My best friend, Shiri [Jaejoong], is one of the most normal people I have ever encountered in my life, at least spiritually. I mean, she dresses like everybody else (though a bit more on the boyish side), she talks not too soft yet not too loud, she gets high grades like every other smart kid on the block, and she comes from the most normal family consisting of her parents and her two brothers. She goes out of her way to come off as a strong but normal happy girl.

What made her different were her achievements. She started playing the piano when she was two and a half years old, won her first national competition when she was seven, and had her first orchestra solo performance when she was nine. In everybody’s eyes except her own, she was amazing—a goddess, even. To put it honestly, there was almost nothing to hate about her. She had top grades that stayed high and almighty, she was pretty, and she had already skipped a grade before meeting me, making her a year younger than the rest of the class. Most people loved her for her energy and spirit, as well as her witty remarks that seemed to come out of no where at times. She was helpful to others and was first to stand up for her friends.

I guess that the only flaw about her was that she was a very tomboyish girl who got into a lot of violent fights with boys; in a way, she was a man-hater. Not that I minded, of course, because I myself believed in feminist rights.

We were best friends ever since third grade. We met when we were sitting at the back of the classroom together, and she started helping me with my math homework. ‘Such a nice and gentle girl,’ I thought. Boy was I wrong. She ended up getting into a fist fight with a boy who called me ‘four-eyes’.

Another peculiar thing about Shiri was that she disappeared from school a lot. She would be gone for days at a time, the longest being three weeks with no sign of her at school (or at her house, for that matter). “Just some festivals,” she shrugged it off every time I asked of her whereabouts. Nonetheless, the number of absences she had only increased as time went on.

Shiri and I remained closest friends up until grade six, just enjoying each others’ company and listening to our stupid ideas together. We had a very loving and symbiotic relationship. She helped me with homework while I told her of the homework she missed while she was going to one of her so-called “festivals”. She stood up for me whenever other girls picked on me for wearing glasses, while I calmed her down whenever some boy decided to pull on her ponytail. We were inseparable and we needed each other, so to speak.

Then grade seven came along, and Shiri disappeared from school altogether. I emailed her every once in a while, asking her what she was doing and why she was not at school anymore. My emails were either ignored or replied with a very vague “Oh, I’m doing fine!” or “Everything’s alright here, how about you?”. She never answered my questions directly, and I often became frustrated with her ambiguity.

Around the middle of the school year, I wondered if we were best friends anymore; we had not seen each other in person for almost six months, and I was dying with worry and curiosity about her. “Shiri, where are you?” I asked myself. Rumors started emerging, and I could not help but listen. There was one that stated that she was touring the world as a child concert pianist. Another person told me that she already graduated from high school. The most outrageous one was that she was a victim of a lurking serial killer; luckily, Shiri emailed me shortly after I heard about that rumor.

I entered grade eight, and by that time, I had not seen my best friend for almost a year and a half. I made different friends who I told everything to, just like I used to do with Shiri. We did things that I and Shiri were not allowed to do because of our age, like shopping, going to movies, and fooling around at amusement parks without any parental supervision. Many times I started wishing that Shiri was part of my group of friends, but there was nothing I could do. I had long given up on communicating with her; I even ignored her when she was actually online on MSN, secretly hoping that she initiated a conversation with me. She never did and neither did I.

And so my life went on.

But then, a year later, Shiri reappeared into my life when she invited me to meet up with her at a local mall. I immediately accepted.

I arrived at the mall and saw Shiri looking twenty years older than she used to, which was scary considering the fact that she was only fifteen. The first thing she did was wrap her arms around me. She looked so tired; all the energy that she once had seemed to have evaporated somewhere else. She also had this surreally mature aura around her that replaced the childlike and carefree atmosphere she used to have, and this bothered me.

“Where have you been?” I asked, still shocked to see my best friend after several long years. We were in the food court, munching on some fries and sharing a slushie. “There were rumors about you throughout the school! We thought you died or something!”

Shiri smiled sadly. “What do you want to know first?”

“Why did you disappear in grade seven?”

“I was attending high school,” she answered.

I made a O_O face. One of the rumors were true. “Seriously?”

She shrugged. “I was taking grade eleven courses back then. I graduated last year.”

“You graduated from high school when you were fourteen?” I stated, eyes bulging out.

Shiri nodded.

“Was it hard?”

“Very.”

“What did you do after graduating?”

