Idol Star School: A Dark Bully Romance (Idol High School Book 1)

by Nara Noelle

  “Get that shit out of my face,” I hissed as the footsteps came closer.

  Once the Group 2 students and I made it to the peak, I was united with Sammy, Arang, and Terry again. As soon as we were given a spare moment, I pulled them aside.

  “So what’s up?” Terry said as he opened his brown paper lunch bag and took out a juice box. “Looks like it’s apple juice today.”

  “Terry, forget about your fucking apple juice. You guys will never guess what I found in Hamin’s pocket earlier,” I hissed before my mouth widened into a twisted smile.

  “Go on. What’d you get your hands on?” Arang asked.

  I chuckled. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

  “Come on, RJ. We don’t have much time,” Sammy said.

  “It’s our fucking lunchbreak. I’ll be damned if I can’t take my time to share how I managed to find a voice recorder on Hamin,” I retorted.

  “A voice recorder? Are you kidding me?” Arang whistled. “Sounds like you had an interesting hike this morning.” He tapped on Sammy’s leg. “Dude, we’ve got to hear this.”

  “Alright. Make it quick,” Sammy groaned exasperatedly before taking a bite of his sandwich.

  “God, Sammy, who stuck a pole up your ass this morning?” I muttered.

  “A pole up my ass? For Christ’s sake, what are you, twelve?” Sammy snapped.

  “Me? Twelve? I don’t think so. You’re the one who’s acting like a bitchy twelve-year-old with raging hormones, not me,” I sneered.

  “Cut it out, RJ.” Sammy fluttered his eyes shut. “All I’m saying is we’ve got a lot of work to do. Don’t forget, we need to go through the equipment for the orienteering game this afternoon.”

  “How fun,” Arang said sarcastically before turning to me. “Anyway, how’d you realize Hamin was hiding a bloody voice recorder? Do you have it now?”

  “It dropped out of his pocket while I was disciplining him, shall we say.” I took the voice recorder out of my pocket and passed it to Arang. “Here it is. Unfortunately, it’s broken now.”

  When Arang pressed on a button, white noise came on. He shook it and pressed on the button once more, then muttered, “Yup. It sounds broken to me.”

  When I turned to Sammy, he was seething through his teeth. For a moment, I thought he was still annoyed at me for wasting time we could spend eating lunch and preparing for the orienteering game.

  “Hamin Han,” he muttered angrily. “So he is a spy, after all.”

  Terry cleared his throat. “Do you guys remember when I shared how I ran into Hamin standing outside Rye’s room late at night? I actually—”

  “Speaking of late at night, I’m pretty sure he was in a women’s bathroom on the first floor of the west wing early this morning. I was wondering if he might be one of those sickos who gets off on watching women use the toilet, but I guess the spy thing makes more sense,” I said.

  “God, I’d love to know who he’s working for.” Arang laughed. “And what on Earth they were thinking when they decided he audition for Idol High School.”

  “I can’t believe he made it this far. Fuck. Whoever those fuckers are, they must think the show’s a total joke,” Sammy growled.

  “All of the bullshit from Hamin ends right here, right now,” I muttered.

  “Alright. It looks like we’re going to be taking extra-good care of him this afternoon,” Sammy proclaimed, clasping his hands together.

  Chapter 22

  Sammy

  “Alright, everyone. I hope you enjoyed your lunchbreak and were able to recharge a bit, because we’re getting straight into an action-packed afternoon now,” I said, grinning.

  “Tell them what we’re doing now, Sammy,” RJ called out with an amused look on his face.

  “RJ, Arang, Terry, and I have been hard at work, preparing an orienteering game for you guys. It’s time to test your endurance, alright? This isn’t going to be a short one-hour activity where you jog around a bit. You’ve got four hours to complete this. Each of you will be timed individually. Then we’ll gather here and return to Idol House,” I explained.

  “Four hours?” one of the students cried out.

  “We don’t have to walk on the way down, do we?” somebody else grumbled.

