Jihyo looked up at the dilapidated building before her. With three stories of falling apart lumber and bricks, peeling paint, boarded up or broken glass windows, and graffiti decorating the walls in random places, Areumdaun Apartments looked anything but beautiful.

    “Good grief, noona,” her childhood friend, Lee Kwangsoo, let out a low whistle at the sight of the building. He shifted the three heavy boxes, the broom, and the bat he was carrying with a grunt. “Where did you even find this place? It looks like it’s one strong wind away from collapsing.”

    Jihyo shrugged and tried to look nonchalant. “At least it’s affordable.” She hefted her bags higher on her shoulder. “Let’s go in.” At her slight push, the rusted gate in front of them creaked open with a metallic screech. Kwangsoo gaped at her in horror.

    “The gate opened just like that? That can’t be safe. Is there even a security guard around here?” He peered into the window of the security box next to the gate, only to find a very muscular but very asleep man drooling on his desktop. Kwangsoo scoffed. “Well, at least there is one, even if he’s sleeping.” He rapped his knuckles on the glass window, but the man didn’t stir.

    “Come on, Kwangsoo-ya,” Jihyo called, and she stepped inside the gate. They made their way up a set of rickety stairs which creaked in protest with every step they took. On their way to the end of the second floor, Jihyo could feel eyes staring at them from above, but when she looked up, there was no one to be seen on the veranda of the third floor.

    Her room was the last on the second floor, so she would only have one neighbor. She inserted the rusty key and, after a little bit of jiggling the lock, the door creaked open to reveal a single room apartment with one moldy window, a door leading to a bathroom, and a small, wobbly looking fridge in one corner.

    Kwangsoo let out another whistle and set down the boxes on her floor with a grunt. The weight of the boxes sent up a cloud of dust, and he coughed. “Well, we’re definitely going to have to do some cleaning, noona. Where do you want to start?”

    To be honest, Jihyo wasn’t sure where to start herself. Aside from the dust, cobwebs lined the corners of the room, dirty newspapers and a pair of stinky old boots lay strewn on the ground from the previous owner, and she could hear the dripping of the sink in the bathroom.

    She sighed and took the broom from Kwangsoo. “I guess we’ll start with sweeping and mopping. Could you help me get the cobwebs from the corners?”

    They swept, scrubbed, and dusted the best they could for the next four hours, stopping only for a jjajangmyun break in between and for when the landlord, a middle aged man with the largest nose Jihyo had ever seen, came in to greet her.

    “Nice to meet you. You can call me Mr. Ji. I hope you enjoy your stay,” he commented, shaking her hand. “It’s a nice place, isn’t it?” He grinned and looked about, admiring the place as if there weren’t cracks in the ceiling, mold on the window, and suspicious holes along the wall.

    “Is he being sarcastic?” Kwangsoo whispered to Jihyo, but she elbowed him sharply in reply. Instead, she smiled at the landlord.

    “Thank you. It’s perfect. It’s got everything that I need,” she said as graciously as she could manage. Kwangsoo snorted at that, muttering “You could be an actress” under his breath.

    Mr. Ji, who clearly didn’t hear what Kwangsoo said, beamed with pride. “Yes, Song Jihyo-ssi. You’ll find that we at Areumdaun Apartments are very close, like a family.”

    “I can’t stop staring at his nose. Do you think it’s fake?” Kwangsoo hissed at Jihyo, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing.

“You’ll get to know everyone soon enough, especially if you find Mr. Ha, a resident in room 305,” Mr. Ji continued, nonplussed. “He knows everything about everybody. Everyone’s friendly enough. Although,” his voice dropped to a low murmur, “I’m only telling you this because I like you, Jihyo-ssi. You would be careful about your neighbor next door. He’s a fighter, I hear. It’d be dangerous for a young woman like yourself to be roaming about at night around here, especially since our mysterious tenant next door is usually gone for the whole day and returns only at night.”

    Jihyo swallowed and tried to look brave. “I see. Thank you for the heads up.”

    Mr. Ji nodded, the professional smile back on his face. “Well. I’ll see you around, Jihyo-ssi!”

    “Noona,” Kwangsoo turned to her urgently as soon as Mr. Ji had closed the door behind him. “This place isn’t safe. You should probably just come back to Pohang with me.”

