“Hey.”

Kim Jongin looked up from the water spout. A girl in their school uniform--it didn’t actually look like theirs anymore, the female blouse tied around the waist of the checked shirt, a brazen crop top and a belly button piercing gleaming in the sunlight--was standing in front of him.

“Give me a boost-up, will you?”

Sure didn’t sound like a question. Jongin put down the mop he was straining with his left foot down and looked at her. She stared back at him, blouse flapping slightly in the wind. The summer was soon coming to an end, and an autumn chill was setting in. Jongin could hear the distant buzz from the classrooms behind them. She didn’t look like someone he could mess with.

“Kim Jongin. Give me a hand.”

Now it surely didn’t sound like a question anymore. He rubbed his hands against his pants, black and school issued, and wished he’d ripped his name tag off his shirt beforehand. She trailed behind as they walked towards the wall. It was stout, but still tall enough to deter her from flipping over it solo. Jongin tried to avoid her gaze as he knelt down on a single knee and propped his hands up. She didn’t stop looking at him, not even when she’d stepped on the crutch he had provided and leapt up the sill of the wall. Jongin glanced at his hands--they were brown from the dirt. Now he had to wash them again.

“Kim Jongin.”

She called, and he stopped. The sun was now beating down on the back of his neck, making it uncomfortable to stay outside for long. He didn’t want to look up at her, so he stared at her legs dangling off instead.

“I’ll remember you.”









 

Sunyoung had a cat that Jongin neither particularly liked or disliked. However he had never been put in charge of it before, not until now when Sunyoung had to leave for an urgent trip to China, and he was the next available cat babysitter. Its name was Trouble--named by Sunyoung’s younger brother who wanted a “cool name for a cool cat”, and Jongin sometimes forgot he was only five and had a limited assessment on what was cool and what was not--but it didn’t live up to its namesake very much.

“She’s still sleeping.” Jongin balanced the phone pressed against his ear as finely as he could while working on a touch pad with a very expensive, dedicated, state-of-the-art pen. “I thought you said she would be easy to take care of.”

“You seriously are the pickiest person on earth.” Sunyoung laughed over the phone. Jongin could hear snatches of conversation in the background in a language he couldn’t understand. Sunyoung’s dedication to her marketing job took her many places. His dedication to his job ensured that he was able to stay home, the way he liked it.

“And you’re marrying him.” Jongin shrugged, and the phone wobbled precariously. “No, but is it fatal for a cat to sleep this much?”

“No. Don’t be stupid, Jongin.”

“Again, you’re marrying him.”

“Against my better judgement, of course. Anyway, all you have to do is feed Trouble when she wakes up. She’s not a very picky cat.” Sunyoung adored her cat, and by extension Jongin always felt a need to adore Trouble as well. It was something about him, a trait that his cousin Jongdae called “an excessive abundance of love”. Jongin only figured that if he had to love someone, then including everything that she did would not hurt either.

The cell phone on the desk buzzed. Jongin strained to see who was calling--the florist, at this hour?--and pondered on whether to pick it up. He wasn’t very good at planning, so all of the wedding details were left to Sunyoung to manage. The sudden business trip had upset almost all of their plans, though, and now he was the go-to person for every supplier that they had engaged for the wedding.

“I miss you, Sunyoung. Come back tomorrow, please?”

He could hear Sunyoung’s low laugh over the line, warm and comforting. It was the one thing that he liked the most about her, the ability that she had to cheer someone up just by being there. She didn’t even have to be physically present for it to work.

“The day after. Now be a good boy and see what needs to be settled, okay?”

Sunyoung put down the call first. He stared at the phone for a while more, before looking back down at his cell phone. Three missed calls and he already wanted to switch the thing off. But first he went to the kitchen, filled up Trouble’s bowl, set it down, picked up the phone, sat down on his sofa, and then looked through them.

One was from the florist, another from Jongdae, and one more from a number he didn’t recognise. The florist he called back first (they needed to know if they could use the backup option of white lilies because they were out of stock for the first option, and if it were possible could they use both options?), and then Jongdae next (so whose stag party comes first?).

