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This prom, Chenle thought to himself, was going to be unforgettable.
Just… not in the way he thought it was going to be.
There was nothing special about this prom. It was very much your run of the mill 1988 junior-senior high joint prom (because their school couldn’t be bothered to do two separate ones), held in the school gymnasium and catered by the lunch ladies who were paid just a little more to stay through the night on a random Friday in Spring. Tinsel everywhere, random balloons popping when the girls accidentally step on them with their heels.
It was forgettably unforgettable, if that makes sense. Pityingly so.
He will never forget Never Gonna Give You Up replaying on the speakers because the DJ had temporarily left the booth to go for a pee break, as all of them are just standing around, impeccably dressed in their tuxes, waiting— Chenle for his non-existent date, Donghyuck for the cider he stole from his brother to kick in, Jeno for the song he requested about thirty times to play, Jaemin for the damn event to be over so he can go home and study, and Mark for his “boyfriend from another school” that he swears he did not invent to show up.
“I swear, he’s coming!”
“This is starting to sound as sad as Chenle saying he’s sure someone’s going to ask him out to prom.”
“Hey!” Chenle protests, only to be ignored. Donghyuck pats him on the back gently.
Mark tilts his head. “It’s thirty minutes into prom and Chenle still doesn’t have a date though?”
“Exactly!” Donghyuck says, exasperated, “just say you made up your fake boyfriend!”
Never Gonna Give You Up finally starts to fade out, and Heaven is a place on Earth comes on. Jeno groans. Still not his requested song.
They look like a sad bunch, the five of them, all dressed to the nines only to nibble on the same tuna mayo sandwiches that they had for lunch earlier that day. Except for Chenle. He hates the tuna mayo sandwiches. He’s sipping on the mystery punch. Someone bumps into him, and a bit of the punch slushes out of his cup and onto his hand. Not that it matters. Nobody was going to hold his hand tonight, anyway. Sigh.
Honestly, Chenle probably would’ve had a date by now, if he had just asked one of the kids from his classes out. Maybe someone from Choir. Instead, he was overly cocky, convinced that in the weeks leading up to prom, someone would profess their undying love for him and he wouldn’t have to do any of the work.
That cockiness didn’t really work out well for Chenle. Now he’s dateless, despite having already spent the hefty fifteen dollars on an admission ticket, and more for the tuxedo he then had to beg his grandmother to alter for him.
Jaemin grumbles. “When is this supposed to become fun? I paid fifteen bucks for this.”
“I’ll give you fun,” Donghyuck says, a devilish hint in his tone that never means any good. The last time this happened, they ended up in detention for two weeks. All five of them. Two weeks.
“I’ll spike the punch bowl.”
Mark gasps. “You are not spiking the punch bowl.”
Donghyuck wiggles his eyebrows deviously. “I most definitely am.” He’s midway through pulling out a flask of the same cider he stole when a boy in a clean, baby pink suit pushes himself next to Mark.
“Sorry I’m late,” he says, shaking his head so that his hair falls nicely over his forehead.
“Oh, thank God you’re here,” Mark rushes out, “these idiots were starting to think I made you up or something.”
The boy laughs, apologising again. “Um,” Jeno says, mouth stuffed with a sandwich, “this is…?”
“Renjun,” Mark explains, “My boyfriend from Pleasant Hill High I’ve been telling you guys about.”
Renjun waves timidly. He’s got pretty eyes, Chenle thinks. And pretty lips. And a pretty nose. Okay. He’s pretty. Chenle will give Mark that.
Evidently, Donghyuck thinks so too, because he is blatantly staring at the chestnut-haired boy.
Jeno gestures vaguely at the space between Mark and Renjun. “You’re… you’re dating Mark? Mark Lee ? Mark Lee Minhyung? Like, he hasn’t paid you or anything… you’re his…”
“Boyfriend?” Renjun finishes, to everyone’s surprise. He nods slowly, and looks slightly confused. Probably because Jeno very loudly slapped his palm over his mouth in shock.
Mark’s actual real-life not fake boyfriend Renjun then turns around, saying something about getting some food for the both of them. He leaves to the food table just as quickly as he arrived.
Donghyuck swallows audibly.
“No offence, Mark, but I think I’m in love with your boyfriend.”
Mark gloats at the statement, puffing his chest out a little. “No offence taken. Obviously.”
