Chapter Text
Siyeon hadn’t wanted any of this.
Okay, she’d wanted her father to get a job, yes, but not one that required him to move across the country. She definitely hadn’t wanted him to decide that it would be a lot easier to move cities without dragging his sixteen-year-old daughter along. Which led to Siyeon sitting here, at this boarding school, where a teacher who was a friend of her father’s had convinced the other faculty to accept her as a student for a while.
So Siyeon sat at her desk in math class and brooded silently, thinking about all the steps in the chain of events that led up to her being here. Not even one of those events had been something she wanted to happen.
As she thought about that she started to get angry. How dare her father simply decide to leave her here and go off to his new job in another city by himself? Seriously, what kind of shitty parent does that—
“Hey, uh…Sihyeon?”
“What?” she said more snappishly than she meant to, turning to look at the girl who had said her name. Giselle flinched back a little, eyes widening, and Siyeon bit back the angry correction of her name that had been about to follow. “And it’s Siyeon, not Sihyeon,” she said less sharply.
“Oh! Sorry.” Giselle apologized. “Siyeon. Got it. Um, so, you didn’t seem to have noticed, but class is kind of over.”
Siyeon looked around the room and realized that Giselle was right. Class was, in fact, over. She, Giselle, and the teacher, Tzuyu, were the only ones in the room. Tzuyu was absorbed in grading homework and hardly seemed to have noticed that the two girls were still in her classroom.
Siyeon sighed and got up, picking up her backpack. “What’s the next class again?”
“Um, next we have art class.”
Siyeon groaned mentally. It wasn’t that she didn’t like that, it was just that she knew the art teacher was her father’s friend. “With Mina unnie, right?”
“Er,” Giselle shrugged, “maybe? I don’t know today.”
That confused Siyeon, who couldn’t see how you could not know who your teacher was, but she just shrugged. “Fine, show me how to get there.”
Giselle seemed relieved to end the conversation, practically darting out of the classroom. As Siyeon followed her down the hall, she felt guilty for snapping at her. It was hard not to though. Giselle was one of those people who got on her nerves simply because they seemed to be constantly jumpy and startled by whatever other people did. That also made Siyeon feel really guilty for getting angry at her though. Which only made her angrier—at herself.
Okay, art class was definitely what she needed right now, a way to express her feelings without yelling at people. Unfortunately, talking to Mina was not what she needed.
“Hey, Siyeon!” The moment she stepped into the classroom, someone called out to her. She looked up to see one of the girls she had talked to earlier that morning when she arrived waving at her from a table across the room. Siyeon crossed the classroom to her, relieved to have someone to sit with other than Giselle. Giselle looked equally relieved as she went to find her own friends.
“Hi…” Siyeon suddenly realized she had totally blanked on the girl’s name. Crap. Uh… “Lia?” She suddenly empathized with Giselle forgetting Siyeon’s own name.
The other girl laughed. “Yeji,” she corrected. “She’s Lia.” She gestured to the girl sitting across from her, who was already drawing something even though class hadn’t started yet.
“Dangit, sorry,” Siyeon sighed.
“No worries,” Yeji assured her. “It’s a ton of new names and faces to learn, I know. Come on, sit with us.”
Siyeon eyed the small bit of empty space at the end of the bench. She wasn’t sure she would quite fit. “Uh, well, I can try…”
“Oh, hold on.” Yeji gently shoved the girl next to her. “Scoot,” she told her.
“I can’t, Chaery’s hogging the bench,” the girl complained. Her hair caught Siyeon’s eye—short and almost white-blonde but with a slight hue of pink. She admired the color for a moment, a little envious.
“You could sit on her lap,” Yeji suggested.
The other girl grinned. “Well, if you say so,” and she promptly climbed into the lap of the redheaded girl next to her, who yelped in surprise and tried to shove her. The pink-blonde girl responded by wrapping her arms around her and refusing to be budged.
“Ryujin, get off!” The redhead looked at the girl across from her, who was identical to her except for having black hair. “Help!”
“Oh, no, Chaery,” the black-haired girl grinned. “She’s your girlfriend, you deal with her.”
Ignoring the minor chaos she had created, Yeji scooted into Ryujin’s vacated spot and gestured for Siyeon to sit down. She did.
“Okay, so…Yeji, Lia,” she nodded at the two girls respectively, “Ryujin?” gesturing to the pink-blonde girl, who nodded. “I don’t think I’ve met the rest of you, or if I have I don’t remember your names, sorry.”
