Chapter Text
When Beomgyu is conscious enough to open his eyes at least almost to halfway, he’s given approximately 1 second to admire the early sunrise peeking through his blinds until he’s doused in ice cold water.
“Meurgh,” he groans as he gets up to see his culprit, and he’s not surprised in the slightest when it’s Minjeong’s smug face that greets him. “What is this, 2014? What’s with the bucket of ice?”
There’s muted noises and the ruffling of sheets, Taehyun’s head popping up and looking considerably soaked, albeit less than Beomgyu, before he peers at his best friend with betrayed-filled eyes.
Hers widen in surprise until it quickly transforms into mirth as a smile begins to stretch on her face. “Tae, you’re here, too. Oh this is too good… for me,” she smirks before dropping the bucket on Beomgyu’s carpet and running downstairs, not bothering to close the door behind her.
Beomgyu scowls and gets up to trudge to the door and close it while Taehyun observes him, amused. “You’re telling me you willingly hang out with that?”
Taehyun grins in response, carding a hand through his hair. It’s a light brown since he dyed it over the summer; Beomgyu practically forced him when the younger offhandedly wondered out loud if he could pull off colored hair, and Beomgyu wanted to prove a point. Brown wasn’t the most adventurous decision, but it was Beomgyu’s secret agenda to work him up slowly to something like platinum blonde. Because with the amount of times Beomgyu has caught him admiring his new hair color in the sunlight or tugging at his front bangs just to affirm it’s actually brown, he knows it’s only a matter of time until his boyfriend will become obsessed, and Beomgyu will get a visual feast.
As for his own hair, it was still long, just not as long as last year. He’s still in the process of growing it out, and it’s only because he was basically bullied into it. He’d gotten the layers chopped off in June, but he was able to live in peace for about half an hour until it was all ‘Is that a bowl cut?’ and ‘Who even are you?’ and ‘It makes your head look more circular’, whatever the fuck that means. Taehyun had said that a face like his could pull off any hairstyle of lack thereof, and while Beomgyu appreciated it, he still didn’t want to spend his senior year with hair that could pass as a bowl cut.
“Are you sure your parents will mind if I go down there with you? I mean, they like me, right?”
“Liking you is one thing, but letting you sleep over is another,” Beomgyu answers indomitably. “Maybe I can smuggle you a piece of bacon.”
“I hope that’s bacon plural, because I don’t think I could function off one strip of bacon.”
Beomgyu steps in front of Taehyun, who’s risen off the bed to face him, and loops his arms around the other’s shoulders. He lets his hands run against their planes, loving how he could feel the material of his own T shirt under them. “Getting greedy, are we?”
Taehyun shrugs, eyes fixed on his. “I’m insatiable.”
“Well then maybe-”
A throat clears at the doorway. It’s his mom because of course it is, and she stands there in her standard mom-pose of one hand propped on the waist and raises a brow.
“I don’t remember permitting a sleepover,” she muses.
“It was kinda spontaneous,” Beomgyu coughs. “Studying late, you know.”
“Mm hm,” she says with eyes trained on Taehyun’s shirt that says COMMUNITY CLEANUP. Sophomore spring break was rough.
“Don’t let the food get cold.” Beomgyu sighs in relief as she closes the door until she calls out, “And you’re clearing the table, Beomgyu.”
Taehyun has the audacity to snicker even though it’s 100 percent his fault for insisting that he wouldn’t fall asleep to Finding Nemo because it’s his ‘favorite movie ever’. Lying straight through his teeth, apparently- and he knows that Beomgyu’s achilles heel is waking his boyfriend up. It isn’t the first time the weakness has come back to bite him in the ass and won’t be the last.
But he can’t regret it if it means that he gets to wake up with the warmth of Taehyun’s body beside him- minus the bucket of ice water.
After breakfast (and Beomgyu clears the table), they head out the door, while Mom says, “What happened to pictures on the first day of school?”
Both Beomgyu and Minjeong wince at that, and Taehyun politely calls out, “Goodbye, Mrs. Choi. Thanks for breakfast!”
The car ride is filled with talk about how the two juniors are excited to have multiple AP classes, and at this point, Beomgyu has conditioned himself to hold his tongue about how nerdy they both are.
