SUGAR KISS [YEONBIN] ✓

two

The first thing I learn when I set foot on SICU’s campus is that I am woefully unprepared for this. The second is that I hate Choi Yeonjun. Both of these things reveal themselves in a single incident.

I drag my suitcase up the little sidewalk that twists and turns its way up to the school, bumping over every square of pavement. I feel like I’m swimming just walking through the air here, like I am suspended in one giant raindrop, and by the time I finally reach the massive double doors of the school, I am drenched. It’s not raining, so I don’t even really want to think about the implications of that beyond the fact that I am vaguely disgusting, and this college looks like something out of The Hunchback of Notre Dame: bright green everywhere on the grounds, and brick and spires that jut up from the earth to make me extremely, positively certain that I am not worthy.

I push through the doors, half wondering if I’ll discover that the staircases move and I’m late for the Sorting Ceremony when I step inside. I am only slightly disappointed when I find neither of those things, instead ending up somewhere I think I want to stay forever. The foyer is small from side to side but feels gigantic because of the ceiling. Golds and browns and reds everywhere, ornate rugs. . . . This looks like a place a ghost from the 1800s would haunt just to feel at home.

“Drop your things here,” says someone to my left—brisk voice, sharp. I drop my suitcase immediately, then have to snatch him back up. She didn’t literally mean “here” unless she wanted a giant pile of bags blocking the entry.

“Sorry,” I say, managing to maneuver my rolly bag so deftly that it rolls right over the woman’s foot not once, but twice. By the time I wrangle it into the side room, she has a perma-scowl on her face and she is peering into mine like she is going to systematically memorize and then destroy it.

“The students are gathering in the common room,” she says, then she turns and slightly limps away.

I head forward past the stairs I presume leads to the dorms and follow the murmurs and shuffling, which get louder the farther I go. And then there they are—my competition. There are twenty-four of us, and it looks like I’m one of the last to arrive. Everyone is just kind of sitting on these little couches, talking or fidgeting, and it feels so big. We’re in this small annex, and I know there are only a few dorms in here—it’s the original building, the one they used when the school was tiny, before they had any idea what it would turn into, but it still . . . well . . . it feels like something major.

And maybe it is. This school has one of the highest job placements of any culinary school in the country after graduation. If I win, I could do this thing. I make my way forward and find an old, flowery-patterned couch with an empty cushion and sit.

“Hi,” says the guy next to me, and I turn.

“Hi,” I say, blinking stupidly for a second. Boys with smirking mouths and dark foxy brown eyes are my kryptonite. And his blue hair is exceptionally, exquisitely floppy.

“Choi Yeonjun,” he says, and he sticks out his hand. His fingers are long and slim—a pianist’s hands.

I shake it, and say, “Soobin.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Soobin . . .?”

“Sorry. Choi. Choi Soobin.” I am so stupid.

Yeonjun nods and throws his arm over the back of the couch opposite of where I’m sitting. He leans back and smiles at me like this is nothing. Like he’s just so relaxed. I, on the other hand, am wound so tight that I can do nothing but scrunch. My skin is scrunched, my muscles are scrunched, my bones are scrunched; I am an ode to the nineties hair accessory. And my thoughts are just scrambling over one another, each one terrorizing the next to get to the forefront of my brain. The only things that are even close to winning are “Hogwarts” and Yeonjun’s dark foxy brown eyes, and so apparently I just say, “Harry Potter.”