The sandbox

Jongin didn’t have friends.

He was a weird kid and when you’re only 4, weird things were usually accepted right away or frowned upon. Jongin found himself surrounded by children that took the latter option when he spoke. No one really wanted to hear about dinosaurs or mummies or reptiles or big cats, so Jongin often found himself alone during lunch or playtime or when he waited for his parents to pick him up.

Well, there was Soojung, his twin sister, but since they already spent most of their time together, she would rather play with the other kids than keep Jongin company.

And that was alright. Jongin concluded he didn’t need friends. He had his games at home and the puppies in the park and Mrs. Ahn’s grey cat that often wandered under his window and mewled in the early morning for a treat. Jongin gave her jelly beans that day. She didn’t look very pleased. He also had his many stories with many fun drawings, his dinosaur atlas and his coloring books. His aunt recently gifted him a 60 pieces puzzle that Jongin had yet to solve, but he was getting there too.

Jongin also had the sandbox.

No one liked the sandbox either.

It was too far back in the playground and no one wanted to cross the entire yard when the bell rang.

So Jongin made the sandbox his kingdom. He had his fortified castles, a dangerous river circling mighty walls, filled with crocodiles or alligators (he forgot the difference between the two, but he knew they were magical and loyal) and he was planning on stealing borrowing Soojung’s pink dragon to pretend he was the King of Dragons in the Land of the Sand.

Just like that, his break time wasn’t lonelier and while sand sometimes got in his socks or pants or all over his hair, he was happy.

Until one day, a bully with the big nose shoved his face in the sand and laughed about it.

Jongin pulled his head out of the sand and gasped. When he turned around, armed with a green plastic shovel, Jongin stopped and stared at an equally sand covered boy with the biggest grin he had ever seen. His hair was more of a mess than Jongin’s, stuck to his head and dirty, and his cheeks were covered with stripes of mud.

“I win!” He shouted happily and stood up quickly, plopping the following second back on the ground. He let out an ‘ow’ and rubbed his back, in his lower lip and squeezing his eyes shut tight.

Jongin held back tears.

“No!” He yelled and pushed the boy away, scooping the sand from between his legs. “You ruined it!”

“Ruined what?”

“My castle!”

“Castle? Where?” The kid gaped around him. “Wait, there’s no castle. Liar!” He pointed at Jongin, pouting and glaring and poking the air angrily.

“You’re sitting on it!”

He lowered his arm and stared down. Up on his feet again, the new kid got out of the sandbox and examined everything from a distance.

Jongin ignored him, busying himself with salvaging what he could, first the foundation, then the biggest tower and last, half of the broken down wall that led to the main gate. He would have to start all over the following day. Lost in thoughts, he did not notice when the kid disappeared, nor did he hear right away the teacher calling for him to come back before it rained.

With a heavy heart, Jongin abandoned the sandbox, with all the shovels and buckets and other molds, and sulked all the way back inside the building.

All because of that one kid he met again on Monday.

The storms that took over the weekend had obliterated Jongin’s work. He crouched in front of the box and lightly touched the sand, cold in his palm. He picked the green shovel, heavy with wet sand, and his favorite bucket, the