novelraw Chapter 161: Company Daycare (1)
Chapter 161: Company Daycare (1)
“Today, all of you will be working as temporary teachers for the Flower Bud Class.”
“We will?”
Still bewildered, we were each given bright yellow aprons and tulip-shaped name badges. This was bad. Our group had a cool-toned aesthetic.
And we were assigned to Flower Bud Class, no less. It was a class that felt out of place for a group of men with an average age of 19.3 years and an average height in the low 180 cm range.
“Does anyone actually remember their daycare days?”
“Who even remembers that?”
“You don’t? We had an English play performance. I played Prospero.”
“…What’s that?”
“A nobleman from The Tempest.”
Lee Cheonghyeon kindly explained, but Choi Jeho’s expression remained utterly disinterested.I wasn’t much different. I just thought, ‘Wow, impressive since childhood…’
“Are there any of you here who have younger siblings?”
The daycare teacher asked a simple question. Choi Jeho, Lee Cheonghyeon, and Jeong Seongbin raised their hands.
“What’s the age gap between you and your siblings?”
“Four years.”
“Two years for us!”
“We’re twins, so the same age.”
The three of them answered in turn. Unfortunately, none had siblings who were infants or toddlers.
The one with the best chance of connecting with the kids was the one with a four-year age gap, but that was Choi Jeho. I abandoned all hope.
After receiving some basic guidelines, the children’s names, and the day’s schedule, it was time for them to arrive.
Ear-splitting cries began to echo from beyond the entrance.
“Oh no… They don’t want to leave their parents…”
Park Joowoo looked as if he was about to cry himself.
Hold it in. If you start crying too, this daycare will need flood damage repairs.
Still, the children were brave. After seeing off their busy mothers, they took off their coats and walked resolutely into the hallway.
Then, the moment they saw our faces, they burst into tears again.
“Waaaah!”
“Hey, everyone take three steps back.”
We could tell from their cries alone. Those weren’t tears of sadness.
It was pure rejection.
“Shouldn’t we get some bunny ears or something?”
“You want to wear that all day?”
“It’s better than making the kids cry all day.”
Kang Kiyeon muttered seriously.
“Seongbin hyung, you go.”
“Me?!”
“You’re the only one we can trust.”
Bolstered by Lee Cheonghyeon’s infinite trust, Jeong Seongbin cautiously approached the first child.
“Uh, hello…?”
“Waaaah! Mommy!”
And he failed spectacularly.
I’d forgotten. Jeong Seongbin was only a gentle pretty boy within our group.
In the harsh reality of society, no one saw him as a warm and approachable person.
As more children arrived, bawling and clinging to the teachers, one of us strode towards them.
It was Choi Jeho.
“Hey, what are you doing!”
“Hyung, come back…!”
He ignored my and Park Joowoo’s whispers.
Sure enough, a child started wailing.
‘I should have put glasses on him.’
That would have acted as a barrier.
As I regretted my oversight, Choi Jeho knelt down in the hallway.
“You can already take off your jacket by yourself?”
We all stared at him, wide-eyed, at the unexpected question. The crying child did the same.
“I saw the other kids getting help from their teachers. But you hung up your clothes all by yourself.”
“Because I’m a hyung…”
“How old are you?”
“Five…”
“Five? You are indeed a hyung.”
Apparently pleased to be acknowledged by Choi Jeho, who looked like the ultimate hyung, the five-year-old stopped crying.
“I’m new here, so I don’t know my way around. Which class are you in?”
“Which class are you a teacher for?”
“Flower Bud Class.”
“I’ll show you. Follow me.”
The child stood up confidently and, grabbing Choi Jeho’s hand, led him to the room with the Flower Bud Class sign.
He could speak so nicely to kids, but why was he so different with us?
The words were on the tip of my tongue, but I held them back. At least he was nice to kids.
Still, Choi Jeho’s smug expression irked me. He knew he’d shown us up.
* * *
After much trial and tribulation, all the children of the Flower Bud class successfully arrived at daycare.
We had a brief self-introduction session. The kids could pronounce ‘Kiyeon’ and ‘Jeho’ just fine, but they struggled with ‘Iwol’. I can’t exactly change my name again, can I?
Should I just have them call me Mr. Kim? But then it’d feel less like a one-day daycare teacher experience and more like a one-day office worker experience.
Fortunately, Spark didn’t end up filming a One-Day Elementary School Challenge.
Because no one came near me.
The kids would start heading my way, then suddenly scurry off in the opposite direction.
Forget getting them to say my name—I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to make eye contact with any of them.
“Just sit down. Stop standing there like a telephone pole.”
Choi Jeho, with a child draped(?) over each shoulder, spoke. I swear, that guy has veins of gold running through him…
As I awkwardly sat down, I heard Kang Kiyeon’s bright, clear voice behind me.
It was truly ‘bright and clear’. I had never heard him speak in such a tone before, but there it was.
“Did they make a Daldal Pang plushie too? It turned out really nice.”
“You know Daldal Pang, teacher?”
“Of course! I love the Mini Pang series.”
“I know more than a hundred Mini Pangs!”
Kang Kiyeon leveraged his accumulated big data to join the children’s conversation.
The kids were loving it. Children with all sorts of ribbon character hair ties flocked to him.
Pointing at a character plastered on a child’s wristwatch, Kang Kiyeon asked,
“Who’s this Pang? I’ve never seen them before.”
