“Don’t look behind you, looks like you’ve got yourself an admirer,”

Ears perking up at ‘admirer’, Choyoung lifted her head from it’s defeated sulking position on the table and peeked over her shoulder anyway, catching a glimpse of the last person she wanted to see this very moment. Though he’d obviously seen her, she ducked underneath the table, pulling Bi down with her. She couldn’t believe Soonyoung was serious about oweing her. At first, she thought it was him being a friendly guy trying to lift the atmosphere, but after first and second break where each time he followed her around like a lost puppy, she confirmed that he was being legit.

“I told you not to look!”

“The more I’m going to look!”

“Okay, whatever, but you still haven’t told me what’s going on between you two,” Bi nudged the younger girl in the upper arm where her elbow could reach now in a crouched position, “Chan asked me not too long after you left for your locker that he saw you two together all red-faced and flustered. As your best friend, I demand to know what’s going on because I swear by Chanel that if you’re secretly seeing the second year’s math prodigy, I’m going to-”

Choyoung felt her heart drop when the chair legs caging her underneath the table slid out.

“I know you’re under there,”

The two girls exchanged glances and peeked from the edge of the table, but not sitting up completely. Narrowing her eyes, Choyoung stretched her head up high enough so that her chin barely leveled with the table, “Excuse me, but this is the first year table,”

“And as a second year, I have the privileges extend to both first and second year tables,” Soonyoung stared her down, obviously not going to back away from this fight. He’d been shoo-ed away the past two break periods by her purposely escaping into the girl’s bathroom, but this time he wasn’t going to back down.

However, Choyoung wasn’t going to deal with this now. Especially not when she was cranky from being hungry but physically just Could Not badly enough that her lunch just sat there getting cold. Her expression did not falter, “This is an invasion of privacy, Soonyoung,”

Hearing Choyoung speak to him informally like that, Bi cocked an eyebrow. This went unnoticed by the latter though as Soonyoung countered her argument with some excuse about how since it was a public school and the tables belonged to the school, the table was also public. Choyoung called ‘bull’ on the excuse, but since her legs were beginning to cramp, she returned to her seat, across from him so that she wasn’t anywhere near him. However, if Soonyoung interrupting her peaceful lunchtime wasn’t bad enough, he turned to Bi with a mischievous gleam in his eyes, “Lee Moonbi, right? The energetic cheerleader that never fails to give our school teams strength at their games. Why don’t you accompany Jihoon over there? I ditched him to sit here and I think he needs a little bit of spirit to cheer him up,”

Bi shot up from under the table, almost flipping it over with her head. She flipped her ponytail out of her face, reaching up to fix the light pink ribbon she had tied into her hair that morning, “Can I really?”

“Just tell him and anyone else who questions you that Soonyoung oppa let you,” he slipped in a quick wink, emphasizing ‘oppa’. This made Choyoung gag. On the other hand, however, the older girl was gone within seconds.

Feeling betrayed, Choyoung watched her friend slowly approach Jihoon’s table and greet him with an excited wave. How could Bi leave her alone like that? Wasn’t Bi so curious to figure out what was going on between Soonyoung and her? It’s as if the conversation between them a few seconds ago completely didn’t happen. Also - Soonyoung had just called himself ‘oppa’. Now, while that was a completely regular title, in the context that it was just used in, just thinking about it made her insides shrivel up like flowers in the winter and die. What did he want anyway.

With just the two of them now, Soonyoung’s charismatic front vanished and was replaced with a pouty puppy in it’s place. Through the tiny slits in his thick fringe, his eyebrows knit together as his lips pulled into a pity pout, still swollen from cuts and bruises similar to hers. Extending his arms out in front of him in a grabbing motion, he whined in a high-pitched voice, “Please, Choyoung! Please let me do something for you! I’ll do anything, please, just let me satisfy the uneasy guilt I have inside! It’s starting to eat me alive!”

This guy was the smartest guy in their grade?

Rubbing her temples, she shook her head and just went back to glaring at her food. If his personal problems with guilt were eating him from the inside, then that wasn’t her problem. Her problem was that hunger was about to eat her alive and she couldn’t do anything about it without breaking into tears. Sure, maybe she was overreacting to an extent, but you try eating with a busted face and knives cutting into your mouth. With a longing exhale, Choyoung threw her head back as her stomach grumbled, mumbling about - according to what Soonyoung could make out  - was about braces being stupid.

A lightbulb must have went off in his head because his eyes traveled down to the thermos full of soup his mum had prepared for him since he too had his own eating struggles. Uncapping the thermos, he held his thermos out to her, “Do you want some of mine? My mom made soup since I also have trouble chewing solids right now, but I figured that you need it more than I do,”

Choyoung’s eyes grew wide, but not for the reason Soonyoung was hinting towards. She was more eager to finally getting him to leave her alone. One day of him dogging her was enough. She di