Deer Luhan,

Life is unfair.  Life is horribly cruel and unfair, and it’s playing tricks on me.  I don’t like it.

Leigh

While there wasn’t really much point grounding me as I was pretty much housebound, my mum did ban me from the internet so I could catch up on the four and a half months of university I’d missed before I risked having to drop out for a year.

“Books are healthier than computers,” she maintained obstinately every time I complained that I could access half the stuff I needed for my course online.  I swear she was just doing it to annoy me.

Abbie dropped by most days with books I needed to help me catch up and transcriptions of lectures and notes that Lucy had passed on, since she was the only other good friend of mine on the exact same course as me.  The exams fortunately had modules I could sit in the summer rather than missing out totally on everything, which was going to be a total pain, but doable.  Mostly, I looked forward to Abbie’s visits so I could steal her iPad to go on the internet.

I kind of had to hide that I was searching for news of EXO or ways to get in touch with them.  Abbie would have gone absolutely crazy on me in all senses of the word if she’d found out, especially the latter, and while I liked the guys very much, I knew what Abbie was like as a fangirl and it was pretty much the only thing about her that I intensely disliked.  I didn’t want to be caught up in it.

Abbie had long been aware of the fact that I did not approve of her fangirling, whether it was over Benedict Cumberbatch or Chanyeol’s left ear, so she toned it down.  She actually managed to get through one afternoon without mentioning K-pop at all, which genuinely impressed me.  But getting back in contact with EXO proved to be much more difficult than I ever would have reckoned.

For a start, it had got out that there was a girl the EXO boys had been visiting pretty much constantly in hospital round about the time I was there, and that she was apparently very close to one of the EXO members.  There were rumours that she looked like Luhan, or possibly Kris, and that she was the reason the whole of EXO-K except Suho was now completely fluent in English.  The sleuths of the K-pop fandom world had pegged this girl as a Brit from the smooth English accents everybody except Kris and Luhan now sported, and speculation was rife as to who in EXO she was probably dating.

There were also rumours that this girl had died, gone home, or broken up with whichever boyfriend it was, because there were plenty of photos of morose EXO being touted as proof of this.

Then one of the Japanese girls from the group I’d helped rescue arrived home, got on social media, and things kind of went to hell.  She confirmed all the rumours, claimed the girl had rescued her personally from the mafia (which was true, though unless she was the one who’d woken up on me in the kitchen she’d been unconscious the entire time) and that she was called Lee something, or something Lee, which lots of people had already picked up on and started using in social media.  Apparently I was also very nice and totally and utterly badass.

Of course, the K-pop fandom being the K-pop fandom, this blew up everywhere with people asserting it was true, utterly false, and everything in between.

I also forgot to mention: the Japanese girl had seen me and Luhan together with Xiumin in the hospital gardens.  EXO’s company explained it away with zealous photoshopping to my chest area, saying that Luhan’s brother had been the one who’d been injured so badly.

That sent the fans into a complete tizzy again.  It kind of sent my head whirling, because most of this happened over the course of a day (at least, all the stuff from the point the Japanese girl showed up), and I was only getting snippets of it from time to time when Abbie’s back was turned or when she went to the bathroom, but she actually had the tabs open herself, for once, so I didn’t have to go searching for anything.

But still, it was enough for no fewer than four thousand, six hundred and twenty-two fans to take to all forms of social media with every possible variation of my name (or Lee Lee, which a number had changed to Leigh Lee just to be different) and start causing total chaos.  There had already been a few hundred before that, but apparently the Japanese girl’s word was divine revelation to some.  There were death threats flying everywhere and some of them desperately trying to assert that everything was true and that X member of EXO was their one true love and always had been, so “please don’t cut off from communication with me, oppa, it’s not fair: that’s why I’m calling out to the world!”

In the midst of all this, I was terrified that Abbie was going to turn around and ask me exactly what I’d been doing with EXO, but she only went as far as commenting that I’d seriously looked like Luhan when I’d had pink hair (it had now grown out, and in spite of my dad’s orders not to touch anything with ammonia in it, one of the very first things I’d done on getting out of hospital was to die it a dark auburn sort of colour), which kind of worried me.  Then she dropped the subject altogether, which worried me even more.

I almost started laughing when EXO began to drop teasers for their comeback video and, by some incredibly ironic twist of fate, Luhan had the same hair colour as me.  I would have pointed it out to Abbie, but she was more concerned with other things.

“Hey, Leigh,” she said, looking up from where she was sprawled on my bed while I sat on the floor looking through my shelf of computer games.  “What does Eo-peu-la-ee-shyun Kok-eu-blok-eu mean in English?”

“It sounds like Operation to me,” I said absently, hand hovering between COD and Age of Empires.  “Why?”

“Kyuline have it plastered all over their social media.  Actually, so does the whole of EXO, f(x) and Super Junior, except for Donghae and Eunhyuk.  Kyuhyun, Changmin and Minho have actually had it up for a long time, along with Taemin and Chen, but this is the first time everybody’s taken to it.”

Mention of Kyuhyun had me scrambling for my copy of Starcraft.  He’d written Changmin’s phone number on the front of it and I’d totally forgotten!  How could I have been so stupid?

“Baekhyun and Chanyeol keep referring to Chen as Osco on broadcast and social media, too,” she went on.  “Does that mean anything?”

I froze, flushing.  “It sounds like they’re failing at calling him Oscar, but God knows why that would happen.  It’s not a Korean word.”

“Oh.”  She fell silent.

I continued my hunt for Starcraft, but it w