part one
summer wonder
p a r t o n e
(listen while reading: x )
During the summertime, Jongin’s favorite time of the day has always been five o’clock in the afternoon.
None of his friends who knew this about him ever understood why. Hell, even Jongin didn’t know for sure why such an insignificant hour had sparked his interest for such a long time.
But there was just something about the way the sky remained a vibrant, refreshing shade of blue, the sun still continued to stay fairly above his head and hit its brilliant light on each of his surroundings, and how a cool breeze replaced the sweltering heat from earlier. It constantly gave him a comforting warmth inside his body – the way summer should make him feel.
So one day, right in the middle of a mild afternoon in June, Jongin decided that it would be good to step outside for a bit and enjoy the day in its summery glory. Besides, now that he’s on a two-month break from his studies, what better time to do it?
A half hour into his walk and he found himself resting among the thick inner branches of a tree, planted in a rather large park next to his former junior high campus. He found himself visiting every now and then, even though the park didn’t have a variety of things that set it apart from any other in the city. Nonetheless, he believed that everyone had their own place where they could submerge themselves in all the serenity and just let their bodies relax. And for him, that place was the park.
He peered through the branches in order to clearly see the view the tree provided him. Not too far from him he could spot an elderly man walking his dog around, and two boys a few years younger than himself were playing at the basketball courts on the school campus. And way in the distance, so far from Jongin that it took him a good minute or so to actually notice it, was a girl riding a teal-colored beach bicycle through the park.
Jongin paid almost no attention to the girl, at first. But as she proceeded to ride her bike down the concrete path, closer and closer to the tree he was currently in, his concern for her grew bigger until she suddenly made a complete stop and parked her bike right against the rough, jagged bark of its trunk.
His thoughts only consisted of two words as she stopped there: go away, go away, go away.
But the girl didn’t go away. Instead she took a seat on the grass and leaned against the tree, clearly showing no intentions of leaving anytime soon.
Jongin wasn’t sure if he should say something to her or just keep silent and wait until she eventually departed. His mouth opened slightly as if preparing to speak but he still didn’t quite know what to say, and he stumbled over some words before settling on saying just a simple greeting.
“Uh – hello.”
She jumped a bit at the unexpected sound of his voice, and she hastily stood up on her two feet to take a glance at the boy who had just said hello to her from the top of a tree.
“Hi…” she replied, her tone sounding hesitant.
“Why are you here?” Jongin asked, trying his best to sound straightforward.
Immediately, she looked straight into his eyes and answered, “This is my spot of the park.”
Jongin was slightly taken back by her response. “Well, maybe this is my spot of the park too.”
The two of them continued to stare at each other, their faces beginning to form frustrated looks. After a few minutes, the girl finally broke off her stare and sighed, putting her bike off the grass and onto the concrete path once again.
“Guess I’ll just be going then,” she said as she turned away from Jongin and pedaled her bike down the remainder of the path. He chuckled as he watched her turn her bike to the left and disappear into the streets, not entirely sure about what had just happened a few moments ago with her. What he was sure however, was how content he was on never seeing that girl again.
A week later he returned to the same tree during the same hour for the same reason, and to his disappointment, the girl with the beach bicycle also returned to the spot.
“You’re here again?” She asked.
“I could ask the same for you,” Jongin remarked.
They began their staring showdown of frustration from before, the both of them wanting this particular tree for themselves. But it was no use. They knew that neither one of them was willing to give it up.
But then again, Jongin wondered, it is just a tree.
“So what, we’re just going to share this spot together?” The girl grumbled.
“I mean, we could. Nothing wrong with that. It’s a tree, it's not like I’m staying at your house for the summer.” He retorted back. “If we’re both going to stay here, we should at least try to get to know each other. If you're down.”
The girl parted her lips to protest, but what came out was instead an unsatisfied groan. “Yeah, I guess you have a point," she finally admitted. "But I’m getting tired of yelling at you while you’re all the way up in that tree.”
“Oh, I can come down if you want.”
Jongin slowly climbed away from the top branches and settled onto a lower part of the tree, closer to the ground. He was able to get a better glance of the girl, and she seemed to be presumably in her teens just like himself. Somehow he became lost in her looks, lost in her piercing brown eyes, in her faded jean shorts, in her ashy hair with caramel streaks that shined like strands of gold in the daylight.
She looked… like a breath of fresh air.
It was a quality of hers that Jongin had never found in any other teenage girl he had met before.