He hedged on the foreign number. Jongin hardly called back to numbers that he didn’t have saved in his phonebook, because he had not changed his own in forever. Numbers that didn’t exist in his contacts list meant that they didn’t have to be dealt with. Sunyoung called this sloth. He preferred to call it logic. This time though he didn’t have a choice. What if it was the dress people, calling to ask for Sunyoung’s revised size? (Not like he could help them out because he didn’t have it)

Jongin pushed Trouble’s bowl around as he waited for the call to connect. The cat was still sleeping, though decidedly less deeply than before. The cat food rolled around in the bowl, swirling until there was a sudden click and the call went through.

“Hello? This is Kim Jongin.” He pushed the bowl back to Trouble’s corner just as she opened her eyes and stretched. She looked at him for a while, before turning her attention to the bowl. “Hello? Who is this?”

“Hey, Kim Jongin.”

He froze.

“It’s Soojung.”











 

Jung Soojung looked back at him in the peephole. Jongin was tempted to keep the door tightly shut, but Soojung kept her finger on the doorbell. The house wasn’t his, and the neighbours didn’t like being bothered, so he had no other alternative.

Jongin pulled the door open. Soojung stood there in her school uniform, a tired look on her face. Their school issued coat was tightly wrapped around her, and she had her backpack on the ground beside her feet. She smiled up at him. Jongin’s hand was still tight on the doorknob, ready to pull it shut any moment. But it wasn’t like he could actually do it.

It had been a month since he had helped her skip school. After that he had thought himself free, but Soojung turned up in his classroom one Wednesday after last period and trailed him all the way home. She had asked for food, and he had been unable to deny. Afterwards it was as if she thought they were friends already, and regularly turned up as and when she liked.

The truth was that this wasn’t even his house. It belonged to Jongin’s uncle. He was just a temporary boarder, sent up north by his parents so that he could attend the high school that had offered him a scholarship. He shared a room with Jongdae, who was older by a year, and found it hard to keep any secrets from his cousin. Soojung, though, he was absolutely mum about.

“I’m hungry. Got grub?”

Soojung dropped all obligatory honorifics whenever she spoke to him. It had been like that since their first meeting, but Jongin had been too concerned about getting back to the classroom to have corrected her speech. Now it was impossible to, even if she was a year down from his. She didn’t seem to play by any of the rules that he did.

His uncle and aunt were both at the hagwon they ran for a living. Jongdae wouldn’t be home until much later in the evening. Jongin considered the odds of getting caught, and noticed that Soojung seemed perfectly willing to continue ringing the doorbell if he shut the door on her. The neighbours would hate that.

“Come in.”





He could feel Soojung watching him as he took out the jjigae that his aunt had put in the fridge. It was leftovers from yesterday’s dinner. She didn’t seem to be picky about food, so he pulled the cling wrap off and stuck the dish into the microwave. The LED numerals flashed and it beeped once, before the dish started revolving clunkily. Jongdae had told him before that the microwave was rather old. Jongin peered in the glass door and wondered if it could handle the task.

“What’s that?” Soojung craned her neck and asked.

“Kimchi jjigae.”

Jongin answered, and threw the cling wrap in the bin. There was some rice left over in the cooker, and he flicked the switch to warm it up. He couldn’t really understand why he was doing this for a girl he barely even knew. Taemin had seen her talking to him once, and asked how they knew each other. Didn’t he know that she was either very rich or had connections to the mafia? Jongin had no clue as to whatever she was. Right now she was just an eccentric, hungry girl sitting at his uncle’s dining table, waiting to be fed.

“I like dwaenjang better.” She said, as if musing. “How about that next time?”

There would be no next time if Jongin had his way. But around Soojung he rarely did, so he focused on fetching the kimchi from the kimchi fridge that was in the corner. His aunt was a fanatic and regularly made huge batches of kimchi to share around the neighbourhood. The neighbours liked that.

Soojung had her legs crossed on the chair when he turned around with a plastic box of kimchi and two pairs of chopsticks. He looked at her for a while, wondering how she could feel so much more at home than he ever could, before sliding over a pair to her. The microwave dinged just then, and he placed the jjigae right in the middle.

“I’ll eat well.” She smiled up at him, eyes bright. He didn’t have anything to say in return, so he nodded instead.

