As soon as I got home I greeted my mom and talked with her a little bit, the usual "how was school?" type of thing before I managed to break away to head to my sister's room. Soo Young was, of course, reading at her desk when I opened her door. She didn’t really do much of anything else in her free time. My mom used to force her out of her room for “family time”, but Soo Young would just bring her book and start reading again if there was a lull in the conversation or she didn’t like the show or movie we were supposed to be watching together. Soo Young comes out into the living on her own now, still bringing her book, but at least she comes out now.

"Oh my gosh," the words burst out of me since needing to talk about this to someone, "you would not believe what happened to me today!"

I went over to her bed and flopped on it, it being the only other place in the room to sit besides the floor since she was sitting in her chair at her desk. She waited a few seconds before responding to me, finishing what she was reading first, driving me crazy because this was important, and her book could wait.

"Hello to you too, Jin Ri," she said as she swiveled around in her chair to face me.

This wasn't an entirely unusual set up; me stretched out on her bed with something to tell her while she was stationed at her desk. It was a lot like what I’d imagine a psychiatrist meeting would go like, except instead of dissecting my mental state I just unloaded a lot of stuff on her about school and friends. This was usually a one-way thing, but that's mostly because Soo Young doesn't really to have much to unload. She has a grand total of one friend who doesn’t even go to the same school, and they get along really well, so no drama there. She also doesn’t usually associate much with her classmates, so no drama there, either. So she doesn't usually have much to complain about, and if she does, it's all pretty minor.

I honestly don't get how she lives like that. It'd be too uneventful to me, too contained, too consistent. Sure, she reads about interesting stuff, and I like reading myself, but I prefer going out and actually doing things instead of just reading about doing them. She's made the argument to me that reading makes life more interesting, that through reading you get to live so many lives and experience so many things and visit so many places, but she reads so much she doesn’t really have much of a life of her own, and that worries me. Soo Young seems happy with it, though, and it's not as if her life is empty; she’s got a family that loves her and a good friend. She doesn't fault me for living differently than her, so why should I fault her for it?

"This is too important for that kind of nonsense!" I exclaim, sitting up on the bed.

"Well, what happened?" she asked, giving me an amused smile.

As a result of Soo Young only having one friend who was about as level headed as she was, she didn't really encounter a lot of drama. When I was in high school and told her about some of the stuff that went on, she would look so blown away by the way people acted and how big things she thought were small got. She thought a lot of it was completely ridiculous nonsense, which it was, and it was extremely frustrating to deal with, too. Things have calmed down since me and all my friends have started college, but some of them still get pretty riled up about stupid stuff sometimes. As a result, I usually can come to Soo Young with some pretty interesting stories every once in a while.

Today was not one of those times, though.

"I was sitting at one of those tables in the library studying for my test next week and then I notice someone sitting across from me," I begin, glad to be sharing this with someone. "I didn't pay much attention, because I was studying, but then I looked up and I was completely surprised by who it was! It was Xiumin! You remember me talking about him, right?"

"How could I forget when you had the biggest crush on this guy for all of high school and you cried over when he got a girlfriend and when you guys graduated because you were going to different colleges!"

This may sound bad, but graduation was an emotional day. And I was on my period. You get over hormonally-induced emotional one day over one small thing and you never live it down.

"Well, it's been a while and you're bad with names!" I counter, choosing to ignore the jab in the hopes that we would be returning to the main point of this conversation

Of course, I wasn't really all that surprised that she remembered him. I had talked to her about him a lot while I was in high school. Like a lot a lot. But that's really only to be expected since I was a high school girl with her first big crush on a boy. I mean, there had been other boys that I’d been attracted to, but I'd never felt for any of them anything quite like what I’d felt for Xiumin. And I made sure Soo Young understood that pretty early on when I started liking him. It was very important that my main confident be completely aware of the gravity of the situation I was in.

"I thought he was studying over seas?" she asked, crinkling her eyerows. This I was actually surprised she remembered.

"I did too! I don't know what he was doing there!" I answered back, grabbing one of her pillows and wrapping my arms around it. I squeezed it lightly, hoping to relieve at least some of my nerves over the matter

"You didn't ask?"

