[~~~Posted Feb. 18 2021
A/N: So you know the addictiveness of a K-drama or C-drama? Those longing gazes? And how your brain melts down when the leads finally kiss?
the goal here is to make a giant ball of cuteness which starts rolling 50 miles away, gets closer and closer, until it hits us and we all fall down in a gooey, grinning fan-girl (and fan-boy) mess. Anyways—wish me luck! And THANK YOU for reading]
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A tall, broad-shouldered guy strides across a campus courtyard. His crisp button-down shirt opens right below his collarbones. In the morning light, his skin seems to glow. His aura's magnetic.
It's the first week of school. From a nearby doorway, a crowd of girls see him and start taking pictures.
Click. Click. Click.
They barely even hide what they're doing.
One girl whispers, "I hear he's going to move off campus soon. Gotta get all our pictures now!"
Brushing the hair from his forehead, Lukas ignores them all.
It's the best strategy for now.
He just walks on. A cold, distant expression on his face.
Feeding the animals just makes them hungrier...
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The first day of freshman year..
Someone—a janitor, probably—left a window cracked open in Kaia Regan Bei's new dorm room. With each gust of wind outside, a cedar tree in the courtyard shook and rustled. The smell of autumn was dry and sharp.
Kai fought the urge to do a 1000-meter dash outside and board the next flight home.
WTF! What the heck are you doing here!?
If only the universe could rewind back two years.
That's all she wanted: to go back two years.
She could go back to being just that girl. The girl who couldn't ice-skate.
The weirdo who once bought a whole ice-cream cake from Albertson's, just for the crunchy middle cookie layer.
She could go back to being the girl who made a BTS "Dynamite" dance challenge video with her best friend Beth. Good Lord in heaven, that video.
(It literally got 10,000 views before Kai pulled it from the internet in horror, Beth cackling the whole time: "Stop being so embarrassed about everything, Kai.")
("Beth." Kai said. "We're dancing in frickin' EASTER BUNNY costumes.")
That was two years ago. Now, things were different. Kai wasn't that person anymore.
And now?
Now, everyone at high school thought of Kai as THAT girl. The girl in the local news.
The girl whose parents and friend died in that freak accident on the US 101.
Let us know if we can do anything to help, they all said. Over and over.
And now she was headed to college. Where no one knew what'd happened
How were you supposed to meet hundreds of new people all day? Acting all chipper and friendly? Avoiding the truth?
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Somehow Kai hauled herself across the country, and made it to college.
Yale University.
She knew two things about her roommate. Girl's name was Lilly Zhao and she came from Lawrence, Kansas.
With luck, Lilly Zhao would be a sociopath. A stone-cold psycho, with murder in her eyes.
Because—with a psycho roommate, you had total permission to slink around and stay outta the away. You could keep to yourself. Not have to explain every time your eyes turned red with tears.
Welp. It wasn't looking like Lilly Zhao was a psycho.
That first day of college, Kai found herself staring into the broad grin of a curly-haired, petite girl who said "I'm Lilly!" Then she added: "OK. Time to reveal some key intel: I still sleep...
... holding a stuffed animal!"
Lilly fished a teddy bear out of her sky-blue suitcase. "He's a little beat-up, I know."
Beat-up was an understatement. Dude was a Level 3 Biohazard. A fist-sized cloud of stuffing exploded out of its face like puke
Kai had to laugh. "I brought stuffed animals too!"
She pulled out three stuffed cacti—
Then Lilly learned:
Those weren't Kai's only cacti.
Nope. This was just the beginning.
Kai reached into a paper bag and pulled out ...a REAL cactus.
Kai said, "This is Barry the Cactus. Barry, meet Lilly."
Then she turned pink.
"Er... I name my plants," Kai confessed. "And I talk to them. I might as well tell you now, before you hear me talking."
Lilly crawled out from under her desk with her laptop charger. "It's OK!" the petite girl with glasses told Kai. "I talk to myself! We're even."
Then Lilly asked, "Why's he called Barry?"
Kai suddenly remembered her dad's role in naming Barry. Always go with a pun, dad used to say. When in doubt, the answer is a pun.
But Kai just told Lilly, "Because he's a golden barrel cactus. Get it? Barrel, Barry—"
Kai listened to herself talk.
Do you HAVE to expose yourself as SUCH a huge dork? On the first day of college...?
But Lilly grinned: "I think we're going to get along just fine."
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Just then a flurry of noise came from the courtyard. Lilly pushed aside their new gauze curtains to check out the scene.
And she inhaled.
Kai put Barry down and went to join Lilly by the window.
In the courtyard, a tall, broad-shouldered guy walked across the path. From a nearby doorway five girls giggled, raising their phones to track his movements. The sunlight gleamed bright in the guy's hair, which fell over his forehead into his eyes.
"Who is that?" Lilly said. "A celebrity?"
Kai squinted. "He's dressed like a student. An upperclassman?" Kai squinted.
"But he's hot enough to be an A-list movie star. Good Fawkin-God. Look at him." Lilly shook her head. "Imagine being him. Or even knowing him!"
"Yeah—" said Kai. "It's gotta get tiring, being stalked like that." She felt, well, a little sorry for him.
Who is he?
What's his deal?
Kai's roommate Lilly was already on her laptop. Scrolling through campus message boards and looking for answers.
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🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱
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