Dying is not as nice as Jeongyeon would have imagined. It’s uncomfortable as hell, actually; as she takes a shaking breath her lungs quake, trapped in a broken ribcage, ready to stab her shutting down organs. She imagines them deflating like balloons getting pierced by joyful children at a birthday party. Pop. Pop. Pop.

Her eyes stare into the baby blue sky above her body. It’s almost indignant how beautiful it looks today. She’s lying on the hard ground, with crushed bones and a spinning head, and the cloudless sky is laughing into her face.

What a nice day!

If she could move her muscles, she’d probably frown. But she can’t, so she just stares blindly into the sun. She tries to move her pinkie. Ouch. Bad idea. It seems that every single bone in her body has been crushed with the fall, she thinks. At least, that’s what it feels like.

to be her, huh?

Jeongyeon listens to the wind blowing through her ears. It’s sixth period right now, she knows that, but isn’t anyone outside, seeing her? Will she be found by an innocent student as her corpse is being picked to pieces by crows? She sighs internally - not externally, because she can’t -, and slowly closes her eyes. Her eye sockets burn. They’re orange spots on an almost black canvas.

She kind of believes this is going to be over soon - her lungs are screaming and it feels like there’s sharp pieces of glass in her veins -, but can someone die from a fall, anyway? She feels like she is, sure, but maybe there’s hope. Right now, she thinks she would prefer dying to this pain.

Jeongyeon doesn’t think that anymore when she slowly loses consciousness. Before she fully dies, she briefly hopes that the person who pushed her from that roof is going to rot in hell.

She wakes up by gasping for air, and the oxygen in her lungs feels so ing great she almost doesn’t care about the people besides her screaming. It just rings in her ears a little bit.

She can breathe. She’s alive.

How is she alive if she just died?

Jeongyeon senses someone trying to feel her pulse rather roughly whilst grabbing her wrist, so she moves it to shake them off. Someone screams again. She blinks as the black dots in her sight slowly vanish and looks at her audience, looking horrendously terrified. There are two people she doesn’t recognize, with gloves and sanitary masks.

“Hi”, she croaks. Suddenly, burns so much she almost gags. She supposes it’s because she hasn’t spoken in - how many hours? (She doesn’t think about how it might have been days. Scary thoughts.)

She tries to get up, but the surface she’s resting on is completely flat. “Could I get something to drink?”

Jeongyeon winces as she smells something that faintly reminds her of fire.

The people around her divan bed close their mouths again after their jaws had dropped and shuffle away, hopefully on their way to get her a glass of water. Jeongyeon tries to rest her (still thudding) head against the hard surface. She wiggles off something on her right big toe. How annoying, who would leave a piece of paper there? It´s her last thought before she passes out once again.

The bed she’s occupying when she wakes up is plain, but neat. White walls and white sheets. Everything feels clean. It feels like a room that someone has tried to make as lovely as possible without putting in any effort. Jeongyeon has never liked hospitals - her dislike grew in early childhood when her favourite grandfather died -, but she guesses it’s better than other places. Buried and suffocated in soil, for example.

She hears footsteps in the hall (a nice distraction from machines beeping idly next to her) and barely blinks when her family storms in, gathering next to her bed. She gets a glass of water from Seungyeon - she looks like she has cried, her face is all swollen up; under different circumstances she so would have sister for it -, and drinks in silence. She suppresses the urge to sigh in joy. The liquid feels good in her dusty body.

“So”, she sheepishly interrupts the tensed silence - no one dared to speak to her, and it was awkward being looked at by ten pairs of eyes while scoffing down the water -, “what’s up?”

“You died”, her mother whispers, clenching her heart, and Jeongyeon’s father holds her a little bit closer. “We saw you dying. You died.” The unbelief in her voice makes Jeongyeon physically sick. She suppresses the urge to barf.

“Actually”, a stranger politely shoves her family aside to get to Jeongyeon´s bedside (a doctor, judging by her white coat and look on her face), “Miss Yoo here has appeared to be, in fact, not dead. She seemed to have multiple broken bones and a massive bleeding in her brain, but-“, now the doctor is stuttering, “w-we must have misdiagnosed her as she, um, seems to be just fine.”

“I am fine”, Jeongyeon confirms her, a bit sharply. She really hates the way the doctor talks about her as if she wasn’t in the room. “I am really thirsty though, could I get more to drink?”

She’s being brought a bottle of water and while she’s drinking, she’s listening to what her visitors have to say.

Seoyeon tells her that they were already looking for urns (ouch, that also explains the room where she woke up – she hopes the employees who found her won’t have nightmares for life), her father tells her she was found by a teacher around 2 pm (so she laid unconscious for about an hour) and her mother tells her it’s incredibly indignant that the doctors managed to misdiagnose her this badly.

Jeongyeon thinks that she recovered from death is something she can’t tell anyone about.

Because that’s what she did - die. Eventually, the cracks in her body broke and left her in shambles, and thus, she died. It’s the only possibility. Only that she woke up again, completely healthy (albeit a bit dizzy and still incredibly thirsty).

 She manages to put on a smile as the doctor writes her a discharge note.

They move away, to the landside, and her parents tell her it’s because her father got a job offer, but Jeongyeon knows it’s because of her. They all need some change.

She gets a lot of “Get well soon!” cards from her classmates. She keeps them at first, but after the first week of being in her new room they seem to taunt her. So she packs them in one of the many heavy boxes around the house. (They aren’t quite ready to move in fully just yet).