He was snapped out of his daze when the girl handed him the question, “Aren’t you going to tell me what your name is?”
He could feel the heat starting to rush through his head. “Oh yeah, right. It’s Jongin. What’s yours?”
“Krystal,” she answered confidently.
Jongin raised an eyebrow. “Krystal? Like salt crystals? What kind of name is that?”
“It’s Krystal with a K, dummy.” She pointed out. “It’s what they call me in the States.”
“Oooh, an American.” He sneered. “So if over there they call you by one name, surely all the other people in your life here must call you by something else. Is that correct?”
That prompted her to send him a glare. “Maybe. Why do you wanna know?”
“Because Krystal feels so wrong to say," Jongin explained. "It’s like Kuh-ris-tal. It’s just so unnatural.”
She sighed in exasperation at his comments on her name and rolled her eyes at him. “God, fine. If you really wanna know, the Korean name I go by is Soojung.”
“Soojung?” Jongin tilted his head a little bit to the side. “I like that name a lot more.”
“You... you do?”
He nodded as a little grin formed on his lips. “Yeah.”
The girl with the name of Soojung was left speechless for a moment, and couldn’t help but let a rosy shade of pink flush through her cheeks as she leaned her back against the surface of the tree.
“So, Soojung, did school just end for you too?” Jongin brang up as an attempt to start some small talk.
“Yeah, I’m – no, I was – a ninth grader,” She told him.
“Me too.” Jongin then motioned his hand towards his old middle school. “Did you go there?”
Soojung shook her head no. “I wanted to, but my parents decided it was too far. So I went to another school downtown.”
“Wait, what?" He had to take a second before replying back to her. "You live all the way downtown? And you came all the way here on a bike?”
She giggled at his reactions. “I actually come here every Friday. Why?”
“Well, it’s just kind of a long ride. You know, on a bike.”
“So? Why are you so surprised? Unless you don't think that such a small, weak-looking girl like me can handle the distance.”
Jongin’s eyes widened to the size of the moon. “No, no, no, no, that’s not what I meant…” Now it was his turn for his face to turn red. “I didn’t mean to offend you- “
“I'm kidding! It's okay!” She exclaimed. “Why don’t you lighten up a little? There’s nothing about me that you should be intimidated about. Seriously.”
Her big, cheeky smile was so wonderfully bright it could have made flowers blossom.
It only appeared on her face for a few moments however, as she took a step away from the tree and began to reach for her bike.
“You’re leaving already?” Jongin spoke up.
“Yeah, I’ve already been out for a while and plus, it’s kind of a long ride back. You know, on a bike.”
He gazed at Soojung as she placed her bike back onto the concrete path just as how she did during their first encounter. And as she was about to turn her back away from him for the second time, she uttered a few words that stuck in Jongin’s head for the rest of the day:
“Until next time, Jongin.”
Jongin did not expect to actually be anticipating seeing Soojung the next week.
But he had to admit that it wasn’t so bad sharing his special spot in the park with someone else. And to be completely honest, if he had to share it with a person he didn’t know very well, he was somewhat glad that it was with her.
Jongin could now tell by the noisy rattling of her beach bike that Soojung had arrived at the park, the sound of it gradually escalating as she pedaled closer. Once she was a mere amount of feet away, he shouted a great big “Hello!” from the tree as loud as he could.
Her eyes spotted him high among the branches as she tried to suppress her snickering.
“You’re really excited for something this time, aren’t you?” She called out as she parked her bike.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe. Just a little bit.” He replied, making her roll her eyes at him.
Soojung was just about to lean against the tree again when Jongin suggested, “Why don’t you come up here with me this time?”
“Like, all the way up there?” Her expression began to show a bit of uneasiness.
“Yeah, why not? It’ll be so much easier to hang out, and more fun.”
“Or you could climb down from there and hang out with me on the ground.”
Jongin pouted at her. “But that’s not fun.”
“Ugh, fine. I’ll come up.”
Soojung observed the trunk of the tree and looked up at it. How in the world am I supposed to climb all the way to where Jongin is? She thought to herself as she hesitantly placed her foot on the rough, knotty bark. Her right hand grabbed onto a low branch and her left hand held onto the side of the tree, and she pulled herself up.
“Now that wasn’t so difficult, was it, Soojung?” Jongin teased.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Come on, keep going!”
