Jinsu’s father wanted Jinsu to stay home the next day to talk about the Attayear and so that she could look round the machine, and Jinsu didn’t actually know whether that or going to school was a worse idea.  Her father had been excruciatingly embarrassing the previous evening and she just wanted a break from him and everything to do with time machines, but on the other hand, she doubted it was something Byun Baekhyun would have taken well either.

In the end, she opted for feigning illness and refused to get out of bed.  For good measure, she’d locked her door and wouldn’t let anybody in so they couldn’t check on her.  She’d never played sick before and her parents knew that she wanted to be left alone when she was ill, and so they just left it.  Jinsu suspected that some of it was to do with her father not wanting to waste time or energy on his supposedly ill daughter when he had better things to do.

“But Dad does that,” Jimin told her patiently.  “All parents are embarrassing.  You just have to put up with it, Jin.”

“Byun Baekhyun is going to kill me when I get back to school.”  Jinsu picked moodily at the yellow pillow case.  She was lying on her stomach with her duvet drawn up over her head, the phone on loudspeaker in front of her.  “I don’t even like the guy, but Dad was actually awful to him.  And God, Ji, Jongdae’s cousin was there too and saw it all.  Jongdae’s entire family is going to judge me so hard.  And Minseok seems like a nice person too – now he’s going to project Father onto me.”

“I think somebody clever enough to build a time machine is more than capable of figuring out that you’re not your father, Jinsu, I wouldn’t worry.  But hey, aren’t you supposed to be in school?  What time is is?”

“I’m sick,” Jinsu replied pitifully.

Jimin gave a fake, very unconvincing high-pitched cough.  Jinsu would have given him the finger if it was on video call.  Sensing that Jinsu probably wasn’t going to deign him with a response, Jimin searched for something else to talk about.

“When you say Jongdae’s cousin Minseok, do you mean a small kind of chubby guy with a fringe practically in his eyes who spends half his time speaking in Chinese and trying to get people to call him Xiumin?”

“What?  No.  No, Minseok is buff, Jimin, very buff.”  Jinsu frowned, trying to call the man to mind again.  “He’s getting married soon—”

“Holy God, I think we are talking about the same person,” Jimin interrupted.  “Wow, he must have been working out.  Amazing what a girlfriend can do for you.  He was in the year below me at university and everybody kind of knew him because he was the sort of person we all expected to go off and become a librarian or a monk.  And now he’s working on a time machine.  Rad.”

Jinsu fake gagged.  “Never use that word again.”

“What, rad?  But it’s rad to use rad, Jin, you don’t understand—”

“I’m hanging up.”

“Love you!” he managed to call out before Jinsu rang off.  Seconds later, a text popped up that read rude, but Jinsu merely texted back with the time (twenty-one minutes past nine) and pointed out that he ought to be working, and that just because he was the CEO of a small branch of the family company, it didn’t mean he could slack off.

Too busy working to respond to your message right now, please try again later, popped up on her screen almost the second she sent her message and Jinsu snorted.  If she hadn’t known her brother was twenty-six, she never would have believed it.  Rolling over, she poked her nose out of the duvet.

The blank ceiling stared back at her.  Back when she’d been younger and afraid of the dark, it had had glow-in-the-dark stars up on it, but she’d organised and reorganised the little pieces of plastic so many times into constellations and then into symmetrical patterns (because the constellations didn’t look neat enough) and then back again (because the patterns didn’t look natural enough) that her mother had eventually taken them away.  Now, the ceiling was just an expanse of white, recently repainted because a little discolouration due to the age of the house had constantly been bugging Jinsu.

Her room itself was a large one, over twenty square feet, and with a single gigantic window that was almost floor to very tall ceiling. and a good ten feet wide.  The walls were a faint shade of magnolia on her mother’s insistence, though since most of the rest of the house was in pastel colours, Jinsu really had no objection.  Three large bookcases lined  the wall against which the head of her bed rested.  The wall opposite gave way to the en suite bathroom and the walk-in closet, and beside the door for the wall opposite the window, there was a desk and vanity, the former used much more regularly than the latter.  The space in the middle of the room had housed a portable dance floor when Jinsu had been about ten, though she’d not used it very often, and was decorated with a lavish oval floor rug that clashed horribly with the fluffy white one Jinsu stepped out onto every morning when she got out of bed.  Really, at some point, she was going to have to go through a textile catalogue to rectify that, though it would also mean reupholstering the covers of the two squishy armchairs by the oval rug since they’d been covered specifically to go with it.  It was either that or swap her fluffy rug for something else, and Jinsu was averse to that.  There was nothing better than sinking bare feet ankle-deep into warm material in a cold room.

By mid-afternoon, Mrs Kwon had bribed Jinsu out of her room for food, established that she wasn’t actually ill, and got Jinsu to go down to her father’s office to apologise.  He wasn’t