Yeseul is twelve years old and Dongmin has a dimple on his right side, so her halmoni must have been mistaken. She tells her about him with starry eyes and her halmoni nods along with a smile, but doesn’t admit her mistake. She’s obviously wrong because Dongmin’s eyes look like the wings of a bird in flight and he told her he likes her through a note he left on her desk, so how could this be anything but right?
Dongmin kisses her cheek in a vacant classroom during recess and runs right away, and Yeseul concludes that she’s in love. But her little heart is broken a mere week later when Dongmin loses interest and trades Yeseul’s soft cheek for another, and she concludes that destiny is for ers and that dimples weren’t that attractive to begin with.

Yeseul is fifteen and she had practically forgotten all about her grandma’s little tale once she realized that everyone she knows has dark hair and stops looking for cheek craters on the faces of strangers. Her grandma is getting sicker as time progresses and her stories get more and more incoherent. Yeseul tries to be patient as she helps her halmoni settle in her bed, bringing her tea and sweets and placing a cold cloth to her forehead. She tries to crack a smile when her grandma calls her by her mother’s name and scolds her for sneaking out with that “Daeho scoundrel”, seemingly forgetting that her daughter and son in law have been dead for years. But her grandma falls asleep the moment Yeseul leaves the room and the tears sting as they well up in her eyes.

 

Yeseul meets Arah during her sophomore year in high school, and finds her to be extremely annoying. She’s busy staring at a handsome transfer student from behind her locker when she’s approached by a cheeky freshman asking her for a cigarette rather loudly. Yeseul turns to look at the random girl by her side and she sees her staring at her with the most exaggerated yearning.  She raises a brow and brushes her off with a hand wave because “smoking is for idiots” and the girl walks away with a fallen face. Yeseul rolls her eyes and turns back around in means to resume her stealthy stalking, only to find that the boy had already walked away.

Yeseul is walking home from another long day of school when she hears a shrill “Yah, sophomore!” behind her. She glances back to find the same girl from earlier walking after her with an irritable step.
“I didn’t appreciate you calling me an idiot earlier,” The girl says once she catches up to Yeseul, slightly out of breath.
Yeseul is baffled by the nerve of this girl, who the hell does she think she is?
“I didn’t call you an idiot,” She humors her with a dry response. “I only said people who smoke are idiots. Do you smoke?”
It’s a rhetorical question, but the girl is quiet for a while and averts her eyes to the ground, still maintaining a quick stride to match Yeseul’s pace.
“No.” She responds after a short silence, and Yeseul is confused.
“Why did you ask me for a smoke then?”
“Ah, well…” the girl stammers, suddenly embarrassed. “It’s my first day here and I wanted to make a good first impression.”
Yeseul finds that hilarious. “A good impression!” She snorts.  “On whom, exactly?”
“I don’t know,” The girl resorts to kicking a stray pebble on the ground. “Anyone, really.”
“Well, that’s not how it’s done, freshman.” Yeseul retorts. “Looking for cigarettes as noisily as you did today will only get you expelled, not make you friends.”
“Oh, and you’re such an expert about being social?” The girl raises her eyes to cast a skeptical look in Yeseul’s direction and Yeseul’s hand twitches at her side, aching to slap that smug look off of the snarky freshman’s face, but finds herself laughing instead because… hell, she’s right.

Arah talks Yeseul into introducing her to her small circle of school friends, a feat achieved by pestering the unlucky sophomore during lunch breaks with puppy eyes and the most pitiful begging Yeseul has ever heard. And as much as Yeseul cringes at the sound of Arah’s voice, she eventually begins to enjoy her presence because at least Arah’s high pitched blabbering takes away from Yeseul’s restless thoughts of her sick grandma and dwindling success at her studies. She almost doesn’t want to share her with her friends, afraid that she’ll lose the simple comfort of Arah’s endless chatter by her side if she finds better company. But Arah’s annoying tendencies seem to work for Yeseul this time because her friends find her almost as irritating as Yeseul did, but don’t really grow to like her as much.

 

Yeseul is sixteen and Arah has bruises on her arms again. She hides them under her long sleeves whenever she catches Yeseul staring at them and probably feels thankful for the cold weather.
“Don’t worry about it,” Arah shifts back into her lying position on the grass. “My dad was an again.” But Yeseul still looks at her warily.
Arah’s discomfort turns into an immediate overdone smile, and she fixates her gaze on the clouds and sighs.
The view from the hill is breathtaking, and the only reason Yeseul even knows this place is because her halmoni used to take her here during her healthy days, but Yeseul hadn’t visited the place since the first time her grandma forgot how to turn on the stove. Arah was surprisingly a sufficient accomplice, though.

