The next morning, Anna had promised to help Mrs. Kim with the laundry, and Mrs. Kim had to run out on an errand. The house had emptied out fairly quickly in the morning with everybody citing their own reasons for spending the day out. Anna didn’t really remember all of them, but she did recall Donghyuk mentioning that he was going to visit his dad.

Not that it was any of her interest; her roommates were still strangely distant with her and each other. It was like they were determined to not become friends in any way, shape, or form. The closest any of them got to being friends was Junhoe and Donghyuk, and all they did was bicker over trivial roommate issues. (Anna already knew far more than she wanted to about Junhoe’s preference for sleeping with no pants on.)

Anna was in the front lawn, where the laundry lines were strung from the roof, and hanging the clean clothes to dry. Mrs. Kim had only put her in charge of her own clothes, but she figured she’d take a load off of Mrs. Kim’s shoulders while she could; she seemed busy with other chores throughout the house.

The sound of somebody yawning behind her made Anna turn around, and she saw Bobby emerge from the house, hair tousled like he had a restless night and still wearing his pajamas. “Morning, sleeping beauty,” she smirked. “Nice of you to finally rejoin the land of the living.”

“Did I miss breakfast?” he asked groggily.

“Yeah, by quite a bit.” Anna shook the excess dampness from a pillowcase before pinning it to the clothesline. “Why? Are you hungry?”

“I’m always hungry.” He made a face. “You don’t know if there are leftovers, are there?”

“There might be. And you could always go to the convenience store to buy something for yourself.”

“I’m already poor. Don’t expect me to spend more money.”

“I can relate to that,” Anna empathized with a heavy sigh as she straightened out a damp shirt by shaking it through the air. “People these days seem to think that college students have money growing on their backyard trees or something.”

“How’d you afford to come here for the summer?” Bobby asked, reaching into the clean laundry basket and selecting a red and black flannel to hang on the clothesline.

“Scholarships, financial aid, and a lot of part-time job tips compiled. I kinda hoped I could use the tips to treat myself to nice things, but about ninety-five percent of it went to the plane ticket to Incheon.”

“,” Bobby whistled. “You work in customer service?”

“Food industry. I’m a barista at a Starbucks on the border of the Berkeley campus.”

“Yikes. I bet college students skimp a lot on tips, too.”

“Yeah, that’s why I refused to work at the one in the middle of campus, even though it’s the busiest one.” Anna wiped some beads of sweat from the side of her face. “What about you? You said you’re studying abroad.”

“Scholarship,” he answered. “I’m studying music, and I somehow found a need-based scholarship foundation that was willing to pay for my summer and fall semesters in Hongdae.”

“Cool,” Anna grinned. “And how’d you find the sharehouse?”

“Craigslist. Where else?” Bobby laughed. “I think I looked into around sixty boardinghouses before I finally got into this one. Finding affordable housing in Korea is hella difficult.”

“Agreed,” Anna groaned. “Why do you think I was so desperate to get into this one? Nowhere else had any openings.”

Bobby snickered. “Wait until you hear about how you even got into this one.”

Anna turned her head towards him curiously.

“We initially didn’t have any openings either,” Bobby began. “We were all full with seven guys, and Mr. and Mrs. Kim made it clear that this would be all that we’d take.”

“Huh?” Anna frowned. “But the ad…?”

“There’s a funny story behind that,” Bobby grinned. “Junhoe was bored and thought we should make a fake flier advertising a nonexistent open room in the sharehouse.”

Anna wrinkled her brows. “…And that was supposed to alleviate his boredom…how?”

“He wanted to see what kinds of people would be looking for housing in Seoul these days. I mean, to be fair, there are lots of foreigners in Korea these days, so he probably wanted to see what those people were like.”

“And he couldn’t just go outside to meet them?” Anna asked incredulously, throwing her hands in the air. “Unbelievable.”

“Don’t ask me. I don’t know how his head works,” Bobby shook his head in disbelief, laughing.

“Then why was your number on the flier, not his?”

“He drew straws. Apparently, he figured that not cluing me in on his idea and then directing thousands of phone calls to my number would be a good idea.”

“Just wait till I get my hands on the idiot…”

“But hey, technically, you did find a new place to live, thanks to him.”

“That doesn’t really change the fact that he’s a major dip.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

Lunch time rolled around soon, and as soon as Junhoe entered the dining room, Bobby shot him a smug smirk. “Guess who knows about the person responsible for this whole housing fiasco?”

Junhoe turned to look at Anna, who was giving him a rather annoyed glower, but he just shrugged. “Cool. No more secrets in this house.”

Anna’s eyes widened in disbelief. “You’re not even apologetic about it?”

“Why should I be?” Junhoe retorted, a note of defense creeping into his voice. “You have a great place to live with awesome roommates such as myself—”

“Oh, please—”

“—and the rest of us get to say that we lived with a girl for an entire summer.” Junhoe beams obnoxiously. “Everybody wins.”

Good Lord. Anna exchanges an exasperated glance with Bobby. Where does this kid get his shamelessness from?

Donghyuk eventually emerged from the room with his nose still buried in a book with the words Theories of Computation: Essentials for Computational Analysis and Software Design. Anna could honestly say that she’d never felt more clueless on a topic her whole life before she’d read just the title of that text. Donghyuk took a seat across from her and only glanced up once he realized he was being watched. When he caught Anna’s eye, her face flushed sheepishly. “Sorry. It’s just…computer science. It’s a completely foreign topic to me.”

He didn’t look extremely eager to engage in conversation, seeing as how he was busy with his reading, but he did say, “It’s not for everyone.”

“Do you know how to code?” Anna asked, her curiosity getting the better of her.

Donghyuk nodded once.

“Really? Any cool programs you’ve written?”

“One. For a class last semester.”

“What did it do?”

Finally succumbing to the fact that he wasn’t going to get much reading done with this girl pestering him, he set the book down. “It wasn’t all that special. I used HTML to write a program that could run basic arithmetic functions if you just typed them into the keypad.”

“So you made your own calculator?” Anna was fascinated. “That’s so cool!”

The corners of Donghyuk’s mouth began curling upwards. “You think?”

“Of course! Science is so cool!”

“It’s an immensely broad field,” Donghyuk agreed as Mrs. Kim began dishing out bowls of curry rice, “but I’m pretty hopeless with the topics that involve microscopes and whatnot.”

“Likewise. For the topics that don’t. How’d you get into computers and coding?”

“My dad worked at a flea market-style computer repair store on the corner of the block I grew up in,” he answered. “He taught me that computers would one day be the universal language and started me off with a couple basic coding programs. It just got pretty fun after a while, and I eventually got really good at it, so now I’m here.”

“That’s awesome.” Anna grinned. “Any recommendations for a newbie who wants to learn basic coding skills too?”

“I could try writing a basic coding program for you to begin with,” Donghyuk suggested. “It’ll be really basic stuff since I’m not super good at programming either, but it’ll be better than nothing.”

“Sweet.”

Bobby grunted from Anna’s left, r