“Today, you’ll be working as one-day teachers for the Flower Buds class.”
“Us?”
While we were still dazed, each of us was handed a bright yellow apron and a tulip-shaped name badge. Great. Our kids are cool-tone.
And “Flower Buds,” of all things.
A class that felt wildly mismatched for a team of guys with an average age of 19.3 and an average height in the low 180s.
“Anyone remember going to daycare?”
“Do people usually remember that?”
“You don’t? We did an English play. I played Prospero.”
“What’s that?”
“A nobleman from The Tempest.”
Lee Cheonghyeon explained kindly, but there wasn’t a flicker of interest on Choi Jeho’s face.
I wasn’t much different. I just thought, ‘Wow, impressive since childhood...’
“Does anyone here have a younger sibling?”
The daycare teacher tossed out a simple question. Choi Jeho, Lee Cheonghyeon, and Jeong Seongbin raised their hands.
“How far apart are you in age?”
“Four years.”
“We’re two!”
“We’re twins, so the same.”
They answered in turn. Unfortunately, none of the siblings were infants or toddlers.
The four-year gap one might have been better with little kids, but that one was Choi Jeho. I gave up hoping.
After we received basic cautions, the children’s names, and the day’s schedule, it was drop-off time.
Wails you could hear from the front door started up.
“Oh no... they must not want to leave their parents...”
Park Juu was on the verge of tears.
Hold it in. If you cry too, they’ll have to do water-damage repairs on this daycare.
Even so, the kids were brave. After seeing off their rushing moms, they shrugged out of their coats and marched stoutly down the hall.
And the second they saw our faces, they started crying again.
“Waaah!”
“Hey, everyone take three steps back.”
You could tell from the sound alone. That wasn’t sadness.
That was pure rejection.
“Shouldn’t we go grab, like, a rabbit costume or something right now?”
“And wear it all day?”
“Better than making them cry all day.”
Kang Giyeon muttered it perfectly seriously.
“Seongbin, you go.”
“Me?!”
“You’re the only one we can trust.”
Buoyed by Lee Cheonghyeon’s boundless faith, Jeong Seongbin tiptoed toward the first child.
“H-hi...?”
“Waaah! Mom!”
And crashed and burned.
I’d briefly forgotten: even among us, Jeong Seongbin only reads as a gentle heartthrob.
Out in the cold, hard real world, no one sees him as a warm-and-soft prince.
While new arrivals sobbed and hurled themselves into the teachers’ arms, one of us strode straight toward the kids.
Choi Jeho.
“Hey, what are you doing!”
“Get back here, now...!”
He ignored my and Park Juu’s hissing.
Sure enough, one little kid broke into full-on keening.
‘Should’ve put glasses on him.’
That would’ve put up a nice safety barrier.
While I was busy regretting, Choi Jeho dropped to his knees in the hall.
“Can you already take your jacket off by yourself?”
At the out-of-left-field question, all of us widened our eyes. The crying child did too.
“I noticed earlier the other kids got help from the teacher. But you hung your coat all by yourself.”
“That’s ’cause I’m a big kid...”
“How old are you?”
“Five...”
“Five? Then yeah, you are a big kid.”
Maybe because it felt good to be acknowledged by someone who looked like a neighborhood boss, our five-year-old big kid stopped crying.
“It’s my first day here, so I don’t know my way around. Which class is yours?”
“What class are you a teacher for?”
“Flower Buds.”
“I’ll show you. Follow me.”
The child sprang up, grabbed Choi Jeho’s hand, and marched ahead to the door with the Flower Buds sign.
So you can talk that sweetly to kids—what happened when you talked to us?
The comeback rose to my throat, but I swallowed it. If he’s gentle to the kids, that’s what matters.
He shot us a triumphant look that said, See that? It was annoying.
After many twists and turns, every Flower Buds kid made it through drop-off.
We did quick introductions, too. They said “Teacher Giyeon” and “Teacher Jeho” just fine, but “Teacher Iwol” came out mangled. It’s not like I can change my name again.
Maybe I should make them call me Mr. Kim? Then it’d feel less like one-day daycare teachers and more like one-day front-office experience.
Thankfully, Spark did not end up filming a one-day elementary-school challenge.
Because no one came near me.
Kids would head my way and then scurry off.
I wasn’t sure I’d even get eye contact, never mind hearing my name.
“Just sit a bit. Don’t stand there like a power pole.”
Said Choi Jeho, with a kid slung over each shoulder. Does gold flow in those shoulders...?
Behind me, I heard Kang Giyeon’s ringing voice.
It was truly “ringing.” I’d never heard that tone from him, but it was real.
“Did they make a Plushie SweetPang of you too? It turned out great.”
“You know SweetPang, teacher?”
“Of course. I love the MiniPang series.”
“I know more than a hundred MiniPangs!”
Kang Giyeon was jumping into the kids’ chatter using the big data he’d stockpiled.
