My office was small, but it was cozy. It was a small section of the large infirmary, separated by a set of dividers. The doctor who originally ran the infirmary, Dr Jong Minwoo, was in Paris for some reason, and I was running the infirmary until a new doctor was found. I didn’t mind running it alone, I found it would be good practice. I sat at the main desk (which i assumed was Minwoo’s) and browsed through the wide selection of books behind me in a cute little bookshelf under the window.

After a few minutes of reading, I heard a few shouts from down the hall and stood to walk out the door to find the problem. Just as I got to my feet, three boys burst through the infirmary doors, “Dr. Jong! We were-” the boys stopped dead in their tracks once they saw me, staring with appalled faces. I noticed the boys in the middle had one leg lifted from the ground, and blood stained his ankle. I immediately switched to “first-aid mode” and snapped out of my confusion.

“Bring him over there,” I pointed to an empty infirmary bed. The boys continued staring with blank faces and I nodded my head in the direction of the bed. The boys snapped out of their daze and scrambled over to the infirmary bed, sloppily placing their friend on the bed, and looked up at me again with blank faces, this time a hint of awe in their eyes.

“So, what happened to your ankle?” I asked as I carefully removed his shoe and sock. None of the boys answered so I left to wet a cloth at the sink. Their eyes were glued to me as I returned with the damp cloth. I began to dab the blood from his ankle to try to find the source of the blood, “Your ankle…?”

The boy snapped out of it again and said quietly, “I fell”

“Okay… and how did you fall?” I wiped the last of the blood and found the wound, it was a small gash on the outside of his ankle.

“I… Um…” He started stuttering and was paying way too much attention to my hands bandaging his ankle.

The tallest of the boys stepped forward, “He was biking and fell, he landed on a branch,” the boy leaned nonchalantly on an infirmary bed. The wheels of the infirmary bed betrayed him and rolled the bed away, causing him to fall to the ground with a loud thud.

“Oh my god, are you okay?” I asked the boy who fell.

The boy jumped to his feet and leaned against the wall, “Me? Psh, I’m fine. Just checking if the floor was clean…” he trailed off and the third boy facepalmed so hard I was sure he would have a red palm mark on his face throughout the day.

What is WITH these guys? Are they okay?

I looked at the three boys in front of me, all giving me looks of awe and confusion. I wondered if they were all sick or something. I approached the boy with the red forehead and held the back of my hand against his forehead. The other boys snorted and watched as I took the boy’s temperature, “Have any of you been feeling sick lately?”

The boys all looked confused, except for the boy who fell. He stepped forward and coughed, “Yang-uisi (Miss doctor)? I think I’m sick…” he started to stumble in my direction and I caught him at his waist. He wasn’t that heavy, so I let him lean on me for support as I brought him to the bed beside the boy who fell off the bike.

The third boy fell against the bed that the boy with the hurt ankle was laying on, “Yang-uisi! I feel sick too!” I wondered what could have gotten into the boys so quickly, they were just able to stand a moment before. I rushed to the boy who fell and put his arm over my shoulder so I could get him to a third bed.

“Boys, you don’t need to call me Yang-uisi, Doctor Byon is my professional name”

The boy with the hurt ankle said “But Yang-uisi is such a sweeter name to call you by! Doctor Byon reminds me of our smelly gym teacher, his last name is Byon”

I looked at the boys who were all lying on the beds and said “Teacher Baek, is my uncle. My last name is Byon. You are my patients, so you’ll call me Dr. Byon, understood?”

The boys all looked up at me with wide eyes and nodded. I began to check the symptoms of the boys…

<>{}<>{}<>

After finding no real symptoms in any of the boys, they still insisted that they were sick, so I gave them lemon water and tylenol before sending them back to their dorms. I checked the time and realized that I was supposed to meet my uncle in the cafeteria in twenty minutes. I quickly grabbed by bag from under the desk and turned off the lights of the infirmary while walking out the door and shutting it behind me. I slid the infirmary key into the lock and locked the door before running down the hall to my dorm.