He scoffs. “Yeah, good luck with that. Meanwhile, I am ready to finally be able to meet the nonexistent expectations of being a senior.”
Minjeong raises a brow from the backseat. “Don’t you have to meet with your guidance counselor?”
“Mm.” Beomgyu had strangely gotten an early email notifying him of a mandatory meeting with his guidance counselor, and while it was weird to do on the first day of school, he didn’t think much of it. It was probably the standard incoming senior stuff.
“You don’t think that’s weird?”
“Do you?”
“I think it’s a little weird for them to schedule one so early,” Taehyun says slowly. “But I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Beomgyu hums before he curses as a bright blue convertible cuts in front of him and takes his usual parking spot. Beomgyu had thought he had it bad last year with the soccer team and their unchartable levels of testosterone, but pair that with a trust fund, and a whole new beast was created: the lacrosse team.
He blamed it on the closing of Our Sacred Heart, the only all boys private school in the area that closed down over the summer because of a scandal involving the embezzlement of profits from several of their charity events. As a result, they turned into law offices and sent a swarm of snobby prep kids into Riverside. They were so preppy, they practically made the ASB kids look like slackers.
And now they had a lacrosse team, and it was already obvious that none of them would be having any qualms about taking what was never theirs to begin with. The cherry on top was knowing that the lacrosse team was created with the budget of the canceled arts programs.
“Jesus Christ,” he groans under his breath as a guy shamelessly gets out with another guy in the passenger seat. He’s wearing a blazer over a T-shirt and not embarrassed about it in the slightest, clearly thinking he’s above the dress code. Deciding to humor himself, Beomgyu rolls down his window from where he’s in between the street and the parking lines and calls out, “I was gonna park here, you know.”
The guy looks at him like a deer in the headlights, but the sarcastic exaggeration of it already pisses Beomgyu off. “I do know. But it looks like you weren’t fast enough, buddy.”
Beomgyu clenches his teeth and feels a hand on his shoulder, Taehyun trying to calm him enough to where he doesn’t do something impulsive like accidentally hit the gas pedal. “Just get out here guys,” he says while scanning the lot. “Obviously it’s gonna be a while until I get parking.”
-
“You're probably wondering why we’re having this meeting in advance,” Miss Na says into her cup of coffee. Beomgyu shrugs from the plush orange chair across from her. “Kinda yeah.”
She sighs and takes out a binder before she clicks at her desktop for a bit. Beomgyu waits and makes himself comfortable, looking around at the framed photos. She either has a son or her parents had a midlife crisis. Finally she looks back at Beomgyu and says, “I think you should rearrange your schedule. They don’t total an amount of graduating credits.”
Beomgyu scratches his head and frowns. “I don’t understand, I thought I finished all the ones I had to.”
“Beomgyu you’ve had an elective for your sophomore year and two electives last year. And now, it looks like you signed up for: yearbook, wood shop, and TAing for Ms. Song.” He grins- he was especially looking forward to that. “But you failed biology, Algebra II, PE, and are missing your second year of a foreign language.”
“But I took an online class over the summer for that.” Beomgyu took several online classes over the span of his three summers in high school. How could he forget- they ruined his summer each time.
Miss Na sighs again and lightly pushes her coffee mug away, looking at him more sternly. “You can take an elective or two, but these ones don’t look very good on college applications.” She points to several classes circled with her pen. “These ones would look better.”
Beomgyu immediately cringes upon reading the one titled ‘freshman mentoring’. He had absolutely no advice of value for Minjeong and she’s only a year younger than him. “I don’t know…”
She fixes him with a vaguely maternal glare. “You need to take algebra II, it’s the last math requirement for graduating. And this is all discounting the community service and extracurriculars you’ll need.” Before he can groan because this is all obviously getting a bit too ridiculous, she cuts him off. “Really, it’s your own fault for pushing this all off until the last minute.”
So much for his senior year plans. What was supposed to be his easiest year was looking to be a lot more than a breeze.
What’s worse is he can’t use the argument that he doesn’t plan on going to college, which has been his excuse this whole time. It was still true, but the consensus he and his mom agreed on was that he’d apply to at least 2 universities and get accepted into 1. If he couldn't do that, then he’d be failing to hold up his end of the deal and it’d be official- he’d just be an ungrateful, failure of a son.
“So where should I start?”
