Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Tuesday, 6:00 PM

“It’s the top of the hour, which means you lucky lot tuning in have the pleasure of joining myself, DJ Jinu, and my ever-personable co-host, DJ Mira, for what I’m sure will be a lovely evening here on AM 1650, K-Uni campus radio. DJ Mira, how are you today?”

“I’d be a lot better if you’d stop calling us DJs.”

“We are DJs! You’re asking me to lie to the people! I think that’s another mark for the apology board.”

A whiteboard marker squeaks.

“Which brings your total to 29, and my total to three. And I did contact Professor Han yesterday to say sorry for discussing his divorce live on air last week, so I’m gonna go ahead and bring my count down to two.”

A flat voice. “I’m sorry for asking you to lie to the people.”

“It’s too late now, I can tell you’re being insincere.”

“That was sincere, give me the board.”

“No! It’s my bit, get your own!”

“Give me-!”

“Hey!”

Tuesday, 6:28 PM

“I hope everyone enjoyed that half hour of uninterrupted listening. We’ve just had some slight technical trouble with the computer here in the studio, but it seems like everything should be back on track now. On a related note, we would like to apologize to everyone for playing Fancy Like ten and a half times while the system was down. You didn’t deserve that, and we never would have put you through it if there had been a way to avoid it. As a result, I have agreed to DJ Mira’s request to have Fancy Like removed from the station catalogue, and we would like to reiterate how truly sorry we both are that you had to experience that. DJ Mira, if you would.”

A whiteboard marker squeaks.

Tuesday, 9:13 PM

“...and I would just think that after six seasons, someone would be able to tell me whether they all actually died at the end, or if some of them managed to get off the island for real. But everyone’s all nobody gets it, bro and you’re not supposed to actually understand it. What if I want to understand it!”

“You could read the wiki.”

“I don’t want the wiki to understand it for me, I want someone I know to understand it and then explain it to me.”

“You’re just like Zoey. I really don’t get what the difference is.”

“One is facts, and the other is passion!”

There’s a long sigh.

“Well, whatever. The point is, that last song was called Lost. Great song. Terrible show. DJ Mira, what’s up next?”

Silence. A clicking sound.

“We’ve… actually got a request.”

“What? Seriously?”

“Someone wrote, some people died and some people got off the island but they all died eventually. They want us to play Call Me Maybe.”

More silence.

“Did I ever tell you that when I worked at the campus gym, the corporate music station they put on would play Call Me Maybe once every sixteen songs?”

“You must’ve developed a real taste for it.”

“You could say that, DJ Mira. But a request is a request. It’s anonymous’s world, and we’re all just living in it. Here’s Call Me Maybe.”

Wednesday, 9:56 PM

When Mira had first been assigned to the evening show, she’d thought she’d be working alone. It was common knowledge that nobody listened to campus radio, especially not at six in the afternoon, so the job was basically guaranteed to be a breeze. Mira had pictured herself introducing songs, talking about artists, and maybe taking an hour to herself every so often to catch up on classwork while she let the music play.

What she’d failed to realize, prior to signing her onboarding paperwork, was that she was actually a last-minute addition to someone else’s pre-established segment—more specifically, Jinu’s show, which was about 50% chatter, 30% gossip, and 20% actual music or music discussion. Mira had known Jinu from a brief yet disastrous encounter in the dining hall which had consisted of Jinu’s soup soaking Mira’s shoes and, in retaliation, Mira’s bowl of noodles being flung at Jinu and his tablemate. Someone had had to drag her away before she could get her hands on anyone’s clam chowder. During their first radio show together, Jinu had introduced her with the phrase the girl to avoid on clam chowder Thursdays and had not elaborated further.

All that aside, it was still not the worst job in the world. Sure, Jinu was actively competing for the title of most annoying person on earth, and sure, they spent four hours of each weeknight struggling to entertain an audience of, at most, six people, but it paid 4% above minimum wage and, on days when Jinu was feeling particularly generous, she still got a couple minutes of peace to focus on her homework. All in all, it wasn’t a bad gig, which was probably why Mira had made it nearly six months at the radio station, in spite of her ridiculous co-host.

Now, her ridiculous co-host leans close to his mic, shooting her a devilish look.

“Did you know,” he starts, and Mira knows whatever comes next will not be good. “Right before we went live today, DJ Mira was telling me a story about her chem class-”

Mira’s jaw tightens. “Jinu I swear to god I will shut this computer down again.”

“-the details of which I would never share on air, because that would be a breach of privacy.”

Mira relaxes slightly.

“But it got me thinking.” Jinu's voice is conspiratory. “Hypothetically, let’s say you end up in the same class as your years-long campus crush, and hypothetically let’s say she agrees to pair up with you for a group project. Is it a sign? Is she head over heels? Or does she just want you for your big nerdy brain?”

Mira takes back all the semi-positive sentiments she’d just been feeling. This job is hell, and she’s stuck living in it.

“Please ponder that, listeners,” Jinu requests. “Unfortunately, it’s time for our last song of the night before we transfer you over to the capable hands of DJ Autoplay. I know you'll miss us, but don't worry—we've got something special to end off with. This is Nerves by JUNIORZ. Thanks for listening and have a safe night, everyone.”

Jinu hits the play button and a smooth, unfamiliar song filters into the booth. It starts with piano, soft and unsure, before a clear, vulnerable voice joins the mix. Mira frowns, leaning closer to the monitor to get a better look. She’s pretty sure she’s never seen JUNIORZ in the campus catalogue before.

But before she can investigate further, Jinu’s in her face, grinning shamelessly and holding his hand out for a high five.

“Perfect show, as always,” he says.

“I’ll shave your head in your sleep,” Mira replies, and does not accept his high five. "I didn't say anything about being into anyone. All I said that she asked me to group up."

Jinu nods enthusiastically. "I heard you loud and clear. It was a totally unrelated hypothetical."

Mira grits her teeth and promises herself a fancy organic smoothie from the dining hall if she manages to keep from strangling Jinu on the spot.

There’s a loud pounding from outside the booth, and Mira casts a weary look at the—totally unnecessary—one-way mirror that separates them from the rest of the station. Her own tired eyes stare back at her. The pounding comes again.

“Off air!” Jinu calls, and milliseconds later a red-faced Zoey bursts through the door.

“I have explained LOST to you four times!” she shouts, jabbing a pointed finger in Jinu’s direction. “I drew you a timeline! Stop acting like you didn’t understand it just to be relatable!”

“I didn’t understand it because all you talked about were the hot women,” Jinu snaps back. “I know the women are hot! I have eyes! That doesn’t make the show make sense!”

Mira thinks idly that nobody has watched LOST in over a decade, and that if Jinu truly wanted to be relatable he would pick a more relevant series. But she’s not about to enable this argument by bringing that up.

“Yunjin Kim!” Zoey is yelling, to which Jinu responds, “I know she’s hot! I know!”

Mira sighs.

She likes Zoey well enough, and she loves a chance to see Jinu get put in his place, but she knows better than to stick around waiting for the end of one of their arguments. Once, she’d watched them walk out the door bickering about which of them their cat would be better friends with, should it suddenly turn human, only for them to show up the next day with Jinu still insisting that since the cat was his birthday present, it was only fair that it would like him better.

“Being your birthday present doesn’t mean he has to like you better!” Zoey had yelled, and Jinu had rolled his eyes and yelled back that, "Even if he doesn’t have to, he still does!"

Another time, shortly after storming into the station and slamming a paper speeding citation down on the table in front of Mira, Jinu had insisted that the only reason he'd been stuck with a ticket was that Zoey had attempted to flirt her way out of it and had ended up scarring the police officer for life. In order to clear her name, Zoey had spent the next fifteen minutes bombarding Mira with her absolute best pickup lines, often pointing at Mira's red and horrified face and shouting, "See? See? She likes it!"

They are, perhaps, the world’s most competitive cousins. Mira doesn’t have it in her to wait them out tonight.

“I’m heading out,” she says, shouldering her bag and slipping out of the booth and into the open station room. Zoey’s stuff is strewn across a table in the corner, her stack of notebooks teetering dangerously over the portable piano keyboard plugged into her laptop. There’s a plastic turtle keychain clipped to her backpack that Mira had found on the ground ages ago and handed over mindlessly, not expecting the way Zoey had lit up and given the turtle what she’d declared to be the spot of honor on her bag.

The turtle stares at Mira. Mira stares back.

“Your owner is weird,” she tells the keychain.

“Well, you’re the one talking to my backpack,” Zoey says from behind her.

Mira jumps. She hadn't noticed the arguing stop. “Jesus, Zo.”

"Sorryyy," Zoey chirps, but she's grinning guiltlessly. “I know you’re going home.”

"Yeah," Mira grumbles, "and trying not to have a heart attack along the way, thanks."

Zoey remains blatantly unapologetic. "Listen, this is important," she continues. "If you’re gonna work on that project with chemistry girl tomorrow, you shouldn’t wear your contacts.”

She makes a little X with her fingers and shakes her head gravely. Mira’s eyes narrow in suspicion. Zoey stares back, the picture of pure, puppy dog innocence.

“Why?” Mira asks slowly.

"Because." Zoey's X is disassembled as she holds up a finger to accentuate her point. “You look good in glasses," she concludes, as if it's obvious. "Studious, but in a sexy way. You’ll charm the pants right off her.”

She waves a hand vaguely, utterly nonchalant. Mira feels her face heat, either from the word sexy on Zoey's lips—in reference to herself, no less—or from the idea of chemistry girl’s pants being anywhere but on her legs. Probably some combination of the two.

“Just a tip,” Zoey adds innocently when the silence stretches on for too long. "But you know, do what you want."

And then she smiles. Like that’s a perfectly normal bomb to drop.

“Right." Mira hopes she doesn't sound as thrown as she feels. “Okay. Thanks.”

Zoey just keeps smiling, hands clasped politely behind her back. She almost looks like she's waiting for something. Mira takes a subtle step backwards, not wanting to unconsciously give it to her.

"Night," she mumbles, mostly out of politeness, though she's already halfway out the door.

“Woof,” she hears Jinu snort as she leaves. “You’ll get ‘er next ti-”

But the door shuts before she can hear the rest.

Wednesday, 7:22 PM

Mira is not, in fact, planning to work on her chemistry group project the next day, and as such, she stabs her contact lenses into her stupid fuzzy eyes like usual. Or rather she would, if it weren’t for the words sexy and pants off in Zoey’s voice bouncing distractingly around her brain, causing her to jam her left contact in a little too hard, which irritates her eye past the point of immediate recovery. And so, rather than succumb to the nebulous fate that is her glasses—and the risk that they’d accidentally charm someone’s pants off of their body—she opts to go through the day mostly blind, which now results in her nursing a headache, as well as a growing feeling of resignation towards the fact that she’ll soon have to re-join her painfully dry abstract algebra group chat and beg notes off of her classmates.

Jinu doesn’t seem to care about her woes, only commenting that God gives his worst eyesight to his nerdiest soldiers and making Mira play a game that involves trying to guess which celebrities’ pictures he pulls up on the station computer while she sits five feet away.

“It’s not really fun when you guess the same guy every time,” Jinu says after Mira’s fifth or sixth “…Ryan Gosling?”

“Well, stop giving me guys who look like Ryan Gosling and I’ll stop guessing him,” Mira snaps. 

Jinu, apparently giving up on Mira’s abilities, closes the browser tab. Mira takes the opportunity to drop her pounding head into her hands and pray to any powerful beings listening that Jinu might spontaneously combust.

“I can’t believe you walked around blind all day because you’re afraid of girls being into you.” Jinu shakes his head in faux disappointment. “Bisexuals used to go to war for that stuff.”

“That is not why I didn’t wear them,” Mira objects. “And girls are into me regardless. It just wasn’t a glasses day.”

Truthfully, she had foregone the glasses because she hadn’t wanted Zoey to think that she was dressing up for her, despite the fact that she’d spent her night staring into the mirror with her glasses on, then off, then on, until she’d lost all sense of what she usually looked like. But nobody, much less Jinu, needed to be made aware of that fact.

"Hey, I get it," Jinu relates. “Glasses can be dangerous. I wore a pair for this Halloween party once—I was going as Clark Kent, and then halfway through I changed into Superman. The girls were really into it.”

“What girls?” Mira asks, dubious.

“Y’know,” Jinu waves a hand. “The girls.”

“Mm-hm.”

“It sucked though, cause Zoey went as Supergirl and everyone thought we were together. It was really gross. Superman and Supergirl are cousins, y’know, but everyone just thinks they're dating.”

Mira rubs her temples and stifles a groan.

“What was that you were saying about God’s nerdiest soldiers?” she drawls. To her right, the door opens, and Zoey sticks her head in.

“I wanted to be peanut butter and jelly that year,” she volunteers. "Nobody would've thought that peanut butter and jelly were dating."

Mira stares up at her, incredulous. “We’re on air.”

Zoey backs out of the booth and shuts the door.

“For the record,” Jinu says as if he truly thinks anyone will care, “I only said no to peanut butter and jelly because she wanted to be peanut butter and I didn’t want to paint myself purple. Though even if she had been jelly, I wouldn’t have been peanut butter, cause, well, I’m allergic.”

He looks genuinely saddened by this fact. Mira’s head throbs.

“When I was seven my friend brought peanut butter brownies to school and they made me sit outside the classroom while everyone ate them so I wouldn’t die. They offered me an extra cookie from the cafeteria, but it was a Friday. Fridays were oatmeal raisin cookies. I told them I’d rather risk the peanut butter.”

There’s another short stretch of silence.

“This would be a great time to play the peanut butter song, had you not banned it from the catalogue.”

Mira stares at the computer screen and prays for time to go by faster.

Wednesday, 10:08 PM

Zoey is kicking around the station common room by the time they switch things to autoplay, headphones on and eyes closed as she walks in little circles, her hips coming dangerously closer to colliding with the table with each passing loop. Mira takes this as a bit of a bad indicator for the evening’s show—if Zoey of all people had deemed Jinu’s chatter too boring to stomach, there was little to no hope that anyone else had managed to stay tuned.

“Zoey,” Mira says, not quietly, as Zoey’s next circle goes wide. “Zoey. Table.”

Zoey doesn’t respond, but pivots away from disaster at the last second. “Shh,” she says, starting to circle the other way. “I’ve got something good.”

She taps her headphones. Mira scowls.

“Walk into the table next time then,” she grumbles. “See if I care.”

As if taking Mira’s words as a challenge, Zoey nearly slams into the table from the other side. Her circle widens again. Mira bites her lip, tries to hold back.

“Table,” she says after a beat.

Zoey pivots. “Shhhhh.”

“Is she in her head again?” Jinu calls from the booth. “She’s working on a new song. Swear she’s been keeping us all on lockdown at home. No one’s allowed to make a sound until she’s got her ideas all figured out.”

“Oh, is that why you couldn’t shut up today? Getting all your words out while you can?”

“The people love this voice, Mira. Who am I to keep it from them?”

Zoey trips over her pulled-out chair, just barely managing to right herself before her head can crack into the edge of the table.

“Got it!” she announces, then slams a few complicated looking chords into her keyboard controller. “There. That’s like, most of an idea. I’ll fix the rest later.”

There's a disbelieving uh-huh from the direction of the booth. Mira feels her lips twitch upwards at the corners. She forces them flat.

Zoey glances up, finally looking her in the eye. “Aw, no glasses?”

Mira ignores that.

“Midterm project?” she asks.

Zoey flops back into her chair dramatically. “Yes and it’s killing me. Who decided creativity could be put on a timeline like this? Probably a STEM person. I’ll bet you ten grand.”

“You music majors," Mira snorts. "So dramatic.”

“It’s drama with purpose, Mira. It fuels the creative process. If you had any joy left in your cold, science-y heart, you’d understand.”

Mira just shrugs and deadpans, “Got me there.”

Zoey barrels on.

“Well anyway.” She slams her laptop closed, then thinks better of it and opens it back up, saving her project before closing everything down again. “We’re going to Abby’s, if you wanna join.”

She pauses the process of cramming an impossible number amount of equipment into her backpack to look up at Mira invitingly. Mira hesitates, weighing her options. On one hand, Abby's place—or the Saja House as it was formally known, though everyone just called it "Abby's"—was always good for a few hours of dancing and free drinks, as well as the best wifi on campus. Everyone knew that that was where you went to get hammered on Wednesdays and to get first pick of classes during online registration. On the other hand, going meant interacting with Abby. Gross.

“Pass,” she decides, and when Zoey pouts, reluctantly adds, “But I’ll walk you there.”

“Yay!” Zoey springs back to life. “Let’s go quick, before Jinu catches up.”

“Before-?” Jinu objects from the booth. "But we're driving home together later!"

Zoey is already towing Mira out the door. “Yep, meetcha there!”

It’s a short walk to Abby’s apartment, though Zoey manages to fill the trip with all the chatter of a ten kilometer hike. Mira finds herself surprisingly un-annoyed by this fact—it’s not Zoey’s fault she’s a talker, and really, anything's better than Jinu and his peanut allergy.

“Not enough pickles!” Zoey is saying now, making a chopping motion with her hands to punctuate every word. “And way too much sauce!”

“Would never have pegged you for a hamburger snob,” Mira comments.

“No, I said the hamburgers were fine. This was about the salad.”

Mira frowns and decides she’s better off not knowing.

They meander together for a few minutes more before evidence of Abby's party starts to make itself known. As usual, the area looks a bit like the scene of a crime (albeit a tame one). There are two people on the lawn outside the apartment complex taking turns trying to parkour up to Abby’s living room window on the second floor and narrowly avoiding landing on their third drunken friend, napping obliviously on the lawn. Nearby, a girl dressed inexplicably in a red bikini top and what appears to be the lower half of a HAZMAT suit is attempting—unsuccessfully—to coax a muscly boy in an unbuttoned beach shirt and cowboy boots down from a tree. Music thrums out through Abby’s open windows, blanketing the scene in pulsing, hypnotic sound.

“Looks like a blast,” Mira says flatly.

Zoey leans back, observing the scene.

“It does seem funner when you’re drunk,” she admits. “Sure you don’t wanna stay?”

She tugs at Mira’s arm slightly, blunt nails nipping ever so slightly at the skin of her wrist.

("Guitar nails," she had told Mira once, and had lasted a whole two seconds before breaking out in a fit of laughter.

"I can't play the guitar, Mira," she'd admitted through her snorts. "I'm just gay."

"You're a music producer and you can't play guitar?"

"I can play Hot Cross Buns, and if I need more than that, I make Jinu do it for me.")

Zoey tugs at her again. "Could be fun," she sing-songs.

It probably would be fun, Mira knows. She's got the night off, no morning classes in sight, and she's not, like, above Abby's or anything. She could relax, relive the glory days of sophomore year. She'd almost be willing to do it, if it weren't for—

“MIRA!”

Zoey glances up towards the source of the voice and Mira, resignedly, follows suit. Abby’s got his entire torso out the window, one arm raised to cup a hand around his mouth like they wouldn’t otherwise be able to hear him. He’s shirtless under a faux leather vest, and his pink hair is flattened against his skull by a clunky, cartoonish-looking cowboy hat.

“DJ MIRA!” he repeats, then points for good measure. “COME PARTY! COME GET LIT! IT’S COWBOY NIGHT!”

A round of cheers pierce the air behind him, and he raises both arms in uncalled for celebration. A poorly tied loop of rope probably meant to resemble a lasso dangles limply from the crux of his elbow like a too-big bracelet. The boy in the tree starts singing something in a country accent that's impressively off-key.

“I think I’m good,” Mira tells Zoey vacantly.

Zoey just sighs and shakes her head, eyes still on the window. “Leave it to a man to ruin all my hard work.”

“Uh huh,” Mira says, though she's pretty much already checked out. “Okay then. Have fun.”

Thursday, 6:00 PM

“Welcome back to the best four hours of your night, also known as AM 1650’s standout hit, the Jinu and Mira show. Tonight’s theme? Cowboy angst. You can thank my cousin for coming up with that one.”

“Thank Abby while you’re at it, for getting her drunk enough to think it was a good idea.”

“Oh, she was the designated driver last night. Stone cold sober.”

“...Of course.”

“Anyway, we’ve got some great stuff lined up tonight. I’m hoping you all like minor chords on the banjo.”

“And if not, feel free to switch stations. Then take a moment to reflect on how lucky you are to be able to do that. Some of us don’t have the privilege.”

“Right you are, DJ Mira. But trust me, once we get into this playlist, you won’t wanna be anywhere else.”

“Remind me why you always get to make the playlists?”

“Coolness level. Superior intelligence. Seniority.”

“Only one of those is true.”

“It’s gotta be at least two, because I have been here longer than you.”

“Do me a favor and go fall in a hole.”

“On it, DJ Mira. Right after this set.”

Thursday, 7:54 PM

“And that was Cruise by Florida Georgia Line. One of my personal favorites, and even better when you’re sloshed at Abby’s on a Wednesday night.”

Mira frowns. “You’d better hope none of your professors are tuning in this time,” she mutters. “And when is the angst part of this cowboy angst night gonna come into play?”

“Well, you see, I don’t actually know many sad country songs,” Jinu admits. “So I figured we’d just end the night with Somebody That I Used To Know or something. Call it even.”

There’s a sharp tapping on the one-way window that lets Mira know that Zoey is not pleased. Jinu handily ignores it.

“For two reasons, though, we’ll be taking a short break from cowboy angst,” he announces.

“Oh thank god.”

“Reason number one, DJ Mira was starting to get that scary eye twitch that means she’s thinking about maiming me.”

“I don’t do that,” Mira grumbles, eye twitching.

“And reason number two, we’ve got a request!”

Mira’s annoyance melts away. “Again?”

“Two in three days!” Jinu points at the little request box at the corner of the computer screen. “Not bad, right? That’s more than we’ve had in a while.”

Actually, Mira’s pretty sure the request they’d received earlier in the week had been the first of her campus radio career. She leans closer to see the message, which is, again, anonymous. Mira’s not actually sure it’s possible to send a request non-anonymously. She glances at Jinu, who shrugs and gestures towards the keyboard.

“Okay,” Mira says into the mic. “This listener wants to hear Nerves.”

“Good choice,” Jinu comments. “I dug that up off SoundCloud a week ago. Great stuff. My taste is impeccable.”

“Second only to your ego,” Mira adds.

“And my unbearably good looks.”

Mira grabs the keyboard and drags it closer, finding the song. It’s the only track by JUNIORZ in the catalogue.

“SoundCloud, huh?” she asks, mouse hovering over the play button.

“It’s where I get all my underground music,” Jinu replies. “Y’know, get in early before people strike it big. Then you can say you listened before it was cool.”

Mira hums thoughtfully. “How many of your SoundCloud artists are striking it big?”

“Quality over quantity, Mira,” Jinu tsks. “There are some real hidden gems out there. Just watch—before you know it, this song will be everywhere.”

Mira stares at the name on the screen. “Y’know, it's not the craziest thing you've said.”

She presses play, and that same gentle piano melody fades in over their headphones. Jinu mutes their mics, leans back in his seat, and grins.

For once, he doesn't talk through the entire song.

Thursday, 10:04 PM

“No angst,” Zoey bemoans, barging through the door as soon as Jinu announces that they’re off air. “Hardly any cowboys. Jinu, you take my ideas and ruin them. What a waste!”

“The cowboys were there in spirit!” Jinu protests. “It was kind of a difficult theme!”

“It was a home fucking run!” Zoey cries, throwing up her hands.

“Swearing!” Mira and Jinu exclaim in unison, and Zoey mutters a quick sorry and bows her head to the microphones.

"Look, I'm sorry you didn't like the show," Jinu says pacifyingly. "I know it's hard to appreciate musical genius when your head's all the way down there. The soundwaves probably skip right over you."

"Mira," Zoey says calmly, "kill him for me."

"I'm not getting into this," Mira replies. "Just add it to his tally."

Jinu stiffens, eyes darting to the apology board on the desk. At the same time, Zoey dives for a whiteboard marker.

