Dear Mayor, he started writing, then stopped. Because how exactly did one go about telling your city’s top government official that you planned to bomb the place to smithereens?

 

How did criminals make full confessions in front of a faceless court? What was the formula for writing a suicide note?

 

And then he wondered how he would sign it. Sincerely? Yours truly? Love? Or just- Goodbye.

 

Staring at the mostly blank sheet, he sighed, crumpled the paper, and tossed it into a garbage can to lie among other unfinished ideas.

 

He turned his attention to the gray, rectangular device sitting on his desk. This had been his life for the past few weeks. The scrap metal was collected from that junkyard off of the Han River. He’d soldered and hammered it into shape in the garage. Just a school project, mom. He’d ordered the timer online. It was a regular kitchen timer nestled in a bed of colorful wires. Blue looped here, yellow and green entwined there. A veritable rainbow of death and destruction. He knew exactly what every wire did and exactly which ones could be cut to avert disaster. His problem right now was those two red wires that stuck up haphazardly from the back of the box. Two unruly, out of place wires that linked the detonator to the explosives.

 

The explosives which were not currently in his possession but would be quite soon. He smiled to himself. Maybe a help wanted advertisement in the city paper’s classifieds wasn’t the best way to go about obtaining what he needed. He supposed it was a flippant action, careless and dangerous. But it gave his plan a sense of being unreal, buoyed up by the ridiculousness and vague direction of it all. For now, it was an idea, a figment of thought blown away on a youthful breeze.

 

“Wanted: An Explosives Expert for the End of the World.” Surely you jest, sir!

 

Until he got a reply, of course. And then the whole plan would be set in motion.

---

 

The next day, he woke up, brushed his teeth, watched his father leave for work, ate cereal, and kissed his mother on the cheek. He drove to school in the shiny silver Benz his parents had gotten him for his 18^th birthday exactly one month ago.

 

The private high school he’d been attending for the past four years looked and was exactly the same as ever. The manicured green lawns, the grotesque white marble fountain donated last year by his father, the science wing bearing his family’s name and funded by its fortune. The pretty, vapid girls in their perfectly prep school uniforms that giggled when he passed and the guys that would wave to him and call out greetings. They weren’t actually his friends. He’d learned this early on, perhaps too early. They were only networking. It was a dog eat dog world out there, but only the rats with their suits and ties and cocktail parties were the real winners of the race.

 

Yes, the school was the same as it always was. Nothing had changed. At least, not yet.

               

Twelve o’clock and the prescheduled meeting with his guidance counselor about his post high school plans. He smirked, sitting down in the plush leather chair across her desk.

 

“Oh Sehun?” She looked at him over her small spectacles.

 

“Yes ma’am,” he replied, playing along.

 

“Hm…” The woman glanced down at a leather-bound binder and tapped her pen against her lips.

 

“I see you did not put anything down in the questionnaire under the section ‘preferred colleges’. In fact, your questionnaire is, on a whole, woefully under-supplemented. So would you mind then, Mr. Oh, to tell me what your plans for the future are?”

 

Sehun rolled his eyes and stitched together some vague thing about travel and personal studies. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the guidance counselor was filling the questionnaire in for him. She’d written ‘foreign study’ under the college heading and a big, fat question mark under ‘career choices’. His life reduced to mere punctuation. How funny.

 

He skipped the last two periods of class and drove to a café downtown. Ordering mango bubble tea, he sat at an outdoor table and opened his razor-thin laptop. Oh look. A reply, re: Classifieds Ad. The sender had a stock email address, no clues there. The message included a phone number and single line of text saying, “Call me! I like doing business better in person. We can set up a meeting date! –Luhan.” Signed off with a cute, smiling emoticon.

 

Sehun wondered what kind of explosives expert used emoticons. He shrugged, thought what the heck, and dialed the number. Four rings later, someone answered.

 

“Hello?” Bright, chirpy voice. Young.             

 

“Er- hello? Is this Luhan? I’m calling regarding-“

 

“I’m sorry, I really can’t help you. This is about phone , isn’t it? Truly, I’m sorry. There’s been a big misunderstanding. Kai’s been putting my number on ographic websites, you see, and-“

 

“Wait, what? Phone ? And who the hell’s Kai? No. Sorry. Excuse me, this is Luhan, right?” Sehun hurried on, so as not to be interrupted again. “I’m calling about your response to my advertisement.”

 

“Oh, why didn’t you say so?”

 

Sehun gritted his teeth. This was becoming one big cliché. Minus the bubble tea and mentions of phone , of course.

 

“Yes, well, anyways- you wanted to meet to discuss ah- business?”

 

“Right, right. Well, I’ll give you the address. Got a pen ready? Yes? We’re currently located a garage down in Incheon District. The Cycling Club, you know, the motorcycle garage repair shop on 7^th. How about you come over tonight and meet the rest of the team? Nine o’clock alright? Great! It’s a date then! I look forward to seeing you Mr. Oh!”

 

Click.

 

Sehun spent a while staring at his phone after he’d disconnected, lips quirked.