-
Soobin snorts into his chili cheese fries from across the cafeteria table. “You walked into this so hard.”
Beomgyu rolls his eyes. “You’re one to talk. I don’t even know what your schedule is, but I know you can’t say that you’ll have enough to graduate.” He frowns and inspects the bandaid peeling off his bloodied finger. “Mine will be fixed by tomorrow, but today I had shop and forgot to put on the gloves.”
Taehyun lifts the finger to his mouth and gently kisses it, chiding, “That’s like going to bat without an actual bat.”
“No sports analogies please,” Beomgyu frowns. “How the hell am I supposed to cram a bunch of units and extracurriculars into one year?”
“You can always join band. It’s the only arts program we have left, after all,” Soobin offers.
“No.” Frankly, he’d rather join the tree planting club or anything else, really, than fully assimilate to the cult that is band kids.
Yeonjun raises a judgemental brow as he takes some fries from Soobin’s tray. “ Both of you stepped in it. Honestly, I don’t understand how you can struggle so bad to even graduate.” He sips through his reusable straw and adds through a grimace, “Meanwhile, my competition for valedictorian has been upped by a thousand since the Bible thumpers moved in.”
Arin plops down her tray looking more frazzled than Beomgyu’s ever seen her within the premises of Riverside and all but collapses at the end of the table with an aggressive huff. It was jarring to see this from the person who walks to class five minutes after the tardy bell.
“Freaks. All of them.” She shivers and wipes her hands on her skirt pleats before unwrapping her cheeseburger with shaky fingers.
“Jeez, what happened to you?”
“The new guys,” she scowls. “It’s so obvious they came from an all-boys’ school. It’s like they’ve never interacted with a female in their entire incel lives.”
Soobin’s expression darkens as he pushes all of his fries to Yeonjun and demands “What did they do? Did they touch you?”
Arin sighs and pushes her freshly cut bangs away from her face. “No, they just said a bunch of gross stuff to me on my way here.”
Taehyun pats her hand in reassurance. “Unfortunately, I don’t think anything good is coming out of them coming here.”
That was for sure. They couldn’t even eat lunch at their usual spot on the bleachers since there were actual people there spectating the lacrosse game taking place on the football field.
“If you join a bunch of clubs in your senior year, it’ll just look like you did it for college apps,” Yeonjun says to Beomgyu. “Your best bet is making your own club.”
“You can make a music club!” Taehyun says excitedly, shaking Beomgyu’s shoulder. “Since the actual music programs shut down, I’m sure plenty of people will be interested in it.”
Arin hums in agreement. “Yeah, and I’m sure if we all sign the club petition, it’ll be enough signatures.”
Club president- that was something that could potentially tie his applications together. It would brush the fact that he had to repeat four classes under the rug and, more importantly, advertise him as someone with leadership abilities. Beomgyu is no stranger to leading things; after all, he was the one who posted any kind of update on their instagram even though Soobin and Arin both had the page’s password and were automatically logged in. He was kind of their band’s unofficial leader, so maybe a music club wouldn’t be too far out of his comfort zone.
-
After the last period bell rings, Yeonjun finds his locker being barricaded by someone. It doesn’t take much sleuthing to deduce that the guy is from Sacred Heart given that he’s matched his school uniform with actual leather dress shoes instead of Converse like anyone else at Riverside. He slaps on a polite smile and taps on the guy’s shoulder.
“Excuse me, sorry, this is my locker.”
The guy just smirks at him and leans a forearm across the top, creating a rather compromising position between the two. “I know. I go out of my way to notice things about the people I find…” He brushes a finger under Yeonjun’s chin, and wow - there’s direct, and then there’s this guy. “Interesting.”
“Right…”
He straightens his position and holds a hand out. He’s wearing cufflinks that Yeonjun wouldn’t be surprised were pure silver or something. “I’m Henry.”
“Yeonjun. Do you mind if I-”
Henry steps to the side with a flourishing gesture, and it takes everything within Yeonjun to not burst out in laughter. It seemed like he rehearsed the interaction.
When Henry continues to linger next to Yeonjun’s locker, the other eyes him with curiosity. “I was wondering if you would want to accompany me somewhere.”
“Now?”
“Yes. That one’s mine,” he says, gesturing to a gleaming silver car with expensive rims. It’s parked at the curbside, and a man in a suit is waiting beside the door.
