM and he spoke, largely in slow and uncomplicated Mandarin, but explaining the odd thing in Korean when I didn’t understand.

“Did the security guys get the package to you?” he asked me.  I nodded.  He smiled.  I couldn’t help noticing he looked a little haggard: there were dark circles under his eyes, and his skin was unnaturally pale.  There was also a dusting of stubble across his chin.

“Great,” he said.  “Now, the most important part of that pack is the Rubik’s cube.  I’m fairly often asked to solve it on shows in under a minute, and if you can’t speak, they’ll probably get you to do that.  The formula with all the algorithms is in there.  If you memorise it, you can’t fail.  The credit card has about 126000 kuai on it – let me get you the code….”

While he tried to remember what the code was, I took the opportunity to look up conversation rates, and my jaw dropped.  He was trusting me with nearly twelve thousand pounds.

“None of it’s blood money,” he assured me as the PIN popped up on the IM and I hastily wrote it down.  “Do what you want with it.  I guess I kind of owe you.”

He went through the rest of the contents of the care package quickly – they included his key into the M dorm, a travel-pass for public transport around Beijing, a list of good places to eat, a couple of Chinese books to read and some CDs to listen to, a spare key into his home (should I ever need it), and a map of the area and mug shots of people I was supposed to know and recognise and who they were to Luhan.

“Hopefully you won’t need to use that last one,” he told me.  “Oh, and I should probably explain that life in M is a little different to when we’re all together—”

What’s with the forfeit game? I typed to him.

“Oh, you’ve met that already?  It’s kind of like a twenty-four-seven spin on Truth or Dare – we started playing it so we could all have fun despite the language barrier.  Chen’s Mandarin always gets creepily fluent when it’s his turn to choose the forfeits.”

What are the rules?

Luhan grinned.  “Basically, if somebody says anything at all that can be verified, you shout ‘challenge’.  They then have to prove what they said or forfeit.  If you forfeit, the person who challenged you chooses a penalty and you have to carry it out.  You can challenge pretty much any statement, even if you know it’s true.  Tao often gets challenged over his name just for laughs.  Kris does over his ability to draw all the time – that’s where there are so many of his pictures in the dorm.  We keep telling him it’s a forfeit, but he doesn’t agree, so that one’s kind of an impasse, but it usually comes up at least once every couple of days.”

I nodded.  I had wondered about why all the doodles were on display.  Some of them had even been framed.

“I totally rock this game, by the way,” Luhan said.  “Anyway, if you challenge something that can’t be verified either way, you forfeit, and the person you challenged picks the penalty.  Oh, and if you respond to a forfeit with a challenge, that’s not allowed either: you forfeit then, too, but that’s not very common.”

I think I did that earlier today, I wrote.

Luhan’s eyes flickered down to the bottom of the screen as he read the message, and he pursed his lips.  “I get the feeling my reputation for this game is going to nosedive, isn’t it?”

I supressed a smirk, but somebody hammered on the door before either of us could continue the conversation.

“Lu-ge, I need to wash!  Can you get a move on?”

I need to go, I tapped out quickly to Luhan.  That’s Tao and it’s getting hard to think up excuses not to shower with him.

Luhan let out a soft snort of laughter and waved, disconnecting the call.

We had a TV appearance the next day.  The presenter had been informed of my inability to speak and tried to be really nice about it by giving us all boards to write on.  We ended up playing a few games and Tao gave a demonstration with his nun chucks before I was presented with a Rubik's cube.  The presenter said something to me I didn’t quite understand, but “forty-five seconds” and “last time” came up, which I thought was cause for alarm.

“Reckon you can do it in under forty-five seconds?” Lay asked, seeing my panicked expression and confirming my worst fears.  I shook my head and fiddled anxiously with the cube as the presenter pulled up the stopwatch on her phone before bracing myself to smile at the cameras and mouth of course.  Following the algorithms the previous night, the fastest I’d solved the cube once I’d memorised the patterns was just over a minute.

“Challenge,” Chen breathed in my ear.  It was the last thing I wanted right then.  I turned to glower at him as the presenter announced: “start!”

The others continued with the interview as I fumbled with the cube.  I managed it in fifty-eight seconds, and I could practically feel Chen’s smirk burning into the back of my head.

Then came the questions about the aborted Christmas promotions due to my being ill and Baekhyun’s hospitalisation.

“Luhan,” said the MC, “you don’t appear to be much better now.”

I shook my head.  Lay took the mic.

“It’s odd,” he said.  “Actually, when we were back in Korea, Luhan wasn’t very well and couldn’t sing, but he could speak.  But we were told it was best that it looked like he couldn’t make any noise at all.”

I wrote it was frustrating in large characters on my board and held it up.  The MC and the audience laughed.

“And now we’re back home,” Lay continued, “he’s suddenly come down with a really bad infection and he actually can’t speak at all, so we’re all taking advantage of this.”

I double-underlined the characters for frustrating, making Kris grin.

“Chen,” said the MC, “how do you look after your voice?  Maybe you can share some tips with Luhan?”

Chen started spouting stuff about diet and sleep and vocal warm ups, but Lay cut in again.

“Luhan does all those,” he said.  “He was just unlucky and got ill.”

Chen agreed with him.  “We always used to do those exercises together,” he said.  “Hopefully Luhan just won’t get sick in the future.”

“And EXO-K,” the woman went on, “last time you came here together with them, didn’t you?”

The others nodded, and I followed suit.

“How are they all?  We’ve all heard about what happened to Baekhyun and we’re rather worried….”

Kris handed his mic to me before remembering that I wouldn’t be able to speak, so I took it as my cue to start scribbling furiously on the board.  It tested my Mandarin to the max, especially when I realised that I didn’t know the word for ‘to discharge’.  I turned to Lay, shoving the board in his direction and discreetly pointing out the gap I’d left.

“Ah,” said Lay, raising the mic.  “Luhan-ge says he wante