Donghyuck rolls his eyes. “I can’t believe he’s going out with a loser like you .”
Mark opens his mouth to protest, but is quickly cut off by Jeno, who has finally come to his senses. “You’d better keep an eye on him or I might just try stealing him, honestly.”
Donghyuck nods in agreement, mouth still slightly agape as he stares Renjun down.
Mark laughs. This turns into a shaky kind of laugh when he realises Jeno and Donghyuck look deadly serious.
“Hey,” Mark pouts, “get in line?! I was here first!” Jeno and Donghyuck make a beeline towards Renjun, and Mark goes into a full out sprint. Unfortunately for him, Jeno and Donghyuck are Elk Valley High’s self-proclaimed track stars. Mark was truly fighting a losing battle here.
That leaves Chenle and Jaemin behind. Chenle twiddles with the hem of his suit, his empty punch cup long discarded.
Chenle doesn’t normally feel this sad about himself— in fact, he’s usually quite confident on his own, very much aware of his own abilities as The Choir Kid Musical Prodigy (their Choir teacher’s words, not his, not to toot his own horn), and it’s not like he lacks any friends, either. Yet, when you realise that you’re at your junior-senior joint prom with no one linked around your arm you can’t help but feel just a little bit sad for yourself.
“You good?” Jaemin asks, suspicious punch in hand. The “ Go Eager Elks!” banner behind him hangs high from the bleachers. Their vaguely elk-shaped mascot's face is winking, almost like it’s making fun of Chenle.
“ It’s a great day to be an Eager Elk,” Chenle jokes, mimicking their school motto. Jaemin does not laugh. He looks more sad for Chenle than he did before.
“You can come over and play on my Atari with me, I’m dying to go home anyway, ” Jaemin offers. Chenle has known Jaemin long enough to know that him offering his Atari for a whole day is his version of a pity-apology. Nevermind the fact that Chenle has an Atari of his own that he could play while the emptiness of the Donkey Kong soundtrack reminds him of how lonely he is. Still. Chenle appreciates the thought.
Chenle, however, shakes his head. He’s got perseverance. Jaemin calls this stubbornness, and Chenle, by extension, stubborn. It does not bother Chenle much: That’s just a mean way of saying he’s a fighter.
“I’m getting a dance today,” he announces. It comes out more uncertain than he’d hoped.
Jaemin shrugs. “Suit yourself, then. I’m gonna go graffiti the toilet with this silly string I found on the floor.”
When Jaemin leaves, the lights in the gymnasium start to dim, now replaced by a darker, blue and purple tinted light. Chenle makes his way to a… special bench located at the back of the gym.
He sits at the Single Pringle bench in anticipation. It’s a running joke among students that the bench at the back of the gym where the substitutes sit during actual games are reserved for people who don’t have a date on prom night. Then, if you’re lucky, someone might just feel bad enough for you to ask you to dance. As if the fog machines and the weird lighting in the dark gym makes you more attractive. Chenle thinks they might be like the high school prom version of beer googles. Disco ball goggles? Whatever. The very idea of sitting on the Single Pringle bench makes Chenle cringe, and part of him is convinced there’s a wad of hardened gum right under where his ass is firmly planted onto the bench. Chenle scans the room in hopes of distracting himself from this thought. He regrets this immediately. There’s a few kids loitering about without dates, like a boy he thinks he recognises from one of his classes in an oversized tuxedo. Still, the number of people dancing alone seems to be heavily outnumbered by the number of couples slow dancing. Even the weird kid from History who always has a comically large jawbreaker in his mouth has a date. Chenle sighs, for the upteenth time. Whatever. The floor is sticky with spilled punch and the bench he’s sitting on is perfectly comfortable and the disco ball isn’t even rotating properly and are they playing Africa by TOTO? Who the fuck is the DJ?
“Yo, kid on the bench, can you keep it down over there? Trying to have a romantic dance here.”
Chenle really needs to work on his habit of speaking his thoughts out loud. Maybe he should start with speaking his thoughts out quietly.
The disco ball continues to spin tauntingly above him, and Chenle continues staring straight ahead with an emptiness he can only describe as “the inside of a disco ball”. Shiny and pretty on the outside (not to toot his own horn, again, but this tuxedo fits him very well), but empty on the inside. The music is loud, the synths are blaring, and it’s all dampened in the same way that makes his insides feel like hard styrofoam. Like a disco ball. How sad do you have to be to start personifying a ball made of cut up cds?
