Part 2

The first time Jung Joon Hyung sees Kim Bok Joo he doesn’t yet know her name and all he can really see is the back of her head.

She’s wearing a red sweater and her hair’s up in pigtails that bobs along with her head movements. She stands out; Bok Joo always does. At age seven she’s round rather than tall and she’s talking animatedly with the girl in the seat next to her. Joon Hyung and most of the other kids are quiet, it’s the first day of school and they are still unfamiliar with each other.

As the days pass his classmates forms groups and pairs. They’re talking and laughing while he sits on the side-line too shy to make friends. Some of the children ignore him, others try to get him to join them, and Bok Joo, she tries hardest of them all. But eventually even she has to admit defeat and he sort of fades into the background.

While young Joon Hyung is a non-entity young Bok Joo is full of life. Her academic results are mostly poor but she’s good at sports despite her rather plump stature and it’s not long before their schoolmates takes to call her ‘Chubs’. Most of them likes Bok Joo though, and the few that doesn’t grudgingly admit she’s cool and so the moniker never hurt her feelings. Instead she bulldoze her way through their early school years—beating up a bully here, belting out a song there—and though it will take time for Joon Hyung to realise it, this is when she starts to enter his heart as well.

Joon Hyung has always admired how easy it is for Bok Joo to talk to people and how quickly they take to her. In the end it takes him years to grow out of his painfully awkward shell but Bok Joo has always been loud and warm and bold and he loves that about her.

-

I'm sorry it's taken so long to post this part. I wasn't happy with the flow so I kept rewriting but I hope you liked it anyway.