I didn’t know who I should look at, and my nose scrunched up in confusion. What was their deal, and why were they all staring at us like they were expecting us to stab them? 

“Hi, we’re your neighbors. Just wanted to stop by and spread some neighborly love and say please shut the up.” I said, my voice as sweet as possible, smiling through my teeth. 

“Is that all?” The one standing at the door asked. I noticed a bit of confusion in his voice. He was wearing the most unsightly gages, and I think I may have accidentally shown my dislike towards them, because he quickly put his hood up. 

“Yes, that’s all? Have you done anything else we should come to complain about?” I rolled my eyes when they all looked at each other confused again. Were these guys foreign exchange students? I made it a point to speak much slower and louder so that we could avoid these long glances around and get straight to the ‘one of us is trying to sleep’ dialogue. 

“No.” He smiled at us for the first time, and it was one of the most picturesque smiles I had ever seen. It still didn’t draw away from the fact that he acted like this was nothing. 

“So are you not going to apologize.” Youngji held my arm in place, because she knew how aggressive I could get at sheer impoliteness. 

“Yeah, we’re sorry, we were just kind of expecting you to know who we are.” He rubbed the back of his neck and smiled again. 

“Are we supposed to?” I tried to recall my last trip to the dentist, and remember if I recognized his face from any poster at the office. I hadn’t, and even if I had, he surely wouldn’t expect everyone he met to remember a hygiene poster. “Do you know who they are?” I looked back and asked Youngji. She shook her head and shrugged. We both looked back at them simultaneously, with the look of disinterest all over our faces. 

“I guess not.” One of them muttered from the back, and they started to disperse. We turned around to leave too, and that concluded the first encounter we had with our weirdly narcissistic neighbors. It did lead to a good discussion between Youngji and I, both of us spilling our theories to each other. 

“Now that you mention it, I think I do remember seeing that guy while getting my teeth cleaned.” She nodded while speaking, and I really couldn’t tell when she was being serious anymore.
“Maybe they go to your school. Secret admirers?” I suggested, since it was pretty much no secret that Youngji was way popular with the guys. It hadn’t been the first time her fanclub’s stalking efforts had gotten to the extreme. She shook her head. 

“I doubt it. They all live with their moms. Maybe they’re internet pretty boys?” She cocked her head and looked to the left, trying to recall any of their faces. 

“Not pretty enough.” I watched as Youngji yawned, and took that as the signal to start clean up. There were tons of wrappers of candy, empty chip bags, and the most disgusting of all, Youngji’s napkins filled with chicken bones. Would it kill her to throw it in the box? I started rummaging around the mountains of trash Youngji seemed to produce just by breathing, and finally found the greasy box of chicken from the place I work. I was close to putting it away after throwing all of my horrible roommate’s trash inside, but I stopped after I noticed the same pearly white smile I had seen not too long ago. 

“Ji,” I muttered, “come over here and tell me I’m not crazy.” Youngji groaned and walked across the room, staring down at the box from over my shoulder. “These are definitely our neighbors, right?” 

“Our neighbors model for your chicken store?” I slapped her forehead and pushed her away from my shoulder. 

“I’m fairly sure they’re more than fast food models. One might even say that they’re famous.” 

I wracked through my brain trying to remember what the hell my coworker said they were called. 

Before I knew it, we were sitting in front of my computer screen, looking up every pop band to have ever had 7 members. We had looked through enough pictures and music videos to make my browser history look like it belonged to a 15 year old girl, and we finally stumbled upon a video of our lovely neighbors dancing and singing. 

“I don’t get it.” Youngji whispered after the video had ended. 

“Are we supposed to?” We looked at each other, wondering what to think or what to do with this news. Neither of us cared for pop music, especially not the genre in question. I was too busy working to get into any of it, and Youngji may seem like a complete ditz, but she’s actually a prospering electrical engineering student, and let’s face it, even if she wasn’t surprisingly brilliant, she honestly wouldn’t care. Were we still supposed to be excited? Should we continue acting like we didn’t care, which we honestly didn’t? 

I didn’t notice in my train of thought that Youngji wasn’t looking at me anymore, and a quick following of her line of sight led me to the dslr camera I used to shoot things for my online store. 

“Youngji, that is wrong.” I tried to sound firm, even though I agreed that it would be a really brilliant idea to make money off of their unfortunate neighbor decision. 

“Semi, please. You never let me do anything. Can we please exploit them? Just for a little bit? C’mon, we won’t even charge for the first batch.” She was jumping up and down like an excited child, and I couldn’t deny that it was sounding more appealing the more I thought about it. 