    “Oh relax, Kwangsoo. I’ll be fine. Besides, I have my first day of work tomorrow. You know how hard I worked to get into that company. I spent a lot of money buying my work clothes too! I’m not letting this all go to waste out of fear of some rumored fighter next door.”

    “If you say so,” Kwangsoo relented, though he still looked unconvinced. He sighed though and picked up his cleaning rag. “What shall we do now? Should we start on the windows?”

    Jihyo shook her head. “I’ll just set out my bed pallet for now and then do everything else tomorrow. You should leave. It’s getting dark, and it’s a three hour drive back to Pohang.”

    “But-”

    “No buts about it. You have work tomorrow, too,” she reminded him gently, taking the rag from out of his hands. Kwangsoo sighed again.

    “Okay. But at least let me help you lay out your pallet,” he told her. She smiled and nodded, and together they unrolled the cotton bedding against the far wall. When that was finished, she gave Kwangsoo a hug and bade him goodbye and good luck at work.

    “Oh, one last thing, noona,” Kwangsoo said, handing her the steel baseball bat he’d been curiously slinging over his shoulder the whole time he was helping her move.

    “What’s this?” Jihyo took the bat and smacked it lightly against her hand. It made a hollow clanging noise.

    “Self defense. I’m not sure how safe this place is, especially with your next door neighbor being some strong fighter dude,” Kwangsoo explained, giving her back a friendly pat. “I wish I could stay here and watch over you, but I know you wouldn’t let me stay. Besides, you’re so strong and scary that no one would dare go up against you, anyway.”

    Jihyo smiled and reached up to ruffle his hair- as best as she could anyway; Kwangsoo was such a giraffe. “You’re so sweet. Go. I’ll be fine. Take care of my dongsaengs for me, will you?”

    Kwangsoo followed her as she opened the door to send him out. “Of course. Call me if anything happens, okay?”

    She nodded and waved him goodbye. “Take care. Drive home safely.” She waited for his curly head to disappear from the steps before shutting the door and leaning against it with a sigh.

    Finally alone, Jihyo crawled to her pallet and let the tears she’d been holding back since her parents’ deaths and her move here finally pool out of her eyes.

    When her parents passed away in a car accident, she’d tried to remain strong for her younger siblings. Her loving grandparents had offered to let her and her two younger siblings live with them, but after living with them in their small, cramped house meant for two over the course of the six months while she was still in college, she quickly realized that they didn’t have the space or the money to feed and house all three teenagers. Being the oldest, she took it upon herself to work part time jobs to help ease the load, finally saving up enough money to move out and look for a job in the city, where she could earn even more money to send back home. So she’d packed up her meager belongings and gotten a friend, Kwangsoo, who owned a truck because his family worked selling furniture, to drive her down to Seoul. She convinced her grandparents that she wanted to try living independently, that she had friends and a good job offer in Seoul, and that she had found a cheap, comfortable apartment to stay at. That was partly true: she did get a pretty decent job offer at an office after only five interviews, and she had found a cheap place. But, of course, the apartment was nowhere near comfortable; she knew nobody in Seoul, and with the city being completely different from her quiet seaside town, she felt terribly misplaced and terribly lonely already.

    She missed her pesky little brother and sister and their antics; she missed her grandmother’s warm food and her grandfather’s stories; she missed walking along the seashore and hearing the sound of waves instead of the sounds of honking and city bustle; she missed the comfortable bed she shared with her sister; she missed her parents the most. She pressed her face into her pillow to drown out her sobs.

    As if contributing to her foul mood, pounding, angry rap music began to blare loudly from next door. Even though Jihyo was a bit preoccupied with her tiny pity party, the vibrating wall and floor due to her neighbor’s beats were a little hard to ignore.

    It figures, she thought bitterly to herself, rolling onto her back to glare at the ceiling. She’d lost the two people who loved her most in the world; she’d given up her comfort at her grandparents’ house for her younger siblings; she’d left the only world she’d known for a bustling, wild city where she knew no one; she was living in a cramped, dirty hovel, and she wasn’t even allowed to cry in peace.

    Sniffling, Jihyo timidly rapped her knuckles on the wall, hoping her neighbor would take a hint and turn down his music.

