Chapter Text
While returning books at the university library, Stella gets the news of Jiwoo’s injury.
She lets out a shrill shriek at the message, enough to rival any horror heroine. What follows is an equally surprising SHHHHHHH! from the frail old librarian behind the counter, and a stern look given her way. Without even looking up from her phone screen, she can feel everyone in the room glaring at her. It’s the middle of finals week, after all. Stella completely understood if they wanted to resort to murder. Right now, she isn’t exactly against the idea. To compete in the Boa Cup—the most prestigious team cup in South Korean collegiate tennis—without their best athlete will be a handicap, for sure. In any team sport, it wouldn’t usually be the end of the world when somebody gets injured. But their landlord-turned-coach is anything but usual, and their living arrangements will be determined if they place in this stupid competition or not. Nineteen-year-old Stella should have been more proficient at Korean to understand the fine print on that stupid contract.
(“Clause 224. Each tenant shall join the Sooman Culture University Women’s Tennis Team and win at least third place in the annual collegiate Boa Cup or risk eviction from the Heart House….”)
The Cup is only a month away from now, and the deadline for final line-up submissions is literally in less than two days. Stella, now 22, gapes helplessly at a picture of a taped-up ankle in their group chatroom, swaddled like a newborn infant, followed by a video of Jiwoo frowning cutely while tracing an imaginary tear across her cheek.
Stella can’t help but feel like crying too. If she could be more dramatic and collapse on the ground right now, she would. Her claim to fame is being the media and communication department’s “sleeping beauty”, anyway. She has Ian to thank for the flattering (?) pictures of her dozing off at the computer lab. Maybe another episode of narcolepsy won’t hurt. She could just sleep here and pretend she’s back at her room with Haram for a second and Jiwoo is still perfectly fine, top form with her service aces and killer backhand.
Before she can even close her eyes, she’s pulled into an aisle by a stoic Nayeon, round eyes boring holes into her face. Stella can only smile at her sheepishly.
“Sorry, Nayeon-ah,” she coos, back to her cheerful self. A ruffle of Nayeon’s bangs. “Did I get you in trouble?”
“Not yet,” the younger girl dramatically sighs, releasing her vice-like grip on Stella’s jacket to fix her hair. An old book trolley sits idly by her side and squeaks when she touches the handle. “I think it’ll take you three more disturbances on your own and once with Ian unnie before you get banned from this section in particular.”
They hear the librarian’s hurried footsteps across marble floor, and Stella clumsily hides her face with her blonde locks. Nayeon is still glaring at her—cutely, Stella adds mentally—but there’s a small tug at the corner of her lip, as if she’s stopping herself from laughing.
“We’re already banned from the computer laboratory until next school year,” Stella whispers as the old woman whizzes past. She cranes her neck a little to watch her exit to a staff room before sighing in relief.
“I forgot how that’s my problem again, unnie.”
“Jiwoo unnie’s injury is your problem too, you know? We’re literally at risk of losing our home.”
Nayeon quietly hums to herself as she puts back the books in her cart in their proper places. “I have niece privileges, remember?”
Oh, right. Kim Hyoyeon may be an eccentric landlord, but she is still an ever-doting aunt (“Unnie,” she corrects Nayeon once, but the latter pouts at her in retort). It’s certainly surprising, considering how calm Nayeon is most of the time. On the contrary, Hyoyeon is never not 100%, gung-ho and ever ready at 3 in the morning to wake the girls up for a morning jog. Stella shudders at the thought.
“Was the niece privilege clause on the contract you signed?”
“What contract?”
“Of course,” the older girl groans, combing her hair back with her hand. “She didn’t make you one…”
Nayeon chuckles to herself, amused. Stella pouts at her like a kicked puppy. “Think about Carmen unnie, Ye-on. Where is she going to live now?” she eggs on. “Haram? Me, your favorite unnie?”
“Yuna unnie is my favorite unnie.” Nayeon says matter of factly.
“You traitor.”
Ian pops up from the aisle beside them, pouting with a paper bag in hand. She dangles it in front of Nayeon for a second, who turns to her and reaches out for it. She takes it away. “I thought I was the favorite unnie!” she whines.
Nayeon shushes her with widened eyes. Stella sees a couple of students glare at them from the corner of her eye and pulls the black-haired girl to her side with a scowl.
“Heh heh,” Ian offers the bag back to Nayeon with a grin. “Sorry.”
The latter lets out a quiet ‘yay!’ and grabs the bag from Ian’s hands.
“I have to go,” Nayeon whispers. “Need to work on something at the research lab.”
She steps away from Stella and Ian for about five seconds before turning on her heel to face them again. “Don’t get into trouble while I’m gone!” she mouths silently, before scurrying off to the staff room at the back of the floor.