"Goodnight," Mira calls over her shoulder, exiting the building to the sound of Jinu's pained voice—"Come on, I was so close!"—and Zoey's loud, maniacal laughter. Dorks, she thinks, though she can't help the smile that creeps across her face.

She's in a surprisingly good mood for having just spent four hours with Jinu for the fourth night in a row. Maybe the lack of annoyance could be attributed to the absolutely gorgeous iced latte she'd picked up before the show, or maybe to the way that Zoey had tapped at the glass with increasing insistence at each ill-fitting song Jinu had played. Maybe she was just happy they'd gotten another request, even if it was for Jinu's underground SoundCloud I knew it before it was cool-farming mystery artist. At least the song was good.

Curiosity taking over, she pulls out her phone and brings up the SoundCloud webpage. An overwhelming number of tracks she doesn't recognize peer up at her from the main screen, but rather than engage, she searches for JUNIORZ. There are a handful of results, one with a smattering of songs only a few seconds long, the rest with none. Mira scrolls until she sees an account with a single regular-length song and four followers. The profile photo is a trio of three flowers, petals a whitish iridescent purple, set against a background of a crumbling brick wall. The location is tagged as Seoul. Mira clicks.

Sure enough, the account only has one song up: Nerves, posted ten days ago. Without hesitation, Mira presses play.

It really is a good song, she thinks to herself as she makes her way home. The production is intricate and beautiful, and the singing is lovely. As much as she hates to admit it, Jinu did find a gem.

She hums the song to herself as she brushes her teeth, taps her fingers against her palm in time to the bassline as she climbs into her neatly-made bed.

I wonder if Zoey likes it, is her last thought before she drifts out of consciousness.

When she wakes the next morning and checks her phone, JUNIORZ's following count has reached one thousand.

Chapter Text

Friday, 12:15 PM

To Mira, chemistry was the middleman between hatred and love, tragedy and joy, or—less dramatically—non-math and math.

Biology? Non-math. It was all cells and organs and other organic crap that nobody with any semblance of a life could even pretend to care about. Physics, on the other hand? Math for ages. Gravity? Numbers. Buoyancy? Numbers. Friction? So many numbers. If Mira could marry a science, it would be physics—which, in the unfortunate game of STEM fuck marry kill, would mean fucking chemistry so she could kill bio.

The point was, chemistry had too many numbers to be a non-math and too few to be a math. It was a pseudo-math, which Mira was consequently pseudo-good at.

She doesn’t explain any of this to Rumi as they pore over their textbooks together, partly because she’s not sure how uttering the words fuck, marry, kill would go down when they’re sitting within earshot of the librarian and partly because she doesn’t want to sound insane. Instead, when Rumi asks if she’s any good at stoichiometry, she just shrugs and says, “I’m decent.”

Rumi shoves her worksheet across the table desperately. “I hate this stuff,” she laments. “I don’t want to balance equations. I just want to be happy. Is that too much to ask for?”

Mira thinks, distantly, that this does not bode well for their group project—the group project that they were supposed to have started today, had she not been remedying Rumi’s week-past-due homework. She wonders, as she peers down at the scratched out answers on Rumi’s paper, if this was what Jinu had been picturing when he’d suggested she use their shared chemistry assignments to make a move.

“I like the creativity,” she offers after a beat. “I don’t know where you got any of these numbers, but it’s a start.”

Rumi lays her head against the table and groans.

They've been at it for a little under an hour, having gotten out of their gen chem lecture at 11:30. Mira had been ready to bail and eat lunch in the stale, comforting enclosure of her dorm room, but she'd stopped dead when Rumi pulled her aside to ask if she'd like to get a head start on their term project. That's how she's ended up in the library, her half-eaten tomato sandwich lying forgotten in its container as she scans over Rumi's shoddy equations and simultaneously feels her anticipated workload for their shared project double in magnitude.

"I think you're overcomplicating it," she says to the top of Rumi's still downturned head. "Balancing equations is actually barely chemistry at all. It's mostly multiplication."

Rumi peeks up through her lashes. "Really?"

Mira's pulse decidedly does not jump at that sight, though she does grip her pencil just the slightest bit tighter. "Really," she says, the response coming just a hint too high. "You need the same amount of each letter on one side of the equation as you've got on the other."

"Can you show me?" Rumi asks.

Before Mira can answer, she's out of her seat and rounding the table. She comes to a stop just behind Mira's shoulder, leaning over her to get a better look at the paper. Mira inhales, gets a faint whiff of something clean and floral—conditioner, probably, and likely the kind that cost more than ₩3,500 at the local drugstore—and decides that she really doesn't need to breathe for the rest of this impromptu tutoring session. She scribbles out a quick solution to the second problem on the worksheet and watches as Rumi follows along, silently mouthing the numbers to herself as she does so.

"Huh." Rumi leans closer. The length of her braid slips off her shoulder and brushes past Mira's arm. Mira shifts away.

"Make any sense?" she asks, voice only minorly choked.

"I'm not sure yet," Rumi admits. "Let me try."

She pulls the worksheet towards her, backing just far enough out of Mira's space to allow her to safely catch a breath. She takes a minute to work out the next problem before sliding the paper back towards Mira hopefully. Mira gives it a cursory check.

"Looks fine," she says approvingly. "No notes."

"But what does this stuff have to do with chemistry?" Rumi asks. "Like, how does it actually apply?"

Mira sucks her teeth. Too non-math-y for her.

"Do you really care?" she points out. "You're a history major, right? And it's a 100-level class. They're not gonna quiz you on the practical application of stoichiometry."

Rumi looks at her like that's the smartest thing she's said all day.

"I'm sorry we didn't actually do any work on the project," she says an hour later, after they've reviewed both her overdue homework and the concepts for the worksheets for the upcoming week. They're packing their bags, Rumi having mumbled something about needing to meet with a group for a different project and Mira having had no desire to spend any additional time in the very public campus library.

"I'm not usually so behind," she continues. "Something about this stuff just… doesn't stick in my head."

She looks sort of embarrassed, and more than a little apologetic. Mira shrugs.

"It's fine," she says truthfully. "I didn't mind going over the concepts again."

"Well, still." Rumi raises a hand to tuck some hair behind her ear, then seems to realize that her hair is, as always, braided neatly down her back. "I appreciate your help."

And then she smiles, open and unabashed. Her teeth are straight and sharp behind the soft fullness of her lips. Her eyes crinkle just above her cheeks.

Mira bites her tongue. Regardless of what Jinu has to say, she is not totally into Rumi—or anyone, for that matter. She's focused on her degree. She's totally into math. Being in the general viscinity of a couple of pretty girls is just an unintended consequence of such dedicated commitment to her education. And if those consequences come with smiles that could light up the sky in the middle of a solar eclipse, who is she to judge?

They exit the library and Rumi utters a grateful, "Thanks again," before giving a polite farewell and making her way down the west greenway. Mira stands and waves for a few seconds too long before heading down the opposite path, back towards her dorm. If she's lucky, there will be time to squeeze in a quick workout at the campus gym a few buildings down before she heads back to her room for a short nap and some abstract algebra and proofs homework of her own.

She's barely made it a hundred paces when something—small, dense, and moving at far too great a speed—crashes right into her.

Momentum, she thinks as she tips backwards into the grass. Numbers.

And then, as the assailing object becomes clearer: Oh, Christ.

"Sorry!" Zoey yelps, pushing herself off of Mira's chest. The positive result of this action is that their faces are no longer millimeters apart, and Mira has some room to breathe. The negative is that Zoey actually ends up righting herself using Mira's chest, which leaves her both straddling Mira around the waist and somewhat ineffectively groping her. Mira, having no idea how to handle this situation, stays perfectly still.

Zoey stares down at her for a moment before her eyes light up in delighted recognition.

"Oh!" she exclaims, a wide grin breaking across her face. "Fancy seeing you here."

"Is it?" Mira manages.

Zoey still doesn't move.

"Cute glasses," she comments. "You meet with chemistry girl?"

Mira's face heats slightly. "Maybe."

Zoey grins wider. "Attagirl."

Mira lets out a low sigh.

"Hey, listen," Zoey barrels on. "I've gotta run—Jinu wouldn't let me take the car and now I'm late and it's all his fault. But I'll see you tonight, yeah?"

Thankfully, she's dismounting before Mira can try to answer, either not noticing where her hands had been resting or truly not seeing a problem with it. She gathers the few things that had been scattered in the collision, separating her pile of overflowing notebooks from Mira's ratty spiral-spined ones and handing them off as they stand.

"Sorry again," she laughs, though she doesn't look very apologetic. "But hey, you were a pretty great person to run into. Very well-defined. A truly pleasurable experience."

Her words come rapidfire. Mira blinks stupidly.

"Zo, what the hell are you ever saying?"

Zoey shrugs, already backing away. "Who knows," she says breezily. "Okay, see you tonight! Brace yourself, Jinu's gonna brag!"

Mira's brow creases. "Brag about what?" she asks, but Zoey's already disappearing down the path. "Zoey, brag about what?"

Friday, 6:00 PM

"If you will all recall," Jinu starts, and the answer to Mira's earlier question hits her like a tonne of bricks. "Less than twenty four hours ago, I predicted the meteoric rise of one previously unknown artist. At the time, barely anyone knew the name JUNIORZ. But now…"

He hits refresh on the SoundCloud page pulled up on the station computer. JUNIORZ's following count has jumped again.

"Over 1,700 followers in the span of a day," Jinu reports. "That's just the kind of selfless, important work we do here on AM 1650, K-Uni Campus Radio. This is the evening show, and we are your hosts: Jinu the Discoverer and his protege, DJ Mira."

"Why in god's name am I your protege," Mira grouches. "And why do I still have to be DJ?"

"Seniority," Jinu says simply. "And branding. Gotta give the people a name to recognize."

"What people?"

"The public! The fans!"

Mira checks the monitor. "We have eight listeners."

"That's twice what we had a week ago!"

Mira sighs. Zoey had warned her.

"All I'm saying," Jinu goes on, voice full of humble placation, "is, basically, I told you so."

"Yes, okay," Mira huffs. "The song blew up a little. You called it."

Jinu grins smugly. "That's all I needed to hear."

"It's not like I said you were wrong."

"All I needed to hear, DJ Mira."

Mira leans down and drops her head against her mic.

Friday, 10:01 PM

"Off air!"

Zoey bursts through the door.

"Have you seen this?" she demands, and shoves her phone in Jinu's face. Mira, feeling both lazy and curious, cranes her neck to get a look at the screen from the other side of the booth.

"Dude, Zo." Jinu leans back and kicks lightly at Zoey's shin. "Some space?"

Zoey doesn't relent. "Look!"

Jinu looks. Mira, giving into the nosiness, rises from her seat to examine the contents of Zoey's screen.

It's a picture of the old language arts building—the one the school had decomissioned two years ago, which was supposed to have been rennovated into a whole new art center, though whenever anyone asked about its status, the faculty just hemmed and hawed and waved their hands.

("Never gonna happen," Jinu had told Mira when she'd brought it up once. "That building's just gonna rot away until they decide to demolish it and put in a new parking lot or something."

"Bit of a waste of money, isn't it?" Mira had asked. "Couldn't they at least put a study room in there or something?"

Jinu had adopted an overly scandalized look.

"But if we let people back in," he'd gasped, "where would Abby sell all the frozen Jell-O shots we make together?"

"Ah," Mira had hummed. "Well I wouldn't wanna put him out of a job.")

"Big empty building," Jinu observes now. "So what?"

Zoey groans and turns the phone to Mira instead. "Look at the flowers," she insists.

Mira looks. "They're… nice?"

"Oh my god." Zoey huffs in exasperation, then jabs a finger at the computer monitor where JUNIORZ's profile is still loaded. The following count has now crept to over two thousand.

"Recognize anything?" Zoey asks.

She's pointing at the profile photo, the cluster of three flowers in front of the run-down brick wall. Mira glances at the phone, then the computer, then the phone. Oh.

Jinu's mouth quirks downwards. "You think they're the same flowers? Those could be from anywhere."

"Same flowers, same bricks, and look-" Zoey taps the corner of the JUNIORZ photo, where a black blob of paint spills over one part of the brick wall, just barely in frame.

"Paint," Mira voices.

"Spray paint," Zoey specifies. "People have tagged that old building to hell. Er, sorry."

She bows to the mics. Mira and Jinu nod, appeased.

"So based on some flowers, bricks, and spray paint," Jinu clarifies, "you think the JUNIORZ picture was taken on campus? It's not exactly concrete evidence."

"That's the thing." Zoey pulls her phone back and taps a few times before thrusting it back out again. "It's not my evidence. It's theirs."

It had all stemmed from a tweet from Abby of all people. He'd posted a picture of the wall outside the language building, flowers included, captioning it we have juniorz at home. Mira's pretty sure he hadn't even been serious, but a heaping handful of people had taken it and ran.

why's it kind of spot on tho

My friend overlaid the photos and it's like nearly a perfect match

who cares if it's the same wall like why does it matter?

And under that last post, three replies all along the lines of, because the song is good dumbass

Jinu sits back in his seat. "Huh."

Zoey shoves the phone back into her pocket.

"Hang on," Mira says, feeling a little lost. "Not to agree with the trolls or anything, but why do we care if it's the same wall?"

Zoey looks over at her, probing. "I mean… you're not at all curious?"

Jinu tilts his head thoughtfully. "It would be kinda cool. Going to school with a potential celebrity."

Mira thinks that potential celebrity might be stretching it a bit, considering the following count is now at a somewhat humble 2,103, but she keeps that to herself.

"It's not that I don't like the song," she says instead. "I just don't think it calls for a whole investigation."

Jinu hums in agreement. "You'd think these people would have other things to do."

"Better things is the saying."

"Well I'm not giving them that much credit."

Mira snorts. "I thought you'd be over the moon that people are noticing your breakout star."

"Well I'm happy to be proven right, if that's what you mean," Jinu retorts. "Didn't think it would come with campus drama, but hey, even better."

Zoey, who's been quiet for much longer than usual, just shakes her head.

"People are dumb," she decides finally, her voice dropping in pitch. "And they make dumb decisions."

With that, she spins on her heel and walks straight out of the booth. Mira stares after her, frowning, then looks to Jinu for explanation.

"Is she okay?" she asks. "She seems kinda tense."

Jinu doesn't seem overly concerned.

"She's fine," he says. "She gets like this when she's got a lot on her plate. She's probably stressed about her music projects and stuff."

"Oh." Mira glances back at the window, though all she finds is her own reflection. "That sucks."

"She'll bounce back," Jinu says. "But I should probably get her home for the night. Get her to rest that gremlin brain of hers."

He follows Zoey out with a casual later, leaving Mira alone in the booth. She can't remember the last time she was the last to leave. Luckily, closing procedure mostly consists of making sure the mics are muted and the autoplay system is working and turning off the lights.

Zoey's hoard of audio equipment—mostly cables and microphone accessories and tabletop mixing boards borrowed from various places around the building—sits piled high at her unofficial workstation in the corner. A ceramic mug full of writing utensils teeters precariously on the edge of the table. Mira bumps it back a few centimeters to a safer spot next to a sticky note that reads I HATE C MAJOR and another that simply reads WHY.

Mira's frown deepens. Zoey had seemed fine earlier on in the day, hyped up and bubbly and kind of overly familiar like always. Surely if Jinu said there was nothing to worry about then there was nothing to worry about, right?

She stands there, staring at the forlorn-looking WHY.

Nothing to worry about. Just lock up and leave.

But Mira's feet don't move.

"Fine," she sighs aloud, shaking her head in exasperation.

She grabs a sticky note from the blank stack by Zoey's keyboard, finds a pen in the pen mug, and hunches over the table. Her pen hovers above the yellow paper, but she hesitates, not sure what to write. She wants to give Zoey something reassuring, but she doesn't want to overstep. The longer she stands there thinking about it, the more she second guesses every idea she has. Something like "keep your chin up" seems too bossy, but "believe in yourself" and "don't give up" seem generic and substanceless.

In the end, she steers clear of all the cheesy sayings her mind conjures up. Instead, she draws a turtle sitting at a tiny, turtle-sized desk across from a laptop of its own. The turtle has its upper fins raised in a might-as-well shrug. As a final touch, she draws the bottom half of a speech bubble at the top of the sticky note, penning in a single word before she affixes the doodle below Zoey's bubbly letters.

WHY NOT? the turtle asks.

Mira gives it a second once-over.

"Keep an eye on her, okay?" she requests.

The turtle shrugs up at her. Might as well.

Mira gives it a nod. Feeling silly, she switches off the rest of the lights and slips out, locking the door for the weekend.

Satuday, 9:10 AM

"You know, some people would kill you for scheduling a homework session so early on a Saturday."

Rumi stares up at her, looking confused. "This is early?"

Mira lets out an amused breath. "Most people haven't even reached the hangover stage of Friday night drunk yet."

"You don't look drunk," Rumi observes. "Or hungover."

Mira shrugs. "I didn't say I was gonna kill you," she clarifies. "I only drink at parties, and I'm avoiding Abby."

"There are parties at places other than Abby's."

"I'm avoiding those, too."

A small smile flits across Rumi's face. Mira's eyes follow the amused curve of her lips.

"What?" she asks.

Rumi shakes her head. "It's nothing. You just have a very serious way of speaking sometimes."

Mira thinks of the twenty hours she spends on air every week bickering quite unseriously with Jinu.

"I'm a serious person," she lies, and begins to unpack her bag.

Rumi had texted her during the show last night asking if she wanted to meet up the next day and actually get some work done on their project, since their last work session had yielded very little in the way of tangible progress. Mira had only seen the message after getting back to her dorm, and had spent a torturous amount of time typing out and deleting responses before ultimately falling asleep without ever sending an answer. She'd woken up in a panic nine hours later, refusing to let herself overthink the sorry, yes, when are you free? text she'd finally sent back.

How about at 9? Rumi had asked.

It had been 8:30.

"Why are you avoiding Abby?" Rumi asks now. Rather than the library, she'd suggested they work at one of the outdoor tables in the courtyard behind the dining hall. Mira, who had been simultaneously tugging on a pair of shorts and trying to figure out a way to make her hair look less greasy, had agreed without complaint. It's a nice day out anyway, though Mira's having doubts about her ability to focus on her schoolwork, because Rumi is kind of lovely in the early morning sunlight.

"He thinks he's in love with me," she answers, slinging a leg over the low stone bench and settling in at the table. "It's kind of a pain."

The confused crease between Rumi's brows returns. "He thinks he's in love with you?"

"He thinks we've got a thing," Mira says dismissively. "Our thing was beer pong. That man could fall in love with a squirrel if it would help him win at beer pong."

Across the table, Rumi mouths to herself: Squirrel?

Mira shakes her head. "It's not important," she says. "Just Sajas being dumb. Fork found in kitchen."

She cracks open her textbook before Rumi can ask any more questions about her, or Abby, or beer pong, or love.

"Shall we?"

An hour and a half later, Rumi's head is back on the table.

"You should probably just kill me," she tells Mira matter-of-factly, voice echoing dully off the stone. "Kill me and tell our professor you need a new partner because your old one died of being really bad at science."

Mira's not exactly sure how to respond to that. She decides to keep quiet and let the episode unfold.

"I hate this," Rumi continues dramatically, her voice pitching dangerously towards pouty. "Why do I even have to take chemistry anyway? I don't need to know about atoms. That's got nothing to do with me."

Mira refrains from pointing out that they've not once studied atoms all term.

"You're a bit of a princess, aren't you?" she asks instead.

Rumi looks up at her pitifully.

"My worst grade is gonna be from a random science elective," she laments. "And now I'm dragging you down, too."

Her head turns back down, face pressed against stone. If Zoey pulled that move, Mira would lean over and blow in her ear until she shot up laughing. As it is, she remains perfectly well behaved on her own side of the table.

"You're not dragging me anywhere." It's meant to be reassuring, but it comes out sounding a little too literal. "I don't mind taking it slow," she amends, though that ends up sounding like a line from a cheesy romance movie. She decides to cut her losses and hope Rumi doesn't notice.

A soft snort bounces off the top of the table. "Gonna wine and dine me before we take it to the next level?"

Mira scowls to herself. Goddammit.

Rumi shuffles a bit across the table, then rolls her head sideways until it's resting in the crook of her elbow.

"Sorry," she sighs. "I don't mean to be so whiny. I'm just not used to… being bad at things. And you're so good at it all that I feel kinda embarrassed."

She laughs a little as she says it, like she knows it's stupid. It is kind of stupid, Mira thinks. She's a math major and Rumi's in the humanities—of course she's better at chemistry.

"You'd probably kick my butt at trivia," she offers. "Or anything having to do with reading."

(She's a slow reader. It's one of the only things she and Jinu have in common. The one time Jinu had insisted they open the show with a dramatic reading of the first chapter of Twilight was the fastest Mira had ever seen their listener count hit zero.)

"You think so?" Rumi stares across at her, considering.

"Sure," Mira admits. "And I'm no good at small talk. Remember the first time we met?"

Rumi smiles. "You didn't talk to me the first time we met."

"Yeah I did." Mira frowns. "The fire alarm in the dorms? We stood out in the rain for thirty minutes waiting for the fire department to let everyone back in?"

"And you asked if I thought there was really a fire, because you were worried about your teddy bear," Rumi recalls. "And when we went back in, you said, 'I hope she doesn't remember that,' and then you realized you were talking out loud."

Mira's ears burn. Her gaze drops to her open notebook. "Way to crush past Mira's dreams."

Rumi just laughs.

"It was fun being your dorm neighbor," she says. "You always said the weirdest things when you got back from Saja parties. I was sad when you moved out early and I didn't really see you anymore."

"Mm." Mira scratches a small, cartoony tiger into the corner of the paper. "Well, worked out for the best, right? We both ended up in underclassman chemistry, and now you've got someone to carry you through it."

Rumi's amused look freezes, then turns to one of despair. "This is only sophomore chemistry??"

"Yeah…" Mira avoids eye contact, thinking of the fresh-faced first years that make up the rest of the class. "Sophomore…"

It hadn't been a total waste of a Saturday morning, Mira figures as she leaves. They'd gone over Rumi's homework and picked the topic for their research project—catalysis, Mira had decided, and Rumi had nodded like she had any idea what that was. Mira had then spent an hour explaining said topic to Rumi so that she'd be caught up for the next time they met. And Rumi had smiled at her thrice—not that it mattered or anything. Then Rumi's phone had lit up an inordinate amount of times, and Mira had suggested they end their study session before whoever was on the other end of that chain texted themselves into an aneurysm. Rumi had blinked dazedly at the rapidly stacking messages and hastily agreed.

It's nearly lunchtime now, and Mira very responsibly shuts down the part of her that begs to spend money she doesn't have on food that might actually taste good. Instead, she decides to head back towards her dorm to partake in another watery protein shake and cup ramyun from the bulk pallet beneath her bed. Her phone buzzes in her bag as she walks and she retrieves it to find a message from Zoey waiting for her. It's a picture of her turtle drawing from the night before, the sticky note carefully peeled from the chaos of the table and pinned at its corners to the bulletin board by the door. Mira wonders if the turtle has accomplished its mission.

What are you doing at the station? she types, but the message sent indicator stays stubbornly unread.

When it becomes clear that Zoey isn't going to answer right away, Mira pockets her phone, only to look around and find that her wanderings have taken her somewhere unexpected. The language building isn't so out of the way that it's odd for her to have stopped by, but it isn't exactly on her normal route home, either. She realizes, with mild disdain, that the conversation about Abby's Twitter theorizing must've wormed its way further into her head than she'd realized.

It's still relatively early on a Saturday for people to be out and about. There are only a couple of other students around, and most of them are involved in their own cheap lunches or midday study sessions. A pair of underclassmen who look suspiciously like tree boy and HAZMAT girl from Abby's cowboy night party are studying the little clumps of flowers in front of the graffiti wall. Mira hovers a good few paces away from them, trying to surreptitiously see what they're seeing. She's not buying into the theories, really, just… sating a mild curiosity.

The brick wall of the language building stares at her, unimpressed. Mira leans back on her heels to better take it all in.

