The living room was dark, the heavy brocade curtains drawn over the windows looking out over the nearby apartment buildings and the park down the street. The television was on, the only source of light in the entire room, the changing lights flashing over Sora’s face.

She sat hunched in her father’s favorite armchair, rolled up in a worn quilt, a soda and a box of candy hidden within the folds of fabric for easy access. The show she was watching was quite dramatic, with lots of yelling and slamming of doors. It was exactly the type of drama Sora was in the mood for at the moment. Nothing that would make her cry, at least.

The overhead light flipped on and Sora hissed, burrowing deeper into her quilt so quickly that she nearly upended her cola.

Her sister stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, a disapproving look on her face. “What the hell are you doing, unnie?”

Sora hissed from her cave of blankets. “The light! The light!”

Dami sighed heavily, rolling her eyes, but flipped the lights back off. Sora reluctantly stuck her head back through the opening in her blanket burrito. “Really, Sora?” she said, quirking an eyebrow. “It’s the first day of summer vacation and you’re holed up here like it’s the middle of a snowstorm. It’s like a billion degrees today. How are you not suffocating?”

Sora didn’t answer, just wrapped herself up more tightly in the quilt. She was missing a very entertaining screaming match on her show, which would probably culminate in somebody getting slapped. Couldn’t Dami see that she wanted to be left alone?

“I’m going to the pool with Minah and Jihyun,” Dami continued, clearly not taking the hint. “You should come with us. You can’t spend the whole vacation holed up in here like a hermit.”

Sora wrinkled her nose in dislike. “I don’t want to go to the pool,” she said stubbornly. “I’m cramping like crazy and I just want to curl up in a little ball. The last thing I want to do is go to the pool with your chatty- friends with my bloated belly all hanging out in a swimsuit. Thanks, but no thanks.”

Dami rolled her eyes and left, and for a brief moment Sora worried that she had really offended her sister. But then the younger girl was back, tossing a bottle of pills to Sora. “Take two of these and you’ll feel better soon,” she said. “I don’t know why you always try to get through your period without any medication. Of course it hurts, you idiot! Your body is ripping itself apart. So take those pills and take a nap and you’ll be fine in no time.”

“Easy for you to say!” she shouted after her as she left, but she really was grateful. Her cramps were especially bad this time around, and she didn’t have much experience with medicating herself.

Sora didn’t like medication. Her mom was a psychiatrist and often told anyone who would listen that she didn’t like to medicate anyone without a real reason to. She thought that medication was overused and that most people could just tough it out if they so wanted, and a lot of her beliefs had trickled down to Sora, her only biological child. So Sora avoided taking medicine for the most part, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and she tossed back the two pills, washing them down with what remained of her cola.

Dami had been right, of course. Within a few minutes, the medicine had kicked in and her cramps began to fade from a sharp, piercing pain to more of a dull ache that she could sort of ignore if she tried hard enough. It still didn’t mean she wanted to get up and do anything, though.

When her cell phone rang about midafternoon, Sora was disinclined to answer it. She figured it was one of her friends, calling to give her the same sort of lecture as Dami had given her about not becoming a recluse for the entirety of summer vacation, but in the end curiosity won and she glanced at the caller ID. It was her mother.

Sora had a much better relationship with her mother than many of her friends. It had been just the two of them until Sora was three, when her mother had married her second husband. Those three years had created an intense bond between the two so that, even now with a husband and another daughter, they were close.

“What’s up, mumsy?” Sora answered the phone.

“How are you feeling?” her mother asked her right away. She always knew when Sora was on her period; she got incredibly crabby and the slightest thing could set her off shouting or crying.

Sora hummed noncommittally. She wasn’t dying anymore, but she also didn’t feel good.

“I need you to do me a favor,” Dr. Cha said. “I’m expecting a very important letter today. It was supposed to be delivered to my office but apparently the hospital got my office and home addresses mixed up. It’s really very important. I need you to run down to the mail box to see if it’s arrived yet.”

“Mo-om!” Sora practically wailed. “You know I don’t feel well today!”

