Kris mother is a nurse. She had worked hard back in Canada, her job had her working at odd hours of the day, but she managed to balance that and being a wife and mother all together. When his father had his affair, the man laid blame it on Kris’s mother. He said she was never there, and when she was, she was always tired. That excuse had caused her to blame herself as well.

They had couple’s counseling, and family counseling, and she quit her job. For a whole year, things were on shaky ground in their household, his mother had played the role of miserable falsely happy housewife. His father had played the lying cheating bastard, and Kris, the hormonal self-blaming teenaged son. It was like a crappy television show, all well-rehearsed and filled with fake smiles, laughs, and happiness.

He had felt so terribly frustrated numerous times that he wanted them to divorce, wished secretly for them to end things instead of prolonging something pass its expiration date.

Kris even remembers telling the family counselor during one of their one-on-one sessions that he hoped his parents would divorce, that he thought his mother was being stupid and that he thought his father was being a jackass.

The counselor then helped him work through his words to make his thoughts about him. Somehow hoping for divorce translated into being a scared teenager.

Anyway, his mother is a nurse which means she can’t be there all the time. She’s off taking care of other people’s kids and bringing her work home when the kids are close in Kris’s age. She does her best though, asks him about his day in the morning, or in the evenings, and even though she gives him lunch money, she still tries to make him breakfast and dinner despite the possibility that she might not be around to eat with him.

Kris doesn’t hate her because of her job, her job makes her happy and she deserves happiness after all she’s been through. He’s just upset with her because he’s alone. Korean is coming easier to him, with the help of having learned three other languages, things are a bit easier to pick up.

He can have a brief conversation on the weather, but he can’t talk with the other kids, he can’t use SMS or SNS. He knows proper Korean, the many hellos that are written in the textbooks, but he doesn’t understand the slang. The slang is always the hardest to learn.

He has nothing in Korea, except for the curious stares he earns thanks to his height and fake blonde hair which he had decided to turn back to a natural color soon.

That changes on the sixth day of school. Just before the start of his weekend. A tall boy, a boy as tall as him, approaches him during lunch.

He smiles at Kris, teeth white and full, and greets the boy with a soft English “Hi.” His voice is deep, deeper than what Kris would have expected from the giant pretty boy, but he greets him anyway.

The boy blinks slowly, the smile still set on his lips as he pats at the pockets of his uniform slacks. “Hold on a sec,” the boy says in fast Korean. Kris watches him with concealed amusement. The boy seems to find what he was looking for, and quickly pulls out a set of note cards.

“Do you play basketball,” the boy asks, in halting English. Kris nods, he’s not cruel enough to try and elaborate on his history of basketball playing, his Korean wasn’t that good, and from the looks of it, the boy in front of him wasn’t that great in English either.

The boy grins brighter, the nervousness of reading his note cards fading away as he nods his head as well. “Do you want to play basketball,” he asks, and then pauses. He narrows his eyes and frowns slightly, as if he’s upset with whatever the card in front of him says. “On team,” he suddenly exclaims. “On my team. Do you want to play basketball on my team?”

The boy reminds Kris of a stray dog he once tried to take home with him when he was seven. His hair is messy, but his eyes are wide and shining with both pride and anticipation and Kris can’t find it in his heart to say no. He doesn’t exactly want to say no anyway.

From Canada to South Korea a lot has changed, but he’s more than sure basketball would be the same, besides being on a team might him mend the disconnect between him and his peers.

“Okay,” Kris says nodding his head once more.

The boy grins and flips through note card after note card till he finds something. Instead of reading it he hands it to Kris muttering thank you in both English and Korean. It isn’t till after the boy has left and Kris is looking at messy scrawled English handwriting, that he realizes that he never got a name.

Practice tomorrow @ 6. Gym.

stand