Fall in Seoul is not at all like the way it is advertised on television.  
It is the intermediate between the blazing summer and the freezing winter, and water falls down on the earth without purpose, a failed product of two opposite elements: the delicate frustules of the cold unable to stand the uncontrollable heat of the summer.  
 
Seulgi is waiting for the rain to stop under the tin protection of the bus stop, each of the thousands of raindrops pinging loudly on the roof.  
 
The wind blows hard, making the tears fall slant ward to the earth. The heavy rain knocks leaves from their stems, like well-buried memories triggered by a familiar song, or an old crusty photo. They crowd the drains, their own impatience foiling their escape. Minimum wage slaves in their thin street cleaner uniforms cannot attend to the backlog right now, and happily sit out their duties. The water collects, and it shrouds the road with a misty veil, gray from upturned silt. 
 
Everything is darker than it should be, opaque cumulonimbus swallowing up the sun, blocking its warmth. The rain flows over car windows, the rate of wind shields unable to keep up with the never-ending assault of the weather. Over the radio DJs warn of minimal visibility in between the top ten songs of the week. Pedestrians outside are no better. There is no way to keep them out of your eyes when you stand directly under it, water swirling over and past and through you. It pushes down on plastic umbrellas, the hands that cling to its steel metal canes still wet despite their best effort. The sour scent of soaked metal stays on the human hands longer than some memories. 
 
Seulgi sighs angrily, frustrated at her luck. She eyes the ground, eyeliner black. There is a big test today, the kind that they tell you will haunt you for the rest of your life. 
 
She glances at her watch, dotted with water like a perspired nose. She wipes the face with her thumb and brings it closer to her face. She squints. She woke up too late to put on contacts, and she was too cool to wear glasses that weren’t meant for the beach.  
 
It was 10:20. The bell must have rung twenty-minutes ago, and the test handed out nineteen. Their teacher, a strict boring man whose only joy in life was seeing those who had not yet lost their youth squirm, was a very punctual man, and did not believe in last minute reviews, or second chances. Or, as if by extension, in Seulgi. 
 
Might as well, Seulgi thought dismissively. And already all the distress that occupied her heart just a while ago dissipates. Not that there was much, but still. It takes a lot for Seulgi to care. That is how she dealt with most things. With a resigned apathy. With a lettinggo attitude, except lettinggo would mean that there was some concern to begin with. Kang Seulgi has no concern, no worries. That wouldn’t be very cool.  
 
She opens her handbag, an expensive thing that did not deserve to get wet and deserved getting a better owner. Her long manicured fingers dance above their options momentarily, like the tentacles of an octopus choosing fish among a school. With an almost serious concentration, she takes out a cigarette, deciding that it was the tallest one among its friends. Seulgi believed that cigarettes had height discrepancies, no matter how slight they may be. And that she, Seulgi, a cigarette connoisseur, had developed a natural talent for detecting these factory errors over the many 
 
years that she consumed them. And when she shared so among her friends, they agreed. At least, Seulgi thinks so. You can never really tell what as sincere of them. 
 
She strikes the match, and for that second it was the warmest thing under that roof. She wraps her pink matte-d lips around the brown end, indulging in what she usually couldn’t enjoy in her pleated skirt.  
 
And then, a running. A girl with a book over her head, sprinting through the rain. The book was covered in plastic, in the pressed-down sort of way that tells you immediately that a good student owned it. She ran against it, so for the most part, Seulgi couldn’t see her. Not that she would. Acknowledging strangers wouldn’t be very cool. 
 
Seungwan wasn’t cool. But she was okay with that. She was okay with friends whom she could laugh at and whom could do to her in return. She was okay with the dull weekdays at home and the lackluster weekends over at Eric’s. She was okay with the look that her mother gave her. All pride in the eyes, but some strange sadness in the smile, like she was addressing the sole survivor of an airplane crash. Or the sole casualty. 
 
She arrived at the bus stop panting, hair wild from coffee stress and back heavy with hardbound responsibility. She looked at her temporary companion with non eyeliner-ed eyes, and bare lips that were chapped by the cold but dampened by the rain. 
 
There are gray half-moons stamped under her eyes, and a bad slouch that one usually gets when they spend hours slumped over desks and kitchen sinks. Her mother always wanted to complain about it, but never had the heart to bring up. Not when he daughter works so hard, her determination to be good making her spend so little time with anything else. 
 

"Oh god, it’s absolutely pouring."  

Seulgi, too preoccupied with the idea that her judgement of this tobacco was faulty (was this the tallest one or the one three cigarettes next to it?), was not sure if it was her that was being addressed. Frankly, it was not her fault (most things aren’t). And what sort of response did she expect? Yes, indeed it was pouring. Their dripping skirts and ruined hairdos could attest to that. 
 
Instead, Seulgi just gives a laugh. A snort with a smile, something that could look like approval. A small fleeting thing, barely lasting a second. It arrived on Seulgi’s stone face and left just as quickly.  
 
Minutes go by in silence. 
 
A lot of minutes. 
 
