Innocence // STRAY KIDS' Han Jisung

twenty-three

The Soda Fountain.

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"Remember," her sister said just as Mirae opened the door, "If that Mingyu dude is creepy, call me right away. The keyword is anything related to school and I'll even run here to pick you up. Seriously."

"Okay, okay," she chuckled and waved her goodbye before going out.

She fixed her glasses, pulled up a bit her black cap to see better her surroundings and began walking through the place called Soda Fountain.

In fact, the only thing that was the reason of the place's name was a big sculpture of a soda can in the middle of the mall. There was no real soda fountain since it would attract basically every single bug on the whole country to drink/eat from the sweet beverage. Besides, it would be a lot of soda going straight to waste and big companies weren't up to that.

Mirae squinted her eyes as she tried to recognize the tall frame of Mingyu in between the people, but found nothing. She guessed it should be easy to locate since they were going to perform, so she went around looking for a place with some kind of stage or anything related to performances.

Luckily, just around the corner she found a stage with a significant amount of people gathered in front and several pictures of different boys on the wall. She went to the back and looked for a place with good sight and sat down on a chair from one of the food shops, a kind of bakery nearby, waiting for the event to start.

As she waited, she ordered a glass of lemonade and a cinnamon bun and got her phone out, automatically going into Instagram to watch videos of slime and memes. She scrolled down a few times before finding a recently posted picture of Hyunjin with Seungmin, Felix and Jisung.

She squinted her eyes at Jisung's face childishly, wrinkling her nose. Why are you so weird lately, dude? She wondered as she zoomed in on his face. What have I done for you to act like that, huh? Tell me!

But only silence answered.

With a sigh, she scrolled past the picture and this time looked for tutorials on how to cook, knowing she most likely would never try any. As she watched a cake being done, she ate her cinnamon bun slowly, savoring the cinnamon and the warmness of it. I want to bake a cake but I can't cook for shit.

She dropped her phone on the table carelessly and looked around trying to find her tall friend (where they friends already or just acquaintances?), but still found nothing. She finished her food, cleaned her hands and mouth with the napkin and threw the garbage on the trash can before deciding to call Mingyu.

"Hello?"

"Hey, where are you?"

"Oh! Right!" he gasped and proceeded to tell her some instructions on how to get to where he and his friends were getting ready to go out and perform since they still had some minutes before having to go out. "Oh, and don't get scared if some dude answers instead of me. There are twelve other dudes here and I can't assure you I'll be the one answering the door because I'm getting my hair done and if I move the hairstylist is going to slice my throat."

"Lovely description, Mingyu," she muttered and hung up, walking to where she remembered he said.

She turned to a smaller hall with a few doors and she walked up to the one who had a white paper with "SEVENTEEN" written. She knocked a few times, heard a lot of male voices screaming and mumbling incoherencies before the door opened up, revealing someone definitely different from the familiar Mingyu.