4:23 PM, June 3rd

I cry out in pain as she hits me hard on the cheek. Tears start to well out of my eyes.

Uhmma, I sob as the sound of slapping skin rings out in my ears and pain threatens to overwhelm me.

Cho Kyu-hyun, you stupid child! How could you get such a low mark?! She yells.

But... I tried so hard... it was the best I could do, I say. Wrong answer. She slaps me hard again.

My eyes flicker over at Noo-na, who is peeping around the corner behind Uhmma. Her eyes are filled with pity, though she doesn't dare to help me now.

When Ah-ra was your age, she was scoring top of the class! Don't give me that! She screams at me while lashing out some more.

It seems to take very long before Uhmma finally leaves me, curled in a ball on the fraying carpet with painful wounds and tears dripping. I wait until she has gone for her job before struggling to crawl to my room and collapse on the bed.

Kyu, Noo-na says to me gently as she steps in. She is armed with a medical kit.

You know, you will have to shape up someday, she says while pressing ice to a bruise on my arm. I am still in too much pain to talk.

I have to go to Montreal next month for boarding school and no one will be here to help you. Do you think Apa will be in any condition to when he comes home drunk every day? No, she grimaces as if remembering the sour stench of the soju that he used to drink in Han Gook, and then the beer that he now has to settle for in British Columbia.

Please, she says. Just for once, listen to Uhmma and Apa when they tell you what to do. Don't protest, unless it involves immoral things. Okay? I don't want to come home at Christmas at find you beaten to death.

I watch as she wraps the last cut and the white cloth of a bandage covers the tear in the skin. I will have to become like that bandaged wound, perfect and unmarred even if I'm breaking up inside.

---~***~---

I watch her playing with 'unnie 'Na', as she calls her, underneath the trees a little distance away.

Though to be honest, I don't really know how the two ESL students can be related. They both speak fairly fluent English with a lilting Québécois accent, but that's where the resemblance ends.

The younger, tiny girl I can't pronounce her name well with my limited English. She has night hair in a ponytail strewn with white flowers and cute earth-colour eyes crinkled in a smile.

The older is much taller compared to her dongsaeng. She has shorter earth hair and pretty eyes which are like the colour of people's eyes in commercials, a little like pale earth and a little like leaves but not quite either.

I hear them laughing from my place under the maple tree. They seem so happy. Why can't I be like them?

Is it because they have each other? I had Noo-na, but now she is gone to Montreal.

Three more little girls, probably about two and four years younger than me join them. Two look remarkably similar to each other, excepting that one has pigtails and the other has wavy hair.

"Hey!"

A girl stands a little way away from my place under the maple tree, wearing strange clothes that are definitely too revealing for my taste, with tanned skin and long wavy earth-colour hair and eyes that are large with long lashes that curl upwards. Her face is creased in an ugly expression, like she swallowed a fish bone.

Amanda. I don't like her very much. I say nothing in response.

"What are you doing there, chinetock?"

I don't understand exactly what chinetock means, but just by the way she said it I can tell it's rude. Amanda is French, so maybe it's a French expression.


"Hey. Are you so stupid that you can't even talk back?"
"Be…" I fumble for the words in my limited memory of English. "…quiet. I hate you." After that, I lapse into Korean because I don't have the English words to express my feelings.

But in Korean, nobody can understand me except for the handful of people here who are Korean.

So really, no one understands me. I have no one to lean on.

I am alone.