“Chaeryeong, or just Chaery,” the redheaded girl said, now making a decent attempt to ignore Ryujin clinging to her. “And this is my twin sister, Isa,” she gestured to the girl across the table from her, “and Ryujin’s younger sister, Yuna,” indicating the sixth girl, sitting between Lia and Chaeryeong.
“Right. Uh, nice to meet you, I’m Siyeon.” Though she figured they probably all knew that already.
“Nice to meet you too. Don’t mind Ryujin,” Chaeryeong said, “she’s just insane.” Ryujin rolled her eyes in response.
The classroom door swung open and a woman who was definitely not Mina walked in. She was blonde, for one thing, and her hair was longer. “Hello, class,” she said.
Everyone looked over at her except for Lia, who was still drawing in her notebook; a girl with dark brown hair at a nearby table who was absorbed in her attempt to steal a pen out of her friend’s bag without her noticing—which wasn’t difficult since said friend was staring blankly at the wall and seemed to not be paying attention to anything going on; and the pink-haired girl sitting on her other side, who reached over and slapped her dark-haired friend’s hand.
The third girl flinched as if startled, shook her head, and looked over at the other two with an expression of confusion as the first girl retaliated by grabbing the second one’s notebook.
The pink-haired girl smacked her friend’s hands away, then grabbed her wrists and pinned them to the table when she tried again. By this point more of the class was looking at them than at the teacher.
The teacher sighed. “Minji and Bora! By any chance did you happen to notice that this is a classroom and other students are trying to work?” Her voice had a slightly exasperated undertone to it that suggested that having to scold those two wasn’t unusual.
“Sorry, Sana unnie,” the pink-haired girl answered, letting go of her friend, who just rolled her eyes. The third girl still looked puzzled. She must have been really not paying attention. Actually, another girl at that table seemed confused as well, at least until the one next to her leaned over and whispered something to her.
The last girl, the clear youngest not only at the table but in the classroom, seemed to be trying to explain to the third girl what was going on. She must have succeeded because the third one suddenly turned and smacked the pen thief on the shoulder.
The teacher nodded, accepting the apology. “All right—” she narrowed her eyes at the smacker, but let it slide. “Feel free to continue with your work then.”
Most of the class went back to drawing, doodling, or various other art-related activities, including, in the case of the youngest girl, folding her notebook paper into origami. Siyeon turned to Yeji, who was idly drawing a line on her paper with no particular pattern, and said quietly, “I thought that Mina unnie was the art teacher? Is she out today or something?”
Yeji shook her head. “Mina unnie and her wife co-teach. You never know from day to day who’s going to be here, it could be either or both of them. But there’s actually not a whole ton of structured teaching anyway, mostly just free work time.”
Siyeon glanced over at Sana, who was half keeping an eye on the class, though most of her attention was on her own notebook and her pens. She looked back at Yeji. “I don’t really know what to do,” she admitted. Everyone else seemed to have something they were already working on.
“Oh, that’s okay,” Yeji answered, “a lot of us don’t really know what we’re doing either. The point of this class is to have fun, not to be productive.” She looked down at her own paper, which now had a complicated curvy line. “This sort of reminds me of something, don’t you think?”
“Hmm, maybe,” Siyeon said, studying it. She tilted her head. “If you flip it upside down it kind of looks like a sitting cat.”
“You’re right,” Yeji agreed, turning her notebook around. “A cat it is then.” She started to draw a cat face on her scribble.
“Sua, what are you doing?” someone demanded.
Siyeon glanced over at the other table, where the pink-haired girl had grabbed her dark-haired friend’s hands again. Or rather she had grabbed one hand with both of hers, but the other continued to draw on the pink-haired girl’s paper.
“Sua! Stop it! Yooh, help!”
The girl sitting across the table from them reached over and grabbed the dark-haired one’s free hand. She had brown hair as well, but the bottom half of it was bright pink. “Sua, really? Can you just not be chaotic for like, ten minutes?”
“I don’t think she’s capable of that,” the youngest girl answered.
The dark-haired girl—Sua, apparently—pulled her hands out of her friends’ grasp and began folding a piece of paper into a paper airplane.
The girl across from Sua, who had bright orange hair, took the paper airplane out of her hands and started unfolding it. Sua grabbed for it and a brief tug-of-war ensued before the youngest girl tossed one of her origami creations, a spiky object of some sort, at Sua.
It bounced off her head, making her let go of the paper in surprise, and got tangled in the short hair of the girl next to her, who jerked back, startled, and nearly fell off the bench. She yanked it out of her hair and chucked it back at the girl across from her.
Sua reached across the table, stole some of the youngest girl’s origami, and began to toss it at her. Her target retaliated in kind.