“You know I wouldn’t ask unless it was really important,” Dr. Cha said in a placating voice. “Please, Sora?”

Sora groaned like it was the end of the world, but she agreed to go and to call her mom back when she’d gotten back to the apartment. She didn’t bother getting dressed just to go down to the mailboxes on the first floor, just sliding her socked feet into a pair of sandals and heading down.

Their apartment was on the seventh floor, so she rode the elevator down to the first and checked their mailbox. There was a slew of letters, mostly bills and a few advertisements, but buried in there was an official-looking document addressed to her mother.

“Well, well, well.” The familiar voice caused her to stop in her tracks, nearly dropping the stack of mail in her hands. “Look who we have here.”

Despite her aching back and cramping uterus, Sora’s face split into a wide grin as she turned to face him. “Jongdae!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms around his shoulders. “When did you get back?”

Kim Jongdae had been Sora’s neighbor the entire eleven years they had lived in this apartment building. Their mothers were the best of friends, and so both families were inordinately close. Jongdae was like a big brother and a best friend to Sora. He did his fair share of teasing, of course, but he’d always been there to wipe her tears when it really mattered. If she was perfectly honest with herself, there was a small part of her – okay, maybe a big part – that had harbored a secret crush on him since she was twelve years old and he had beaten up a little boy who had been teasing her. He was three years older than her and had spent the last several months at college in Busan.

“This morning,” he answered. “I just wanted to sleep the day away but my mom made me go to the market for her.” He held up a cloth shopping bag as if to reiterate.

Sora could barely mask her excitement. “How long are you in town for? When do you have to go back to school?”

“School starts back at the beginning of September, but I think I’m going to head back a week or two before that,” Jongdae explained, grinning lazily. “So I can, you know, hang out with my girlfriend a bit.”

Now Sora had to fight to keep the smile in place. It shouldn’t have been such a surprise that Jongdae had a girlfriend. He was good-looking, funny, and talented. It was only a matter of time until someone snatched him up. But it still hurt somewhere deep inside.

“Oh,” she said stupidly. “That should be fun.”

“But don’t worry,” Jongdae said, misinterpreting her hesitation. “We’ll have plenty of time to hang out before I go back! I think my mom was talking about a big dinner tomorrow night. Are you busy?”

“No,” Sora answered immediately. Somewhere in the back of her mind she remembered that she’d promised her friend Amber to go to a baseball game, but Jongdae was certainly more important than baseball. In fact, Jongdae was more important than pretty much everything.

They rode up to the seventh floor together, chatting about their various school lives and what classes they were taking. They split in front of the elevators with promises to catch up again soon, Jongdae going right and Sora going left. She was so distracted by the time she let herself into the apartment that she nearly forgot to phone her mother back and fax over the documents she needed.

Once her mother had received all the information she needed, Sora barricaded herself in her bedroom and covered herself with her blankets again.

It didn’t really matter that Jongdae had a girlfriend, she told herself over and over again. It wasn’t like she’d ever had a chance anyway. Even if Jongdae stayed single until the day he died, he would never look at Sora like that. He would never look at her as anything other than a little sister.

She tried to pretend that it didn’t hurt.

Dami came in to see her when she got back from the pool, reeking of chlorine and with the tops of her shoulders pink where she had forgotten to reapply sun cream.

Dami wasn’t Sora’s real sister, but she may as well have been. She was two years younger than Sora, with a tiny waist and a cute little upturned nose. Her real parents had died when she was just an infant, and she had been adopted by their dad, who had been a good friend of Dami’s parents. He had met Sora’s mother not long after that, and then they’d gotten married, forming a strange sort of family dynamic that worked a lot better than most conventional ones.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, perching on the edge of Dami’s bed and automatically picking up the one stuffed animal Dami kept – a little purple elephant that was worn nearly through in some places and who was missing one eye. “Did the medicine help?”

“Yeah, it helped,” Sora mumbled.

Dami turned the elephant over and over again, running her fingers along the old seams. “Guess who I just ran into in the hallway?”