Yep, that's a wall.

Bricks, mortar, clustered flowers, spray paint. Nothing damning. Nothing to further suggest that anyone vaguely, micro-niche-ly famous has ever taken a picture there.

Tree boy points at the black arc of a tag that reads ORAL PLZ in big bubble letters. HAZMAT girl leans in close, investigative.

Mira shakes her head and turns away.

Really, what had she been expecting?

Monday, 5:50 PM

The atmosphere in the station is, to put it mildly, odd. Mira takes one step in and is met with two sets of eyes, one excited, the other wide and unreadable.

"Hey guys," she says cautiously. "Weird vibe in here."

Across the room, Jinu grins big. At the same time, Zoey's mouth pulls into a bit of a grimace. Mira glances at the turtle on the bulletin board for help, but it only shrugs back at her, clueless.

"Okay, what?" she asks directly.

Jinu's grin stretches wider. "Only the best promo ever."

In a move that's starting to feel familiar, Mira crosses the room to huddle next to Zoey, peering down at the soft glow of her phone screen. Their shoulders bump together as Zoey turns the phone for her to read, Jinu crowding in at her other side to get another look.

It's a new tweet, once again from Abby. There's no picture this time; instead the tweet consists of only seven words, three lines, and eleven thousand likes.

@ABBYBOY (3h ago)

JUNIORZ NEW SONG.

9 PM.

AM 1650.

Chapter Text

Monday, 5:54 PM

Monday is, for three reasons, the worst day of Mira's week.

Reason #1: her 8:00 AM lecture.

It had been a stupid class to sign up for. Mira had needed one more elective credit to fill out her schedule, and at the time of registration she'd decided that a nice, early start to her week would help get her moving and keep her out of trouble. Now she spends every Monday morning counting the days until her next birthday, wherein she can use her yearly birthday wish to go back in time and slap her past self for ever forcing them into something so dumb.

It's not even an interesting class. History of Fashion. Mira loves fashion, and is stunningly passable at history on a good day. By all means, it should be a gem. But infuriatingly, the class consists of nothing but readings and group discussions, the former of which take Mira an inordinate amount of time and the latter of which she's refused to participate in ever since her socratic seminar leader pulled her aside to give her a "gentle reminder" that just because she doesn't agree with someone's personal fashion choices doesn't mean she can follow up all of their contributions with "You're gonna say that, while wearing that?"

("They were wearing Minions socks and Birkenstocks," Mira had grumbled to Zoey later on. "Not even the Minions themselves would stoop that low. It's so bad that it rhymes."

"It's both cute and weird how much you talk about the Minions," Zoey had replied. "For someone who claims to have never seen the movies."

That had left Mira grumbly for entirely different reasons.)

The point is, History of Fashion absolutely blows, and Mira would have stopped showing up long ago had it not been for A) the 20% participation grade and B) the fact that she's promised herself this will be the year she stops skipping all of her classes—even the morning ones. And while there technically is a later session offered, which might make the whole ordeal slightly more bearable, Mira has no room in her schedule to make the switch because of reason #2: therapy.

Mira is no stranger to therapy. As a child, she'd often experienced uncontrollable bouts of anger and sullenness which her parents had found unbecoming of a girl of her status and had paid heftily to try to get rid of. Mira had had a behavioral therapist, a dedicated in-school counselor, and three visits to a child psychologist, all before the age of ten. Whether any of it had helped, she truly doesn't know. Her parents hadn't seemed to like her any more after all of her visits than they had before, though she had learned to keep her moods to herself if she didn't want to spend more hours in sterile-looking rooms with strange men who were paid to analyze everything she said and did and send it all back to her folks in a clean, itemized report.

The therapy had stopped around the time she'd become a teenager, which, coincidentally, was around the time she could've really used it. But beggars couldn't be choosers when it came to her family, which is why Mira now pays for her new therapist out of her own pocket—just like she does for food and clothes and everything else her parents have deemed as not an educational necessity.

So yes, Mira is very familiar with therapy, and no, it doesn't make her feel any better about going.

The amount of her station paycheck that she forks over each month makes her wish she did like it, at least a little bit more. It's almost insulting to have to pay that much for something you have to force yourself to do—like, here's my money, now make me miserable for an hour and give me a million things to do before next week. Mental health is a ripoff, Mira thinks as she shuts her laptop on the telehealth window. She should just quit it all and be sad. At least she'd be sad with money in her pocket.

(It's worth it, she reminds herself every time she manages to make it out of bed and into her seat for History of Fashion at the start of each week.

She hates it, but it's worth it.)

And speaking of her station paycheck, that brings her to reason #3.

"DJ Mira, we are blowing up."

Jinu clacks away at the computer keyboard, bringing up their audience statistics. Even now, in the half hour of autoplay that spans the gap between Sussie's afternoon shift and the start of the evening show, their numbers are already hovering close to sixty, and the count is climbing higher with each passing second.

"This is such bullshit," Mira grumbles, if only to calm the odd squelching feeling in her gut that she refuses to acknowledge as nerves. She doesn't get nervous—not for chemistry study sessions or days where she chooses glasses over contacts, and certainly not for a stupid publicity stunt being forced upon them by some nameless, faceless artist with one crappy song.

(It's a good song.)

(That still doesn't mean she's nervous.)

She glares at the screen over Jinu's shoulder as the audience count ticks up again. "Why are they dragging us into this? Just release the song on SoundCloud and have Abby tweet about it there."

"It's probably a thank-you to me for giving them their big break." Jinu sounds far too pleased about the whole situation. "Also, swearing."

Mira huffs and bows her head to her muted microphone. Behind her, Zoey is scrolling through the numerous replies to Abby's tweet.

"People think it's him," she reports. "Well, not actually him, the voice sounds pretty feminine, but everyone thinks he's in on it."

"How else would he know to tweet about it?" Mira latches onto the idea with ease. "This whole thing is such an attention grab, it's right up his alley."

"If it was him, don't you think he would've just plastered his name all over everything in the first place?" Jinu points out. "He's not clever enough to figure out a stunt this size. He dropped out of all our marketing classes, remember?"

"You can reminisce on your failed marketing major bromance later," Mira hisses. "For now, can we figure out what we're going to do about this? The show starts in three minutes, Abby promised everyone a new release in three hours, and we don't have the song."

Another minute slips away on the computer screen. The listener count spikes again—when did it get into the hundreds? Mira's stomach squirms more violently. Her eyes bounce around the booth, looking for anything else to focus on.

Gentle fingers curl around her upper arm. She glances down to find Zoey's hand resting against her, steadying.

"Just do the show like usual," Zoey instructs. "Welcome the new listeners, stick to your playlist, and only talk about JUNIORZ if you want to. It's your show, not theirs. If they want to use you for promo, they shouldn't make you jump through hoops."

"We'll keep their SoundCloud up," Jinu adds. "If they post a new song, we can play it at 9:00 and make everyone happy. If they don't, we'll say they didn't come through."

Mira shakes her head dazedly in the hopes that it will clear. As always, her hopes remain unanswered.

"Fine," she agrees. "But however this goes, I'm putting you down for another mark on the board. This whole thing sucks so bad, you're lucky I don't give you two."

The clock ticks to 6:00, the last seconds of autoplay beginning to fade.

"That's my cue," Zoey says, and squeezes Mira's arm. "Good luck in here. Scream if you need anything."

The door shuts behind her. DJ Autoplay clicks off, and Jinu holds up three fingers, then two, then one.

Monday, 6:00 PM

"Good evening out there, K-Uni and friends. It's Monday, which means new week, new you, and new smoothie menu in the west dining hall. Someone should stop by and see if they've brought back the Mango Berry Blast yet—that one's my favorite, and I think they discontinued it to spite me after I slandered their barista's overuse of kale on air one day. I honestly haven't seen it back on the menu in months. DJ Mira, thoughts?"

A dry swallow. "I like the Hazelnut Califlower Dream."

"Odd! For everyone who's joining us for the first time, I am DJ Jinu, cauliflower smoothie over here is DJ Mira, and this is AM 1650 K-Uni campus radio—apparently home to the unofficial JUNIORZ fanclub, all nine hundred of you."

"Did you say nine hundr-"

"Tonight's theme is cheaper by the dozen, where we only play songs with numbers in their titles. I came up with it in honor of DJ Mira and her giant brain and unhealthy love for math, and I was gonna start us out with a tried and true classic: One In A Million. However, in honor of our new audience, I think it's only fair that we start off with a request. Anyone have any guesses on the song being spammed on our request page?"

"I'm gonna gues it rhymes with serves."

"There's that brainpower I was talking about. To all our new listeners, this one goes out to you. Here's Nerves."

Monday, 8:56 PM

Mira has never been more grateful that Jinu shares Zoey's seemingly endless capacity for chattering, because the more listeners start pouring in, the less she finds herself wanting to talk. The nerves—or, not-nerves, because she doesn't get nervous—abate with mercy in the first half of the show, only to slowly dig their slimy claws back into her as the 9:00 hour grows closer. There have been no updates to JUNIORZ's profile, and no end to the requests they've recieved that are, for the most part, not even requests at all—instead, they're messages probing into JUNIORZ, and Abby, and the new song, and Mira and Jinu's relationship to it all. Jinu is a good sport about it in the beginning, answering the first few requests and repeating his story about finding JUNIORZ on a random SoundCloud deep dive. But after a while, even he loses interest in seeing the same questions pop up over and over again, and after the twelfth request to play Nerves, he announces to the audience that they'll be closing requests until later on in the night.

Now it's almost time for the promised debut, and they still don't even have the song. Over the past three hours, the station's listener count has climbed to an unthinkable 3,200. On screen above the listener metric, JUNIORZ's follower count has reached 7,000 plus.

Mira presses a fist into her forehead and groans. Her headphones, slung loosely around her neck, float the tinny sounds of I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) thinly to her ears.

"We've still got a few minutes," Jinu reasons. "That should take us at least to the end of this song."

Zoey, who Mira has allowed to sit at the back of the booth if only to share the crushing weight of stress, bobs her head unconvincingly.

"If you need more time, just cut to another song," she suggests. "Maybe if these people like JUNIORZ they'll like… KARA?"

"We've used up all their numbers already," Mira groans miserably.

"What about all the 2Me's? The instrumental? Does that count?"

Jinu grimaces. "Used it so Mira could go outside and fling rocks into the parking lot."

Zoey rounds on her. "That's where you went? I thought you were like, puking."

"Well there's a handsome picture," Mira mutters.

"I could unplug the computer," Jinu suggests.

Zoey taps her chin. "We could fake a medical emergency. I can do a really convincing scream."

Mira rubs her eyes tiredly. "What medical emergency takes place in a radio station that requires you to scream?"

"Y'know. Something like, oh my god! The pop filter shot off the mic and gouged Mira in the eye! If only she had been wearing her sexy glasses!"

"Let's think of something else," Mira says.

"DJ Mira," Jinu corrects at the same time.

"It gouged DJ Mira in the eye!" Zoey repeats.

Mira cradles her face in her hands.

Maybe it won't be so bad, she reasons. There are probably at least three other Miras on campus—no one has to know it was her who failed to deliver them their new song. Maybe Sussie will swap shifts with her and she can finally realize her dreams of a quiet, low-stakes radio gig. Or maybe she'll quit, take the plunge and get a job at the gym listening to Call Me Maybe five times a shift. She can learn to like Call Me Maybe. She's adaptable.

Zoey's hand is on her back, one blunt nail dragging back and forth against her skin through the thin material of her t-shirt. Mira wonders, ridiculously, if Zoey would come visit if she worked at the gym. She probably works out. She looks like she works out. Mira cracks one eye open to eye the broad swell of her thigh.

Maybe the gym wouldn't be so bad…

She's startled out of her ludicrous daydreaming by the sound of a something buzzing against wood. Her eyes dart to the offending object—Zoey's phone—before both she and Jinu shoot Zoey a look.

"Phones on silent in the booth," they say in unison, and Zoey cringes nervously, grabbing her phone off the desk.

"Sorry," she babbles. "It's normally silenced, I just turned it on for- oh."

Jinu cranes his neck. "What is it?"

"Email." Zoey flips her phone screen around. "You're both on it, too."

Sure enough, the email is addressed to all three of them. There's no message given, just a single .wav file under a subject line that reads "Song". The sender address is just a random series of letters and numbers, nothing identifiable, but the purpose is clear.

"Holy…" Jinu glances up at the muted microphones. "…wow. Kinda left it to the last second, huh?"

Somehow, the obtaining of the song does little to quell Mira's restlessness. Over her headphones, she can hear a thrumming guitar outro start to wrap things up.

"I really hate this," she sighs. "Come on, load it up quick and let's get this over with."

Jinu plugs his phone into the station computer and transfers the file into the catalogue just as 500 Miles trails to an end. Mira prays that this isn't a prank—there's no time to preview the contents of the file, and it would be just like Jinu to get the whole campus radio department shut down for playing something obscene. She should probably start polishing up her resume, just in case.

Jinu flashes them both a signal with his hands, and Mira slips her headset back on as he unmutes their microphones. Behind her, Zoey pops earbuds into her ears, listening in.

"I gotta say, DJ Mira," Jinu starts, "that might be my favorite song The Proclaimers have ever done."

Mira makes a mm-hm sound. "And how many other Proclaimers songs can you name?"

"I don't see what that has to do with what I said. Although if I'm being honest, I don't think there's a single thing on earth I would walk five hundred miles for."

"Not even a Mango Berry Blast?"

"Only if it came with a side of your cauliflower abomination."

In the back, Zoey snorts.

Mira rolls her eyes. "How sweet."

In the corner of her eye, she can see that their listener count has climbed inconceivably higher. She gestures towards the computer—get on with it. Jinu nods.

"Well, DJ Mira," he says, keeping his voice light. "It does appear to be nine o'clock, and I believe our precious listeners were promised something. Lucky for them, K-Uni campus radio is now in posession of JUNIORZ's sophomore song."

He laughs to himself. "Get it? Junior-z? Sophomore?"

"I got it," Mira replies flatly. "Stop dangling it over their heads."

"Okay, okay." Jinu's still chuckling to himself. "We won't keep you waiting any longer. DJ Mira, would you do the honors?"

"If I must." Mira leans over the keyboard to squint at the freshly-added song. "Here you go, weirdos. This is Be For You by JUNIORZ."

She's not sure what she had expected. Nerves had been a slower song, closer to a ballad than a dance hit. JUNIORZ's voice was bare and honest and the production had done everything to emphasize that, letting the singer's talent speak for itself. But Be For You has clearly gone the other way—it's fast and upbeat, and it takes breaks from its vocals to let the trilling synths and wailing guitar shine through. Where Nerves had felt raw and open like someone trying to break out of their shell, Be For You feels almost… flirty.

I could be for you, the voice sings, and it echoes back and forth on alternating sides of Mira's headphones like magnets begging for her attention, pulling her in two different directions.

Be for you, be for you, be for you, I could…

Mira can already tell it's a hit, and from the look on Jinu's and Zoey's faces, she knows they agree.

Jinu takes them off mute when the song ends.

"Wow." He leans back in his seat. "I don't know about you guys, but that's going in my liked songs ASAP."

"Still not on SoundCloud yet, huh," Mira observes, peering at the computer.

Jinu clicks his tongue. "Probably a midnight drop. That's what I'd do."

"Hm." Mira sits back. Despite the annoyingness of the whole situation, she has to admit that it's kind of—kind of—cool to get the first real copy of a song like this. The radio release experience still isn't something she'd have willingly put herself through, but she finds that the cool confidence of JUNIORZ's voice has dulled the rage to the point where she's not quite so mad about it all as she had been a few minutes ago.

As if reading her mind, Jinu leans in conspiratorially.

"What do you think, DJ Mira?" he asks, grinning wide as his eyes dart to something just over her shoulder. "Wanna hear it again?"

Tuesday, 9:30 AM

Her resolution to not be so mad about her part in the Be For You release lasts right up until Tuesday morning, when she makes a quick run to the radio station to retrieve the laptop charger she'd accidentally left there overnight and emerges to find HAZMAT girl and two of her friends staring at her, wide-eyed.

"You're DJ Mira," HAZMAT girl says, awed. "You're friends with JUNIORZ."

Mira draws back, feeling a little bit cornered with her back to the station doors. "I'm not friends with them," she denies. "I don't even know them."

"Well they sent you their song," one of the other girls insists. "Jinu has to know, at least. Hasn't he told you anything?"

Mira lets out a stupid hm-mm sound and is halfway to asking why the girls don't bother to call him DJ when HAZMAT girl cuts back in.

"You used to hang with Abby all the time," she says. "And he's the one tweeting all these hidden clues. Are you sure you don't know anything?"

"Maybe it's her," the other girl whispers to her friend, who eyes Mira up and down suspiciously.

"It's not me!" Mira sputters. She can feel the back of her neck growing hot. "I don't do music. I'm a math major."

"The perfect cover," the girl hushes to her friends from the side of her mouth. HAZMAT girl looks intrigued. Mira throws her hands up, exasperated.

"Hey, now," a deep voice rumbles. "Let's leave DJ Mira alone. She's not the type to sell anyone out."

Mira curses to herself. She knows that voice.

The girls take a polite half step back as Abby emerges from around the station corner and moves into the space beside Mira, their eyes going a little glossy at the sight of him. Mira feels his broad hand land on her shoulder and wishes, not for the first time, that she had passed away of stress and anger during Monday's show. That would teach JUNIORZ and everyone else to leave innocent people out of their insane schemes. At the very least, it would get her out of this situation.

"I don't need your help," Mira hisses. "And I'm not selling anyone out because I don't even know who to sell out. It's probably just a bored senior trying to get some campus rep before graduation."

HAZMAT girl cocks and eyebrow. "Why would their name be JUNIORZ if they were a senior?"

"Why would they release a song through the goddamn campus radio?" Mira cries. "I'm not saying they're smart!"

"Abby's a junior," the girl in the back whispers to her friend.

"What year are you?" the friend directs at Mira.

Mira opens her mouth, then shuts it. The girls stare at her, blank and unimpressed, and Abby puts a gentle pressure on her shoulder and steers her away from her inquisitors.

"We have to get going," he tells the HAZMAT trio. "But I'll see you all at the party tomorrow. Save your theories for then, yeah?"

The girls don't protest as they depart, though they do return to their hushed whispering before Mira and Abby have made it even three paces away. Once they're out of sight, Abby steps out of Mira's space, giving her a smug grin.

"Close one, eh?" he asks.

Mira's breath comes out in an annoyed huff. "I said I didn't need your help."

Abby rolls his eyes. "Relax, DJ, I wasn't trying to swoop in and save you. I'm just trying to preserve the suspense a little longer."

"Incredibly suspicious thing to say," Mira notes.

Abby just laughs. "Come on. Something cool is finally happening around here, I don't want the interest to die out too quickly."

Mira stares him down, eyes narrowing. "You're lucky I know for a fact that you don't have a musical bone in your body."

"What can I say?" Abby turns his palms up in a gesture of picturesque innocence. "I love a good mystery. Don't need any musical talent for that."

Mira's eyes narrow further. Abby just smirks back, smarmy and entirely unperturbed.

"Anyway," he says. "I've gotta go. Saja Club meeting. I'll tell Jinu you say hi."

"I do not say hi," Mira deadpans, but Abby ignores her, already walking away. She glares at the back of his ugly pink head and prays that, if Jinu is to ever magically explode, Abby will follow right after. As if reading her thoughts, Abby turns back over his shoulder and shoots her a wink.

Mira grinds her teeth so hard she can feel the tension in her ears.

Motherfucking Sajas.

Tuesday, 10:00 AM

She's not exactly proud of it, but the first thing she says to Rumi when she makes her way into the lecture hall at the start of class is, "Have you heard about this JUNIORZ stuff?"

Rumi fumbles in the midst of unpacking her bag. Her textbook slips from her hands and lands on the desktop with a thunderous smack. Every head in the room swivels back to face them, and Rumi wilts a little under all the attention.

"Have I what?" she asks, self consciously slinking down into her chair.

Mira follows suit, lowering her voice so as not to attract the attention of their classmates. "There's this mystery artist, and they're blowing up the radio station I work at and they emailed us their song last night and made us release it for them and I have no idea why but I'm pretty sure Abby's in on it somehow."

Rumi grimaces. "Beer pong Abby?"

"Exactly." Mira drags a hand down her face. "Or… maybe I'm crazy. I don't know. All I know is I've got people stopping me around campus now to ask about new songs and secret identities and crap. As if I know anything!"

It's not an exaggeration. On the walk from her dorm to the chemistry hall alone, two separate people had approached her with JUNIORZ questions, none of which she'd been able (or willing) to answer. That on top of the HAZMAT/Abby interaction from earlier is enough to make her feel… well, not like a paparazzoed celebrity exactly, but definitely way too prominent in the public eye. With her family's reputation she's no stranger to having eyes on her, but she's still not a fan of being approached by random people she doesn't even know.

Rumi puffs her cheeks. Her nicely-manicured nails drum once against the desktop. "Yikes," she murmurs around a warm huff of air.

Mira finds herself going on.

"And now Jinu's all hyped about the station getting more attention, and Zo- my friend is acting kind of weird, and the whole thing is just throwing me off."

That part isn't an exaggeration, either. Since the end of the Monday show, Jinu—who normally never texts except to beg Mira to pick up snack on her way to work—has messaged her six times with updated listener counts and even a few links to livetweets from the time of release. Meanwhile Zoey—who normally texts Mira throughout her entire ride home with Jinu, and then again on their morning drive in—hasn't messaged once.

It's this fact more than the questions and unwelcome interaction with Abby that itches persistently at the back of her brain. Zoey always sends her something after her shift, whether it be a blurry picture of someone's pet taken through the car window or a hulking paragraph of text that usually starts with the phrase you will not BELIEVE what jinu just said. At the very least, she'll send some sort of dorky, chronically-online meme that Mira unconvincingly pretends not to understand, and usually another in the morning. But it's been radio silence from her ever since she followed Jinu out of the studio, much more subdued than usual and without her usual goofy goodbye.

Rumi is staring at her now, her brow somewhat furrowed. Mira recounts everything she's just said and comes to the disappointing realization that she sounds insane.

"Sorry." She turns away, training her eyes on the front of the room and trying to ignore the heat rising in her cheeks. "I'm just annoyed and rambling. Ignore me."

"No." From the corner of her eye, Mira sees Rumi shake her head. "You're dealing with a lot of consequences for something that you're not even a part of. I've been there, too. It is annoying."

Mira doesn't respond. Still, some of the tightness in her chest goes the smallest bit slacker. Rumi doesn't seem to mind as she pulls her notebooks from her bag and arranges the pens on her desk—black, red, blue. She's keeping her eyes ahead, too.

"I hope your friend comes to her senses," she says sincerely. "I'd hate for you two to lose each other."

Mira only has enough time to wonder to herself why everyone is saying such ominous things today before the professor claps her hands once and the lecture begins.

Monday, 9:00 PM

If Mira expects things to go back to normal following the song release debacle, she's sorely disappointed.

Her and Jinu's nightly listener count doesn't exactly hit the same exorbitant numbers it had peaked at during their last Monday show, but it doesn't return to its old, stable baseline of 4 people, either. Over the remainder of the week, it trends from the low end of the hundreds to just under a thousand, depending on the time of night and how much JUNIORZ Jinu decides sto subject them to. Requests keep coming in, mostly from listeners who want to hear Nerves or Be For You. Why they can't just play the songs for themselves on their own devices, Mira has no clue.

Some people still send in long messages demanding to know more about the station's connection to JUNIORZ, which Mira deletes without hesitation. Twice, she finds people bottlenecking as they walk by the station building, whispering to each other about new songs and SoundCloud numbers and conspiracy between the DJs.

Abby manages to clear his name of suspicion by posting screenshots of his DMs with a Twitter account called @JUNIORZMusic who had offered him a ₩30,000 E-Mart gift card in exchange for his participation in the song release. The account is private, created just days ago, and has absolutely no personally identifiable information visible—it so closely resembles a scam that Mira almost can't believe Abby had entertained the interaction at all.