She thinks about death a lot (the thought is quite inevitable when you’ve, well, died). She contemplates telling Jihyo, her best friend at home; the idea got sillier the more she thought about it. Jihyo is pragmatic, not spiritual at all. Best case, she´d laugh at Jeongyeon. Worst case, she´d try to make her see a shrink.

Sometimes she wonders if she imagined it. The doctors talked about a brain bleeding, that surely would have caused hallucinations?

She stares at the glowing stove in the kitchen. Then, hesitantly, she hovers her left hand about it. Her fingers flinch for half a second, but her body is quicker than her mind.

Jeongyeon lowers her hand and presses.

At first, there´s nothing, and she’s sure she has actually gone insane. Then, almost immediately after, the fire, so hot it feels cold, runs up her nerves and veins, and she cries out in pain as the pain explodes in her whole arm. Out of a reflex she removes her hand and runs to the sink, working the tap with shaking fingers.  The water barely soothes the pain. Her lips tremble as she looks at her left hand with a blurry vision.

At least she knows she isn’t dead. Yippie-Yeah.

The days are getting shorter. She unpacks the rest of her things. It doesn’t feel like home.

She fakes a smile as she´s being introduced to her new classmates. “Everyone, this is Yoo Jeongyeon”, her teacher says with a smile as big as his moustache. “She just moved from Suwon. Sana, would you give her some of your notes?” He turns to Jeongyeon to tell her, “I´m sure you will catch up in no time.”

Jeongyeon nods, barely hearing what he´s saying. The girl called Sana beams at her. She´s got long, blonde hair and shows her teeth when she smiles. Jeongyeon gets depressed just by looking at her.

 “And this is our cafeteria”, Sana blubbers as she´s floating through the hallway. “The sandwiches are okay, the lasagna is bad, and you should eat the potato gratin if you want to miss a couple days of school. Well, that’s basically it. Any questions?”

“Um, yeah”, Jeongyeon clears . It´s been half an hour, but she hasn’t spoken a lot. Not that Sana has noticed. “Where is the bathroom?”

“Oh! Well, we have a couple ones. What class do you have next?”

Jeongyeon takes a quick glance at her brand-new time table. “Spanish. Room 406.”

“Ah, that´s right here. Is it fine if I leave you here? I have to do some research for Literature class.”

Jeongyeon shakes her head, slightly relieved she can be on her own for a while. “No, it´s fine.”

Sana smiles – pretty, straight, white teeth – and even hugs her before bouncing away. Strange girl. Jeongyeon wouldn´t be surprised if little birds helped her dress every morning while trilling an upbeat song.

Jeongyeon pulls the door to the stall and sits down on the toilet seat. There´s stickers plastered on the walls. This is the first moment she actually feels (somewhat) at peace since the incident. The stall is dirty and reeks and full of strangers´ thoughts. It´s like seeing her own mind in motion.

She reaches for her bag and pulls out a cigarette and a lighter. Quickly, the cig is put between her lips. Jeongyeon inhales and exhales smoke towards the small window above her. She wouldn’t consider herself a smoker (she doesn’t like to think in black and white), and it doesn’t exactly relax her, but she likes the burning in her lungs and the dizziness in her head. Bit macabre, but who cares if you’ve already died once, right?

“Smoking is prohibited in here”, a female voice suddenly says, and Jeongyeon almost drops her cigarette. She curses silently and puts out the cigarette on the trash bin. “Um, yeah, sorry about that”, she says, feeling a bit sheepish. Jeongyeon isn’t exactly someone who cares about the rules, but she isn’t a troublemaker either.

She opens the door. There is a girl with black hair, just above her collarbones. Her eyes are sharp and her arms crossed. Jeongyeon can´t help but stare at her. The girl is smaller than her and – judging by her uniform – obviously a student. How uptight can you be?

“Um, are you gonna tell on me, or..?”, Jeongyeon asks, not quite sure how to handle this situation.

The girl smirks. “Actually, I was going to borrow one. May I?”

Jeongyeon shrugs, giving the girl a cig and a lighter. The girl puts the cig between her lips and inhales deeply.

There is an awkward silence as Jeongyeon waits for the girl- to what, exactly? Her job here is done, and she´s sure she´s missing the beginning of her Spanish class.

“I´m Nayeon, by the way”, the girl says between two puffs, “Im Nayeon.”

Jeongyeon decides Spanish class can wait. “Yoo Jeongyeon.”

The girl – Nayeon – smirks at her. “Oh, I know. You´re the dead girl.”

Jeongyeon hearts skips a beat. “Excuse me?”

“You know. You´re dead.”

When Jeongyeon doesn’t answer, Nayeon says: “This isn’t a big school. If someone transfers, everyone knows. Everyone especially knows when someone transfers who looks dead inside. Are you, like, okay?”

Jeongyeon suppresses the urge to let out a sigh. Maybe she´s seeing ghosts. She still has to adjust to the whole having died thing and it being a secret she´s going to have to carry alone.

“Um, yeah. You know, just moving and all that. Not everyone can have sunshine beaming out of their .”

Nayeon lets out a laugh. “Right. But not everyone has had the pleasure to experience death, after all.” She winks at Jeongyeon and Jeongyeon´s heart drops once again – what the ?

“I gotta go”, Nayeon chirps with the cig still in . “See you around, dead girl.”

She leaves Jeongyeon standing alone.

This is the second time in her whole life she has question marks running in her head.

Does Im Nayeon know she´s dead?