01
Voice of my Heart
You met Myungsoo in the third grade. You’d just moved into the neighborhood, and so you didn’t know very many people. You were too afraid to talk to people since your parents kept you very sheltered and kept mostly to yourself, leaving the kids to believe you thought you were too good for them when you were really just too scared.
It was time for lunch, you remembered. You went to go get your lunch box from your cubby because your teacher wanted to take everyone outside since the weather was so beautiful. When you looked though, your lunch box was gone. You blinked a few times, searching around for it, and when you didn’t find it, you could feel yourself tearing up. You knew you’d brought it.
You heard snickering from behind you, and turned around to see some of the other kids high fiving each other before following the teacher outside. You stood there, completely dumbfounded. You were used to the names they called you, the fact that they shunned you from their games during recess, and the looks they gave you. But they’d never taken anything that belonged to you before.
You were the last one left in the room, and you sighed, trying to hold back the tears as you turned off the light and closed the door behind you.
You wandered out to the field where the other kids were eating. They were trading things in their lunches, and you felt your stomach rumble a little bit. You sat underneath the shade of a tree, a distance away from the others. You pulled your knees up to your chest and rested your head on them, pulling up grass with hand.
“Where’s your lunch?” You were startled to hear someone talk to you. You looked up and quickly wiped away the tears in your eyes to see one of the boys in your class, holding his own lunch box in his hand.
“... It’s gone,” you said quietly, burying your face in your knees. He frowned and sat down next to you, opening his lunch box. You looked up when you felt something soft poking at your arm.
“You can have half my sandwich. I never finish the whole thing anyway, and my mom gets mad.”
You blinked at the sandwich before looking over to him. He was holding out half of his sandwich to you, holding the other half in his mouth as he rummaged through his lunch box to see what else his mother packed for him.
You slowly straightened your legs out and took it from him with both hands, taking a bite out of it. He looked over to you and took a bite out of his half, chewing slowly. “I’m sorry if you don’t like tuna.”
“Tuna is fine,” you said, nibbling on the corner.
“You can have my apple, too. We have an apple tree in our backyard, so I can always get more.”
Out of the corner of your eye, you could see the bright red apple he set aside for you and sniffed once before smiling at him. “Thank you,” you said softly.
“It’s okay. My name is Myungsoo.”
“My name is-”
“I know what your name is.”
You blinked at him a few times before going back to nibbling on your sandwich triangle. You two were inseparable from then on.
--
You pursed your lips. You never did ask Myungsoo how he knew your name back in the third grade. It always slipped your mind whenever you were with him, because your mind was occupied with other much more important things. Like nothing. Nothing was something too, and it was important.
“You look too mean whenever you’re thinking too hard,” he said from beside you. The two of you were at your usual spot underneath your usual tree in the park. Myungsoo was laying down, head on your lap as you leaned back on your hands.
“Your eyes aren’t even open,” you said, poking him in the face. He opened up an eye and grinned at you before sticking out his tongue and closing his eye again.
“My eyes don’t need to be open to know you’re thinking too hard. We’ve known each other since we were eight. It’s been ten years.”
“Speaking of which. When we first met in the third grade, how did you already know what my name was?”
You watched a smile creep onto Myungsoo’s face. “I’ll tell you later.”
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