Breaking Rules

RULE # 57: KEEP MUM

Oversleeping is not always a bad thing

With a start, Dara sat up on her bed and instantly looked up the table clock on her counter.

Flashing like the northern star on a cold dark night, 8:00 PM blinked at her as though to say "YOU'RE LATE!!! YOU'RE LATE!!! YOU'RE LATE BIG TIME!!!"

"OMO!!!!" She screamed.

The party downstairs was going to start at 6:00! She scrambled to get up, cursing Durami and Sanghyeun for not waking her up and stumbling on the floor.

"Why did they let me sleep this late?!?!?" she asked aloud, standing up, as she opened her closet to take out the dress she had bought for tonight's celebration. Tired and a little disgruntled from everything that was happening for the past two days... what with Ji Yong and everybody in her family acting so strangely and getting hints here and there about something that was going to happen and hoping and praying that it was the fulfillment of a long-time wish and... Oh God! Her mind just went to another dimension again.

She paused and took a deep breath. She was already two hours late and she was sure that everybody would be looking for her. Maybe around this time her mother would realize that she wasn't downstairs and would be racking up her door to wake her up.

She needed to get dressed immediately.

"Haissshhhh" she muttered to herself as she entered her bathroom "I shouldn't have listened to Durami." It was her youngest sister who had made her take the siesta. She remembered that they had slept together in her room but where was the culprit?!? Durami most probably must have woken up earlier and scrambled – like her now – to get ready and forgot all about her older sister in the process.

Soaping up and shampooing at the same time, she told herself to stop thinking and focus on the task at hand. In no less than ten minutes, she was able to finish her bath and dashed to her bed where the dress lay.

In truth, she always took her time with everything, most especially with prepping up. She wasn't the picky kind, nor was she the typical girly-girl but she does want to always look, if not good, then at least clean.

And with the way things were going now, she only had one way to go and it was to look clean... Chaerin wasn't there to help her at least fix up her hair, Bommie wasn't there to at least dab something on her face so she at least looked "healthy", and Minji wasn't there to make light of the worry filling her by "kissing" it all away.

Sighing, she sat down on her bed and tried to focus back again. It was only 8:15. She had to move quicly. Five minutes to dry her hair, five minutes for make-up, one minute for putting on the dress, one minute for accessorizing, and three minutes to see if she looked decent enough.

"Let's hope Grandma doesn't kill me for being late" she prayed as she efficiently ran the blower all over her long hair.

In the next minutes, Dara moved as fast as lightning. She had fixed up in even less than the time she had calculated. "Yes!" she exclaimed as she faced the mirror.

She looked... OK but not quite what she had planned for this morning – which reminded her that she wanted to look her prettiest because Ji Yong and his whole family was going to be there. She had bought this white dress, that he had never seen before, just for him and had envisioned herself looking as radiant as the time she and the girls were doing the shoot with Mai-unnie.

"Pyong!" she told herself as she looked up the mirror "I look like a chambermaid instead."

Defeated, she turned back from the mirror and decided to put on her sandals. Going straight to her shoe rack, something glittering inside the white pumps she had decided to wear caught her eye.