***Warning: There's a bullying scene in the second half of this chapter.***

Jinsu was still feeling fairly out of sorts when she got back, Sungwoo having eventually taken her to a park with the idea that fresh air would do her good, though she had got through four of the tubs of ice cream he’d bought her.  She was greeted by a very bouncy Saeeun the instant she got in through her bedroom door.

“I’ve been doing some reccying for you!” the maid announced before she seemed to realise what kind of state Jinsu was in.  “Are you ill again?”

Jinsu stumbled across to her bed and flopped down on it face first, her feet dangling off the edge.

“Got into a fight with my dad,” she mumbled.

“Already?”

Jinsu just groaned and rolled over.  Saeeun surveyed her for a moment or two.

“Here,” she said eventually, shoving something in Jinsu’s direction.

Jinsu took it and saw to her bafflement that it was a very old model of mobile phone.  Utterly confused, she looked between it and Saeeun.

“I am prepared to stake my life on your father tapping your phone,” Saeeun announced, “so I got you a new one.  And because I’m awesome, I also skipped school today and went to track down Minhwan’s mum.  She’s divorced and lives alone in an apartment near the central train station and it looks like she has about a thousand cats.  Anyway, she invited me in for tea and I got her number and everything.  There are photos of Minhwan everywhere, but I think his dad has custody most of the time because she kept talking about her son coming to visit at the weekend.”

With a flourish, she produced a few pages torn out of a notepad, filled with neat, cramped handwriting.  Jinsu sat up.

“You’re actually taking this seriously,” she said in amazement, looking through them.  Minhwan’s mother’s address was right at the top of the first piece of paper, which had her business card clipped to it.  Saeeun beamed at her.

“Being undercover is fun!”

Jinsu raised her eyebrows, almost ready to blurt out that she thought the files from the future on her big brother had got to Saeeun’s imagination too much, but she figured it best not to offend the girl.

“I was going to go to your school after too to inform your boyfriend that you’re alive and kept hostage, but tea with Mrs Jo took so long everybody would have left the building by the time I got there, so I didn’t.”

Unbidden, a smile spread across Jinsu’s face, and her heart suddenly felt an awful lot lighter.

“Thanks, Saeeun,” she said, and she couldn’t have meant it more.

The atmosphere around the house the next morning was a little weird.  Jinsu couldn’t pinpoint why, but it made her very glad to be out of it and finally on her way to school, both phones in her pocket and trying not to be too anxious about the work she’d missed.

She was called into the school office almost the instant she’d set foot in the place so that she could sign a couple of forms declaring her absence, all of which had copies that needed to go home to be signed by a parent or guardian (Jinsu decided at once that she’d need to track down her mother, since Jimin was abroad and she had no intentions of spending more time with her father than she could help).  The school secretary made a couple of comments about having seen her on TV and how proud she was of their school being so well represented on the Attayear, after which the headmaster popped in for a brief moment to say that he’d requested everybody who was on the Attayear to write up a little diary of their trip so that he could post it on the school website.  Once she’d agreed to that, he beetled off again and Jinsu found herself presented with a timetable.

“I already know what my lessons are,” she told the secretary.

“Just check it, dear, I think some of your classes have been moved.”

It wasn’t some, as Jinsu discovered when she unwillingly followed the timetable to her first lesson.  It was every single one.  She found herself in Mandarin rather than physics, and geography rather than maths, and for all the subjects that she still had which she’d done before, she’d been dropped to either the set or the year below the one she was supposed to be in.  By break time, she was bored, and by lunchtime she was verging on angry.  She was a top stream student and one of the best in the school, and to be knocked out of her subjects like this was insulting.  Determined to find out what was going on, she skipped the lunch queues and headed back towards the secretary’s office.

She was out in the courtyard between the cafeteria and the reception building when running footsteps announced she had company.

“Where’ve you been?” demanded a very out of breath Kyungsoo, snatching at her wrist to turn her around.  “You do realise we have our spoken English assessment tomorrow and it’s thirty percent of our grade, right?”

The previous week – skipping the time they’d spent on the Attayear – Jinsu would have thought that all he was bothered about was his grade, but that Kyungsoo would never have run after her, and his eyes were frantically scanning her face for information.  Part of Jinsu wanted to burst into tears in reply, but she reined it back.

“I. . . just – look.”  She pulled out her new timetable and presented it to him.  Letting go of her, Kyungsoo took it, his dark brown eyes flickering over it as his eyebrows pinched together.

“What the heck?  Our timetables used to be identical.”

It surprised Jinsu a bit that he’d paid her enough attention to notice that before, but it was warming nonethelesss.  “I know.”

“No physics, no maths, they’ve dropped you a whole year for – this is insane.”  He passed the timetable back.  “Well, at least you don’t have Yoo Dahee and Do Minyoung in your class.  Let’s go to the secretary and get this sorted out.”

There was no denying it felt very, very odd to be walking through school with somebody beside her, but most people were eating lunch so there was nobody to stare, and Jinsu was very grateful for Kyungsoo’s presence, which felt more or less normal after their time on the Attayear.  He explained that they’d seen the news reports she was ill, and then the interviews, and that Chanyeol had worried her father was monitoring her communication and everything she did when he didn’t receive any responses to his texts.  Jinsu admitted she’d actually forgotten to reply, but that this very probably was the case since he’d taken her phone away on at least two occasions.

“Psychopath,” Kyungsoo muttered.

Jinsu could only agree.  She was all set to launch into her father attempting to get her to sign a false witness statement, but they had reached the school office by that point and Kyungsoo was already knocking on the door.

The secretary looked up from the sandwich she was eating in front of her computer.

“What can I—?”

Kyungsoo didn’t even let her finish speaking before grabbing Jinsu’s timetable to brandish.  “What the hell is going on with this?”

The secretary squinted, then looked at Jinsu and seemed to realise what was up.

“Ah.  We had a phone call last night from Miss Park’s father asking for her to be moved as various people in her classes were causing trouble,” she explained, taking off her glasses.  “He wasn’t able to name the perpetrators but seemed quite insistent about it, and all of Miss Park’s teachers corroborated when we asked and it was considered the best solution until we can get to the bottom of what’s going on.”

Kyungsoo looked as taken aback as Jinsu felt.  Jinsu plopped down in one of the chairs beside the secretary’s desk, utterly confused.  Was this her father trying to get back at her for not agreeing to sign the witness statement?  But considering how miserable he now knew she’d been at school, wouldn’t he just have left her in her classes if that was the case?

“Well. . .”  Kyungsoo floundered for a moment or two.  “Shouldn’t that request come from the pupil, though?  I mean, Jinsu pretty clearly doesn’t want to be in any of the classes she’s just been put in.  She didn’t even know about this.  To be completely honest, she’s one of the top students in the school and doing this to her without her consent is pretty patronising.  At least bump her up a year rather than down.”

The secretary gave what was obviously supposed to be some kind of sympathetic grimace.

“I can give you the names of some of the troublemakers if you want,” Kyungsoo persisted.  “We’re in all the same classes together – or were, until today – so I’ve seen most of what’s gone on.  And in any case, it’s urgent she’s at least put back up into the right English class.  We have a project due tomorrow that’s nearly fifty percent of the final grade and since it’s a paired one, if one of us isn’t there to do it, both of us fail, which’ll look really bad for the school when we’re the top English students in the year.”

It took a fair bit of wrangling, but Kyungsoo’s final (exaggerated) point seemed to hit home hard enough for the secretary to agree that she could at least rejig things for their English class.  By that time, lunch was over and both students had growling stomachs.  Kyungsoo peeked over at Jins