About a week passed, and Dahyun was suspended for three days. After her suspension was lifted, almost everything went back to normal. Nobody, apart from Tzuyu, I suppose, ever found out why Dahyun did those things to that girl. It was a girl thing, the three of us concluded, and girl things were usually too complicated for three guys like us to understand, so we all left it at that. Fortunately, the year was nearing examination season, so the incident was quickly forgotten within the school, too.

As usual, the six of us sat in the canteen together, talking about the next places we wanted to go to by train. Hanbin wanted to go to Sokcho, for the sea, but the whole group concluded that it was too expensive. On the other hand, Tzuyu wanted to visit Nami Island, for the great views it had to offer (and because of the television series, Winter Sonata)—but in the end, her idea was shut down for the same reason.

Just then, while we ate our lunch, Dahyun kicked me under the table and looked over at Myoui Mina. She was with another friend, and while walking past our table, they both waved and smiled at Dahyun.

Dahyun tilted her head and looked at me, flashing a playful smile.

“Hey, guys,” she suddenly said. The others stopped talking, and turned their attention towards her. She leaned closer towards the table and whispered, “June’s going on a date with Myoui Mina.”

They all looked at me with a shocked expression. I wasn’t sure whether I should’ve taken it as an insult or not. Nevertheless, I kept quiet and only shook my head.

“Yes you are,” Dahyun said, nodding hers.

I shook my head again. And in return, she gave me another kick under the table, even harder than her last one.

“Ouch!”

“Yes you are! Hey, guys, tell him that he is! He has to!”

“Hey, Dahyun, you must be out of your mind or something,” Jiwon laughed. “Why would someone like Myoui Mina want to date someone like June? Is this another one of your lame jokes?”

Dahyun landed a punch on Jiwon’s arm. “I’m not kidding, !”

Both of the two girls aside, everybody still seemed confused.

“Listen, you es,” Dahyun finally said, heaving a small sigh afterwards. “June’s going on a date with Myoui Mina. It was meant to be a blind date and all, but you guys know how stubborn this guy can be. So I thought, hey, maybe if I told him that the girl was Myoui Mina he’d actually go. I mean, like, who the hell would say no to a girl like her? Have you seen her—“

“Why June?” Jiwon cut in.

Dahyun raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Why not Chanwoo? Or Hanbin? Or me?” he asked. “Why did you pick June?”

“I rolled a dice,” she simply answered.

Hanbin and Chanwoo just chuckled, and Jiwon continued, “You rolled a freakin’ dice?”

“And it didn’t land on your number, Jiwon. Sorry, fellas. June’s just really lucky, I guess.”

“So are you actually going to do it?” Chanwoo asked, with zero hesitation.

I shook my head once more. “I’m not going to do it.”

“Why not?” Tzuyu chimed in.

I shrugged my shoulders, and mumbled, “I don’t know. Just because.”

“Do you already have someone that you like, June?” Hanbin suddenly asked.

I was taken aback by his question. Still, I laughed it off and told him no.

Everybody paused at that one, and suddenly Dahyun covered with her hands, and her eyes widened. I looked at her, and she looked back at me. “Yes, you do!”

“What?”

“You’re lying! You do have someone that you like!”

“I’m not lying.”

“You are! C’mon, June, who’s the girl?” She pressed her hands together on the table and thought about it for a while. “Tzuyu, who’s that girl in his English class? The pretty girl that went up to him and asked to borrow his book that one time during lunch.”

“Ah, I know her! You mean—”

“It isn’t her,” I cut in.

“So who is it?” Hanbin joined in once more, and stared me in the eye. “If it isn’t her then who is it?”

The five of them kept on proposing random names. I scoffed, and felt the air get hotter.

“Fine, I’ll go on a date with Myoui Mina,” I finally surrendered. “Do you guys believe me now?”

They all looked at me, smiling as if they had planned the whole thing out and had caught me in some sort of trap.

“All it took was some pressure, huh?” Dahyun remarked.

The bell rang right at that moment, and we scurried back to our classrooms. As always, the hallway was crowded, so the six of us ended up getting split up on the way. Chanwoo, Tzuyu and Dahyun rushed ahead, blending in with the crowd, and so I ended up walking to my classroom with Hanbin and Jiwon. Being seniors, their classroom was on the floor above ours.

