Heejin hangs her head lowly, trying to disappear to her locker. She’s quick to pack up her bag and hurry to grab her supplies. She doesn’t want to get caught by her classmates. She wants to go home, cry to her mother and father of her horrible school life and the torment she receives from other girls. She shrugs further into her blazer and pulls down the green pleated skirt. 

    She moved into the city from the country just last year. She missed her farm with fresh cut grass, the big red barn, the horses, and picket fences. Heejin doesn’t understand what makes her so much different to the point that she has no friends and is now just getting bullied. She’s lonely, fed up, and lonely again. 

    She’s not like whatever those Withers are and she isn’t from “The Slums”. Heejin is a good girl, she doesn’t skip school, have dirt on her uniform, or get in fights. She’s trying to stay steady. Her family is fine, except for her sick papa, she isn’t poor, she comes from the good side of the town. She’s never even gone towards the city outskirts in fear of the stories of poor gangs and violence. She tries to be nice, she smiles, or she used to. She sees the supposed bad people laughing though, laughing and smiling while having a good time. Maybe they aren’t bad, the world just thinks of them wrong. Everyone is so quick to throw them into boxes, maybe they just don’t fit.

   She’s done as she’s told. She stays away from the “Withers” and the south east of the town. She never goes out at night because people from “The Slums” will try to rob her or gang up and do horrible things. She is not nearly as horrible as these seeming heathens. No, Heejin is a humble, well mannered, albeit misunderstood girl. 

    It’s soaking wet outside with the drumming patter of the rain on the school’s roof. But the pleasant sound is drowned as the bell rings signaling the end of the day and instead comes the loud taps of students in the halls. 

    “Heejin-ah!” Calls someone down the hall. 

     She looks down and sees Haerim and Seojung giving her a devilish smile, they’re coming for her. They’re coming for her. Maybe they’ll drag her to the toilets and nearly drown her again, lock her in a dumpster for two hours, or make her do twenty push ups with Seojung’s shoe pressing stains into her back. With the two, her pains came new and repeated, she wish it would stop.

    Haerim yells,”Heejin-ah! I’ll count to ten for you to run!” She cruely stomps her foot, alerting the surrounding students that the chase has started. No one dares stand up for Heejin. Just a farm girl. 

    . 

    Heejin grabs the rest of her school work and shoves it in her bag, zipping it and bolting down the hall. 

    Run.  Run. Run. 

    She sprints with no regard to the teachers that yell at her to slow down because she needs to run. Run until she gets home and her old fashioned papa comes out with a shotgun to scare them off. Her papa’s health had been on a steady decline in the meanwhile which is why they moved to the city. Even though he was weak and ailing, he would still protect her. 

    Heejin high tails it out the back doors, this is ing scarier than when she’s gone hunting and all those encounters with bears or moose. This was hell. These girls  are going to do something horrible, she feels it. 

    The school’s back doors clang and fling open as she bolts towards the back alleys leading towards her house. It’s faster this way so she won’t be held up by people. She climbs the fence and hops over the top in a clumsy attempt to save time. 

   Lucky for her, it’s raining hard, few people are out. She’s terrified of thunder and lightning because lightning once struck their barn and shredded it to red splinters in the blink of an eye. Nature was scary and it horrified Heejin, in the lightning strike her favorite horse died in the rubble. 

    Her feet slap the ground in hard thuds as she breathes, in and out. She’d like to think she can run and is semi athletic, but when two soccer players are on your back, you can only hope. Seojung is close and Haerim too, she stands little chance. 

    Especially when Seojung grips her backpack sending her tumbling back into a puddle, ruining her neatly ironed uniform and soaking her school work. Her bag is kicked in front of her after being ped. Heejin tries to hold back tears when she tries to collect herself on her knees, but Haerim catches up and kicks her so her left knee scrapes just right and starts to bleed. 

    “Heejin-ah!” Seojung smirks, hands on her hips in victory. Haerim looks satisfied as she kicks up the nasty water onto her beloved object of torture. 

    Heejin frowns, backing against a trash can by the alley wall. She holds her soaked backpack as an attempt to block off whatever horrible things are going to happen. The sting of her knee is not helping the glimmers in the corners of her eyes.

   “You’re lucky today because we have to go to soccer practice soon, but it was a nice warm up. Practice ends in a few hours…” Haerim frowns at the notion of not having enough time to make Heejin’s life more of a hell. 

    “How’s this?” Seojung calls from the side of a dumpster, a large, soaked cardboard box is brought into Heejin’s view. “We put her in it and come back after practice to come and make sure she hasn’t moved.”

    “N-No—please,” Heejin stutters. She absolutely does not want to be here in a thunderstorm in the darkening dusk in a box. 

   “—Shut up, I’m not done.” Seojung yells and kicks Heejin in the shin. She taps her foot, forcefully pulls Heejin’s bag away from her, and puts the cardboard box on top of the girl. “We’re taking a picture so we know if you move or not. If you want your school stuff back, you have to wait—“

    The poor girl yells from inside the pitch black box,”—No! Please, you don’t understand—“

   Someone kicks her again and she hears a picture being taken. 