“Jongdae?” Sora suggested.

“Ah, you already know,” Dami sighed, setting the elephant back down. “He just got back today. He’s looking quite good, don’t you think?”

Sora glared at her sister. Although she had never said anything aloud about her crush on Jongdae – not even to her best friends – Dami of course knew. They were close like that.

“We’re all going out to dinner tomorrow night,” Dami continued with a knowing little smile. “His mom called and arranged everything just a bit ago. I already had plans, but Mom is making me go too.”

Sora almost said something about Jongdae having a girlfriend, but in the end she bit her tongue and stayed silent. Mentioning his girlfriend was almost like admitting her crush on him, and she would never do that. Not when everything was so hopeless.

“Anyway, I told Mom you weren’t feeling well so you don’t have to come out to dinner. She put some in the oven for you to reheat when you get hungry,” she said, getting to her feet. “Feel better, unnie.”

Sora did feel marginally better by the next evening. Her cramps had mellowed out into nothing she couldn’t handle without medication – they were always the worst on the first day, after all – and she even felt a little better about Jongdae having a girlfriend. It didn’t really change anything between them, so she tried not to think about it too much.

The two families went out to eat at Jongdae’s favorite restaurant, a barbecue joint that he liked because they’d let him drink there before he was old enough. They were quite a crowd, with Mr. Kim and his wife, Sora’s parents, Jongdae and his older brother, and Sora and Dami. Still, they squeezed around one of the tables and ordered heaps of food that Jongdae’s brother, Jonghyun, and Mr. Kim cooked on the grill.

The talk revolved mostly around Jonghyun and Jongdae’s school lives. Jonghyun was two years older than Jongdae and already in his final year of university. He would graduate at the end of the year and was hoping to get a position in his father’s company. Everyone, including Jonghyun, knew that Mr. Kim wouldn’t give him a job simply because he was family; Jonghyun would have to earn that job.

But when Dr. Cha asked Jongdae if he, too, hoped to get a job at the family company once he graduated, Jongdae had shaken his head. “I don’t think so,” he answered honestly. “I’m not quite sure what I want to do yet. I’m majoring in computer engineering, so I think there’s a lot I could do with that.”

“It should’ve been business, like Jonghyun here,” Mr. Kim pointed out, flipping the meat on the grill. It sizzled loudly.

Jongdae’s mom, Mrs. Nam, put a hand on her husband’s arm. “Leave it be, yeobo. You know he doesn’t have the heart for business.” She flashed her youngest son a little smile.

“Computer engineering?” Sora repeated. “You’re majoring in computer engineering and you wouldn’t help me fix my computer when it crashed last winter? You’re such a jerk!” She threw a wadded-up napkin at him.

Jongdae caught it easily, laughing. “I was busy,” he defended himself. “Besides, what do you use your computer for anyway? Wasting time on the internet?”

“Certainly not doing homework,” Dr. Cha said wryly, but she was smiling. It took a lot for her to get upset, and Sora’s lackluster grades weren’t really a big issue at their house.

Still, she stuck out her tongue at Jongdae. “You could’ve at least helped me fix it, you know. It wouldn’t have taken you very long.”

“Is it fixed now?” he asked, chopsticks hovering over the grill before he plucked a tender piece of meat off.

“Yes,” she answered sullenly. “Well, sort of. My friend Minseok took a look at it and fixed it the best he could, but it still crashes sometimes. He said I need a whole new computer.”

“You’re not getting a whole new computer,” Dr. Cha said calmly, as if they were discussing something as mundane as the weather. “You should be happy you have one to begin with.”

Jongdae grinned at Dr. Cha. “I’ll swing by sometime this week and take a look at it,” he promised. “I can probably fix it enough that it’ll stop crashing.”

And Sora was happy. Even though she knew that he would never reciprocate her feelings – he would never even know about them, if she had her way – she was happy just to get to spend time with him. That was enough for her. 

Hello! Welcome to my first Chen-centric fic! I'm excited for this one haha