Too many minutes. 
 
Seungwan her lips and takes notice of their embarrassing state. She has her eyes cast downward, at almost the same angle as Seulgi, yet there’s a completely different feel behind it. Her clothes are wet from the rain, and her tan bra is imprinted slightly. She pulls up her blouse, the wetness clinging momentarily, making the pink more obvious. Then finally lets go with a messy suction. 
 
Like a kiss dripping with saliva, or pulling out a toilet plunger. She begins to bite the little bits of hardened skin, pulling them off with an emotionless grin. It would be a measure that anyone would have second thoughts of doing on the worry that it would come off as suggestive, or do it just because it is, but Seungwan is not that kind of person. It is not that she does know how she would look like to others, but years of being overlooked has taught her that they simply wont. 
 
She looks over at her companion at the corner of her eye, and takes note of the effortlessness that radiates off her. Her bag, too small to hold more than one book, or at least three notebooks, is hanging on her bent arm, while her hand holds the lit cigarette close to her face. She looks like she’s posing, ready for paparazzi or fangirls. But then she moves slightly, transferring the weight of her body from one long leg to another.  
 
That’s how lazy people stand, Seungwan, her mother said once. It was Seungwan’s first time standing in line. It had been thirty minutes already, and a seven-year old that didn’t do a lot of leg work quickly grew tired. She shifted constantly between two poses, springing back and forth in Bratz boots. When her mother took notice, she wagged a disapproving finger and whispered in her ear.  
 
Seungwan stood straight for the next of the hour, feet close together and hands clasped behind her back. She didn’t completely kick that habit that day, and continued to use that strategy for school fire drills and for washing the dishes.  
 
Seulgi is getting tired. The length of the has been burnt to less than a third of its original, and she flicks it away. Again, she pulls the zipper to get her hankerchief, and it takes her a while to find it. Much like her life, Seulgi’s bag is a mess. Despite the several zippers lining the sides, she doesn’t do compartmentalization. Everything that she needs for the day is thrown inside, and is mixed among the medley. She doesn’t take the time to organize it, noting that the time she would take in doing so could be used for much more important things.  
 
But shifting through the rubble takes several small portions of her day. She would be surprised to learn that the time she takes figuring out from which of the half empty containers of hairspray were still usable and detangling a cable she needs from the rest takes up more time than sitting down in her room and doing that all at once. Or, more likely, she would not.  
 
She swaths away bits and bobs with her hand. A calm back and forth motion that seems gentle, with the kind of cautious manner you’d use to handle fragile things. It’s all glass and plastic in here. Tubes of lip gloss and adapters, a compact and a hairbush. Shifting around the cosmetics creates a scent cloud. The mixture of the different brands is a few degrees too sweet, much to the irritation of Seungwan’s nose. There are earphones and folded tissue papers with cellphone numbers of boys whose names she can’t remember. There aren’t any notebooks down here. Seulgi finds jotting down notes useless, and can actually remember everything that the teacher says when she happens to be listening.  
 
She pulls out the corner of a pink cloth reaching for help underneath her powerbank, and dabs her face with it. Pat pat pat, lightly dabbing the hankerchief on her face onto areas wetter than the others. And, disregarding how she struggled with retrieval, she puts it back inside in a crumpled heap as careless as before.  
 
As she pushes down protruding parts of the cloth down into crevices, her eyes catch on the box that sits atop everything else. She clucks sadly at the joint she considered, the second tallest one. By just a teensy tiny bit, it was not used, and would have to go through the torment of waiting several long hours more of before it could perform its purpose. This is what seems to be Seulgi’s way of rationalizing her self-destructive habit: convincing herself that inhaling the cigarette’s toxins was her way of helping them fulfill their destiny, as she could not do for herself.  
 
Seungwan, hot in the face from having so utterly failed at conversation, doesn’t look her way until she strikes her match, and turns her head towards it. Seulgi puts the cigarette in and brings the flame to its tip.  
 
The inability to allow a person to succumb to harmful things makes Seungwan mouth itch (although to Seulgi, that itching was from being unable to stay out of other people’s business), and she warns her that it was going to kill her. Seulgi, being a creature made of sin and spite, responds to the stranger’s gesture of concern by facing her and taking a drag that nearly went through the whole thing. She releases the smoke in a single exhale, eyes closed in pleasure.  
Seungwan, fazed and eyes wide in at such a blatant act of hostility, reconsiders whether her concern is well-placed. Shakily, she points to her left, to a sign on the wall. One of those freakishly morbid government warnings that they post all over town that campaign against cigarette-smoking. The first time Seungwan had to lay her eyes on the bloody gums and dead fetus, she nearly doubled over. She didn’t wonder why smokers did their thing, but why the government would post such unpleasantness in public. 
 
Seulgi follows Seungwan’s finger with her eyes, not even turning her head. She rolls her eyes and flicks the away, already spent from that brief exchange.   

"You’re kind of snotty."

"And you’re kind of annoying."

"Excuse me?" 

"You started it."