  “Sorry, guys. On the bright side, you get the day off tomorrow. I can promise you that.” I scanned through the crowd of students until I laid my eyes on Hamin. “As long as you can get through today, tomorrow will be a breeze.”

  Hamin rolled his eyes at me. Though I would’ve found it annoying and brought attention to his behavior under any other circumstances, I decided to let it slide this time. I’d had enough bickering with RJ already. Now, all I wanted was for our plan to come together seamlessly.

  “Here,” RJ said, passing me a silver palm-sized orienteering device.

  “RJ and Terry will be handing these out to you guys.” I held up the gadget. “You’ll be given fifteen minutes to read through the manual, which explains how you can check your location and record each control point using this device. Since it also has a GPS tracker installed, if you’re totally lost and in desperate need of help, you can send out help signals. All you have to do is press the two little red buttons on each side of the device. In short, consider this your lifeline.”

  “Excuse me. I have a question,” Mas called out, raising his hand.

  “What do you want to know?” I said.

  “This game is going to be shown on the next episode of the program, right? How are we going to be filmed?” he asked.

  Before I could reply, his friend Rich chimed in. “Do we each get a cameraman trailing behind us? This is going to be like filming a low-budget horror movie.”

  “Dude, if you get lost in the woods and never make it out alive, I’ll recover the footage and auction it off to a film producer,” Mas teased.

  A couple of students laughed nervously.

  “Alright. Let’s not get sidetracked. That’s not going to happen. As I mentioned earlier, your gadgets have a GPS feature, so any of us on the cast or the television crew can track you down if need be,” I shared.

  RJ snorted.

  Of course, I knew what he was thinking. One very special epsilon kid was not going to be relishing the comfort of his warm, cozy bed in Idol House tonight. Nope. Hamin Han was going to spend the night in the woods. Mind you, the plan wasn’t to leave him out in the wild—if you could even call it that—forever. My band members and I intended to come back for him early at dawn.

  How did we intend to do this? First, we’d rigged one of the orienteering devices—which we named O1—for our favorite epsilon kid by tampering with its copy of the map and restricting the GPS setting so that his location would only appear on one other device, referred to as O2. I know, I know. Not very innovative names, are they? But we only had an hour to prepare everything.

  “Done and dusted,” RJ whispered in my ear after he passed the gadgets out.

  “You made sure to give the kid O1, right?” I asked.

  “Yup. Don’t worry. We’ve got everything under control. Arang should’ve arrived at the first control point by now,” he said.

  To ensure that Hamin went off in the wrong direction, Arang told the television crew members he’d wait by the first control point to keep an eye on the students and check that they knew what they were doing.

  “And you gave him one of the spare gadgets before he left, didn’t you? I don’t know how good he is with directions.” I laughed. “He should be fine as long as he has one of those with him though.”

  “Nah. I think Terry took care of that,” RJ replied.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Why don’t you ask him? He’s been sulking since lunch. God knows why.”

  “Alright.”

  Terry was standing by the starting line with a stopwatch in his hand. Before I could talk to him privately, I went back into TV show host mode while he sent the contestants off with two-minute intervals between each of them. To prevent
the other guys from accidentally meddling with our plan, we’d tweaked the order so that Hamin was the last student to pass the starting line.

  “Your four hours begins in three… two… one….” Terry said playfully, peering at the stopwatch. “Break a leg!”

  “Except I’m not performing today,” Hamin called out while he ran off—or more like waddled away.

  “Right,” Terry muttered, lifting one brow.

  Though I had a lot to say, I simply smiled; I knew better than to snap out of show host mode so abruptly.

  As soon as we were no longer surrounded by the television crew, Terry asked me, “Hey, do you have O2? Let’s check where Yo-yo is.”

  “No. Didn’t I pass all the gadgets over to you and RJ?” I said.

  “Including O1 and O2?” Terry asked.

  “Yeah. I guess RJ has it then. Oh, and speaking of RJ, he told me you handed Arang one of the spare gadgets earlier. Is that right?” I said.

