The Surprise Party Only the Host Didn't Know About
A few days after the comic-book-worthy incident in the equipment shed, Yeoncheong still found herself flashing back to it from time to time.
She buried her face in her pillow, then promptly slammed her head into it, over and over. Only after she'd finally shaken off the emotion did she lift her head.
"Haaah..."
Giving it a hundred percent benefit of the doubt, tripping and getting tangled in the net had been her own fault. What lingered, though, was the shock of Seoyun smacking her on the butt and telling her to hold still.
At first it had been a scolding — hold still, would you — but partway through, her senior had started giggling while she did it.
That was clearly beyond the original intent, and it was the reason Yeoncheong kept dodging Seoyun's apologetic texts.
Did I rub honey on my butt or something...?
Suyeon teasing her nonstop during the school trip, fine, she could let that go. But then Seoha at the beach, and now Seoyun. Yeoncheong grumbled as she noticed how often she'd been getting smacked on the backside lately.
She'd never once been hit there even by her own parents, and now her female friends and seniors were doing it — she was starting to get genuinely worried.
"I know my reactions are the real problem here..."
She already knew most of her friends' pranks happened because her reactions were so entertaining.
But... responding to that kind of teasing in kind? That, she still wasn't ready for.
She considered getting serious and snapping at them, but even that felt difficult to pull off.
For days now, she'd been running on this hamster wheel of a question without arriving at an answer.
Yeoncheong shook her head, shaking off the unanswerable problem, and reached for the smartphone sitting on her nightstand.
Rolling onto her side, she checked the group chat.
"Why aren't these guys texting me?"
As far as she remembered, today was the day they'd all agreed to meet up to celebrate Suyeon and Hasol's birthdays.
"Not even a reply..."
And yet, well past lunch, the group chat had gone dead silent. When she messaged Suyeon, Nayun, or Seoha privately, all she got were read receipts.
"Whew."
A shallow, steadying breath.
Telling herself this was her last attempt, Yeoncheong left a message in the group chat.
Even sending it made her heart pound.
She had zero intention of cutting ties with the friends who had been the ones to reach out to her first, back when she needed it most.
But the whole thing reeked of them deliberately shutting her out while cooking up some scheme, and that was why Yeoncheong had played hardball.
One by one, the little number beside her message dwindled, until at last the read marker appeared. Then a flurry of frantic texts came flying in.
Suyeon's messages streamed in one after another.
The typos bleeding through even those short bursts made her panic abundantly clear.
Then, spaced a beat apart, Seoha's impeccably typo-free messages arrived. That said, the staccato delivery made it obvious she was every bit as flustered.
The two girls' messages flowed smoothly back and forth. Judging by the context, they were together.
Reading their texts, Yeoncheong smirked.
She could picture her friends' faces as they read her message perfectly.
The corners of her mouth had curled up so high it probably looked ridiculous, but with no one around to see, she didn't care.
For Yeoncheong, who usually occupied the receiving end of these things, chances like this were rare.
She opened the clock app, fiddled with the screen for a moment, and set the timer running.
Seoha's chilly aura came through loud and clear even through the screen.
As if answering the call, Suyeon sent a rapid-fire cascade of angry animal stickers, but Yeoncheong actually laughed out loud.
"Ah, that finally made me feel better."
She'd had plenty on her mind lately, so even a little stress relief went a long way.
Seoha's command to wait made her nervous, but the satisfaction of landing a clean hit on the two biggest pranksters in her life felt even bigger.
She watched the timer numbers tick down.
Imagined her friends scrambling in panic at her sudden hardline stance.
Spent a while plotting how she'd tease them if they couldn't come up with a decent excuse within the time limit.
And then, outside — or rather, on the stairs outside her building — things got noisy.
The sound of something clattering up en masse.
Delivery guy?
Yeoncheong's first thought was of the couriers who toiled even in this sweltering heat.
But the noise grew loudest right at her door, then abruptly stopped.
And then.
Beep beep. Beep.
As if fumbling, uncertain, a familiar chime filtered into her apartment along with unsteady keystrokes.
Yeoncheong bolted upright in bed.
Something about the scene felt eerily familiar.
There had definitely been a time like this, back when she was holed up in her apartment.
Yeoncheong muttered.
"Did I... ever change my door code...?"
According to her memory —
I cried my eyes out and was such a mess I just left it alone!
The voice in her head swelled in a rising crescendo.
Blue eyes widening into circles, Yeoncheong kicked off the bed and bolted.
There was exactly one person who could be punching in her door code right now.
Her judgment was so fast she was moving before the thought even became words — but...
Beep beep. Click.
She couldn't possibly beat the person who'd already finished entering the code.
"Oh, it's open."
"See? Told you I remembered!"
Familiar voices drifted through the gap in the door, and Yeoncheong's imagination began materializing into reality.
There, sprawling into view before she could even reach the door, were Suyeon and Seoha — along with Nayun and Hasol besides.
The friends looked down at her splayed on the floor, and among them, Seoha grinned.
"The timer hasn't gone off yet, has it?"
As if in answer to Seoha's words, the alarm on the smartphone she'd left on her bed chimed, announcing the end of the ten minutes.
Suyeon spoke to Yeoncheong, who was still sprawled on the floor.
"Your friends came all this way and you don't even invite them in?"
