Subject: Re: Feeling a bit blue, are you?

From: NaminParis@staygold. com

To: [email protected] uk

Date: 6 May 2015 8:50 am

 

 

Seungyoon wrote:

Homesick? If not, I’m sorry, I must have done something that makes you mad at me, although I don’t know what

 

 

You didn’t do anything, Seungyoon, except be your perfect, funny, adorable self. It’s me. I’m a bad boyfriend. I think you deserve someone better, someone who thinks about you every single minute of the day. Jinwoo thinks about Mino like that.

                Wah! I’m setting you free, Seungyoon. Go off and have a really, really happy life. without me.

 

Taehyun

 

 

 

Subject: Re: Now you’re just being silly

From: NaminParis@staygold. com

To: [email protected] uk

Date: 6 May 2015 8:52 am

 

 

Seungyoon wrote:

I’m not Mino and you’re not Jinwoo, so stop comparing us to them. I like you the way you are, and wouldn’t want you thinking about me every single minute of the day. You’ve got a brain, Tae, and I like brainy birds. So stop saying you’re a bad boyfriend and start planning what you’re going to wear on your birthday. Make it something easy to take off, wink wink, nudge nudge.

 

 

Oh, Seungyoon! That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me! Not the brainy bit, but the part about making my clothes easy to take off, **.

                I think I’m going to cry.

 

                Taehyun

 

 

 

Subject: Sorry!

From: NaminParis@staygold. com

To: Hiphopbabylion@bbusan. com

Date: 6 May 2015 11:33 am

 

 

Back! We had our French drill and had this creepy feeling of Mr. VI staring at my for the whole time I had to stand in front of the class to recite the new terms we learned. Eew.

                OK, I’m just going to forget that. Let me just tell you about Taehyun and Jinwoo’s not-so-really-wonderful-trip in Paris.

                I wanted to go to a Hard Rock Café Pascal mentioned before but Jinwoo wanted to go no Notre Dame with the rest of the school. “You don’t know that it will be boring,” Jinwoo said stubbornly. “You probably haven’t ever heard Gregorian chanting before.”

                “Donghyun’s dragged me to enough ancient churches; I can pretty much guarantee you that it’ll be boring.”

                He did the hand-wring again. “This is a special church, though. They have statues of knights and things like that.”

                “I’m off guys dressed like knights unless they are named Seungyoon or were in the Lord of the Rings movies.”

                “The gargoyles—you’d like them! We could have our pictures taken next to them. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

                I gave in and let him talk me into seeing Notre Dame that night. Since you haven’t been to Notre Dame, I’ll describe it for you: it’s big. And gothic-y. You know, all cathedral-like, with great big stone arches and swoopy gothic ceilings, and stone pillars and stuff. It also has some pretty stained-glass windows, not the usual type that your mother likes, with scenes out of the Bible, but rose windows that look like really pretty kaleidoscopes. I’d like to say more but I figured out by now that you can just google it or something.

                The rest of the school was getting ready to leave when we got there, I guess we took a lot of our time walking down the Boul’ Mich (Boulevard St. Michel, but only tourists call it that; if you’re hip, you’ll call it Boul’ Mich), which is the student area of Paris.

                Jinwoo chewed his lip. “I wouldn’t mind seeing the gargoyles, but it’s clear that the tours were over. It’s already after seven and they have a rope across the door to the stairs.”

                “Oh, don’t you worry about thayat!” Irene said appearing by our sides. “We’ll ask the priest a question while you two slip behind him so you can go see the towers. No one will be the wiser.”

                “What if we get in trouble?” Jinwoo whispered, his fingers doing the sleeve clutching thing again.

                “Trouble? Y’all won’t get into trouble. There’s nothing up theyuh but some stairs and a great big bell and the gargoyles. Go on; we’ll ask the priest a couple of questions. Y’all go have a good time.”

                Jinwoo pinched my arm as I started toward the entry area. “Remember what happened at Nethercote Castle? You said all we would do was look at the dungeon and you got stuck in a medieval mantrap.”

                “That was an accident! Besides, it can’t possibly happen here; there are no mantraps on these stairs.”

                “That’s not what I mean and you know it,” Jinwoo hissed, still tugging at my arm.

                “Nothing is going to happen. Look, there’s no door to the stairs, so we can’t be locked into the tower, and they don’t lock all of the doors t the cathedral at night because people come in to pray, so we’ll be able to get out whenever we want. The worst thing that can happen is someone will see us up there, and if that happens and they yell at us, we’ll just say we don’t understand them, and leave. OK?”

                “I don’t like it—” he started to say.

                “Consider it a broadening experience,” I said, grabbing his hand.

                I trotted up the stairs, “Don’t know, but you don’t have to worry; I won’t make you stand at the edge and look down. I know how heights make you woozy.”

                “They don’t make me woozy,” Jinwoo protested.

                I rolled my eyes at that, because he really is afraid of heights, but if he wanted to be brave Jinwoo, then who was I to tell him he wasn’t?

                Suddenly we hit the top and burst out into open air.

                “Oooh . . . gar . . . goyles!” I said, pointing over as I doubled my breath. “Break . . . time!” I slid Raeryun’s backpack off and leaned against the cold stone wall of the cathedral as I looked at the gargoyles.

                “That’s not a gargoyle,” he said as I wandered over to a big stone bird with an open beak that was clinging to the stone railing. There were metal barriers here, too, evidently to keep people from throwing themselves off the top. “The guidebook says that only gargoyles have a function—they drain the rainwater off the various roofs and buttresses. The rest are chimera, which are fantastical creatures that were added during a restoration in the nineteenth century. This is the chimeras’ gallery and its . . . Oh! Three hundred and eighty-seven steps!”

                There we were in Chimera Land, it took me five minutes to talk Jinwoo into walking down the narrow gallery over to the South tower, but finally we did the picture thing with a couple of the chimeras. I slid a questioning glance at him. Jinwoo looked liked he wanted to barf, but he mumbled something about making it to the top if it killed her, which it probably would.

                “You’re such a drama queen,” I teased as we started up another staircase, this one even narrower than the last. It was wood, not stone, though, and wasn’t nearly as long as the previous ones. In no time we popped out into a small room with a huge bell.

                “Quasimodo’s bell,” Jinwoo said in a whisper. “Oh, Tae, don’t!”

                I couldn’t help but reach around the big wooden beams housing the bell and rapping on it. It made a dull, low, heavy sort of sound, not at all bell-like. “Coolio! I’ve touched the Quasimodo bell!”

                Jinwoo angled the guidebook to catch the weak light of the single light bulb that lit the room. “This must be the belfry. The bell is named Emmanuel. I suppose you want to go to the summit?”

                “Yup,” I said, and almost had to drag him up the last flight of stairs. It was really nar5row, only room for one person at a time, but at last we made the top. Jinwoo refused to look out at the view, and I have to admit that it was a bit cold up