When Kang Kiyeon encountered a character he didn’t know, the scene became even more heated.
“That’s Jjaljjal Pang. Don’t you know him, Teacher?”
“Was there a character like this? Is it new?”
“He first appeared in Mini Pang’s fifth season.”
“They’re already on the fifth season? I’ve only seen up to the third.”
This scene reminded me of something.
Something I’d seen before…
≫ ??? Why is my timeline suddenly flooded? Did something happen with Kiyeon?
└ Kiyeon’s concept photos just dropped~
└ What? Why was I the only one left out??
≫ When was this picture of Kiyeon taken??
└ During the special stage for Mini’s second album~ The sound quality is terrible, so I recommend turning off the audio and just watching the performance~
└ If you like this kind of outfit, you should check out Kiyeon at the Music Festival… The burgundy eyeshadow was revolutionary.
└ Leaving a link to Kiyeon dressed as a Hwarang, courtesy of his homma… Enjoy
I remembered. It was just like when veteran fans spoon-feed new fans all the content they’d missed.
Meanwhile, Park Joowoo also enjoyed immense popularity. His vibrant sky-blue hair apparently reminded the kids of characters from transformation cartoons.
He looked pathetic trying to answer the question, ‘Teacher, did you dye your hair Sseubseul Pang color?’.
It didn’t stop there—ribbon hairpins started appearing, one by one, in Park Joowoo’s hair.
“Teacher, look here! So pretty!”
“With this, you can become the Fairy King! I’ll let you borrow it, just for today!”
Park Joowoo’s hair transformed from simple twin tails into a total of thirteen tiny ponytails. It was tragic.
Yet, Park Joowoo himself seemed at peace.
“Noona does this to me a lot…”
Apparently, his older cousin had given him early exposure to such things. No wonder his choices in mock fan sign events were always so sophisticated.
Heart-shaped jewel earrings dangled from Park Joowoo’s ears. A true role model for all idols.
At this point, only the Es were left out.
Jeong Seongbin tried to herd the children like sheep, insisting they wash their hands first, and ended up making two of them cry. Meanwhile, no one dared to approach me.
Lee Cheonghyeon was the Es’ only hope, but he was struggling.
“Teacher, can you play the piano?”
“I can play anything. What should I play?”
“Play ‘A Single Flower’!”
“I’ve never heard of that… How about ‘Trout’ instead?”
And so, Schubert’s Trout flowed through the Flower Bud classroom. However, it failed to satisfy the young audience.
“Can’t you play it after hearing it? You have perfect pitch, Cheonghyeon.”
“They’re all singing in different keys, so it doesn’t work…”
And so, Lee Cheonghyeon failed to recreate ‘A Single Flower’.
I was starting to think this whole MBTI thing was a scam. At least in this classroom, Seongbin, Cheonghyeon, and I were the ultimate outsiders.
* * *
For lunch, we engaged in the highly coordinated group activity of making sandwiches together.
While Choi Jeho, Park Jowoo, and Kang Kiyeon watched the kids, Jeong Seongbin, Lee Cheonghyeon, and I slaved away in the kitchen, prepping the ingredients. I thought my heart was going to explode from the pressure of making sure we finished on time.
“Taking care of kids is really not easy.”
Lee Cheonghyeon said with respect. His hair, meticulously styled at the salon, was now a complete mess.
“Well, compared to Joowoo, your hair is still in decent shape.”
“True.”
We turned our heads to look at Park Joowoo in the playroom. An untouchable splendor overwhelmed us. It seemed Park Joowoo would soon receive an invitation to the Fairy Kingdom.
“I get why Kang Kiyeon fits in with the kids, but what’s up with Jeho hyung?”
“He’s on the same wavelength as the kids.”
“Aha.”
We also badmouthed our colleagues a bit. We had to; otherwise, the ingredient-prep team wouldn’t have any footage to use in the broadcast.
“Cheonghyeon, didn’t you say you played with your younger sibling a lot?”
Jeong Seongbin asked. Lee Cheonghyeon, who was sealing a bag of bread, paused.
“Not ‘a lot,’—just the usual amount, like any siblings.”
“Is your younger sibling similar to you in personality?”
Lee Cheonghyeon shook his head at my question.
“Totally prickly. The complete opposite of me. If you met them, you’d think, ‘Wow, Cheonghyeon is such a nice guy!’”
“That bad?”
I couldn’t quite picture it. Maybe because the version of Cheonghyeon in my head was too much of a ‘friendly golden retriever’ type.
“What about your hyungnim?”
Jeong Seongbin, well aware of the members’ family situations, asked again, but Lee Cheonghyeon recoiled once more.
“He’s even worse. Seongbin hyung, not all hyungs in the world are like you.”
“I doubt I’ve been a great hyung to Jong Seongjun either…”
“It’s on a completely different level.”
And so, as they fried eggs and blanched ham, they passionately debated whose sibling was ruder and whose older brother had the scariest glare.
“Come to think of it, I’ve never heard about Iwol hyung’s sibling situation.”
Lee Cheonghyeon blurted out. My hand, which was opening the strawberry jam, slipped.
Considering he didn’t use the term ‘family’, it seemed he was trying to be considerate of my parents’ situation.
“What about you, hyung? Are you an only child?”
Their gazes turned towards me. Beads of sweat formed on the hand I was using to open the jar.
Author's ThoughtsHi, everyone, I am sorry, but the schedule will go back to 4 chapters/week🙇