She continued on and climbed onto more branches, and the higher she kept on going, the more anxious she was about her foot suddenly slipping and falling down. Finally she made a stop and stood on a long, thick branch in the middle of the tree.
“I think I’ll just stay and talk to you here,” Soojung told him. “I don’t think I can climb much higher than this.”
“Sure you can,” Jongin insisted, and leaned down to offer her his hand. “Here, I’ll help you.”
Soojung stared at it for a moment before sliding her hand into his. His firm grip made heaving her body up easily and quickly, and before she knew it, she was seated on a branch inches away from where Jongin settled on. Their legs were hanging and overlapping each other, and the two could finally look at each other face to face.
“Okay, I’m up here.” Soojung spoke up. “Now what?”
Jongin opened his mouth to suggest something, but then he quickly closed it. “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
A silence briefly lingered between them as they both pondered about what they could do together. Then all of a sudden, Jongin’s face lit up as he took out his cell phone from his front pocket.
“How about some music to liven things up?” He proposed, and Soojung eagerly nodded yes. “What kind of music do you like?”
“I actually prefer American music,” She informed him. ”You know any American songs?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know plenty.”
Jongin opened an internet radio app on his phone and browsed through some of the most popular international hits at the moment. After a brief few minutes of skipping over most of them, a certain song played through his phone’s speakers and immediately made Soojung’s body cringe at the first piano note.
It was none other than “Let It Go” by Idina Menzel.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she grumbled under her breath.
“I know every word to this song!” Jongin then exclaimed.
“Wait, really?”
“Yeah! My English skills are pretty superb, if you ask me.”
Soojung scoffed at him. “Then prove it.”
It was quite amusing for her to watch Jongin attempt to sing in his best dramatic-sounding tone with pronunciation skills that were way off. Then as he began to build up for the chorus, he switched to a falsetto voice.
“Let it go, let it- whoa!”
Jongin had become so absorbed in his singing that he stumbled and almost fell out of the tree. Soojung was trying her best not to erupt into laughter, cupping her hands over before revealing the same smile that was on her face the previous week. It seemed even brighter up close.
And what made Jongin also form a smile after seeing it wasn’t the fact that he liked her smile. It was the fact that he was the one who made it appear.
“So tell me something, Soojung – why do you come here?”
Jongin took her by surprise, and she was at a loss for words. She wasn’t expecting such a sudden question from him, especially after having just arrived at the top of the tree.
“What do you mean?” She asked back.
“You live downtown, right? So why don’t you bike around that part of town?” He clarified. “Why do you choose to ride all the way here?”
Soojung remained quiet and speechless for a moment, and then a little grin curled on her pink lips. She averted her eyes from Jongin and towards the overview of the park.
“You wanna know why, Jongin?” She began to explain. “I come here…for an escape.”
He furrowed his eyebrows and tilted his head to the side again.
“You do realize our city is located right against the beach, don’t you? It’s become a popular tourist attraction. Downtown there are crowds and crowds of them, now that it’s summer.” She continued. “There’s so much people and so many buildings rising above my head back there, that I’d become engulfed in all the commotion.
“Here the sky is bluer and the air seeping into my lungs seems fresh. I guess that’s because there are more trees here than buildings. I don’t know, here it’s just easier for me to empty my mind and sooth my thoughts for some reason. Here there’s a sense of tranquility that I don’t usually experience.”
Jongin intently listened to Soojung ramble on, and he knew what she was trying to express.
“I’m starting to sound crazy, aren’t I?” She mumbled.
“No, of course not,” Jongin assured her. “It’s not crazy at all. Coming here is kind of an escape for me too but…” He stopped mid-sentence to heave a sigh. “It doesn’t ever really feel like enough. I’m tired of where I am too, you know.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying it’s already July, and I don’t want to waste my summer stuck in the same area for two months. There’s a lot of different things and places to explore in the city, but I’ve never had the guts to go out and see them. Not alone, at least. I don’t know what I can do to make this summer count.”
Soojung turned to face Jongin, her grin forming bigger and her eyes lighting up. “What if we explore this city together?”
Jongin had to take a second to respond. “Are you serious?” He chuckled.
“Oh, it’ll be so much fun! We can show each other a new place every week!” She squealed. “And besides, there’s no better way to spend the summer than with a new friend.”
Her last statement left Jongin silent. They really were friends at this point, weren’t they?
“Let’s do it,” he decided. “I think I already know the place I wanna show you first.”
☼ ☼
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