They were the ones who'd opened the door themselves — at her friend's own home, no less — and now they stood there waiting to be told to come in. The sheer nerve of it was staggering.
Still, she couldn't very well keep them standing out there making a racket, so Yeoncheong craned her neck up.
"...Just... come in."
Only then did the friends step inside.
Yeoncheong watched them with a half-dazed expression.
Self-reproach for not anticipating this situation, regret for provoking them with careless words. Those silences between her words held more emotion than such a brief gap should have.
"Hm..."
Having silenced the blaring phone timer, Seoha looked around the apartment with an intrigued air. Fair enough — last time, she'd only made it as far as the entryway.
"Whoa. It's way cleaner than last time."
"Right? How does a place someone lives alone look this good?"
Hasol and Nayun were much the same.
Given what had brought them here last time, this was effectively their first real look around Yeoncheong's place.
Watching them all claim their own spots and settle in, Yeoncheong let out a sigh.
I knew this would happen. That's exactly why I tried to stop it...
Not long ago, Suyeon had said she had an important favor to ask. The friends who'd refused to reveal the location until the very day of the get-together. Looking back, the warning signs had been everywhere.
But Yeoncheong had brushed them all off — and only understood the moment that door code started beeping.
"I'm such an idiot..."
At the note of resignation in her murmur, Suyeon chimed in.
"It's okay. We all know the feeling."
Yeoncheong narrowed her eyes at the girl who was so casually twisting the knife.
Suyeon dumped her bag carelessly in the small room and opened the fridge without a second thought, delighted that Seoha's cake fit in perfectly. Whatever the reason, after sleeping over once, she clearly knew the place better than anyone else here.
From her behavior she could roughly guess the answer, but a sliver of hope remained, so Yeoncheong spoke up.
"So, um — just asking in case I've got the wrong end of the stick... the party venue. Is it my house?"
Suyeon looked at her and snorted.
"What are you asking for when you already know?"
Even that last sliver of hope snuffed out, Yeoncheong hung her head and trembled.
Then she flung her head up and shouted.
"Are you kidding me?! Why would the HOST be the only one who doesn't know?!"
"Eek! You scared me. What's with the sudden yelling? You startled me."
Suyeon fussed at her friend as if Yeoncheong were the problem here.
Yeoncheong's glare bored into her.
"What kind of party happens without the host knowing?"
"A surprise party, obviously."
Suyeon shrugged.
Yeoncheong, who had never once imagined that kind of surprise party, let out a strangled laugh.
"Heh. Haha. Ha. HAHAHA!"
This unhinged display clearly hadn't been in anyone's forecast, because Suyeon and the others began shooting each other uneasy glances.
By the time she'd finally rolled around on the floor long enough and picked herself up, Suyeon and her friends were kneeling on the ground before her.
They looked ready to die on the spot if she asked, and Yeoncheong tilted her head.
"Haha...? What are you guys doing?"
"We just... thought maybe we went too far..."
"Sorry. We apologize."
Kneeling front and center as representatives of the group: Suyeon and Seoha.
Which told Yeoncheong exactly who the ringleaders of this whole affair had been.
She scratched her head as she looked them over.
What is this... I'm not even mad...
Well, she hadn't been completely unmoved.
But more than anger, what she felt watching her friends be so brazenly, unapologetically themselves was a kind of exasperated disbelief.
And the way they acted around her without any pretense — in a way, it proved just how close they all were, which made her a little happy, too.
Compared to the old all-boys school days — when leaping off the second floor because the cafeteria line was getting long counted as normal behavior — this was an adorable little ambush.
When all those tangled feelings finally overflowed, they burst out as laughter — an entirely different emotion than expected.
Still, I probably shouldn't tell them the truth, right?
Saying she wasn't angry at the exact moment all her friends were kneeling in a row begging forgiveness just felt wrong.
Showing up at her place without so much as a heads-up was definitely out of line, too.
When Yeoncheong pointed this out, the friends' heads dropped parallel to the floor — so they were aware of it after all.
How many minutes passed like that?
"That's enough. All of you, get up."
"But still..."
"I said it's fine. You came here to have fun, right? So get up already."
Yeoncheong forcibly hauled her friends — who clearly felt their apology was still insufficient — back to their feet.
"So... can we hang out at your place, then?"
When Nayun, who'd been hanging back, asked, Yeoncheong snorted.
"That's what you came here for in the first place, isn't it? And honestly, there's nowhere better to relax than home."
The friends' eyes sparkled — they'd braced themselves for the very real possibility of being thrown out after seeing a side of Yeoncheong's anger they'd almost never witnessed before.
"Yeoncheong, are you secretly an angel?"
The unfamiliar word made her skin crawl, and she rubbed her arms.
"Huh? How did we get there? I only forgave you because it's you guys."
Her reply didn't matter. It never reached her friends' ears.
Just as they'd flinched at her earlier scolding, Suyeon, Seoha, and the rest knew full well they'd crossed the line this time.
But with Yeoncheong forgiving them so readily and completely, they began to see her in an entirely new light.
"Angel Yeoncheong."
Starting with Suyeon, every single one of them took to pairing her name with the word angel.
It was meant as pure, sincere praise for a friend who was laughably kind-hearted.
"Aaagh! Stop it! I said stop it! I'm the one who's sorry!"
But for Yeoncheong, who had never once in her life been saddled with a nickname like that, it was enough to make her shudder head to toe.