It’s the same thing every morning—Mina opens her locker, and a pink slip of paper flutters out.
“Another love letter?” Jihyo tries to look over her shoulder as she examines it.
“I mean…I guess? I’m not too sure what they are,” Mina squints.
“Why does your secret admirer have such bad handwriting?”
Mina sighs, “I don’t know.”
She folds the piece of paper into quarters and tucks it into her pocket, making sure it doesn’t crumple. Maybe one day she’ll manage to decrypt it.

    “Nayeon!” Jungyeon hits her friend’s shoulder repeatedly to get her attention, “look! She’s reading it!”
“Owowowowowow stop hitting me!” Nayeon spits, shoving Jungyeon away. She squints at Mina and Jihyo, who are studying the letter Jungyeon slipped into Mina’s locker, “how can you be sure she’s reading it though? Your handwriting is the worst.”
“Hey, shut—oh crap! They’re heading this way! Let’s go!” Jungyeon panics and grabs Nayeon’s hand, pulling her along as she bolts down the corridor.
Nayeon has no time to argue, and can only allow herself to be dragged along.

    “Is that…Jungyeon and Nayeon?” Mina asks, squinting at the rapidly moving figures.
Jihyo shakes her head, “I wonder what kind of trouble Jungyeon’s caused today.”
Mina nods her head slowly, “I wonder.”

    Dear Mina,
I’ve written you so many letters, this must be, like, the 87th? you must be curious about who i am ^^ honestly i really want to tell you but I'm just scared that you think I'm a loser—i mean i am, but that doesn't mean i want you to think of me as one :c my friend tells me my handwriting looks like i wrote everything in the dark and i agree, so you probably cant read any of this anyway oops. but anyway, i saw you reading (?) my letter yesterday and you looked really pretty and i couldn't help but stare (and then you looked my way so i bolted)

    “Literally the only thing I can make out is ‘Dear Mina’—is your secret admirer a chicken?” Nayeon squints at the letter that Mina has decided to show the group, in hopes of figuring out who wrote them.
Jungyeon kicks her under the table.
Nayeon looks back at her with a grimace and eyes that scream “ do you want me to tell her?”
Jungyeon rolls her eyes.
Turning to the letter, she pretends to study it, “it—”
“Well it’s cute, I guess?” She’s interrupted by Mina, who takes the letter and puts it back into her pocket, “points for trying?” she giggles.
“Oh crap,” Jihyo says, looking at her watch, “we’re gonna be late for class if we don’t go now, Mina. See you guys.”
Nayeon waves at the two who leave.
Jungyeon sits, unresponsive, unmoving.
“Is this because she said it was cute? Because if yes, you are so stupid and I hate you,” Nayeon rolls her eyes.
Is Jungyeon listening?
No.
“She said it was cute,” Jungyeon mutters with a dumb smile on her face, and Nayeon wants to punch her.

    It’s the typical, “hello friends, you introduced me to the new transfer student and I fell in love with her at first sight” thing, and Jungyeon can’t believe how cliche it is. But it’s Jihyo’s fault for bringing the ridiculously pretty transfer student from Japan to their group one lunchtime. She remembers, quite clearly, sitting at their table with Nayeon, waiting for Jihyo. And then, out of nowhere, Jihyo turns up with this—this Myoui Mina, who looks so shy and uncertain with her hands clasped nervously in front of her and listening to Jihyo’s every word, and Jungyeon is just in.

    Of course, Nayeon is the first one to find out. Maybe it’s because she’s known Jungyeon the longest. It might be because she knows exactly what Jungyeon is like when she’s in love, but Jungeyon insists that Nayeon has dark magic on her side (there is no other possible explanation, after all).
“No, it’s because you’re so damn obvious, for god’s sake,” Nayeon rolls her eyes.
“Oh yeah?? How?” Jungyeon challenges.
“Every time you look at her you go red.”
“That’s just—I coincidentally have allergic reactions to—to the sun.”
Nayeon stares at her in disbelief, “are you hearing yourself right now?”
“I’m an idiot,” Jungyeon groans, letting her head drop to the table.
Nayeon pats her head sympathetically, “what’s new though?”
“You’re a terrible friend.”

    The first letter she sends is entirely on impulse. Its roots can be traced back to the night before the first math test of the term, during which she pulled an all nighter and went to school the next day, fuelled solely on coffee and self-hatred. The idea for the letter comes at about 5 am, before the sun rises. Jungyeon can feel her heart palpitating in its bony cage, unsure if it’s because she hasn’t slept for nearly 24 hours, or because just the thought of Mina causes a surge of adrenaline.

