00 a promise

Irene was still sniffing as she sat in the sandbox.  She had calmed down considerably, but the tears were still fresh on her face.  Her pigtails were messy, her yellow sundress dirty on the ends from when she had tripped on the ground earlier after running away. 

The boy beside her patted her on the back without a word.  He was a short scrawny boy with thick eyebrows and sharp nose.  He had seen her run to the sandbox in the playground outside the classroom after hearing the other children about her mother having affairs with other men. 

Even though Irene was only 7 years old, she wasn’t crying because they were bad-mouthing her mother.  What they said was not far off the truth, it’s just that it forced her to realise that there was no one in her family who cared about her. 

She tried to keep herself busy by drawing scribbles in the sand using the stick she had found earlier. 

Everyone in class had drawn their perfect families with their perfect smiles for their art class.  Irene had been stuck.  She could only draw herself.  She couldn’t draw anyone else in her family.  She couldn’t even pretend that she had a normal family and draw a generic mum and dad in her drawing. 

She drew herself again in the sand with a big unhappy face and a lonely house beside it.

“Tae, I wished I could draw a real family,” She said to Taehyung who had been quietly sitting next to her.  Tae’s real name was Taehyung but Irene had always affectionately called him Tae.  Taehyung knew that she was afraid of being abandoned.  She was already abandoned by her mother who cared more about her happiness rather than her child’s. 

At first, young Taehyung didn’t say a word and instead took the stick gently from Irene’s hand and began drawing something next to hers.  After he had finished, Irene realised that the boy had drawn himself, a high nose and hard eyebrows as the distinguishing features, his stick arm stretching out to link with Irene’s stick figure in the scribble on the sand.  He then rubbed away Irene’s sad face and replaced it with a