University of Wonderland

Chapter Sixteen

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like something was strange about the things Sehun knew about me. He knew my address without ever having spoken to me before or being in one of my classes. He knew I was on honor roll. He claimed he would've known if I was into "this kind of stuff," which meant he believed he knew me. He seemed almost excited to see me when he caught me spying, like it was a reunion and not a bust.

So where did he know me from?

Later that day, brushing my hair in my room, I kept going back to how he'd known the way to my house. It was like common knowledge to him, like he'd been there before. Too bad we didn't take attendence from everyone who ever entered the premises. And the closest thing we had to security camera were the photo albums gathering dust in my -

Wait . . .

I dropped the brush back on my dresser and headed to the hallway closet where we tossed things away when we wanted to forget, like evidence of bad haircuts and discarded volin carcass from the five seconds I'd attempted to learn. The only kind of instrument I should ever played was the radio.

I pulled out a bunch of albums and set them on the carpet. This might have been a long shot, but it was my best shot. I balanced the top album on my cross-legged knees and flipped it open. My mind was focused on haystacks needles, so seeing my parents' smiling faces caught me off-guard. My throat tightened. I slammed the cover shut, as if to shut out my emotions.

The image stayed in my mind like a carbon etching, and my lower lips trembled. I breathed in desperate but that didn't clear the image. I hadn't llok at these photos since . . . before. It was hard to remember them as happy, as alive. It was hard to remember them.

Taking another deep breath, I opened the album. My parents stood in front of a crowd, arms latched around a few other adults I didn't recognize. A protest sign hanged from my mom's hands: Gone Fission = Going Green. I turned the page to find documentation of another misson. Only one other guy appeared in every photo with my parents. I traced my fingers across the photo, envying them. The lump forming in my throat dissolved and renewed determination took its place.

Maybe one day I'd come back and study their methods, but for now, this photo album wasn't what I was looking for. I grabbed the next one on the stack and found a picture of IU and me sunbathing during family BBQ where we thought we were so sexy because we finally allowed to wear bikinis. I remember thinking I might one day fit all the cups in the bikini. Oh, how naïve I once was.

I almost passed a picture at the bottom when I glimpsed at a photo and my mouth widened. There, at the same BBQ where IU and I were posing to my mom who was taking pictures, was a photo of younger Sehun. He sat on a bench in the background of my past. His hair was longer, and he was obviously scooting away from a man who's tried to put his arm around him.

I didn't remember Sehun at all. IU and I had been too busy trying to get the attention of one of Shin-Hye's guy friends who we had a huge crush on while he probably thought we hadn't yet graduated to solid foods.

The guy next to Sehun looked familiar, but not because I knew him - Because I had just flipped through a hundred of pictures of him in the album with my parents. Sehun's dad had been involved in all my parents' environmental protests.

. . . =^_^= . . . =^_^= . . .

School was a pain in the arse . . . *sigh* 10th grade seemed hard already!