[F] Chen/Baek/Yeol: Take a left at the broken tree
Baekhyun and Kyungsoo RecommendationsTitle: Take a left at the broken tree
Author: Black_Keys
Characters: Kim Min Ji, Park Chanyeol, Byun Baekhyun, Kim Jongdae, Jang Ye Jin
Genre: Romance, Friendship, Slice of life, Drama, Slight Angst
Description:
Jang Ye Jin was the girl of every boy’s dream. She was smart, she was pretty and she was athletic. Byun Baekhyun ranked her as the most beautiful girl in the school for three years in a row. Kim Jongdae acknowledged her as his only worthy competitor in academics. And Park Chanyeol openly declared her as his ideal type since the day they met. Jang Ye Jin was the girl of my nightmare. My name is Kim Min Ji and I am invisible.
Preface:
When you are a young and energetic kid in the 90s, there weren’t any smartphones or no one got quite understand the internet yet. Thinking back, how did we occupy ourselves? I suppose, there is no such thing as boredom when you grow up in the same street as Byun Baekhyun, Kim Jongdae and Park Chanyeol.
We knew each other since we were babies. Since we were all born in 1992, we had been been in the same class since pre-school. Naturally we would haven been separated if there were enough kids in this street to make two classes, unfortunately the teachers would just have to bear with us.
It’s really not as if we try to make their life difficult. I mean, I try my best for every single tests, it’s not like I failed everything on purpose. Baekhyun was a naturally curious kid, how could you blame him for having a question for every piece of new knowledge we were learning? Jongdae wouldn’t be disturbing our classmates so much if he weren’t so smart that every lessons bored him to death since he knew all of it already. And Chanyeol… Well okay. I have no excuses for Chanyeol. He is just Chanyeol.
Our childhood wouldn’t have been the same without Chanyeol though. He was the one with the crazy ideas, like the time we tried driving Uncle Byun’s car when we were eight or the time we decided that a living rooster would be a good teachers’ day gift when we were 10? When Chanyeol has an idea, Jongdae would make a plan to ensure 'maximal success rate'. Baekhyun would always be the lookout and distraction so guess who had to catch a rooster? You guessed it, yours truly.
I am not a pushover. No. I don’t blindly listen to the things they told me to do. Their reasoning always seem to make sense to me. As the only girl, the adults let me off easier than them if we got caught. I mean they do try and bail me out, sometimes.
These boys, are my everything. When you are the middle child, you get ignored a lot. But the boys never leave me out of anything. We are a team. We are inseparable. My childhood wouldn’t be the same without them.
Good things never last, unfortunately. Everything changed when we were 11. Nothing was the same since Jang Ye Jin moved to our street.
I remembered it well, the day we met her. We were cycling back from the jetty, the four of us, when a moving van pulled up beside us, nearly causing me to fall off my bike. A Chinese man popped his head of the driver’s window and asked us for the location of Street 61 in broken Korean. That was our street. We turned to each in confusion, none of us knew that we were getting a new neighbor. Chanyeol smiled politely at the man, who we would eventually learned to be Ye Jin’s stepfather, and replied him.
“All the way down this road and take a left at the broken tree.”
Please do read this story! It's one of the best I've ever read. Even though it wasn't mainly about Baekhyun, it just killed me to read about my bias. Min Ji's feelings are relatable as well. Though I'm more of a Ye Jin person. It's a great read!
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