Deer Luhan,

EXO-M… where do I start?  Now this is more what I expected of dorm life.  The place is a tip already, and at a rough estimate, I’d say it’ll be a week and a half before it’s impossible to walk across the living room floor because of discarded clothes.  Nobody knows where anything is in the kitchen because we don’t have D.O. to organise it and Lay seems to forget where he’s put everything.  And the boisterous behaviour – you guys really let loose here, don’t you?  But seriously, God forbid anybody ever finds out what you’re really like behind that front door, because it would ruin your image forever.

Leigh

I was converted to the EXO-M way of dorm life early the next morning.  And considering I really resent being woken up before seven a.m., that’s actually saying something.

“Luhan!” Tao’s voice was yelling as if the building was about to collapse, “Luhan, get out of there!”

I leapt out of my bed with a start, accidentally knocking a chair over onto Lay’s bed and waking him up, too.

Giving a bleary yawn, he stretched and sat up.

“Wassa matter?”

“Luhan!” Tao yelled again.  I heard something whacking against something.  Possibly a fist against a door.  Tao was kind of mad.  I dithered, wondering if it was better to face his wrath or pretend it wasn’t me, whatever it was.

“Go calm him down,” Lay mumbled, flopping back onto the bed and pulling the duvet up over himself.  “He obviously wants you.”

Reluctantly, I shuffled out into the hallway.  Tao was jogging frantically on the spot by the bathroom door, one hand reaching towards his privates and the other hammering against the wood.

“Luhan, will you get out of there?!  I’m dying!”

I tapped him on the shoulder, rubbing one sleep-filled eye with my free hand.

For a moment, he stilled, one leg raised in mid-jog and his arm frozen in the act of pounding at the door again.  His head tilted back as he looked at me.

Then everything snapped back to normal and he resumed killing the door.

“Kris!  Get a move on – I need to use the bathroom!”

After a couple of minutes, Kris appeared, followed by a bleary-eyed Xiumin.

“Tao, it’s half-six in the morning,” Kris mumbled.  “What are you doing?”

“Somebody’s locked himself in the toilet!” Tao fumed.  “He’s been in there twenty minutes!”

“Well, it obviously wasn’t me,” Kris yawned.  Tao scowled at him and then went back to hammering on the door.

“Chen, you troll, open up!”

One of the bedroom doors opened and Chen popped his head out.  “What?  I’m trying to sleep.  Do you have any idea what time it is?”

Even garbling his words around a yawn, he sounded royally pissed.  Tao decided it was best to vent his frustration at somebody else.

“Xiu— Lay!  Will you please get your behind out of the bathroom?”

I frowned.

“Lay, for the love of God!”

I tapped Xiumin on the shoulder, and then pointed to my room and mimed sleeping.

“Tao,” Xiumin began, “Luhan says Lay’s asleep in his room.”

“He can’t be!” Tao yelped, hopping from one leg to the other.  “You four are here, which means Lay has to be the one in the toilet!”

Lay chose that moment to make his appearance.

“You called?” he asked in his best unicorn voice.

The scene in the room froze for a couple of seconds.  We all looked from one to the other.  Tao rattled the bathroom door handle.

“Tao, we’re all here,” Kris told him.  “There’s nobody in the bathroom—”

Tao went still and looked at Kris for several seconds before his eyes rolled up into the back of his head with a whimper of something like “ghost” and he collapsed with a crash.  We all jumped.

There was silence as we each considered who ought to move Tao’s body.  Eventually, Chen stopped blinking like an owl.

“Whoops,” he said.  “I wasn’t expecting him to freak out that badly.”

Kris looked up at him.  “Chen, what have you done now?”

“Nothing!” he protested.

“Challenge,” said Xiumin as Lay rolled Tao into the recovery position.  Chen held his hands up.

“For future reference,” he said, “the bathroom lock is the easiest one to pick – either to open or close.”

“You locked us out?” Kris asked incredulously.  Chen was unable to help his smirk.

