Chapter 2 – Texting buddies

I was on the train the first time I heard back from him.

Actually, I’m not quite sure what I’d been doing since work hadn’t started again yet, but it was about a week after I’d come back from Korea. Honestly, I had nearly forgotten about “the V incident”, so I was surprised – and confused for a while – when a text that read [noona, what are you doing?] popped up in the middle of my Candy Crush game.

I clicked on the kkt icon and stared at it for a while, and let out a little “aaah!!” when I realized it was from Taehyung, startling the guy next to me and nearly dropping my phone.

I replied that I was back in Japan and some other nonsense. I don’t remember.

After that he mailed me really often. He said he wanted to be better at English. He said he was studying at the same time too and sometimes would ask me grammar questions, which was funny. But mostly he just chit-chatted about random things. When I asked him questions about the comeback, he would refuse to tell me (jokingly) because he said I would tell people. It was a secret. But he promised it was going to be great.  

It was such an odd addition to my nearly nonexistent social life, but I didn’t question it. I felt happy and special that he wanted to spend some of his precious time on me. As a fan, it felt completely unreal, but soon it stopped feeling like a strange dream and started feeling normal. I had a lot of online friends, with whom I chatted almost daily, it wasn’t that weird. So he just became one of them.

V cracked me up. He was just as silly and cute behind the scenes as he was in front of the camera. Although he did have his odd serious moments.

*

The first time he called me was right after they got their first number 1 on a music show. It was in the middle of the night and I’d forgotten to turn my phone on “do not disturb” mode, so I woke up all dazed to the sound of his voice.

“V? What the heck, it’s like 2am??” I muttered sleepily.

“I’m sorry noona, I just can’t sleep.”

And then he asked as an afterthought “Were you sleeping?” to which I answered “yeah” and then he tried to get me to go back to bed but I was like “Well I’m up now, so what is it?” and he started gushing, half in English, half in Korean about how they’d won #1. They’d done it for real this time.

I was confused for a moment because I’d fallen asleep really early and missed the live broadcast. They hadn’t won the first 2 shows cuz it’d been less than a week since the album was out so the sales weren’t high enough yet to beat EXO, but now it’d been a week and they’d done it, ARMY had done it, we’d given them their first win. I grew so happy and started congratulating him and getting really excited too.

“Noona, you cry?” he asked me, in a cute, amused voice.

“What, no,” I lied, “I’m just happy for you”.

“Noona I’m so happy…” he gushed into the phone, to which I proudly replied, “You deserve it, kiddo.”

*

After that he kept calling me every once in a while, though he was careful to mail first, asking if I was awake. You’d think that it must’ve been hard to communicate, but I’ve spent 6 years as an English teacher in this country… trust me when I say that I’ve learned how to keep conversations going and infer a lot from the words of people who can barely speak the language at all. In any case, he wasn’t as bad as you’d think. He was better than a lot of my students anyways.

Day by day, his broken English slowly became better and better, and I don’t think I even noticed when it was that his sentences actually started to flow normally in English, but it took a surprisingly short time. I guess, he already had strong basics and he just needed someone to practice with; but in less than 5 months, we could have a normal conversation, no problem.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.