A whole week passes after that day and nothing much really happened since then, and I didn’t think a lot would happen either as I’m dismissed from English class. Well, that’s until a bubbly voice greets me by the door.

Tiffany smiles as usual, her hair straightened with a black bow on top, and for some reason it makes her random greeting a little odder than it would be. I nod my head as I struggle to find my notebook, but before I could rearrange the books in my hands, a grip on my wrist stopped me. “Let me help you,” she says while still smiling, and she proceeds to take a pair of books in her own hands, attempting to hold them all in one place. Some of them threaten to fall over but she smiles nevertheless, finally straightening them up before looking at me and talking again. “You’re going to your locker, right?”

I wanted to reply with at least something, but I couldn’t get my notebook and pen without having the rest of my schoolbooks falling on the floor. Therefore I simply nod before walking a little ahead, small footsteps trailing behind me until we turn the corner and see a row full of red lockers. I walk up to mine, punching in the code before opening it up and placing most of my books inside.

When we were done, I grabbed my notebook quickly out of my bag, along with a pen to hand her a note.

“You didn’t have to do that, you know.”

Tiffany looks at me for a while with confusion in her eyes. “Do what?”

Again I write something down with my pen, not really paying attention to how ugly my handwriting was at the moment, or how my hand still ached after all the previous writing in class.

“You didn’t have to help me with the books.”

She looks at me for a while before suddenly smiling, hitting my shoulder playfully with a small thud echoing through the semi-crowded hallway. “You were struggling; I wouldn’t let you carry all of that by yourself,” she says honestly, and for a reason I feel my insides warm up a little by that, the corners of my lips almost going up, yet nothing comes out. Instead I just lift my hand and pat her on the head, hoping she’d understand my somewhat form of a thanks. Soft hair landed underneath my hand before I withdrew it again, wondering what I just did.

After that we fall into a somewhat awkward silence, none of us saying anything for a while. We just look at each other a little, although Tiffany seems a little lost. Her eyes zone out somewhere behind me, and carefully I turn around to see what caught her attention.

It was nothing there.

My eyebrows rise in confusion, but when I turn around again I suddenly meet a pair of brown eyes looking right at me. I nearly jump again, calming down my fear struck heart as I let out a sigh in relief. I should stop being so scared all the time. As usual she lets out a small giggle, probably because of how I reacted. But before she can say anything I grab my pen before I write another message.

“Why were you waiting outside?”

I found myself asking, as from what I saw she must have had gym by now, and the gym is a distance away from this part of school. “Oh yeah, I was going to ask you something!” Tiffany suddenly realizes before looking at me again, awakening me from my thoughts with a smile on her face. “Do you want to come over to my place?”

I blink once, then twice, and then suddenly everything seems to go off in a never ending strobe light as my brain tries to cooperate with me. Did Tiffany just ask me to visit her?

Honestly it’s been a while since I visited someone, and I haven’t ever visited a classmate’s, much less a friend’s house before. It was scary just thinking about it, and what if I do something stupid or break something? Carefully I try to breathe properly so I don’t look like a total idiot. 

I look at her without any idea of what I’m going to say. Should I decline and say I’m busy? That might come off as rude, and it’s not like I didn’t want to go to her place, I was just scared and I didn’t want to be an intruder.

“But hey, if you don’t want to you could always come another day?” she then avoids eye contact, her gaze drifting towards the floor and a sudden pang of guilt hits me when I see her like that.  With a deep breath I take out my pen again before writing on a new page, and when I’m done I rip it out before quickly placing it inside her hand. A slight embarrassment washes over me when I see her reading the note, and now it’s my turn to look at the floor.

“I’m not really a fun person to be with.”

With some courage I look up at her, my eyes still avoiding hers, but at least I’m not looking like an idiot staring at the floor. From what I see a small smile graces her lips again, and then a pair of arms engulfs me in a tight hug. Slowly I feel the warmth from her on my upper body, the smell of a sweet fragrance intoxicating my nose as I blink yet again.

“You’re not boring Jess! And relax I’m not going to interrogate you or anything, it’s going to be fun, promise,” she says excitedly for some reason, and the hug ends as soon as it came before she parts and holds up her pinky finger. For a while I just look at it, not really knowing what to do other than slowly accept the promise. Intertwining our fingers together, her eyes nearly disappear as her smile almost brightens up the whole room.