I still wasn’t used to the room and my breath was taken away again as I walked through the door of my dorm. I inhaled deeply and sighed as I shut my door and locked it. The sound of the deadbolt was unsettling to me for some reason, making me feel as though the school wasn’t actually safe… even though I knew it was. It was the best school in Seoul, probably in all of South Korea. There’s no way that the school would let just anybody in the school, not with all the security they have. Not to mention all the questions I’d had to answer before I was even allowed to contact the school board.

I walked up to my loft and quickly changed out of my scrubs and into a more comfortable outfit. I threw on a pair of ripped skinny jeans and my soccer jersey from Canada. The familiar fabric touching my skin made me feel like I was flying. I closed my eyes remembering what it felt like to be on the field, feeling my heart flutter. I opened my eyes and rushed into the bathroom to take my hair down from my bun, sending it down to fall on my shoulders in long messy curls. I debated brushing it out but the curls looked nice, and I knew that if I brushed it out my hair would turn into a frizzy mess. I parted my hair so it looked like my “do” had at least partial effort and turned to leave the bathroom.

I walked into the main part of the dorm and grabbed my bag, slinging it over my shoulder as I walked out the door. I locked the door behind me and the familiar click of the deadbolt announced that it was safe for me to leave my dorm. I started to walk down the hall as I sent a text to Min,

~Hey! Where’s the cafeteria?~

I continued to walk down the hall and not even a minute after sending the text I heard the ping from my cell phone. I pulled the phone out from my pocket and unlocked it,

~You don’t know where the caf is? Tssk Tssk! Hahaha I’m sending you a pic of the map of the school. And hurry! You don’t want the boys to eat all the food before you even get here!~

A second text followed the first, and I clicked on the picture to enlarge it. The cafeteria was in the building beside me so it wouldn’t take more than two minutes to get there. I put my phone back in my pocket and adjusted the straps of my backpack while walking through the doors of my building into the evening air. It wasn’t too cool, but I’d wished I’d grabbed my jacket. That didn’t matter though, since the cafeteria is inside. I bit my lip to deal with the cool breeze and walked down the sets of stairs that led to the courtyard. There were so many stairs all over the school, it was ridiculous.

I just reached the last few steps when I had to turn to walk up an identical set of steps to the building where the cafeteria was. After all four flights, my legs were feeling tingly from climbing so many stairs, but I wasn’t out of breath. After playing soccer for so many years, running takes little to no effort, it was just upper body strength I lacked in.

I opened the doors to the building which held the cafeteria and the classrooms and was immediately lost again. The halls were empty, probably because of dinner, but there were so many halls to go down. I pulled the map of the school up on my phone and studied the map to find the halls I needed to take to find the cafeteria. I finally found my place in the map and discovered that the hall directly ahead of me led straight to the cafeteria.

I started to walk down the hall and immediately was greeted by delicious scents of baking and cooking. I didn’t even need the map anymore because the scent from the cafeteria was strong enough to lead me to the cafeteria.

I opened the door and was taken aback by how massive the room was. The cafeteria was larger than most food courts in malls that I’d been to and seated hundreds of boys who were hungrily eating their food. As I scanned the room I felt all the eyes in the room land on me and the sound in room slowly faded into silence. The click of my cleats hitting the tile floor echoed as I tentatively wandered into the large room. My eyes frantically searched for a way out of the spotlight, scanning all the tables. Every table I searched was full of boys who stared back at me with awestruck eyes and the room started to feel heavy. In the silence, I heard a chair squeal against the ground and I looked over to see Uncle Min standing alone by a table with two plates of food sitting in front of his seat.

“What are you all doing? Eat! Or I’ll have you all clean the change rooms with your toothbrushes!” Min’s voice echoed in the silence and was quickly replaced by the loud chatter of the boys. I gave Min my best ‘thank you’ look and walked over to the table he was sitting at. As I approached, Min sat in his seat and nudged a plate towards me. I sat across from him and took the chopsticks beside me in my hand to start eating.

Between mouthfuls of kimchi I looked up at Min, “Are you even allowed to make them clean with their toothbrushes?” I took another bite and watched as Min laughed quietly to himself.

