@mlleitie
It’s been five minutes in the making. five minutes of prolonged irritation, five minutes of a scrunched up smile and amused brows.
setting? Gyeongdam cafeteria. it’s never anything special. the cafeteria breaks the record for forced individuality that instead settles as awkward conformity. Cliques. they’re everywhere they’re obvious and it’s no longer unspoken that people separate themselves into them. Hell even the teachers sit with their own cliques. Forty year old virgin teacher who stutter when approaching senior girls, fresh out of college teachers with apples on their desks and virgin smiles, the teachers who talk shit about the other teachers, the teachers who are fucking other teachers. No one says anything, everyone pretends. It’s superficial and they wear the masks cheap and overdrawn. it’s tacky. it makes his face scrunch when he passes the tables.
That’s not what bothers him.
There are the rich kids by marriage, so their parents married into wealth, there are the future business kids who study too hard and don’t let enough of their adolescent vulgar run free. There are the prodigies, athletic stars, the jocks and the ones who always take a picture in the mirror after leaving the gym. Everyone maneuvers around each other not like someone outside their clique is the plague but more like intermingling is foreign and gross and they might spurt warts if they so much as look at each other. It’s fucking dumb. It’s the high school equivalent of cooties. He’s tired of it. He’s accepted it but he’s tired of it, he’s always going to be. it makes him sigh into the chatter clogged atmosphere and look around with amusement.
That’s not what bothers him either.
Walking into the cafeteria is easy, he gets smiles from almost every other group and the ones that don’t smile will probably smile later, in another environment or in another space. The jocks ask him if he’s throwing a pre-game party to which he shrugs. Some girls ask him if he’s dumped his girlfriend yet, he doesn’t even have one. Some kid whose father just entered a partnership with his own asks if they can hang out, he says yeah. Everyone has speculations and expectations and Seunghun’s just trying to cruise by. He’s trying to ignore the guy with an arm around his shoulder with a mouth smelling of too much kimchi and too much weed. He’s going to ask seunghun for a hit later. Another girl leans too close against his side, fingers curling into his arm. She smells of a perfume his mom endorsed last week. Typical.
It’s still not what bothers him.
No what bothers him is past the ten minutes it takes to enter the cafeteria. what bothers him is five minutes of staring, raised brows and the first genuine scowl to cross his features since he entered. what bothers him breaks his reverie and doesn’t really bother him. it entertains him, makes him grin with this fond disgust that he would admit to no one. he hasn’t touched his food, probably won’t. instead his hands lean against the table, one elbow perched on so his chin can rest in his palm.
“yah.” he reaches forward to push her forehead back. it probably won’t catch, she’ll probably bite his finger. well she would. if her mouth wasn’t full of whatever concoction she’s stuffed into the lettuce. “yah what the hell are you entering a chipmunk contest later? do you get a lifetime supply of banana milk if you can fit the most in your cheeks.” it’s not that she’s not ladylike he could care less. it’s not that he cares that it’s bad manners even though he’s been raised on good ones. it’s that the obscene picture it makes doesn’t have him scowling for long and he’s doing his best to prevent the scowl from turning into a grin. it’s hard.
so he switches his hand’s direction midway and turns to tug at her cheeks instead hoping to make the image even more obscene and ridiculous so his words will hold their usual bite and banter. “yah yah yah food doesn’t even taste that good when you’ve shoved it all in.” his face still contorts in usual disgust but it threatens to fall.
that’s what bothers him. the lack of banter. the lack of bite.
man what the hell.