Clique (txtXitzy)

6. Day 8

"Watch it!" Taehyun grunted when someone bumped his shoulder and his file case fell down, causing his test papers and notes to scatter out on the floor of the corridor. He turned around and rolled his eyes only to see... Chaeryeong? "What are you doing here?"

"I go to Hanlim too, you know?" Chaeryeong muttered, "I'm sorry for not looking."

She seemed to be in a rush for something else but immediately bent down and began helping him pick up his papers to put back in his folder. It was in the shape of a transparent briefcase made of plastic with separators for all sorts of different papers, but recently the handle fell off so he had to carry it around in his arms. After bowing to each other, Chaeryeong added something before taking off to continue being in a hurry.

"You got some really good grades. It's surprising how you could juggle school with sport life so well," Chaeyeong whispered. Then she turned around to leave him without waiting for a reply.

"Surprising?" Taehyun retorted to himself on his way to his locker, "That's not a special adjective to hear anymore in compliments these days."

The five boys went to school (Beomgyu and Taehyun at Hanlim Academy, Kai at BigHit Highschool, Soobin at SOPA and Yeonjun at BigHit University), aced classes, practiced basketball, stayed fit at the gym, made girls swoon, learned choreographies for fun and spent their free time at karaoke bars. But the netizens had always underestimated them, unlike ITZY. While the girls had been welcomed quite well, they had to take their debut the harsh way. According to TXT, that's what made ITZY different from them. Starting from getting so much hate on the internet for being too perfect to be real, getting accused for riding on BTS's fame, having no talent at sports whatsoever, and so much more that they couldn't keep up, it was rough for the teens when they first started even if their first match was one of the smoothest debut matches in K-sport since decades ago. But the group was already a year old now, actually turning two in a few months like ITZY, so the audience also gradually noticed that their talent was well beyond surprising. They did many genres for their matches and games, starting from graceful moves with ballad and R&B music in the background, to disco songs, to hip hop and rap, to arthouse and many others. They were only almost two years old and their game history has already been labelled as one of the most versatile. All the haters who thought wrongly of them could now only gape at how mistaken they had been. They were indeed perfect, and there was almost nothing about them anyone could hate. Each of the members were tall, had top-notch visuals, were very fast, agile and powerful and possessed teamwork like no other. TXT was still considered a rookie group.

"Taehyun-ah," Beomgyu called out to him after Taehyun had closed his locker door. "What is Ryujin doing here?"

"Ryujin's here too?" Taehyun wheezed, "How indifferent are we actually that we didn't notice Ryujin and Chaeryeong have been in our school the whole time?"

"Great, and we still have to make sure they assume we're their friends but make sure the other students DON'T assume something else... How is that possible when probably our school would be famous for having 40% of ITZY and TXT in the same building starting from this year? And Jeon Somi, and other kids I don't remember the names of but are 4th gen athletes too?"

"We don't share the same classroom with them so we most likely won't see them too often. Just make sure you greet them when you see them and put in short small talk like 'do you need math test spoilers? my class has done it' and by doing small favours for them, it will slowly build their trust for us. Just use your common sense okay hyung?"

"Taehyun-ah, I know things like that but our schedule for the new semester has been posted on the bulletin board and our classes will fuse for chemistry, English, art and sports. What do we do then?"