The reaction was explosive. Kids with every kind of ribbon-character hair tie flocked around him.
Pointing at the giant character stamped on a child-sized watch, he asked,
“Which Pang is this friend? First time I’ve seen them.”
If he discovered a character he didn’t know, the room heated up even more.
“That’s SaltyPang. Don’t you know it, teacher?”
“Was there a friend like this? Is it new?”
“It first appears in the fifth MiniPang story.”
“MiniPang is already up to story five? I only made it through story three.”
The scene reminded me of something.
Right—something I’d seen before...
≫ ??? Why is my timeline so behind—did Giyeon drop something?
└ Giyeon’s concept photos just dropped~
└ What do you mean why—why’d they release it without me??
≫ When are these pics from?
└ Mini 2nd album special stage~ The sound mix is trash so I recommend muting and just watching the stage~
└ If you like this styling, maybe try Giyeon at the Music Grand Festival...? It’s the revolution of burgundy shadow
└ Leaving a link to Gallery Giyeon made by his fansite... bye
I remembered. It was exactly like veteran fans spoon-feeding a newbie to convert them.
Park Juu was a sensation too. His brilliant sky-blue hair must’ve reminded them of characters from transformation cartoons.
When a kid asked, “Teacher, did you dye it SweetPang Bitter color?” he flailed, then managed a brave answer. It was endearing.
If only it had stopped there—but ribbon hairpins started piling into his hair one by one.
“Teacher, look here! Oh, so pretty!”
“With just this, you can be the fairy king too. I’ll lend it to you specially!”
Park Juu’s hair, split past pigtails into thirteen little sprigs, was a sight.
Even so, he himself looked perfectly calm.
“My cousin does this to me a lot...”
Early education by his cousin, apparently. No wonder his picks at mock fansigns were always top-tier.
Heart-gem clip-ons dangled from both his ears. A role-model idol moment.
Which left only us E’s on the fringes.
Jeong Seongbin herded the kids off to wash hands first like a flock of sheep and made two of them cry, and no one dared venture near me.
Lee Cheonghyeon was our E-type hope, but it wasn’t easy.
“Teacher, can you play the piano?”
“I can play everything. What should I play?”
“Play ‘One Flower’!”
“Never heard of that one... how about ‘The Trout’?”
Schubert’s Trout filled the Flower Buds room. It did not satisfy the tiny audience.
“Can’t you play it by ear? You’ve got good ear training too.”
“Everyone’s singing in different keys—it won’t add up...”
And so, Lee Cheonghyeon failed to recreate “One Flower.”
I’m starting to think MBTI is a lie. At least here, me, Jeong Seongbin, and Lee Cheonghyeon had become supreme outsiders.
At lunch we did a high-level group activity: making sandwiches together.
While Choi Jeho, Park Juu, and Kang Giyeon watched the kids, I, Jeong Seongbin, and Lee Cheonghyeon went to war on prep in the kitchen. My heart nearly exploded, worried we wouldn’t make the time.
“Watching kids is no joke.”
Lee Cheonghyeon sounded genuinely awed. The salon-set hair he’d brought in was a wreck.
“Compared to Juu, your hair’s fine.”
“True.”
We looked over at Park Juu in the playroom. The sheer splendor was unapproachable. He looked one invite away from being summoned to the fairy realm.
“I figured Kang would be in his element conversation-wise, but what’s with Jeho?”
“He’s at their eye level.”
“Ah.”
We also sniped at our coworkers here and there. Otherwise the prep team would’ve had zero usable footage.
“Didn’t you say you played with your little brother a lot, Cheonghyeon?”
Jeong Seongbin asked. Lee Cheonghyeon paused with the bread bag twisted in his hands.
“‘A lot’ is a stretch. We were like any siblings.”
“Does your brother have a similar personality to you?”
He shook his head at my question.
“He’s super prickly. The exact opposite of me. If you met him, you’d go, ‘Oh, Cheonghyeon really is a nice kid!’”
“That bad?”
I can’t picture it. In my head, Lee Cheonghyeon is an eternally friendly big dog.
“What about your family?”
Jeong Seongbin, who keeps everyone’s family trees in his head, lobbed the next question—only for Lee Cheonghyeon to grimace again.
“His is worse. Seongbin, not every older brother is like you.”
“I probably wouldn’t be a great brother to Seongjun either, but...”
“It’s a whole different level.”
Frying eggs and blanching sliced ham, the two of them launched into /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ a fiery debate about “whose little brother is more ill-mannered” and “whose older brother has dagger eyes.”
“Come to think of it, I don’t think we’ve heard about your siblings, Iwol.”
The words popped out of Lee Cheonghyeon. The hand twisting open the strawberry jam slipped.
He hadn’t said “family situation,” so I guess he was sparing the parents topic.
“How about you? Are you an only child?”
Both pairs of eyes swung to me. Sweat beaded on the hand about to crack the lid.