Stella wastes no time and shakes Ian’s shoulders, staring into her eyes.
“Did you see Jiwoo unnie? How is she doing?”
“A couple of stress fractures and a sprain.” Ian visibly deflates. “Reumen unnie’s with her at the university hospital.”
“Oh no, that sounds…”
“Not good, but she’ll be able to walk. No playing for a few weeks, at least,” the younger girl sighs. “Are we still going to sign her up, unnie? The captain doesn’t have to play, does she?”
“No…” Stella trails off, feeling her right knee ache a little. “I think she might feel a little bad about not being able to play. It’s her last playing year, after all.”
“I’m going to ask Yuna unnie if she knows anybody.” Ian wiggles herself out of Stella’s grasp and grabs her phone out of her pocket. Her fingers are quick to press on Yuna’s display photo in the group chat—her in dark sunglasses as the eligible bachelor Lee Hoon. She says it’s for a makjang drama they’ll be making at the end of the year, but Stella thinks that drama does not even exist.
(Her method acting has spilled into the courts, too, getting a hefty fine at last month’s qualifiers after shouting “Understaaand?” to the umpire after he erroneously called Haram’s serve a fault. In her defense, she was still in her Lee Hoon persona—an explanation Hyoyeon wasn’t exactly happy about. Good thing they had won that doubles final. Yuna’s still paying her back, however.)
“Ah, don’t bother,” the latter grabs Ian’s phone out of her hand as the younger girl whines. “Whoever Yuna knows, Haram-ie knows as well. And besides, I wouldn’t exactly trust a scout who only knew tennis players from Prince of Tennis.”
“Hey.” Ian’s face suddenly turns serious as she crosses her arms over her chest. “Don’t disrespect Ryoma Echizen.”
Stella rolls her eyes at that. “Can we find someone as good as Ryoma Echizen in less than 48 hours? Coach Hyoyeon is going to kill us if we don’t find a replacement fast enough.”
“Correction!” The younger girl makes a show of booping Stella’s nose. “She is going to kill you. Or Jiwoo unnie. But probably you, vice-captain.”
Although she loves Haram to death as her OG ride or die since they were seatmates in elementary school, Stella can’t help but think this should have been her problem. Haram’s next to Jiwoo in age, after all. “You’re way more experienced than me,” the girl had told her at Carmen’s graduation party when the topic of the older girl’s replacement came up. “You were world junior no. 7 at some point! I’m just somebody who happens to like playing tennis,” she had explained. But this was something even someone who used to be world no. 1 could never prepare for. They needed five players for the line-up. Nayeon hasn’t even picked up a racquet in a month, let alone scored a point against any of them. They needed to win.
Stella groans into her palm as she leans back onto the bookshelf behind her, filled with books on exercise science and fitness. As she starts to think about the printed registration forms in her bag, Jiwoo’s name already printed in ink (why is the registration offline, anyway?), Ian tugs at her sleeve.
“Hey, Stella unnie?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you know people from the physical education department?”
Stella removes her palm from her face. Ian is looking far away, towards the back of the floor, near the ceiling-to-floor windows. She turns back to look at Stella is one quick motion, a sly grin on her face. Stella looks at her quizzically.
“Someone’s been staring at you,” the younger girl whispers.
“Jeong Ian, I almost got kicked out of this section mere moments ago—”
“No, no, not like that! They don’t care about you anymore, I think. But this pretty girl has been like,” Ian’s eyebrows move up and down suggestively, “…staring staring at you.”
Stella ignores the comment about the stranger’s appearance and sighs in defeat. “Where?”
“3 o’clock. Don’t make it look obvious,” the younger girl winks. Stella slowly turns towards her right, looking at the row of tables situated there. At the third row were a gaggle of physical education students, their distinct oversized dark blue varsity jackets hanging by their chairs. She tries to make out their faces from far away. On the far right was Chanyoung, varsity swimmer and an acquaintance from the international students’ club on campus… but he isn’t exactly a pretty girl. Next to him were a bunch of familiar girls who had interviewed her after winning the MVP award at last year’s Boa Cup. But they had been buried in their notes, eyes nowhere near her.
She squints at the last person at the table—long black hair, pale skin rivaling a vampire’s, aura with an air of mystery. Half of her face is covered by her laptop, littered with stickers of Kuromi. Her eyes are sharp monolids with dark irises, a familiar intensity in them. She’s looking shamelessly at Stella, as if she was trying to commit her face to memory. Stella thinks the girl doesn’t realize that she has already caught her staring.
But then she closes her laptop to reveal her face, and Stella freezes on the spot.
