2 - crying girls

11 3 1

by cherri_x

by cherri_x

✩.･*:｡≻───── ⋆♡⋆ ─────.•*:｡✩

"I'm glad you took my advice, Erica. I'll put your name forward for the course and soon you'll receive an email with the details and instructions," Mrs Lin said, dismissing Erica from her office with another warm smile. After sorting out the lessons for Erica, she only had one thing left to do before she could get a head start on the mountain of paperwork she had for the weekend. Logging onto her computer, Mrs Lin opened up her email and began to type.

--- in Korea, on the same day ---

Hanyu was tired. After a draining day of doing school online, helping the other members with homework and completing their strenuous daily training routine, the last thing he needed was a dreaded email from his school.

Dear Mr Jia,

We regret to inform you that while we understand that you will be occupied with promotions for your job and will thus be unable to have full attendance in classes, your credit score for your middle school record is under the amount required for you to graduate. This means you may have to take another class or extracurricular in order to provide evidence for the participation and communication aspect of learning that would otherwise be neglected through your planned online learning. Unfortunately, we can only provide you with two options to ensure you are meeting the guidelines, which are either to assist the school counsellor in her sessions with fellow students, or to enroll in a penpal exchange between schools in the area.

I should let you know I'm advance however, that the counselling will allow you to gain more credits in a shorter time frame, the only disadvantage being that you may need to present in school for the training sessions that take place prior to your placement with the school counsellor. I will leave the decision up to you Mr Jia, please let me know your about your choice as soon as possible.

Sincerely,
Mr Liu

One of the staff members walked into the conference room just as Hanyu finished reading the email and took a seat in front of him. "I assume you've just read the email?" he enquires, noting the pained expression on Hanyu's face.

"Yuan Ge," Hanyu whined, "Do I have to choose one of the two? They're both terrible! Why can't you just send them an email and explain that I'm too busy to do any of that."

"That would be too much to ask, I'm sorry. We've already had to ask for permission to get you and the others to do online school while you're here, as well as exceptions regarding exams and tests because you're not there to physically complete them- don't give me those puppy eyes they don't work on me anymore."

Hanyu groaned with multiple unintentional voice cracks, giving up in his attempt to persuade Yuan. "How come it works for Shuyang and not for me?" he pouted.

"Because you're 13 and he's 10," Yuan replied, patting him on the shoulder, "What's so bad about those options anyway? The penpal thing seems like a good way to make friends but the counselling assistant training might be better because it's quicker."

"Oh no no no," Hanyu tutted, shaking his head, "there is absolutely no way I'm going to be a counselor."

"But...why?"

Hanyu began to whisper like he was revealing his biggest secret even though everyone knew about it, "Because of girls."

"Girls?" Yuan started to wonder if Hanyu was becoming delusional because of exhaustion.

"Specifically, crying girls. I think I would die if I had to comfort a crying girl because it would be so awkward and I could say the wrong thing and- ugh I don't even want to imagine it." Hanyu dramatically slumped on his chair but it did next to nothing in swaying his Gege's determination to have Hanyu take extra classes.

"I'm sorry about that Hanyu but there's nothing I can do except tell you that you're not the only one taking extra courses. Zeyu and Zihao were also sent similar emails so at least you'll all be doing extra work together." Yuan tried to cheer Hanyu up but ended up chuckling at his hiding-my-pain-behind-a-meme-face reaction.

After Yuan left, Hanyu had to make his decision quickly and just get this over and done with. Unfortunately for him though, the other Boy Story members decided that it was the perfect time to walk, or rather stomp, into the room and do their daily routine of pestering him.

"HEY JIABAO GERRR." Hanyu heard Xinlong's voice before they even opened the door, ornamented with voice cracks and random changes in pitch to go along with his journey through his final form. (A/N: anyone know where this is from?)

Each of the members came in one by one: Xinlong came in screaming, Mingrui made sure to randomly jump and (attempt to) hit the top of the door frame, Zihao strutted in while singing some song really loudly and slightly off pitch and Shuyang followed them while laughing uncontrollably. It was only after they closed the door that they realised they were missing one person, so at that point Xinlong got up and went to drag Zeyu inside, who spaced out while they walking to the room and was stuck a few metres away from the entrance.

Once they were all inside the room, there were a few seconds of silence before it was like a bomb went off and they started making noise. A lot of noise. Barely even acknowledging the presence of their leader and being determined to distract, Mingrui and Shuyang were having a competition to see who could laugh the loudest, Xinlong and Zihao were pretending to be animals and galloped around the room, while Zeyu was yet again spaced on the couch, the only member not contributing to the overwhelming noise that was starting to drill into Hanyu's head.

In an attempt to reply quickly to the email he recurved earlier, Hanyu swiftly composed a new email thanking his principle for the notice and mentioning at the end: "I've decided that in order to make up for the lost time in school I would like to take _____."

Hanyu left the end of the letter blank because suddenly zeyu came up to him and slapped the back of his neck, triggering a ( hopefully) safe wrestling match. It looked like Zeyu obtained his hyper energy a little later than the others, as usual. Before going to take revenge on Zeyu, Hanyu quickly clicked an option on the laptop and sent the email.

----

After his wrestling match with Zeyu, which he ended up winning, Hanyu sat back down at the desk and opened up his laptop. He began to sigh I'm relief after realising that his members, who were all worn out from the past hour of uncontrollable laughter, screaming, animal roleplaying and wrestling, were finally sitting down and being quiet. However, Hanyu's sigh somehow turned into a rising scream when he read the new email that came through on his laptop.

Beginning to lose his sanity at this point, Hanyu started grabbing at his hair, making the other boys turn to look at him in confusion. "WHY HAVE I BEEN ENTERED FOR THE PENPAL SCHEME??"

✩.･*:｡≻───── ⋆♡⋆ ─────.•*:｡✩

Word count: 1226
Written: 15/03/21
Published: 18/03/21