  “Nope. I’m pretty sure he was meant to take care of that,” Terry replied with a yawn.

  “Don’t play me,” I groaned. “You gave Arang one of the unrigged devices before he left, didn’t you?”

  Terry’s eyes widened. Shit.

  Chapter 23

  Arang

  When I arrived at the first control point, I had three goals in mind. First of all, I needed to figure out where the television crew had installed the camera. Then I had to find a way to break it “accidentally on purpose” before Hamin arrived. Once I got that sorted, the best part remained—I would finally get to lead Hamin astray.

  The camera wasn’t hard to find. It took me half a minute to spot it hanging on a low-branching tree ten feet away from the control point. When the contestants came over one by one, I could hardly focus on my interactions with them. I plotted various methods to break the camera and played out the possible outcome in my head. Sure, I could just throw a rock at it, which was what RJ suggested, but that wouldn’t be subtle enough, especially if one of the students ended up witnessing the situation.

  After over twenty contestants had gone past, I paced up and down in front of the control point. I thought I’d have plenty of time to prepare for my interaction with Hamin, but suddenly, I found myself strapped for time.

  Also, it started spitting rain. Great. By the looks of things, I was soon going to be filmed standing in the rain, awkwardly contemplating how I should go about leading Hamin astray. When I kicked at the muddied ground in frustration, I nearly slipped over.

  Seconds later, an idea flashed through my head. I ran over to the low-branching tree on my tiptoes. Honestly, I felt like a bloody buffoon. I was pretending to sneak behind the tree as if I was going to jump-scare the next student who arrived at the control point. When I was two feet away from the camera, I acted as if I’d lost balance, waving my arms around. Then I reached for the branch the camera had been placed on top of and yanked at the branch until it snapped off.

  Thump.

  I landed on the ground with the camera merely inches in front of me. The instant I heard footsteps, I jumped back onto my feet, making sure to stand on the camera in the process.

  The rest of the build-up to Hamin’s arrival was a breeze. I taught the students how to scan the QR code at the control point with their gadgets as briefly as possible and waved them away while telling them to speed up.

  Since the rain had intensified by the time Hamin appeared, I was standing under the low-branching tree for some shelter.

  “Hi, Arang. Could you help me out?” Hamin shouted out, crouching down to get a closer look at the control point.

  I groaned as I walked toward him. What on Earth was up with the weather? I couldn’t wait to reunite with Sammy and the other members at the peak. Scratch that. I was dying to return to Idol House. Had PD Oakland called for a bus yet? Because there was no way in hell I was going to trudge down the mountain like this. I prayed that he wouldn’t leave everyone running around in the rainstorm to sensationalize what was otherwise an ordinary orienteering game.

  “I’m supposed to scan the QR code over here, right?” Hamin asked.

  “Yup,” I replied, taking O1 from him to demonstrate what he had to do at each control point. Ha. It was too bad he wasn’t going to make it to the second control point.

  Beep.

  “Does that mean the control point has been registered?” he said.

  “What the hell do you think? Yes, dumbass,” I muttered, tossing O1 in his direction.

  He managed to catch it—but only just. His eyebrows shot up upon hearing the last word.

  “What are you looking for? The camera?” I snickered as I wiped the raindrops off my face. “God, how desperate are you for attention? You don’t expect the viewers to give you a pity vote because I called you a dumbass, do you?”

  When we exchanged glances, Hamin’s eyes flashed with indignation. Although I expected him to respond with the first lame comeback he could think of, he beamed at me. And I hate to admit this, but it made my heart skip a beat.

  “What are you leering at me for, you creep?” I hissed, though I knew it was probably the fact that he believed we were being filmed. Perhaps he thought I was trying to get him to lose his cool on camera.

  “I appreciate you standing here in the rain to help me out, that’s all,” he answered as he turned around.

  “Hold up!” I yelled out. When he looked back at me, I added, “Let me give you a word of advice.”

