chapter five | the fifth period

“Why don’t you just have him tortured, killed, and get it over with?” Mi Young complained over dinner. The fancy violin music shredding the air could never drown his wife out. “I want him gone. I need him gone. I just want to avenge our daughter. Don’t you feel the same?”

“Patience darling, patience,” he chided, slicing his steak into two neat pieces, wanting to do the same to Shim Changmin. Mr. Choi doesn’t have to look up to confirm that his wife was on the verge of tears.

Mrs. Choi Mi Young was a strong woman who could conquer the hardest of times. She experienced what it was like to rummage through the garbage of fast food joints. She knew what it felt like to go to school wearing her aunt’s hand-me-downs because they were too poor to buy clothes that didn’t have holes anywhere. She had heard every insult there was to be heard, and she had handled every crumpled paper thrown at her with vile names scrawled all over them. 

By studying hard and working even harder, she fought her way to be where she was right now.

Having been provoked by the ugly world she grew up in, Choi Mi Young isn’t afraid of anything.

However, her only daughter, Min Ah was her Achilles’ heel. Min Ah was her sole weakness. Mention her daughter’s death and she would lock herself up in her room, writhing in agony. Min Ah was her everything. They prayed, waited, struggled for years just to have her. It had seemed like a bitter joke when she had been snatched from them with just a blink of an eye. “I miss her.”

“I do, too. But we can’t bring her back,” Mr. Choi placed his hand over his wife’s. The passing years and experienced tragedies never dulled his love for her, if ever, it made his feelings stronger. “We could only seek for revenge and make sure he would suffer every single day of his life. I already have something in mind and it has already started.”

“No matter what you do, I still think I’ll like that kid better off dead,” There’s something in Mi Young that wants to have the last word. She ignores the food on her table to stare off into the distance. To some people, she’s on the top of the world. To her, she might as well be buried six feet under the ground with her daughter Min Ah.

After Min Ah, there was no point anymore.

The only thing keeping her alive is hatred—for what has been taken from her, for the world, for Shim Changmin.

She grabbed a table napkin and crumpled it on her fist. Choi Mi Young was going to avenge her daughter, even if it’s the last thing she ever does.

The students’ routine for this day did a complete three-sixty when the intercom buzzed with the latest news right after the fourth period. All classes had been suspended. There was going to be a general cleaning of the school grounds and the campus was scheduled to be sprayed. Yoona’s block mates threw their hands in the air while the rest jumped on chairs and called for a celebration.

They were already making plans; plans that never involved Yoona because there had always been a wall between her and the rest of the world.

“Guys, let’s go check out that newly-opened shop downtown,” One of her classmates, whose hair was always in pigtails, has her back turned to Yoona and she was speaking to a group of her friends who never seemed to leave her side.

“I heard their macaroons are heavenly,” The girl’s gay friend replied.

The rest of their crew joined in as they walk out of the room, hand in hand.

Yoona gulped, packed her things and tried not to think too much of crumbling cities and departing airplanes. She tried not to think of laughing faces and inside jokes, of things that should be normal when you’re nineteen and clueless.

She stood up and made her way to the door.

It’s okay, she’s getting used to the loneliness anyway. It’s just that it sometimes it really hurts to be the one stumbling behind a cluster of grinning people. It hurts to be the one absorbing the echoes of their laughter because you didn’t have a choice. It’s too awkward. She gripped the strap of her bag. Yoona could already feel herself getting into one of her slumps—the one where she pities herself and cries about how lonely she feels. She shoved her way past the corridor filled with eager students.

Just then, a hand slapped itself into her shoulders, causing