    If anything, however, the music seemed to pour through the threadbare walls at even higher decibels, the angry rapping having increased in speed and emotion.

    Jihyo tapped the wall a little more forcefully this time. “Please stop,” she whimpered, but it was to no avail.    

Annoyed, Jihyo sat up and banged her fist against the wall with full force. Who cared if her next door neighbor was a fighter? He was clearly a jerk.The strength with which she knocked on the wall increased with her rising frustration. But the music remained deafeningly loud; her knuckles felt sore, and crumbs of dry whitewash were raining down from the ceiling due to the force of her blows.

    So, after giving the wall one last kick, she opted to cover her ears with her pillow, hoping that she’d drift off to sleep somehow. Then, like godsend, the music came abruptly to a halt, and somehow, even with the screeching of sirens and traffic in the distance, she did fall asleep.

    Close to midnight, however, she jolted awake. It was eerie quiet in contrast with the booming music from earlier, but somewhere close to the foot of her pallet, she could hear a faint scratching noise. She froze in panic. Was it a bug? There was nothing she was more scared of than bugs.

    It’s okay, Jihyo, she told herself, forcing herself to take slow, calming breaths. Bugs are to be expected in a dirty place like this.

    Something brushed past her foot- furry and slick, and she yelped, hopping to her feet. That was most definitely not a bug. She hurriedly snatched up her phone and the steel baseball bat that Kwangsoo had given her, clutching both to her chest. Her finger hovered over her speed dial, ready to call Kwangsoo, but she paused, hesitating.

    Kwangsoo was probably already all the way in Pohang by now. And she couldn’t possibly call him every single time a critter showed up in her house.

    Taking a deep breath, Jihyo flicked on the flashlight in her phone and shined it in the direction where she’d felt the creature. The light reflected back at her from the eyes of a rat the size of a small cat. She shrieked, found the light switch, and the lights just in time to see the rat scuttling away. With a courage that she did not know she had in her, she picked up the bat and smashed it against the rat, but the rat dodged it by a few centimeters, running up the length of her wall. Jihyo continued to hit at it with her bat, but it continued climbing, unaffected. With each smack of her bat, she could hear crumbling noises of protest from the wall, but she was too preoccupied with trying to kill the rat to pay attention to that. Trying to stop the rat before it got out of reach, she the bat in front of the rat with all her might, accidentally punching through the thin wall. She gasped as a large chunk of wall fell through, starting from the hole her bat made, and widening enough for her to see a dimly lit room, a bed, and a very man lounging on top of it. She screamed.

    The man on the bed jumped awake. “What the-” Turning, he saw her peering through the hole, looking aghast, and hastily dragged his sheets around him. “What the hell, lady? I turned down the music already!”

    She gulped. He wasn’t as large and muscular as she’d imagined, him being a fighter and all, but he had a lot of tattoos running up his arms, bruises and scars decorating his face here and there, a spiked, closely shaved haircut, and an angry, menacing look on his face. He definitely looked like he’d seen many fights in his day. She wondered if she’d need the bat for him instead of the rat.

    “No, no it’s not that…” She looked up just in time to see the rat’s tail slip through the hole she’d created and quickly whacked at it with her bat, causing more of the wall to crumble. “It’s… there’s a rat!”

    The man cursed under his breath and reached through the hole to grab her bat. She could hear thumping on the opposite side of the wall as the man thwacked at the rat. Her room shook with the force, and there was so much fallen whitewash and plaster on her ground that it looked like a tornado had blown through. So much for sweeping my floor, she thought idly. The thwacking noises continued for a while, and then silence.

    “Got it!” The man emerged from below the hole triumphantly, dangling the large dead rat by its tail gingerly. A silly grin was pasted on his face, the smile pronouncing cheekbones that she hadn’t seen earlier when he’d looked angry. Now that he was smiling, he looked less scary- almost goofy and warm, in a way.Then she noticed that his sheets had slipped from around him, so she quickly looked away.

    “Oops,” he said, and then there was a rustling. “Let me put on some shorts. Man, what an adventure, eh?” She could hear the smile in his voice and couldn’t help but smile a little too.

    “Yeah,” she replied, just as the rest of the wall came crashing down. She looked at him, eyes wide.

    “Oh shoot,” they whispered simultaneously.