“I went to a conservatory in northern France,” she replied, just a bit bitterly.

“France?”

“Yah, France. My mom [Jaejoong’s mother] came with me, but I was lucky that I could already speak a little bit of French, or else we would have been totally clueless.”

‘Yah, right,’ I thought sarcastically. ‘You’re practically fluent.’

“It was horrible there,” she closed her eyes. “You see everything here? It’s green and filled with color. At France, it’s just brown and grey. Everybody seemed so depressed and stuck-up.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “The only thing I did there was practice. From eight in the morning to eight at night. A good twelve hours stuck in a practice room.”

I gaped.

“I had to,” she answered my silent question. “Practice rooms were hard to get there since everybody practiced like crazy. It was also on a first come first serve basis, and the early birds got the worms. My mom woke me up at six to catch the bus, and I would have to run a good block and a half to make it to the conservatory before it opened.”

“But you got the practice rooms, right?” I said optimistically.

“Not all the time,” she shook her head. “Sometimes people stay overnight.”

I made a confused face, but she ignored it.

“Once you left the practice room, it was almost impossible to get it back, so I had no choice but to use them as much as possible, and eventually I started practicing for twelve hours a day.”

“Jesus.”

“I know. It’s a wonder I don’t have tendonitis yet.”

“Yet.”

She laughed weakly. “During the first week, I started using the best Steinway piano, but it was an unwritten rule that seniors had their own rooms, and that newcomers should find their own territory. I happened to be practicing on a senior’s piano, but at first I didn’t know that. Then the senior—his name was Jin [Yoochun]—walked in and my mother decided to piss him off by standing up for me. He got so mad that he pushed her away and almost slammed the lid on my fingers. Then he closed the piano lid and sat on it, demanding that we leave.”

I bit my lip. “Did you?”

Shiri nodded. “My mother and I had no choice. He was insistent and he looked really dangerous.”

“Jerk.”

“I know,” she giggled.

“It also turned out that our only friend there, Chantal [Junsu], was his girlfriend,” she added.

“That must have .”

“It did,” she agreed. “We never talked anymore.”

I smiled at my friend. “Did you make any other friends?”

“Yah,” she perked up. “His name was Timothy [Changmin].”

“And?”

“Well, he was just a come-and-go kind of person,” she described. “He spoke Chinese, so he only talked to my mother and ignored me most of the time.”

“Was he cute?”

My friend shrugged. “Cute enough, I guess. Not really my type. He was really nice to me, though. He liked playing the piano with me.”

“Aww!”

She rolled her eyes. “Anyways, I studied with one of the more famous piano teachers there, but I’m sure you haven’t heard of him since he keeps to himself a lot.”

“Who knows?” I chirped cheekily. “I might know him.”

“No you don’t,” she affirmed. “His name is Peter Sokolov [Yunho], but I only called him Professor.” Shiri smiled softly. “He told me that I was such a sweet and smiley girl.”

“You?” I inquired, aghast. Of all the adjectives that described Shiri, ‘sweet’ was not one of them. She could be considered ‘smiley’, perhaps, but that was a runner-up.

“I know, that’s what I thought.”

“So what about this Sokolov guy?”

Shiri chuckled. “I just had lessons with him.”

“That’s it?” I winked. “You seem to like him.” Shiri’s eyes were dreamy, which was very out of character for her.

My best friend bit her lower lip and then nodded. “I did. I really liked him.”

I squealed with glee. Shiri definitely had crushes before, but never once had she ever admitted them to me (though each and every one of them were as clear as day in my eyes). “What was he like? Tell me, tell me!”

Shiri had a silly grin on her face. “He presented himself very nobly. He had a really deep voice and he spoke English with a Russian accent. He was so wise, and taught me a lot about life and its lessons. He had very dark eyes and was very deliberate with his words. He liked to touch my hair a lot—”

“He touched your hair?!?” I gaped. Shiri never let anybody—ANYBODY—touch her long straight waist-length black hair unless they wanted a broken finger or two. “Wow, you must have really liked him.”

“I did,” she confessed. “He was such a nice man.”

I frowned at the word ‘man’. “How old was he?”

My friend froze for a minute. “You’re going to think I’m weird.”

“You know very well I won’t.”

Shiri closed her eyes and let out a breath. “He was seventy, and he was married. Even his son was older than me.”

My eyes drooped. Shiri looked so sad just then, as if she learned that a relationship between a fourteen-year-old and a seventy-year-old just didn’t happen. “Did you know he was married?”

