Deer Luhan, With Love

24

Chapter 24 – In Which I Am Introduced to Dorm Life, EXO-M Style

Deer Luhan,

I think I now understand why your manager refuses to live with you.

Leigh

The kitchen, I kid you not, had a proper football goal in it.  And the bathroom, on the opposite side of the (enormous) apartment, had one fitted in over the bath.  For starters, I wasn’t quite sure how you could get a decent shot at either goal when your angle was limited by the doorframes into each room, but the idea of bathing with a net hanging over me wasn’t exactly scintillating.  It kind of sounded like a nightmare from Agamemnon’s death in the bathtub.  And third of all, I was pretty certain they shouldn’t have been playing football indoors anyway.

“Challenge,” Lay had joked when I’d written out my opinion on the subject, and I decided that perhaps it was just best if I didn’t know.

Chatting to Luhan that evening was a little awkward as he was the only one able to speak.  I had to lock myself away in the bathroom in order to do it, too, and we eventually struck up a rhythm in which I typed through whatever I wanted to say on the IM and he spoke, largely in slow and uncomplicated Mandarin, but explaining the odd thing in Korean when I didn’t understand.

“Did the security guys get the package to you?” he asked me.  I nodded.  He smiled.  I couldn’t help noticing he looked a little haggard: there were dark circles under his eyes, and his skin was unnaturally pale.  There was also a dusting of stubble across his chin.

“Great,” he said.  “Now, the most important part of that pack is the Rubik’s cube.  I’m fairly often asked to solve it on shows in under a minute, and if you can’t speak, they’ll probably get you to do that.  The formula with all the algorithms is in there.  If you memorise it, you can’t fail.  The credit card has about 126000 kuai on it – let me get you the code….”

While he tried to remember what the code was, I took the opportunity to look up conversation rates, and my jaw dropped.  He was trusting me with nearly twelve thousand pounds.

“None of it’s blood money,” he assured me as the PIN popped up on the IM and I hastily wrote it down.  “Do what you want with it.  I guess I kind of owe you.”

He went through the rest of the contents of the care package quickly – they included his key into the M dorm, a travel-pass for public transport around Beijing, a list of good places to eat, a couple of Chinese books to read and some CDs to listen to, a spare key into his home (should I ever need it), and a map of the area and mug shots of people I was supposed to know and recognise and who they were to Luhan.

“Hopefully you won’t need to use that last one,” he told me.  “Oh, and I should probably explain that life in M is a little different to when we’re all together—”

What’s with the forfeit game? I typed to him.

“Oh, you’ve met that already?  It’s kind of like a twenty-four-seven spin on Truth or Dare – we started playing it so we could all have fun despite the language barrier.  Chen’s Mandarin always gets creepily fluent when it’s his turn to choose the forfeits.”

What are the rules?

Luhan grinned.  “Basically, if somebody says anything at all that can be verified, you shout ‘challenge’.  They then have to prove what they said or forfeit.  If you forfeit, the person who challenged you chooses a penalty and you have to carry it out.  You can challenge pretty much any statement, even if you know it’s true.  Tao often gets challenged over his name just for laughs.  Kris does over his ability to draw all the time – that’s where there are so many of his pictures in the dorm.  We keep telling him it’s a forfeit, but he doesn’t agree, so that one’s kind of an impasse, but it usually comes up at least once every couple of days.”