I was born in Seoul and turned fifteen on the day that newspaper headlines, radios, and broadcasting systems all read, spoke, and flashed the same news about the eruption of a small group of conspirators failing their attempt to assassinate the president. The next day, it was released to the public that the small group of conspirators turned out to be a nationwide underground coup, determined to overthrow our country.

The war started. 

Fathers, husbands, and sons were plucked from their homes, handed machine guns and plopped in cities and battlefields to fight against their neighbors as the government watched from their velvet thrones.

People were dying, poverty struck the low and middle classes, and citizens spoke of foreign intervention that would include bombing and English speaking men with blonde hair. It had been one year since the start of what seemed to be a trivial rebellion, but I still found myself sitting in classroom 2-C in the safe haven of Gangnam, the war in the back of my mind and the question of what color to paint my nails next occupying my thoughts.

“We have four new students today,” Our homeroom teacher’s shrill voice echoed in the classroom. She held her sinister ruler in her left hand and made violent and utterly expendable hand gestures with her right.

Luckily I sat at the back of the class next to the window and had the freedom of staring at the tops of the oak trees where birds perched on their nests in the spring and where snow laid to rest and then melted away with the winter. I also had the privilege of not getting spit on by Mrs. Jeon and having her lint from her midi green tartan print skirt fall off onto my desk.

Unfortunately, my best friend and class president Kim Jongdae did not share that pleasure with me.

The whole class seemed to perk up at the sound of those two words. 

“New Students”

Just as I had seen on American television programs and read in foreign books, with the outbreak of war, a handful of students quietly left our school one-by-one, leaving the rest of us to wonder whether their parents were spies or secretly part of the conspiracy groups taking over our beloved nation. Neither best friends nor family members knew where their intimates fled to- they simply just evaporated from our schools and workplaces and no one talked about them ever again.

By now, we had gotten somewhat used to new faces. Ever since the outbreak of the war, people were constantly being replaced, as fast as the seasons come and go.

When I looked away from the window to scrutinize the new students, I saw Jongdae looking back at me with his cheeky grin, mouthing the word, “legs”. I rolled my eyes and met the gaze of the new students, wondering who would stay this time and who would leave. It was a new record: we had fifteen new students last week, all but two of whom decided to leave us as quickly as they had shown up.

As Jongdae said, two of the three girls were obviously unaware of the snow outside and stood proudly in the front of the class with extremely short tailored uniform skirts on, making my eyes inadvertently divert to their long skinny legs. They popped their gum and thoroughly examined every person in the classroom. 

I didn’t judge them. Whether we admitted it or not, whether we actively permitted it or not, the war was slowly but surely changing our lives. That’s why everyone’s parents cut back on afterschool classes and allowed the boys to smoke and girls walk around in daisy dukes and other pieces of thin cloth draped over tiny bodies. Parents were probably sorry that their children were born in a period without foreign movies and actual freedom of speech.

Standing between the two girls was another girl who looked as plain as plain could get.

As for the boy, he was somewhat tall for our age and very skinny. His pale complexion made him look as if he was sick. His temperament made him look as if he was constantly negligent about his surroundings. Small mouth and gaunt features. All I knew about him was that he was beautiful in a fragile yet tempestuous way and I did not want to take my eyes off of him. 

I listened as he introduced himself briefly as ‘Sehun’. He spoke with quiet confidence. Sehun’s eyes glazed across the faces of his new classmates as he finished his introduction when he held my gaze for a brief second. I gave him a brave smile that he returned to my content.

I felt the corners of my lips turn upwards yet again when Sehun was seated directly in front of me. Now I had another pretty thing to distract myself with.

A good two weeks were spent staring at the back of Oh Sehun’s lovely head of wavy dark brown locks before I decided that he was probably here to stay. Plus, Kim Jongdae snagged a bit of information that Oh Sehun’s father was one of the leading military generals and was sent up to Seoul from some city down South.

After Jongdae encouraged me to talk to Sehun and made a crude joke along the lines of “We’re all going to die from the war anyway”, I still decided to spend a good couple of hours contemplating whether or not I should ask Sehun what he thought about the war, or our psychotic history teacher, or the ddukbokki stand down the street. However, I didn’t want to look like an idiot so I waited until a good excuse popped up naturally.

It must have been my lucky day because during break, Oh Sehun turned around during break and flashed me a brilliant smile.

“I don’t think I’ve ever talked to you before.”

I told him that we should go out to ddukbokki and we did after school. We sat there at the plastic red tables and talked about ourselves. I noticed that Sehun talked with a lisp but I found it absolutely adorable. He looked soft-spoken but in actuality, was most eloquent- his voice didn't waver, he knew exactly what to say at the right moment, and he stared at me right in the eyes. 

I learned that he loved food more than he loved his father.

From there, our relationship progressed.

After school, the three of us (and occasionally the plain new girl whose name was Danah) would go to Jongdae's apartment and if the weather was in our favor, we would sit under the large oak tree in front of the usually vacant neighborhood park where the military tanks and policemen were not around. Jongdae would study, Sehun would listen to music and I would read as we all munched on junk food and the occasional beer, dreaming of the foreign snacks that once filled the aisles of our supermarkets.

Although during school we were just as voluble and jovial as the rest of our classmates, the comfortable silence that we shared daily is what brought the three of us together more than anything.

About two months from the date I first talked to Sehun, I decided to write him a cautious love letter and attach a bar of chocolate imported from France. I had been saving it for a special occasion but of course Sehun didn’t know how special that little bar of candy meant to me.

Kim Jongdae, Oh Sehun, and the rest of the teenage population were at the prime of our lives and refused to believe that our existences would end with finding delight in emergency bomb drills at school (we got to miss thirty minutes of class) and stealing soju.

At that point, I did not know much about Sehun nor did I love him to the point where I would even dare to contemplate marriage. I only saw the bits and pieces of the flowery parts of his life that he chose to show me and he only knew what he observed and heard about Ji Yoonmi.

But nonetheless, Sehun asked me to be his girlfriend and I, without hesitation, said yes to who would become my only shining star in the vast and plain darkness of my premature heart.