“Are you sure you’re all right?”

My mom asked for the hundredth time that morning. Ever since, she found out about last night from Mr. Kim, she hasn’t stopped asking me if I felt like there was anything wrong. My mom has been paranoid since I got into middle school, and things like these just fuel her fears up so I tell her nothing’s wrong.

When she realized that my answer wasn’t going to change, she started asking other things.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you to school? If anything comes up you know you can just call home, right? I’ll be at home the whole day. Did you memorize our new phone number?”

I chuckled and turned sideways as I fixed my left shoe. “I’m going to be alright, mom.”

She was about to protest, but I cut in. “And yes, I know our new number. I will call you at lunch, just so you know I haven’t been eaten alive by the cannibalistic cult that possibly resides in our school.”

“Stop scaring your mom, Paran.” My dad scolded from behind the newspaper he was reading, though I swear I could almost hear him grinning.

“Take care, dad. See you later, mom.” I called out before closing the door behind me.

School wasn’t all bad. The classes were all boring as classes are supposed to be. But thankfully no PE today, although several of the teachers made me introduce myself in class despite knowing the homeroom teacher already did that. Several of my new classmates made fun of my name “to themselves”, but there were two girls who let me sit beside them and chatted with me during lunch. I still can’t remember their names well. They were both nice and even asked if I wanted to go home together, so I said yes.

Except I saw him again outside the gates. The boy from yesterday.

“Nam Paran.”

I didn’t mean to see him. I would have ignored him if I could, but I didn’t know it was him when he called out my name.

I spun around and saw him leaning on the gate’s wall, grinning at me.

“Hey.” He said, raising a hand.

I shook my head and started towards my friends, when he spoke again.

“Would you rather I bothered your friends, over there?”

I glared at him for a full minute, though unfortunately he didn’t budge. Then I sighed in frustration and turned to the girls.

“You go ahead for today. I’m going to take care of this.” I called out to them, motioning towards the boy with my thumb. They looked at me and then past me towards the boy in confusion, but they nodded and went.

“What do you want?” I growled, facing him again. I almost jumped when I saw him right in front of me. Almost.

“Shhh. Not here.” He replied, looking around. I followed his eyes and saw that some students were staring at us. He turned to the direction opposite my house and walked, motioning me to follow.

“Where are we going?” I asked when we were farther from the school gates. We had turned a couple of times and are now in a high road with a cliff on one side. There seemed to be a few houses and even one temple, but they were usually atop a long set of stairs. For some reason, I wasn’t as scared of him as yesterday. I guess, given some time to think, I realized how much I overreacted to the situation and was probably just having an episode of paranoia (maybe I inherited it from my mom?). Still, it didn’t prevent me from noticing that he was leading me to a less populated area. That’s when I stopped walking.

“Stop.” I said, watching as he turned around. “Look, what do you want? Are you hungry? Need some money? I don’t have time or money to waste, okay?”

He had opened his mouth to say something but he suddenly froze and just stood there. His eyes narrowed and looked to the side like he was listening for something, and then suddenly, he was climbing up a tree on the side of the road.

“Climb. You need to climb.” He ordered once he was up. Once again, without a sound explanation—perhaps it was the urgency in his voice--, I found myself listening to this kid. Despite the fact that I was wearing a skirt, I grabbed the nearest branch and hauled myself up. When I was comfortable enough, or at least as comfortable as sitting on the branch of a tree in a skirt can be, I looked at the ground expectantly. Nothing happened.

“What.” I scoffed in disappointment. But then he shushed me, so I turned to him and saw he had his eyes closed. He was still listening for something. So I did the same. And I heard something. 

A/N: So I'm on a roll tonight. Haha. Currently in the middle of writing the (n)th chapter. Not going to tell you what number but I want you to know that I have at least 1/3 of this story already planned out... Not sure if that's a good thing. Anyhoo, hope you enjoy this one!