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It just had to be her.
Of all the 30 students in 4-C, Zhong Chenle, the responsible, loud secretary just had to be paired up with his own rival.
“Don’t you think it’s a little biased to everyone else to pair me up with her?” Chenle points to the girl beside him, trying to plead with his teacher for a reconsideration. “You know how competitive we both are. Also, we’re both practically the valedictorians of this class. You can’t pair up both valedictorians.”
“We’re the salutatorians, idiot,” the girl beside him rolls his eyes at his attempts of reasoning with the teacher. “Renjun’s the valedictorian of this class. And unlike you, at least he’s satisfied with his partner.”
“Yeah, because his partner isn’t his long-time rival, idiot.”
“You’re the only one calling us rivals, Chenle. I’m not even calling you a competition, you assuming imbecile.”
“Did you just call me assuming?”
“I’m not calling you an idiot.”
“Yeah but you called me imbecile, you absolute piece of—”
“I think that’s about enough reasoning, Mr. Zhong!” Their history teacher puts down his red pen from grading papers. “You won’t get to change your partner. If any one of both of you complains one more time, the deadline of this project will be tomorrow. Are we clear?”
Chenle and the girl look at each other with a glare and sigh. She nods and returns to her seat with him following. “So, partner,” he calls, and for the nth time that day she rolls her eyes. “my house or yours?”
“Mine,” she folds her arms above her chest and leans back on her chair. “I can’t believe I’m already your seatmate . . . And now I’m your partner!” I can’t believe how—”
“I swear if neither one of you ask each other to a date this instant, I’m going to lose my mind listening to your ‘rival’ banter.” Renjun speaks up from behind her chair.
She turns from her chair to face Renjun, “Just because you and your ‘rival’ made out yesterday and are now officially together doesn’t mean that’ll happen to us, you best-friend stealer.”
Renjun laughs. “I forgot you’re her best friend. I’m sorry, ____.”
“Yeah suck up to me because without my approval you both won’t be dating.”
Renjun shoots her a look. “Without my approval you won’t be anywhere near dating Zhong Chenle.”
Her face scrunches up in disgust. “I do not want to date this arrogant, self-centered jerk.”
“Well this arrogant, self-centered jerk doesn’t want to date you, either!”
“OH, so you’re going to admit you’re an arrogant, self-centered jerk!”
“You—”
“Okay! Class dismissed.” Their teacher says, and everybody starts packing their bags for dismissal.
“I’ll wait for you by the gates of the school,” _____ says to Chenle as she leaves the classroom. He watches, befuddled. He looks to his friend, but Renjun only shrugs.
“Were you guys this bad?” Chenle slings his bag over his shoulders.
Renjun shakes his head. “We weren’t verbal or showy about us being rivals.”
Renjun waits in the hallway for the other classes to finish, but this time Chenle can’t join him because he knows he can’t keep _____ waiting. He waves Renjun goodbye and promises tomorrow he’d join him in waiting, but Renjun says its no problem.
Chenle’s surprised to see her there, standing, earphone in one ear, the other tucked into her shirt. “Oh, hey,” she greets. “Ready to go?”
“Yeah,” he answers, and looks around. “Where’s your car?”
“Oh,” she says, “I don’t have a license yet. I commute.”
Chenle freezes. “You . . . commute?”
She stops walking and looks back at him. “What, don’t tell me you don’t know how to commute?”
He looks anywhere but her eyes, his nicely polished shoes suddenly becoming interesting to him. He hears her laugh lightly and grab his wrist. “Come on, you big baby,” she says. “I’ll teach you how to commute. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe.”
“Are you sure? How about the thieves on the sidewalk?”
“There aren’t any thieves around this area, Chenle. We live in a New City. Everything around here is safe.” She looks left and right before dragging him across the street in a chaste. “When you cross roads, stay on the pedestrian lane. And look both ways before crossing.”
“What if there are no traffic lights?”
Even when they’re walking on the sidewalk, she makes sure not to let go of Chenle’s hand, because she wants him to feel like he’s safe around her. “Wait until the cars are far enough for you to cross. Some cars will stop for you, but still be careful.”
“How do you commute?” He asks curiously, looking around his surroundings and finding that the city is much cleaner and safer than his parents taught him. “Do you use a bus, or a train . . .?”