"Aren’t you a bit too cool to say that sort of stuff." 

"On the contrary, it allows me to say just about anything I want." 

"Sorry I had to bother your coolness with my air molecules. I’ll just stand over here with this wad of gum, then."  

Seungwan takes two steps backwards until her back is against the wall, and turns around to face it, skirt flitting up. She doesn’t see Seulgi smile largely at her action. Her face is freakishly stretched out, foundation cracking under the above average muscle exertion. Cartoonish and somehow exagerrated antics was not an effective way to acquire her appreciation, yet she finds it rather endearing on the otherwise average stranger. 
 
The bus arrives two minutes late on its schedule, thirty-seven minutes late for Seulgi’s and an hour and twenty-two minutes early for Seungwan’s. They climb aboard, occupying seats right next to each other, as everything else is taken. 
 
Seulgi stares out into the window, and Seungwan realizes how pretty she looks, despite the uniform. Despite the frizz in her hair and the cancer forming in her lungs. Those things wouldn’t have had the same effect on her. How different can we get, Seungwan thinks.  
 
The truth is, much more. There is so much similarity in them, and in their different blackness around their eyes hold the same kind of fear of others. In their different ways of manifesting defeat, Seulgi’s in mind and Seungwan’s in body, is just the same struggle to get through each day.  
 
In them holds a world that could be so familiar for the other, if only they let each other in. But Seungwan doesn’t know that. Instead, she sees someone completely far away from herself, and in could no way reach. Even the way that she sits her among her kind in public transport still makes her reek of beauty and money. She looks at Seulgi and believes her to be nothing but a shell of passive aggression with an entitled air that turns Seungwan off.  
 
How much can you learn from a stranger in a measly thirty-minute encounter, with barely a hundred words to found upon? There was potential here, as two polar types of clichés should be the beginning of something romantic, dangerous and exciting. 
 
This occurs to both of them, not at the same time but almost, and suddenly there is tension. Seulgi, her hands folded on her lap, puts them on her sides, unable to bear the dampness of her skirt. The edges of their pinky bones make contact. It was just a light brush, something you slightly scooted away from. 
 
Seulgi debates whether or not to move forward. When she went out, it was always with boys who asked her out first. Everything about those kind of arrangements were easy: a boy would offer up his companionship, and depending on the reception of her friends she would answer, and when they’ve had enough, they’d bid each other goodbye, not really caring enough afterwards to become awkward. 
 
But with this girl, it would be hard. Seulgi already gave her a wide opening that she wouldn’t take. Already that was a major move. Yet the girl remained still, steadily holding her place, but not forming any attempts to grab for her.   
 
Was it irrational to feel a desire to have more of her? To savor this small fragment of skin purely because of what lied ahead? To know how it felt like to have her hand in hers? To find out if the rest of her was just as smooth as what she experienced now? To explore the uncharted territory that is her back, her nek, her hips, her thighs? To crave every inch of her before she even catches sight of it? To even be thinking of this, knowing that her uality was taboo, something to be hidden? 
 
They arrive at the front of the school, and to the credit of the romantic in Kang Seulgi, she reaches out to Seungwan before they parted forever.   

"Hey, that was rude of me. Actually you’re kind of cute. Here, my number, call me later or something? For a date or whatever."  

Seulgi walks away, and Seungwan stares at her disappearing image, smiling. 
She looks down at the napkin, smeared at the side with a pale pink color the same as her lips. Seungwan peered at the digits. They were written in black ink, slanted to the right, like trees being blown 
 
away. She counted the digits without taking note of the numbers. There were too many to memorize. 
 
She throws the number in the trash bin, and walks in the opposite direction, to the route to her friends. 
 
She wont remember me, Seungwan thinks. And she’s right. By the end of the day, Seulgi will barely remember the shape of her face, or the color of her eyes. Not that she would be able to, since she spent a less than three minutes actually looking at her. She will be a little disquieted at the idea that she did not call. 
 
By the end of the month, she will barely remember her at all. A boy in their class will come out through weibo, and will be eating alone at lunch the next day. While he poked sadly at his rice, Seulgi will consider sitting next to him before the other male seniors started hitting him with their briefs. Seulgi will look away, unable to bear their insulting words, which were meant for her as much as it did for him. She wont notice a girl with chapped lips stand between them, ready to protect others because she didn’t have much to worry over herself. When they sat at their table, her friends will spare no time in discussing who else could possibly to be gay. Seulgi only swirls the noodles of her ramen. 
 
 By the end of the year, when the rain stops falling and the sun shines bright in the clear Seoul sky, there will not even be a memory of that damp bleak day. The leaves are green, and for months they can photosynthesize securely in their branches.  
 
And by the end of her life, her children and grandchildren, sired from a man whom did she not love, surround her bed. They will ask her of the notable people in her life, just to fill her final waking hours with talk that would not make them guilty in the future. In between chest-rattling coughs, she will talk of many people, and indeed all of which deserve a mention. But she will never consider the girl she happened to meet at the bus stop.     
The greatest tragedies are those that never happened.