They ate in silence for a while. Soojung did eat well, and finished half of the jjigae within fifteen minutes. As he picked slowly at his rice, Jongin thought about what would possibly have made her so ravenous. Nobody knew anything much about Soojung. Sometimes he was inclined to believe that she was just a rich girl wasting her time away, but why would someone with money always ask for food? It didn’t make sense to him at all.

When everything was finished, he reached over for her chopsticks and put them in his bowl. She had finished all of her rice. The chopsticks clattered around for a brief moment, and he could see Soojung eyeing him again. She always did that, stare and look for extended periods until the contact became uncomfortable. Jongin--through their very limited time together--felt that she often did this on purpose to intimidate. She reminded him of a cat.

“I’ll wash up.” She volunteered. “I feel bad.”

He shook his head and piled everything into the sink. “I don’t think so.” He didn’t know her very well, but well enough to know that was a lie.

“Okay.” He could almost see her shrug and lean back from the back of his head.

As Jongin washed the dishes she asked him about the house. How many people lived in it, for how long, how many rooms there were. He answered as briefly as he could, and avoided telling her too much. She was weird, and he didn’t want to be telling almost-strangers every detail of his personal life. Jongin’s report cards often commented on how careful he was--Jongdae called it being timid.

“I wish I shared a room.” Soojung suddenly said, after prying from him that he and Jongdae roomed together. “Sounds fun.”

“It’s a small room.”

This was the nicest way of saying that it really wasn’t. Jongdae snored, and Jongin was sure he did too. It wasn’t fun, but he liked it all the same. Soojung leaned her right cheek into a hand and cocked her head. She still hadn’t let up looking at him. Jongin put the chopsticks into the drawer and closed it shut. Now that they were done eating, he wasn’t sure of how to tell her to go home.

“My sister has a room of her own. But it’s not like she stays in it, anyway.” Soojung was tapping on the table with her other hand. It was a slow, almost hypnotic rhythm. Jongin sat down opposite her, and wondered what to say. “I don’t know where she stays, actually.”

He kept quiet. Her hair slid down around her face, and covered half of it. She looked like she might have been talking in her sleep. Jongin realised that he had not an idea of what to do with her, especially when she was telling him things that he wouldn’t tell her.

“Sometimes I imagine her coming back home, you know? Walking through that front door with gifts and everything. It’s not like I need any. I just want to know where she’s been all these years. I like to think far-flung, exotic countries. Maybe she’s been in South Africa all this while? And then I’d hug her.”

Soojung still sounded like she was mumbling in her sleep, but now she turned her face up towards him and kept her gaze steady. Like she was daring him to say otherwise to what she had fantasised about her sister. Jongin watched as something sparked and burned in her eyes. Her chin was angled in defiance. What if he said the answer that she didn’t want to hear? He considered it for a moment.

“She would like that. I think.”

But he didn’t. He watched as the chin went down and her spikes shook themselves off. All that remained was her overabundance of hair and her eyes, still looking straight at him. Even when pacified she still insisted on wanting to intimidate. She couldn’t let anyone get the higher ground on her, could she? Suddenly Jongin realised that he was reading way too much into her personality. She only reminded him of a very peculiar cat, he thought to himself, trying to make it stick in his head, but as she got off the chair and asked if she could come over again, he didn’t say no.







She still came over as and when she liked. But now she had learned how to press the doorbell only twice, and Jongin would answer the door promptly after that. He still didn’t know why he was doing this for her, but watching her eat made him feel strangely accomplished. His aunt now often asked why he was eating so much, but Jongin chalked it up to extra track practice. Jongdae was the only one who eyed him with suspicion. Once Soojung left a ring behind by accident, and he was only saved by the timely hiding of it under his pillow before Jongdae could spot it with his very good eyes.

Jongin allowed himself to be persuaded into letting her into their room the next Thursday when she came over again. Soojung sat in the middle of the boxy room, school skirt a circle of checks around her. Jongin perched himself on his bed. There was nothing interesting about the room, but Soojung was looking at the boxes under his bed with interest.

“Uh, they’re all textbooks.”

“Of course they are.” She shot him a mischievous grin, and pulled one out before he could stop here. It was filled with books, and in a quarter of it, a sizeable supply of oil paints and paintbrushes. Soojung picked two glass bottles up, and clinked them against each other. “Are they yours?”

