Finding Fabulous (Jin-hwan)

[Alanna Darlington]

After meeting with Jasper over lunch, Alanna only had one more set of photos to take: the sewing club. She knew there was a meeting this afternoon and she knew that her roommate Seraphine was in sewing club. They weren't exactly friends, but they got along well enough, so Alanna was hoping that she would help her out. Besides, who didn't love being featured in photos in the yearbook? Still, the idea of asking Seraphine for anything made Alanna a little nervous. 

So her mind turned to happier things. Namely her 'work' lunch with Jasper. 

It had been nice to spend time with him. Not to mention that the food was amazing beyond words. How did someone even make food taste that perfect? Because the food was literally perfect. She was absolutely convinced of that. Not to mention that it meant that she got to escape the crowd at lunch. But that was by no means the best part. 

Jasper was the best part. She had never met someone like him - so open and happy. He made her smile. She liked spending time with him. Alanna just hoped that he felt the same way. Maybe she really could have friends after all. 

Then she arrived at the club room. She cautiously stepped into the room. "Excuse me? I'm from yearbook... I'm looking for Seraphine... or someone... to help with some photos?"

[Jin-hwan "Jen" Park]

Jin-hwan Park had arrived at the club room slightly before lunch, and had been working ever since.

His project, an ensemble that consisted of a striped blouse and navy pencil skirt, had been painstakingly attached to the aging dress form in the corner. On the table nearby, fabric scraps and buttons had been meticulously moved and sorted to make room in the center, where a bottle of green tea and a small Caesar salad sat untouched. Jin-hwan himself was hunched over in front of the dress form. To the untrained observer, it surely looked as though he was painstakingly tying and re-tying a bow over the blouse’s collar with identical results.

He was dressed in black from head to toe: glasses, shirt, cardigan, skinny jeans, high-topped boots. His thick, shoulder-length black hair had been pulled back into a half-bun to keep it out of his eyes. He was so transfixed by the stubborn strip of fabric he was tying that he barely heard the door open behind him.

The voice got his attention, although he did not turn around to acknowledge this. There was a brief pause, filled by the sound of fabric slipping as he untied another knot.

“Seraphine isn’t here,” he said, stating the painfully obvious. He turned, then, and fixed his naturally critical gaze on the girl behind him. He recognized her—they were both in the Yearbook Club, although she’d joined much later than he had. He bit his lip in thought.

It started with an A... Alice? No. Allegra? No, that was a medication. Well, whatever.

He smiled a small, polite smile.

“I have some things you could photograph,” he said. “How many shots do you need?”

[Alanna Darlington]

Alanna flushed immediately as the lone person in the room pointed out the obvious - no one else, including Seraphine, was here. "Oh, right, sorry," she stammered, especially as the person's - boy's - gaze turned to her. She couldn't help but shrink a little under the critical intensity of that look.

There was something familiar about him though... Was he on yearbook or newspaper with her maybe? It was hard for her to keep the two straight sometimes - after all, her function was pretty much the same for both.

Her thoughts were scattered though when he spoke again. "Oh, um, only a handful, like 3 maybe?" She glanced around the room nervously. "But yeah, that would be great, if it's not too much trouble for you, I mean." She set her bags down on the ground, keeping only her camera bag on her shoulder.

"It's Jen, right? From yearbook?" she asked, uncertainty in her voice. She hesitated a moment before adding. "I'm Alanna by the way."

[Jin-hwan "Jen" Park]

Jin-hwan didn’t reply to her stammered apology. He’d long believed that this was the kindest thing one could do—in his experience, making a note of an embarrassed person’s embarrassment only served to make them more embarrassed. And in the end, wasn’t that more cruel?

He turned and opened the small portable closet where the Sewing Club’s finished projects were stored. After running his thumb thoughtfully over several hangers, he hooked a few garments and pulled them out.

“You don’t need them modeled, do you?” he asked, not unkindly. He furrowed his eyebrows at the outfits he’d pulled out. For several moments, he appeared to be deep in thought; after a while, he put one of the ensembles back in the closet. He held the remaining outfits out for her to see. Every single one of them was black paired with another color.