   Haerim declares,”Wait here, farm girl. We’ll be back and give you your back if you’re good, which means no telling anyone or crying. If you aren’t good, we’ll kick the out of you and keep your bag. Stay the here.”

    Steps are heard walking on the cold asphalt and Heejin tries to sob quietly.

   Hell. 

... 

    Jungeun does not like beating the out of people, but sometimes you have to. Fighting is something she’s taken professional classes in along with other awful street experience. These two s tried to scam her uncles bakery and refused to leave him alone, sometimes a little street talk will help with that. 

   They’re sloppy guys, from the outskirts of the town, The Slums, the poor district, but Jungeun is too. She lives with an alcoholic and abusive father in a house about to collapse, it’s leaning too far to the left and looks like it would never pass any safety standards. But it’s The Slums, no one cares about regulations there. It’s only gangs, fights, murders, bad, no good people. 

    At least everyone who isn’t from The Slums thinks that. Really, it’s only people scraping by. Yes, the gangs are violent and bad things happen with the groups, but who can blame someone when society doesn’t take them. Eventually one needs to believe in something so they do what they’ve always been told they are. 

   It’s a vicious cycle and it’s the people not from The Slums that have made it so toxic.  Jungeun wishes people would be kinder and give second chances. Everyone is trying to scrape by to the next meal, next rent due, next day of struggling to live. Still, everyone higher than them, even just a little higher, by the pettiest skin of their teeth, call them Withers. Withers because they cease to flourish, but it’s only because no one will help them. 

    Jungeun tries to prove that The Slums don’t make people bad, but it’s other people poisoning their water. The Withers are trying to be better, no one will let them. It ing . Jungeun does her part though, she takes freezing showers everyday despite the financial strain (personal hygiene is necessary), she walks or drives her little neighbor, Yerim, to school in the morning to make sure nothing happens to her. She gives homeless people money in their cups, even if it means that she herself will go without food tonight. She studies hard and does her best in her North side school. 

    She was accepted on a whim, a suggestion by her friend, Sooyoung, to start making The Slums better by “clearing our names and being good” at school. It was a charity kid thing which Jungeun apparently matched up with. Grants would be given for being so gracious as to give a low life Slums girl a chance at a higher education. People ate that up, no one wanted to be mean to the girl who was “beating all odds to become a good person”.  She was all over the North and The Slums’ news as a hero to both. 

   People just saw her tattered clothes and scarred knuckles and assumed she was bad turned good. 

   It might be true, but Jungeun thinks the world should stop making assumptions and start asking questions to form an understanding. 

   They didn’t know that her mother was a good one until she killed herself in the bathtub. They didn’t know she struggled to put ointment on her belt whipped back half of the time, her knuckles were torn and awful from stopping the so called good hearted northerners from her in the city  (“She’s a Wither-Slum-, we can her. No one will care if she’s a Wither.” Jungeun fought with all the hell she’s ever had and beat them to a pulp. She cared, she cared for herself. She would not be used.) She tried to save up her own money to bring her neighborhood children toys around the holidays. Maybe Jungeun was always good, but the world was always bad. 

   The boys she is fighting, they’re maybe a little tipsy. They clumsily yell and toss their limbs haphazardly to try and land a hit. 

   She sighs. Her uncle on her mother’s side is one of the only Withers that owns a shop in the heart of the city, so he has become a target. Jungeun finds it scary how somehow everyone can differentiate between everyone and someone of the Slums. She begged her uncle to move out of the city outskirts and inward to somewhere better but her replied with, “I am born and raised here. I am proud of the Outskirts and I love everyone here. I will not leave.”

    Uncle probably wouldn’t approve,  but after repeated attempts at bullying him, Jungeun was fed up like hell and took them to a back alley. Just because she has strong morals didn’t mean she always follows them. Being from The Slums, learning to fight goes hand in hand with counting and reading, you just learn from everyone. 

    Just when Jungeun thinks she’s done, one of them leaps up with a broken beer bottle as the other one charges her. She’s pinned up and struggles against the boys when the glass bottle slices, basically crudely tears across the lower part of her nose bridge.

    “How you like me now ?” The bottle one asks as they let her go and smirk. 

    Jungeun leans forward, feeling the awful sting as crimson flows down. “ you.” She presses forward and punches him until his nose is broken and her knuckles split and spill more blood. He passes out and drops to the wet ground as she looks to his friend, ”Stay the hell away from here unless you’d like nose surgery too. “

   The boy runs off. 

    Jungeun’s shoulders sag as she touches her nose, and assesses her damage. This ing bites, lucky she wasn’t wearing her glasses. She holds her hoodie sleeve to try and stop the bleeding, fortunate or not, her hoodie is red enough to only make the blood look like rain water soaked through. 

    She picks up her black leather jacket from the ground and slings it over her shoulder, placing her oversized, grey, knit cap on as well. Her steps are quick as she walks the half a block down to the bakery and through the back door. She fumbles in a one handed battle to fish her keys out of the jacket until she can get it in the hole and open the door. 

    It’s just past 6:45, there's a faint grey to the sky as blue hangs above it, just around twilight with heavy showers. Typically they’re open, but some internal renovations have been going on so they’ve closed earl