WRONG NUMBER

HANA’S POV

The neon glare of Minji’s phone screen illuminates the cramped space of the school library’s back corner, casting sharp shadows over the stacks of textbooks we’re supposed to be studying. Minji is leaning in entirely too close, her eyes glittering with the kind of chaotic mischief that usually means trouble for anyone in a five-mile radius.

With a triumphant flourish, she taps her screen and slides her phone across the scuffed wooden table, a brand-new contact card glaring back at me with a name that makes my heart do a violent, erratic flip.

It’s Jungwon’s number—the quiet, effortlessly charming junior who sat two rows ahead of me in AP Chemistry and completely dominated my thoughts, though he barely knew I existed. I stare at the digits like they belong to a live explosive, my breath hitching in my throat while Minji grins, clearly thrilled by the sheer panic radiating off me.

“I dare you to actually use it right now, Hana, and I don’t mean sending a boring ‘hey’ like a coward,” Minji whispers, her voice a sharp, teasing hiss that pierces through my sudden paralysis.

She leans over the table, her fingernails tapping a rhythmic, torturous beat against the wood as she lays out the terms of a challenge I’m entirely unprepared for. Her dare is insane, a reckless push to send him something completely out of character, something risky and bold like a cropped photo in my new lace bra to utterly shatter my good-girl reputation in his eyes.

My brain screams at me to refuse, to laugh it off as one of her usual unhinged jokes, but the suffocating weight of my long-standing crush mixes with a sudden foolish burst of adrenaline, overriding my common sense.

I snatch my own phone, my fingers trembling so violently I could barely type as I copy the number into a new, unsaved chat, deliberately masking my caller ID settings in a desperate, last-minute bid for plausible deniability if things went south.

The bathroom mirror is spotted with dried water droplets and smells faintly of industrial lavender cleaner, providing a profoundly unglamorous backdrop for what I’m about to do. Standing inside the locked stall, my heart hammers against my ribs like a trapped bird as I unbutton my school blazer and loosen my crisp white shirt, exposing the delicate edge of the black fabric underneath.

I lift the camera, carefully cropping out my face and the name tag on my school uniform, leaving only a shadowed, breathless glimpse of collarbones and lace that feels entirely detached from the real me. My thumb hovers over the blue arrow for what feels like an eternity, my vision blurring with sheer terror before I finally force myself to tap the screen.

The satisfying whoosh of the sent message echoes in the quiet bathroom, followed immediately by a cold, crashing wave of reality that leaves me leaning against the graffiti-covered stall door, gasping for air.

My phone vibrates so violently against my palm that I nearly launch it into the bathroom sink. Every muscle in my body seizes at once, and for one horrifying second I become convinced Jungwon has somehow tracked down my home address, informed the principal, and scheduled my public execution before sixth period. Instead, all that stares back at me is a single message sitting in the center of the screen with the casual confidence of someone who has no idea they’ve just detonated my nervous system.

Who is this? Four words. Four harmless, ordinary words that somehow manage to shave ten years off my life expectancy.

“Oh my God,” I whisper to absolutely nobody, already typing a reply with fingers that have forgotten how the alphabet works.

Guess :) No. Delete. You’ll find out. Absolutely not. Delete again. Wrong person lol. That somehow feels even more suspicious, like something a serial killer would text before disappearing into the fog. I let out a sound that can only be described as a dying kettle, pressing my forehead against the cool bathroom mirror as my brain begins drafting seventeen different escape plans, three of which involve changing my legal identity before lunch.

Then something tugs at the back of my mind. A tiny, irritating thought. Minji’s handwriting.

I fish the folded piece of notebook paper from my blazer pocket with all the grace of someone trying to defuse a bomb underwater. The paper is crumpled from being shoved into my pocket during lunch, the ink slightly smudged where my sweaty hands have practically dissolved it over the last twenty minutes. I compare the number on the note to the one glowing on my screen once. Then twice. Then a third time because surely my eyesight has malfunctioned under stress. My soul exits my body somewhere around the fourth comparison.