(Then again, she had once watched him pound a six-pack and consecutively crush each can against his forehead at 12:00 PM the day after a rugby foul had landed him in the infirmary with a concussion, so maybe she was overestimating his capacity for critical thought.)

The few moments she manages to get with Zoey before and after shifts at the station do little to make her feel more normal about it all. On the surface, Zoey is the same as ever—bubbly and cheeky and with a head that drifts off into the clouds every now and then. She still taps on the window when she disagrees with something Jinu's said, still invites Mira down to Abby's with her and Jinu on Wednesday night. After her silent spell the previous Monday, she starts texting Mira silly things from her day again, but the texts aren't quite so frequent as they had been before, and when Mira declines her invitation to the Saja House, she only nods and says, "Okay."

Mira even tries wearing her glasses in one day—but the only reaction she gets is a subtle catch in Zoey's gaze and a small smile on her lips before she tugs her headphones back on and disappears into the music software on her laptop.

Despite the station's increased listenership and the questions Mira gets about JUNIORZ—both on and off-air—the lack of Zoey in her week makes it one of the least enjoyable in the entirety of Mira's junior year. To make matters worse, Rumi is suddenly consumed with a host of other responsibilities that leave her unable to get together to work on the chem project, which leaves Mira plenty of time to get ahead on her intro to proofs homework while feeling like a bit of a friendless loser.

She spends History of Fashion mulling over how to explain the whole situation to her therapist in a way that doesn't make everyone involved sound like they've lost their damn minds—which, to be fair, they have—but by the time her 3:00 appointment rolls around, she's only drawn blanks. Part of her wants to spill the whole story, to soak in the incredulous and baffled look on her therapist's face and to say see? They're crazy out here. It's not just me.

The other part of her knows that she's already let the whole situation root itself into her mind in a way her therapist would definitely not approve of, and she'd really like to be spared the lecture.

In the end, she settles for a simplified explanation: there have been some changes at work that are snowballing into her campus life and other relationships, and she really hopes things will go back to normal soon so she can stop feeling so rattled by it all.

Her therapist listens to her understandingly, validates her feelings of discomfort and upset, and then drives a final nail in the shitty situation coffin as she reminds Mira to never count on things going "back to normal".

"Normal is always changing," she tells Mira sensibly. "What you find abnormal today could be the new normal tomorrow, and you just wouldn't know it yet. I know you've had to deal with a lot of big changes these past few years. I also know you're an adaptable person. Don't get caught up waiting for life to go back to how it used to be."

"Thanks," Mira says flatly. "I don't like that at all."

Her therapist just laughs and thanks her for her time.

"I'll talk to you next week, Mira. Keep an open mind until then."

Paradoxically, with the sudden lack of both Zoey and Rumi in her life, the evening show becomes Mira's new touchpoint for normalcy. Even with his newfound notoriety, Jinu manages to keep each night feeling relatively similar to how things had been before. He still calls her DJ Mira, still adds unfair tally marks to her side of the apology board, and still blathers on about his missing meal plan credits—Zoey had used them—or his new shoes—half a size too big, but it wasn't a big deal, he could wear extra socks—or whatever other inane topics come to mind, going on and on until Mira cuts him off to play a song.

Despite Mira's resolute belief that nobody in their right mind can be enjoying Jinu's rants, people seem to stick around. Song requests start coming in with little notes like p.s. love your guys' dynamic and it's so funny when jinu starts whining over dumb shit and mira shuts it down. It's a small solace that some people in their new audience, at least, don't seem to be completely JUNIORZ-brained.

Still, their most popular moments come about whenever they either play or talk about JUNIORZ—which is why it's odd that, at 9:00 PM, when Jinu queues up Be For You in celebration of its one-week release anniversary, their numbers drop dramatically.

"We just lost like, 300 listeners," Jinu observes, sounding peeved. "What gives?"

"Maybe people are finally sick of hearing the same two songs over and over?" Mira suggests hopefully.

Several harsh taps on the one-way mirror crush her hopes like bugs.

"Look at this," Zoey snaps as she bursts into the booth seconds later. Mira hardly has time to protest that even if there is a song playing, they're still on air, before Zoey's phone is being shoved past her face and into Jinu's.

"This is where everyone went," Zoey continues on. She's a little red in the cheeks, her eyes sharp and her voice a mixture of flustered and almost… angry?

Mira catalogues the image in her mind for later.

"Don't tell me it's Abby again," she pleads, leaning back so she can get a look at whatever's on Zoey's screen. Indeed, Zoey's phone is open to Twitter—but this time, it's not Abby's account that's causing the ruckus. It's a new one, with barely any tweets and an impressive number of followers in comparison. Looking closer, Mira realizes that it's the same person from Abby's screenshots, the one claiming to be JUNIORZ. There's no profile photo, no banner, only a basic screen name and a proud K-Uni in the bio.

The most recent post, made just minutes ago, sits at the top of the page gathering likes. Mira and Jinu both take a few moments to read it. After her first pass, Mira reads it again, then again.

@JUNIORZMusic (2m ago)

THE DJ. OUT NOW.

soundcloud.com/juniorz/play/the-dj

Chapter Text

Monday, 9:04 PM

"AM 1650, I'm sure you've seen the news—and if you haven't? Well, say hi to DJ Mira when she gets home to that rock you both live under."

"Sleep with one eye open tonight, Jinu, or say goodbye to that glorified bowlcut of yours."

"You know, there's no need for cruelty in these tumultuous times. Don't make me get out the board."

"No, go for it. I'll draw the mark myself."

"Lucky for you, my ill-mannered co-host, we've got some bigger fish to fry right now. As I was saying, and as I'm sure you've all seen, everyone's favorite mystery artist has just dropped another surprise song on us, and all of us here in the booth are just dying to check it out."

There's a faint groan in the background.

"I know we're late on the uptake this time and you're all probably onto your second listen already, but we'd be remiss not to give a JUNIORZ release the attention it deserves—especially when it's got a title like that. Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else… this is The DJ."

Tuesday, 9:45 AM

Mira makes it to the quad outside her lecture hall just in time to find Abby slouched against an ancient picnic table, hands in his pockets and an infuriatingly smug smirk on his face. There's a small crowd gathered around him, all jostling for place and hanging off of his every word.

"He says he doesn't know a thing," Abby is saying. "Hasn't talked to them, hasn't heard from them. He's a damn good liar, though, is all I'll say, so I'd take it all with a grain of salt."

"So it is about him?" someone murmurs from the crowd.

Abby shrugs, apathetic. "It is called The DJ. Isn't it obvious?"

Mira suppresses an eye-roll, less for the crowd's sake than for the sake of nursing the throbbing headache that's building at the back of her skull. Of course Abby's wormed his way back into the middle of this mess. She angles around the sea of vultures, hoping to slip past and make it to the lecture hall unnoticed.

"Mira!"

Mira curses. She ignores the call, soldiering on down the greenway. Behind her, Abby excuses himself from the crowd, catching up to Mira in a few easy strides.

"Big night last night," he comments when he reaches her.

Mira pointedly does not look at him. "What do you want?"

Abby just rolls his neck, ignoring her tone. "You know you guys are still trending?"

"JUNIORZ is trending," Mira corrects. "That's got nothing to do with me."

Abby snorts. Mira feels annoyance roil in her veins. She wishes Abby would disappear. She wishes she'd never heard of campus radio.

"This shit's blown up so fast," Abby laughs. "Fucking hilarious. Leave it to Jinu to become the campus heartthrob without even trying."

"Yeah." Mira's voice is perfectly flat. "Hilarious."

It's not that she minds the whirlwind, star-crossed, oddly parasocial relationship Jinu seems to have gotten himself into. JUNIORZ can pursue anyone they please, even if they're a singer chasing a radio DJ, how original. It's just that she's not particularly loving her own role in the whole situation. To put it more plainly, she's really missing the days when people knew how to leave her the fuck alone.

Her day has already not been off to a great start. She'd woken to a voicemail from her brother that she refused to listen to on the basis of not wanting to rip her hair out at seven in the morning. Her morning workout had been interrupted by not one, not two, but four people stopping her in the middle of a set to ask about Jinu and the song. Upon returning to her dorm, she'd found herself out of clean shirts to wear and had been forced to settle for an old sleep tee rescued from the hamper and doused in lavender room spray. Following that, her floor advisor had knocked on her door and politely asked her to tone it down with the spray, other people were trying to breathe after all, and had immediately followed up the request with a not-at-all-subtle, "So… you and Jinu, huh?"

And that's the other part of the problem: her and Jinu.

Because it isn't enough for JUNIORZ to write a love song about her coworker, the most annoying man in the world. It isn't enough that people have been bombarding her with questions ever since, as if she knows a single damn thing about what's going on these days. No, beyond that, there's a theory floating around campus that is rapidly gaining traction—a theory that makes Mira's stomach churn with disgust.

People think that Mira… likes Jinu.

Enough to want to woo him through their shared love of music, smoothies, and campus radio.

Enough to write a song about him.

("What the ffff-" Jinu had hissed, his fingers flying across the station keyboard. "A new song?"

"The DJ?" Zoey intoned, incredulous.

Jinu had already found the page. Three iridescent flowers stared out from the screen, mocking. Mira could only look on in helpless confusion.

"We have to play it." Jinu was downloading the track.

"Now?" Zoey's voice jumped an octave.

Mira was just as taken aback. "You're not seriously thinking of playing into this game again."

"It's called The DJ, Mira." Jinu shot her a flat look. "It's practically got our names written on its forehead. People will talk more if we don't play it than if we do."

Mira's temples throbbed. "This is so not worth what they pay us."

Zoey's head thumped lifelessly to the desk. "You guys are getting paid?")

Despite her best efforts to shake him, Abby is still hot on Mira's heels by the time she makes it to class. Rumi glances up at her entrance, averts her eyes, then does a double take, gaze snapping onto Abby as he trails behind Mira into the lecture hall.

Mira, glaring pointedly away from Abby, takes her seat one chair down from Rumi. Uninvited, Abby plops down on her other side.

Rumi stares over at them.

"Hey," she offers tentatively, clearly thrown by Abby's presence. She sniffs the air. "You smell… floral."

Mira instantly regrets the lavender spray. She tugs inconspicuously at her shirt.

"So what do you guys do in here?" Abby asks, sounding bored. "Blow stuff up?"

Rumi eyes him skeptically. "It's a lecture."

"It's a general requirement," Mira elaborates. "Shouldn't you have taken it by now?"

"Shouldn't you?" Abby shoots back. "Oh, wait. You tried."

Mira's glower intensifies. She fights the urge to glance over at Rumi and see if she's caught on. "Fuck off, Abby."

More students begin to filter into the classroom, no shortage of them stopping to stare at Abby and Mira as they make their way past. Mira watches as Rumi takes in the scene, her lips parted slightly with confusion. A group of freshmen point over at Mira from the front of the room, whispering to each other, and Rumi frowns.

"All this over a song?"

"So you've heard it, too." Abby regards Rumi with open disinterest. "I'm sure you've got plenty of opinions."

"My opinion is that it's stupid to look too closely into any of this," Rumi answers evenly. "It's just a song. It could be about anything."

"It's called The DJ," Abby counters. "I think we know what it's about. Besides… Tall like a daydream, quick off the cuff / An abstract introduction but the proof is enough?"

"Jesus, he not even that tall!" Mira gripes. "And what, do you have it all memorized or something?"

Abby raises his hands, his face still set in smug self-satisfaction. "It's just funny, is all."

"Whatever." Mira sits up a little straighter as the professor walks in. "Get out of here, Abby."

For once, Abby obliges without complaint.

"Don't be a baby, Mira," he grunts as he leaves. "You're too easy sometimes."

"Slimeball," Mira mutters, but Abby is already gone. She takes a deep breath, coughs once, and shakes her head.

God, she really needs to do her laundry.

Tuesday, 10:35 AM

Chemistry, once a numerically-dense reprieve from any obligation of social interaction or emotional labor, now does little to take her mind off things. A handful of girls a few rows ahead keep peeking back at her over their shoulders. Mira can see SoundCloud pulled up on one of their computer screens, The DJ paused in the Now Playing bar. Mira narrows her eyes at them, just a bit, and watches as their backs go ramrod straight and they spin back towards the front of the room. To her right, Rumi shoots her a terribly unsubtle glance, mouth twisted in a sort of grimace. At the front of the classroom, the professor's lecture goes on.

"Catalysts," she projects, "are substances which we add to a chemical reaction in order to increase its speed. Although it might seem like the catalyst causes the reaction, the reality is that the chain of events had already begun before the catalyst was added. The catalyst's main role is to shorten the timeline of the reaction when we need to speed things along."

Mira's phone buzzes quietly in her pocket. For a moment, she lets herself hope that it's Zoey, finally putting an end to the uncharacteristic radio silence she's been stewing in as of late. But it's just another message from an unsaved number—probably someone from an old class group chat—asking if she can put them in touch with Jinu, or Abby, or even JUNIORZ themself. It's not the first message she's recieved along those lines. One person even had the audacity to ask if she would be on an episode of the campus podcast to discuss her role in JUNIORZ's confession. On principle, she's refused to respond to any of it.

It doesn't help that Jinu is already such a popular figure on campus, what with him and Abby stepping up as co-heads of the Saja Club. Mira's sure that if the object of JUNIORZ's affections had been Sussie, or Bobby, or even Mira herself, the whole ordeal wouldn't have been nearly as huge as it was. But of course, wherever the Saja Club members were involved, there was sure to be drama.

"What kind of person writes a love song about a college radio DJ?" Mira hisses to the void of her phone screen.

As if in response, the phone buzzes in her hand, and Mira's traitor heart dares to hope for Zoey again.

Jinu, the name on the notification reads.

Mira scowls.

more like hazelnut cauliflower nightmare, Jinu has written, along with a picture of Mira's favorite dining hall smoothie. some1 gave it to me 2 give to u buuuut… I was thirsty.

Mira types back, What?

smoothie, Jinu writes. hazelnut cauliflower.

Mira scowls into her phone like the expression might travel through the screen. Thanks, genius, I understood that much. Who's giving you my favorite smoothie?

Jinu's reply comes in several short bursts. senior girl. jrz t-shirt. did u know they had t-shirts? pretty sure Abby's selling them on the low. Then, don't b mad. I left my protein shake @ home and needed 2 hydrate.

I don't care that you drank it, Mira writes.

Jinu's typing indicator appears, then vanishes. After a moment, he starts writing again.

ohh I get it. yes i was meant 2 court u with cauliflower. they think u have a thing 4 me.

Mira's grip tightens on her phone. You mean they think I'm JUNIORZ.

Another round of type, pause, type from Jinu. Finally: DJ jrz, 2 b exact.

Mira slams the phone back into her lap and closes her eyes.

"Catalysis often requires a very little amount of the actual catalyst in order to occur," the professor is saying. "And given that the catalyst is not consumed during the process, this small amount can be recycled as the reaction continues, sustaining the chemical process until it reaches completion."

Another buzz against her leg. Mira cracks an eye open, stares down at the blurry shape of a name on her screen. There's no Z—another letdown—but there's no J either. She squints until the strong curve of an R drifts into focus.

Rumi has written, Are you okay?

Mira stares down at the message. She's suddenly very aware of a pair of eyes burning into the side of her head.

Peachy, she lies.

Rumi's reply comes quickly. You look how I feel.

Devastatingly cool?

There's a quiet chuckle from Rumi's direction. Tired. Though I'd never accuse you of not looking cool.

Mira feels her face heat. She tilts her face away and hopes that Rumi doesn't notice in the dusty classroom light. She tilts her phone up under her desk to check Rumi's next message.

Can I say something about earlier?

The message makes something not unlike discomfort squirm in Mira's gut. She doesn't know how she'll handle it if Rumi asks about her and Jinu, or the song, or Abby, or any of it. But Rumi isn't invested in the JUNIORZ drama. She'd said it was stupid to look too closely into any of it.

She's not going to ask, Mira tells herself, and pushes thes squirming feeling aside.

Okay, she writes.

Rumi types back for a long time, her long nails tapping arrhythmically against the screen. Mira is used to waiting on messages, given that the only two people she texts are either slow typers (Jinu) or get distracted in the middle of their messages only to pick the conversation back up hours later like no time had passed at all (Zoey)—but even still, Rumi takes a remarkably long time composing. By the time her message comes through, the lecture period is almost over, and Mira's phone battery has dropped by 12% just waiting for her response.

You were right, Rumi writes. He's not very tall at all.

Tuesday, 11:30 AM

Everyone knows Jinu, Mira figures as she packs her notebooks back into her bag.

Rumi had probably met him at a Saja party, or had crossed paths with him in the library one day.

Surely it was something like that.

Tuesday, 5:45 PM

Zoey is scribbling in a book of word puzzles when Mira makes her way into the station later. Mira watches the tip of Zoey's pen glide in short, blunt curves across the flimsy page as she unscrambles the word GLAMOROUS. She's relieved to see her there; Mira and Jinu had gone off-air the night before, only to emerge from the booth and find that Zoey had taken the bus home early, texting Jinu that she wasn't feeling well and wanted to sleep it off. Mira had sent a text checking on her, but had only gotten a thumbs-up back.

"Hey," Mira greets now, voice even. "Feeling better?"

Zoey startles a bit at the sound of her voice, her pen jerking off the page. She stares at Mira wide-eyed for a moment, then shakes off the surprise, her eyes flickering away.

"Oh, um, yeah," she replies haltingly. "Thanks."

Then she stands, holding the book out imploringly. "Help me out here?"

Mira peers down at the offered page. Every line is filled in but one. A jumble of letters stares up at her, and her eyesight swims a bit.

"Um," she says elegantly. "It's, uh… Geo… Pong…"

"Don't make her do your crosswords," Jinu calls from the booth.

Zoey rolls her eyes, but draws the book back. Mira, rescued from the clutches of childrens-activity-based humiliation, lets out a sigh of relief.

"They're word scrambles, not crosswords," Zoey corrects, dropping the book carelessly to the table behind her.

Jinu's voice is drawling. "Same thing."

"Not true," Zoey objects seriously. "Crosswords are for old people. Word scrambles are for four-year-olds."

For the first time since she woke up, Mira feels a smile tug at the corner of her mouth.

"They've both got me beat," she offers. "The old people and the four-year-olds. Words and I don't get along."

"Words aren't for everyone," Zoey says offhandedly. "Numbers are your thing. That's cool too."

Mira likes the way she says it—without pity or the sticky sweetness of benign reassurance. She likes that Zoey talks plainly. Likes the simplicity of not having to guess.

"Not as cool as music, of course," she jokes, because Zoey never misses an opportunity to praise music over math. But this time, Zoey just lets her head roll back in defeat.

"With everyone on campus talking about how hot my cousin is, I think I could actually use a break from music," she groans.

"Hence, the word puzzles," Jinu contributes. "Because my mom told us we play too many video games."

"You're twenty-one," Mira points out.

"You're never too old to listen to your mom."

"Well, I'm done listening to all the JUNIORZ talk," Zoey complains. "I mean, the things I've heard just walking around campus…"

She shudders. Mira grimaces in sympathy.

"It's no picnic for me, either." Jinu emerges from the booth, an audio cable wrapped neatly in his hands. "Jinu, is DJ Mira your secret admirer? Jinu, when are you gonna ask her out? I mean, no offense dude, but that is not happening."

"I'd say I'm having it worse," Mira scoffs. "Everyone's magically coming up with paragraphs of proof that I'm desperately in love with you and am confessing through song. You should be so lucky. I would rather eat nails."

"I'd rather drink cauliflower," Jinu agrees.

"I'd rather retake freshman english."

"I'd rather listen to Fancy Like ten more times."

Mira frowns. "You love Fancy Like."

"You nearly cried when she banned it from the catalogue," Zoey adds.

"Fine." Jinu taps his chin, looking, for a moment, eerily similar to his cousin. "I'd rather teach Zo how to drive again."

"Oh my god, no." Even Zoey looks a little queasy at the thought. "Once was enough. Your mom is never gonna forgive us for the pigeon incident."

She freezes, her eyes snapping to Mira with urgency. Mira can see the lightbulb flicker on above her head, and in the next second, she's diving for the discarded word games book.

"PIGEON! Oh my god, it's PIGEON!"

She scrambles for a pen. Mira watches as the one she'd been using earlier untucks itself from behind her ear and bounces unceremoniously to the floor, where Zoey scoops it up instantly.

"Well," Mira says. "At least things here are business as usual."

"Remind me to come up with a bird-themed playlist sometime," Jinu instructs. "I've got enough bird stories to last the whole shift. There have actually been an incredible number of pigeon incidents."

Tuesday, 6:00 PM

"Good evening K-Uni! And welcome to the show where DJ Mira and I are not in love, and you all need to get a little less parasocial about things, real quick."

"For once, DJ Jinu, we're in complete agreement."

"History being made, folks. In all seriousness, if DJ Mira was in love with me, there's no way she'd be able to hold out long enough to write me three whole songs. I'm afraid I'm just too irresistible."

"Wow. Such a strong start only to blow it immediately. What a shame."

"You see, my friend and I were talking about this earlier—and yes, DJ Mira, I have friends. Don't go for such low-hanging fruit. Anyway, I was telling my friend: at the end of the day, we don't even know each others' birthdays, or top Spotify artists, or favorite colors. How much can you really like someone if you don't know their favorite color?"

There's a dry snort. "You're telling me you couldn't guess my favorite color?"

"Okay, well, the pink hair kind of gives it away. Can you guess mine?"

"You seem like a blue kind of guy. Blue walls. Navy bedsheets. Super basic all around."

"Mean and true, DJ Mira. Can you guess Zoey's?"

"Don't need to guess. It's green."

"Well there you have it. Mira likes pink, I like blue, we are not in love, and the first song of the night is Sorry for Party Rocking."

"Romanticize that, nerds."

Tuesday, 9:56 PM

"'The DJ', 'The DJ', 'Please play The DJ'…" Jinu clicks through the request messages observationally. "Yep, it's every single request."

It's the first shift in what feels like ages that they've managed to make it through the whole four hours without playing a single JUNIORZ track. Jinu had argued at the start that it was important to keep their new fans happy by playing what they wanted every now and then; Mira had argued that that made them sellouts. Jinu had replied that they were finding their niche, pulled the seniority card, and then put down another mark on Mira's side of the apology board for accusing him of selling out. Their total was 33-4. Mira was beginning to suspect that the apology system was a bit unfair.

"We can ignore it," she bargains now. "We just say the requests page is down. Or don't say anything."

"'Why is the request page up if you're ignoring all the requests'," Jinu reads.

Mira sighs deeply. "I miss when we had four listeners."

She doesn't even want to look at the number under the currently listening panel on the computer. The last time she'd glanced at it, it had been in the mid-quadruple digits.

"It's one song," Jinu reasons. "That's less JUNIORZ than we've played any other night since Nerves. We play it, we get it over with, everyone goes home happy except for you."

Mira rubs at her forehead. "Can I veto?"

"Nope." Jinu pops the p. "Seniority. Coolness. Height."

"You," Mira grits out, "are not even that tall."

Jinu presses the unmute button as the last notes of the song fade.

"JUNIOR-izers," he starts.

Mira gags. "Nope."

"We know we've kept you waiting long enough."

"They could literally go on SoundCloud and play it on their own."

"Despite the drama, we know a good song when we hear it, and we know you all want to hear it, too. So, just because you've stuck it out with us all night, here you go. Have a good night and stay safe, everyone…"

He looks to Mira. Mira lets out a tired breath, then leans into her mic.

"…This is The DJ," she says obediently.

Jinu clicks play. The sweeping, rhythmic sound of JUNIORZ's guitar bounces back and forth in Mira's headphones, which she pulls from her ears and rests around her neck, just close enough that she can still hear the high end of the song. Jinu does the same, wiping imaginary beads of sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his hoodie.

"We did it," he announces. "We played our songs, we said our piece. No more love scandals for these DJs. We've made it through the JUNIORZ drama of the week."

