They’re sitting at the usual table in the back corner with their fellow loser-status friends, Jongdae, Junmyeon, and Sehun, and Kyungsoo. Jongdae is half awake, staring off into nowhere in particular while slowly spooning chicken soup into his mouth. Junmyeon, allergic to apparently everything, is eating a special meal the school has to make for him every day. Sehun is a freshman—to be honest, Chanyeol isn’t sure when he came to the table or when they even let him in, but nevertheless ever since whenever he’s been faithfully coming to their table, sticking his nose into everything and laughing at everyone for a reason he has yet to figure out. And of course, Kyungsoo is the quiet kid who just sat with them from day one and has only so far said “thank you” and “see ya”. Nobody bothers to ask the kid anything. There’s something daunting about his silence.

Baekhyun is telling them the episode of his “talk” with Mr. Jung, their Calculus teacher. “Okay, so like after class, I just walked to the front while everyone left, and his eyes were already glaring at me like he knew what I was going to say, because—well—you heard me, right, Chanyeol?—I kind of asked him in class if he was really giving us a test on Wednesday because we preferred it to be Tuesday, and yeah. So I kind of asked him that, and he looks at me, like the are you kidding? face and all—“ he makes an imitation, everyone laughs, “and…”

Chanyeol is holding the plastic fork in his hand, nudging the carrot around his soup and imagining it swimming in a tiny chicken soup pool. He can hear Baekhyun’s chews in between his anecdote, the sort of cute chewing noise only Baekhyun makes.

Baekhyun seems to have gotten over that awkward comment pretty easily, but for some reason, it’s made Chanyeol run into some sort of emotional malfunction. He can’t seem to get that comment out of his mind. Was it embarrassment?

“…the matter with you, Chanyeol?” Baekhyun prods Chanyeol with the end of his spoon, waving his arm around Chanyeol’s face. “Earth to Chanyeol, Earth to Chanyeol~ Or are you not from Earth, is that why? Are you from another planet? Like an exoplanet?”

“Shut up, Baekhyun,” Junmyeon wheezes as he pushes away his half finished sans-eggs bread veggie burger with soy milk. “That’s probably the worst joke yet.”

“But look at him! He’s staring off into space, and his ears are just like alien ears—“ Baekhyun leans over to pinch Chanyeol’s ears, which promptly gets Chanyeol out of his trance.

“Hey!” he swats his arm out in front of him, sending the carrot on his spoon flying into the air.

“You’re such a ,” Sehun snorts. The three of them shoot a glare at Sehun.

“Nobody asked you to talk, dweeb,” Baekhyun says. Sehun has been getting increasingly annoying; tolerating his obnoxious presence has gone past the borderline these past few days.

Sehun shrugs, still smirking. “Fine, es,” he says as he flicks a pea across the table. He goes back to doing whatever he’s doing.

“But guys,” Baekhyun wheezes, choking over his food just thinking about it. “Guess what. Chanyeol has a fanbl—“

“Shut up! Shut up!” Chanyeol throws pieces of napkin at Baekhyun’s face—a futile attempt—it lands in his soup, floating downwards instead of going in the right direction.

Baekhyun snorts at his attempt and continues—“blog of 2NE1—you know, that—“

“K-pop group, yeah, yeah, I know,” Junmyeon finishes.

“Wait—how…?” Chanyeol stops in the middle of ripping apart another napkin for ammunition.

“Look. I came over to ask to borrow your laptop and you left the room with the tab open.” Jummyeon sneezes into a napkin and carefully folds it. “It was like three months ago.”

Chanyeol tilts his head down in embarrassment as the entire table snickers at his very characteristic carelessness.

Sehun rolls up one of Chanyeol’s napkin pieces and flicks it at his head. “You’re such a ,” he says.

Nobody bothers to react, but as Chanyeol lifts his head, he sees a strange emotion flicker across Baekhyun’s face. Their eyes lock for a split second and for some strange reason it’s all too embarrassing. Chanyeol looks away immediately.

“So,” Baekhyun says in an abnormally loud voice. “I have to go back right now to finish writing that essay. I forgot about it. Bye guys,” he says, suddenly getting up and leaving.

“Hey, you left your phone here,” Kyungsoo says to Baekhyun, who is already gone, in the hallway outside of the cafeteria.

Everyone looks at Kyungsoo.

“Wha—“ Sehun starts to say.

Kyungsoo kicks him in the shins from under the table.

“Shut up,” he says.

Sehun stifles a whimper as the rest of the losers stare agape at Kyungsoo. There’s nothing left to say at the cafeteria table.

After a deep silence of shock, Chanyeol finally bursts out, “I’ll give it to him later.”

The rest of the dinner is strangely silent. Kyungsoo looks oddly confident and Sehun, for the first time, doesn’t say anything.

 

 

He’s back at the dorm, checking his activities. There’s a strange spike in notes, judging from the little mini-graph at the side of his dashboard next to the tab marked “Activity.” It seems like some sort of post has attracted a lot of attention from his followers or something. Usually the graph stays pretty consistent.

He clicks on the activity tab out of curiosity. While the page is taking forever to load, he looks over at Baekhyun. “Yo, so did you finish your essay?” he asks.

Baekhyun looks up from his laptop, crouching over on his bed. He looks oddly protective of it, as if ready to shut it any second.

“What?”

“I said, did you finish your essay?”

“Oh. Oh, yeah. Yeah.” He distractedly continues clicking through whatever.

“What are you doing?”

“Oh? What? Oh. Um. A game. Clicking. Starcraft. Um. Yeah.”