The girl in front of me shook her head. “Not at first. I only found out when he introduced me to his wife at China.”

“China? During that international competition you told me about?”

“Yah,” she responded blankly. “I lost.”

“Of course you did!” I exclaimed. “You were competing against twenty-two-year-olds, for god’s sake!”

“Whatever, I played terribly.”

I pouted and then sighed. “Was she nice? I mean his wife?”

Shiri nodded. “Unfortunately, she was just about the most agreeable person on the face of the planet.”

“And his son?”

“I never met him, and I hope I don’t.”

I tacitly agreed. “Did you really love him?”

Shiri inhaled deeply and then exhaled slowly. “Yes. I did.”

Okay, my best friend was not stupid. Shiri was one of those rare people who really knew who they were and understood themselves inside and out. Big deal, you say? Well, it really is. You try describing yourself in detail or explaining your character to a stranger. Would you be able to express it in a way that everybody could understand? Would you be able to describe who you are through mere words?

I know I can’t.

“Do you still see him?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

“I asked my mother to book tickets home before the results came out. I came home a week ago. He didn’t even know we were leaving.”

My heart clenched for her. Compared to Shiri, my life was a piece of cake. While I complained of not getting a date, she swallowed the pain of leaving somebody she loved. “Does he know where you are?”

Shiri nodded. “I emailed him last night.”

“What did your email say?”

“That I would not be attending the conservatory anymore, and that I would be going to a local university instead.”

I bit my tongue, a habit I had whenever I didn’t know what to say.

Shiri’s sharp eyes saw my jaw move, and she smiled. “You don’t need to say anything. I’m a strong kid.”

“I know, but all those things you went through—!”

“It’s in the past,” she cut me off. “It’s done. Finished. Behind me.”

I looked at her weirdly. “You know, Shiri, most people actually mope around for several weeks when something bad happens to them. I was depressed for a year when Brandon broke up with me.”

Shiri grinned. “My time for moping around is over; I have no time for it now. The local university gave me full scholarship, and I have to work hard to maintain it. You know me, Ava, I have to get things done!”

I smiled along with her. “I know.”

Shiri is now sixteen and still single. But she’s happy. She’s working hard at her studies and hopes to enter graduate school in the near future. There are many boys chasing after her, but she rejects each and every one of them for indiscreet reasons. I know that she still thinks of her professor, but I no longer doubt that she has moved on. Like she said, she’s strong. She knows what she is doing, even if she thinks she doesn’t.

I trust that she will eventually become whatever she has always wanted to be.

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Character Inspirations:

Jaejoong, the main character, is based on Shiri, my best friend (I changed her name for privacy purposes)

Yunho is the compassionate piano professor, a.k.a. Shiri’s love interest, Peter Sokolov (I also changed his name since Shiri wouldn’t have liked it if she saw his name floating around winglin).

Changmin is Timothy, Shiri’s only friend when she was in France. I also based the later him on Yundi Li (look him up; he’s hot ^^)

Yoochun is based on Jin, the boy who kicked Shiri out and started her nightmares. Shiri once told me that she wanted to go out on a walk to clear her mind while her mother stayed to guard her room, but right outside the door she saw Jin. From then on she never dared to leave her practice room even if she was tired. I almost cried when she told me about this.

Junsu is based on Chantal, who was Shiri’s friend before Jin came along. Apparently she’s a really nice person who works really hard and takes discipline very seriously.

Kangin and Leeteuk are symbolizing Alessio Bax and Lucille Chung, a pianist couple who met through an international competition in Japan (http://www.prairiedebut.com/wp-content/uploads/Bax-Chung.png). Shiri met both of them at a master class in Japan.

Heechul is me ^^ except I’m single. My knight in shining armor (cough Han Geng) did not sweep me off my feet just yet.

Donghae and Eunhyuk signify close friends of me and Shiri who suddenly started dating! Never saw it coming! I mean, they always quarreled and hit each other whenever we were around, and then the next day we saw them holding hands.

Jessica Jung depicts a girl from my middle school who had a baby when she was fourteen. Apparently, she had an abusive sixteen-year-old boyfriend who date her.

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All of the events were fictional or loosely based on things that have happened to me. Like the park where Jaejoong met up with his friends? Me and Shiri used to go there all the time when were kids. The bird analogy? Me and my mom were talking about Biology while walking at a park. Everything else was by my little sister and her four dimensional ideas.