"Don't jinx it," Mira chides.

Zoey has abandoned her word puzzles when Jinu and Mira make their way out of the booth, but rather than plugging furious chords into her laptop like usual, she only stares forlornly at her phone. Mira's pretty sure she's never seen her sit so still. She prays to all that is good that she hasn't uncovered another drama-inducing tweet from Abby or JUNIORZ or anyone else. But this time, Zoey doesn't spring to her feet or shove her phone into anyone's face, just glances up and offers a small, flickering smile.

"All done?" she asks.

"Yeah." Mira scratches awkwardly at her arm. "You didn't listen?"

"Not tonight." Zoey looks a little apologetic. "Jinu said the theme was songs with less words than you think and I figured I'd sit it out."

Mira frowns. "He told me it was songs that sound like gravel."

Zoey cracks a small grin at that. "What does that even mean?"

"He's your cousin," Mira chuckles. "You tell me."

Jinu shuts the booth down while Mira and Zoey tidy the studio for the morning shift, and a few minutes past 10:00, they lock up for the night. Jinu slings an arm around his cousin's shoulders as they depart, both of them waving goodbye before heading off in the direction of the parking garage, Zoey's shoulders slouched, Jinu talking quietly to the top of her head. Mira doesn't move as she watches them go, leaning back against the concrete wall of the radio station until the pair are well out of earshot. Only then does she retrieve her phone from her backpack.

She brings up her voicemails. Her brother's name stares coldly up from the screen.

Mira takes a breath.

She presses play.

Tuesday, 10:11 PM

Mira, it's me. I'm calling to tell you to tone it down with whatever this drama at your job is. People are starting to talk about it, and it's making you look ridiculous. It's making us look ridiculous.

I'm just trying to warn you. Mom and Dad aren't happy about it. Just keep your head down and stay out of trouble. They're not gonna put up with another scandal.

The voicemail cuts off with a shrill beep. Mira stares down at her phone, dumbstruck.

"It's only campus radio."

If there is one thing Mira has not historically been good at, it's keeping her head down.

She'd been prone to breakdowns as a kid. Her parents had tried to throw money at the issue and therapize it out of her, which had only managed to steer her breakdowns into fits of teenaged rebellion. Her freshman year of college had been rocky at best, and her sophomore year, well…

It really wasn't until the start of her third year that she'd decided to buckle down and leave the acting out behind—and even that had been more for her own benefit than her family's.

But her family has money, and even if they refuse to pay for any of her basic costs of living—though she knows they never hesitated to shell out for her brother when he was in school—they still pay her tuition in full. Mira may have picked her battles badly in the past, but she knows when she's beat now. She's not about to go and try to piss off the people keeping her out of debt, no matter how badly she may want to.

The problem is, it's out of her control.

Contrary to what half the student body seems to think, it's not her writing the songs, or drafting the tweets, or pushing her lovelorn agenda out into the world. She doesn't know how to keep her head down when it was never her head that was up in the first place.

Rather than try to figure it out, she stays the course: she does nothing.

And miraculously, JUNIORZ does nothing, too.

Wednesday, 1:00 PM

Eight days go by with no development on the JUNIORZ front.

There are no new songs, no cryptic posts from Abby, no discoveries about anyone's profile photos, or email addresses, or anything of that nature. Jinu tones down the amount of JUNIORZ music they keep on rotation in an attempt to dispel the rumors surrounding both him and Mira, and when that doesn't work, threatens to stop playing it altogether if everyone doesn't learn how to behave.

(The threats do nothing to help.)

(Jinu keeps playing the music anyway.)

Mira's bag slams onto the chemistry lab bench with a disconcerting clunk.

"I never," she tells Rumi in lieu of a greeting, "want to hear the words DJ or Mira again."

"Well…" Rumi taps the back of her pencil against her open notebook. "One of those is your name, so…"

Mira groans and empties her bag onto the table, producing drug store bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a packet of instant dry yeast. There are one and a half weeks left in the term, which means one and a half weeks to get their chemistry project presentable. The first step to that? Getting Rumi to sit through the experiment.

Mira retrieves two beakers and lines their materials up on the bench.

"Alright," she says. "Elephant's toothpaste."

"Tiger's stripes," Rumi replies. "Are we just naming things?"

Mira snorts.

"Elephant's toothpaste is the name of the experiment," she explains. "They call it that because it's normally kids doing it. But for our purposes, it's a fine example of catalysis."

Rumi looks unconvinced. "You're basing our junior chemistry project on an experiment meant for children?"

"I'm basing our general chemistry project off a concept I think my group partner will understand and enjoy talking about," Mira corrects.

Rumi flushes, but doesn't object.

Mira fills each beaker a quarter way with hydrogen peroxide. In a separate cup, she deposits the yeast and asks Rumi to mix it with warm water. When Rumi returns, Mira lines their containers up again.

"Reaction," she says, and points at the hydrogen peroxide, which is slowly stirring and popping in its glass. "It's going really slowly right now, breaking down into its basic components."

Rumi doesn't follow. "Are people still bothering you about this thing with Jinu?"

"There is no thing with Jinu." Mira swirls the yeast mixture in its cup. "But yes."

She hands the cup to Rumi, curling her fingers around Rumi's to keep it upright. "Catalyst. The chemist's time travel."

"Why don't you just come out and say it's not you?"

"Why do you think?" Mira frowns. "Tried it. It didn't work. Can we focus?"

Rumi presses her lips together. Mira feels bad for snapping. She's opening her mouth to apologize when Rumi takes the cup in full, depositing its contents into the beaker.

"Slowly!" Mira warns, but it's too late. Thick, frothy foam explodes upwards in the beaker, spilling up and out over the edge of the glass with reckless speed. Rumi rescues her notebook and scoots back, eyes wide, while Mira watches as the bubbling mess washes across the tabletop and down onto the floor.

"Well." The foam begins to drip onto the floor and Mira wishes, momentarily, that she'd thought to dye it a fun color. "There you have it."

Wednesday, 9:48 PM

When the article comes out, Mira thinks of elephant's toothpaste.

Hydrogen peroxide is an unstable mixture, its reactionary element triggered by even the slightest exposure to light. But the reaction is slow, boring, amost unobservable.

The week and a half between the release of The DJ and the release of the article are like that: slow, boring, and unnotable, with something bubbling right beneath the surface.

Zoey knocks on the window twelve minutes to the end of their Wednesday show, and things start to explode.

They're in the middle of a song—Madonna, upon Jinu's insistence on Throwback Night—and Jinu is, for once, not talking her ear off, which is why Mira finds it odd that Zoey's banging on the window at all.

"Come in?" Jinu asks, sounding equally bewildered.

Zoey cracks the door. "Have you guys seen?"

Mira frowns. "What now?"

"New JUNIORZ stuff?" Jinu asks.

Zoey nods.

"Another song?"

Zoey shakes her head.

"Korea University's secretive musical sensation speaks out," Jinu reads. "By Indie Music Korea."

The words are slow and halting. Jinu squints down at the screen.

"Jesus Christ," Mira mutters, taking the phone from Jinu's hands and handing it back to Zoey, who smoothly picks up where Jinu's left off.

"Following the impressive success of their sophomore smash-hit Be For You, we reached out to rising artist JUNIORZ to talk about their strong production, captivating lyricism, and unique approach to marketing and audience outreach through Korea University's campus radio program. In the interest of their privacy, JUNIORZ politely declined. However, after controversy on campus after their latest release in a strong streak of well-performing hits, JUNIORZ has reached out again and asked us to release a statement on their behalf."

She slows, her eyes scanning ahead.

"What is it?" Mira asks.

Zoey's brow creases. She shakes her head. "Nothing," she says. "I'll keep going.

"My music was always meant to be for myself, JUNIORZ writes. I put it out into the world on a whim, but I never expected the reaction it would get. I'm very glad that people can enjoy and relate to what I've created. But my songs were never meant to be puzzles to solve. They were a way for me to escape the pressure of my family's expectations, a way to express feelings I wasn't confident enough to express in person. I regret putting myself out there in a way that caused hurt to others. I hadn't thought to account for this kind of reaction."

Jinu sits back in his chair. "Jeez. Kinda heavy."

"Yeah." Zoey's shoulders slump. "I guess… to clear up the rumors?"

She glances at Mira. "…What do you think?"

Mira swallows roughly. Thinks of a way for me to escape the the pressure of my family's expectations.

"How long has this been up?" she asks.

Zoey checks the timestamp. "Two hours."

Mira pushes away from the desk.

"Sorry," she says. "I need to go."

Wednesday, 9:52 PM

She calls her brother. He picks up on the first ring.

"Mira." His voice is hard and tired.

Mira exhales, harsh. "I know it looks bad, but it wasn't me, I swear."

"You're humiliating yourself. You need to shut it down."

"I didn't write the songs!" Mira protests. "I don't know who did! I don't even have time, I've been studying and going to class… I'm keeping my head down. Like you said."

There's a long silence on the other end of the line. Mira's heart thunders in her chest. Sometimes, when she was younger and caught in one of her fits, her pulse would rush so loudly in her ears that she couldn't hear anything else. But she can't hear her pulse right now. All she hears is the silence.

"Mira," her brother says finally. "I know you didn't write the songs."

Confusion breaks through the tangle of panic in Mira's gut. "Then… what…?"

Her brother's breath comes out in a huff, exasperated. "Of course you didn't write them. They're about you."

Mira's head feels foggy. "No."

"Yes." The clack of a keyboard comes through the tinny phone speaker. "Here: An abstract introduction, but the proof is enough. What classes are you taking this term?"

"General chemistry," Mira answers automatically. "History of fashion, junior seminar…"

She slows, her words becoming hesitant. "Abstract algebra."

"And introduction to proofs," her brother finishes. "And what dorm did you live in last year?"

"University House."

"Room?"

Mira wavers. "B-4."

Her brother sighs again. "I thought you knew. You were always acting out for attention. I thought you'd finally found someone to give it to you."

"I didn't know." Mira's voice is small.

"Just figure it out, okay? Tell whoever it is that you're not interested. I'll tell Mom and Dad you're working on it."

The call cuts out without a goodbye. The phone goes heavy in Mira's hand, and—

—oh.

Now she hears her pulse.

Wednesday, 10:11 PM

Abby is, as always, in the center of fucking everything. Mira finds him by a keg on the lawn outside the Saja house, holding a scrawny freshman's legs for a keg stand. The party is in full swing, with music pumping from a set of speakers somewhere inside the house and students in various states of undress scattered throughout the area. Mira is on a mission. She ignores it all.

Abby loses interest in the keg stand boy as soon as he sees her, dropping the boy's legs without care. Behind him, Mystery and Baby both reach out, lightning quick, to keep the boy from falling.

"DJ Mira." Abby's voice is low, cocky and amused. "Back at a Saja party. It's just like old times. Do I sense a beer pong tournament?"

Mira's hands land squarely in the middle of Abby's chest, though he hardly budges. "Tell me you didn't do this."

Abby's grin goes a little tight around the edges. "Do what?"

"You know what," Mira insists. "What, just because I didn't like you back? Just because I stopped coming to your parties? Tell me you didn't drag some innocent girl in to sing songs to get back at me. Tell me you didn't make this whole thing up for that."

Abby's face finally drops into a mix of boredom and annoyance. "I didn't make anything up," he says. "It wasn't me. You can call off the witch hunt."

"It wasn't you," Mira repeats, disbelieving. "I was here during registration, you were right beside me when I signed up for those classes, and you're the only one who ever came to my dorm last year-"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Abby interrupts. "But I'm telling you, it's not me."

He's angry now. Mira recognizes it in the deep crease of his brow. The crowd of partygoers around them is beginning to take notice of the commotion, and Abby looks around, exasperated, before leaning close to Mira's ear. Mira recoils on instinct, but Abby follows her as she retreats.

"It's in the name, Mira," he says, voice seething with frustration. "And he's a marketing major. Come on."

He pulls away to take in her stunned silence. There's no triumph on his face, just that same angry boredom, the same hint of arrogance, like he's waiting for her to catch up.

A marketing major, Mira thinks. She only knows one.

"But…" she mumbles. "He doesn't-"

"Like you?" Abby interprets. "No shit. If you thought that's what any of this was about, you're even more self-centered than I thought. He's promoting his show, Mir. He got bored of talking to nobody night after night. That's the damn problem with radio. Everyone's just there for the music. Why should they give a fuck about you?"

Mira stands stock still. She feels like some sort of rug has been pulled from underneath her feet, twice over now. Around her, the party goes on, but she can't bring herself to move.

"Fuck you, Abby," she mutters, and only then do her feet unroot themselves from the ground.

Someone switches the music as she walks away. The opening notes of Be For You ring out across the yard, and people cheer.

Mira walks faster.

Chapter Text

Monday, six months ago, 5:30 PM

"Who's this?" Mira asks, jabbing one thumb backwards over her shoulder. The girl being jabbed at tilts her head, her fingers stilling on the small synthesizer keyboard plugged into her laptop, wide eyes crinkling at the corners with something like amusement.

Jinu cranes his head back until he's peering out through the open sound booth door. "That's my cousin," he answers, dipping back into the booth. "Zoey, Mira. Mira, Zo."

"And I can actually introduce myself," Zoey adds. "If the girl who wants the introduction asks me directly."

She raises her eyebrows at Mira, her lips tugging upwards in what almost seems like a challenge. Mira, not used to being called out, feels her cheeks heat.

"I'm Mira," she repeats, instead of what she should say, which is sorry.

"So I've heard." Zoey's mouth gives into a full-on grin. "Welcome to Korea University campus radio."

Jinu lets out a semi-spirited whoop from the booth. Mira glances back and forth between the cousins, bewildered.

"You don't work here too, do you?" she asks. One surprise coworker is enough. She's not sure she has the wherewithal to handle two—especially not on air. But Zoey is shaking her head, her long, dangling earrings glinting as they sway back and forth under the dim overhead light.

"Nope!" she confirms, still grinning. "Well, not officially. But I help out. Test the inventory, make sure everything's up to snuff. I'm pretty much essential to the operation."

Mira eyes her setup dubiously. Her laptop, which looks like it's crawled out of 2008, is plugged into an outlet in the corner labeled ZOEY—ONE PLUG AT A TIME. Half of her belongings are strewn about the radio station's sole small table, which is plastered in sticky notes has a stack of index cards shoved under one leg to keep it from wobbling. Her backpack is stuffed to the brim with textbooks and papers and a giant bottle of water—a commuter student, Mira guesses.

"Zo's a music producer," Jinu translates, out of sight. "She hangs around to bum off the station's audio equipment."

Zoey makes an insulted noise. "And for a ride home!"

"She hangs around to bum off the equipment and then bum a ride home," Jinu corrects. "Don't mind her. She doesn't even pay attention to the show. By the time we get everything going, she'll be off in her own little world."

His words are punctuated by the sound of cardboard boxes shifting and sliding against the rough-carpeted floor. There had only been one microphone set up when Mira had arrived, though Jinu swore he'd requested a second be added for her. Mira eyes the shiny microphone on Zoey's desk. It looks an awful lot like the one in the booth.

The thunk of another box hitting the ground echoes out from Jinu's direction.

"Shit!"

"Swearing!" Zoey calls without missing a beat. "No swearing in the booth," she informs Mira, "or else you have to bow and apologize."

Jinu's voice is compliant. "I'm bowing!"

"You're such a liar!" Zoey accuses. She angles back towards Mira, though her eyes are still rolling in Jinu's direction. "Anyway, sorry I don't feel like tuning into the Jinu show every night. Maybe if you talked about something interesting once in a while, I would!"

"I do so talk about interesting things!" Jinu objects.

"You talk about what you had for breakfast and how much more you can bench press than Abby," Zoey scoffs. "Say something people care about! Say something cool!"

She waves her arms as she talks, and Mira catches a few rows of beaded bracelets on her wrist, alternating shades of purples and greens. She's wearing a baggy gray hoodie that hangs low over a pair of blue jeans. Her shoes, which Mira presumes had once been white, are scuffed and aged with dirt, and her laptop is smothered in stickers for various musicians and music making programs, as well as one that reads SAVE THE SEA with the name of a marine wildlife conservatory printed below. There's a rhyming dictionary half falling out of her open backpack, and a book of word puzzles tucked below that.

Mira is intrigued.

"Something like what?" she asks.

Zoey's big, round eyes turn back on her, something inside them newly alight.

"Okay," she says, her smile wide and conspiratory. "So, have you ever heard of LOST?"

Wednesday, 11:13 PM

The text to Zoey reads, Did you know?

Mira hasn't sent it yet. She hasn't decided whether or not she actually wants to know the extent of Zoey's involvement. Would it explain her weird behavior if she had known? Did she pull away out of guilt? Or paranoia?

Did she even care at all?

Mira bites her lip. Maybe she and Zoey aren't as close as she likes to think.

But, no. Zoey carries the turtle keychain Mira gave her everywhere on her bag. Zoey pins her silly doodles to the bulletin board and doesn't poke too much fun when she catches Mira speaking to inanimate objects. Zoey tells her that words aren't for everyone, and that's okay.

Zoey is her friend, isn't she?

Isn't that the sort of thing friends do?

Mira presses send.

There are a lot of things she wants to know.

Wednesday, 11:14 PM

Mira

Did you know?

Can we talk?

Wednesday, 11:43 PM

Zoey

i'm sorry

Thursday, 12:01 AM

Mira sits down with a pencil and paper.

It's in the name, Abby had said.

Carefully, Mira writes out J-U-N-I-O-R-Z.

JINU, she unscrambles first.

And then:

ZO.

Thursday, 9:00 PM

Mira has worked at AM 1650 K-Uni Campus Radio for just over six months now, which means two things: first, she has far too intimate a knowledge of Seoul's most favorite, most mediocre pop hits; and second, she has saved up just enough sick hours to call out of one entire shift and not leave herself hurting on her next paycheck.

That's what you get for six months of dedication and commitment: caught up in the middle of your friends'—no, your coworkers'—cruel, elaborate schemes, and five and a quarter hours of paid time off.

Mira cashes it all in without a second thought.

It's kind of surreal to be out on campus at 9:00 PM on a weeknight after so many months spent crammed in the booth with Jinu, bickering over what songs they should or shouldn't ban and listening to Zoey bang on the glass with way too much force whenever she disagreed with something they were saying. What a waste it had all been. She could've been out on her own doing whatever she wanted instead of digging herself deeper into the campus radio grave.

(Her therapist had been happy for her when she'd first brought it up.

"It will give you some structure on those nights when you're feeling untethered. It's good to have a routine when you're getting yourself back on your feet."

At the time, Mira had agreed. Now, she wishes she had scrolled past the AM 1650 listing on the campus job board and never looked back.)

Mira sets off across campus with her hair tucked down the back of her hoodie and her hat pulled low enough over her eyes that she can avoid having to engage with anyone milling about along the way to her destination.

Saja Club is technically a weightlifting club, though everyone knows it's really just an excuse for Abby and his friends to bro out at the gym on Wednesday evenings and then go back to their house and party. Even on other days of the week, the club members are always hanging around Abby's, drinking and doing curls and daring each other to lick things. Abby had once accused Mira of being an overthinker, in response to which Mira had accused Saja House of being an absolute breeding ground for under-thinker activity.

Mira hopes she can stand by that comment. She is in desperate need of some underthinking.

Abby's in the living room when she gets to the house, sprawled out languidly on the couch with Mystery on one side and Baby on the other. They're each holding beers in one hand, game controllers in the other. A sporty-looking video game is taking place on the glowing TV, but the volume is turned down low, making room for the thin sound of Jinu's radio voice coming from Baby's laptop speakers.

"-so tired of kimchi buchimgae," Jinu is saying. "It used to be my favorite, but Zoey always burns-"

Mira kicks the laptop closed as she walks by.

"Woah." Abby frowns up at her from the couch. "Not cool, DJ. Don't throw a tantrum on us just because that JUNIORZ shit didn't go your way."

Mystery snickers under his breath, and Mira clenches her teeth so hard that her jaw aches.

"I don't give a damn about JUNIORZ," she lies.

Abby huffs. "Yeah, real fucking believable."

Mira doesn't waste time replying, just stalks right through the living room and into the kitchen. Baby is complaining loudly behind her, and Abby replies exasperatedly, "Crazy, man, who knows."

It doesn't matter. Mira is already digging through the massive catalogue of cereal boxes in the pantry, reaching behind the flimsy cardboard for the bottles she knows are stashed behind. Her fingers encounter a thin, smooth neck and she retracts her arm like a claw machine, drawing her prize out into the open. Vodka, about half full. Absolut. She can do that.

She has the good sense to wrap her find in a paper bag before she leaves, though it doesn't stop Abby from muttering, "Jesus, Mir, my stash," as she passes back through the living room.

"Take it up with Jinu," she responds, uncaring, and lets the door slam behind her as she leaves. There's no party tonight, and the lawn feels empty. She's not used to seeing it without all the chaos of a Wednesday rager. The solitude suits her just fine, though. She's not in the mood to see anyone.

She takes her first few sips propped up against the tree that buzzcut boy had been stuck in that night she walked Zoey over after work, though with the little amount of food in her system, her head starts feeling foggy far too quickly and she finds herself needing to lie down. She wiggles her way out from underneath the tree canopy to stare up at the darkening sky.

She's never been able to see many stars from Seoul, though whether that's due more to the light pollution or her ever-worsening vision is anyone's guess. Even now, without a cloud in the sky, Mira can't make out a single pinprick of light beyond the buzzing streetlamps that border the campus greenways. It's just as well, she thinks. She doesn't know shit about stars. That's not her kind of math.

("The stars are pretty shit in America, too," Zoey had told her once. "At least, you can barely see them from Burbank. But one year, my dad took me camping in Oregon for my birthday, and there were stars for ages."

Mira had nodded sagely. "And Oregon is… below California."

"Above," Zoey had corrected. "It was unreal, Mira, there were like a million little lights. I've got to show you sometime. It was like seeing the New York skyline, only it was actually part of the sky."

"New York." Mira knew that one. "Like Ghostbusters."

"Exactly like Ghostbusters!" Zoey had clicked her fingers. "We'll make a U.S. geography expert out of you yet!"

She'd tapped the side of her head twice, nodding, then reached out to tap the side of Mira's the same way, her eyes bright and sparkling and amused.

Mira had just smiled.)

Thursday, 10:08 PM

Mira

I hate Abby

Such a dick

Did he know the whole time?

Why didn't you tell me?

Thursday, 11:15 PM

Back in sophomore year, at the height of Mira's party days, she could drink the entirety of the Saja Club under the table with ease. It was one of the reasons Abby liked her—that and her innate talent for bouncing ping pong balls into plastic cups of beer. But the partying had started to feel less like an escape and more like a stubborn owner, tugging her attention along on a leash until she gave in, pushed her studying aside, and went out to find Abby night after night.

It was only fair that Mira's grades at started to slip. She had expected it. What she hadn't expected was for her brain to shut down any sense of motivation she'd previously had going for her. Her grades had dropped to Bs? Fine, they may as well be Fs. She'd missed the first class of the week? No point in going to the rest. It was better to write it all off and hope that somewhere down the line, some distant version of her would find a way to get it together. It was so much easier not to care when she could tell herself everything was already ruined.

Parties were easier. You couldn't ruin a party—well, you could, but it never mattered when another would pop right up the next night, offering a redo, a blank slate, a chance to erase everything before. Sometimes Mira didn't even drink, just went and danced for hours until her feet were numb and her body was sore and slick with sweat, and she felt so bone-tired that she'd more often than not end up crashing on somebody's couch, sleep through her midmorning classes, and start the cycle all over again. It didn't much matter whether she spent the night drinking or dancing; they both quieted her brain in their own ways. Abby preferred to drink, of coure, but Mira had a sneaking suspicion that it was more due to his utter lack of rhythm than to his propensity for alcohol. How he got away with his reputation as the party king of campus when he couldn't follow a beat to save his life was anyone's guess.