“Catch you later, June,” Jiwon said, before walking the other direction. Hanbin said nothing but gave me a two-finger salute. I did it back to him. And then all of a sudden, he smirked, and this caused me to look at him.

And I remember thinking I was crazy at the time, because then I saw Hanbin mouth the words:

“It’s Dahyun, isn’t it?”

. . .

By the time I arrived at our meeting place, Mina was already there, wearing a long black coat and a red scarf. The winter sun had reflected onto her hair, and her skin seemed to be translucent under the light. She looked up and grinned, “You must be June, right?”

I introduced myself, and told her I was from the classroom next to hers. There was a vague sense of awkwardness between us. What made things worse was that she was so beautiful to the point I felt my cheeks turn red each time I looked at her.

I asked her if she waited long. She said she just arrived herself.

“Should we grab lunch?” I asked. “Or would you prefer coffee?”              

“Coffee,” she said with a smile. “Do you mind if I pick a place?”

. . .

The two of us took the bus to Seocho, the journey taking only five minutes. We slowly ambled down a few roads, and during that time we managed to fill the silence with small talk. About school, mostly, and the upcoming exams.

And then we went inside a café. The store was old-fashioned, with high ceilings and wooden planks, some mellow jazz music was playing, and there were only a few customers. As soon as we entered, the smell of coffee immediately hit our noses. Mina breathed in, and another smile graced her lips.

“My favourite smell in the world,” she told me. I couldn’t help but smile.

We both ordered Americano and cheesecake, and then we took the seats in the corner. At first, it seemed like a normal date. Mina asked me questions about myself, and in return I asked her questions about her. I told her that I wanted to become an architect, and she told me that there wasn’t anything that she had set her mind on yet. I told her that I liked books, and that my favourite book was The Great Gatsby, and she told me that The Phantom Tollbooth was hers, but The Great Gatsby was a close second. We talked about more things, then, and surprisingly our conversation lasted about two hours.

Out of the blue, she mentioned how she always saw me with Dahyun and the others at school, and then went on to ask how we became friends.

“It just happened, I guess,” I ended up telling her. “I wasn’t there to see the group form.”

“So you were the last to join the flock,” she said, nodding her head. “Still, I’m pretty envious of what you guys have, you know?”

I looked at Mina for a second and prompted her to carry on.

“You guys just have this amazing chemistry. Whenever I see you and your friends, hanging out at the canteen, laughing together and messing around, it reminds me of my family back home. Maybe you don’t see it because you’re already a part of it. But I think everyone else at school sees it.”

“Hm, I understand,” I told her.

“I had friends like those in Japan, too. And now that I think about it,” she continued. “When I was with them, at the time I wasn’t even thinking about the rare harmony we all had. Do you know what I was thinking about at the time?”

“What is it?”

“‘This has to end someday, right?’” she said, a soft sigh escaped her lips. “I was always thinking that something bad was going to happen to us. Something was ought to destroy our harmony. The weird thing is that I did nothing and I just waited for it.”

“And what happened?”

“Distance,” she said. “We all ended up moving away.”

“I see.”

“Oh god, sorry for being such a downer.”

“You’re not being a downer,” I chuckled. “It’s fine.”

“It’s my first time talking about things that happened back home,” she explained. “I guess I just got carried away.” She tilted her head down to the empty cup of coffee in front of her, and I could see that she was a tiny bit flustered. She couldn’t stare me in the eye.

“Do you not like talking about it?” I asked her. “Home, I mean. And your old friends.”

She shook her head slightly, and chuckled underneath her breath. “Honestly, I don’t even like thinking about it. I get too homesick. I don’t know why I talked about it just now.”

“I wonder.”

“You’re a good listener,” she said. “That’s why, I guess.”

I scoffed. “Should I take that as a compliment?”

“Good listeners are rare, so of course that’s a compliment.”

It made me smile, but I decided not to reply anymore. I sipped the last of my beverage, and it was cold, bitter and sweet.

