dewberries, vocab tests & purple-blue finger stains |

The month of May came quietly through the back door, a creak of the floorboard in an absent calendar flip and marginal humidity.  It wasn’t until the arrival of honeysuckle, dewberries, and wild roses that residents in the form of oblivious adults realized summer was coming.

Like the rest of the local youth, eleven-year-old Jung Haeun was looking forward to summer vacation very much.  Her latter days in the classroom were spent daydreaming of katydids, watermelon, front porch swings, and air so muggy you could taste the heaviness on your tongue.  She also may or may not have been thinking about adjoining backyards and a certain neighbor boy.

She didn’t like him, okay?  She didn’t like him.  They were just friends and fellow troublemakers and he was generally gross but also fun and conveniently located so she hung out with him sometimes and that was it.  That was the end of their relationship.

One of the primary reasons Haeun considered neighbor boy—otherwise known as Byun Baekhyun—to be “gross” was because of his tendency to get into trouble on a regular basis.  Now, Jung Haeun was no goody-two-shoes, but she did care what people thought of her.  And Baekhyun seemingly didn’t.  This was perfectly acceptable in theory, but the other day he had come home with the skin surrounding his right eye swollen and looking as if a heavy hand had painted it eggplant purple.  She found this worrisome.

(Haeun privately wondered whether he might have a Napoleon complex since he was a little on the short side, but that would be stupid because Park Chanyeol was freakishly tall and also got written up, like, every day practically.)

There was also that small and truly rather minute detail of Baekhyun vigorously provoking Haeun’s ire at every turn.  She recently began trying to anticipate his offensive antics, and while she did manage to outsmart him on more than a few occasions, his success rate was higher than she would have liked.  (Though honestly, she did have to give him points for creativity and implementation.)

But Baekhyun wasn’t all bad.  Redeeming qualities included a nice face, a pleasant singing voice, and a willingness to shoulder the blame when they got caught being mischievous.  All in all, one could overlook his many faults in favor of a greater purpose—the pursuit of Mrs. Byun's homemade, triple chocolate chip cookies.  Amen.

The increasing temperature and thickening humidity had exchanged honeysuckle, dewberries, and wild roses for fragrant gardenias, elegant peonies, and just-budding blackberry brambles.  It was now the end of May.  During this time, the adults of the subdivision began planning weekend barbecues in order to talk amongst themselves about important adult things such as the rising prices of gas and bacon, global warming, and what this meant for the future generation.  For some, summer was a gentle wake-up call—a reminder of time and its perpetual nature.  Meanwhile, the only thing the local youth cared about was longer days; as far as they were concerned, the clock never chimed.

Haeun planned on spending her first day of summer vacay composing a bucket list of sorts—things she wanted to do before summer ends.  In fact, she had diligently prepared the night before.  Placed atop the teakwood desk in the corner of her room was a perfectly cockeyed orange spiral notebook and a modest array of colored pens.  After waking up and eating a late breakfast, she would then take her pens and notebook to the farthest corner of her backyard, where she would sit upon the sad stump that had once been a gigantic mysore fig tree (may Thaddeus Bueller rest in peace) and contemplate her role as a small observer of the universe.

But now, as she stood in front of the aforementioned stump that had once been Thaddeus Bueller the Fig Tree, all her aspirations of a rewarding start to summer vacation melted in the heat of Byun Baekhyun’s smug gaze.

He