Deer Luhan,

I don’t know what the is going on with all your labelmates, but just what the hell was up with Taemin’s I’M BREAKING FREE! post on SNS?  Is that a High School Musical reference?

Leigh

The first few days of the week passed pretty slowly.  I’d downloaded the video to my iPod and spent most of my spare moments watching it and laughing over Tao’s ridiculous rap and the way Sehun’s waterbottle somersaulted across the screen, and when I wasn’t trying to pretend I was working, I won’t deny I tried pretty hard to find that Johnny Chan guy again, just to see if he genuinely existed and there really had been another EXO doppelganger about.

On Tuesday evening, I finally resorted to asking Abbie if she’d seen him again, to which she just shrugged.  “He said he’d be around, though.”

On Wednesday morning, my dad told me off for trying to ditch the crutches almost a month too early.

On Wednesday evening, Abbie finally caved.  “Yeah, he’ll be at your birthday party.  Make sure you’re free from about four onwards tomorrow.”

“Oh, you’ve organised something?” I asked, surprised.  “I was just thinking about having a small thing over at home tomorrow evening with you guys.  I mean, I’m not really up to much, and besides, Jason’s back and said he would pop round.”

“I’ve already told Jason.”

“You’ve done something to him, haven’t you?  He’s being awfully quiet and evasive.”

Abbie looked horrified.  “Me?  Do something?  Never!”

Oh, and how could I possibly forget the way that social media in the K-pop fandom sphere suddenly exploded late on Tuesday night when Kyuhyun suddenly updated all of his statuses to “Operation : Success!  Time for Mission Match-Make!”

This had everybody wondering for all of about two minutes before all his labelmates – and literally all – suddenly started updating their status from airports across Asia with random slogans and taglines, some of them in English which looked like they’d had D.O.’s hand in them somewhere.

Changmin had uploaded a selca with Jessica at Incheon with the caption “eloping is better than groping!”, which made me laugh for a good few minutes.  Yunho appeared to have snatched Zhang Liyin from somewhere with a message that read something like “Chen, look what I’ve found!  And now you’re never going to find us!”  There was a photo of them inside a plane.

Donghae’s and Eunhyuk’s also made me laugh.  Donghae had written “YES NO MORE ING FINALLY I CAN SHIP MYSELF WITH EUNHYUK AGAIN!”, while Eunhyuk’s was a simple “VEGAS, BABY!”  After stalking them both for a while, it turned out that Donghae had packed himself off to Thailand with Shindong and Sungmin while Eunhyuk had managed to persuade the entirety of f(x) to go to Peru with him.

It did actually take quite a lot not to demand Abbie whether or not she’d seen all this, especially on Wednesday morning when she was saying nothing and official statements were flying thick and fast about the label not actually having a clue what was going on, but assuring everybody that it was not a mass elopement for marriage (all of Girls Generation appeared to have been snatched away by a male labelmate, so how Eunhyuk had scored the entirety of f(x) was a bit of a mystery, because there were more than enough men to go around them and f(x) could have afforded to be picky).  Only Onew and Key from SHINee appeared to have remained behind, apparently thoroughly bewildered as to where everybody else had gone.  The rest of SHINee, along with the whole of EXO, the girls from The Grace, and TVXQ, who were supposed to be doing promotions in Japan but had apparently managed to cancel everything without their managers knowing, had pretty much vanished without trace, though some people thought that Luhan changing his weibo profile picture to Donald Duck meant at least he was heading to Disneyland.  I was extremely impressed that so many of them had managed to totally evade their sasaeng fans.

In the end, the most official statement that actually made any sense and calmed people down came from Jungmo of TRAX, even though he was in military service at the time and probably wasn’t best placed to say anything.

“It’s kind of like an April Fool’s prank,” he told a frazzled-looking reporter, “except pretty much a month late and probably as some kind of joke for Mayday.”

“PR stunt?” Onew had offered when he was asked.  “I know nothing.”

“Jon Snow,” added Key.

To be honest, I was very surprised Abbie didn’t mention any of this at all, but from the way she was stressing out, I figured that perhaps she was planning something big for my birthday and hadn’t actually been looking at the internet.

Thursday morning began oddly.  Mostly because there was a husky puppy in the kitchen when I hobbled downstairs for breakfast, and my mum, who usually hated animals, wasn’t even batting an eyelid.

“Morning, honey!” she cooed as I dropped into a chair at the kitchen table.  “How many slices of bacon?”

“Mum, there’s a puppy,” I said, staring at the dog basket that the husky was sitting in, bright-eyed and wagging its tail.

“Happy birthday, darling!”  A fried egg, two slices of bacon, three sausages and a cooked tomato landed on my plate anyway, alongside a hash brown.

The puppy was shockingly well behaved: while it clearly watched me eating, it didn’t leave the basket.  After several minutes of staring, I realised it had a pink bow attached to its collar, and then it twigged that somebody had given me a husky for my birthday and given my mum hadn’