Nari stumbled out of her classroom and the door closed with a bang behind her. Normally she wouldn't have let it slam but she was too upset to care right now.

Her teacher had just yelled at her in front of everyone. Everyone. What kind of teacher does that? Okay, maybe her essay wasn't the greatest. She had been going on three hours of sleep when she wrote it, but still. Did he need to bring up that fact during class so all of her classmates would know?

She slumped back against the wall and tried in vain to stop the tears she could feel forming. A few spilled out and without warning a sob escaped too. She clapped her hand over and hurriedly walked away from the door.

She rounded the corner nearly blind now because of all the tears. Thankfully the hallways were clear because all the students were in class. Where she should be too. Mr. Oh had told her to leave, however.

"If you cannot do your homework properly, you have no need to be here," he had sneered at her. "Go. Leave. All you're doing is causing a disruption in class," he'd added.

Yes. Because his words had deeply upset her and that upset had caused her face to turn beet red. All her classmates already thought her weird because of her shy demeanor and the fact that she spoke to almost no one.

Once, she had had friends. Not tons, but several very good friends. They would hang out at the mall on the weekend and buy the latest clothes and phones and talk about their crushes and their favorite idols and what they wanted to study when they got to college.

All that had changed two years ago when they had entered high school.

Being freshmen, some older students had started to pick on them a little, mostly her. For as long as she could remember she had always been a little overweight. Not a lot, but a little. 

Before, surrounded by her three best friends, they had thought nothing of it. She was just their good friend and the four of them always planned to stick together. It didn't matter if her stomach was slightly plushy and acne still liked to appear on her face when she least expected it.

After a while though, her friends started to do things without including her. Oh, they would apologize later, saying they had just somehow forgotten to text her that they'd be at a certain restaurant or at the mall to shop again.

She had believed them and let it go. Everyone was human. Everyone forgot things sometimes.

Soon though, it wasn't uncommon for her to not see them for several days. She was in an accelerated class schedule so they didn't have any classes together. They would just not show up in the lunch room and the texts she sent, asking where they were, often went unanswered for hours.

Then came the straw that broke the camel's back.

Her father lost his job as the assistant to the CEO of a large hotel chain. It wasn't anything he did. He believed he had made an enemy somewhere in the company and they set him up. Someone stole funds from an investment and pinned it on her father. Since, the CEO couldn't find proof that Jung Insoo had stolen the money, he wasn't charged with a crime but instead he lost his job.

Nari felt it was all very unfair and a righteous anger built up inside her against the person or people who would dare to do this to her by-the-book loving father. He had worked at that company for twenty years and was the CEO's right-hand man. He was as honest as they came and Nari knew without a doubt that he wouldn't have even ever thought of