Deer Luhan, With Love

28

Chapter 28 – In Which an Eyebrow Thief Strikes

Deer Luhan,

On second thoughts, I think I’d like the HunHan teasing back.

Leigh

After the New Year’s Day scare, life in the dorm got back to normal.  Tao was challenged over his name for answering Kris’ phone and not referring to himself as Huang Zi Tao (apparently the challenge was legitimate even if it was for a nickname) and Chen made sure not to say anything stupid when I was around alcohol.

On the morning of the third, the day before a large fan meet to be held a city over, five of us woke up missing half a right eyebrow.

Kris was the first to notice it as, for once, he was the first up.

“Who is this blasted eyebrow plucker?!” was the tone for our alarms that morning as doors slammed open and we blearily sat up, looking at each other.

“Luhan,” Lay said, significantly more awake than I was as Kris tore out of our room and into Xiumin’s.  “Part of your eyebrow’s disappeared.”

“Huh?”  I stopped rubbing my face and patted the upper edge of my eye sockets.  Sure enough, rather than the outer half of my eyebrow, there was a faint dusting of bristle.  I frowned and looked over at him.  “Wait – yours has too!”

“Ree Lee?”  Lay patted his forehead, just as I had done.  “Huh.  So it has.”

He seemed unfazed by it, and my coffee-deprived brain just managed to figure out from that and Kris’ angry whirlwind tour of the rooms that it must be fairly normal to wake up without eyebrows intact.

We were called into the living room for a meeting shortly afterwards.  Kris was prepared with small mirrors and eyebrow pencils – this had evidently happened often enough for it to be a regular drill.

“So who’s missing eyebrows this time?” he asked with a sigh.  All of us raised a hand except Tao, who let out a sigh, close to tears.

“For the last time, gege, it wasn’t me!”

“Tao, you’re the only one without missing eyebrows!  Who else would it be?

“I don’t know!” he wailed.  “I just know it wasn’t me!”

“He has a point,” Lay said as he handed me a mug of coffee from Xiumin.  “Last time Luhan was the one without missing eyebrows and he said it wasn’t him either.  And the time before that, it was Chen and he said it wasn’t him as well.”

I had to hide my smirk behind my mug of coffee.  It was beginning to sound like a prank one of my cousins had pulled at boarding school, in which all but one of his year had woken up with a pink streak in their hair (all against school regulations, of course), and my cousin had included himself among the victims so he didn’t get caught.  He’d chosen the teacher’s favourite as the unaffected one, though, with the result that the man was reluctant to punish anybody and they’d all wandered around school with semi-permanent pink hair for a couple of weeks.  From what I could see, it obviously wasn’t Tao or Kris, and I knew I hadn’t done it, so it had to be one of the other three.  My instinctive reaction was Chen, and so, apparently, was everybody else’s.

“Are you kidding?” he demanded, gesturing to his face.  “I don’t even have long enough hair to cover it!  Why would I do that to myself?”

“Oh, the eyebrow stripper’s struck again, has he?” Luhan said with evident amusement when I rang him after lunch.