If I wasn’t the pretty girl in my friend group, I was definitely dubbed as the most eccentric one. On a scale of booger-eating adult and social time bomb, I was somewhere in the middle.

Pretty enough to benefit from pretty privilege but also off-putting once I’ve been in your vicinity for five minutes.

After enough encounters from guys ranging from never touched a woman to I can change her, I’ve basked in what I call unfiltered weirdness.

It worked well enough that I didn’t necessarily need to use my killer judo moves.

Did I have regrets?

Certainly not. I guess I’d rather be eternally alone than date a guy who couldn’t stand a second of me opening my mouth.

Though if you ask me if there was a time in my life that I wanted to desperately rewind, it would most definitely be my first impression with Jeong Jaehyun.

I haven’t managed to botch an acquaintanceship quite so bad as such in a hot minute. So maybe it served as a good lesson in hindsight.

“Hold on a minute, she’ll come out of it in…three…two…and—“

My fellow friend, AKA the principal of Bear Valley, beams with an expression that reads somewhere between glee and I’m-a-genius.

“Oh, you were right,” Karina mumbles, bobbing her head in a sort of awestruck motion.

Johnny, still in the midst of looking like he was very proud of himself, explains to Karina in a National Geographic narrator-esque voice, “don’t be too stunned, darling. Fei’s not suffering from anything wildly mental. She tends to disassociate mid-conversation. Don’t let it scare you away. She’s in desperate need of friends.”

I hum, “no, yes, continue like I’m not sitting here.”

Karina freezes. “Oh—I’m so sorry.”

I wave my hand dismissively. “No need. Johnny’s kind of underqualified for his job therefore has no idea what he’s talking about half the time.”

Johnny barks out a laugh. “She means overqualified. That’s just her poor impulse control speaking.”

“And that’s just his absurd histrionic personality speaking,” I add, winking at him.

“Coming from a with ADHD who refuses to medicate herself, I don’t wanna hear it.”

Karina’s eyes dash between us as if she’s on a pirate ship with either of us threatening to push one another off the plank. “Is this—should I be scared?” She asks, swallowing nervously.

Karina is new to Bear Valley Elementary. She’s fresh meat, freshly out of college, and student teaching under me. Of course, under anyone else’s guidance, she would shine and sparkle. Under mine, well, I can only hope that she has access to a therapist.

Last school year, we had two teachers quit. One won the lottery, and on the last day, cussed out a fifth-grader and simultaneously quit his job. Another got pregnant by the last principal and is currently eloping somewhere in the Maldives with a giant rock with…well, our last principal.

So, basically, we’ve had an entire faculty refresh.

I truly wonder why they’ve decided to hire Johnny Suh. But I guess we can blame it on the measly pay that nonunionized school faculties receive from the government.

It was a desperate measure. A means to an end. So far, it’s going quite wonderful.

I’ve slaved away for Bear Valley since I was twenty-two. I’m now twenty-eight, so I guess that makes me one of the oldest staff to remain at this hole, disregarding Mrs. Jonas who is one second from croaking into ash. Long story short, she’s teaching as a hobby while cashing out her social security checks from the government.

For a school in an outrageously expensive neighborhood, we are far from underfunded but we run the risk of losing half of our staffing from suburban drama.

PTA mothers had way too much authority, and it really begs the question of why the hell they didn’t just send their kids to a private school and spare us of our sanity?

Like we really have a say over school curriculum—public school education is garbage, and as a public school faculty member, you’re lucky if you’re getting paid decent money.

So far, Johnny is appeasing the mothers with his stupid good looks and early 2000’s Hollister model vibes. Of course, he’s also sleeping with half of them.

But who’s complaining? Lusting housewives were the scariest people known to man.

Sometimes, I question the morals of this place, but here’s the deal—this is how I feed myself and pay for my outrageously expensive rent.

It’s a random Tuesday evening, and today just coincides with our monthly book club meeting.

The Romantic’s AU Bookclub.

In other words, where all of your maladaptive needs come true, a place that welcomes all , sad single people.

Oh. And I give relationship advice.

Which is so odd considering my dating history. But no one needs to know as long as I’m getting my check.

We’ve captured the spirit of a romantic, candlelit grand-gesture-y dinner with LED tea light candles set on every surface humanly possible. Before Bear Valley was converted into a school, it was a massive chapel with exquisite white marbling and Grecian statues.

Still is. But it’s got an elementary school drop splat in the middle of it. Really, a normal person would question the morality of carved testes in a child’s vicinity but the generations of administration before us thought otherwise. We’ve taken YOLO to the extreme.

Despite the sketchiness, the library especially was one of the places that I knew I wanted to work for because it was perfect in all of its picturesque post-renaissance gothic architecture, catering to light academia romantics such as myself. The hauntingly beautiful state-of-art stained glass was the cherry on top.

Except I think Mary might be actively judging us all with her holy mother get-up she’s got going on.

