A Curious Thing: Chapter 1
And here's chapter one, written while I should be writing my two essays due in less than a week...but it's okay. That can always wait :D Pretty short chapter, but they will get better (I think).
Title: A Curious Thing
Fandoms: After School & 2PM
Pairing: Raina & Wooyoung (and others)
Rating: PG/PG-13
A CURIOUS THING: CHAPTER 1
My real name is Oh Hye Rin, but I hate it. It makes me stand out; it makes people stare when they run a finger down a roster, so the name I tell people to use is Raina. Raina Oh. It’s not perfect either and it’s still different, but I like it and it’s what I settled on after some debate with my parents, who constantly stress pride in my homeland.
I’ve always been a normal child, the one that prefers to watch from the sidelines or hang out with just a small circle of friends. I would be the one to find the seat in class furthest from the teacher’s desk, not because I had something terrible to hide, but because I wanted to hide myself. I always liked to stay out of the line of fire, out of that crowd gathering around some quarrel or fight. I was content with just being there, with just my closest friends. Nothing more, because that would mean taking risks which almost certainly leads to trouble. And trouble is something I never wanted to be in the vicinity of, but all that would change.
The teachers used to ask me whether I wanted to join the kids on the slide, or if I would like a cupcake from the birthday boy when he simply passed right by me because I made myself unnoticeable. My answer was always no; the less I wanted, the better I could hide.
My friends were different though. Admittedly, I’ve only ever had two friends I consider close; everyone else was just an acquaintance, people I would make nice with so they wouldn’t cause trouble for me, but those two were all I needed. Their names are Lizzy and Nathalie, but Lizzy calls her Nana and the name stuck. Lizzy is a year younger than me, and Nana is two years older. Lizzy’s the crazy one. She knows it and she loves it, and she sounds like a four year old on the phone. But I don’t really blame her; she had a crazy childhood with her real parents and somehow, she got herself into a foster home and is now adopted by an elderly American couple. She just vents out all her confusion on that feeling of ecstasy. I actually haven’t seen her sleep, not even stop to take a nap. Thank goodness for Nana though. She is, you could say, the “leader” in the sense that she knows what she’s doing and she seems to always know what’s best for us. She’s cautious and reserved, levelheaded even in the most urgent situations. It’s probably because she’s had to take care of two sets of twins younger than her while her mother worked overtime to feed the family when her father was out drinking the money away. The one thing she can’t do though, is to get Lizzy to calm down and go to sleep, but then again, I don’t think that’s possible. Me, I’m kind of in the middle, perhaps more with Nana, just without all those childhood issues. To put it bluntly, I’m a misfit. I don’t really try to fit in anywhere; whatever happens, I just let it go and keep my mouth shut. We’re a strange group, and if you think about it right, we’re actually all just misfits put together, and that’s why we mesh so well.
We were inseparable all through high school, and we’re all students at the University of Chicago. Me and Nana got used to it quickly, but Lizzy’s had problems with the whole college thing. She rooms next to me and Nana, and I doubt her roommate gets any sleep. In fact, they might as well move her to our dorm seeing as she’s there the whole time anyway, so her roommate doesn’t get a chance to kick her out.
Honestly, I don’t understand why they ever wanted to befriend me because normally, I don’t attract people, and that’s my purpose: to go about life doing things myself. At first I thought they were talking to me and inviting me to join them for lunch out of pity and I hate that too. I know I sound hypocritical, but I could never stand being pitied. I don’t take things that were given to me out of pity. But somewhere along the road, I found that what these two felt toward me wasn’t pity, but a genuine desire for friendship. With me, of all people. But these two were persistent, and they finally got to me. I’m glad they did because, as cliché as it sounds, our trio was definitely meant to be. It’s one of those things you look back on and think, this was so freaking obvious, why didn’t I see it earlier?
Well, that summer before Lizzy entered college, Lizzy’s parents, on a totally random whim, decided that me and Nana ought to take her for a vacation, so the day after school ended, we packed the car with our suitcases and snacks, and Nana drove us down to Ocean City, Maryland, where Lizzy’s parents had rented a condo near the sea. They should’ve seen the consequences beforehand; our little group of oddities was bound to get in some sort of trouble, but nobody can tell the future, so the only thing we could do was let it happen.