“There is no way.” There is, in fact, every way.

At the very end of the number, where Jungwon’s contact is supposed to end, sits one wrong digit. A single. Tiny. Stupid. One. Instead of a four.

“...Minji.” Silence. “...MINJI.”

I stare at the screen as though intense eye contact might somehow convince the number to correct itself out of pity. It doesn’t. Numbers, as it turns out, are remarkably stubborn. Somewhere in the universe, karma throws its head back and laughs so hard it probably pulls a muscle. I have not sent the photo of me in my lace bra to my crush. I have sent it to a complete stranger because my best friend apparently believes phone numbers are suggestions instead of exact sequences.

My phone buzzes again. Another message. You still there? I stop breathing. Air abandons me like it has better places to be.

Whoever this mystery person is, they’re not ignoring me. They’re participating. They’re engaging. They’re treating this catastrophic accident like the beginning of an actual conversation, and somehow that’s infinitely worse than being blocked. My knees genuinely threaten to give out beneath me as I slide dramatically down the bathroom wall, landing on the floor with all the dignity of a sack of potatoes.

“This is it,” I mumble to the ceiling. “This is how I die. By a typo.”

As if summoned by the sheer force of my misery, the bathroom door swings open, and Minji strolls in carrying an iced coffee like she doesn’t have innocent blood on her hands. She takes one look at me sitting on the tile floor with the expression of a woman who’s just witnessed the collapse of civilization, and immediately bursts into laughter. “No,” She says between cackles. “No way you actually did it.”

I slowly lift the crumpled piece of paper into the air. “I typed one instead of four.”

Her smile freezes. “...You did what?” For the first time since I’ve known her, Minji goes completely, horrifyingly silent. Her eyes dart from the paper to my phone and back again, her face draining of color so quickly I’m almost impressed. Then, with impeccable comedic timing, my phone vibrates for the third time.

Hello???

The three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again. Disappear again. And I have never hated punctuation more in my entire life.

Whoever is on the other side of this conversation is typing with the confidence of someone who pays taxes and makes responsible life decisions, while I’m crouched on the grimy floor of the women’s restroom having what can only be described as a full-scale psychological collapse. Every time those three tiny dots reappear, my heart attempts to escape through my throat. Every time they vanish, I convince myself they’ve finally come to the sensible conclusion that I’m clinically insane, only for them to begin typing again as though they’re equally committed to whatever bizarre social experiment this has become. By the fourth cycle, I’m considering throwing my phone into the nearest toilet and transferring universities under an assumed name.

Another vibration. Another notification. This time, all three of us physically flinch.

The phone rests in my lap like it’s possessed, glowing innocently despite the absolute emotional warfare it’s inflicting upon me. Minji and I stare at it with identical expressions of dread, while somewhere in the distance a professor’s voice drifts through the open hallway, lecturing about consumer behavior as if my own behavior hasn’t just become a case study in catastrophic decision-making. The universe has remarkable timing.

“Read it,” Minji whispers, nudging my shoulder with all the confidence of someone volunteering another person for a gladiator match.

I slowly turn my head toward her. “If I survive this, I’m telling everyone you cried during Finding Nemo.”

“I was eight.”

“You were thirteen.”

“I was emotionally invested.”

I unlock my phone with trembling fingers. The new message loads. You alive?

I stare. “What?”

Minji leans over so aggressively our foreheads nearly collide. “Move.” She snatches the phone from my hands before I can protest, squinting at the screen like she’s deciphering encrypted government files. Her eyebrows lift a fraction. Then another. Then, horrifyingly, the corners of her mouth twitch upward.

“No,” I warn. “Don’t you dare smile.”

She bites her lip so hard I’m convinced she’s drawing blood. “I’m not smiling.”

“You’re literally smiling.”

She clears her throat dramatically before reading aloud. ”Good. I was starting to think you fainted." Minji snorts. I don’t. Because my pulse has somehow migrated into my eyeballs.