Tonight, we’ve got a decent crowd. There are some new faces and old faces, even some founding members.

Johnny, being one of them, hence how he finessed the principal gig in the first place.

The clock strikes seven-thirty. We’ve been dabbling here and there for half an hour, waiting for fellow singles to submit their anonymous relationship tidbits.

Johnny and I cohost the book club. Today, we will not be discussing romance books, but rather—people’s love problems.

Clearing his throat, Johnny claps his hands together and gathers the attention of the crowd hunching over the tiny tables meant for children.

“Alright, we’ll be pulling at random today,” he announces, eyeing each and every member. In the midst, he gets distracted and stops to wink at some googly-eyed mothers.

And my elbow just coincidentally snaps into his side, leaving him gasping and rasping about.

“I’ll start,” I say and proceed to dig my hand into a large fishbowl filled to the brim with submissions. Pulling one aside, I open it, stalling for as long as possible, while people are hush-hush with anticipation.

How do I break it to my husband that he hasn’t given me a single in the span of our ten-year marriage?

I clear my throat, wracking my head for ways to read this aloud without sounding insensitive.

Johnny beats me to it and guffaws while repeatedly slapping his hands over his knee. He howls, tears breaking in the corner of his eyes. I smile tightly, standing in haste to put him in an arm lock. He chokes, slapping at my arm for oxygen.

Karina awkwardly jumps up, grabbing the slip of paper to somehow salvage this situation. She flushes red, stammering out, “this one reads: h-how do I break it to my husband that he hasn’t given me a single in the span of our t-ten year marriage?”

I sigh, finally letting go of a purple-lipped Johnny and plopping down on the seat beside him. “I’ll take over,” I tell Karina.

She stares at me, wide-eyed and awfully untrusting. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I consider a quiet Johnny a job well done,” I murmur, making sure to keep out of earshot of everybody else.

They all stare at us, waiting and, of course, acting like I hadn’t just sent half of Johnny’s soul to the afterlife.

Easing my way into an amicable smile, I begin to address our first submission with questions of my own. “So…uh, in terms of how bad are we talking of his skills are, on a scale?”

“Bad,” someone coughs.

I nod. “Okay, like how…bad? Have we tried communicating?”

“Yes,” they cough again.

Johnny comes back to life and chirps, “is his game bad enough that we don’t feel pleasure?”

“Yes.” Another cough.

Johnny and I exchange uneasy looks. And then he says, “have we considered getting a divorce?”

He’s met with utter silence.

I twist my finger into his side until he yelps. “Don’t listen to him. No one is divorcing. This problem can easily be solved with a toy. Listen, Anon, if you’re still in love with your husband, and it’s just that he doesn’t have the skillset to satisfy—try a toy. If he continues to that up—“

“Get a divorce,” Johnny coughs.

“ counseling,” I correct, “there are really good therapists on google that shouldn’t be too hard to find. And with that—we’ll continue. Johnny?” I shoot him an expectant look, silently telling him to behave.

He smiles while grimacing and digs into the fishbowl that Karina holds out. His eyes scan the slip of paper, and he reads it aloud, “I’ve fallen out of love with my significant other…how do I break up with said person? Hold on a minute—Jae? Is that you?”

I narrow my eyes at Johnny. He’s broken the number one rule of our book club. No calling out a single anonymous submission.

Johnny pitches forward to find this Jae guy in the crowd.

Suddenly, like in a movie, people start peeling off one by one, allowing space in the center until someone is uncovered.

And that someone just happens to be the person I never thought I would see again. But it’s really him. In the flesh.

Jeong ing Jaehyun.

“Dude!” Johnny chirps. “You actually showed?”

Jaehyun visibly winces in the chair that he is currently towering over. He sighs, rubbing a hand over his face. “Dude, I thought you said this was anonymous.”

I groan to myself. This was totally my fault. He definitely didn’t want to uncover his identity here. I wasn’t exactly someone likable to him.

We hear some moms cooing over him as expected.

Jaehyun wasn’t ugly by any means. He was God’s perfect creation. I haven’t seen him since I graduated college, but oh my god, he’s still a looker and no words can describe his gorgeousness. None other than how violently my ovaries are protesting from his presence alone.

Johnny coughs, “oh my bad, bro. I’ll let our relationship guru, Fei, do her magic later.”

Jaehyun quite literally freezes, shoulders stiffening and everything. I feel knives impale me from every direction. That is the worst reaction you could possibly bring out of a man, and I’ve managed to do it without uttering a single word.

As we continue on with our relationship advising, I try so ing hard to not be a total creep and just stare at him.

But it’s really difficult to not do that when you’re busy thinking of a million possible scenarios of what you’ve done to wrong him.

Of what I did to drive away the only man who wasn’t a hyper fixation.

[a/n] man this chapter was so chaotic. fei is ur average violent fmc. and i've brought back weird friendship dynamics woohoo <33