 

Yeseul makes a cake for Arah’s sixteenth birthday, and the latter practically moans when she bites out of a generous slice of the homemade delicacy. Yeseul doesn’t even feel embarrassed by her friend’s over the top reaction because she knows better than to expect anything but extravagant from her.
“Who taught you to bake like that?” Arah exclaims as she the sweet residue from her fingers.
“My halmoni,” Yeseul answers somewhat sadly, and Arah’s eyes soften in response.
“I would really like to meet her someday.” She says with a smile that rarely surfaces on her lips. They’re curved in a way that only barely reaches her eyes, and on anyone else it would have looked detached, but Arah makes it look… intimate, subdued. It’s nothing like her usual radiant grins.  
“She sounds like an amazing woman.”
Yeseul smiles back despite the sudden hollowness in her chest, and Arah reaches over to wipe away a stubborn tear from Yeseul’s cheek.

Yeseul is seventeen and Arah had become a third resident in her home. There isn’t a day in which Arah doesn’t knock rhythmically on the door and enters without waiting for a response, yodeling a high pitched “Is anybody home?”, and infuriating Yeseul in the process.
Yeseul scolds her repeatedly, saying that she shouldn’t go barging into other peoples’ home like that, especially when one of the inhabitants is a sick grandma who might be startled by the noise. But unlike Yeseul’s friends, her halmoni loves Arah from first sight. Arah is her bubbly little self when they meet for the first time, seemingly unaffected by the elder’s glass eye and general frailness. She shakes her hand gently but eagerly, spouting compliments and gushing about how excited she is to meet “the famous halmoni”. And Yeseul’s grandma, who hadn’t had an intelligible conversation with anyone but her granddaughter for years, looks genuinely surprised for a moment and then smiles a smile so wide that her face scrunches up into one big wrinkle.
Yeseul stops reprimanding her friend’s unmannered behavior when she realizes how lonely her halmoni had been all this time. Instead, she stands at the door, half hidden behind the threshold as she watches her grandma neatly fold her wrinkled hands over Arah’s, telling her another ridiculous story Yeseul already knows by heart. And Arah, irritable fidgety Arah, sits patiently across from her, listening intently and nodding along to the endless stream of words. Yeseul might have stood there for ten minutes, wishing she could stop time to savor this moment forever.

 

Yeseul awakens in the middle of the night to the sound of a hesitant knock on her door. She tiptoes around the house as to not wake her grandma, and opens up for a bloodied Arah, hunched over and trembling at her doorstep.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Arah cries as Yeseul ushers her in and lays her down on her living room couch.
She flees to the kitchen to retrieve a wet cloth and holds it up to her bruised face.
“You’re not going back there again.” She threatens with a wavering voice, dabbing the dried blood at her temple. Arah quivers under her touch and whimpers more apologies, though Yeseul knows she’s not the one who should be sorry.
Arah stays at Yeseul’s house for the remainder of the week until her wounds heal, and Yeseul does everything but drop to her knees and beg her not to return to the home of her abusers. But Arah is as naïve as she is stubborn.
“My parents are worried about me too. I know they are.”
Yeseul’s heart is heavy as she watches Arah leave, and despite not being particularly religious, finds herself lighting some incense that night, muttering a long forgotten prayer for her friend.

 

Yeseul is eighteen when she comes home from school one day to find her grandma lying on the floor, barely conscious, surrounded by pieces of glass and a puddle of water. She nearly trips as she throws her bag on the floor and rushes to her injured halmoni, tears already streaming down her cheeks.
“I was thirsty.” Her grandma sighs as Yeseul erratically phones for an ambulance.

Yeseul’s halmoni passes away at the hospital that day. Yeseul holds her hand for the last time before the doctors take her away to the morgue and wishes she could go right along with her.

Yeseul comes back to a house that suddenly feels much bigger and colder. She manages to clean the glass away and mop up the water before she collapses into a heap on the floor, wailing for her halmoni to cradle her head in her arms like she used to and tell her that everything will be okay, but all is silent.

 

Yeseul gets a sympathetic gaze from the clerk as he hands her the new hemp suit she purchased for the funeral. She drops the money into his hand and returns what is supposed to be a grateful smile when she actually wants to punch his teeth out. She doesn’t need his sympathy, just as much as she doesn’t need that of the funeral home owner or of the few friends and relatives her halmoni still had as they refused Yeseul’s invitation to the parting ceremony. She doesn’t need any of them. All she needs is her grandma and her lemony laundry starch and comforting embrace, but she settles for a smile and a polite “I’m sorry for your loss”.

Arah holds Yeseul’s hand as her halmoni’s casket is lowered into the ground. The hemp itches at her bare skin underneath the heavy garments, but she doesn’t scratch it. Maybe this is what she deserves for being careless enough to leave her halmoni alone at home during the day despite knowing how sick she is. She stands still and trembles in silence, hoping that the itch never goes away, that it would be her eternal punishment. She lifts her eyes to the empty cemetery, her eyes skimming over the spaces the mourners would occupy if any of them had actually come. Yeseul bends over to grab a handful of dirt and tosses it thrice over the hole. Arah the back of her palm with her thumb and sniffles quietly by her side.