Mira wishes she'd had the forethought to go dancing tonight, rather than subject herself to the quietude of the Saja Club's front lawn. There's something almost disconcerting about the lack of cheering and shouting from drunk upperclassmen, the nervous energy of freshmen trying to disappear into the edges of the crowd so as not to draw attention to themselves and become the target of Abby's next keg stand challenge. Ridiculously, the serenity makes Mira feel very alone.

Abby's vodka is halfway to her lips again when she realizes she doesn't really want to be drinking anymore. It's not the most helpful realization when the bottle already looks to be down to an eighth of its original volume and Mira's tolerance is no longer anything to brag about. If only she'd kept up with any of her friends from her previous years on campus. She could be swaying to a song she'd never heard before, arms wrapped around a girl whose name she didn't know, content in the knowledge that none of it would matter come morning.

Instead, Mira plants the stolen liquor firmly in the dirt and wishes her limbs didn't feel so heavy, wishes she had a glass of water and that her friends weren't all such absolute jerks. She lets her body sink back into the grass and stares defeatedly up at the nothing sky.

"I thought you didn't party."

Mira's head tips sideways slightly, her vision swimming with the motion. Rumi stands over her, staring down with an expression that's part curiosity and part concern. She's dressed badly for the chill of the night, wrapped only in a thin white hoodie and a pair of leggings that cling so tightly to the curves of her legs that Mira has to avert her eyes. She kicks herself for always being so easily done-in by a good pair of legs.

Rumi is still watching her, expectant, and for one insane moment Mira considers asking if she works out.

"Does this look like a party to you?" she asks instead. Her tongue feels leaden and too big in her mouth, and the words come out blurry and oddly paced. She realizes, in that moment, that she's never stopped to consider whether or not one should be able to feel their lips when they speak. Is she feeling hers now? Should she be? She moves her mouth experimentally, but there's only a tugging sensation in her cheeks.

Rumi's expression tips more towards concern. There's a moment of hesitation before she ducks out of Mira's field of view—but she doesn't leave, only settles down beside Mira on the grass, knees tucked up to her chest. Mira tilts her head further in her direction.

"You weren't in class today," Rumi states, her voice quiet. "It was a bunch of review for the exam. I took some notes for you."

Mira raises her eyebrows. Rumi's cheeks go pink.

"Er, I tried," she amends. "It may be better to get them from someone else."

Mira's next breath comes out in an amused huff. "Thanks anyway, princess."

Her buzzing brain thrills in the way that Rumi's face colors even further at the name. Rumi just tucks her face into her knees and mumbles something about teasing. Her long braid hitches up her back with the motion, and Mira fights the childish urge to reach out and tug.

"It's cold out here," she notes after a few moments have passed in silence.

Rumi hums. "I'm surprised you can feel anything through that buzz you've got going."

"I'm not that drunk," Mira defends, but Rumi only laughs.

"Heard that before."

Mira sighs and relaxes against the ground again. There's a breeze picking up across the lawn, rustling the leaves of the tree overhead and leaving goosebumps on her skin. Mira's body feels liquid around the edges. She wonders if Rumi could feel it if she touched her. Would the press of their skin startle her back into solidity? More likely, Mira would probably melt.

Rumi shivers beside her. Mira suddenly feels bad for keeping her out in the chill night air.

"I'll go home in a bit," she promises. "You don't have to stay."

Rumi gives her a disbelieving look. "You're ridiculous, you know that?"

Mira just shrugs and cranes her head back again to look at the sky. "Suit yourself."

The vodka burns warm in her stomach, though her arms are still goosebumped. A chorus of laughter breaks out across the block, then recedes into the night. Through Abby's window, Mira sees the corner of the TV change from video games to one of the Rocky movies.

Rumi huddles stubbornly in her hoodie, blowing on her hands for warmth.

("It's getting so cold," Zoey had complained about a month or so back. "The heater in the car is broken and Jinu's too cheap to fix it, so I get to sit there and freeze my ass off for thirty minutes both ways."

Mira hummed. "Wish I could help, but I am no longer rich."

It was ten minutes past the designated end of Mira's shift, and she and Zoey were sitting on a bench outside the radio station while Jinu did his best to chase a mouse out of the building. Zoey had informed her, once they were outside, that she was actually an expert at catching rodents and releasing them back outside, but that she had thought it would be funny to make Jinu do it instead. Mira, who was terrible with animals, wild or not, had had no objections.

A warm puff of air had escaped from Zoey's mouth. "I finally get in with a rich girl, and she's practically already been disowned."

"Sorry to disappoint. You'll have to find someone else to fulfill your sugar baby fantasies."

"I mean, I guess I know someone with a trust fund, but she's all responsible with it and stuff."

"Rich people, am I right?"

Zoey had laughed, and then after a pause had admitted, "Actually, she offered to fix the car, but Jinu said no."

Mira refocused. "Men, am I right?"

That had earned another snort from Zoey. "Oh well. Guess I'll just freeze to death or something. Will you visit me at the morgue?"

"I guess it's only fair, since you stick it out here with us every night."

"That's a relief. I'd hate for my only visitor to be Jinu. You know how he gets when he's got a captive audience."

There was a crash from inside the station, followed by a loud string of curses. A light flickered off and on at a rapid, comical pace. Mira and Zoey had stared on as Jinu's silhouette rushed back and forth past the window.

"This is gonna take a while," Zoey had decided, and reached down to grab Mira's hand. "Come on. I'll walk you home.")

Rumi insists on seeing Mira back to her dorm.

"I can get there just fine on my own," Mira grumbles irritably. "It's like a ten minute walk at most."

She's trying desperately to hang on to her bad mood, but in the wake of Rumi's company, and with the static of alcohol in her veins, her anger is slipping steadily into a put-out sort of melancholy. Mira wishes it weren't the case; being pissed feels good, righteous and self-serving. Now that she's starting to mope, the whole night just feels a bit pitiful.

The world sways around her as she attempts to sit up and she flops back to the ground like a sad, pitiful fish. Rumi stands easily and levels Mira with a look.

"It's close to midnight," she says. "And you're, y'know…"

"Drunk?" Mira supplies.

Rumi's mouth twists. "I was gonna say not feeling well."

"Polite as ever."

"My aunt was big on manners." Rumi brushes herself off, then offers Mira a hand. "Come on. It'll be just like old times."

Mira drags her feet as she walks, Rumi dutifully keeping pace beside her. She's in no particular rush to get back to her dorm tonight, afraid of what awaits her once she's well and truly alone. Maybe Abby had been right when he'd called her an overthinker. Mira had always had a hard time stopping a train of thought once she'd set it loose. She doesn't want to go home and sit in the quiet and think about Zoey.

Zoey plunking away at her portable keyboard, one earbud wedged under her headphones to listen in on the show.

Zoey barreling into her along the greenway and calling her "a truly pleasurable experience."

Zoey kicking her feet, legs dangling off a stool at the back of the booth, sitting in for moral support in obedient silence while the clock ticks down on the Be For You release and Mira's stomach ties itself in knots.

Mira doesn't want to think about Zoey, and how she'd been in on everything all the while.

"Do you think they laughed at me?" Mira asks her shoes.

She doesn't mean for Rumi to hear. She's always had a bad habit of talking to herself that tends to slip out even when she's got company. It's not like Rumi knows what the hell she's talking about, anyway.

"Sorry," she apologizes, voice weary. "I was just thinking of something else."

But Rumi's face has gone funny. The corners of her eyes are tight, and her mouth is set in a badly-drawn line.

"Nobody's laughing at you," she promises. The words are heavy. Rumi suddenly looks very tired.

Something scratches at the back of Mira's mind.

"Mira," Rumi says. Her mouth opens, then closes. She takes a deep breath. "I should-"

A shrill ringing splits the air. Mira winces away, her shoulders rising to her ears. Rumi flinches too, her hands flying to silence the source of the noise: her phone.

"What-?" Rumi stares down at the incoming call screen. Her face scrunches in frustration. "Not now," she mutters jabbing at the decline button. "Mira, I need to tell-"

The ringing comes again, instantaneous. Rumi's expression turns desperate. Mira decides to help her out.

"You should take that," she says. Whatever it is Rumi needs, surely it can wait a few minutes. Clearly, whoever's trying to get ahold of her has something important to say, and it's not like Mira's going anywhere.

Rumi hesitates, face taught with indecision. After a moment of deliberation, she caves.

"I'll just be a second," she promises, then steers Mira to an empty picnic table and guides her down onto the bench. "Don't wander off, okay? Please?"

Mira dutifully crosses her heart. Mollified, Rumi walks a good few paces off, then brings the phone to her ear.

"Hello?" Mira hears. "Yeah, at Abby's. I don't know, probably. How is-"

Her voice grows quieter as she wanders away until Mira can no longer make out the words. Rumi gestures as she speaks, though her movements are small, short and contained. Mira remembers a time when Zoey had tracked her down in the middle of the day to bring her a latte as a good luck gift before her exam and had promptly knocked it out of her hands, her arms splaying wide as she lamented how the man in front of her in line at the coffee shop hadn't been able to choose between hazelnut or peppermint syrup.

"Whoops," she had laughed, sheepish but unembarrassed. "I was worried something like that might happen, so I got you a scone as backup."

She'd handed over the scone, then proceeded to knock that out of Mira's hands, too. Luckily, it had been wrapped in a parchment bag.

"-put her on?" Rumi is saying now, her voice growing louder. "No, I don't want to be yelled at, but-"

She cuts off, her body going rigid. "She doesn't? Fine! Then I don't want to talk to her!"

Mira looks away, not wanting to spy. She hums lowly to herself in a gallant attempt to drown out Rumi's words, and glances around at her surroundings to keep herself occupied. Rumi has taken them the long way back across campus, out around the outskirts of the few old humanities buildings. It's a far less populated area of the school, with no cafes or open study spaces to draw in students from other disciplines. Mira only ever comes by on Mondays for her History of Fashion class, but she figures the path is probably second nature to Rumi by now.

Her eyes wander from the smooth concrete of the tiny history annex where she attends her Monday lectures to the faded red brick of the larger building across from it. Mira knows, from having run into her after History of Fashion a few times, that this is where Rumi takes most of her history classes. Not for the first time, she feels both glad and a bit embarrassed to be a math major, luxuriating in the niceties of the much more modern, newly renovated STEM buildings while the rest of the campus gets hand-me-down furniture and band-aid maintenance. The larger history hall looks old as dirt, mortar turning to dust at each crumbling corner and with half of the west wall covered in scrawling black tags that read things like SAJA CLUB ORGY ㅋㅋㅋㅋ and CRAM FAIL REPEAT.

Something about the graffiti catches in her brain. Rumi is still muttering into her phone a few paces down the walkway, and Mira takes the opportunity to abandon her post at the picnic table and wander closer to the wall. The university always made sure to keep the buildings closer to the heart of campus clean and free of any unwanted marks, but just like the decommissioned language arts building, the main history hall seems to have fallen through the cracks. Mira runs her hand over the curve of a spray-painted C. An odd feeling stirs in her stomach, and she kneels, keeping one hand flat against the cool brick.

It takes her a moment to make them out in the dark, but she finds them eventually, exactly like the picture Zoey had shown her before: three small, fragile-looking flowers, glowing iridescent in the pale moonlight.

The odd feeling splits into two—annoyance, freshly renewed, though without the bitter undertone from the start of the night, and inconceivably, a sense of relief.

She's not crazy. It was right there all along.

Mira sits back on her heels.

"You sly little nerds."

Thursday, 11:54 PM

Mira

Feeling better. See you tomorrow

You'd better have a damn good explanation

Thursday, 11:59 PM

Jinu

aye aye, DJ

Friday, 12:00 AM

Rumi looks a little frazzled when they reunite at the picnic table, and she doesn't bring up their interrupted conversation from earlier. Instead she simply takes Mira's arm and gets them back on their way, her brow scrunched and her cheeks flushed with badly-disgused petulance. Mira doesn't call her out, allowing herself to be marched across campus in relative silence. Rumi has never been to her new dorm, and Mira takes the lead once they're in the hallway, leading them through the building until they reach her room. Mira fumbles in her pocket for her keys. Rumi stares at the door plaque, face unreadable.

"A-36," she notes, distant.

Mira makes a quiet sound of affirmation.

Once they're inside, Rumi pulls out all the stops, filling a glass of water for Mira's bedside table and moving the metal trash bin closer in case Mira wakes up needing to be sick. Mira, having burned off most of the drunkenness in the Saja Club yard and on the walk home, finds this all entirely unneccessary, but she holds back her protests as Rumi fusses. By the time the room has been duly idiot-proofed, Mira has offed her shoes and removed her contacts, and Rumi is still hovering, hands clutched in front of her like a nervous teacher on her first day of school.

"I'm fine," Mira grumbles, barely resisting the urge to pelt Rumi with the pillow currently lodged under her head. "I've had plenty of nights worse than this one. If I roll out of bed and concuss myself or start choking on my own tongue, I'll call you."

"You're so not reassuring," Rumi sulks.

Mira stands her ground.

"Get out," she insists. "Thank you for the escort and the water and all. Now go sleep, or stare out the window again, or whatever it is you do now. Stop using me as an excuse for your insomnia."

"Fine." Rumi's pout lessens, just a bit. "But if you need anything, just call me, or… I don't know, call someone. Do you want me to ask your neighbor to keep an eye on you?"

This time, Mira really does throw the pillow, and Rumi squeaks with such virogous indignance that Mira can't help but laugh. Only once Rumi has finally vacated the room—with the promise that she won't disturb any of the other A-hall residents with her concerns—does Mira stand and retrieve the pillow, tucking it nicely back at the top of her thin twin mattress. But rather than climb back into bed and settle down for the night, Mira wanders over to her desk.

The paper from the previous night has been tucked away under a worn calculus textbook, sandwiched between an old sheet of chemistry homework from sophomore year and a page of notes from a YouTube video she'd been using to review for exams. Mira retrieves it carefully, sliding her glasses on over her nose to examine her work, even though she already knows what it will say.

J-U-N-I-O-R-Z, she had written.

JINU. ZO.

R.

Chapter Text

Wednesday, sophomore year, 2:34 AM

The thing about talking to Rumi is that Mira is never quite sure when she's repeating herself.

In the half year that they've dormed next to each other, most of her memories of Rumi are clouded by the buzz of coming home fresh off a Saja party, head still foggy, mouth still looser than usual. She knows that Rumi was there for the fire alarm disaster, remembers the distinct feeling of putting her foot in her mouth when she'd asked, "Do you think there's really a fire? Do you think they'll let me get my stuffed bear?"

Beyond that, she's not got much.

She talks to Rumi plenty. Mira has developed a habit of stumbling home late from Saja house, and Rumi is a chronic insomniac. The first night they'd run into each other, Mira had been unsuccessfully trying to get back into her room, cursing quietly to herself as her key stuck in the lock, only for the door to swing open from the inside, landing Mira with the realization that she was, in fact, standing on the wrong side of the hall. Rumi had refused her apologies, helpfully pointed her to her own door (which sat about two steps across the walkway from Rumi's), and had even been kind enough to help Mira unlock it when she'd managed to get her key stuck in her own lock, too. Since that incident, Rumi had elected to keep a pale purple sign that read R. RUMI on her door, and she seemed to be keeping an eye out for Mira's drunk shenanigans as well.

From Mira's perspective, Rumi pretty much never sleeps. No matter the hour when she makes it back to University House, Rumi is usually sitting at her window, desk light on and a book in her hand.

They're basically a match made in heaven. She says as much to Rumi as they sit on the concrete steps outside the dorm, Rumi pulling her thin sweater tighter around her shoulders to shield her from the chill of the night.

"A match made in heaven?" Rumi repeats, her cheeks flushing in the frigid air. Mira, unthinkingly, shrugs out of her thick wool jacket and leans over to drape it across Rumi's shoulders.

"You know," she says, offhanded. "Cause you're always up, I'm always up, we're always outside at two in the morning."

"I wouldn't be outside at two in the morning if you would stop forgetting your keycard at Abby's every night," Rumi fires back, though her voice has grown flustered.

"You say that," Mira laughs, "but you're the one always waiting at your window to spot me and let me back in."

Rumi blushes prettily, but makes a valiant attempt to scowl. "I'd just hate to leave for my morning class and find you passed out in front of the stairwell, is all."

She rubs embarrassedly at her rosy cheeks, breath forming a cloud that melts into the dark night sky. Mira feels a smile tug at her lips.

"Such a worrier." She barely manages to get the words out before she's seized with the need to yawn.

Rumi just huffs and watches as she smothers the gesture into her shoulder. "You're a pain."

"Whatever, rich girl."

"You're the rich girl!"

Mira sniffs, rubs at her nose, and pretends that she doesn't hear.

"We should go in," she decides, and shoves off the concrete steps, somehow managing to get her weary body in line above her feet. Rumi follows her example, rising from the entryway stairs and resting a thin hand against Mira's back to keep her steady. She manages to reach around Mira to wrestle open the front door, which squeaks unforgivingly and makes them both wince.

Mira lets herself be ushered inside. "What a gentleman."

Rumi's scowl returns. "You're much quieter sober, you know. You have way too much confidence drunk."

The building's single elevator always takes forever to come, but Rumi won't let Mira attempt the rickety stairs in her current state, so they wait in familiar silence. Mira sees Rumi hide her own yawn behind her hands and wonders, not for the first time, what it is that keeps her up so late every night. She knows it can't just be her—Rumi's light is always on, no matter the time, no matter if Mira is out at a party or safe and sound in her room. But she never hears any music floating across the hall, never sees any sign that Rumi might have company over in the late hours of the night.

In fact, the only person Mira has ever seen stop by Rumi's dorm was a small girl with dark hair and a knack for tripping down the stairs every time she left. Mira usually observed this happenstance auditorily, listening in on the various bumps and crashes and exclamations of "ouch!" that the visitor made as she left, but she had once had the misfortune of being caught in the stairwell as the girl came tumbling down. She had managed to bowl Mira over completely and had bowed so low in apology that Mira could only see the top of her head as she retreated. Mira had found Rumi cringing in the hall afterwards and had asked if the tripping girl was her girlfriend, mostly to get a rise out of her. Rumi had blushed beet red and blurbled something along the lines of "Erm, well, uh, I guess… no."

Mira is thinking about this blurbling when the elevator deposits them out into hall B. Rumi is fighting exhaustion, her eyelids drooping low over her pretty brown eyes, and Mira wonders whose light will shut off first tonight.

They reach their respective doors just a few paces down the corridor. Rumi rubs at one eye with the heel of her palm, and Mira bites her lip and hopes she hasn't repeated her next words too many times when she mumbles a quiet, "Thanks. For sitting with me tonight."

"Anytime," Rumi answers, which is not exactly reassuring.

But Mira just smiles and nods as Rumi hovers by the door across the hall from her own.

"Goodnight, B-5."

Rumi smiles back through another yawn.

"Goodnight, Mira."

Friday, 11:23 AM

Mira wakes to a skull-splitting headache and the sinking suspicion that her party days are well and truly behind her.

"Fuck me," she mutters against her pillow. Her tongue feels like sandpaper. She heaves herself up, grabs blindly for the water Rumi had left her, and chugs.

The pro of being an ex-party girl is that Mira is, by now, an expert at hangovers. She finishes off her first glass of water and fetches two painkillers from her backpack on autopilot, then refills her glass from the jug above her mini-fridge and downs everything in a few deep gulps. In the past, she would've washed everything down with an energy drink and crashed back into her bed to zone out on her phone and let the painkillers do their thing, but for now she only pokes a straw into a stray vegetable juice box that's been living in her fridge for longer than is probably advisable and changes from last night's grass-stained outfit into a tank top, an oversized hoodie, and a pair of gym shorts.

The midday sun has done little to melt away the chill of the morning, and Mira's legs prickle in the open air. Fridays are always lighter on foot-traffic, and she finds herself utterly thankful for the thinness of the crowds that bustle through the campus, partly because hardly anyone has the desire—or nerve—to point and whisper at her, and partly because it means that the gym, when she finally arrives, is mercifully uncrowded.

Of course, nothing gold can stay, and Mira has barely had time to drop her things in a locker and claim an out of the way treadmill before she catches a flash of obnoxious pink hair in her peripheral vision.

Abby steps onto the treadmill beside hers. Mira eyes him as he gestures for her to remove her headphones, then cranks the volume on her music higher.

"I'LL SHOUT, MIRA," Abby warns, already shouting. "YOU KNOW I WILL."

"Jesus." Mira slips the headphones down around her neck. "You are so obnoxious."

Abby ignores her completely.

"I'm impressed," he states. "I would've thought you'd be on your ass recovering still."

Mira rolls her eyes, though it makes her stomach churn a bit. "I stopped partying, Abby, I didn't reset my liver. I can handle a hangover just fine."

"You are such a waste of a cool person," Abby sighs.

"Yeah, and you're a waste of nice abs." Mira adjusts her treadmill speed, settling into a light jog. "We know this already. What do you want?"

"Hey, relax, DJ," Abby says. "JUNIORZ is blowing over, my fun's all done. I'm just letting things go back to normal."

"Normal." Mira fights the urge to roll her eyes again. "What was your part in all this, anyway?"

"Nothing, really." Abby shrugs. "I figured it out pretty fast. They told me to keep it under wraps, gave me a few things to post."

"The profile picture?" Mira asks.

Abby shakes his head. "That one was organic. Didn't figure it out until Jinu started blabbing about getting his listenership up. Next day he messaged as JUNIORZ telling me to tweet about his show." He laughs. "Not the most subtle guy in the world. But I mean, who else would give a damn about nighttime campus radio? It's not exactly great promotion for the artist."

"Good for the station, though," Mira hums.

Abby sighs again. "Lucky son of a bitch. If he doesn't make it in the marketing world, I'll eat my foot."

With that, he hits the stop button on his treadmill. The belt slows to a crawling halt, and Abby slouches his way down.

"See you around, Mira," he calls as he departs. "You owe me ₩20,000 for the vodka."

"I said to take it up with Jinu," Mira grumbles after him. Or Rumi, she supposes. Surely one of them would pay.

Though Mira wouldn't bet on Zoey.

Friday, 5:27 PM

On a hunch, Mira arrives to work half an hour early and huddles just outside the entrance, arms crossed. She's not quite sure what time Zoey and Jinu typically arrive, only that they come together and that they're always there before Mira. She doesn't have to wait long before two familiar heads pop into sight, both craning over something on Zoey's phone and snipping back and forth at each other in a petty, squabbling tone. Jinu shoves a finger into Zoey's collarbone, and when Zoey looks down at it in indignance, flicks it up and into her face. Zoey's next words are a string of rapidfire English—Mira catches "short" and "sad" and "pathetic little freak of a-" as well as several other unidentifiable profanities, the likes of which she's only ever heard in the American slapstick comedies Abby used to put on as background noise at his kickbacks.

It isn't until they're within a few feet of the front door that Zoey notices her, her body going rigid with panic before she spins ninety degrees on her heel and starts to hustle off in another direction.

"Nope," Mira deadpans, and grabs her soundly by the collar.

Zoey makes an undignified squawking sound, her arms flailing. "I was just-! I forgot my-! Um, there's a cat over there that looks like it's stuck in a tree! I'd better go help."

"That," Jinu observes keenly, "is a squirrel."

"Of course!" Zoey's voice pitches high. "A squirrel! Stuck in a tree. I'd better go help!"

"Come on." Mira hauls Zoey back on her heels. Jinu holds the door open as Mira herds the squirming fish of a girl inside.

She deposits Zoey at her usual table, which, Mira notes, seems to be cleaner than usual. The familiar mess of sticky notes and half dead pens have been cleared away, leaving the glossy white tabletop clean, save for the ugly doodle of a fox in Mira's glasses that Zoey had drawn in permanent marker.

("I thought it was dry erase!" Zoey had cried. "What kind of idiot leaves permanent markers around where just anyone could get ahold of them?"

Mira had stared impassively down at the fox. Its glasses were badly crooked. She had straightened out her own glasses, just to be sure.

"Well," she'd said. "Just make sure it comes out of Jinu's paycheck, not mine.")

