Chaewon waits on top of the school rooftop, sitting on the lone bench there. It’s not a place frequented by students but she finds peace there, the view overlooking the city enough to calm down the nerves from a busy school day. 

Her fingers twitch at the edges of a piece of paper, previously slotted into her folder. It piqued her interest the first time, a nice piece of stationery filled with neat handwriting and small pencil drawings. It didn’t strike her as a normal love letter then, and now drawn across almost a week, she still can’t call it orthodox.

The format goes: her admirer lists a few observations about her, coupled with colorful prose and interesting commentary (read: two lines worth of gushing about how apparently cute she looks). some small hapless doodles and a small rushed-looking M at the end. 

She tends to find out that her admirer was right about their observations the next day; that yes, her eyebrows did knit together a lot, and yes, she taps her pencil to the beat of the cheer team’s routine, and that she tends to look for a hand to hold whenever she gets nervous. 

She was endlessly wondering about it; whoever this person was, how painfully observant they were, how it could possibly be a stalker. Sometimes she’d have to catch herself to stop thinking about it so much, that this shouldn’t matter as much as she was playing it to be. 

But the recent letter had Chaewon’s heart drop intensely. Not even the contents of it, but the small letter m filled in with the rest of the name. It was an all too familiar one. That certainly dispelled most of her questions. 

Chaewon thinks that it makes sense that there wouldn’t be many people who would be able to notice all her little quirks. Only someone who was significantly closer to her would be able to tell. 

She doesn’t quite know what to feel with the discovery; Minjoo’s her best friend, has been since they were in grade school, and Chaewon has never trusted anyone more than she has the other girl, and the feelings aren’t necessarily unrequited. But she doesn’t  know where she stands with this: curious to take the leap but too afraid to find out if things will change. 

Chaewon looks out towards the skyline, the sun edging towards the horizon. Each second feels like a pindrop, slow and agonizing. She takes a deep breath, three counts. And she lets go, letting the thoughts follow. 

Like everything with Minjoo, she thinks it’d be better to simply talk it out.

Chaewon hears brisk footsteps on the concrete stairs soon enough. A voice peaks out from behind her, “Anyone sitting there?”

Chaewon turns to see a disheveled Minjoo, hair messy but not enough to make her look unkempt. She tugs at her to sit. 

“Don’t worry, I saved it for you.”