That night I walked all the way back home on my own. Jongin didn’t protest. That night I got this feeling that our relationship would never be the same again.

               Going back to school was terrible. I had come to rely so much on Jongin that I felt totally lost without him. A little part of me wished that he would just forget about what happened and come to sit with me during lunch, however things didn’t go this way.

               Throughout the day he totally ignored me, and my pride was too big to approach him first. He swapped sits in the classes we had together so he wouldn’t have to sit with me, and wouldn’t even acknowledge my presence when we walked past each other in the hallways.

               A couple of days later I finally gathered the courage to send him a message:

               ‘Hi’
               ‘Do you think we can still be friends? I miss you”

               I was left in seen. He never acknowledged my texts. That’s when I was 100% sure that our friendship was gone for good. At first it hurt. A lot. In the few weeks I had known him he had become such an important part in my life that I didn’t know what to do without him. I felt tired, I lost my appetite and started having trouble sleeping. When I could finally fall asleep I would always dream about that moment in which I rejected him. That moment in which our friendship was ruined.

               However, they say time heals anything, and with times things got better. Weeks went by, and I started getting used to life without him. I stopped going to parties, but this meant that I could focus on studying to get into the University of Seoul. I also made a new best friend: Wendy. She started coming to our school about a month after I came in. We immediately bonded over being the new students.

               Jongin had also seemingly started to move on. Barely a week after the party he started dating Irene. When I saw them together I could still feel the jealousy in the pit of my stomach, climbing up my gut like a colony of ants destroying everything in their way.

I couldn’t understand why he was angry with me if he didn’t even think about me that way. I also couldn’t understand why he would even say he liked me if he was clearly attracted to Irene. Nevertheless, I tried to stop this thought from consuming my mind.

               I hated that someone I knew for so little time had such a big influence over my feelings and my life. Because of this I started going to afterschool activities to prove myself that I could still function like a normal human being. On Tuesdays I would go rock climbing, on Wednesdays I would give biology after school lessons, on Thursdays swimming on Fridays martial arts and on Saturdays I would tour Seoul with Wendy.

This way, time went by incredibly fast as I was always had stuff to do. The extra exercise was also beneficial. I was never fat, but I was always a little bit chubby. Exercising weekly allowed me to tone my arms, legs and abs, making my figure start to show.

This actually gave me a huge confidence boost. Boys in school started noticing me, and I started thinking about the possibility of dating one of them. Little by little life was piecing itself back together. Now I just had to get into Seoul University and things would be okay. Once in a while I would still think about Jongin, and it still hurt, but things were getting better.

Soon enough it was time to write the entrance exam for Seoul University. I started to feel like the only thing I had done in the past few weeks was studying. When I went to sleep I dreamed of equations, English grammar, science…. I thought I was about to go crazy.

“Wendy!!! Could you give me back my notes?” I asked. We were waiting outside the building to go in to write the exam and seemed to have forgotten everything I has studied the last month.

“Come on, you gotta be kidding me!! I need them more than you! You know it back and forth!” Wendy whined as she desperately tried to cram for the last few minutes.

“Please, I will fail if you don’t give me my notes!!” I exclaimed.

“Eunbi, go away! If you come any closer I will hit you.”

In the end I gave up. I would just trust the studying I’d been doing for the past months.

‘Everything will be ok,’ I told myself as I took deep breaths to calm my heart rate.

When we were about to walk into the exam room I saw Jongin walking into the room through the door next to ours.

‘Hmmm,’ I thought to myself, ‘he never told me he wanted to attend Seoul University when I stressed about how hard it is to get into the engineering program.’

As I was staring at him while we walked into the room I could have swear that he looked directly at me, and stared at me for a second.

Inside the room the AC was blasting full force, and right after seeing Jongin, this immediately reminded me of our first meeting. I remembered how he took my hands into his and kindly took me to classes and….

‘Yah!’ I interrupted my own thoughts, ‘It isn’t time to think about Jongin you dumb dumb! You have to focus on getting near perfect on that exam lying in front of you!!’

Just as I finished reprimanding myself I heard the examiner go: “Your time starts now, you have 3 hours to finish the exam!”

I started to answer the questions methodically, giving myself around a minute for every question and circling every question I couldn’t easily answer to come back to later. Before long, the examiner was announcing the last 5 minutes of the exam, and I still had to finish writing my essay. I quickly rushed through it and luckily finished writing just before the exam was yanked out of my hands.

There was nothing else to be done. The exam was finished and now we would just have to wait for the results to be out.

As Wendy and I walked out of the exam room I found Jongin looking straight at me. When our eyes met he came running towards me.

“Eunbi, can I speak to you for a moment?” he asked.

“I don’t know, can you?” I asked back, thinking about how he had ignored me all these months, “maybe if you could you would have spoken to me earlier.”

“Please?”

I couldn’t say no to his puppy eyes. I never could.

“So… What do you need to tell me?” I felt so awkward speaking to him again, it was weird.

“I’m sorry.”

“Huh?”

“I said I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have reacted that way after the party. It isn’t your fault that you don’t think of me that way. I also shouldn’t have ignored your texts.”

“And what do you want to get out of this?” I asked, clearly confused as his apology was late. Really late.

“I… I kind of want to go back to being friends,” he said, as if our relationship wasn’t totally broken.

“Do you know how hard it was for me to lose you as a friend?” I was on the verge of tears, however I refused to let a single tear fall down.

“I don’t know, but I just hope it isn’t too late to fix it up…”

“I don’t know Jongin. Maybe it is too late to go back to how things were before.”

“Still, I can’t let things end this way,” he said, which made me think that maybe with a little effort from both our parts we could go back to being friends. Maybe.