“No, I’m not, but they don’t know that,” he looked around at the hundreds of boys and laughed again to himself before eating another spoonful of his seaweed soup. Just as the seaweed came in contact with his tongue, he spit it out, “Hot! Hot! Ouuuu it burns!” he reached for his water. As he took a sip, I started to wipe the bits of seaweed from my arm, “Oh…. Oh gosh… I’m sorry Brooke, wait here,” we both stood at the same time.

“It’s fine Min, I can grab my own napkin. You sit here and blow on your soup, it needs to cool. The napkins are over there?” I pointed to a table in the middle of the cafeteria that held sauces, straws and utensils that I saw on my way in.

“You sit here, I’ll get the napkins” Min walked towards the middle of the room where I’d pointed and I sat back in my seat.

I looked around the room and noticed that all the boys were dressed exactly the same, besides their shoes. Some boys wore fancy italian shoes, work boots, running shoes, all kinds of shoes. I looked around at the boys’ feet, oddly fascinated by their shoes. As I scanned the floors, I came across an especially interesting table. There were four boys sitting at a table together.

One boy’s sneakers were fairly normal, other than the fact that they were black and pink. I didn’t pay too much attention to his shoes though.

The boy beside him wore a pair of green nike’s, which I recognized because I almost bought the same pair for myself a month ago. The thing that surprised me was he replaced the black laces with bright pink laces.

Beside him was a boy with regular white sneakers, but I noticed something sticking out of the heel of his shoe, tucked between the wall of the shoe and his ankle. I looked closer and noticed that it was a stick of Chapstick. I nearly laughed out loud and moved onto the last boy’s sneakers.

He wasn’t wearing sneakers… he was wearing cleats. I stared in disbelief as I realized that he had the same cleats as me. I looked up to see his face and realized he was already staring at me in disbelief.

Jeez, are these boys really not used to girls being here?

I looked back at my plate and continued eating my kimchi, the seat across from me was pulled out and Min sat in it. He handed me a wad of napkins and I used one to wipe the seaweed mess from my arm and sat the dirty napkin beside my plate.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the boy’s cleats, and my jersey was starting to feel heavy on my shoulders. I remembered Min mentioning a soccer team and knew there would be a field somewhere.

I looked up at Min, “Thank you, Uncle Min,” I ate one last bite of kimchi and sat my chopsticks on my plate, “but, I think I’m going to call it a night. I’m super tired, and for some reason, I’m not that hungry…” I stood and picked up my plate and Min stood with me.

“Brooke, are you sure you don’t want to finish eating? You can’t eat in your dorm so this’ll be your only opportunity to eat for the rest of the night, unless you go into town,” he stopped in his tracks and interrupted himself, “Which I am not letting you do alone. Just, are you sure you’re not hungry?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Besides, if I get hungry enough I’ll just make you take me downtown to get something to eat, I haven’t been yet so it would be fun,” I laughed and looked down at my half full plate, “Where do I put the plate?”

“Just leave it here, I can take care of it,” he looked back up at me and smirked, “The field is behind the school, on the east side”

“How did you-”

“You’re my favourite niece… I know you better than you do. Go play, I know it’ll make you feel better. If you need a goalie, give me a call,” he tapped his cell phone that was sitting on the table and laughed, “Even though I hardly match up to you, a goalie is a goalie,” he crossed his arms and nodded, giving me permission to leave. I bowed deeply and turned to leave the cafeteria. My walk almost turned into a run in the middle of the cafeteria, but I held back the urge and walked calmly to the doors.

After making my way down the hall and reaching the doors, I took a deep breath before opening the doors, letting in a gust of cool wind. I shivered, but my whole body felt warm. I was tingling with excitement and I took a step into the night. I started off walking, but as I reached the steps, my pace quickened and I was soon jogging down the stairs. At the bottom, my jog turned into a run and I sprinted my way up the stairs to the building where my dorm was.

Once I reached my room, I was slightly out of breath, and exhilarated. I rushed over to my sofas and picked up the soccer ball I brought from Canada. I hugged it to my side with one hand and ran out the door, I heard the click of the door shutting behind me as I ran down the hall to look for the field.