onewtoria (ontae?)
“I don’t like Victoria.” Jinki pauses, waiting for a reaction. Taemin is crouched over his video game, his knees tucked into his chest and elbows jutting out like flimsy airplane wings. This position makes him look a lot ganglier than even usual, and for the span of however long it takes to breathe one breath Jinki is jealous. He’s thinking about effortless grace and how Taemin manages it even in the daunting face of puberty. This can only portend even more wonderful things for the magnae, as puberty is one phase in Jinki’s life that he still can’t quite reflect on without shuddering. He used to eat candles for fun. Taemin’s doing a lot better than he did.
When the game ends in a gleeful wah-wah of death, Taemin throws the console dramatically against the couch and launches into a pretend tantrum. If Jinki’s calculations are correct, this will last about another two seconds. Tick. Tock. Sure enough, Taemin grins and looks up at Jinki, who’s clutching one of their sofa pillows out of boredom.
“Victoria? Hyung, are you being racist?”
Jinki throws the pillow at him, aiming straight for the face. His months of intensive training in the art of pillow-fight have paid off, he thinks as the mass of fabric and polyester filling hits Taemin square on the forehead. Not hard enough to hurt the moneymaker but enough to send the message that Jinki is a force to be reckoned with and will not stand to be called racist.
“No, you little punk,” Jinki says, squinting his eyes into two unamused lines. “When have I ever discriminated against Chinese girls? What’s my philosophy about girls again?”
Taemin mulls it over. “You like big butts and you cannot-“
If Jinki weren’t too lazy to move, he’d be reaching over to choke Taemin Homer-and-Bart style. But instead he shakes his head slowly. “Close but no cigar, young grasshopper. ‘Sum’n ‘s better than nuth’n.’ With girls, especially for guys like us-“ he pauses here to really drive that sense of solidarity home, even though it’s a lie and Taemin doesn’t need it because “guys like us” implies that they are the same, and once again, Taemin has never known the blissful feeling of wax lying heavy in your stomach after a bad day at school, “we gotta take what we can get.”
If Jinki weren’t too lazy to move, now would be a good time for him to hook his arm around Taemin’s narrow bird-shoulder and shake him up a little like Western fathers do to their sons in movies. Kind of like a cowboy. He even contemplates the motion for a brief moment before tossing it into the back of his mind to rest there like the other thousands of ideas he comes up with on a regular basis but rarely follows through on. Such is the life of an idiot savant, he thinks, or he thinks he thinks, but in reality this is all happening way too fast in a matter of nanoseconds, just neurons jumping around.
In any case, Taemin shrugs like the cool, nonchalant, pubescent sixteen-year-old he is. “Really? ‘Cause I think that Suzy girl has a crush on me. Hey, do you have her number?”
In the end Jinki never gets to tell Taemin why he doesn’t like Victoria. Taemin starts another round of Mario and Jinki falls asleep on the arm of the couch. The pillow he threw earlier stays on the floor until Jonghyun trips on it later coming into the living room to wake him up for dinner.
When the game ends in a gleeful wah-wah of death, Taemin throws the console dramatically against the couch and launches into a pretend tantrum. If Jinki’s calculations are correct, this will last about another two seconds. Tick. Tock. Sure enough, Taemin grins and looks up at Jinki, who’s clutching one of their sofa pillows out of boredom.
“Victoria? Hyung, are you being racist?”
Jinki throws the pillow at him, aiming straight for the face. His months of intensive training in the art of pillow-fight have paid off, he thinks as the mass of fabric and polyester filling hits Taemin square on the forehead. Not hard enough to hurt the moneymaker but enough to send the message that Jinki is a force to be reckoned with and will not stand to be called racist.
“No, you little punk,” Jinki says, squinting his eyes into two unamused lines. “When have I ever discriminated against Chinese girls? What’s my philosophy about girls again?”
Taemin mulls it over. “You like big butts and you cannot-“
If Jinki weren’t too lazy to move, he’d be reaching over to choke Taemin Homer-and-Bart style. But instead he shakes his head slowly. “Close but no cigar, young grasshopper. ‘Sum’n ‘s better than nuth’n.’ With girls, especially for guys like us-“ he pauses here to really drive that sense of solidarity home, even though it’s a lie and Taemin doesn’t need it because “guys like us” implies that they are the same, and once again, Taemin has never known the blissful feeling of wax lying heavy in your stomach after a bad day at school, “we gotta take what we can get.”
If Jinki weren’t too lazy to move, now would be a good time for him to hook his arm around Taemin’s narrow bird-shoulder and shake him up a little like Western fathers do to their sons in movies. Kind of like a cowboy. He even contemplates the motion for a brief moment before tossing it into the back of his mind to rest there like the other thousands of ideas he comes up with on a regular basis but rarely follows through on. Such is the life of an idiot savant, he thinks, or he thinks he thinks, but in reality this is all happening way too fast in a matter of nanoseconds, just neurons jumping around.
In any case, Taemin shrugs like the cool, nonchalant, pubescent sixteen-year-old he is. “Really? ‘Cause I think that Suzy girl has a crush on me. Hey, do you have her number?”
In the end Jinki never gets to tell Taemin why he doesn’t like Victoria. Taemin starts another round of Mario and Jinki falls asleep on the arm of the couch. The pillow he threw earlier stays on the floor until Jonghyun trips on it later coming into the living room to wake him up for dinner.