Authors Note (6/27/2017): edited this chapter and will be posting the next one soon

I’ve always prided myself for being rather intuitive. My friends call it quick to judge and sometimes even irrational. But, I call it intuitive. I think I’m a pretty good judge of character. Which is why when rumors about Song Jinri being a delinquent and, as my classmates so graciously put it, a “” were floating around I wasn’t phased. I knew I liked her the minute I saw her. I also knew that young girls had a habit of embellishing things. Now we’ve been friends for six years and counting.

“Marry me.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Your dad’s a priest. He’ll have a heart attack if you marry a girl.”

“He’s super progressive you know?”

“No.”

“But, then I’ll never get married.”

“That’s not true. You have Chanyeol”

I flinched as my face was met with a handful of popcorn. “Jinri!”

“Shut up,” her cheeks flushed. “I don’t like him.”

I stuck my tongue out at her. “Whatever you say, Jin. Now let’s study or else I swear it’ll be your fault I fail my final year of highschool”

Jinri was undoubtedly my best friend. We first met when we were 12. Her mother had recently passed away so her family moved to Jinhae District-- more importantly my apartment complex-- for a change of pace. She was having a rough couple of months adjusting. Jinri had this beautiful wide smile that boys were crazy about which in turn made the girls crazy jealous. So, they found an endless list of things to bully her over--- she was “too tall,” her lips were “too big” and  she was too “easy.” The rumors were totally baseless.

We didn’t immediately become friends. It’s not like I was biased against her because of all the nasty things I heard. No, I was just too shy to approach her. For a while, she was just the girl who lived upstairs.

It was maybe a month after she moved to Jinhae. I had to stay behind to clean the classroom as punishment for my unrelenting tardiness. Jinri had to stay behind as punishment for her unrelenting sleeping-in-class disorder. It was awkward at first. Neither of us spoke a word to each other for a good ten minutes. Jinri broke the ice when she happened to slip on the freshly mopped floor spilling the bucket of soapy water everywhere. That wasn’t the funny part, though. The funny part was how she popped back like a jack-in-the-box and tried to pretend nothing happened. We both ended up laughing and suddenly I was comfortable enough to speak with her.

“You live in Sajik Apartment Complex, don’t you?”

“Mmhm,” Jinri covered her hair with her face. She was still being shy.

“I see you sometimes in the mornings. . .” I stopped for a moment, thinking about what