“You kind of give off the same feeling, too,” Mina suddenly said. “You have a place—or even a certain someone—that you don’t like thinking about, right?”

I stayed quiet.

I thought about my old hometown and the older brother that I’d forgotten.

The name that I left behind.

My childhood.

The hospital.

Something about it all had tugged at my heartstrings.

“That’s why,” she said, as if she understood my silence. “Maybe that’s why I chose to talk about home to someone like you. We’re really similar, in a sense that nostalgia screws us over ten times harder than it does everyone else.”

And it was at this point that I stopped seeing Myoui Mina simply as just some beautiful girl that, thanks to my luck, happened to be my date. Now I knew that she was more than that. She wasn’t the type of person to be taken lightly, and realizing that I was sitting in front of a girl like her had suddenly sent my heart turbulent.

“Do you mind if we see each other again next week?” I asked. I had no idea what came over me, then, but I just felt like those words were waiting to be said.

“I’d like that,” she agreed. “Next time, you pick the place.”

I looked at her, and felt my cheeks glow red. The strange thing was, I didn’t even bother hiding it.

. . .

We took the bus home together, and on the bus, the topic of Kim Dahyun suddenly came up. I gave Mina a compliment on her Korean, and how good it was considering she had only studied it for three years. She already mastered the basics, and even knew some of the slangs I didn’t even know myself. I told her I was plenty shocked at how good her pronunciation was when I’d first heard her speak.

“Dahyun taught me how to swear, too,” she added giddily.

I chuckled. I didn’t even have to question whether it was true or not. “What swear words did she teach you?”

Mina smiled and whispered, “Motherfu—”

I burst out laughing. “Don’t say it. It’s filthy and people will look at you weird. Just let Kim Dahyun do the swearing.”

“Nope,” Mina said. “I can’t just let Kim Dahyun do the unpleasant things. I promised myself I’d swear at the next person that she fights with.”

As soon as Mina said those words, I had a hunch that she was referring to the incident that got Dahyun suspended from school. And I knew I’d be crossing the line if I asked Mina to carry on—I felt like I’d be invading Dahyun’s privacy.

But still, I did it nevertheless.

“Why would you do such things for her?”

She looked at me, and it was clear that she was thinking about something. Finally, she said, “Dahyun gets her hands dirty for other people, and she doesn’t even hesitate when doing it. I envy her the most.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“She suffers alone so that her friends don’t have to suffer. You’ve seen it. Last week, when she destroyed that girl’s things...”

Mina told me that the fight had started as a result of a comment that the girl made about Tzuyu in front of all the other girls. It was a comment so humiliating that I could understand how desperately angry that must have made someone like Dahyun, who was there to hear it at the time. Mina also explained how some people still continued to talk badly about Dahyun after that incident, calling her all sorts of names.

“Her suspension should’ve been longer. She thinks she can do whatever she wants just because she’s from a wealthy family. Her manners are the worst,” Mina said. “They say all those things, even though they’ve only seen one side of the story.”

“I thought the whole incident died down,” I admitted. “She never talks about it.”

“I told you, she suffers alone,” she repeated. “I think that telling you would’ve hurt her pride. But still, I’m glad you were there to stop her,” Mina continued. “I made a promise—I’d save Dahyun next time.”

. . .

“Hello.”

“June?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Why the hell are you calling at this hour? Are you freakin’ crazy? It’s like two in the morning.”

“You do it all the time, so why can’t I?”

“So what do you want? Did your date with Myoui Mina go wrong or something?”

“Um.”

“I don’t wanna hear it. I’m freakin’ sleepy. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Wait.”

“I’m gonna freakin’ kill you, I swear.”

“I want to tell you about the book, Rabbit, Run. You wanted to hear my thoughts on it, remember? I just finished it right now, so I’m going to tell you what I think.”

“When I said that, I didn’t mean at two freakin’ a.m. in the morning, .”

“Should I just hang up, then?”

“Just hurry up and get on with telling me about this book already!”

“It might take long, though.”

“Are you freakin’ kidding me, June?”

“Okay, okay, I’ll tell you about it.”

“I’ll listen, so hurry up already!”

. . .

shoot you down // his favourite song