How 21 Students Saved the World

14 - Jihoon and Soonyoung

tw: attempted suicide, you can skip this chapter if you want

"Can you believe we're about to start middle school?" Soonyoung told his best friend, Jihoon, who was helping him build a house with craft sticks in the orphanage after dinner. "It's going to be so much fun."

To Jihoon, it didn't sound like fun at all - the movies always portrayed it as more homework and more bullies. However, he knew the media lied all the time, too, so he knew he shouldn't get worried. He still couldn't feel himself get excited, though.

"Let's just hope everything goes okay," he said, carefully squeezing the bottle of glue on the side of the house so that the sticks could, well... stick. "It's different from elementary, that's for sure."

"Oh, soon we'll go to high school and then college and BAM we're going to have pretty wives and children and go to Disney World with our grown up jobs," Soonyoung rambled, not paying attention to his wooden house at all. He always did that. "You know that annoying girl, Kasey, who always blocks everyone in the hallway? She was showing her pictures to everyone, including to Niall and Jeffrey, and they thought the trip was amazing."

Jihoon shrugged. Him and Soonyoung have never gone to amusement parks, much less Disney World. All the kids with families and a little extra money always went there, including to trips to Florida and Hawaii and even other countries, like wherever that Cancun was. It was most probable that Soonyoung and Jihoon wouldn't have those experiences with families, only on their own once they're older and age out of the system.

It has always been Jihoon's dream to go to South Korea, because of Kpop or whatever some crazy fan girls in school talked about, like Tracy and Angela in his math class. No, it's because he was Korean, him and Soonyoung.

He always knew he looked a bit different compared to other kids in school, and that's because he figured he wasn't white as those kids were called, but Asian instead, which meant he might get discriminated against. He didn't know why that was a thing anyways; hating someone because their eyes were different was pretty stupid. He thought adults were supposed to be smart.

Soonyoung had these thin eyes which people in their class always made fun of him about, calling him the usual Chinese stereotypes. Soonyoung would often cry a lot if he was bullied too much, and it was Jihoon's job to glare at people until they ran away.

But yeah, it was his dream to go to the place where there were people like him, who had his name like him and spoke Korean. Jihoon didn't know much, but him and Soonyoung were learning it together, and soon, they were able to have their own conversations in Korean and have people not understand them. Most of the Asian kids in school were Vietnamese anyways.

Suddenly, Jihoon saw Soonyoung wave his hand at him. "Hello?? Woozi?? Are you paying attention?"

Woozi, the nickname he had come up with. Soonyoung and Jihoon thought it would be pretty cool to have a nickname, since they didn't have middle names like a lot of kids in their class. Jihoon would be Woozi and Soonyoung would be Hoshi. They never called each other by their real names anyways. The Hoshi-Woozi combo, Soonyoung would call themselves. Nothing could separate them, nothing.

"My bad, I was thinking," Jihoon said, paying attention to his wooden house again. "What were you saying?"

"That if you think we should go to an amusement park after we graduate from high school," Soonyoung repeated himself. "Ooh, I know, we should definitely spend graduation day together and maybe even go straight to Disney World!"

"If we have the money," Jihoon agreed. "And I get to have pizza bagel bites."

"Then it's a deal!" Soonyoung shrieked, bumping his knee on the table, causing his bad wooden house to dismantle. "Aw, dang nabbit. I spent a lot of time on that."