Extremely sad, apparently. Chenle is about to give up and find his friends before he sees the boy in the oversized tuxedo shuffle his way towards him.
“Hi,” the boy says, “it’s Jisung. Um. We have Calculus together?”
Chenle scans his face. Vaguely, he remembers having a Jisung in his Calculus class, but nothing in his brain is really clicking yet. Before he can properly think about it, Jisung is continuing:
“Anyway. I came to ask if… if you… Do you, um, do you maybe want to…” he takes in a deep breath, and then, in one short breath, “ do-you-want-to-dance-with-me-maybe sorrythisissoawkward”
Jisung finally looks at him properly, and then it finally clicks. Jisung from Calculus! The one always wearing the flannel! The one always twirling his pencil! The one with the cute nose! He’s the one who Chenle always thought looked mousey, but like, not in a bad way. In a cute way. He still looks mousey now. It’s cute.
“What?” Jisung asks, and for the first time tonight Chenle is thankful for the shitty DJ.
Which witch did he kill in his past life to be cursed with this stupid talking your thoughts out thing? And how on earth does he reverse it!?
“Nothing,” he lies, getting up from where his ass must’ve dented the bench, “yeah, okay, let’s dance.”
“What?” Jisung asks again, rather dumbly.
“Dance. You wanted to dance? We can dance. If you still want to, of course.”
“No, no, I mean, yeah. Of course I still want to.”
Chenle sticks his hand out, the one with the corsage around his wrist. “Lead the way, then.”
Jisung takes his hand (awfully clammy, though Chenle will let it slide because he’s cute), and leads them to the middle of the dance floor. Slower songs have started playing now, the DJ apparently finally getting the hint.
When they start slow dancing, Chenle’s arms around Jisung’s neck, he can smell some kind of woody cologne— it’s a nice departure from the slightly sweaty gymnasium smell, to be honest.
“Why were you alone back there?” Jisung asks.
“My friends disappeared somewhere,” Chenle says. They’re swaying in time with the song, now. “I think they’re trying to woo Mark’s boyfriend who they just discovered is real and also hot.”
Jisung laughs, an airy giggle. “What does that even mean?”
“My guess is as good as yours,” Chenle shrugs.
Jisung’s got a little rose in his tuxedo pocket, which, he learns, is oversized and baggy at the shoulders because it’s a hand-me-down from his older brother. Something about this is very endearing to Chenle, like he’s just a kid trying to do big boy things. The more he talks to Jisung, the more he finds to like about him. Suddenly he feels partially bad about never having talked to him in class, ever. To be fair, he is asleep in Calculus most of the time. Which is probably why he is failing. Luckily, Jisung isn’t, and has kindly offered his free tuition services.
“Thanks for dancing with me, by the way. I must’ve looked so sad sitting there alone.”
Jisung shakes his head. “Oh, it’s really no big deal. Dancing with you, I mean.”
“No, seriously,” Chenle says, “You saved me from what is probably weeks of being the butt of the joke.”
Jisung looks up from where he was staring at Chenle’s necktie now, and looks him right in the eye. It’s unwavering. “Don’t worry. I wanted to dance. With you.”
He gives a small smile. “Honestly, I can’t believe I wasn’t met with more competition.”
“For me?” Chenle asks incredulously. “Nobody even bothered asking the past three weeks.”
“Really?” Jisung squeaks. “That’s surprising to me.”
“ Surprising? Why?”
“I don’t know,” Jisung starts, nibbling on his lower lip. They’re nice lips. “You’re just… you’re you . You’re super talented and smart but also funny enough to be the class clown and…”
The tone has shifted, now. It might be the lighting, or the fog machine, though Chenle’s pretty sure he’s just fallen a bit in love with Jisung. Disco ball goggles.
“Sounds like you have a crush on me,” Chenle teases. Jisung stays silent. This gives Chenle enough time to trail his eyes down Jisung’s, to his nose, back down to his heart-shaped lips.
Then, the lights in the gymnasium come on, and quite literally everybody in attendance audibly groans. Awkwardly, everyone is instructed by the teachers to clean up the mess, and in under ten minutes, everyone is kicked out of school.