Oh my poor, sweet, naïve little sister. She thinks just because I'm friendlier with people that I have more confidence than she does. That I could do something like that, just walk up to a guy I had a big crush on for years and say "Hey, I heard you left the country for college. What are you doing back here?" Because that wouldn't be weird. Or embarrassing. Or awkward. Although, knowing my sister, that would probably be her idea of how it would all go down, those exact words and all. She wasn't very good with communicating, especially with people she didn't know well. Just last week we were at a restaurant and the waiter there was flirting with her, not that she noticed because she's so oblivious, and was saying how she should apply so they could spend more time together, and her response was "Sounds like spending a lot of time with people I don't like." How it sounds: I don't like you, and if I worked here I would have to spend a lot of time with you, whom I don't like, which, surprisingly, does not sound very appealing to me. How she meant it: I'd rather not have to cater to customers whom I don't like, because I've noticed an alarming number of them easily shift from being well mannered people to self-righteous jerks who pick on employees when something doesn't go exactly how they want it to and I don't really want to spend a lot of time in an environment where I'll be surrounded by these types of people.

Oh my poor, intentionally sweet but sometimes accidentally passive-aggressive, naïve little sister.

"I couldn't talk to him!" I answered her.

"Why did you run?" she asked, shocked.

"I panicked!" I said, slightly exasperated. She really needs to spend a little more time with people rather than her books so she can at least keep up with these conversations. "He'd changed so much! So much muscle!" my mouth blurted before I could stop it. Because he had gotten more muscular. Much more muscular. And he looked good. Really good.

"That's really weird that he would just appear like that," she sister commented, pulling me back to the conversation at hand. "Are you going to talk to him the next time you see him?"

I hadn't even thought of next time. Would there be a next time? It was a big campus, and it was really a big coincidence that we ended up running into each other like that once to begin with. We probably won't run into each other again. Then again, we might. But did I want to see him again? I had been so flustered by the fact that I had seen him, I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about it. I had liked him for so long, and it took me quite a while to get over him, but that was the thing. I was supposed to be over him. I’d even had a couple of boyfriends, however short lived those relationships were, since the last time I had seen Xiumin. Why was I even flustered about him to begin with? Was it because I still liked him, or he was the first guy I ever really liked?

And either way, did I even want to talk to him? We weren't friends in high school at all. But a lot changes from then to college. It probably wouldn't be that weird for us to talk, at least not theoretically. But would he be the same person? Would he see me as the same person? Have I really changed all that much from high school? I feel like I have, but I feel like that's more related to how I handle responsibility, not my personality itself. And even if I haven't changed, would his opinion of me have, or would he still find me annoying? Would my opinion of him change?

There were too many questions flittering through my head, and too few that I could come up with an answer to. But Soo Young was waiting for an answer to her question, so I gave her the best answer I could at the moment.

"Maybe," I began, carefully. "People change a lot when they start college." I was going to leave it there, but as I was thinking about it, I realized something that I had to tack on. "It'd be good to talk to him."

I let myself for a moment, well, maybe more than a moment, imagine what that would be like, talking to him. If we did accidentally bump into each other again, and we ended up talking and catching up. If we would have a nice conversation. If he might think I'd gotten pretty, or, crazy as the thought might be, that I had gotten prettier. If maybe his heart would beat faster, like mine probably would. If he'd want to see me again. If he'd want to spend time with me. If he'd want to get to know me. If he'd want to be my friend. If he'd want to be more than my friend.

I wondered about what he had been doing all this time that I hadn't seen him. If he had done well in school. If he had made friends. If he had many, if any, girlfriends. If he had any girls he only spent a night with (in my imagination this was a preposterous idea, but I kept it in there simply because I liked thinking it was a preposterous idea, because I liked the idea that he would be serious about all the girls he spent time with, and I think he would be, but I don't really know him well enough to be sure, so I could be wrong). I wondered if he’d had any wild adventures. If he’d made many memories. If his family was doing okay. If his old high school friends were doing okay.

If he ever thought about me.

I tried to flush that thought out of my mind, feeling that by having it I would start walking down a dangerous path. I saw him once, in the library, and I ran away. We would probably not be running into each other again, it was too unlikely. Then again, him transferring back to a school here from the states, a school that I go to, and him walking into the library at the same time I was in there, him walking up to the same table I was using, and him sitting down right across from me, was way more unlikely just a few hours earlier.

Who knows? Anything could happen.