Seol Chong Academy was for the elite. The elite of the elite, the crème de le crème, the haute monde of society. It was for the who’s who of Korean aristocracy. Everybody, including me, knew I didn’t belong there.

I was a scholarship student, the very first at Seol Chong. I had taken the entrance exam as a joke, never expecting to make a perfect score. The school board had been so impressed with my score that they had created the scholarship program, with me being the first recipient. It was a full ride to the most prestigious school in Seoul, including tuition and book fees and uniform costs. I should’ve been happy about the scholarship. I knew it was my chance – perhaps my only chance – to make something of myself. But my enthusiasm was a bit lacking.

Unlike the other students at Seol Cheong Academy, my life was far from perfect. I lived in a rundown apartment building in one of the worst parts of the city with a drunk for a father who couldn’t be bothered to care about his teenage daughter. Money had always been tight, mostly because my father blew every paycheck on whiskey and beer, so I’d never had nice things. Still, despite my living situation, I had some really good friends. They may not have been what society would call reliable and acceptable, but they had been there for me through thick and thin since I was a kid.

I didn’t have any friends at Seol Chong. I had been going there for nearly two months now and the only time anyone ever paid attention to me was if I was being teased or bullied. Being poor was practically a criminal offense to these entitled kids. To them, scholarship students ranked somewhere below rapists and murderers.

It would be nice if I could say that the abuse they sent my way was purely emotional and mental, but that would be a downright lie. Poor-kid-bashing was the favorite sport of my classmates, and, as the only poor kid at Seol Chong Academy, I was a frequent target. Most of the time the bullying was fairly harmless; I usually got away with nothing more than a scraped knee or a few scratches. Sometimes, though, they got carried away and took it a bit too far. I’d gotten a nasty black eye my very first day at school and had to miss the rest of the week.

Even if my father was home enough to notice that I was being bullied, he wouldn’t have cared. We were at the bottom of the food chain and we both knew it. There was nothing the poor could do to protect themselves from the rich. It was just the way things were. I thought I had everything figured out.

But then my perception of the world changed drastically.

It all started the day Ms. Lee assigned a yearlong social sciences partner project. She hobbled up and down between the neat rows of desks, passing out stapled packets of paper while she explained the project in her quivering voice.

“I’ll be the one assigning your partners,” Ms. Lee explained, returning to the lectern at the front of the classroom. I sighed in relief. Though typically I didn’t like Ms. Lee – she was about a hundred years old and suffered from the same superiority complex that my classmates did – I was infinitely grateful that she wasn’t giving the students a choice on who their partner was. I knew that no one would willingly be my partner, so it saved me from the embarrassment of being the odd one out if she was assigning the partners.

“The point of this project is to learn more about one of your classmates, and to hone your investigative and writing skills,” she croaked on. “The end product will be a dossier, as complete as you can make it, about your partner. You’ll have the remainder of the school year to work on this, so I expect it to be quite extensive. You’re going to have to dig deep into your partner’s life, to step outside of your typical comfort zone. This will be a large portion of your final grade, so I advise you to take it seriously.”

She pushed her thick glasses higher on her nose and began to read the pairings aloud. I only listened half-heartedly until I hear my name read off the list. “Song Narae,” she called. “And Kim Jonghyun.”

I felt my heart sink somewhere in the vicinity of my toes and then even lower. I chanced a glance at my new partner, who was sitting in his usual seat in the back corner, surrounded by his friends. He had sunk low in his seat, glaring at me with something close to loathing; his friends tried to hide their snickers at his misfortunate behind their hands. I let my head fall onto my desk, squeezing my eyes shut. I had perhaps the worst luck in the entire world.

Kim Jonghyun was one of the popular kids at Seol Chong Academy, and, in a school full of popular kids, that’s really saying something. He was a sort of god around school, a legend for his riches, his popularity, and his prowess. He was the epitome of a spoiled rich kid; if you looked up entitlement in the dictionary, his picture would have been right there. He was the only son and sole heir of Kim Yoohyun, a corporate mogul who owned chains of ritzy hotels, restaurants, spas, and shopping malls. His face was plastered on billboards all over town, even in my neighborhood. Kim Jonghyun was set to inherit a vast fortune and he made sure that everyone knew it. He was the type of person I liked least, flaunting his wealth and power.

My luck couldn’t have been worse.

Thankfully social sciences was sixth period, so I only had math class left before school let out for the day. I hung around in the math classroom for a good half hour after the final bell had rung. I’d learned early on in my time at Seol Chong that it was in my best interest to wait until the corridors were mostly deserted before I tried to go to my locker. The less student traffic there was in the hallways, the less likely it was that I would get bullied. My math teacher, Mr. Park, always stayed late to grade homework and didn’t mind that I hung around after the bell. He was one of the few teachers that hadn’t come from a wealthy background and so he looked out for me when he could.

