Changing schools can be really hard, especially for young children. As the car left her behind, Hwamin had never felt this lonely. Her parents had made her change school very suddenly and against her wishes. This new school wasn’t nice. Of course the building looked fine. It was a low, brick building with a flat roof and a large, round playground in front of the main entrance. Her old school hadn’t had nearly as much space to run around in. Hwamin didn’t like to run though, so this didn’t matter to her. Her old school had her old friends, this school only had strangers.

Unhappy but left without a choice Hwamin crossed the schoolyard and sat down next to the door. Mothers walked in with their children and lovingly told them goodbye with kisses the children all wiped off their faces. Fathers gave their children a small trinket or toy to make them feel safe. Hwamin just sat there on her own as she often did when she was mad. This time her parents weren’t there to notice her rebellious behavior. Someone let out a sneering laugh upon discovering her. It was a chubby boy with short, black hair and thin lips.

“I thought you hated it here? Why don’t you go back to your own school?” He teased and poked at her leg with his shoe. Hwamin tried to ignore him but he kept doing it, eventually so hard that he was kicking her. The girl couldn’t say a word, her anger was choking her and kept any words she might have to say about it bottled up underneath. The chubby boy noticed a friend of his coming onto the schoolyard and ran away.

In her previous school Hwamin had a large group of friends. She’d had a best friend, with whom she competed on writing skills, and even a friend who was a year older than her. Bitter tears streamed down her face as Hwamin thought about her friends happily going to school together. Why did it have to be like this? Why didn’t her parents listen when she told them she hated it here?

The bell rung and Hwamin got up when she saw the other kids form lines. Cautiously she watched as the children were divided by age and got ready to go inside as their teachers came outside to take them in one by one. One of the teachers, a strict looking woman with greying hair and almost completely black eyes stopped her children, beckoning Hwamin to come closer. Confused and uncertain Hwamin approached her, unhappy to see that the chubby boy was waiting in her line.

“Are you Hwamin?” The woman asked, crossing her arms as she tapped her foot in annoyance. When the girl nodded, the teacher pointed to the line. Hwamin understood and walked to the end of the line. When she was almost there something kicked her feet from underneath her and made her crash into the floor. Her hands were scraped open by the stone tiles and she could feel the sickening sensation of blood coming from her knees. The deriving laughter seemed to come from everywhere. Barely able to swallow a sob, Hwamin got up and moved to the back of the line. Then her group was led into the school.

The building was quite pretty on the inside, but Hwamin didn’t feel like the school had any inner beauty to speak off. The colorful paintings on the walls and handmade decorations on the ceiling didn’t belong in a school like this. It was all a lie to her.

The teacher made her stand in front of the class as she was introduced. The chubby boy and the boys sitting around him, all made faces at her. The whole experience felt rather shameful. The days started, the teacher explained, with all children reciting a piece of poetry that was written for them by the teachers.  Every day between five and eight children came to the front and proudly repeated what they’d been instructed to.

“Since you don’t have a poem yet, you’ll just have to wait.” The teacher smiled, but there was nothing friendly in her eyes as she gestured for Hwamin to take a seat. Luckily she didn’t have to sit near the boys that tripped her. Instead she was placed next to a girl named Mihyun with long hair and big eyes. She was one of the prettiest girls that Hwamin had ever seen, and she even smiled at Hwamin as she sat down, offering her a piece of crayon.

“This is special crayon,” the girl whispered at her, “because if you draw your wish with this, it’ll come true.” And Hwamin believed her. After the designated children had all read their poems, some of them didn’t know them by heart yet, the teacher started with her class. She wrote down a few sentences on the blackboard and instructed the children to write them down as well and underline the verbs.

The girl next to her was very kind and talked a lot to Hwamin. She said she wasn’t originally from here and had moved from somewhere else as well. That comforted Hwamin. If someone as nice as this girl had been new once, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Unfortunately for her it was. Not only did the chubby boy, Gyu Seok, hate her, his friends also started disliking her. A short girl named Yura seemed to be their leader, and Yura hated Hwamin with a passion.

“She’s so weird, isn’t she?” Yura remarked loudly as she cornered Hwamin before she could leave the room, “why did you come to our school?” Hwamin bit her tongue. Internally she wanted nothing more than to run away or scream at Yura that she didn’t choose to come here.

“You should just go back to where you came from. You’re stupid.” Gyu Seok added, “we don’t want you in our class. Go back! Go back!” Along with him the other boys started chanting. Yura just smiled at Hwamin as she tried to cower away in her corner. That evening Hwamin did her best not to show her mother her bruises.

In her spare time Hwamin loved to draw. The school was quite strict on their lesson plans and didn’t allow doodling in the notebooks, but Hwamin always found scrap papers to draw on. The art lessons of this school were boring; Hwamin liked to draw horses, dogs, cats and flowers rather than doing as she was instructed by the teacher. For some reason that Hwamin could never recall later on, she decided to draw a friend for herself. It should be a friend who always protected her, unlike Mihyun who was scared of the bullies. As she always did, Hwamin started with the eyes.

Hwamin wanted his eyes to be big and shaped like crescent moons when he was smiling. He should have thicker eyebrows so he could be intimidating to the bullies. By accident she drew his nose a little wide. She tried to fix it but it didn’t work. It doesn’t matter, she told herself, being superficial was stupid. As she drew his lips the crayon she was drawing with flipped onto its side and made the upper lips a bit thicker than hers. With a sigh she made his lower lip bigger to match. His ears stuck out to the side a bit because Hwamin wasn’t good at drawing those. Finally she drew the line to make his face and added dark brown hair on top. She imagined he’d had a soft, kind voice. With the crayon that Mihyun had given her, Hwamin wrote ‘please come’ above the paper and hugged her drawing.

The time she spent at the school didn’t get much more enjoyable for Hwamin. Often Yura would wait for her with a group of friends and break or steal the things Hwamin brought to school, if she brought any at all. One day things started to go particularly bad. Yura and her group stopped Hwamin as she was walking to the door.

“Look what I found.” Yura sang, holding up a ladybug. Hwamin stared at the small creature that wriggled in Yura’s hand. “We’re going to test how motherly you are.” Horrified Hwamin watched Yura as she brought a needle closer and closer to the small bug. She wanted to scream and tell Yura to stop, but Gyu Seok had grabbed hold of her arms firmly and was squeezing them hard. All Hwamin could do was watch as the metal object pierced the innocent creature. Yura grinned as she found Hwamin standing still, looking mortified.

“You fail at being motherly.” She said and tossed the bug away. As she turned and walked away, so did the group of boys. Gyu Seok turned back to her once and punched her in the stomach, causing Hwamin to fall forward, gasping.

“Are you okay?” She heard an unfamiliar voice. Slowly Hwamin sat up and realized she was looking straight at a guy she’d never seen before but recognized immediately. The stranger smiled at her and offered her his hand, helping her stand up. It was a young man with big eyes, just like she’d imagined him to have.