“What do you think of these?” He wiggled the hangers thoughtfully. “Too much black? Is there such a thing?”

Jin-hwan took her mispronunciation of his name in stride, being that teaching a Westerner to pronounce Korean consonants was not unlike teaching a baby to roller skate. Besides, Jen was a cute nickname. Over the years, he’d found that it had grown on him.

“Mmhmm,” he hummed. “I’m not in very often—I do the page layouts and the typography at the end of the year, after everyone else has done the hard part.”

He batted his eyelashes to accentuate the playful nature of his statement.

[Alanna Darlington]

She fidgeted anxiously as he went to the portable closet and began to sort through the garments there without a word. When at last he did speak, Alanna swiftly shook her head. "No, they don't need to be modeled," she said. She couldn't help watching thoughtfully as he seemed to reconsider his choices before putting something back.

Alanna was a little surprised when he asked her opinion but once more she shook her head - this time though there was a small smile on her lips. "No, I think the pops of color help to break it up and keep the black from being too overwhelming. Not to mention that the black adds a bit of continuity between the outfits, sort of typing them all together without them being inherently similar," she responded thoughtfully. She wasn't particularly fashion savvy, but she did understand design from a visual angle at least - it was a huge component of photography.

She offered a small smile, pleased that she had correctly remembered him, though his quip found her laughing. "I can understand that. I'm not usually in longer than it takes to deal with photo assignments," she admitted with a small grin.

[Jin-hwan "Jen" Park]

Jin-hwan nodded to acknowledge that he’d heard her reply to his question. Good, he thought; he didn’t have time to change clothes three times. He really needed to deal with the bow on that blouse.

And, you know, eat lunch at some point.

He looked down at the clothes gathered over his arm as she talked knowledgeably about pops of color and continuity. After a moment, he looked up at her and smiled.

“Oh, I like you,” he said. His eyes had narrowed into small, happy crescents. “Still, if I had my way, it’d be all-black-everything.”

There was a beat of silence; he was still examining the outfits, presumably checking them for tiny out-of-place threads or uneven seams.

“I don’t blame you,” he said, finally laying the outfits out on another nearby table. “The publication room is stuffy, isn’t it? I’ve never been able to concentrate in there. Maybe if they could find a way to get that ancient Xerox machine to be a few decibels quieter than a foghorn.”

He finished his sentence with a half-chuckle, half-tsk.

“Are they good on the table?” he asked, quickly returning to their original topic.

[Alanna Darlington]

For a moment she worried that her analysis might have come off as a bit pretentious or something, but then he turned to her with a smile and she felt herself flushing slightly as he declared that he liked her. Apparently she had somehow managed to impress him, though she was a little uncertain as to how if she was being entirely honest. Not that she was about to question it.

Alanna gave a small shrug. "Nothing wrong with that. People underestimate black on its own. It has more than one shade after all, and even then, the texture can make a huge difference..." Her voice trailed off slightly as she realized that she was rambling. She waited as he examined the outfits in question before speaking again.

"Yeah, that's for sure," she agreed. "It's practically deafening in there." And that was without hearing everyone's thoughts on top of it all. "I don't know how anyone manages to get anything done in there." She smiled slightly. "That's the good thing with my job I suppose. I don't have to be in there any longer than it takes to be told what photos are needed by when," she said with a small chuckle.

"Oh yeah, they're fine there. I might hang them on the door after I get a couple shots, but that's just because clothes are designed with gravity in mind and I want to make sure the fabric lays right..." She cut herself off. "Sorry, you already knew that of course." She quickly got to work assembling her camera with the proper lens. "Don't mind me though," she said as she turned her equipment on. "You can keep working or eat or whatever. It won't bother me and I don't want to interrupt."

[Jin-hwan "Jen" Park]

“Everyone seems to think that it’s so depressing,” Jin-hwan said with a sigh. “Personally, I think it’s powerful. Such a statement color. Timeless. Visual confidence.”

He sounded as though he could have gone on; fortunately, he did not. He snorted a bit as Alanna questioned out loud how anyone ever got anything done in the publication room.

