Prologue

I wasn't normal, let me just tell you all that. At the age of five-years, I was more interested in sports that involved my feet than playing with dolls and pretending to drink tea with my stuffed animals.

I was born and raised in Beijing. I lived in a small household with my parents, grandparents, and older brother. My father was Korean, and he spent a lot of his years studying abroad in China, which was how he had met my mother. 

Growing up in Beijing and having a father whom was Korean, I ended up learning both languages. For a kid my age, it wasn't exactly all that hard to learn both Mandarin and Korean. It was basically an instinct to pick up both languages, considering the fact that my mother and father would speak both languages around my brother and I all the time.

I lived a pretty good childhood. I liked to play sports a lot, and to my parents' surprise, I made a lot of friends in pre-school. I would always come home with a huge smile splattered on my face, which would consist of them asking me what I did during the day, and I would tell them about all of the things that I had learned.

I lived in Beijing up until I was in third grade. In third grade, my father decided the he wanted to fly back to Seoul and live with his family. My grandmother, whom was my father's mother, was becoming very sick. He wanted to be there for her for her very last days, so we flew back to Seoul and lived with my grandmother.

A little over a year later, my grandmother's sickness became too much for her to handle, and she had failed to breathe. She ended up dying, but I knew that she was in a better place. Even if I was only a little over nine years old, I still understood that she was happier dead than being alive and in pain.

Anyway, that wasn't the point. The point was, I came to Seoul and that's when I started to find it harder to make friends. Girls would pick on me for being such a tom-boy. They wouldn't let me join in on them whenever they played with dolls, not like I wanted to join them, anyway. I just wanted some friends.

I found it really hard to get along with girls my age, and that's when Jongin and Kyungsoo came into the picture. It was on a sunny day at the playground, and Jongin and Kyungsoo were fighting over who got to push who on the swing. The both of them were pushing each other back and forth, when I decided to go over and just steal the swing.

It wasn't like I was scared of them. They could beat me up and give me a black eye for all I cared. All I really had to do was send a kick to the right area, and I would have the both of them lying on the ground, begging for mercy.

Anyway, after I stole the swing from the both of them, they ended up just staring at me with disbelief written all over their face. The both of them were definitely not very happy about me stealing their swing, so I just sent them my most innocent look and smiled. 

That's when Jongin had asked me if I wanted to come play soccer with them, and that's when I found out that I got along better with Jongin and Kyungsoo than any other people. I actually got along with them so well, that it was pretty safe to say that I was addicted to hanging around them and I would wake up in the morning, actually looking forward to school.

My mother had always told me about how she had wanted a little girl. She told me about all of the struggles that she had went through with me, because apparently, I nearly crushed her dreams of wanting a girl. 

I refused to put on a dress, refused to let my mother tie my hair into pigtails, and refused for her to put any type of lipgloss on my lips whatsoever. I had a good nose, and everytime I smelt the strawberry flavoured lipgloss, I would scream and sprint towards my older brother, grabbing onto his shirt in hope that he would save me from the demon-like tube of gloss. 

I cringed when I saw a dress, and I hated doing my hair. Ponytails were the only acceptable kinds of up-do's, and instead of playing with dolls, playing pretend, and having tea-parties, I spent time with my older brother.

I went outside almost too often, and always played different types of sports. I would play soccer, basketball, volleyball, any type of sport that you could think of, if you threw it at me, I was willing to give it a try. I was a straight up tom-boy, and I grew up falling into the boy's category rather than the girl's.

Every now and then, I would cry over how much I missed my friends back in Beijing. Even though I had Jongin and Kyungsoo, I had to admit that I liked my friends back in Beijing a little bit better. After all, I spoke Mandarin a lot better than I spoke Korean. Jongin and Kyungsoo also really liked to make fun of my awkward accent whenever I spoke Korean. 

I also really missed my grandmother and grandfather, who used to spend their days watching after my brother and I, who would usually run around the house and fight over stupid, little things like who got to watch TV, who got to sit where, who ate first, who went to the bathroom first, and who could play with certain toys and who couldn't.

Yes, my brother and I fought. You would think that we were the most perfect little angels and well-behaved