Chanyeol jumps out of his seat to hop over onto Baekhyun’s bed. Startled, Baekhyun frantically moves his fingers on the keypad and starts typing furiously.

“What is it?” Chanyeol says, feeling mischievously curious. He peeks his head over Baekhyun’s shoulder to look at the screen. He feels a little tension as his cheek touches Baekhyun’s bare shoulder, but he ignores it and looks at the screen, which is a word document with three words on it: “Once upon a”

Baekhyun is frantically setting the font to size twelve, back to size eleven, to size sixteen, clicking randomly through the little dropdown list.

“…what…”

“What?” Baekhyun says defensively. His voice is suddenly loud. “What? I’m setting the font.”

“That’s… a nice essay you have there, Baekhyun,” Chanyeol says. He closes Baekhyun’s laptop and runs away back to his side of the dorm.

“Hey!” Baekhyun says. “I didn’t save my essay!”

Chanyeol rolls his eyes and looks at his computer. The activity page has finally loaded.

“What the…”

He scrolls down, letting the infinite scroll option show more notes—by the same user. He scrolls for about a few hundred notes and realizes that in between a few other users here and there, 99% of his notes are from a random user he’s never seen before—taeyeonnie506. He squints at the screen, moving his face closer to examine the pixels of the username.

After scrolling for what seems like ten minutes, he finally reaches the point where all of the “taeyeonnie506” stops at “taeyeonnie506 is now following you”. It seems like a new user, judging by the ugly name and the default geometric shape icon.

He shrugs. So maybe this person really likes all of the posts on his blog. Good for her—or him, he thinks, though he’s pretty sure that taeyeon is not a 2ne1 member but a SNSD member. Whatever.

He scrolls through his dash, puts a few more posts on queue, updates his twitter complaining about finals, and logs off before going back to sleep.

 

 

It’s the summer now, and Chanyeol is back at home with his family. He’s on full active mode on tumblr now, making new edits almost every day. His follower number is spiking up and so are the number of anon messages. He’s getting a steady flow of ten or so anon messages a day—though oddly similar. But still, it’s nice to know that so many people love him.

“taeyeonnie506” has not ceased to like all of his posts and reblogs—he’s pretty sure that it’s been the fourth month ongoing that “taeyeonnie506” has been his “number 1 fan” according to his activity page. It’s a little strange, to be honest, but it’s really nothing to worry about. There’s another user, 920506ty, on twitter, who seems to favorite almost all of his posts, as well. He guesses that with fame comes stalkers. It’s a strange saying he made up, so he never bothers to tell it to anyone.

He hasn’t been talking to Baekhyun or Junmyeon or Jongdae that much—they live pretty far away. Of course, Baekhyun lives about thirty minutes away, but they’ve met only once or twice during the summer, for an awkward game night or two.

Today, as he opens up his dashboard, he has a few ten messages again. He clicks on the tab, expecting the same sweet messages his anon gives him. There always seems to be a pattern to it, though, as if someone is sending the same messages every day. But that’s too much work, Chanyeol thinks. It’s probably just a bunch of anons who all just decide to use the same words and phrases…

The first message: Anon says, “Senpai u r so good looking can u marrey me”

The second message: Anon says, “Senpai pls teach me how to be so fabulous”

The third message: Anon says, “Hello! I was wondering how you make your gifs—through photoshop or another program? Thank you!” (So this one’s different.)

The fourth message: Anon says, “to be honest, you are my favorite person on tumblr. You are my favorite person ever. I love you so much chanyeol-senpai”

The fifth message:

Chanyeol stops.

It’s not anon.

It’s “taeyeonnie506”.

The fifth message: taeyeonnie506 says, “u know senpai, to tell u the truth, I have a big crush on you. you are the funniest and awesomest person ever. I love how quirky and dweeby you are. I really, really, really like you. I don’t know how else to put it. Ur so nice and funny. I don’t know. U probably don’t know me but I really like you. a lot. It’s hard to explain. I think it was for a long time. This is embrrassing. I don’t know. I hope we can at least be friends. from a secret admiring anon.”

So the person made a mistake—it was supposed to be off anon.

It’s always cute when that sort of thing happens.

Chanyeol smiles at the sweet message. He lets the words sink in. Wait…

He stares at the screen. He leans in closer to the screen, again discerning the individual pixels making up this now-familiar username. Taeyeonnie506…

Something seems strange.

He leans in closer, his nose now touching the screen. It’s too close to actually be able to see anything, but he keeps his face on the screen anyways, cross-eyed.

“taeyeonnie506…” he whispers.

Something is oddly familiar.

Something…

May fifth?

No way.

Taeyeon? SNSD?

Suddenly, it dawns on him.

No way.

No, no, no way.

Baekhyun?

Baekhyun’s birthday is May fifth.

But 506 doesn’t guarantee anything!

He remembers the passing comment Baekhyun sneered at him when he first showed him 2ne1.

SNSD’s better. Taeyeon’s better looking than Dara.

No, no way.

A smile slowly spreads on his face, though. He tries to wipe it off, but he keeps thinking…

He’s on his dashboard, and a little red number one appears on his message icon again.

He clicks on it.

This time it’s a deliberately non-anon message. Taeyeonnie506 again.

It says, “senpai can we please be friends? on tumblr? I’m sorry ><”

Chanyeol usually publicly replies these sorts of messages with an “of course!” and a cute gif of Dara or Bom being happy.

But this time, he replies it off anon:

“Of course. I like you too.”

He pulls out his phone. He decides to text Baekhyun.

“Hey,” he types. “Do you wanna come over for some pizza and super smash bros? I have something to tell you.”