BAD REPUTATIONS

Outspoken, short-tempered Lina Qureshi-King is a storm to be reckoned with.

She knows she's a bitch. As horrid as the word is, little Miss Qureshi-King had internalised it a long, long, long time ago, content to be as harsh as others expected her to be. And she doesn't intend on changing.

Yet, luck would decide otherwise.

When Min-Ji Beom sits beside her one fine fall morning, Lina couldn't even begin to suspect that this sweet, pretty, ❝ popular ❞ girl would turn her whole existence upside down. As if science with the worst teacher alive weren't already a major problem to juggle in senior year, now she is stuck with a girl whose desire to be friends is unrelenting - and Lina is sure her meanness would chew the poor girl up and spit her out.

But it isn't until Lina is locked in a closet playing Seven Minutes in Heaven at Min-Ji's birthday party that she meets someone else who, up until that night, popular as he was, had still been a stranger to her; she'd met her match...

Lina had no desire to be caught up with the likes of James Frans and nor would she have expected him to seek her attention.
Didn't he know she had a reputation? That she would never be the kind of girlfriend he was used to having?
Chain-smoking at his former French boarding school and being a little aloof seemed to never besmirch the image of Frans perfection around town; but if she'd ever let him have her, she would make sure to expose him for the annoying, entitled, spoiled brat he was... But that would involve being around him, and that was simply out of the question.

The more he was around her, the more she realised her own irritating traits.

Too bad that, yet again, luck would have otherwise.

WARNING: unreliable narrator, who's also a little bit of a shit.