As the students filter out the school, Chenle stands by the entrance, looking for his ragtag group of friends. Instead, Jisung comes up to him again, a little more confident this time, his shoulders not as slouched as before.
“It’s still early… do you want to hang out somewhere else?”
It’s a tempting offer. Chenle reasons his friends have probably gone home, anyway.
By midnight, and at an empty playground they’d dumped themselves at, Chenle learns that Jisung’s lips are as soft as they look. He tastes like cola gummies and youth and home.
☆
Upon realising that it’s Jisung from the dance team?!?! that Chenle disappeared with on prom night, Jeno immediately has a colossal headache. One, Chenle actually gained something from being painfully stubborn, which means that behaviour is now reinforced, meaning he will continue to be stubborn.
Two, it’s like having two completely worlds completely colliding, except both worlds are built on annoying the ever-living fuck out of Jeno. On many occasions, he questions how they even get along.
“I mean,” Jaemin supplies, “Jisung can’t get any words out, and somehow Chenle gets all of them out. This literally could not be more perfect.”
“He does talk,” Chenle says, oddly defensive, “as long as he’s comfortable around you. Sungie is just a blushing mess when you first meet him.”
“You know what, I do not care about the logistics of your relationship. Please never call Jisung that around me ever again,” Jeno deadpans, head still in hands.
School life, for the most part, stays the same. He is still failing Calculus. He is still his music teacher’s favourite student. And he still will not eat the tuna mayo sandwiches served to him during lunch.
Though, sometimes, after Choir, he’ll pop by the dance studio down the hall, looking for a certain mousey looking boy.
“Hey, Sung,” Chenle says, popping his head into the dance studio.
Jisung smiles, despite being out of breath, his lips curling up into a heart the way that makes Chenle’s heart melt. Not that he’d ever admit it to anyone.
Especially not Jeno. Who is also in the studio. “Well,” he announces, upon seeing Chenle, “That’s my cue to leave.”
“You can stay, we’re not getting up to much,” Jisung says.
“Nah,” Jeno says, scrunching his nose, “wouldn’t want to intrude on your little after school date stuff.”
“We’re just hanging out!” Jisung argues.
Jeno slaps Jisung on the back. “Hanging out,” he says, using his fingers to make air quotation marks, “right. Honestly, I can’t believe you didn’t just ask me to link you guys up.”
Jisung grumbles. “Saying that as if you wouldn’t have told literally everyone I had a stupid crush and was useless about it.”
Jeno shrugs, lifting the end of his shirt to dab some of the sweat on his forehead off. “Touché.”
As it turns out, Jisung had never let on exactly how long he had a crush on Chenle. Jisung first set his eyes upon Chenle when they had English Lit together in freshman year, though Chenle apparently never even looked in Jisung’s general direction. Oops. In his defence, Macbeth had a decently interesting plot.
“Besides,” Jisung says, “I like the way things turned out. It was, um…”
“It was cute,” Chenle agrees, “it was very cute.”
Chenle looks at Jisung, who is sat on the floor, properly now. The ill-fitting tuxedo he wore on prom night really didn’t do his figure justice. Beyond being cute, Jisung actually looks good. Really good.
At this, Jeno audibly gags. Jisung turns a brighter shade of red than he did before. Chenle must be talking aloud again.
“Alright,” Jeno says, getting his bag and making his way towards the door, “you lovebirds have fun. I’m off to try and steal Mark’s boyfriend again.”
Chenle chuckles. “You should give up while you’re ahead.”
Jeno stops at the door, where Chenle is, just before exiting. He puts a solemn hand on his shoulder, so gentle it’s as if his pet parrot just died or something.
“I overheard him say I love you to Mark the other day. My heart shattered to pieces. Suddenly I understood the perils of Romeo and Juliet.” He sighs dramatically, and puts a hand to his forehead. “Alas. Love is not easy. I persevere.”
Chenle rolls his eyes. “You’re stupid.”
Jeno shrugs, finally leaving the studio. “Love is stupid!” He screams, down the hallway.
“Oh, and remember! The dance studio is not that sound proof. Take it from me! I have experience!”
Jisung burns bright red at this comment, but that is not really a problem for them— they won’t be in there long.
“So…” Jisung starts.
“Yeah,” Chenle finishes for him, deciding he agrees love is indeed stupid,
“the playground sounds like a great idea.”