Dark Matter | JJK

12. Enigma

As the last of the spring breezes whisked away the month of April like dried leaves swirling in the air, the unforgiving summer sun heralded – along with the muggy hot ambience – an unending cycle of research projects and thesis submission deadlines for all university students,  stuck between getting four hours of sleep and living on packets of instant ramen.

Even the jovial and ever-excited Hyun Seunghee seemed to be drained of all her energy. So when Petra flopped down on the chair opposite from hers in the common room, she was not surprised when Seunghee refused to lift her eyes from the pile of ruled papers on the table to deviate her concentration and acknowledge her friend.

"Excuse me while I ignore you for a while longer, Peter Pan," she said, her index finger of pointing to a sentence in a thick hard-covered book while she furiously scribbled bullet points on a paper, her hair pulled up in a haphazard bun atop her head.

"You're not ignoring me anymore now, are you?" Petra asked, eyeing her bemusedly. Never before had she seen Seunghee so serious about anything that was not chocolate-chip muffins or the apparently good-looking first-years on campus. "How long have you been sitting here?"

"Three hours." She stopped abruptly in the action of marking a small horizontal line on a t, stared at the paper for a moment, and groaned so loudly that several heads turned in their direction.

"What?" Petra asked, chuckling at her antics.

Seunghee pouted like an exasperated child, looking back and forth between her friend and the paper before her. "I made a mistake...I guess – I guess I skipped a line or something..."

Just as she was about to crumple in paper in a fit of anger Petra snatched it away from her, not only because Seunghee had dedicated an entirety of three hours to its completion but also because the girl was in dire need of a break.

Seunghee scowled at her, threatening her with a pencil while trying to take back her paper.

"Wait up," Petra said, neatly folding the paper and holding it far from her reach. "You're going to go crazy if you don't take a break. Trust me, just stop for a while."

Seunghee hesitated, dramatically rolled her eyes and finally sat back in her seat, sighing.

Petra unfolded the paper and momentarily let her eyes span the words written. "What are you working on by the way? This doesn't look like your literature thesis."

"No shit, it isn't," Seunghee muttered, untying her bun and running her fingers through her hair. "It's a news report. You won't believe me, Petra – I've been interning under such a jerk of a journalist, so what if he's the chief journalist of S+TV? Does that give him the right to be so rude to others below him? That goddamn nincompoop, it's not been two days since I've started working for him and he knows that I'm an all-time university student but he still gives me report after report to write as if I'm the most stupid, jobless hag out there begging to do his work for him –"

"If he thought you were stupid, he wouldn't have given you so much work to do –"

"– and when you make a mistake he'll look at you like he wants to give you a spanking but rest of the time it's almost like he's not got an ounce of sleep for all his life and it's so irritating when he stares at you like you're the dumbest person alive. But, Petra, holy moly Petranella, he's so freaking sexy it's almost unfair – do all hot guys have to be assholes? And, hey – are you even listening? Petra?"

Petra blinked once to find Seunghee waving her hand before her eyes, frowning heavily. Everyday, Petra would allow her friend to rant about her problems and would listen attentively, not bothering to nod or express her thoughts but simply staring at her face, almost zoning out while Seunghee's lips moved nonstop and hands gesticulated wildly in the air, waving around and pounding aggressively on the table as though weaving a spider web out of her problems.