Jinu slouches against the open door, eyeing Mira with amusement. Unlike Zoey, his posture is totally relaxed, no trace of worry in his expression. Mira curses whatever power decided to make life so easy for all the horrendously annoying men of the world.

Jinu checks his watch. "Where do you want me, boss?"

Mira relaxes slightly. At least he's an obedient horrendously annoying man.

"Outside," she decides, and turns her gaze back on Zoey. "I'll start with her."

Zoey makes an audible gulp.

For all its audio-technical amenities, the whole of the radio station only has three chairs—two in the booth for Jinu and Mira, and the one sad stool that Zoey occupies now, perched like a nervous bird with her knees drawn up to her chest. Mira doesn't mind standing. For one thing, she'd gone a little hard at her workout earlier, and if she sits down now she may never get up again, and for another, she derives some small, petty pleasure from standing over Zoey and watching her squirm.

"So…" Zoey's fingers knit together in front of her, twitching distractedly as she looks anywhere but at Mira. "Nice weather we're having."

Mira's mouth flattens. "Zoey, it's freezing."

Zoey stares at the empty tabletop. "A nice freezing…"

She trails off, defeated and picking at a loose thread unraveling from the sleeve of her sweater, and the tiny station room falls into an unnatural quietude. Mira sighs. The chattiest person alive, and she chooses now to clam up. She glances pleadingly at the turtle still pinned to the bulletin board, but it just shrugs back at her, helpless.

Well. Looks like it's up to her to bite the tough conversation bullet.

"You're JUNIORZ," she states, plain and simple, at the same time that Zoey exclaims, "You got new glasses!"

There's a moment of silence. Mira touches her glasses. Zoey seems to shrink in her seat.

"…I'm JUNIORZ," she admits, forlorn, at the same time that Mira utters, "These are three years old."

They stare at each other for another moment. Zoey places her hands over her face.

Mira decies it's time for a reset.

"Okay, just…" she waves a hand, clearing the air. "Forget the glasses. Just tell me why."

"I'm sorry!" Zoey speaks into her hands. "I know it was such a weird thing to do, and we didn't mean for it to get this big or for you to get dragged into such a huge mess! It just got so out of control," she admits. "I'm sorry. I totally understand if you're not comfortable with me hanging out here anymore."

"What?" Mira frowns. "Of course I still want you here. Why wouldn't I?"

Zoey garbles something unintelligible into her palms. Mira's frown deepens.

"Look," she says, trying to keep her tone gentle. "I really only budgeted in a few minutes of interrogation for each of you. Can you please just tell me why you're out here terrorizing the student body with all of this musical conspiracy?"

"I wouldn't say terrorizing," Zoey mumbles. "More like… accidentally intriguing."

Mira supposes she can let her have that. "Can you tell me why you're out here accidentally intriguing the student body?"

Zoey pauses. Peeks out from between her fingers. "Actually, I don't like how that sounds either."

"Zoey!"

"Okay!" Zoey drops her hands. "I said I'm sorry, Mira, I really am. It was just me and Jinu messing around at first, making stuff in his garage. He'd written a bunch of guitar solos and I thought they'd make great songs, and then all of a sudden we were putting them on the radio. I didn't think anyone would notice."

Her voice is small as she admits, "I just thought it would be cool. Hearing my own stuff out in the world."

And, okay, Mira can't exactly begrudge her that. Half the fun of college jobs was doing things you'd normally never have the clearance for. The other half was thinking up ways to murder your coworkers without being found out.

"Sure," Mira allows. "Okay, that's… whatever. But what about all the stuff with Abby and the second song? You know that was a ton of pressure, right? I mean, that was clearly more than just messing around."

Zoey shrinks even further.

"It was Jinu's idea," she defends weakly. "I knew you wouldn't like it, but he insisted. He and Abby had some bet or something, I don't know. I guess he just wanted to show off."

She shrugs lamely. Her whole body is slumped in defeat. She looks so guilty and downtrodden that Mira almost feels like she should be the one apologizing. Outside, Jinu whistles idly, looking not the least bit put off. He wraps one swooping bang around his finger, pulling until it bounces back into place with a perfect curl.

Mira decides she'll kill him later.

"I really am sorry," Zoey is saying again. "But it's over now, I promise. Jinu and I won't do anything like it ever again."

She presses her palms together now, fingers weaving together. Mira desperately wants to reach out and— what? Shake her? Take those nervous hands in her own?

What about the songs? she wants to ask. Did you mean what you wrote?

Instead, she asks, "And what about Rumi?"

And Zoey's whole face darkens.

(Mira has seen a lot of emotions from Zoey over the months.

Happiness. Annoyance. Excitement, sadness, anger.

Without meaning to, she's built a catalogue of each one. The tilt of her brow when she frowns. The crinkle of her eyes when she teases. If Mira has ever perfected one thing in her life, she hopes it's reading this girl.

But as Zoey's expression clouds over, Mira turns to a new page.)

Zoey's voice is flat. "You know about Rumi?"

"I figured it out," Mira says. "You and your word scrambles, huh?"

Zoey laughs, but it's short and stiff. Her mouth contorts into in a firm, straight line.

Mira frowns. "What?"

"Nothing."

But it doesn't sound like nothing. Mira cranes her neck to meet Zoey's eyes, but Zoey just ducks away.

"Zoey, seriously," Mira presses. "What is it? Why didn't you tell me you guys hung out? I didn't even know you knew each other."

"Of course we know each other," Zoey grumbles. "She's Jinu's best friend."

"She's what?"

Mira whirls back towards the window. Jinu is studying his short black fingernails, scratching at a peeling piece of paint by his cuticle. He looks so utterly unremarkable that Mira can't fathom the idea of him and Rumi even standing in the same room together, let alone sharing any kind of kinship. It still blows her mind how he can stand next to Zoey every day and not explode from sheer insignificance in the face of her brilliance—and they're at least related.

"You really didn't know?" Zoey asks. "They grew up together. Went to the same grade school and everything. I mean, you even saw them in the cafeteria together freshman year. You threw your soup at them."

Mira positively balks. "That was Rumi?!"

Zoey just nods, momentarily stunned out of her brooding.

"But-" Mira grasps blindly for some thread of logic. "But you never said anything. Even with all the… chemistry girl stuff."

She feels her face heat as she says it. Zoey bites her lip.

"I didn't want to talk about her," she hedges.

Mira, fed up with being so out of the loop, asks, "Why?"

"I just didn't want to!" Zoey snaps.

There's a moment of stunned silence. Zoey slaps her hand over her mouth.

"Sorry," she says, sounding a little taken aback. "Sorry."

And then, even quieter, "It's just… I knew you liked her."

Mira's face reddens further. She has an odd notion that she's been caught doing something she shouldn't. "I don't-"

"Don't lie," Zoey interrupts. "She's Ryu Rumi. Of course you liked her, how could you not? And I knew that she…"

She trails off. Shakes her head. Her gaze stays firmly on the floor.

"I just wanted a little longer," she says. "To show you."

Mira feels like she's missing something so, so obvious. Like she's trying to solve the easiest arithmetic problem in the world, but someone has gone and blacked out all the numbers.

"To show me what?" she asks.

Zoey's next words are hushed. Mira's sure she's never heard her sound so uncertain and embarrassed.

"That I could be for you, too," she whispers.

Something like a vice closes around Mira's lungs. She doesn't breathe, doesn't dare move. She forces herself to be perfectly, remarkably still.

"I know you like her," Zoey goes on. "I know she's beautiful, and talented, and you'd fit so well together. But I'm here, too."

Her voice grows stronger with each word, until she's speaking with a quiet conviction that Mira has never heard from her before. Zoey is not a weak-willed person. Her every opinion is shared with a confidence that Mira both fears and envies. But there's a difference between the Zoey who climbs on park benches to yell at passers-by for littering, and this Zoey—vulnerable, nervous, but still standing her ground as she takes her heart from her own chest and extends it for Mira's review.

"Zoey," Mira breathes.

Finally, Zoey meets her eyes, here face open and beeseeching and firm all at once, and-

-Ryu Rumi all but breaks down the door.

Zoey's eyes go wide. Mira curses to herself.

It looks like their few minutes are up.

Friday, 5:39 PM

"What are you doing here?"

Zoey is on her feet at once, all the softness from earlier replaced with acrid annoyance.

Rumi sniffs, brushing invisible dust from her shoulder as the door swings closed behind her. "Being interrogated, I guess. Same as you."

"There was kind of a line," Mira mutters, glancing back to where Jinu is waiting. But neither of the girls are paying her any attention anymore.

"It's not polite to barge in on people's conversations," Zoey says, loud and snide, and Mira graciously refrains from pointing out the sheer number of times Zoey has appeared, seemingly from nowhere, to barge in on her own conversations.

"I wasn't barging," Rumi retorts, voice rising.

Mira graciously refrains from pointing out that yes, she was.

"Oh, of course not!" Zoey shouts. "You were just doing whatever you wanted, like always!"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means-!" Zoey cuts herself off with a strangled noise. "It means you can't just do stuff without checking in first! You can't just bail on our radio premiere until the last minute, or post my song or talk to news sites just because you feel like it!"

Rumi looks affronted. "You wrote it for her! I was just trying to help, I know you like her!"

"Oh, like you don't?" Zoey fires back. "Did you think I wouldn't notice her stupid room number in your song?"

"Old room number, stalker!" Rumi huffs, apparently oblivious to the fact that this does little to strengthen her argument. "Like you're any better, singing about her class schedule!"

She points an accusing finger at Zoey, who throws her hands in the air.

"It was a math-based play on words!"

The words ring out over each other, loud and badly tangled. Mira, caught on I know you like her and Oh, like you don't? feels her head spin.

"Oh my god," she mumbles to herself, then glances over Zoey's shoulder to meet the shrugging turtle's eyes. "What the hell did I get myself into?"

The turtle, as ever, is useless. Mira turns back to the conversation, dazed. The argument seems to have moved on without her; Rumi, red in the face, is growing increasingly more agitated as the debate progresses, and Zoey's eyes are hard and frustrated and a little shiny. Mira glances out the window at Jinu, who has been side-eyeing the whole exchange with a grimace plastered to his face. He meets her eyes and makes a clear slashing motion across his throat.

Mira sighs.

"Enough," she declares, interrupting Zoey's "-spoiled little br-" and Rumi's "-both know you were never gonna make a mov-".

Both girls fall silent, cowed. Mira rubs numbly at her forehead, noting with displeasure that her headache is making an admirable comeback.

"What is wrong with you both?" she asks, incredulous. "You drag me into your radio drama, you make everyone think I'm into Jinu, you release that article and somehow manage to make my family more pissed at me than they already were, and when it's finally time to explain yourselves, all you can do is argue with each other? And over what? Who gets to ask me out in the least effective way?"

"You," Mira points at Rumi, "went rogue with The DJ to try to push me closer to her, and you," she points at Zoey, "were so sure that I'd pick her that your idea of wooing me was shutting me out and pouting about it."

"She wrote it for you!" Rumi protests.

"Who wouldn't pick her?" Zoey cries at the same time.

"Oh my god." Mira puts her head in her hands. "Great. And to top it all off, you're both fucking obsessed with each other."

For the first time, nobody interjects. The room is suddenly and remarkably quiet. It makes Mira think of one therapist from early on in her childhood, who had suggested that she might benefit from having a pair of noise cancelling headphones to keep with her for when she was feeling overwhelmed or out of control. Her parents, of course, had refused to entertain the idea, but when the therapist had quietly allowed Mira to try on a spare pare of headphones during their next session, it had sounded a lot like this—an abrupt vacuum. Complete nothingness.

(Mira doesn't wear her headphones often anymore, mostly to the gym and when her neighbors are getting too rowdy for her to focus on her homework. They're not so much a crutch as they had been in high school, when she'd finally convinced her parents to buy her a pair because everyone was using them to study. Still, she always makes sure to keep them charged. Just in case.)

When Mira finds the will to look up again, Rumi and Zoey are both sullen and red in the face. Zoey is back to picking at that damn thread on her sleeve, and Rumi has suddenly taken remarkable interest in the stained ceiling tiles.

Ridiculous, Mira thinks. How these two and Jinu, of all people, managed to pull one over on her, she'll never know. It'll just have to go down in history as one of her biggest personal failures—right next to losing flip cup to Abby that one time and letting Bobby talk her into signing up for the daily student government newsletter.

"Seriously?" she asks. "All this singing and making music together, but did you ever even talk?"

Zoey swallows. "We did talk," she replies. "We just kind of…"

"Broke up," Rumi explains, just as Zoey finishes with, "Fought."

Zoey gapes. "For the last time, we were not together!"

Rumi actually stomps her foot. "Why not?!"

"Because!" Zoey waves her arms uncertainly in Mira's direction. "You and her! Her and you! You like- and you were never-"

She wiggles her arms again. Rumi just stares, dumbfounded.

"Never what?" she asks, and when Zoey doesn't reply, continues, "Zoey, I'm… I think you're like, the coolest person ever."

It's Zoey's turn to look surprised. "You do?"

"Of course." Rumi's brow draws, like it should be obvious. "Why else would I have agreed to any of this?"

"Because Jinu is your best friend and you've had a crush on Mira since she threw soup at you and ruined your favorite sweater?" Zoey recites.

Mira coughs awkwardly. Rumi hardly even looks embarrassed.

"I guess some of that's true," she admits. "But mostly I just wanted to hang out with you more."

Zoey's eyes go wide. "Really?"

"I think you're amazing," Rumi promises. "Both of you."

She clasps her hands in front of her, shoulders high by her ears, but her voice doesn't waver. It sends a burst of static up Mira's spine, sizzling through her veins and down to the tip of each and every nerve ending.

Rumi actually likes her.

Zoey, too.

Even if they have managed to invent a new and terrible way of showing it.

"I'm confused," Jinu comments, and Mira nearly jumps out of her shoes. She hasn't noticed him come in, and from the looks on Zoey and Rumi's faces, they hadn't either.

Jinu glances back and forth between the three of them, utterly nonchalant. He scratches idly at the back of his neck. "Who's confessing to who right now?"

Rumi and Zoey turn on him in unison. "Get out!"

Jinu's scowls. Mira, seeing the opportunity for a break from the insanity, steps in.

"Actually," Mira interjects. "I think you two need to figure your stuff out first."

When both Zoey and Rumi start to object, she levels them with a firm look.

"We can talk later," she instructs. "It's Jinu's turn for interrogation now."

Friday, 5:51 PM

Zoey and Rumi are reluctant to leave despite Mira's reassurances that no, she doesn't hate them, even if they are utterly weird and strange and purely awful at courtship, and that yes, she will talk to them later, yes, she's sure, yes, she promises. By the time she and Jinu have finally managed to shepherd the world's most awful flirts out onto the greenway, there are only a few minutes left till the start of the show. Mira takes three of these minutes to catch her breath.

"It's rough out here, huh?" Jinu relates. "Such a pain when you've got people throwing themselves at you left and right. Us gorgeous and irresistible people should start a club."

Mira is too drained to even say anything about that.

All things considered, the week has been pretty shit. From the JUNIORZ article to the call with her brother, all the way to being inadvertently forced to mediate her own apology from two girls who were apparently deeply into each other, she's sure she's had enough drama to last her for the rest of her natural life—which, if people keep throwing her into the deep end of the stressful situation pool with Rumi and Zoey-shaped cinder blocks tied to her limbs, might not be long.

And okay, maybe if all this stuff with Rumi and Zoey and her actually goes anywhere… maybe it will have all been just a little bit worth it.

But still.

She collapses onto Zoey's stool with a groan. Jinu pats her shoulder sympathetically.

"Hey," he says. "It's not all bad. You've got two awesome girls doing musical battle over you, and we've got a great four hours ahead. Tonight's theme is songs my mom calls 'neat'."

Mira lets out an unenthused grunt.

"Attagirl," Jinu cheers. "Come on. We've got just enough time before the show."

Friday, 5:52 PM

They settle down in the booth. Jinu sits attentively, hands in his lap, and Mira stares him dead in the eye.

"You went to grade school with Ryu Rumi."

"And Baby Saja, too," Jinu supplies.

"You knew I threw noodles at Ryu Rumi and you never thought to tell me?"

"In my defense," Jinu says, "you were there."

Mira lets out a long, low sigh.

"God, you're gonna owe me like a million apologies."

Saturday, 9:12 AM

On the spectrum from a winning lottery ticket to an actively poisoned death threat, there are simply very few good things that an unmarked, hand-delivered piece of paper can be. Mira returns from her shower to find one slipped under her door.

"You'd better not be some JUNIORZ 2.0 bullshit," she tells the paper as she exchanges her bathrobe for a clean pair of clothes. She makes it wait on the floor as she applies a thin coat of lotion and runs a hint of oil through her damp hair. It's only after she's sure the note has been tortured with a sufficient lack of attention that she gives in and retrieves it from the floor.

The loopy handwriting is Rumi's. Mira recognizes it immediately from the pages and pages of homework she's reviewed for her over the course of the term.

On the outside of the note, Rumi has written, To Mira. Mira flips it open to examine the contents and finds Rumi's loopy writing replaced with Zoey's confident scrawl.

Hello Mira,

I am sincerely very sorry for everything that happened with Jinu and Rumi and our songs. Rumi is here too and she says I should have written "we". We are very sorry for everything we dragged you into. If you're willing to let us make it up to you, please meet us at the location below later today. If you don't want to come, we totally understand. No pressure either way. We're still very sorry.

Sincerely,

Zoey and Rumi

P.S. We promise not to fight this time.

Mira checks the given location, once again written by Rumi. The address is for the parking garage where Jinu leaves his car. The date and time read Saturday, 9:30 AM.

Mira rolls her eyes. Well, at least she can tell who picked the meeting time. She presses her lips together to suppress a smile and glances at the clock on her nightstand.

It's 9:21.

"Goddammit, Rumi."

Chapter Text

Monday, 6:00 PM

"It's the top of the hour once again here at AM 1650, K-Uni campus radio. Tonight I, DJ Jinu, am joined as always by my wonderful co-host, DJ Mira, to whom I have given the honor of choosing the theme of the evening. Let's hear it, DJ Mira."

"Right. Tonight's theme is Call Me Maybe: songs about all the ways you can communicate with someone you like, that aren't insane."

"Very on the nose. We're gonna kick things off in just a second here with Answer the Phone by Mina. But first, I would like to make it known that I reached out to Dr. Kim earlier today to apologize for warning everyone that there would be trick questions on the upcoming Marketing Strategy and Management exam, so let's go ahead and update the board."

A whiteboard marker squeaks.

"There we go. That brings my total to one-million and three, and DJ Mira's to 35."

"He's catching up on me, folks."

Monday, 9:59 PM

Mira is watching the clock tick over to a new hour as Jinu bids their listeners farewell. Compared to the insanity of the last few weeks of nighttime radio and the relative banality of their shows from before JUNIORZ had come to be, Mira would describe the night as medium-normal. They had started the night at a listenership of 1,100, peaked just a bit higher when Jinu had decided that Nerves could be counted as a song about communication ("It's about being nervous to put yourself out there! What's more gay and communicative than that?") and had managed to hang on to about 700 listeners by the end of the night. Jinu had kept the requests page closed and had dutifully kept his lips sealed about any of the drama from the week before, though it was obvious to Mira that he was positively dying to call her out for the absurd three-way gay meltdown he'd been witness to on Friday.

There had been no new songs dropped on them, no falsely incriminating Indie Music Korea articles published with or without their knowledge. Mira had even managed to finish half a page of homework in between Jinu telling her—in extensive detail—about the funny sound his car was making and the disastrous moment when they'd both gone to unmute their microphones, only to realize that Jinu had somehow unplugged the whole soundboard from beneath the counter and had managed to kick the connecting cord so far in the corner that Mira had had to wiggle through the tangled mess of decades-old cable management on her stomach to retrieve it.

To put it simply, it was almost-but-not-quite like old times. What had Mira's therapist called it before?

A new normal.

"Thank you ever so much for listening," Jinu is saying now. His voice takes on a stronger hint of theatricality as he continues, "DJ Mira and I will catch you all next time. Be sure to tune in, because you won't want to miss tomorrow's theme. Spoiler alert: there are monologues involved, and Abby was absolutely smashed when he came up with it."

"Oh good," Mira deadpans. "What a perfect time to have used up all my sick hours."

"Perfect indeed, DJ Mira." Jinu claps his hands once. "Alright. It's time to hand you all off to DJ Autoplay. Thank you all again for being here, and have a safe night."

They linger by the computer for a few moments to make sure autoplay has properly kicked in. Mira curls her fingers around the back of her chair to keep herself from speedwalking right out of the booth and seeing if Zoey's around. She doesn't need to find out what crimes she might commit if Jinu calls her out for being desperate.

"Jeez," Jinu drawls. "Hold your horses. She texted me a few minutes ago. She had to go grab something from Rumi's. She'll be back in a few."

Mira feels the crimes take hold in her mind. "I wasn't even thinking about her."

It's a truly awful lie. Jinu doesn't even deem it worthy of addressing.

"How was your date, anyway?" He asks as he starts closing out of their tabs, one by one. "Did you endear them with your math skills and inability to solve elementary-level word puzzles?"

"Something like that."

"Did they grovel? Zoey kept saying she was going to grovel."

"Something like that," Mira repeats. "I'm beginning to think if I ever want a straight up apology I'll need to separate them first. Otherwise it just turns into more bickering."

"Ha!" Jinu snorts. "Yeah. They've really lost their manners around each other—especially when they're trying to impress you."

Mira bites her lip. "Yeah," she mumbles, and hopes that the dim lighting hides the blood rising in her face. "Maybe it's not so bad…"

"Oh, wow," Jinu observes. "You're already down atrocious."

"Wh-" Mira sputters. "Am not!"

Jinu just laughs again. "And here I was thinking you'd be the most level-headed."

"I am!"

"God, this is going to be comedy gold. Can we talk about you guys on the show? Does your weirdo brother still listen in? We should tell him we'll pretend you're super well-behaved if he buys us a car."

"Who is us?"

"Come on." Jinu nudges his elbow into hers. "Take one for the team. My AC's broken again and the driver's side door won't open without the alarm going off. My neighbors are like two morning commutes away from smashing my windows in."

"Don't see how that's my problem," Mira quips.

"Uh, cause we're friends?" Jinu's brow quirks in the same way that Zoey's does when what she's saying really means cause I'm right, duh. "All of my problems are your problems now, too. And besides, I'm sure the ride to ours would be nicer for you if your girlfriend had a decent car."

Mira's face reddens further. To her annoyance, she feels a small smile tugging at her lips.

Jinu catches the change in expression, but for once, he doesn't call her on it. He just puts the monitor to sleep, stands from his chair, and begins to head out, stretching as he goes. When he opens the door out into the main room, Mira can see a matching smile playing on his face.

"It seems like you're gonna be sticking around a while."

(It's Saturday, 9:41 AM, and both Zoey and Rumi have their heads in their hands when Mira finally makes it to the parking garage.

"She's not coming," Zoey is warbling into her palms. "I get it. I wouldn't want to come, either, if I had been sonically coerced into the middle of a pre-existing situationship between a music producer who can't play guitar and a spoiled rich girl."

"I don't know what any of that means," Rumi mumbles into the sleeves of her hoodie. "And why does everyone forget that she's also a spoiled rich girl?"

"We blew it, Rumi," Zoey blathers on. "The coolest, math-iest girl in the world, and we may well never see her again."

Rumi's voice turns horrified. "I'm gonna have to do our chemistry project alone."

"We fumbled a ten and all you can think about is homework?"

"Sorry!" Rumi groans. "It's just, the professor's gonna know that I still don't understand catalysis, and then I'm gonna get an F, and I'll be stuck retaking gen chem for the rest of my life. I'll never graduate! I'll never get a job! I'm gonna be talking about elephant's toothpaste until I'm 40!"

Zoey drops her hands to stare at Rumi incredulously. "It's entry-level chemistry."

Mira can't help but agree. Just a little bit.