“What did I just say about being obvious!” Ian suddenly shouts. Stella wakes up from her trance and uselessly covers Ian’s mouth with her hand. She feels the stickiness of the younger girl’s lip gloss on her palm, and the eyes of everyone (including her, of all people!) on her again. Heels clack loudly against tiled floor, and in a flash the old librarian is fuming at them, finger in front of pursed, dry lips.
“SHHHHHHH! GET OUT OF MY SECTION THIS INSTANT!”
Ian and Stella are reduced to a blur of blonde and black as they bow profusely, hair flying in all directions. While being escorted out by a couple of student assistants, Stella catches a glimpse of the girl through the glass doors of the section.
Those dark, cold eyes are studying her again. But there’s a slight upward quirk of her lips now, a ghost of a knowing smile there. A familiar warmth spreads in Stella’s belly at the sight.
She feels her chest tighten as she looks away.
“Coach Hyoyeon already submitted our registration form?”
It’s almost 8 in the evening in their shared living room, and the TV is on some horror movie courtesy of Yuna and a reluctant Haram. Stella’s sandwiched awkwardly beside the duo and Jiwoo’s long, outstretched legs on their eight-seater sofa, ankle bandaged and elevated with a throw pillow. Jiwoo had just told Stella the news while busily scrolling through her feed, feigning nonchalance as she tried to ignore the movie. Stella looks at her like she just grew a second head.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Dahyun-ah,” Jiwoo chews idly on an apple slice from her ‘get well soon!’ basket courtesy of their team physiatrist, Dr. Choi. Her eyes are still glued onto her phone screen. “She just texted me that she already submitted it this afternoon and to not worry about it.”
Stella frowns. “Don’t tell me you’re going to play with an injured ankle?”
“Of course not, silly,” Jiwoo laughs, popping another apple slice in her mouth. She spares the younger girl a glance. “Coach told me she recruited somebody from her department. Someone good, apparently.”
The blonde narrows her eyes at the short-haired girl. “This is all very suspicious.”
“You’re always suspicious of everything,” Haram’s voice is muffled from under the blanket, and Stella elbows her side, making her yelp.
“If she were any good then shouldn’t we have heard of her by now?”
“Who says we haven’t?” Carmen quips from the kitchen, where Ian had been busily “helping” her. In reality, the younger girl just finished her second ramyeon cup of the day, and was about to fish some meat from the warm kimchi jjigae on the stove. Carmen thwarts her plans by taking her chopsticks away, and Ian whines.
“Do you already know who she is, unnie?” Stella blinks.
Beside her, Jiwoo is frantically typing at her phone, and Carmen’s phone pings loudly in the kitchen. The girls are all looking at their phones now, and Stella gets even more suspicious. Her expression hardens as she gives Jiwoo a glare. “Spill,” she says, bite in her voice.
Haram peels the blanket from her face and laughs nervously. “I think,” she carefully starts, everyone’s eyes on her, “what Carmen unnie meant to say was that she’s probably a transferee from one of the other teams on the circuit?”
“Y-yeah, that’s right,” Carmen affirms, voice deviously pitchy. “I think she might have been in last year’s B bracket so we were not able physically to meet her.”
Ian is clinging onto the eldest girl with a frown. She mouths a ‘what’s happening, unnie?’ to Stella, but the latter doesn’t respond. She’s currently busy mapping every possibility in her head. Recent transfer from bracket B? Impossible. Who transfers in the middle of the year, let alone before the semester ends? It might be a student who already attended their university. But Coach Hyoyeon barely even paid attention to kids in her class—unless they were a prodigy. Talent meant nothing if they didn’t have the experience.
If Stella were in Hyoyeon’s shoes, she’d scout someone who had both. Someone to replace the analytical and graceful Jiwoo. Someone who could win them the cup. Someone like…
“Kim Juun’s pretty good,” Yuna says casually, nodding to herself. “She was in my tennis class in freshman year.”
At the mention of the name, Stella immediately stills.
Haram removes the weighted blanket on her in lightning speed, glaring at Yuna with hands on her hips. “Roh Yuna!”
“W-what? What now?” the younger girl sputters.
The door creaks open revealing Nayeon with Coach Hyoyeon in tow, carrying take-out pizza with them. The heroine in the horror movie they had in the background screams in terror, but the atmosphere in the living room is heavy and awkward. All eyes are on Yuna as she blinks innocently.
“Aren’t we supposed to tell Stella unnie?”
In the corner of Stella’s eyes, she sees Ian with her mouth agape, Carmen busying herself with cutting already cut cubes of tofu by the counter. Hyoyeon’s already tip-toeing away back to the door with the pizza, and Nayeon is shooting her a disapproving look. She hears Jiwoo and Haram whispering behind her, but she can’t be bothered to decipher what they’re saying.
“Too late,” Stella grumbles, putting Haram’s blanket over her face, make-up be damned.