A/N: Mixing it up! Putting the flashback before the regular storyline. It's madness! P.S. A pic of predebut Woohyun cooking is close enough to the story line. He's in chemisty class. P.P.S. This actually happened to me!

“No, Woohyun, stop it. You’re not allowed to touch the Bunsen burner anymore,” Maeri warned as she slapped her friend’s hand away from the gas valve. “You lost that privilege during the last experiment.”

Woohyun sat back down on his stool and rested his head on their lab table, pouting. “It was an accident,” he muttered under his breath.

Maeri rolled her eyes as she measured out the chemicals as accurately as she could before pouring it into a ceramic dish. “Yea one that almost burnt down the lab and cost me an A,” she chided, shooting him a menacing glare.

Woohyun just grumbled as he played with a scale on the table, letting his friend basically take control. She won’t ever forget that. All I want to do is have fun with the experiment. Leave it to Maeri to take the fun out of playing with fire, he complained to himself and glared at his friend, who was too concentrated on making sure the Bunsen burner was at the right temperature. They were in their joint Chemistry class, performing an experiment about moles and energy. The best friends didn’t actually pick each other as their lab partners. Sure they liked each other, but Maeri was ruthless when it came to her grades. She would’ve dumped him and picked up one of the other smart kids in a heartbeat. And Woohyun would probably be in the back with Hyunsuk, setting the lab aflame. At least we wouldn’t have to do the stupid lab reports then. No lab. No problems.

Their chemistry teacher was the one who assigned them together for reasons unknown to them. The middle-aged woman hadn’t even known that they were best friends, or that they even knew each other. She had assigned the whole class in mixed pairs in a seemingly random pattern. If you based it on Maeri and Woohyun alone, you would assume that the teacher did it based on skill level, pairing the top students with the bottom. But the two dumbest kids in class were paired up with each other. It was a recipe for chaos. Weird smells and smoke was already wafting from their corner of the lab.

Woohyun sniffed the air curiously and turned around, watching the bottom girl and guy in the class struggle to put out a miniature fire. The teacher was already there with a fire extinguisher in hand. She sighed as she put out the flame; it had become a routine procedure for her, even when they were just experimenting with baking soda and vinegar.

“Yah Yoo Maeri! Even Sunhwa lets Changsun use the Bunsen burner,” he said pointing to the panicking couple in the back of the classroom.

Maeri stopped what she was doing and turned to him. “Yea, and look how well that’s going,” she commented.

Woohyun stood up. “I’m bored. At least let me pour something!” he demanded grabbing a vial from her hands. He had grabbed it too roughly, and some of its contents had spilt on his hands, right onto his unprotected skin. Suddenly his mind flashed back to the safety lecture that their teacher had given them just moments before, saying that they were going to be using dangerous chemicals and to be careful. Dangerous chemicals…on my skin. Oh ! This is bad! “Yah! Maeri what is this?! I think it’s burning my skin.”

Maeri’s eyes widened, and her jaw dropped. “Hurry! Put your hand under water!” she spoke with an urgent voice. “NOW!”

“Where? Where?” Woohyun freaked out, spinning around in circles.

“There’s a sink over there!” she shouted, pointing to a sink next to him.

Woohyun sprinted over, the faucet, and emerged his hand under the gushing stream. He looked at Maeri, completely worried. “Maeri! I don’t think it’s working. I still feel it burning,” his voice shaking with worry.

“Pft!” Maeri snorted before she crumpled into laughter. She was laughing so loud and so maniacally that the whole class was staring, even the teacher, who was now walking towards them.

“Maeri-ah! Is this any way to act when your friend is losing his arm?!” Woohyun hissed, shooting quick glances at their fast approaching teacher.

The laughter finally stopped, and Maeri walked over, turned off the faucet, and started to dry Woohyun’s hand with a towel. “It was water mixed with Sodium Chloride,” she admitted, finishing drying his hand.  She looked up at Woohyun, who was still lost in confusion. “Salt water, you big baby.”

“Yah!” he yelled. “You knew?”

She shrugged as she returned back to her (technically their) experiment. “You need to learn to be more careful,” she chided. Woohyun clenched his fist. If they weren’t in class, he would totally have her in a headlock by now.

“Is everything okay?” their teacher asked when she finally reached their lab table. “Did you spill anything?” she asked, staring directly at Woohyun.

“Everything’s fine, Seonsaengnim!” Maeri responded in a chipper voice. “Woohyun was just washing his hands.”

“Teacher’s pet,” Woohyun mumbled in a voice so low that no one could hear. He hated this side of her. It seemed so fake, yet so aggressive at the same time. And he was positive that she hated his laidback approach to school. She normally lectured him like his mother to study.  

“Good thinking, Woohyun-goon,” the teacher praised him, patting him on the back. Wait, did I just get praise for something? He thought automatically perking up.  Then the teacher looked back and forth between the two curiously. “Do you two have any plans for the break?”

Maeri put down the beakers. “Um, besides soccer practice every day, I don’t,” she answered.

“And you?” the teacher asked Woohyun.

He nodded. “Yep, I have practice every day too. Why?”
The teacher leaned in, jutting herself in between the two. “Do you guys want to know a secret? Why I paired everybody else like this?” she whispered. Woohyun and Maeri nodded enthusiastically. The teacher giggled before confessing, “I did it based on who would make the cutest babies. And you two, you guys will have the cutest in the class.” She pulled away from the dumbfounded students, whose cheeks were growing redder by the second. “Use your break wisely,” she advised with a wink, before she left for the next blundering lab table.

Maeri and Woohyun could not look at each other for the rest of class and made an unspoken pact to never mention this again. Teachers meddle too much sometimes in their students’ lives.