“Then let’s go!” Tiffany announces in glee before taking my hand and nearly dragging me towards the exit. I barely manage to shut my locker before we suddenly head off, multiple pairs of eyes following us as we go. I try to ignore all of the stares, all of the questions and whispers as we walk further inside the hall hand in hand. For some reason I expected her hands to be a little damp and sweaty, but they were surprisingly cool and soft. I keep looking at our hands for a while, totally entranced by how well they looked together. How mine just slid perfectly inside…

Okay stop it, this is getting a little out of line.

I shook my head as I faced her again, who looked at me curiously. Slowly I raised my eyebrows, wondering what the problem was, but she just smiled. “I was just asking if you had enough money to take the bus.” I nod a little too fast as the back of my head feels a little heavy. For a moment things spin around for me, but I act as nothing; it’s not like I want to faint on the way either.

Her hand is still cool against mine though, and even after a long time passes Tiffany still doesn’t let go. And neither does the small, bubbly feelings deep inside disappear the longer we wait by the bus stand, still holding hands, still like this.

When the bus finally arrives we board it, along with some other students, before taking a seat far in the back. By now I would’ve expected her to let go of my hand again, but she still held it tightly as she spoke about random things. And even if I nodded and tried to pay attention, a part of me was still focused on our intertwined hands. Did she even notice or was it just her forgetting to let go? I’m not really sure at this moment.

After a fifteen minute drive a huge apartment complex enters my vision, the walls covered in white and multiple windows. On some of the apartments I can see small balconies in black metal, some of them bare and some of them filled up with furniture.  I wonder which one of these apartments Tiffany lives in.

“I’m staying at the ninth floor,” she says as if she read my mind after we exit the bus, where the stop is conveniently located just in front of the complex. As we walk I hear her fumbling around in her jacket pocket for her keys, before a small jingle sound is heard. I turn my head over to see a set of keys along with a, wait for it, pink figure of a small piggy. Silently I chuckle, yet it comes out more as a hoarse whisper like sound than anything else.

“The lift is broken so we have to take the stairs, are you alright with that?” Tiffany asks after finally unlocking the front door and both of us heading inside a grand corridor. In the center a set of white sofas and chairs are placed, along with a coffee table, bombarded with magazines. A little further ahead there was a corridor which led to a never ending set of doors by each wall.

We walk a little down the hall until I see a dark wooden staircase, where we trudge through the wooden steps together. The staircase looks kind of long and it’s very broad, and for a moment I wonder how I’m even going to survive walking up nine flights of stairs.

When we finally reach our destination I already feel a little out of breath, my legs not used to walking up stairs that much. Tiffany seems to regain her breath too, yet not as much as me, before her eyes meet mine. “You sure you can handle walking further down the hall, Jess?” she asks teasingly, and in return I give her a playful push with my free hand before nodding curtly. Tiffany just laughs in reply before she leads me through the wooden doors, until a door with the name “Hwang residence” appears.

After she unlocked the door we finally stepped in, and to be honest I felt a little nausea as the door opened up. I didn’t really know what to expect from this, not really used to any place other than my own, cold home. “Welcome to my place,” Tiffany announces with a smile. “It’s not much I suppose, but we manage,” she continues and I nod as I take of my shoes, placing them neatly on a small shelf before slowly looking around.

The hallway is small and narrow, walls painted in a creamy texture as it leads towards the living room. There are some pictures of who I assume is her family, a mother and a father, along with an older pair, probably her grandparents. Just like Tiffany, everybody is seen smiling as bright as the sun, the happy aura already emitting through the pictures and I haven’t even met them yet. I wonder how they were in person then.

“You want anything to drink?” I hear her ask before she makes her way down the small hall and takes a right, her figure disappearing from my sight. With small steps I follow after her before shaking my head, declining the offer. Tiffany only nods before taking out a bottle of water and an apple. “My parents won’t be home until later, so we can sit by the dining table if you’d like.”

I simply nod in reply before letting her guide the way. All though the apartment wasn’t exactly big, it was still confusing and so foreign that I didn’t feel safe in even trying to figure out where everything was. What does one usually do anyway when visiting someone? Compliment their home? I don’t even know.

We walk down the small hall before we enter what I assume is the living room, and on the far corner I see a glass dining table, along with some white leather chairs. A window is placed above it on the wall, trees covering up most parts of the view. “My room is over there,” Tiffany nods her head towards a door a couple of meters away from the dining area. “I’ll give you a cookie if you manage to guess which color the walls are in.” Her voice challenges, albeit a little teasingly before she lets out a small laugh. In return I let out a faint smile, before grabbing my notebook from my bag and opening up a new page.