  “A word of advice?” he repeated.

  “Don’t follow the path to your left, alright? You should be going down that way instead.” I pointed at the muddy downhill track to his right. “Um, I just thought I’d give you a heads up, since a lot of the contestants seemed to be getting the directions confused.”

  “Gee, thanks,” he said.

  When he listened to my advice without hesitation, I knew I should’ve been relieved at how everything was unfolding perfectly. Hell, if RJ had been by my side, he would’ve undoubtedly been fighting back laughter while muttering shit about how gullible Hamin was.

  However, as I stood alone in the rain and watched Hamin hurry downhill, a wave of guilt washed over me. Genuine or not, he’d been nothing but polite during our encounter. I knew he’d behaved suspiciously earlier—RJ had the evidence to prove it—but this seemed overblown, especially in this weather. What was in store for him was not an eye for an eye; the worst thing that could happen to him was skidding in the mud and falling to his death.

  Ugh. Why did I even care? I had the future of Pluto Entertainment to take care of. Hamin was an attention whore who was on the island to mess with the show. Though he was much smaller than me, his safety should’ve been the least of my concerns. Yet I couldn’t shut off the voice in my head that told me to follow behind him to make sure he wasn’t in danger. Besides, I had one of the orienteering devices in my pocket. It wasn’t as if I was taking a big risk by checking up on him. I was going to return to Idol House with my band members in no time.

  I took long, fast strides—practically bouncing off the ground. When I heard a clonk, I realized my gadget had dropped out of my pocket and was sliding downhill. I chased after it and stretched my arm out to pick it up. However, once I grasped it, I lost my footing and tumbled. Yup. I tripped in the mud just like before, except this time, I wasn’t putting on an act.

  “Goddammit!” I shouted out while I rolled down the track.

  After a couple of seconds, I crashed into a tree trunk. A sharp piece of bark stabbed me on the back. It fucking hurt. For a moment, my eyes went blank. Once I caught my breath, I rubbed my gadget dry against my arm and peered into the screen to check the GPS tracker.

  “No,” I groaned as panic welled up in my chest.

  It was then that I realized what I was holding wasn’t one of the regular gadgets—this was O2. Though I could receive help signals from Hamin, I couldn’t send any myself. To add to that, the screen kept flickering, so I couldn’t look at the map either.

  “Why me
?” I roared, pounding my fist on the ground. “Fuck my life.”

  Evidently, the joke was on me now. I was the one who’d gotten lost in the woods. As the rain fell down on me, I slammed O2 against the tree over and over until the entire screen shattered into pieces.

  “Arang? What the heck happened to you? Are you alright?”

  My mouth dropped open as Hamin came toward me. Who would’ve thought I’d be relieved to see him of all people?

  “What kind of question is that? Do I look alright to you?” I grunted, tossing O2 aside.

  He stopped in front of me. “No, obviously. But I meant, like, do you think you can stand?”

  “Yes,” I replied as I pushed myself up. Although my shoulders and back ached with pain, thankfully, I could still move on my own.

  “Here. Let me help.” He positioned our upper bodies until our arms were wrapped around each other. “How’s this?”

  Though our height difference created a bit of difficulty, I didn’t protest.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “According to my map, there’s a log cabin nearby. Why don’t we walk over to get some shelter from the rainstorm?” he suggested as we took our first step.

  I sighed.

  He added exasperatedly, “I know it hurts, but you’re going to get hypothermia if you lie there in the mud in this weather. I’ll send help signals as soon as we’re there.”

  “Shit,” I grunted.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “We can’t send help signals with your gadget,” I confessed.

  “What do you mean? Why not?”

  “It’s… a long story. Why don’t we leave it at that?”

  “Please don’t tell me you guys gave me a ratty old device that barely works to fuck with me.” His hand dropped from my shoulder. “Well, I guess you’re getting a taste of your own medicine now.”

  “Hamin, it wasn’t my idea,” I insisted, though I knew I sounded like a total idiot.