“Oh, you know. Some people like that sort of thing.” The corners of his lips twitched upward into a small, barely perceptible smirk. “I’m more like you—I prefer to work in peace. Say what you will, but collecting a list of student names is hardly an art form, is it?”

He paused to rearrange the outfits that he’d place on the table just a few moments before. His long, short-nailed fingers worried the hem of one of the shirts.

“If you’re not satisfied with the door, we can use the dress form,” he said. He smiled again. “I’ll help you.”

With only a moment’s hesitation, he stepped out of frame so that she had free reign over the table. Despite her insistence that he needn’t pay her any mind, he was still standing nearby, watching closely.

“Oh, I’m almost done,” he said, waving one hand absentmindedly toward the outfit already on the dress form. There was a beat of silence as he watched her fiddle with her camera. He crossed his legs where he stood, still watching intently.

[Alanna Darlington]

"Yeah, I never got that association. I mean, black encompasses everything, embraces everything. To me white was always far more depressing - it's literally the absence of color. Call it purity if you like but to me it always just seemed... lonely. Like it's just empty, waiting to become something more..." She cut herself off with a cough. "Listen to me waxing poetic over colors," she said with a chuckle, hoping he wouldn't find it too odd.

"That is true," she agreed. "On all counts." She glanced over at Jen. "I think it's safe to say that we have the actual fun jobs," she said with a small laugh. After all, half the work of yearbook was fact checking and going over the spelling of every name with a fine tooth comb not once, but twice, at least. Even then, one or two mistakes always managed to slip through.

"You sure? I don't want to trouble you, and I know you're already working on something..." she began. Still, she couldn't help but think that she would like to get at least one photo of a piece on the dress form - it was such a vital aspect of the process after all.

She raised an eyebrow in surprise as he insisted that he was nearly done along with the implied it can wait, but shrugged before turning her attention back to the table and the clothes atop it. At first she was a little hesitant, knowing she was being watched, but soon all that anxiety melted away and as it did it was as though she began a different person entirely. There was a silent confidence in her movements replacing the subtle hesitance that always seemed present in her actions. She moved about, twisting the lens this way and that with an expertise that was obvious.

Several minutes passed before she pulled the camera's viewfinder from her eye. "Alright, I think that's good for this," she said, her voice firmer than it had been earlier. She lifted one dress from the table, her camera hanging on it's strap around her neck, and held it up for consideration. "I'd like to see this one on a dress form if that's alright," she said. "The skirt gets a bit, well, flattened, just hanging like this."

[Jin-hwan "Jen" Park]

Jin nodded at several points during Alanna’s monologue on the color black. It was only when she stopped that he looked up, surprised; why should anyone ever apologize for waxing poetic about colors?

“Oh, god, no,” he said, in an attempt to reassure her. “Trust me—I could talk about colors for hours. I have, in fact. I might have driven my ex-boyfriend a little crazy.”

He did not look very troubled about this. He did, however, smile again as she suggested that they had the fun jobs. He’d never truly thought of it like that; to Jin-hwan, picking good fonts and page layouts was more of a necessary public service than a fun job. He couldn’t run the risk of any of the underclassmen trying to use Comic Sans.

“If you trouble me, I’ll let you know,” he said, in his characteristic no-nonsense tone. Silence fell between them again; Jin-hwan watched her closely, observing every single detail of the artistic process. It was, after all, something he took very seriously. If the look on her face while she was lining up a shot was any indication, Alanna took it seriously, too.

She broke the silence first, and he reached out immediately to take the proffered dress.

“Yes,” he agreed, squinting at the skirt of the dress critically. “No, I agree. Here, hold this.”

He handed the dress right back to her, apparently oblivious to how inefficient this was. His back was already turned to her, though; he had busied himself with removing all manner of pins from the fabric of his project and slipping it carefully off of the dress form.

After the blouse and skirt were secured on the work table, he extended his hand behind him—a silent request to hand the dress back. He didn’t bother to make eye contact.

“By the way, what conditioner do you use?” he asked, as though this were perfectly normal dress-photographing conversation.