Jihyun is stuck in a love scandal with someone whom she hates. This person is coincidentally the stubborn Riki on her debate team and her favorite mainstream artist at the same time. And Jihyun is just a college girl who gets wrapped into a dating s...
It goes a bit like this. Jihyun spends the rest of her day interacting with family, keeping her brother from inhaling legos through his mouth and indulging in the cups of ramen located in the pantry. She's wrapped in the warmth of her home, enveloped in the scent of caramel here and there from the candle lit on the dining room table effusing throughout the room.
She's bothered by her brother again, him asking for a cup of ramen as well and though it was her favorite and she hid it specifically so that others—her brother—wouldn't see it in the pantry, she decided to tell him to wait on the chair as she prepared a cup for him too. "Jeeyu, stay seated, okay? And no legos or toys at the table, the table is strictly meant for eating."
That's when she hears the sound of wheels turning on a toy car come to a sudden stop and a petulant whine follows. "But it'll take a while for you to make it."
"Do you want to go play in the living room then?" She asks him, slipping the cup into the microwave and shutting the door closed.
"Yeah," he chimes brightly as he pushes himself off the chair, his big toy car in hand. "I'll wait until you're done in the living room."
"Don't break anything, and don't get hurt, either."
He hums in agreement, and pressing the numbers in, Jihyun waits by the counter and watches the numbers tick down. Out of idleness, she pulls her phone from her pocket and opens it, looking through whatever apps she had to occupy herself. However, it was the red dot near the corner of one of her apps that caught her attention, and she tapped on it first to clear the notification. She rarely got notifications from it unless it was a notification from Shiru or a company announcement, so she was a bit more intrigued over this one.
She somewhat skims over the words after the letter starts with from, HVBE. High-frequency words like the or it are the only two that she picks up due to their repetitiveness, but other than that nothing calls her focus until she blurs over the word; confirmed.
Jihyun's eyes rivet to the top of the announcement to read it properly from the top down, and as she takes in each word she realizes with almost daunting horror what this statement from the company meant.
They confirmed it, that she and Riki were the two in the photo, but later on in the message announced that they had broken up, all without Jihyun's own permission to do so. What the heck? She stares in disbelief, flabbergasted at her screen and the reality it held in its thirteen lines of words. Okay, she needed to tell her mom about this pronto.
Jihyun shuts her phone off and opts to avoid looking at media for who knows how long despite the flood she may return to when she picks it up again.
What in the world?
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"So that's what happened—or, that's what's happening," Jihyun says.
"Oh, I'm sorry about that, Ji," her mom croons. She stretches her arms out and wears a cordial smile on her face. "Do you want a hug?"
Jihyun chuckles, dismissively waving her hand. "No, it's fine. Honestly, I'm just tired of it. I've kinda gotten used to the responses so now I'm just waiting for the moment that everything dies out finally. It's just weird at school now, I mean, dude was pretty much my arch nemesis."
"For a lucrative company they had a pretty shitty way of handling things," her dad pipes up, soon receiving an elbow in the side from her mother.
"Agreed, like—all you needed to do was deny it before it got big but whatever. Can't turn back time now anyway," Jihyun says. She peers over at Jeeyu, the boy sitting at the table and scarfing down ramen with the fork the cup came with, his car moving back and forth on the surface of the table. Maybe it's just something in children's nature, their temperament, that made them constant rule breakers.
She clearly told him to not bring toys to the table.
"At least he's busy enough watching whatever that is."
"What? Do you plan on telling him?" Her mother questions.
Jihyun looked at her, furrowing her eyebrows as if to weigh the sincerity of her question, but it seemed like it was a genuine question. "'No. He wouldn't understand the weight of the situation, but hey I might. It could prove to be a story to tell him during the day or just before he goes to sleep, no?"
"True. You know how much he loves his stories," her mom chuckles, bringing to lip of her coffee mug to her mouth.
"As long as you proceed without doing something irrational. And—try to avoid catching feelings for that guy, too. If it's like this already then it won't be any better if the two of you end up dating."
Her dad makes a clear point that she doesn't consider, mostly because she sweeps the prospect of falling for Riki under the rug like it isn't mutually exclusive with her reality. She had more priorities, like finishing top of her club as well as top of her class. She had goals for every step of the way.
"Or if you do, keep everything secret between you two. But, I say that you take a break off of school for now, there's a lot going on for you and a little break can make you feel better," her mom says gently.
"But I'm fine. Plus, I've been going back all this time that it'd be weird for me to take a break now. I'm fine, and plus I don't want to to spend my time trying to catch up on endless amounts of work."
"A mental break," her dad clarifies.
"Just think about it. If you do you will have to take care of Jeeyu here and there but it should be fine."
Jihyun sighs, letting down the barrier that keeps her from agreeing to hint at possibly conceding. "Eh."