“When I want to get home fast, I use a taxi cab. When I don’t have enough money, a bus. When I’m with my friends I use the train, since they all use the train too. So most times I use the train.”
“But what are we gonna use today?”
“Do you have your public transportation card? We can use the train—”
“I don’t have a transportation card.”
She stops walking to look at him. “What the . . . how do you get to school then??”
“Uhm.” He doesn’t like answering that question. “I have my own transportation.”
“What, you pull up to school in a jet black limo? You give your friends rides in it?”
“Yes…and no. I don’t let my friends ride unless they pay for gas.”
She stops walking again and stares at him. “Damn, Zhong Chenle. You could’ve told me earlier that we could take your limo.”
“The limo’s only to and from school. Can’t go anywhere else with that thing.”
“And whenever I see you walk home with your friends? Where does the limo go then?”
“That’s ice cream Wednesdays. We go down to the convenience store every Wednesday and get some ice cream then go home together.”
“Okay, Chenle, we’re crossing the main road so this is going to be a bit scary,” she squeezes his wrist and waits for the traffic lights to stop. “You’re going to have to walk fast, alright? They only give us thirty seconds to cross this road.”
He brings his gaze to the main road (which is around four lanes) and gasps. “Thirty seconds to cross this?! Really?!”
“Yeah, but since there are other people with us they’ll wait more. But let’s follow rules and cross fast.”
Once they get across, Chenle asks again, “So . . . are we going to use the train or the bus? Or a taxi cab?”
“We’ll use the bus. Have you ever ridden in a bus before?”
“No.”
She grins and drags him to the nearest bus. “Good. Because you’re about to experience the best bus in the city.”
“How is it the best bus in the city?”
“They don’t wait for the bus to fill up to go,” she skips in her walk, wiggling Chenle’s arm. “They leave based on schedule. So if we wait for 20 minutes and we’re the only people riding, we leave with only the two of us. Yay!”
“Wow,” he sits down on the bench and looks at the lamppost with the posted schedule. “The next bus comes in five minutes!! And we leave in fifteen minutes!!”
“See?” She sits down on the bench and pats the space next to her. “Efficient. This is what it’s like for me everyday.”
“By the way,” she speaks up after a few minutes of silence. “You owe me money for this. I’m paying two days worth of bus fees for both of us, since you have no transportation card.”
“Oh,” he fishes out his wallet and gives her a ten thousand won bill. “Keep it. I have too many of that in my wallet already.”
“Wow, Zhong Chenle! Rich kid galore!”
“Shut it. Is that our bus already?”
She takes a look at the numbers of the bus approaching. “Yep! Come on.”
Once they get on, she taps her card on the machine twice and they both get seated in the two frontmost seats with Chenle seated on the window seats.
Chenle is amazed at all the sights he sees, mostly because everything he passes by is something he doesn’t see on his way home. He sees more students of his school pass by him on the sidewalks, and he swears he saw Renjun and his girlfriend making out in an alleyway they passed. But apparently that wasn’t Renjun because Chenle called him and Renjun said he was already home five minutes ago. After fifteen minutes of commute he sees the next bus stop and a frown plasters itself on his face. Why was it over so early? He wanted to see more of the world. Maybe next time, he says to himself as they both get off the bus.
“Enjoying ourselves, are we?” _____ asks Chenle, and he nods slowly as he watches the bus they just rode close its doors and wait. “Come on, Chenle. My house is right here.”
Behind the bus stop, a block to it’s right, was an uphill road with black gates at its peak. “Is that your home?!” Chenle gawks at the forest inside the gates. She laughs while she walks up but shakes her head, and gestures for him to follow her. “This is a village. Kind of like Forbes. But not really.”
“What do you mean—!”
“Rich people live here, Chenle,” she rolls her eyes and puts her thumb into a machine by the posts of the gates. The gates immediately open, creaking, and he has to remind himself his house is just as big as the Kardashian-Jenner’s household and closes his mouth. “And my house is the biggest one yet.”
As they walk among the neighbourhood, _____ waves to her neighbors who lounge outside of their houses, and introduces Chenle to them. One of her neighbors, he notices, since he was his father’s business partner, but he couldn’t understand why he had a bird perched on his shoulder. Chenle bows slightly at him while looking at the bird but he laughs. She holds a small conversation with him about how Chenle was her partner for a project. He says he’s one call away if she needs any more building materials. She laughs, pets the bird on his shoulder and goes, but Chenle can only wonder why she needed building materials in the first place.
