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Keiju was ninety percent sure that this was how people got murdered. No, scratch that, ninety-nine. Why exactly did he let Donghyeon drag him into listening to a true crime podcast when they were headed home from school that Wednesday afternoon? Now he was hopelessly paranoid that shadows that looked like toads with osteoporosis would jump out at him in the form of some middle-aged salaryman with a receding hairline.
Sitting in the café that they had deemed their rendezvous point, fiddling with the edge of his hoodie sleeve, he kept repeating every internet safety PSA he’d ever heard.
Don’t meet with strangers you’ve only interacted with through a screen. Don’t trust people with anime profile pictures or people with heavily filtered ones that make them look like aliens with too much foundation and mascara and those coquettish pink bows. If they say they’re your age, they’re most definitely a forty-year-old man named Steve.
But! That little voice in Keiju’s mind begged to differ.
This was different, right?
He and ‘Manja Boy’ had played through that stupidly cute MMO where all you needed to do was raise a glorified Tamagotchi-like pet to accompany you on battles for nearly six months.
Six.
Months.
That was practically a long-term committed relationship in gamer years. They had a seventy-day gift streak. Seventy! Day! Gift streak! That wasn’t something stinky creeps could commit to, Keiju was sure.
He knew Manja Boy’s typing quirks—how there were way too many commas at unnecessary points of time in the sentence. He knew his overly dramatic way of rage-quitting where there was a sudden and rapid increase in pouting wolf emoticons sent into their private chat. He knew the way Manja Boy somehow always picked support roles but carried the entire team anyway.
And Keiju had wisely consulted Donghyeon about this. His best friend had taken one look at Manja Boy’s profile and given him the go-ahead for the meetup.
…Still. ‘Online friend’ might just be another way to say ‘potential kidnapper with excellent WiFi.’
Keiju glanced up at the café entrance for the fifteenth time in the past two minutes. He looked down at his phone and sent yet another barrage of texts to Manja Boy about the fact that he was going to be late.
A bell tinkled, and Keiju’s heart did an entire gymnastics routine and fell straight on its ass. He immediately crouched slightly behind his chair like he was hiding from someone who definitely had murder in mind.
Then he saw him.
Not a creepy forty-year-old named Steve with suspicious stains on a plaid shirt. Not a weird cosplay enthusiast with scarily perfect skin and contact lenses that could double as flashlights. Not someone with a trench coat and a dubiously large backpack.
No.
This was someone else entirely. Someone stupidly, unfairly, ridiculously good-looking. Obsidian hair that looked like it had been styled by angels on their day off. Chocolate, doe-like eyes that made Keiju’s lineage feel inadequate. Smile that made his brain short-circuit. Clad in dark denim, with a pocket embroidery of red balloons.
Keiju’s hand twitched at the edge of the table, and all the nervous energy that had bundled inside of him was ready to explode. His heart was doing that weird drumline thing it did whenever he panicked… or whenever something very, very cute was smiling at him. He suddenly felt underdressed. Or overdressed. What if his fluffy Hello Kitty bucket hat was too much? It was his favourite. If it was too much, he’d have to toss it out or bear with the secondhand embarrassment it gave him.
Or what if the cute guy wasn’t even Manja Boy?
He was just about to go into a full blown panic when the said cute boy stared right at him. Keiju may have stopped breathing. He took an obnoxiously loud slurp from his iced Americano. Said cute boy looked down at his own phone, then typed a message.
Keiju’s phone pinged immediately.
Holy cows of the holiest grasslands of the holy golden mountain.
Minje really thought that whoever ‘Ninja Hattori-kun’ was had to be fake. AI-generated. Or a catfish. Probably both. The universe didn’t just let someone casually have a hand-drawn profile picture of a boy who looked like he was from Crayon Shin-chan and still spam him with cat memes and laugh through text with ‘wwww’ like a Japanese shuojo manga character.
Juwang was no help when Minje told him about the meet-up either. He was too focused on eating his chicken—it really seemed like he was always doing that these days—and only fueled Minje’s paranoia. “What if he’s actually a fifty-two-year-old accountant named Greg who collects rubber ducks and collects anime posters?”
Minje had frowned at him. “That… is weirdly specific.”
Juwang shrugged. “You never know. He might even be a woman.”
Somehow, that thought was worse than a financially-troubled Greg.
He’d spent roughly ten minutes in front of his mirror stressing and tearing his hair out before Juwang pushed him out of the house, then spent the next twenty minutes on the subway texting Ninja Hattori-kun, with each message more desperate than the last.
where are you? i’m roughly,, 2 stops away!
please don’t be scary,,
i brought snacks,,, do you like chocolate?
also please be a human and not a cat that recently learned how to type…
Minje could practically hear his own heartbeat in his ears now as he pushed open the café’s glass doors. It seemed way too bright, too quiet, too… suspiciously normal. He was half-expecting a spotlight to shine down on him and a deep menacing voice to announce: Congratulations. You’ve been catfished.
He sent an experimental text.
And then— oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no. Someone just waved at him. Just a shy, casual hand wave. Minje’s brain short-circuited entirely. He froze, mid-breath, mid-thought, mid-step, mid-existence.
Ninja Hattori-kun was not a fifty-two-year-old accountant named Greg. Nor a mysterious woman with supposedly malicious motives.
This was a boy who looked like the human embodiment of a cat emoji.
