The Babysitting Contract | j.jk

21 • date

◦ ◦ ◦

I pick up Nayeon's call on the third ring.

"Hey—"

"Taehee," she breathes, voice crackling through the receiver. I hear a toilet flushing in the background. "I need you now. Like, yesterday now. It's an emergency."

"It better be," I growl, flicking my controller, steering Peach past King Boo with ease. Jeongguk curses. "I'm so close to creaming Jeongguk's ass for the hundredth time and — motherfucker!"

The blue shell came out of nowhere. It sends my bike spinning out of control. The ravenette laughs — a juxtaposition to the whining I'd been putting up with after a mere hour of studying Biology today after school.

"Okay, Teahee, we get it," Nayeon snaps. "You're ass at Mario Kart. Worst the world's ever seen. Not the point."

"Sounds to me like you're trying to make it a point." I pinch my phone between my shoulder and my ear. "What's up?"

"This is a real life, no jokes, totally super serious emergency. Like, I quiet possibly may die. I'm talking code red, code blue, code son of a motherfucking bitch. All of the codes. All of them."

"No clue what code red or blue means," I quip, "but code 'son of a motherfucking bitch' sounds relatively major on my scale of Problems That Nayeon Encounters On Blind Dates."

Jeongguk spares me a glance. I promptly shoot a green shell backwards, laughing as King Boo starts spinning as well.

"You think this is funny?" Nayeon's voice hitches an octave higher. "She's so much worse than bird guy. Taehee, she started doing magic. Magic. Like she deadass tried to make a rat appear out of fuck knows where but it turned out to be dead. I have no clue how long the poor guy has been in this girl's pocket, but the rat is dead, she is crying and I am going to die."

"Where are you?"

"I'm hiding in the bathroom. We're at the theatre in the mall and just finished watching Ratatouille, which, the fuck? Who the fuck cries during Ratatouille?"

"Probably someone who just lost their pet rat."

I slide past the finish line and give Jeongguk a silent middle finger as I claim the win. He starts whispering about how I'm going to eat my words. I push his face away with the palm of my hand.

"Anyways, she wants to go to dinner at the bistro near the end of the mall and I can't do it. Please, I'm begging you. Help me out. Stage one of your dumbass interventions — I don't fucking care anymore. Just come and jail-break my ass  out of here so I can high-tail it out of this terrible, terrible date from hell."

I heave a sigh, pressing the home button on the remote and pausing the victory lap Peach had been taking across the screen. "Stay strong, solider. I'll be there in thirty."

"What was that all about?" Jeongguk asks after I hang up the phone.

I stand from the couch in his room, stretching my arms. The Biology notes we had been studying twenty minutes earlier are left dejected on his coffee table. We had made progress last night and even more today. I saw he'd been absent from the cafeteria, and when I met him in his room after school it was clear he'd been studying during lunch.

"I have to to bail Nayeon out from yet another terrible blind date."

"Are you going to pick her up?"