Jongin had been sent to high school on a mathematics scholarship. He did okay in the subject, better than the average student and good enough to maintain his standing on the scholarship list, but he wasn’t nearly as interested in it as he made himself out to be to his parents. He had bought the art supplies last summer on a whim, and stuffed them away before anyone could see them. Art was something that he liked, but maybe not enough to try.

“You can have them if you want.” Though they were rather expensive.

Soojung pulled out the rest of the bottles and started to arrange them in the colours of the rainbow. He watched her do it with strangely intense concentration. She very rarely focused on anything much, he’d noticed, not in school and not in this house and not anywhere else. Most of the time she seemed to be lost on a plane nobody else could access. She looked up at him when she was done, and Jongin had a nagging feeling that it wasn’t going to be anything good.

“If you have the supplies, then draw something for me.”

“What?”

Soojung had gotten up on her knees, holding out the glass bottles of red and yellow to him. Jongin took them over instinctively. She smiled at him again, the sunlight from the window pooling itself in her eyes. Soojung had always been beautiful, but he thought that she looked beyond that today. The bottles were cold in his hands, a little dusty. Nobody had ever known about his secret dream, the one he kept under his bed in a cardboard box filled with calculus textbooks and lined paper. Now she wanted him to draw for her. Curiously somehow he wanted to, too.

“I said draw for me. Anything. I’ll like them all.”

She was too close to him, her hair touching his cheeks, smile still on her face. He could see the dust specks fall in front of her eyes. Soojung was spectacular. Jongin wanted to reach out for her, but she kissed him first. She tasted like the malt candy that his mother used to make back at home, the little town near the fringes of Mokpo and the sea--it had been a year since he last ate it. It was something he missed but yet now existed in the form of Soojung, right in front of him. So he kissed her back, gently at first and then slowly, as slowly as he could. He could feel her hands curl around the sleeves of his school shirt, wrinkling them. He stopped, for a moment, and she opened her eyes to look at him. They were smiling, and he saw himself reflected upside down. He looked to be the same. Then she leaned forward, hands falling to rest on the covers he was sitting on, surrounding him in all of her, and kissed him again.














 

Jongin stayed in Seoul after he graduated high school. One of the more prestigious private universities offered him a full scholarship at their math department, and he took it without too much consideration. He went back home once, two months before matriculation, and watched as his parents cooked him a feast to celebrate. He didn’t want to be away from home, but sometimes he could not choose. There were too many things that were out of Jongin’s control. What he could do was only make the best of his situations, and he was good at that.

Soojung and he were now dating. He was, however, not sure whether it was the way that people typically dated. She had barely managed to fulfill the minimum required amount of attendance dates, and scraped by only because somebody from her family talked to the principal about it. She was like what they said she was, rich, but also not the same. Taemin had chosen to attend the same university that Jongin did, and made use of their lunchtimes together to discuss her family background. Jongin didn’t like the sort of speculations that he made, and listened only because Taemin was a friend, and Soojung didn’t like talking about her family too much.



“I don’t understand why you’re still doing math.” She said one night as he was cleaning up after dinner. He had moved to a tiny apartment closer to campus a few months before he enrolled. Jongdae had tried to make him stay, but Jongin figured it was about time to go. They still kept in touch often, though, and Jongdae was only a short metro ride away in another national university, where he was now reading architecture. “You like art more.”

Jongin turned around at the tiny sink. Soojung was lying on his equally tiny sofa, legs up in the air. Now she no longer wore their school uniform, choosing instead to overhaul her wardrobe with tight jeans and huge shirts. The shirt she wore dangled loosely on her, exposing a shoulder. Soojung never ate outside of his place, for reasons she never bothered to explain, and hence never gained the weight that he would have liked to see her gain.

“They didn’t offer me money to study art, so…” He trailed off as he wiped the last dish over and stacked it up. “College is expensive.”

Soojung let out a noncommittal “hmm”. He wiped his hands on the nearby dishcloth, and walked over to sit down beside her. She got up to make space for him, and laid her head down on his lap as soon as he was settled down. Soojung wasn’t in school anymore. He wondered why sometimes, but these sort of things never seemed to bother her. Jongin her hair absentmindedly as she played around with the remote control. The light off the miniscule TV screen illuminated her face, flashing with every channel change.

