“excuse me!” 

chaewon’s speaking voice was relatively quiet. she never had to shout or anything when she was growing up. back then, her peers tended to listen to her by default. even so, she was sure she could be heard over the hum of the convenience store refrigerator. she just needed to shuffle past this guy a little bit ... then get up onto the very tips of her toes ... and then she should, in theory, have been able to reach the top shelf, where her favourite variation of coffee evaded her by mere centimetres. 

her theory was wrong, as it turned out. chaewon was left with two options. one: admit defeat and ask someone, like the guy beside her, to reach it. two: climb up onto the bottom shelf of the fridge like it was a ladder rung and risk looking like an idiot on a much more substantial scale. option one was clearly the winner.

chaewon was a bit on the bored side these days. she just couldn’t seem to settle on anything. if she sat down to watch something, she couldn’t focus on the screen. if she started to learn a new dance or to play a new song on her guitar, her mind wandered. none of her usual techniques seemed to be sticking. maybe that was how she ended up browsing the spines of some manga in a bookshop. she recognized some nerdy kid back at school in london who used to carry around a few of the names she saw. she’d always had a bit of a closet interest in anime and manga, but had never delved further than subconsciously remembering some of the names and art of the stuff that was popular in her early teens. 

the choice, it seemed, was endless. where the hell was she meant to start? after scanning title after title for near on fifteen minutes, chaewon was starting to get pissed off -- with the writers and artists for producing so much of the stuff in the first place, and with herself, for not even being able to decide on something as simple this. 

there were a couple of other people in the section, who chaewon automatically assumed were more well versed than her. she considered asking one of them for a recommendation, but decided since she probably wouldn’t even get past the first five pages, that she wouldn’t bother. just as she turned to leave, she found herself faced directly with someone.

chaewon wasn’t really much of one for idol groups. she followed girl groups to an extent, mostly because she enjoyed learning new choreography, and because she knew their faces from beauty and fashion ads she spent her time flicking through, but she couldn’t actively call herself a fan or a stan or whatever of any of them. boy groups were less interesting to her. chaewon had no interest in the boyfriend fantasy that they were marketed with -- if anyone cared to ask, she was happy being single. but after the singing class ran by and*roma’s gyeoul, chaewon found she had a new appreciation for nova entertainment’s newest girl group. in the little goodie bag she’d been given at the end of the class, she’d found a signed polaroid of gyeoul herself, a little instax photo that she had no idea what to do with. chaewon eventually ended up tucking it into the back of her phone case, like she’d seen fans do with their photocards. if anybody saw it, the genuine signature and the story behind it might make for decent small talk.

anybody did not include gyeoul herself. 

as soon as chaewon found herself face to face with the idol, she tucked her phone into the bag strapped across her chest. chaewon was briefly tempted to act like she didn’t see gyeoul, but quickly decided that that would only reflect poorly on herself should they ever meet again. instead she politely greeted her before confidently doing her best to leave a good impression.

“i still can’t believe you dyed your hair back to black,” chaewon whined as she sat back in her seat. greedily, she’d taken the booth side of their table at the café for herself. sure, it had been like three months or something since jinsoul did it, but chaewon was still mourning it, even if nobody else was. she ran her hands through her own blonde strands of hair, which were steadily becoming more and more fried by the day, ever since jinsoul first bleached it for her months and months ago. “it suits you though. it definitely suits you better than if you bleached your scalp bald.” 

because chaewon couldn’t ever just give a friend a sincere compliment without some kind of back handed element. she couldn’t find it in herself to feel bad about it, however. lately, she’d been struggling between making an effort to be kinder or staying snide and bitchy. the latter option was much, much easier. there was a while there that she was semi-focused on being a better person, but in the last couple of weeks, she wasn’t so interested in it anymore. she felt stuck, like she wasn’t seeing any progress. it was best that she kept to what she was good at. chaewon took a sip of her coffee, scalding hot and bitter to taste. she lowered her cup and quirked one side of her mouth.

“you’re pretty enough to stand out without the blonde though ...” 

h&m was possibly chaewon’s least favourite shop back home in london once upon a time. there was a specific place she could stand, somewhere on the intersection between regent street and oxford street, that she could see three different h&m stores just from that spot alone. back then, she could afford to turn her nose up at cheap fashion thanks to her parents’ high ranking jobs. nowadays, living off of inheritance and her own meager income, shopping exclusively from luxury brands wasn’t something chaewon could afford to do anymore. granted, she still bought a considerable amount of designer junk ... just a lot less, but with a lot more high street junk piled on top. 

chaewon perused the racks of dresses, idly humming to herself as she went until she spotted a familiar head of hair from across the aisle. the employee in question was a girl around chaewon’s age, maybe a year or two younger, and she’d rung up chaewon’s exuberant purchases a few times in the past -- then, chaewon spotted her in that speak up freestyle dance workshop last week. chaewon didn’t say hi then, frankly she hadn’t been in the mood for so much as conversation that day, never mind the teamwork that was part of the class. she probably wouldn’t have said hi this time either, had she not stupidly caught the other girl’s eye.