 

Yeseul is blindfolded and she feels the ground moving under her. She doesn’t know why she let Arah do this to her as she is not in the mood for surprises. Yeseul had meanwhile made a home (or more likely, a fortress) from the dusty attic of her halmoni’s house- barricading herself with blankets and beef jerky and living amongst the forgotten memories her halmoni never had the chance to speak of. So when Arah peaks in from the opening of the floor with that mischievous smirk of hers, Yeseul knows she’s up to something
“Arah, where are you taking me?” Yeseul yells over the noise coming from what seemed to be a sort of public transportation.
“You’ll see.” Is all her friend answers, and Yeseul settles back into her seat, and returns to her partial sensory deprivation with a frown.

 Arah removes her blindfold, after a long walk and countless stumbles later, to reveal a view overlooking small houses and buildings arranged almost inseparably in the tiny town they call home. Yeseul can see the people out and about their business as the noisy tram passes through the bustling main street. They’re standing on the top of their hill again.

“What’s the big surprise?” Yeseul asks, confused. She and Arah would occupy the hill as often as they could, and the location was no longer exclusive to Arah and her late grandma, so Yeseul didn’t see the point of the secrecy.
“This is stop number one.” Arah answers with a perky smile. She reaches into a bag slung over her shoulder to take out a thin, worn out photo album that looks awfully familiar to Yeseul.
“When did you manage to take this?” Yeseul should have known Arah had her ulterior motives to walking around the attic looking all focused as she did.
“That’s not important.” Arah dismisses with a hand wave, and opens the album to its first page, where Arah and her halmoni are sitting on a grassy patch on the hill, smiling softly at the camera.
“Next we’re going to the lake in this picture here,” She says, pointing to a picture underneath the first one, where Yeseul’s halmoni is photographed in her bathing suits along with a few other women, standing in front of the shimmering water and hugging each other at the waists.
Yeseul has yet to catch the drift. “Why are you doing this?”
Arah’s smile softens until it was a small curve tugging at the corners of her lips.
“Your halmoni was a spectacular woman. And no offense to the lovely funeral you arranged, but her memory should be honored through more than a lonely ceremony at an old funeral home.”

Yeseul is speechless and Arah takes advantage of that to keep rambling.
“I know your grandma had been losing her memory, and I wanted you to live the stories she might have not had the chance to tell you. And when I saw this photo album I thought it could be the perfect map for our little field trip—“

Yeseul silences Arah with a kiss, causing Arah’s bag to slide off her shoulders onto the moist grass beneath them. Yeseul backs away after disconnecting their lips, but Arah doesn’t resume her chatter. Yeseul almost wants to laugh because out of all the ways she’s tried to shut Arah up, this was the most successful one.

Arah just stares at her, wide eyed and flustered before she clears and reaches into her bag again, pulling out a medium sized blanket just big for the both of them and a paper bag filled with apples.

“It’s not much, but I was hoping we could have a small picnic before we move on.” Arah finally says, her face still flushed.

 

“I told them I love you,” Arah has finished her apple and is playing with its skeletal looking core between her slender fingers. She is looking ahead into the distance where their tiny hometown buzzes with activity beneath them. “That’s why I got beaten bloody that night.”

The girls weren’t speaking of anything specific when Arah brought up the subject. In fact, they were sitting pretty much silently, nibbling on the Pink Lady apples Arah brought along and just enjoying the beautiful view from their hill. Yeseul stops mid-bite and puts the apple away, the juice flowing from the corner of onto her chin, and she wipes it away with a swift brush from the back of her hand. Arah doesn’t turn to look at her and doesn’t look particularly distraught, but Yeseul knows how much strength it took for her to admit what she did, both to her parents and to Yeseul, and to have gone through that atrocity that night.

Yeseul wants to take her away. Far from her parents, far from the mediocre life they’re living in this hellhole of a town. Because the view is only beautiful from afar, and the thought of going back to their unfortunate reality makes Yeseul’s legs itch with the urge to up and run. Arah deserves better, and Yeseul wants to be the one to give her that. She can’t stand the look of her cold empty home anymore, and yet Arah turns more and more beautiful with every passing day. She’s just as annoying as she used to be, but Yeseul had learned to expect it, to adore it. And she won’t stand anyone breaking her spirit like that ever again.

“I love you too.”

Arah’s head whips towards Yeseul, obviously surprised by her response. But her shock soon transforms into a wide smile, beaming and radiant and meant for no one but Yeseul.

A sudden wind gust blows at the edges of their blanket, raising their paper bags into the air, and both rise to frantically chase their scattered belongings, laughing and screeching (Arah’s chortle a little too loud as always). They pack their things and head down hill as Yeseul reaches for Arah’s hand, intertwining their fingers as they trudge down the grassy plain to their next destination. Arah’s smile seems permanent on her face, an almost inseparable part of her being, but as Arah moves aside a dark strand of hair, joining it with the rest of her wind-mussed locks, Yeseul suddenly notices something she has previously overlooked. Her eyes widen and moisten with long forgotten recognition, but her chest flutters as if on the brink of an uncontrollable laughing fit. At the corners of Arah’s upturned lips there is a pair of two symmetrical looking dimples.