happiness! » stray kids

13. ["what's snapping, stinky?"]

Felix, while still being dumb stupid at Chemistry (and still just barely passing, but hey, Ds get degrees, right?), had some hidden talents. These talents included consuming an entire pineapple and running an underground market while being on lockdown in a confined space otherwise known as detention.

He could tell that he was freaking out Woojin, because whenever Woojin got nervous, he tended to just scream instead of laugh. If you were an eighty-year-old hard of hearing woman with equally hard of hearing friends who laughed like hyenas, you'd think his scream-laugh was normal. Everyone else within a ten-mile radius? Not so much.

Whenever Felix said literally anything, Woojin did this scream laugh, and normally he would take immense gratification at that—the only person he could count on to laugh at his jokes was Chan if Chan was running on his signature BangChanHighPower drink, the contents of which have never been divulged—but this was surely too far. Before school on the last day of his detention, he drew Woojin aside from the others.

"What's snapping, stinky?" He asked Woojin in a slightly furtive, serious voice.

"Please...Why do you keep tormenting me like this? Kids don't actually speak like this, do they?" Woojin begged, tears standing in his eyes. He'd been sleep deprived ever since Felix's speech because he frequently woke up at two a.m. in a cold sweat and saw Felix standing in the corner of his room, spouting this absolute nonsense at him until he passed out from the crippling anxiety.

"Sorry, sorry. I keep forgetting you're not..." Felix shuddered before forcing himself to say it, "dank enough." It was an old meme, but Woojin was an old soul who always went to bed at eight at night and drank milk like it was the holy grail of lactose. "What I'm trying to say is, are you okay?"

"Oh." Woojin's face went blank. He was probably trying to back-translate the phrase "what's snapping stinky" and failing. "What do you mean?"

"You're doing the scream laugh thing. The last time you did the scream laugh thing it was because Chae Hyungwon almost got elected class president and his campaign poster only had a picture of him sleeping on it and that was it."

"Yeah." Woojin averted his eyes, and Felix noticed that Chan and Changbin were staring at them. The combined raw power of both their gazes on him made the cystic acne hiding under his skin like fifteen year-old boys waiting for the perfect moment to send an unwarranted dick pic surface. 

"Yeah?" Felix prompted. He was getting distracted, but Woojin's scream laugh was a tragedy that eclipsed everything, including getting stared at intensely by Seo Changbin. 

"Um, when you were informing everyone about the bottled happiness problem, the way you spoke was...amazing." Woojin laughed without humor, the way white people do when they're trying to be friendly with people they don't know. 

"I would say thank you, but you said that the way you'd say I spoke with a toe in my mouth instead of a tongue." Felix blinked. Sometimes, even he himself was astounded at the stuff that came out of his mouth. Sometimes, he started saying something and then let whatever higher (or perhaps lower) being controlled him take over. Maybe it was Minho in his non-human form. Probably. 

"It's just that I've never heard you talk so eloquently and I feel inadequate because seriously where the heck did that come from?"

"I'm just very passionate about my Gucci slides. Also, I looked up all those words and how to pronounce them the day before in math class, and I watched some TED talks too. I don't really know why, but it just felt right."

Woojin breathed a sigh of relief. The universe righted itself. Felix looked at Changbin, who pretended to vomit. Chan was asleep, and Jisung was bothering Jeongin while Minho laid on the floor, occasionally taking a swig from a bottle of happiness. Hyunjin and Seungmin were throwing tiny of balls of paper into Chan's open mouth and snickering.