It's recess and we catch a break.

I'm ravenous. My best friend, Junnie and I dash to the cafetaria. I need to get there quick before the queue forms. There are about ten people in the queue already. How the heck did they get here so early? I line up behind Junnie, and murmur, "Something good happened to me today."

"Let me guess... it's Jaemin," she grins. "You saw him in front of the boys' loo today." She giggles.

"Better still," I sigh rapturously, and lay my hand against my heart. "He smiled at me this morning."

"Really?" She stares at me. "Wow."

"Yeah, and that's not all..." My face splits into a wide smile.

"He," I lean close to her and close my eyes in rapture, "said hi."

"OMG," she gasps. "OMG. Seriously?"

She grabs me.

"And then what?"

"He said..."

"What? What? What did he say?"

"He said... ," I pause dramatically, "so...bye..."

"Oh," she looks deflated. "that's it?"

"What do you mean 'that's it'?" I glare at her.

"Well, it's a start." She beams at me. "At least he didn't ignore you."

That's the thing about Jaemin. He's so cold and aloof most of the time I've just given up on being friends with him, even though we live next door to each other, and practically grew up together. We were close growing up, and we played together, and we even went on vacations together, since my parents and his are good friends. But as we grew older, around my 12th birthday, we just stopped hanging out together. I mean, I still wanted to hang out with him, but he just slowly distanced himself - he was hanging out with a bunch of boys, and when I turned 14, the girls started to come to his house, and he started hanging out with them too. Older girls with long hair and makeup and red lipstick and short skirts. I just faded, I guess, into the background. By the time I turned 14, we were virtually strangers, hardly exchanging more than a "hi" or a "bye" when we ran into each other in the neighbourhood.

I took to avoiding him in school, because it started to hurt me that he was so cold toward me.

But there was another, more worrying reason.

I was starting to get this odd, funny feeling in my heart whenever I saw him: my heart would skip a beat, or it would beat too fast, like it was going to jump right out of my chest. Maybe it was because somehow, somewhere in that time between being his friend, and becoming a stranger, he had changed...he was no longer the boy with the runny nose, or the mussed up hair, or the scrapped knees; he had become so devastatingly goodlooking that I couldn't believe that this was the boy who had laughed with me, fought with me, comforted me when I fell from the swing in the playground and hurt myself, and dug a hole for an hour in my backyard to bury my pet guinea pig. This new guy was someone I didn't know anymore, with his shuttered eyes and that freezing wall of coldness.

But something was budding deep in my heart, something new was growing: the seeds of a love, full of yearning and longing, bittersweet, because, for the first time in my life, I felt jealousy, and tasted its bitter dregs when I watched a girl walking next to him, sitting beside him, chatting, smiling, laughing, flirting with him...

Junnie opens her eyes wide.

"Don't turn around," she whispers, "but he's right behind you..."

"Huh? Who?"

I turn around at once, and Junnie groans, and mutters something that sounds like, " You moron! I said, don't turn around."

It's him.

Jaemin.

He's standing right behind me, tall and lean and so impossibly beautiful, and he's looking straight down at me.