04 – Scribbles

(he found his name written all over her notebook)

It was their Japanese class; he didn’t mean to snoop around other people’s business, but something just urged him to do so.

Jieun; that was her name; it wasn’t all pretty, but it managed to stand out. It was between the common and popular. She stood about a head shorter than him, always wearing her hair in a bun. It was messy, but it stuck out in the right places. She needed glasses for someone her age—she mentioned once that her eyesight was poor, and so she was stuck with her thick rimmed glasses for the whole semester.

He wouldn’t call them friends—acquaintances, maybe; no more, no less.

But what he hadn’t expected to find were scribbles of his name on every corner of her lesson notebook.

They were both paired up by Mrs. Ayuzawa—not that he minded, though—for a final project.

After Jieun had left saying that she needed a bathroom break, his hands automatically took a hold of the blue object. He flipped the pages, reading through the Japanese transcripts and notes. There were a few English words and sketches of animes and manga characters.

Once he turned it to the next page, much to his surprise, he found doodles of his features and his name written in Hangul and English. It was one of the prettiest handwritings of her he saw—when she wrote his name. He chuckled, though, when it was apparent that she struggled to write his name in Japanese.

“Myungsoo-ssi, what are you doing?” her eyes became wider than it usually was—which he found utterly adorable—before she snatched her precious item that Myungsoo had managed to snoop into.

She realized that she came across a dead end in a maze full of complications—she was found out.

Myungsoo had to admit, a lot of girls were going after him; but he didn’t expect the class representative, Lee Jieun.

“Let’s get to work, shall we?”