“Okay, but we need to take pictures of them far away from here so they don’t suspect its us, and I get a higher share because its my camera.” She stuck out her hand and we shook on it, taking in our new source of income. 

It was 5 AM, neither of us had slept, and Youngji had somehow convinced me to dress in all green, including face paint, to match the bushes we were hiding in. We heard through the grapevine (aka the stalker forums that existed throughout the internet community) that their first schedule was at 7 AM, approximately an hour away. By that logic, they should be leaving soon, and our first batch of moneymakers should be uploaded onto a custom domain very soon. 

In a moment’s notice, our boys walked out of their dorm, looking absolutely horrible. We tried to snap the pictures as quickly and quietly as possible, hoping it wouldn’t down the quality. 

As soon as they were loaded into their weird, specialized vans and out of sight, we sprinted for our apartment, uploaded the photos, and prepared to play the waiting game. We linked our sight to a number of their stalker forums, so the response should be fairly quick. Remarkably quick, even. Only a couple of minutes had passed, but we were already getting thousands of hits and comments. 

“Youngji,” I sang, getting excited at the idea of another possible job. “Our future customers are here!” Youngji sprinted over to my desk, plopping herself on my bed behind it. It was surprising that she had so much energy, on account of only sleeping for 2 or so hours and all. On a normal weekend, sleeping less than ten hours was deemed unacceptable for her. We clicked on our site, waiting patiently to see our comments of praise, and people lining up to subscribe to our services. We scrolled down to the first comment. 

Leave them alone! Why would you follow them to their home?

“That’s probably just one kid with morals.” I muttered, scrolling down to see more. 

Is that a leaf in the corner of the picture? How creepy. Stalkers like you make us look bad.

“Okay, so the first two aren’t positive, whatever.” I cleared my throat nervously. 

Not just creepy, look how bad the picture is. LOL, can’t expect stalkers to be talented. 

“Hey!” I shouted at the screen, somehow expecting to justify myself to them. “I’ll have you know I took a 16 week online course in photography! I’m probably better than you.” Youngji shook her head at me, pushing past me to retrieve the mouse. These kids were fast at commenting, and didn’t have a positive thing to say. Some denounced us as fake, saying that there was no way their idols could ever look as unsightly as they had in our pictures. The majority told us to stop stalking them and get a life, as if it was possible for us to avoid them. A good chunk of people also informed us that they were reporting us to their company, tracking our IP address, and ruining us for good. It took about 15 of those threats to finally get us to take the sight down. There were already 500,000 views on it, though. 

Weekends always consisted of updating my sight with the weekdays orders. Much to Youngji’s dismay, it meant more of a mess than usual; boxes everywhere, clothing and accessories being sorted and sprawled out around the house. Sometimes I think back to how easy it was before Youngji became my roommate, when her room was storage for me and I could be as messy as I wanted to. But her mother was a good friend of mine’s and I was doing my mom a favor by letting her live with me. I guess it was beneficial for me too. She was my model, and modeled merely because she liked hearing customers comment on her appearance. It went to her head, though. She was basically a diva. 

I had to wait 8 hours for her highness to get her beauty rest. Even after all of the time spent making sure she looked good, the majority of our shoot was still her running inside and taking forever to change. I would always be forced to sit around, taking pictures of bugs like the weird kid on the playground that had no friends. Youngji was taking particularly long today, and I wondered if she was doing it on purpose, because she was somehow convinced that I was the one that ruined the whole photo scheme. Another 20 minutes gone by waiting for Youngji to get the next outfit on, and I was so immersed in cutting off ants from their trails that I hadn’t even noticed the van arrive, or one of the seven guys approach me from behind. 

“Let me see your camera” he said sharply. I shot up, since I was taken by surprise, and was instantly filled with thousands of horrible thoughts. Had those brats really held up their threats? Was the scary guy with the backwards cap and loose fitting pants here to personally crack my skull with my camera for breaking his personal space barrier? I knew I had deleted the pictures from the camera already, but still, I was nervous in handing it over. I was so nervous that I didn’t even realize I didn’t have to hand the camera over. 

He took it from me and starting scrolling through the pictures with a straight face. How many close up shots of bugs had I taken? I mentally cursed myself for having the interests of a 12 year old boy sometimes. He finally got to one particular picture that caught his attention, I guess, and he broke out into a toothy grin. 

“Help me?” He said, looking directly into my eyes. I managed to pull myself away from his stare long enough to look down at the picture he was pointing at. It was a picture of Youngji.