The hallways were thankfully empty by the time I left Mr. Park’s classroom at half past four, which was just fine by me. I didn’t mind Seol Chong Academy when all the kids were gone. I found my locker in the sea of lockers and flicked the lock to the appropriate combination, searching for the many books I would need to complete my homework.

My stomach was grumbling; I hadn’t had much to eat for lunch and I was starving. I knew our cupboards were pretty bare at home, so I was wondering what I could find to eat for dinner when a hand clamped down around my upper arm and dragged me off almost before I could register that it belonged to Kim Jonghyun. He led me into the nearest room, completely disregarding the fact that it was the women’s restroom, and slammed me against the wall with enough force to knock the breath out of my lungs.

“We are not doing Ms. Lee’s stupid social sciences project together,” Jonghyun practically snarled at me. His face was close enough to mine that I could count the individual lashes that framed his angry eyes. “You will write your own dossier and I’ll write mine. Then we can just put each other’s names on them and turn them in. Do you understand?”

I nodded wordlessly, though I wasn’t happy about it. I was a fairly talented writer – it was my essay that had really sold the school board on my acceptance to Seol Chong, after all – so it pained me to think of Jonghyun, whose writing skill was far below mine, turning in something with my name on it, but it wasn’t like I had a choice in the matter. Kim Jonghyun’s word was law around this place.

“Good.” He released my arm and left the restroom in a huff.

“What a ,” I muttered to the empty bathroom, my annoyed voice echoing back to me off the tiled walls.

Zelo was waiting for me outside my apartment when I got home, wrapped in a jacket, his usual shark-toothed mask covering his chin. Even though he was a couple of years younger than me, we were the best of friends. We’d grown up together, more like brother and sister than friends. When I was a baby, Zelo’s mom would even keep me while my father was at work.

“Hey,” I mumbled in exhaustion, digging around in my cluttered school bag for my key.

“Hi noona,” he grinned, unfolding his lanky limbs and getting to his feet. Even though he was only in his third year of middle school, he already towered well above me. “How was school today?”

I groaned dramatically as I unlocked the door, allowing the two of us to step in out of the chill April afternoon. “It was awful, of course, but I guess that shouldn’t surprise me. It’s Seol Chong Academy, after all.”

“If it’s so terrible and you hate it so much, why don’t you just go back to your old school?” Zelo asked for what seemed like the millionth time, flopping down on the shabby, second-hand sofa that smelled of cigarette smoke and tequila.

I sighed, going to the cabinets and opening them in search of something edible I could make for dinner. “I can’t,” I muttered, squinting at the near-bare shelves. “No matter how much I hate it, graduating from Seol Chong will open all sorts of doors for me in the future. No matter what, I have to get out of this hell hole. I refuse to end up like our parents.”

My mother had walked out on my father and I when I was less than a year old, still in diapers. My father wouldn’t talk about her often, but from what I had managed to glean from him over the years she had cheated and was pregnant with another man’s child when she left us. Zelo had never even met his biological father. All the two of us really knew about him was that Zelo was named at him, but Zelo hated that and so he refused to go by his real name. Even his mom called him Zelo – when she remembered who he was. She’d taken to self-medicating after her last failed relationship and most days she didn’t even know she had a son.

“You hungry?” I asked, finding some rice in the back of the cabinet and putting a pot of water on the stove to boil since we didn’t have a rice maker anymore – my father had thrown it across the living room in one of his drunken rages and we didn’t have the money to replace it.

“Nah, Himchan-hyung cooked dinner earlier at his place,” Zelo shook his head, playing with a loose thread on his hand-me-down jacket. “I just wanted to stop by and check on you, and see how your day went. Hyungs said something about going on a run later tonight. Do you want to come?”

I had grown up going on runs with Zelo and the others – I usually had a lot of fun on them, actually – but that was before I started going to Seol Chong. “No thanks,” I sighed. “I’ve got a lot of homework to do tonight and I have to get up early in the morning for school.”

“Bor-ring,” he whined, watching as I maneuvered around the narrow kitchen, dumping the rice into the pot of boiling water.

I gave him a dry look over my shoulder. “As exciting as a midnight run in the worst part of town with the worst kind of people sounds, I really can’t tonight. I would get in a lot of trouble if my school finds out.”

“It’s just some ganja,” Zelo shrugged, wrinkling his nose. “There probably won’t even be guns.”

I laughed out loud. Zelo’s logic – or lack thereof – was always amusing. “I still can’t go, pabo. Maybe another night when I don’t have to get up for school.”

“Okay, okay,” he gave in, pecking me on the cheek in a brotherly fashion. “See you tomorrow then.” 

So this is something I've been working on for a while. It might seem a little stereotypical, but I really like this one. I don't write much hetero anymore but I really enjoy this OC. Hopefully you guys will too. Please let me know what you think <3