“It was because I built a birdhouse for one of my baby birds,” she elaborates without him having to say anything. “He offered me some free plywood like it was nothing. I gave him one baby bird in return and he loved it. The one on his shoulder? Yeah that was him.”
He nods and looks around at the vibrant trees around the neighbourhood. There were few houses but everyone seemed so close. Someone who was jogging waved at her and she waved back.
“Where’s your—?”
He didn’t even need to complete his sentence as he saw a house just a bit smaller than his, but more modernly designed and with more plants and three cars parked on the curb.
“Come on, Chenle,” she giggles, “it’s not that impressive. I bet it's nothing compared to your house.”
“It’s just a bit smaller.”
“See. Come on.”
“Yeah, but I live in the actual Forbes Village, not . . . Heaven on Earth village.”
She laughs.
“So _____ _____, salutatorian of class 4-C, lives in one of the richest villages I’ve ever seen, has . . . I won’t even bother to count how many cars you have, neighbors with the hottest celebrities and biggest entrepreneurs of society . . . commutes to school?” He mocks jokingly, but this earns him a glare from her.
“I know how to drive, Chenle. I’m just too young to get a license,” she rolls her eyes and leads them to the front door, where she fishes her house keys from her pocket. “Okay! We’re home. Welcome to my household, Zhong Chenle. Enjoy yourself.”
Chenle doesn’t even have time to talk about the velvet carpets, the gold-pleated doorknobs, and the giant diamond chandelier that seemed oh so familiar to him before she started to lead him to her room. Once there, she sits him down on her work chair, and looks around from under her bed and finds some bond paper, markers, stickers, and decoration scissors. She hands them all to Chenle. “Start decorating, lover boy. I’ll research and draft the paper.”
“Lover boy?”
She doesn’t look him in the eye when she says, “You can call me something too if you’d like.”
Chenle thinks for a moment. “Okay, princess.”
He sees her flush a bit but in reality that was only short for Princess Fartface.
——
From that day on, Chenle finds himself enjoying a flirty conversation with his seatmate.
For example, two days ago:
“Hey princess,” he says, taking a seat beside her. “What’d you eat for lunch?”
“Chicken and rice, why?”
“Okay. Did you think of me?”
“Yeah. I thought of beating you in today’s history quiz, baby.”
“Really now? I just thought the same thing, princess.”
“If you get a 23/25 in today’s quiz, dance in front of the whole class.”
“Alright. And if you get a 24/25 today you have to sing about how great I am in front of the whole class.”
“You’re on, Zhong Chenle.”
Though these past few days have been hectic, he finds it saddening that she isn’t there to sit beside him anymore since nowadays she hasn’t been attending school. Teachers say she acquired dengue, and will be gone for a few days. Chenle volunteered to collect her homework and bring it home to her (in her limousine of course) and teach her the material she missed. It was a good opportunity for Chenle to get close to her even more.
When she got well enough to go back to school, the teachers were surprised she could keep up with the lessons well and she credited it all to Chenle, to which he said was nothing.
Nevertheless from that day on, Chenle’s dislike towards the girl lessened. He texts her more often, even when he’s with his own group of friends they’re texting each other, and Jisung is the first one to take notice of this one fateful Thursday. Jisung, though he knows what’s definitely going on, remains silent.
All hell breaks loose when Haechan hears Chenle laughing by himself, staring at his phone. They all shoot each other a questioning look as he continues to laugh without care. Haechan shakes his head and pops the question:
“Who are you talking to?”
Chenle freezes up and slowly begins to hide his phone. “My mom,” he answers as calmly as he can, but Haechan’s not buying it and snatches his phone before Chenle can even think of it.
In not less that 30 seconds Haechan covers his mouth in surprise as he scrolls down Chenle’s messages with his Princess contact. The rest of the boys huddle around the phone, but Renjun is just shaking his head with a knowing look. When Chenle glares at Renjun all he does is shrug.
“I can’t believe Renjun and Chenle have girlfriends before I did,” Mark says, laughing.