They were watching a documentary about field mice and eagles when Soojung reached up and pulled on his fringe. He glanced down at her. She pulled on it one more time.

“Your hair is way too long. I’ll cut it for you.”

She sat up and turned around to pull on his hair a few more times. He laughed and let her. It flopped back downwards, and Jongin watched as she opened up one of the cabinets and began digging for a pair of scissors. He hadn’t noticed, but now that she did, it was getting long. Soojung returned with it and a stack of newspapers after five minutes. The field mice were still in hiding from the eagles when she had cut a hole in one of the pages out of the classifieds and made him wear it like a bib.

“Are you good at this?” He turned around at an awkward angle and asked. She was doing a few practice snips on another page off the International section, and Jongin didn’t like what he was seeing.

Soojung looked almost insulted at the question. He kept quiet, tried not to laugh again, and turned back around. The eagles had found the field mice nest, and then Soojung stepped in front of the television. She approached the task with surprising concentration--Jongin had never seen her so focused since the day she’d discovered his hidden stash of art supplies under his bed. Soojung slicked his hair wet with the spray bottle he used as part of his ironing regime, and began to cut. A few stray pieces rolled down his face and stuck onto the rim of his t-shirt. She was breathing into his face, almost, and smelt like malt candy again. Jongin held onto her waist as she went around from left to right. She was so skinny that he could wrap an entire hand around her side with no difficulty.

“Are you still not eating when you’re on your own?” He asked her as she snipped away, slowly and carefully. His hands were now warm against the small of her back. Soojung shook her head, and snipped some more. Jongin could see her biting down on her lower lip.

“Why not?”

She paused for a moment to admire her handiwork, and swept some of the hair away from his forehead. Jongin wanted to know why she did the things she did, but also felt like if she ever answered, he wouldn’t be able to understand either. He liked Soojung as an entirety, but sometimes figured that she would never show herself to him fully. He didn’t know if it would matter in the future, but for now he was content to have her and whatever she was willing to give. Soojung leaned backwards as if to look better at his hair, and he supported her well.

“Because,” she shrugged and her shirt slid upwards to reveal the belly button stud, a miniature lion snarling, “because they’re not made by Kim Jongin. I don’t want to eat anything that you didn’t make for me.”

She ran her fingers through his fringe again, still damp with water, and leaned in to kiss him on his right temple. Soojung was too fond of physical contact and Jongin indulged her (and him, he figured out much later).









He had a few classes with people who also came from the same high school as he did. Kyungsoo was a chemistry major, and they did lab classes together. Kyungsoo then also knew who Soojung was, especially since she turned up after class and asked for food again.

Jongin knew that everyone in his class was staring at her. She was the type of girl that people would stare at, whether in awe or desire or both. She slipped her hand into his and they walked back to his apartment together. She didn’t say much, not even after he had made lunch for them, and she was eating very slowly, head nestled on the crook of his neck, legs pulled up to her chest.

The spoon made a loud sound as she put it down. Jongin had a meeting to go to in an hour and a half but he didn’t want to move. Soojung had turned her face sideways and he could feel the stealthy warmth of her breath as she stayed there, quiet. Today she seemed even more silent than usual. Jongin shifted in his seat so that she could lie more comfortably on his shoulder. Her arm clung loosely on his waist as he did that, and he held her by the wrist. It was incredibly small.

“I’m leaving.” Her voice was small against the fabric of his shirt. “I’m going… will you look for me after I’ve left?”

He didn’t fully grasp what she was trying to say. Soojung always had had the habit of disappearing from time to time. When they were still in high school he hardly ever saw her regularly, only when she turned up from time to time. She would come and go as she wished, and it wasn’t something that he could control. Soojung was always there but slightly out of his reach. Her breath on his skin began to not feel real. Now her arm clung on tighter, and he wrapped his fingers around her wrist.

“You know I’ll be here.”

It was the only answer he could give. Jongin felt her stir and pull on the bottom of his shirt, before pressing her lips next to his jugular, pulsating in his neck. They sat for a while more, and Soojung didn’t say anything else after that.

When he returned from his group meeting five hours later, her suitcase was gone.