Bomi kicked off her shoes, dropping her leaden bag by the shoe rack, and trudged into the dark apartment. She wiped the beads of sweat tickling her neck and collapsed on the sofa in the middle of the living room. Bomi buried her face into the armrest of the furniture and listened serenely to her brother’s oblivious snores resounding across the entire house. She pulled her dancing leotard off her legs and sighed with a refreshing relief as she stretched her bar legs freely into the empty air.

It was Sunday. She stared at the clock ticking away relentlessly above her; she wished it would rest. Soon as the minute hand strikes number twelve it would be Monday again. And Bomi would have to return to school in the breaking of dawn. She would have to fly past classes and homework and notes then rush to the dance studio with Gongchan again.

Her phone buzzed.

Bomi limply took the device out of her jumper’s pocket.

“You looked tired during practice today…rest well. Seeya! - Gongchan”

She frowned, disappointed. It wasn’t the name she wanted to appear on her screen with a goodnight message. Quickly replying a thank-you, Bomi ditched the phone on the sofa table.

Her breaths deepened and soon her conscious slowly drowned under the water to the bigger iceberg of the unconscious.

She didn’t hear Eunji’s hollering from across the street in the next morning. Bomi only whipped around as her friend roughly pulled her earphones out of her earhole. Eunji was frowning at her disapprovingly, her small eyes squinting into an invisible line.

“Good morning to you too.”
“I told you not to listen to music on the streets”

Bomi grimaced and rolled her earphones into a neat wind around her iPod.

“Really Jung Eunji, your nagging is worse than my mom’s”
“Thanks sweetie.”

“You’re welcome darling.”

Eunji tackled her, seizing Bomi’s head under her empowering arms. She laughed with twinkling golden bells and the best friends skipped to school bickering like two little sisters.

 She parted with Eunji halfway down the populous hall. She watched Eunji’s fluorescent light disappear slowly behind towering bobbing of heads.

When the red heavy doors swung inwards with a faint creak, Bomi didn’t see the face she wanted to see in the seat next to hers. She only rubbed her calloused skin awkwardly as she scanned the room for him.

Nam Woohyun was at the back of the classroom encircled by a crowd of girls and Krystal. His invigorated laugh filled the classroom as he shifted his chair intimately closer to the girl, boring his intent gaze into her face. He whispered secrets only in her ears and smiled satisfactorily.

Bomi glanced back at the empty sit next to her and buried herself against the wall in complete resignation. Woohyun had an unassailable fling for Krystal since freshman. Bomi had a muted crush on Woohyun since middle school. She stared doubtfully at her bag before she routinely pulled notebooks out to study before class, so that her grades will never dip, so that her parents wouldn’t frown at her report cards, so that she could continue to dance. When she grows up, Bomi always repeated to herself, she wouldn’t regret her labor, and when she grows up she would be happier.

“I have a party at my house this weekend if you want to come Krystal,” Woohyun’s effervescent voice shouted.

Bomi had eight straight A’s to maintain.

Looking back at her untroubled and blithe five-years-friend, she also had a twisted knot tugging at her small abandoned heart.

The March on Washington for freedom and jobs was in 1963, when her mother was born, Bomi reflected.

“Bomi!”

Her pencil snapped, cracking loudly as flawed pencil marks stained her page. Her frown lightly creasing her eyebrows, Bomi mildly glared at her intruder. Nam Woohyun grinned guiltily, staring to and fro between an irritated school girl and her inseparable study notes. His small eyes twinkled.

“Hey sorry, you won’t mind my sitting next to Krystal just for today?”

Bomi shook her head.

“Thanks, it’s just,” he smiled smugly, “you know…it’s Krystal.”

“Yeah. It’s Krystal.”

“Seeya.” Woohyun clicked his tongue and flew her a twisted grin innocuously forgetting her in a flitting second returning to his sweetheart at the back of the class.

As the result of the march, the black race reinforced the black spirit, but the majority began raising doubts to these peaceful protests and frustration increased in communities, Bomi continued adamantly.

“No Bomi’s dating Gonchan, isn’t she Bomi?” Woohyun hollered.

Girls laughed.

Bomi dropped her pencil on the page and buried her forehead on the book. She heaved a loud sigh, sick of him, sick of them, sick of everything. A sickly wooden smell of her table filtrated through her system rapidly. Taped to her personal drawer beneath the desk her unsurpassable report card bored proud gazes at her expectedly. She scanned over her only incentive. When she grows up, she assured herself, she’d get to her shining star. She believed it, because that was what her parents told her. She would be perfect.

Bomi stole another gaze back at the boy behind her pensively. She felt regretful leaving him behind.

Woohyun showed an impressive bubble off to Krystal and she popped it amusedly with her fingers.

He wasn’t even her star to take anyway, Bomi mused, he was Kyrstal’s.

“…She’s so funny. I think she actually likes me back. Oh and the way she smiles and gazes so intently at you-”

“Shut up Woohyun!” Eunji snapped as her fork threateningly stabbed an innocent slice of tomato on her plate.

Woohyun glowered at her wordlessly.

“We all love the perfect Krystal, but frankly, I’m hungry and I also love food."

He sputtered incoherent curses under his breath and casted hopeful glances at a reading Bomi to see if she would ally with him in the Cold War. The girl only return an empty puzzled pale face, sleep deprived and lost in the middle of the galaxy, a placid sleeping bear.

A dissonant scraping of the tile against the tile startled her a little as he stood up abruptly and tore his gaze away from her. Nonchalantly snatching his tray from the table, Woohyun announced, “I’m going to go sit with Krystal for today,” and swiftly turn on his heels.

“Why all of the sudden” Bomi shouted.

But the boy was already across the Milky Way.

He never came back.

He never returned to the seat next to Bomi.

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I'm not planning to make this story long, probably about twenty chapters?

And Krystal is not going to be the y ty 'mean girl', not that I love fx to death, but I don't want to be murdered by fans. In fact I'm not having that mean girl character in this story so don't misinterpret anything please :)