“It’s either pink or white.”

An unreadable smile appears on her face as she looks up from the note and onto me again. “Oh? Well you can only choose one,” she says teasingly and I look at her for the longest time, my mind trying to figure out which one was the correct one. A part of me wondered how she could have pink walls, because had it been me I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night, the color being a little too much. But at the same time Tiffany is the polar opposite of me, so it wouldn’t surprise me that she would’ve managed.

“Well?” she asks after a while, and suddenly an idea pops into my head. And letting out a somewhat mischievous smile I ran right past her and towards the door. Before she could react I had already gotten out of her reach and carefully twisted the knob before opening the wooden door.

Behind the door lies a medium sized room with a bed made up neatly beside a huge window, the frames painted in white. Surprisingly the walls weren’t pink, but in fact a creamy white, the same shade as in the hallway. It matches well with the pale wooden floor, and also some of her posters on the wall. I tilt my head a little to look around, noticing a huge, black bookshelf placed in the corner by the room.

“Hey, that’s cheating!” I hear Tiffany say as she approaches me, slightly laughing before I see her beside me. I let out a faint smile towards her direction before turning around to study her room a little more. A couple of meters away from the door I spot a small table, a bunch of K-pop cd’s on display, along with some other random merchandise. I let out another faint smile before lifting up my notebook.

“So I assume you like Korean music at least?”

A small hint of red is apparent in her fair skin, looking a little embarrassed. “Well, first I just listened to it as a part of my learning, but then…” Tiffany’s voice trails off before she looks up at her posters, mostly consisting of who I think is Big Bang, but I’m not too sure. I’ve never been up to date with famous idols anyway.

“It’s cool. I used to listen a lot to 2NE1 for a while.” I reply back with a note, before I go back to looking around the small room which doesn’t have much but still oddly seems so typically… Tiffany.

She smiles a little by that before walking towards her little collection. “I like them a lot too! I guess most of my allowance went on buying their merchandise,” she says and laughs a little, and with a bit of time I managed to somewhat laugh along as well. Albeit it wasn’t as loud as Tiffany’s, I supposed it was a start.

After a while we walk out towards the dining table before sitting there a couple of hours, me helping Tiffany with her history homework by translating some tough paragraphs. At the same time she helped me with my math, although I wasn’t really struggling that much, but I did learn some new studying techniques, so I suppose everything went well and better than expected to be honest.

Sometime during our study session a door is unlocked and a pair of footsteps echoes throughout the apartment. A pair of keys is tossed somewhere, and after a while of rummaging and random sounds a figure appears. “I’m home.”

Without knowing what to do, I simply look at the woman who I assume is Tiffany’s mother. It wasn’t hard to see where she got her genes from; Tiffany looks just like her. Even in the way Mrs. Hwang smiles I can see their resemblance, and it throws me off balance for a while.

“Hey mom,” Tiffany replies casually, her head still buried in her books. I look at them a bit awkwardly, not really knowing what to do or say.  “Oh, you brought a visitor!” Mrs. Hwang nearly shouts, and I jump a little in surprise before she approaches us with a big smile. “You must be Jessica; my Tiffany baby has told me a lot about you,” she starts eagerly and from beside me I hear Tiffany groan in what I assume is embarrassment. “You two seem to get along well. I’m so glad she’s managed to get to know someone here.”

Before Mrs. Hwang can speak more, Tiffany abruptly interrupts her. “Mom, please, you’re going to ramble about non sense again,” she says, giving her mother a look. I thought she would get a scolding or something, but instead of raising her voice, Mrs. Hwang just laughs.  “Oh alright, but you’re going to have to take your homework in your room now,” she says after a while and oddly doesn’t seem to ask about my lack of replies. Does she already know?

Silently we both nod before we pack up our stuff and head towards Tiffany’s room again, Tiffany sitting on her bed while I awkwardly stand by the door. “Jess, just sit down, I won’t bite.” Tiffany smiles before patting the space next to her. Hesitantly I look at her, but in the end I carefully sit down next to her.

I don’t know why I suddenly became so shy, but I felt somewhat different now that I was really inside of her room. Why I don’t really know, and as I take a seat next to her I get that weird, bubbly feeling in my stomach again.

What is this feeling?