Messy-but-perfect hair, slightly too bright eyes, and that fluffy bucket hat that made Minje question his entire childhood and taste in aesthetics because he loved it. He also wanted to run, scream, hide, throw his umbrella out in the middle of the café, and also simultaneously shake this person’s hand and ask if he could adopt them.
“Hi. You look… good. Really good.” was what the boy started the conversation with. “You look like a Gyarados. Not in a bad way. Like you have those sharp angles. Very sharp angles. Very handsome. Good-lookin—I’ll stop now.”
Keiju had to physically shut himself up. There was no way in hell he had just called someone who looked like they had stepped straight out of a K-Drama a Gyarados. It was like his brain had thrown in the towel. He really should’ve asked Donghyeon to come with.
He could not do this. At all.
He had just called Gary—no, Manja Boy—a Gyarados. Where did the name Gary even come from? Keiju wanted to sink into the floor, curl into a ball, and maybe dissolve into the latte he had been continuously stress-sipping.
Keiju opened his mouth to say something—anything—but the only sounds that escaped him where a series of undignified squeaks. His hands had suddenly gone rogue, and they reached out for Minje’s without his permission. “So! Welcome… to… café… land…! I’m Keiju. I’m Ninja. Ninja Hattori-kun. Yes. And you are?”
Manja Boy—he kept thinking of him as Manja Boy now—tilted his head slightly, the smile not faltering for even a second, and even while sitting Keiju could feel his knees threatening mutiny. “Minje. Choi Minje.”
Keiju’s heart did that drumline thing again when Minje squeezed his hands slightly. Only louder. Possibly accompanied by cymbals and an entire orchestra. He could hear the triangles. He swallowed, then smiled back. “I have chocolate.”
No, wait, that sounded like he was the witch from Hansel and Gretel.
He tried again. “I have chocolate.”
Nope, that was the exact same thing.
Minje chuckled, then held up a plastic bag… with an entire melon. “I… have a melon.”
Keiju burst into laughter. After about three million seconds of just straight-up cackling in poor Minje’s face, he wiped tears from the corners of his eyes, trying—and failing—to act like a normal human being. “I… I didn’t mean—I mean… the melon! It’s huge! Amazing! Wow!”
He was babbling now, his hands twirling in midair like he was about to perform some kind of interpretive dance. Minje tilted his head, his smile slightly sheepish now. “My dormmate made me bring it along. I thought, you know, chocolate and melon… balance each other out? Nutritional harmony.”
“Totally! Perfect harmony. Very… uh… zen.” Keiju managed, wishing he could crawl under the table like a spooked hamster. He offered the chocolate anyway, shoving the little bag toward Minje with all the grace of a penguin attempting ballet. “Chocolate buttons. Cadbury.”
Minje accepted it with a soft laugh, popping a piece into his mouth. “Oh… wow. This is… really good.” His eyes lit up, and Keiju felt his own heart and soul melt into a puddle of goo.
They sat there for a moment, an awkward bubble of chocolate, melon, and flustered silence stretching between them. Keiju’s mind raced. Don’t say anything stupid. Don’t make this weird. Don’t—oh no, he’s smiling. He’s looking at me. My brain is melting. Why is his smile so unfair?
Minje finally broke the quiet. “So… uh… your pet in the game… still alive?”
Keiju choked on a laugh. “Yeah… barely. Barely alive. And yours?”
“Also barely,” Minje admitted, smirking. “I may or may not have neglected it for an entire week because I… forgot it existed?”
Keiju gasped, clutching his chest dramatically. “How could you. I trusted you. Seventy days. Seventy days of continuous gifts. And you broke that streak.” He waved his hands in the air like he was conducting some tragic orchestra.
Minje laughed so hard he almost dropped the chocolate. “I… I didn’t think gifts counted that much! You’re ridiculous!”
Keiju pretended to faint, then peeked one eye open. “Ridiculous? Me? I am… the living embodiment of commitment and honor in pet-raising. And we were on a roll. How dare you.”
Minje blinked. A slow, deliberate blink. “Oh… well… that’s… um… I’m sorry?” he said, though the smile tugging at his lips betrayed him.
Keiju groaned theatrically, collapsing back into his chair like he’d just been personally betrayed by the universe itself. “You… you monster. You’ve shattered my trust… my soul… my entire—oh no, stop laughing!”
Minje only grinned, eyes sparkling like he knew exactly how catastrophic his charm was. “I… I didn’t mean to. But… you look really… dramatic. I like it.”
Keiju blinked. Dramatic? He was catastrophic, not dramatic. Catastrophic! But Minje’s smile—no, his entire aura—had the power to melt glaciers. He fumbled with his hoodie sleeves, wishing for the thousandth time that he could disappear into the floor. Instead, he tried to recover some dignity. “Well, uh… if we’re talking disasters… my pet might survive… if I forgive you. Maybe.”
“Hmm,” Minje hummed thoughtfully, tilting his head. “Maybe I can make it up to you. Extra gifts… every day… for a week?”
Keiju’s heart performed a violent drumline routine again, and he choked on his own breath. “A week? That’s… that’s… heroic. Noble. Completely legendary!”
Minje laughed softly, a sound that made the café’s ambient noise vanish entirely. “Good. Legendary is… a good start.”
He reached across the table to squeeze his hand again, just a little, and Keiju didn’t panic. Not this time. Well, he may have blushed. A little.
Keiju grinned. “It was nice meeting you, Mister Manja Boy. I was really scared you’d turn out to be a serial kidnapper, but… do you maybe want to do this again?”