“You’re too old Mark, don’t dream of it.” Haechan continues to scroll but is lightly shoved by Mark. “Wow Chenle, who taught you how to flirt this good?! If she isn’t in love with you at this point I’ll be convinced she has no heart.”
“Do you like her?” Asks Jaemin, and Chenle doesn’t even have to nod before everybody’s clapping his back and squealing.
“Wow just three weeks ago it was Renjun, now Chenle…” Jeno shakes his head. “I’m…”
“Alright, Chenle, what’s our game plan?” Haechan gives him back his phone. “How are you going to tell her?”
He panics. “I don’t know! I haven’t thought of how.”
Renjun thinks of an idea. “Who’s better at math, you or her?”
“Her.”
“Alright. Make her solve for a graph.”
“. . . Renjun, I think that’s the least romantic thing you’ve ever said.”
“No, but the graph is in the shape of a heart.”
Renjun earns himself a few cheers from the boys, and a ‘That’s so smooth!’ from Jaemin.
“And then,” he continues, “use code at the bottom to say ‘I like you.’”
He earns himself louder cheers and he nods, accepting the cheers. Chenle considers it and starts to look up a graph for a heart.
“This might actually work, Huang Renjun,” Chenle laughs. “Oh my god. Huang Renjun. You’re a genius.”
“Of course I am. That’s why I’m valedictorian and you’re salutatorian, Chenle.”
“Shut up! I do my best.”
“You always do.”
——
Chenle slides the paper into her locker, careful that nobody sees him do it, and leaves for the cafeteria, where he gets some food before he leaves school.
While he’s walking to his limo (which is parked outside of school,) he sees from the corner of his eye Renjun, walking along the rest of his friends, who stops and gives his girlfriend a small peck before waving her good bye. He wishes that were him and _____ soon.
The next afternoon comes and Chenle is on his way to his limousine again, only this time as he’s chewing the sandwich he acquired from the cafeteria he hears a loud call of his name and the thundering of footsteps behind him.
He turns around and sees her, running towards him at full speed, probably getting ready to jump on him. “No, don’t I have a sandwi—!”
He drops the sandwich anyway, and catches her and tries to hold himself steady while she latches herself onto him.
“God, Zhong Chenle,” she says onto his hair as she squeezes him tighter. “I ran all this way for you.”
“You really didn’t have to,” Chenle eyes his perfectly good sandwich on the ground, now scattered. As very few people pass by the two of them and his ruined sandwich, he can only give them apologetic eyes, because the rest of his face is obscured by his girl.
Then he sees his group of friends, pointing to the both of them, and Haechan starts to bring out his phone, even though Chenle does his best to glare at them and tell them to stop. The rest start bringing out their phones. Chenle ignores them.
“My god, Zhong Chenle,” she holds his face in her hands and mushes his cheeks. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you to say you like me back?”
Before he can even answer, _____ brings his face to hers, instantly connecting their lips and kissing him over and over again. Chenle enjoys this moment of theirs, but he doesn’t know how long his arms can keep holding her.
“No,” he says as she peppers his face with more kisses. “I don’t know how long. Can I put you down now?”
“Too long, baby. Way too long.”
Chenle pulls his face away from her hands and plants a soft kiss on her lips instead. One that lasts just a few seconds, but is more than enough to compensate for all the time that she’s waited.
“You don’t have to keep holding me up,” she wraps her arms around his neck and squeezes him lightly. “I can latch onto you like this forever. It’s so comforting.”
“Yeah, I know you can princess, but . . .” He rubs her back and cranes his head to look at her. “. . . the guys—my friends, they're . . .”
She turns her head to look at them and widens her eyes. She turns her attention back to Chenle, and Chenle is convinced his arms are about to turn to absolute jelly (not because she was heavy but because he wasn’t used to using his arms for such a long period of time.)
She finally asks for him to put her on the ground, but she hugs him this time. Chenle hugs her just as tightly, but sees the boys still recording and flips them off for one second. Jeno laughs.
“Want me to bring you home?” Chenle takes hold of her hand.
She flips the boys off too before turning back to him and walking out of school. “I thought this thing doesn’t go anywhere but to and from school?”
“If you pay for gas, it can.” He says, opening the door for her and waiting for her to get inside. As soon as they’re both comfortable inside the car, he holds her waist and whispers, “but for you I think I can make an exception . . .”