The pink-haired girl looked between Sua and the youngest. Then she put her head down on the table with an audible thump. The girl across from her, the one with the pink highlights, reached over and patted her shoulder sympathetically.
Sana stood up from her desk, apparently deciding she’d had enough of this behavior. “Ahem.” The entire class looked at her except for the two origami-throwers, who realized several seconds later that they were in trouble and froze.
“I realize that this class is right before lunch and it’s a little more difficult to focus, but this is quite frankly ridiculous. Bora and Gahyeon, I want to see you both after the end of classes today. Now please, for the love of God, try to practice appropriate classroom behavior for the remaining…” She checked the clock. “Ten minutes. And the next one of you who causes a class disturbance is getting a detention, is that clear?”
Her pointed words were quite clearly aimed at the six girls at that table, who assented quickly.
When Sana sat back down, Siyeon leaned over to Yeji and asked, “What’s up with those girls? Are they always like that?”
Yeji shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much,” she answered. “They’re kind of…” She seemed to be searching for the right word.
Yuna looked up from her doodling and made a twirling motion next to her head with her free hand.
“Nah,” Yeji shook her head. “Sua’s crazy, sure, but the rest aren’t exactly. It’s just…” again she struggled to find the way to describe them.
“Chaotic,” Ryujin suggested.
“No, we’re chaotic,” Chaeryeong disagreed. “They’re something else.”
“Wild.” Everyone looked at Lia, who had put her pen down and looked up from her drawing. “That’s the word for them. They’re wild.”
“Honestly,” Isa muttered, “they’re eerie, is what they are. They freak me out.” She shivered slightly.
Siyeon glanced over at the six girls. The pink-haired one and the girl with pink highlights were now talking while casually restraining Sua’s hands to stop her from trying to cause any more trouble, while the other three did their best to ignore that. There didn’t seem to be anything particularly creepy about them, and she looked back at Isa questioningly.
Ryujin objected as well. “Isa, they’re not eerie. They’re a little weird, I guess, but it’s fine.”
Isa shook her head, looking at Siyeon, not Ryujin. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” she said. “They’re okay in class, mostly, it’s later that they’re scary.”
“Isa!” Ryujin protested. “They are not! Stop filling Siyeon’s head with preconceived ideas!”
“Actually I’d have to agree with Isa,” Chaeryeong put in. “There’s something kind of off about them. Two of them don’t even say anything half the time when you talk to them, they just look at you.”
“Alright, that’s not quite fair,” Yeji said, “Handong probably doesn’t answer because she either doesn’t understand or doesn’t know how to say what she wants to say.”
“Okay, that’s true, but what about Dami?” Isa challenged. “She’s perfectly capable of understanding and answering. She just doesn’t.”
Ryujin shrugged. “Dami spaces out a lot. She daydreams or something, I don’t know.”
“Yeah, and it’s freaky,” Isa insisted, Chaeryeong and Yuna nodding in agreement. “When she’s not paying attention, she’s seriously not paying attention. I mean, you all saw Gahyeon have to explain to her what was going on earlier.”
So the girl that Sua had tried to steal the pen from was Dami, Siyeon noted mentally. And the youngest was Gahyeon then. Who was Handong? Maybe the orange-haired girl, since she was the quiet one out of the other three.
She glanced over at them again just as the bell rang for the end of class. Most of the students, including everyone at her table but Isa and herself, had already been putting away their things and they jumped up instantly and flooded out of the room, or at least gathered by the door. Siyeon stayed seated though, watching.
The two girls holding onto Sua let go of her hands, exchanging a look of relief, and got up. Three of the other four stood up almost at the same time as well. The last girl, Dami, didn’t move until the girl with the pink highlights leaned across the table and smacked her shoulder. Then she leapt to her feet, clearly startled. “Ah! Sorry. I didn’t notice.”
“See what I mean?” Isa muttered as she picked up her backpack. “She spaces out, sure, but have you ever seen someone daydream through a class bell before?”
“No,” Siyeon had to admit. She’d thought the bell was pretty noticeable.
“They’re all weird,” Isa said quietly. “In different ways, sure, but they’ve all got something going on.” She shook her head. “You seem fascinated with them. Well, look all you want, but I’d avoid them if I were you.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Siyeon said. The six girls were still gathering their things, since only two of them had managed to get ready before the bell. The others had been busy variously restraining their friend’s hands, being restrained, or daydreaming.
“I’ve got some more advice, too,” Isa said.
“What?”
“Don’t be the last one to get to lunch.” She grinned and took off.
Siyeon grabbed her bag, jumped up, and ran after her. “Hey!”