“From eleven p.m. last night.”

“D*mn,” said Xiumin.  “I thought that was Lay in the toilet.”

I thought it was Tao, I typed into Luhan’s phone and held it up for Lay to see.

“I thought it was Xiumin.”

Chen held up an empty hand, then quickly turned it around.  I saw a large, familiar copper coin resting in his palm and started forwards with a muted exclamation of surprise.

“Ta-dah!” Chen exclaimed, tossing the two pence coin to Kris, who’d joined the group of us by the bathroom door.  “I don’t even call the lock on that door a proper lock.  Saw some kids doing this in one of the public toilets back when we were on tour in the UK and noticed the locks were the same as the bathroom here, so I kept the coin.”

We all exchanged cautious glances.  Kris turned back to Chen, and it was clear that he was trying to hold back his anger.

“So you’re the reason I had to ring the manager up at two in the morning because I needed a piss?” he demanded.

Chen’s face lit up.  “What, really?”

Kris snorted and decided to retain what was left of his pride by turning to the door with the coin and trying to unlock it.

“Dude, you actually risked your life for that?” Xiumin gasped out.  “I went to the twenty-four-seven fast food restaurant.”

“I went to the local park,” said Lay.  All four of us looked at him.

Trooper, I typed into Luhan’s phone.

“Challenge,” snorted Chen.  “It’s, like, twenty blocks away.”

Lay scratched the back of his head.  “Yeah, you’re right.  I didn’t actually need to get up during the night, but I’m kind of bursting now.  Must be all the toilet talk.”

Given the amount Lay had drunk the previous night, I was absolutely shocked he hadn’t felt a midnight call of nature.  Apparently, one of the requirements of Forfeit Time when it was on the town was that you’d had something to drink before each forfeit, and Lay had had a lot of forfeits.  Still, it had taken me three shots of baijiu just to muster up the courage to do my first one of requesting – in mime, no less – a pregnancy test from a very surprised woman and professed EXO fan at the pharmacy around the corner.  Kris, conversely, had needed less than half a gulp of Tsingtao before strutting off to let rip with his screamo part from Mama on a street corner.  It had almost sparked a brawl with a drunk, buff guy nearly twice Kris’ size who’d thought Kris was yelling at him, and we’d had to run from the police after that.

Tao chose that moment to return to his senses with a groan, just as Kris got the door open.  With a humungous yawn, Lay helped the younger boy to sit up and then blinked slowly several times and shuffled back to his room.

“Come on, Tao,” Kris sighed, frustrated and still evidently pissed off, when Tao made no move towards the bathroom.  “People are going to be queuing if you don’t get a move on.”

Tao glanced at what was visible of the football net over the bath and then back at Kris.

“B-but gege,” he said shakily, “there’s a ghost in there—”

“I promise you there’s no ghost—”

“Can you come to the toilet with me?”

“What the hell, Tao, no—!”

“Please?”

“N—”

Tao tugged on Kris’ pyjama leg.  “I’m scared.”

He must have spent time with Taemin, because his puppy eyes were quite something.

“N— fine.  Just this once.”  He turned to Chen with a glare that could have frozen hell.  “You are going to pay for this later,” he mouthed, or I assumed it was something to that effect, and he took Tao into the bathroom.

Xiumin cracked up the instant the door closed.

“My God,” he wheezed as he tried to catch his breath.  “First the weird noises on that microphone toothbrush that fan gave you so he asks people to shower with him, and now this?  Brilliant.  Cruel, but brilliant!”

Chen tapped his fingers absently against his chin.

“In interests of survival,” he said, “I don’t think now is the best time to tell Kris we swapped Tao’s shampoo for blue hair dye, so let’s pray Tao doesn’t want to wash.”

Xiumin stopped laughing to look at him.  “Wait, we actually did that?  I can’t remember it.”

Chen bit his lip, and it might just have been me, but it looked a little like he was trying really,