Yeonjun can’t believe this is real life. People like this actually exist, and they apparently don’t take no for an answer, because soon enough, he’s being dragged to the school parking lot towards the silver car.
“Hold on-”
“You’re probably wondering where we’re going.” Henry smiles at him, and Yeonjun thinks the other is convinced it’s charming. “But I’ll let your imagination run first.”
“Can I talk, please ?” he snaps, making the other flinch in surprise.
Who did this guy think he was, and what did he think this was, Wattpad? Yeonjun thought it was amusing at first, but this guy really thought Yeonjun would be charmed by being whisked away to god knows where with not just him, but him and a creepy butler. And more importantly, he already had a ride.
“Sorry, but someone’s taking me. My boyfriend , and he puts your little setup to shame.”
At that, Henry’s expression does a complete 180, and he raises a brow in challenge. “Oh, really?”
“Mm hm. I didn’t want to say anything, but it’s actually kind of embarrassing if you compare the two.”
“I see,” he hums in thought before scanning the parking lot at all the other cars. Several of them also had people in suits standing beside the passenger door.
“And there he is now!”
Soobin rolls up in the car he’d gotten over the summer, a used one that Brick reworked and still had some kinks that needed to be fixed. The loud gurgling sound was what Yeonjun assumed to be one of said kinks.
Yeonjun takes a minute to admire his boyfriend as he fiddles with the gearshift. Soobin finally got over his irrational fear of contacts and got a pair over the summer. It was an upgrade if only for the fact that Yeonjun didn’t have to worry about knocking them off when they made out anymore. Of course, Soobin still wore cargo shorts with his uniform and more often than not, they were way lower than intended, but baby steps is what Yeonjun was considering it.
“That?” Henry splutters with a finger pointed at Soobin as he gets out and slams the door shut, the side view mirror immediately rattling against the side. He bends over and inspects the car before spotting Yeonjun and waving the bag of gummy worms he must have gotten at the gas station while Yeonjun was waiting.
“Yup.”
Yeonjun runs toward him, jumping into his arms, and Soobin is visibly shocked for a moment until he just smiles and hugs him back with just as much furor. It garnered some questioning stares, but Yeonjun loved a good dramatic moment.
“What was that for?”
“I’ll tell you on the way back,” he promises before tugging him in for a kiss. His eyes meet Henry’s narrowed ones from where he’s still loitering on the curbside, watching them. Maybe the private school invasion was good for something; Yeonjun got some pretty good entertainment out of it.
-
“Okay, so no more woodshop. How about…” Taehyun circles another class on the spreadsheet they were using to alter Beomgyu’s schedule. “Independent study tutoring.”
Beomgyu lifts a questioning brow to his boyfriend. “Me? A tutor?”
Taehyun presents him with a knowing smile. “My elective is independent studying.”
“Ah, ulterior motives,” Beomgyu smirks, throwing an arm over the junior from where they were lightly swaying on Beomgyu’s porch swing. “Now I see the appeal.”
“You should really replace the TA period, by the way. It really does nothing for your college apps.”
Beomgyu frowns, insisting, “But I was looking forward to that.”
Taehyun pats the hand perched on his shoulder with sympathy. “I know. But think about graduation- you wouldn’t want to repeat another year of high school, right?”
Beomgyu lays his head on Taehyun’s shoulder. “If I did, we’d have another year together.”
“Don’t tempt me, I’m trying to help you,” Taehyun says while carding his fingers through the strands of Beomgyu’s hair. “You’re going to walk that stage, and you’re going to get accepted into a university.”
Beomgyu tiredly mouths against Taehyun’s shoulder before rolling his head into his neck and feeling another hand come up to stroke his hair. Taehyun had this habit of saying things like they were universal law and not just one outcome of many, and while Beomgyu wouldn’t take that kind of optimism seriously with anyone else, he knew it was born out of his boyfriend’s belief in him. Beomgyu felt a physical ache at the thought of leaving this.
“I’ll be around,” he promises. It’s quiet for a moment as Taehyun doesn’t say anything to that. Beomgyu doesn’t make baseless promises anymore; even if he does get accepted somewhere, he’s sticking to his original plan. He’ll take all the time he can get with Taehyun.