Rumi is still whimpering into her sleeves when Zoey finally notices Mira's arrival. Her eyes go wide, her face tomato red, and she lets her mouth hang open for several seconds before her brain apparently sends the signal that it's not going to come up with something for her to say anytime soon and she snaps it shut.

Mira says, "Hey."

It's Rumi's turn to startle then, her spine snapping ramrod straight as if she's been electrocuted. She spins as this happens, the movement so uncharacteristically uncontrolled that she only narrowly avoids slamming Zoey into the side of a parked car.

"Rumi!" Zoey cries, voice high with momentary indignance.

Rumi just drops her hands from her face and shoves them deep into the pocket of her hoodie. "Mira! We were just-"

She freezes mid-sentence, her mouth still open as if she, too, is waiting for her brain to hand her her next words. Mira, being incredibly patient, waits for a few long beats until it's clear that Rumi is drawing a blank.

"Right." She draws the word out to fill the silence.

Two overactive faces smile at her, wobbly and desperate. Zoey's smile, at least, looks apologetic. Rumi's attempt is, to put it kindly, closer to a wild animal's badly-practiced grimace. It reminds Mira of a time near the start of the term when she had left the booth to refill her water and found Zoey grinning sillily at a series of photos of smiling great white sharks. Zoey had thrust her phone out eagerly and asked, "Doesn't this look like-" only to pause and apologize when she'd realized it was Mira, not Jinu, standing before her.

Mira mentally overlays the smiling shark atop Rumi's grimacing face.

Yep.

"Sorry I'm late," she continues eventually. "Well, actually it's kind of a miracle I made it here at all, because you guys gave me like twenty-five minutes of warning at most. So, I guess I'm not sorry. I guess I'm just late."

She wonders if this delightful show of incompetence will make them like her any less and, in turn, make them act a bit more normal. If the hope-filled looks on thier faces are any indication, this isn't the case.

"It's fine!" Zoey breathes. "Rumi picked the time, and like, she totally should've known better."

"Or Zoey could've delivered the note earlier," Rumi cuts in. "Like she was supposed to."

"There was traffic," Zoey mutters from the side of her mouth. "You live here, why didn't you do it?"

"Because you forgot to take it out of your notebook before you left," Rumi mutters back. "And you spilled coffee on all of my notebooks."

"Why do you only have two notebooks?"

Rumi keeps her voice uselessly low. "Because you spilled coffee on the rest of them."

Their smiles, still wide and slightly panicked, stay glued to their faces throughout the whole exchange.

"Right," Mira says again. To her relief, this seems to finally break Zoey out of her spell.

"I'm really glad you came!" she exclaims, and steps forward to take Mira's wrist in one hand.

Rumi, not to be outdone, marches forward robotically and grabs Mira's other wrist. Then, as if she's steeled herself for it, she reaches over and grabs Zoey's, as well. Zoey blinks in surprise. Mira watches as her shoulders relax, just slightly, and feels the change in Rumi beside her as she relaxes, too.

Simultaneously, she notes the absurdity of the scene: three girls standing in a circle in an empty parking garage and holding wrists on a Saturday morning.

At least their palms feel soft on her skin.

"I'm glad, too," Rumi confesses. "We both felt awful about everything. We thought, maybe… we could hang out? To make it up to you?"

"A totally normal hang out!" Zoey butts in.

"Yeah!" Rumi is nodding. "Like, maybe a date?"

Mira raises an eyebrow. Zoey's face drops into an expression of sheer exhaustion.

"Can you please," she groans, "stop just deciding that things are dates?"

"I'm asking this time!" Rumi protests. "Like you said!"

Zoey squeezes her eyes shut and groans louder. Mira snorts, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling as she chuckles to herself. When she looks back down, both girls are staring at her again.

"Sorry, Rumi," she laughs. "But Zoey's right. A date isn't exactly a totally normal hangout."

"But…" Rumi actually pouts. "But I want it…"

Mira catches Zoey's eye. Spoiled! Zoey mouths, and Mira cocks her head.

"And you," she goes on.

Zoey pales.

"I think you could learn a thing or two from princess over here."

Mira jerks their still-joined hands in Rumi's direction. Rumi, seemingly unsure whether to take this as a slight or a compliment, remains steadfast in her pout.

Zoey frowns. "What did I do?"

"Nothing, Zoey," Mira sighs. "So much nothing. You pretty much ignored me for weeks and hoped things would work themselves out. I promise it's okay to go for what you want."

She swings their hands again. Unconsciously, Zoey's fingers tighten around her.

"Anyway," Mira says. "I accepted your guys' invitation, and so far I have been stared at and argued in front of. If this is a date, it's not exactly living up to the hype."

In truth, Mira is having a fine time. It's not often she has the high ground on Zoey or Rumi—metaphorically speaking, since she actually is quite tall—and she's not exactly upset about having another chance to see them squirm. But as she's learned over the past month, there's very little either Zoey or Rumi can accomplish when they aren't hidden behind an anonymous SoundCloud profile with Jinu hyping them up. If she wants this date—and shockingly, despite the utterly comical circumstances, she does—then she's going to have to herd things on a bit.

Luckily for her, it seems neither Zoey nor Rumi is capable of backing down from a challenge.

Zoey puffs her chest first. "You want hype? I've got hype."

"This is just the beginning," Rumi agrees. "Like, pre-date. Pre-hangout. It doesn't even count."

Mira smiles to herself. Hook, line, and sinker.

"Great," she says easily. "So where are we going first?")

Monday, 10:06 PM

"They took me out for boba," Mira tells Jinu as they shuffle their feet in the cold night air. "Because Zoey wanted something sweet and Rumi said she's cutting back on coffee."

They're leaning up against the wall of the radio station, waiting for Zoey to get back from her errand at Rumi's dorm. They're not exactly inconspicuous, Mira with her bright pink hair let down for once and Jinu—somewhat bafflingly—sporting a neon orange jacket, and every once in a while people will wander past and stare. A group of sophomores, clearly tipsy and doing little to hide it, slow their movements as they stumble by the station. Mira stares them down, daring them to utter even one syllable about JUNIORZ. Beside her, Jinu smiles and waves.

"Rumi has been drinking a pot of black coffee a day since she was thirteen," he replies as the sophomores scurry on. "In high school she would smuggle it in in a giant thermos because we weren't supposed to have anything but water, and then she'd make me stand guard while she chugged it behind the tennis court."

Mira smiles to herself. "She's kind of weird, isn't she?"

"Oh, don't let her fool you with that perfect princess act. She is a deeply unusual person."

Mira's smile widens.

"Anyway," she goes on, "we got boba and Zoey wanted to try mine, and then Rumi wanted to try it, and she liked it better so she ended up keeping it. Then we went to the arcade, and Zoey started cheating at skee-ball like it was second nature."

Jinu looks surprised. "She braved the arcade again?"

Mira sighs. "We got chased out after ten minutes. The employees said, and I quote, 'and tell your cousin he still owes us for the fire extinguisher'."

"Hm."

"Then we get tangsuyuk and hung out at Rumi's. Zoey showed us a bunch of songs she's working on—Zoey songs, not JUNIORZ ones."

"Hey, whatever gets her to stop bugging me to listen to every chord progression she comes up with."

A breeze rolls across the greenway. Mira rubs mindlessly at her arm. "It was kind of nice."

Jinu claps her on the shoulder. "Look at you. Being social. Bagging two oddball girlfriends. And you didn't even have to get all drunk to do it."

Mira shoves his hand off. "Thanks."

When Zoey finally does arrive, she's puffing like she'd run all the way from the dorms. Mira's hands feel just about frozen to ice in her pockets, and squishes them into each side of Zoey's flushed and clammy face as retribution for making her wait.

"Cold!" Zoey shrieks.

Mira keeps squishing.

"Get what you need?" Jinu asks.

Zoey nods from between Mira's palms and holds up a to-go container of various banchan.

Mira closes her eyes. "You ran to her dorm to pick up leftover sides?"

"Nice one," Jinu says approvingly. "Dibs on the eggplant."

"She always lets leftovers go to waste," Zoey explains. "Besides, I didn't see her all day. I thought maybe she'd come by the station while you guys were on."

"Did you ask her to come by the station?" Mira asks.

Zoey toes the ground. "Well…"

A fond huff escapes Mira's lips. She shakes her head. "We'll work on it."

Zoey's nod is resolute. "I will be the best go-for-what-I-want-er."

"Well, I want to get out of the cold," Jinu cuts in. "Let's go before I freeze to death."

He tugs the plastic takeout container from Zoey's hands and, without further delay, starts off in the direction of the parking garage. Zoey rolls her eyes.

"Yeah, yeah," she gripes, but there's a smile creeping onto her face. "At least Mira will visit us in the morgue."

Sunday, 4:11 PM

"Your cat's blue," Mira observes passively from the floor of Zoey's room. The cat in question stares at her from its place on the bed next to Rumi, its large yellow eyes wide and, honestly, a little stupid-looking.

Zoey glances over from the desk. "Oh, yeah. That's Jinu's fault."

She doesn't offer any more information. Mira doesn't ask. She stays perfectly still as the cat reaches one fat paw towards her from the edge of the bed and presses it firmly into the socket of her eye. Newly lacking in 50% of her vision, she turns her head slightly to check and see if Zoey is planning to offer any kind of help.

"Oh, he likes you!" Zoey coos.

The cat lets out an affirmative yowp. Mira keeps her eye firmly shut.

Sprawled out on her stomach on the bed, Rumi snorts. "Derpy, quit it."

The cat drops its paw obediently. As a reward, Rumi reaches over and gives it a rather rigorous few scratches on the head. Mira blinks the black spots from her vision.

"Why don't you have any purple?" Rumi wonders aloud once she's abandoned the cat. She's fishing through a giant plastic jar of beads, searching for the perfect colors to string onto the limp elastic wire she swears will soon be Mira's new favorite piece of jewelry. Mira, having seen the braceletes Rumi has made for Zoey, is not anticipating a masterpiece. Zoey's beaded bracelets are thoroughly planned, each pattern unique and full of intent, while it seems that Rumi just tends to string the beads on as she finds them.

Mira had let Rumi measure the elastic against her wrist regardless.

"Dunno," Zoey says, and glances conspicuously towards the underside of the bed. "Maybe you should use green instead."

Mira is suddenly entirely certain that there is a stash of purple beads to be found hidden under the thin slats of Zoey's platform bed.

"I want purple and green," she says, testing.

"Well, she doesn't have any purple," Rumi huffs.

"Do pink!" Zoey insists. "It's her favorite color."

"I know that!" Rumi sputters, then turns insistently on Mira. "I already knew that. You told me once when you were drunk."

"Oh god." Mira wonders if the well of things she's told Rumi when drunk and subsequently forgotten about will ever run dry. Already, she's been surprised by the fact that Rumi 1) knows her favorite movie, 2) had read the book series Mira had liked as a child after she'd drunkenly recommended it, and 3) remembers how upset she'd been the night she'd come back from a party missing one of her favorite shoes. Mira hadn't even remembered wearing those shoes out that night. She had spent weeks assuming the other sneaker had been lost in the mess of her dorm and would surely turn up soon.

Zoey is pouting now. "How come she gets all the secrets!"

She slumps down from her desk to the floor, resting her head expectantly against the mattress by Rumi's leg. Grinning, Mira leans over and blows gently into her ear, and Zoey gives a yowp that sounds nearly identical to Derpy's.

"Hey!" Zoey squeals, and Mira laughs.

"Don't mope," she chides. "Here, I'll tell you a secret, too."

Rumi pauses in her bead hunt as Mira leans in close to Zoey's ear, whispering just low enough to keep Rumi from hearing. When she pulls away, Zoey's brow has knit in surprise.

"Really?" she asks.

Mira shrugs. "That's why this term has been so easy for me."

Rumi scrambles to her knees, leaning over the side of the bed in their direction. "What'd she say?"

Zoey hesitates, glancing to Mira. Mira gives her a go-ahead nod.

"She said," Zoey murmurs, "that this is her second time taking gen chem."

"What?!"

Rumi turns on Mira, knocking over the jar of beads in the process. She ignores the colorful bits of plastic as they spill out across Zoey's bed, though Zoey at least has the wherewithal to look a little bit displeased. Faced with Rumi's scrutiny, Mira just shrugs again.

"That's why I picked catalysis for our project topic before we'd even gone over it in class," she explains. "I knew it'd be a big focus."

"Wh-" Rumi rattles. "But why?"

"I failed," Mira admits lightly. "It was first term sophomore year. I failed all my classes that term."

Zoey appears baffled. "But you're so smart."

Mira laughs again. "I never went to lectures. I didn't do homework. I was out partying with Abby every night."

Rumi sits back on her knees. "Huh."

"So what happened?" Zoey presses. "Did you have to retake everything?"

"Pretty much." Mira thinks back. "My parents made me withdraw from the rest of the year and come home to get it together. I did some online classes over the break, and at the start of junior year I re-enrolled in all the stuff I was behind on."

"And started at the radio station," Zoey marvels.

Rumi shakes her head. "This whole time, I thought you just moved to a different dorm for the second term."

"Nope. Went home. Got halfway disowned." Mira ticks her way down the terrible sophomore year timeline. "And now thanks to you two, my parents make my brother listen to K-Uni radio to make sure I'm acting presentably."

Zoey and Rumi cringe, but Mira waves away their apologetic expressions. Her brother checking in every now and then since the JUNIORZ incident hasn't been so bad. She thinks of the text he had sent her after her Friday night show: Your coworker should let you make the playlists and stick to his asinine stories. Then: Mom and dad wouldn't like the bit about you hunting men for sport, but it makes sense if you're hunting him.

If the lack of messages from her parents was any indication, he had kept his mouth shut. Mira had figured a win was a win.

"Anyway," she says. "There's my secret. Now get back to my bracelet."

Rumi stares for another long moment before turning defeatedly to the overturned bead jar. "Is pink okay?"

"Pink's fine." Mira smiles as Zoey and Rumi start picking little pink beads off the bedspread and carpet. "Next time, though, I want purple and green."

Tuesday, two weeks later, 1:03 PM

And that, Mira types, one painstaking letter at a time, is catalysis.

Rumi stares dubiously at the screen over her shoulder. "I just don't know if that's the best way to end things."

"Oh, it's awful," Mira agrees. "But it's freshman chem. We could write the whole thing in gibberish and they'd still give us an A so long as we captioned our figures correctly. Hasn't Zoey ever shown you her final chem paper?"

Rumi frowns. "No?"

"You should ask sometime." Mira hits save as PDF. "She started every other paragraph with 'and by the way'."

Rumi makes a face, and Mira laughs. "Aw. My poor little history major."

"It's just not a good conclusion," Rumi grumbles, though she doesn't protest as Mira uploads the PDF to the class portal.

"Who cares?" Mira shuts the laptop. "You're done. Congratulations, princess—as long as you turn in the next week's worth of homework, you've passed general chemistry."

Rumi slumps over onto the table with a groan.

They're back in the courtyard, because Rumi seems to do her best work when there's a big slab of stone for her to slam her head against. Mira had offered to type up the final page of their chemistry paper while Rumi struggled through another worksheet, and they had both found themselves rather miserable with their respective tasks. It was only fair, Mira figured. Zoey seemed to have a complete lack of academic weaknesses, and Mira and Rumi had to start putting in the work if they ever wanted to catch up.

"How's that going?" Mira asks, jutting her chin towards Rumi's paper.

From the table, Rumi lets out a long, wordless sigh.

Mira grasps the edge of the paper and yanks it out from beneath Rumi's arms. Of the eight problems given, Rumi has answered about three and a half—the half being a prettily scrawled I DON'T KNOW. To Mira's equal shock and delight, the other three answers are perfectly passable. She relays this to Rumi in the hopes that it will spur her on to finish the page, but Rumi only grunts.

"Tell you what," Mira proposes. "Let's hit the dining hall, you'll grab me a smoothie, and we'll regroup here to finish this off."

This proposal does not elicit a major reaction. Mira decides it's time to up the ante.

"If you're good," she entices, "I'll give you a kiss."

At that, Rumi sits bolt upright.

The night before, Zoey had gotten a kiss from Mira as a reward for refraining from comparing herself to Rumi, and had immediately gone and texted Rumi to brag. Rumi, somewhat incensed at the thought of being left out, hand instantly demanded that Mira come over to her dorm and even the score. Mira had somewhat paradoxically responded that she'd even the score when the other two both stopped keeping count, and had bid them both goodnight and gone to sleep. Rumi had been moping about the injustice all day.

(Mira had badly wanted to point out that it hadn't even been any of their first kisses. Rumi had been the one to broach the topic the previous Saturday. They had been goofing around in Zoey's garage, Mira fiddling with one of Jinu's guitars while Rumi's and Zoey's mouths hung open.

"You never said you could play guitar!" Zoey had accused.

Mira had shrugged. "I never said I couldn't."

The strings had dug into her fingers as she strummed a few chords. For whatever reason, Jinu kept his guitars tuned a half step down, and the looseness of the strings was pissing Mira off. She had been in the process of retuning when she'd glanced up to find both girls staring at her.

"Mira?" Rumi had asked, her voice small and wondering. "Can I kiss you?"

And then, in a move that had made Mira's heart feel like it was melting through her chest, she'd turned to Zoey. "Both of you?"

Zoey had seemed a little stupefied by the suggestion, her eyes going big and dark.

"Yeah," she had managed.

Mira had added, "Of course."

In the interest of keeping things fair—a prospect that still made Mira roll her eyes, but she supposed they'd have time to tamp down Rumi's and Zoey's oddly petty competitiveness later—they had decided to go in a circle. Rumi, apparently feeling the bravest of all of them, had leaned over and pressed her mouth sweetly to Mira's. She had been so much softer than Mira had expected, her lips plush and a bit sticky with gloss. Mira had been kissed before, but never so gently. When she had pulled away with a quiet smacking sound, Rumi's pupils were blown, and Mira's breath had felt just a little labored.

Zoey had remained remarkably still as Mira leaned over to her. She'd had to bend a fair amount to capture Zoey's mouth, not that she minded. Zoey's lips had been even fuller than Rumi's, and her skin was much warmer to the touch. Where Rumi's kiss had felt like a request, Zoey's felt like an offer. She had moved her mouth against Mira's like she couldn't imagine doing anything else.

It was different when Zoey pulled away and moved towards Rumi. For people who had known each other for the better part of three years, they had kept up an awkward sort of distance since their awful confession at the radio station. Mira had supposed the whole JUNIORZ debacle had rattled them a bit and thrown off their usual dynamic. But over the weeks, she had watched them slowly warm to each other again, their ridiculous one-uppings melting into more comfortable banter. Zoey had moved towards Rumi without hesitation, like she knew Rumi couldn't help but move towards her, too. They slotted together like magnets. Mira had heard Rumi inhale.

Worth it, she had thought to herself. Just a little.)

Rumi stares at her wide-eyed now, her homework-induced tantrum. Mira raises an eyebrow.

"Any thoughts?" she asks. "Smoothie? Homework? Kiss?"

"Kiss," Rumi says decisively.

Mira huffs fondly. "Not an either/or, babe."

That brings a sore look back to Rumi's face, though it she loses her grip on it quickly as her mouth tugs up at the corners.

"Okay," she acquiesces at last. "Is Zoey free? Maybe she wants to join for smoothies?"

Mira pinches her own leg beneath the table to keep herself from smiling too big.

"That, Ryu Rumi," she says, "is the best idea you've had all term."

Tuesday, 7:34 PM

"-and then after I quit my job at the gym freshman year, Rumi would not stop sending me voice note clips of Call Me Maybe every few hours. And she sent a lot of voice notes anyway because she said it was easier than typing when she was focusing on her homework, so it was like… is it an overworked Rumi meltdown, or is it Call Me Maybe? There was no way to tell."

"Don't voice notes have transcriptions?"

"Come on, DJ Mira. We both know I'm not reading all that."

"God." No wonder he was never a lyricist.

"The point is, after fifty-five million and a half times hearing it, I think I'm finally coming around. I think I might owe Carly Rae an apology."

"Add it to your tally."

"I'm very sorry, Carly Rae Jepsen. Next time Zoey's gone I'll sneak into her room and steal your CD and play it three times in your honor."

There's an affronted banging on the window. Mira hums.

"I'm sure that's really soothed Carly's spirits."

"I think so. But anyway, next up in our queue here we've got Headache by DAY6. And might I remind you all that the theme of the night is songs that remind me of my best friend."

There's another round of banging on the window. Mira takes a second to appreciate how thoroughly Zoey's shown Rumi the ropes.

"You keep this up and they're gonna break down that window," she warns.

Jinu just shrugs. "Add it to my tally."

Tuesday, 10:02 PM

Zoey and Rumi are in the booth the moment Jinu calls off-air.

"You are not touching my CDs," Zoey informs him, glaring daggers even as her fingers intertwine softly with Rumi's.

"I am not a headache," Rumi insists at the same time. "I'm a delight!"

"I didn't say you were a headache," Jinu replies emphatically. "I said you remind me of a headache."

Rumi splutters uselessly. Mira sighs and decides to remove herself from the situation.

All of Zoey's belongings had returned to the wobbly station table the week after the JUNIORZ reveal, much to Mira's relief. There was something comforting about knowing that, even if she was stuck in a tiny, soundproof room with the man who invented ragebaiting, there was at least someone right outside waiting to throttle him by the end of the night.

And lately, there had been two someones to fill that role; Zoey's stuff had been shoved ever so slightly out of the way to make room for Rumi's laptop, and a second stool had been fetched from god knows where to accomodate the new addition to their nightly ritual. Two backpacks sat resting against the table legs now, one with Zoey's plastic turtle keychain, another with a wobbly-mouthed shark charm that Zoey had insisted they buy for Rumi from the aquarium they'd visited together. Mira's own backpack had yet to get a memento of its own—Rumi and Zoey were insistent that they had to find the right one, and were each equally insistent that they would be the one to find it.

"Mira!" Zoey calls from the booth now. "Tell Jinu he can't take my stuff!"

"I'm not a headache, Mira, right?" Rumi yells over her.

Mira shoots the turtle and shark a tired look. "What are we going to do with them?"

The baubles have yet to answer her by the time Jinu finally gets things shut down, but this time it's not Jinu that Mira's waiting for. Rumi and Zoey squeeze out of the booth, hands finally separate as they pack their things, only to take Mira's hands between them.

"Movie night still?" Zoey asks, hopeful.

With it being dead week, she's managed to convince Mira and Rumi to take a break from studying to come over and marathon their favorite movies in her room. Mira's not exactly sure how they all plan to fit in Zoey's little twin-sized bed—Mira's, at least, is a twin XL, but Zoey had insisted they get off campus for a bit—but she can't exactly say she's not looking forward to finding out.

"Movie night still," she confirms, and Rumi nods in agreement.

"My favorite first, though," Rumi says.

"Then no complaining about the snacks I chose."

"I love the snacks you choose."

"Even the wasabi crabs?"

Rumi falls silent. Mira laughs.

"I'll eat the wasabi crabs with you, Zo," she soothes. "Rumi can have her turtle chips."

"It's not about the taste," Rumi grumbles. "I just don't like the little holes."

"They're freaky," Jinu agrees as he herds them out the door. "The flavor makes them worth it, though, unless you're a baby—or have textural issues, I guess, but Rumi doesn't. Come on, let's hit the car."

The lights are cut, the door is locked, and soon Mira's being tugged along between her two girlfriends as they make their way to the parking garage. Rumi and Zoey are still bickering around her—at one point, Rumi stops in her tracks, inadvertently yanking Mira's arm nearly out of its socket, and at another Zoey seems to forget that there's an entire person in between them and delivers an elbow to Mira's ribs that she has to assume was meant for Rumi's. Mira wonders, if they had both been on the apology board from the start, what their tallies would be. But in both instances, Zoey and Rumi are immediately sheepish and apologetic, taking a break from their antics to press repentant kisses to Mira's cheeks before resuming their debates. Zoey clings tight to Mira's side as they shuffle through the cold and Rumi rests her head gently against her shoulder.

Mira finds that she doesn't much mind at all.