The Reason? - Yoon Jeonghan

Chapter 13

     Ophely silently sat down at the back of the dance studio as the others filmed themselves. After the lie the company had announced, she shouldn't appear in any of the videos until further notice, but she should still be around the boys to learn Korean and other important pieces of Jeonghan's life. Like learning how to dance and sing (that second part had been quickly forgotten). And it wasn't easy as some of the boys spoke very quickly, used dialects or didn't even finish their words. They danced at a rapid pace, going over the moves far too quickly for her to understand or separate the moves, and they did a lot of runs as a full group, so all thirteen of them were in the middle of the room.

     Ophely decided not to participate in those big practices as she couldn't keep up with the boys and often made a whole mess in the positions. So she silently sat at the side of the room, away from the cameras.

     With the medical leave reasoned as overworking, Jeonghan had to not be very active and was said to have taken time off work to stay with his family, which wasn't the truth. Being on the side of videos and other public activities meant that the public didn't know that Ophely in Jeonghan's body didn't speak Korean. That she wasn't where she wasn't supposed to be. She was also glad that Jeonghan's mother hadn't called her since the beginning of the holidays, more than a week before.

     So Ophely sat down against the wall with a laptop on her lap as she wrote emails to Jeonghan, explaining what to do on her behalf while her parents were away to see the family. He didn't have it easy either, with studying for midterms and staying in contact with her friends, who didn't know of the Switching case. That's what they started to refer to the body-swapping thing as, The Switching Case, something that still needed to be resolved.

     Weirdly enough, it seemed that Ophely somehow knew, deep down, how to speak Korean. Her reading and writing had come naturally, and speaking was just starting to become second nature to her. That was a bit far-fetched, but close to the truth. It didn't take her five minutes to translate the simple question of '이름이 뭐에요? '. Even if that was very useful, it still wasn't enough for Ophely to be fluent, or know the whole Korean dictionary. She still struggled to fluently talk to the boys, putting her with the staff would raise a lot of questions. She also didn't talk the same way Jeonghan did, didn't put the same intonations. She just wasn't the same person, so it was expected that her accent wouldn't be the same. But still, some ways still stuck, or the two simply had the same way of acting, and those moments really troubled the boys, it wasn't truly Jeonghan in front of them. ('What's your name?')

     So Ophely was now sitting on a bench, watching the boys as they filmed themselves having fun, playing around, talking loudly, laughing. Globally making Ophely miss her friends even more than she had before. Ophely would feign sleeping whenever they forgot to not show him on camera and the lens passed by her. Jeonghan was supposed to be reposing himself, not partake in the boys' activities.

     It was weird for the boys to leave Jeonghan out of the loop as he was one very sneaky member, their time on camera were of the same, and their time at home wasn't either. Living with only the shell of your friend was weird, weird enough when they acted like a completely different person, reactions to minute things really making the whole ordeal awkward for some. Ophely's reflexes were much different from Jeonghan's. When you live with so many people, you are kind of used to having people touching you all of the time, but Ophely wasn't used to being constantly smothered, pushed and pranked. It especially showed in the way she reacted to certain things.

     Three days after the change, she had already punched two of the boys in the guts and escaped the sudden hugs, causing the boys in question to fall. She apologized profusely right after. But it was during those moments that the boys realised that it was Jeonghan living with them but a pure stranger.