    Dear Mina,
hot diggity dog ur so beautiful and i like you a lot

    When Mina produces the letter from her pocket at lunch, Jungyeon has passed out from exhaustion at the table, and Nayeon, immediately recognising the handwriting feels the secondhand embarrassment as if it is her own. Thankfully, Mina and Jihyo are clueless as to who the mysterious messenger could be. Nayeon looks at the scene around her; Jihyo, who stares intently at the slip of paper, trying to decode the message; Mina, who blushes, cheeks tinged with pink and lips sealed; and Jungyeon, blissfully unaware and drooling onto the table. In her mind, she admits to herself that, oh all right, Jungyeon and Mina would totally be cute with each other (but she keeps that thought to herself, because, really, there’s no need to feed her best friend’s already huge and obnoxious ego).

    It all falls apart. It all falls apart in what Jungyeon would describe as “a situation not unlike having an elephant on rollerblades in a shop that sells very delicately handcrafted glass wind chimes” (“That’s….oddly specific,” Nayeon squints).
“Jungyeon?” Mina asks, approaching the table where Jungyeon and Nayeon are lazing about.
Jungyeon looks up, gulping slightly as she sees the object of her affections, standing before her, hands clasped tightly like the first day they met, but this time with a familiar pink sheet of paper between them.
She swallows a scream, “y-yeah?”
“Can I—” Mina falters, “can I talk to you?”
Jungyeon shares a glance with Nayeon, who shrugs, “I don’t know anything.”
She clenches a fist in fear, standing up slowly, preparing herself for the worst, “s-sure.”

    Wordlessly, she follows Mina away from their table, willing herself not to start sweating nervously and trying to think of excuses. She bumps into Mina when she stops abruptly in a deserted corridor.
“So that last physics test was absolute bull, hey?” Jungyeon blurts out, trying to avoid Mina’s eyes.
Mina sighs, “Jungyeon…I—”

“Okay you got me I was me I wrote all those letters,” Jungyeon cracks unintentionally, and like an egg, it’s messy and everything is everywhere and it is chaos.
Mina’s eyes widen, “Wh—”
“But only because I like you so much!” There it is; it’s out now there’s no way she can take it back.
Mina’s eyes widen even more, “you—you what?”
Jungyeon panics, “well would you look at that! Lunchtime is up gotta go to class!!” she says hurriedly, looking at her wrist, at the watch she doesn’t have.
She doesn’t wait for Mina’s reply before she runs off, eyes forcefully squeezed shut, hoping that the sheer pressure on her eyes from doing so would somehow induce a coma and/or eject all memories of the incident from her brain.

    The next text she gets from Nayeon pretty much sums up her feelings.
You done ed up, kiddo.

    She tries. She tries so hard to forget. Unfortunately the only thing she manages to forget is the fact that Mina sits only two seats away from her in their math class.
So of course the only logical solution is to pretend that nothing ever happened and that Mina didn’t exist. 

    Echoes of Nayeon’s text chime in her head.

    “Do you know how stupid you’re being right now? Because it is A Lot™,” Nayeon sighs, as she watches Jungyeon slumped over the table, looking as if she’s trying to become one with the obnoxiously bright orange surface.
“Nayeon, how am I supposed to even look at Mina?” Jungyeon groans.
“Well for starters, get your head off the table, and—well, you’ll need to open your eyes,” Nayeon rolls her eyes.
“I can’t do that, she’s like the sun. Have you tried looking at the sun? My mum’s cousin looked at sun once, and he’s blind now, apparently, but we’ve never met this “cousin” so maybe she was lying and she probably was, you know, just trying to scare us kids like a parent does—anyway, what I’m trying to say is that if I looked directly at Myoui Mina, her perfection would just fry my eyeballs and then I wouldn’t ever be able to look at her from far away like I have been content to do for the past 10 months—”
Her rambling ceases at the sound of a soft, “Jungyeon,” and she looks up.
Nayeon is gone, and in her place is Myoui Mina.
Jungyeon slides down in her seat, under the table, as far as she can go.
Echoes of Nayeon’s text chime in her head.
You done ed up, kiddo.
“I know,” she mumbles, to no one in particular (to herself, perhaps).

    She misses the frown on Mina’s face.