Another bubble appears beneath the message before either of us can process it, the three little dots returning with all the menace of a horror movie soundtrack. We watch them in complete silence, shoulders pressed together so tightly we’re practically sharing the same panic attack. I have never been so emotionally manipulated by punctuation in my life.

The next message arrives. ”I’ve got class in five minutes, so I can’t play detective for much longer.”

I blink. He has class. He sounds... normal. Annoyingly normal. No anger. No accusations. No threats to report my number to the school security. Just someone casually informing a complete stranger that he’s about to be late for class, as if receiving bizarre anonymous texts is simply another inconvenience on today’s to-do list.

“Well,” Minji says slowly, “he’s handling this better than you are.”

“I’m handling it perfectly.” She looks down at me still sitting on the bathroom floor. “I am handling it... horizontally.”

She sighs. “That’s the closest thing to a correct statement you’ve made in the last ten minutes.”

Before I can formulate an appropriately dramatic response, my phone buzzes again. Also... unless I’m seeing things, that uniform looks exactly like mine.

A heavy, suffocating silence falls over the cramped restroom stall, so absolute that even the distant, metallic clang of a dropped water bottle echoing down the corridor sounds like a distant explosion. Neither of us moves a muscle, our breathing completely arrested as I stare at the digital death warrant glowing on my screen, my mind desperately trying to reject the reality staring back at me.

With a sudden, desperate jerk, I snatch the phone back from Minji’s paralyzed grip, my eyes scanning the text repeatedly as if sheer willpower could somehow force the terrifying words to rearrange themselves into a harmless typo.

“Our school uses the exact same navy blazer, doesn’t it?” I whisper, my voice sounding hollow and entirely detached from my body as the true magnitude of my mistake begins to settle into my bones. At that exact moment, my soul didn’t just leave my body in some poetic, dramatic sigh; it effectively packed a suitcase, gave me a look of profound disappointment, and walked out the door forever.

“He goes to our school, Minji,” I croak, the words tasting like ash in my mouth as I look up to see her eyes widening to the literal size of dinner plates. She grips my shoulders, her voice dropping to a panicked, frantic register as she forces me to repeat the devastating confirmation out loud. I can only nod once, a miserable, mechanical motion that signales the absolute end of my peaceful existence at this school, while Minji stares at me with pure psychological horror.

“Oh, this is actually beyond catastrophic,” She murmurs slowly, laying out the apocalyptic facts of my new reality with brutal, unblinking accuracy. She points out that I can literally pass this nameless stranger every single day on the way to lectures, that he can easily recognize the distinct cut of the uniform, or worse, recognize the exact contours of what lies underneath it.

“I KNOW!” I finally shriek, the raw panic exploding out of me so loudly that the sound bounces violently off the tiled walls, causing two girls by the sinks to glance over in pure terror before hurriedly scrambling out the door.

Minji pinches the bridge of her nose, deliberately forcing herself into a strict problem-solving mode as she tries to calculate the mathematical odds of my survival in a school containing hundreds of students. We both nod eagerly at the comforting thought of safety in numbers, desperately clinging to the hope that the sheer volume of the student body would shield my identity from discovery. But the fragile illusion shatters the instant we remember the school’s crowded central cafeterias and tightly packed libraries where everyone is forced into close proximity.

Minji closes her eyes in defeat, muttering that she’s going to buy me a lottery ticket just to see what happens when my spectacularly abysmal luck finally swings in the opposite direction.

Before I can even attempt a sarcastic retort, the phone delivers a final, parting vibration that draws our eyes back to the screen like a pair of doomed magnets. The stranger’s closing words appear with a casual finality.

Anyway, good luck with... whatever this was. And next time you borrow someone’s number, double-check it first.

The absolute certainty dripping from his text leaves me entirely breathless, the realization hitting me like a physical blow that he isn’t just guessing anymore. “He knows, Minji, he absolutely knows I’m a student here,” I whisper, the crushing weight of the situation causing my knees to feel entirely like jelly.

Minji lets out a long, theatrical groan straight into her open palms, fully acknowledging that my anonymous, high-stakes game of telephone has just turned into a dangerous game of school hide-and-seek.