Su Lin stands up abruptly, and slams her palms against the table.

Ouch, that's gotta hurt.

"Jaemin!" Her voice rises to a shriek above the clamour and the chatter. "Na Jaemin, what are you doing, flirting with that - that girl?" She jabs a beautifully-manicured fingernail in my direction. 

Everybody has stopped eating. Everybody is staring at us. It's gone all quiet, so quiet you can hear a pin drop.

"I like you. You know how much I like you. She's sobbing now, tears welling up in her beautiful eyes, dampening her smooth alabaster cheeks, glistening like piteous pearls at the edges of her thick, lush eyelashes.

She's pretty even when she cries. When I cry, my eyes turn all red and swollen, and my face gets blotchy and sticky from snort.

"How could you - how could you treat me like this? How could you humiliate me like this? I like you so much!" she cries, her voice choking on a sob.

He looks at her and says, his voice even and casual, "But I don't like you."

He doesn't sound sorry, or angry, or worried, or anything. He could be saying, "But I don't like fish", or, "I don't like Mondays", uttered in that exact same tone, and his voice would sound exactly the same: bland, calm, unruffled, as if he's speaking of something so trivial, so unimportant, that it warrants hardly a change to his tone, barely raising a ripple in the ebb and flow of his minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day existence.

"But I don't like you."

His words, delivered in that most mundane of tones, have, with one swift , relegated the beauteous and incomparable Su Lin to the humble and, sadly, common ranks of fish and Mondays.

"Why?" She wails. "Why don't you like me? Tell me why!"

"Because," he says, wiping his mouth carefully with a tissue, before turning to me, and draping an arm nonchalantly over me, imprisoning me against his hard and muscular chest, "I like this girl."

What????

I swivel my head up jerkily, like creepy Annabel in The Conjuring, because my neck muscles have frozen stiff from the shock.

And it's not only me.

Su Lin's face is a mask of white. She opens and shuts , as if she is struggling to say something, but nothing, not one single word, comes out.

Everyone is staring at us.

Someone drops a plate, and it shatters into fragments.

The noise breaks the silence.

Su Lin bursts into tears, turns on her heels, and runs out of the cafetaria.

With her exit, normalcy reigns once more. Everyone resumes eating and drinking and gossiping about the drama that has livened up an otherwise boring and predictable morning. Human beings are creatures of habit, after all, and life goes on, even in the aftermath of a shocking event.

Junnie clambers to her feet, and says faintly, "I need to go to the loo. You guys carry on your, um, conversation." She waves a hand at us awkwardly, as if she's blessing our union.

Union???? Did I just say union????

I must be crazy.

This nutcase, sitting beside me, pressed close to me, with his arm still draped possessively over my helpless shoulder, has driven me crazy.

"What the heck are you doing?" I snarl, and push him away. "Is this some kind of a joke? Because, if it is, IT'S NOT FUNNY!!!!"

"It's not a joke," he says, and bends his face close to mine. "From now on, you're my girlfriend."

He takes a gulp of iced green tea, and rises to his feet.

"I'll come find you in your classroom after school. Wait for me. We'll walk back home together." He smiles at me enigmatically, a crooked little smile, that tilts the edges of his lips just a bit, so that he looks wicked, almost cruel, all of a sudden.

"Huh????"

"So wait for me, Kim Mina." He reaches out a hand, ruffles my hair, and saunters off, cool as a cucumber.

.

What have I got myself into?