the first thing he notices about her is that she is barefoot.

not barefoot, per se- she’s got on socks, but they have holes in them around the toes. they might have once been white, but now they’re soiled with dust and muddled earth, and they’re tucked under ragged jeans that clung to her hips loosely, all topped off with a boy’s grey jumper, baggy over her small form. he could only manage glimpses of her face, covered with short black curls of hair, but from that alone, she radiated a school-girl’s innocence. where he stood, watching, it became apparent that the schoolgirl lead way into a maniac. she looked like she was possessed; limbs breaking, muscles snapping, only to reform themselves again, bent with brute force and stretched with aching tenderness. powerful like shakespeare’s tempest, but soft like a midsummer night’s dream. she shoots into the air like a volcano, but she fell like plum blossom petals in the winter: lonely and melancholic, but beautiful beyond belief. maybe it was classical music that she made seem like it was pulsing electric, 808s in his heartbeat, or maybe it was the fact that the music had stopped but she hadn’t stopped dancing.

they were pirouette children, though. they had never heard music but they made them dance anyways, little wind-up ballerinas that danced without tune. jongin keeps on staring, even after she takes a heaving breath and wraps her arms around herself as she tucks her legs into her chest, sitting on the floor, head ducked and body shaking. her breathing is the only noise in the room, if she couldn’t hear his own. then, her phone continues playing, and debussy comes on, and before she rises with all the grace in the world again, she takes off her holed socks, and folds them gently, and puts them on the ground in front of the mirror and her bag. then, she rises again, and the process begins all over, to a new beat, and she goes slower this time, but not by much. she holds herself like a ballerina should, he thinks- on the tips of her toes, en pointe, back straight, head high, but she trembles, why does she always tremble?

he doesn’t know how he got here, staring at some girl. he came to practice before class, not get a crush on some girl he’s never seen before. crushes are stupid, to someone like jongin; it’s the same cyclical nature of wanting over and over again, the same feeling of aching, just with a new girl a new time. eat each other’s words, heart, what’s the difference? all it leads to is helplessness, that’s what he thinks. just helplessness and bitterness, he’s become too comfortable with it, after soojung and everything, he can’t bear to think of it happening again, never again. crushes are just fear, anxiety, and a heavy heart his mother gave him, that’s all it is and that’s all it ever will be. but there’s something underneath everything, underneath it all, that astounds jongin, more than soojung ever did. she was just a little girl, soojung, she didn’t know anything about anything, she was meek and sad half the time, she was uncomfortable around him, even after months and months, and he didn’t know where this all came from. spewing from his head.

the song ends before he can figure out why why why, and suddenly, she does a single turn, her hair bouncing, and she meets his eyes.

she’s pretty, as he expected in south korea, the land of failed dreams, smelly fermented cabbage, and plastic surgeries, but she has a rather big nose and no makeup on and boy’s clothing, so it feels odd saying that when every person ever has said that those big eyed-doll girls are the ideal. but her face is tiny, her eyes rather large, skin deathly pale and lips perfectly pink. she thinks he looks good, but messy, as does he, jongin can tell from her face, observing his sweats that hadn’t been washed in a long while (what? he was a teenage boy, it was a given) and his tee shirt that had probably once been white, too, before all the dance practices and sweat and tears. she stares at him for a moment, complete with bare feet and wide-eyed stares that weren’t all that wide now that he thought about it. she stares at him in the complete wasted silence, and without saying a word otherwise, she picked up her duffel bag- that had probably been white too, at some point- and slung it over her thin shoulder, grabbing her socks off the floor and moving quickly towards the door on the tips of her feet.

“wait!” she stopped. right in front of the door, socks at hand, she waits.

“i… you’re a really good dancer.” he compliments, but all she does it look at him, with eyes as dark as black matter itself, and she nods once.

“thanks.”

and then, jongin is alone, while she scurries out of the practice room. he sighs disdainfully, staring at the spot the mystery girl once occupied, until he notices something, something he wouldn’t have normally noticed, had he not had the most unusual encounter with the girl of his dreams this time around (jongin wasn’t bitter over soojung, or about what happened- at least, that’s what he told himself). but there, on the floor, there it was. the dirty, worn-out sock that had seen better days in its short-lived life, laying on the floor. jongin nearly laughed; she was practically cinderella, if only she had two evil stepsisters and mice for friends. he picked up the sock from the ankle, being careful not to touch the rest of it (she might have been pretty, and she might have been one of the best dancers he had ever seen, but that was no reason for him to go around and touch her sweaty foot-cloth).

she didn’t think she had ever ran faster in her life than in that moment. barefooted, skin slapping against the sidewalk, in boys clothes and a flushed face, she must have looked odd to onlookers, but she does not care much, all she cares about is getting far away from there, far away from that boy who saw her dance - the most personal of activities to her, for she did not allow anyone to see her dance, personally, because it brought up bad memories of things she never wanted to relive. seoul is a city that never sleeps, and she had only lived in the city for a span of a few months, but she’s noticed it’s always illuminated, saturated in neon lights. tonight, though, after all the dance schedules have been finished and the practice room was left for her to waste the night away, the streets seem oddly quiet. even through the heartbeat pounding in her ears like a snare drum, it’s evening and everything is quiet, and the sky is a dark, moody purple. in her adrenaline-run, fueled by chemicals in her brain that made rage, sadness, and some foreign feeling of not being real, she passed by hazes of buildings, until her feet felt raw and sweat dripped down her forehead.

“so priscilla, why do you