It’s late in the afternoon and the sky is a glowing orangey-pink and it’s like an abstract painting. It’s late spring so the grass on our new front lawn is as green as they can be. The remnants of the sun are giving their all, emitting an unbearable heat.

As we step out of the car my mum stands there with her hands on her hips and her lips pursed as she takes in the scent of flowers mixed with our collective sweat.

“This is just fantastic,” she sighs like we were the genius architects behind this beauty of a house, like we had planted the grass that surrounds the house like a moat, like we were the ones that poured the cement that made our new driveway, when in reality we were just the ones who bought the house—fighting a few other families to get it.

“Actually, it’s just like our old house except in a completely different part of the country and oceans away from my boyfriend,” Songdam, my sister, says bitterly as she scurries off to the front door, taking refuge beneath the shade.

“You do realise that you can email him, right? Or, you know, call him?” my dad suggests.

I smile. “Oh, the wonders we can do with modern technology,” I chime.

Songdam sulks. I can’t wait till she moves out of the house. She’s hogging all the oxygen.

From a distance I hear the sound of a front door swinging open and I can smell the scent of enthusiastic neighbours advancing towards us to warmly welcome our family to the neighbourhood. A nice gesture, yes, I cannot disagree with that, but I’d much rather get into the house and submerge myself in a bathtub full of ice than try to make a good impression on my new neighbours.

“Hello, hello!” a woman greets loudly. As if to further torture me, the temperature decides to increase by a few degrees and it’s enough to melt a good percentage of my flesh from my body.

A man (probably the woman’s husband) instead of approaching my dad and doing whatever it is dads do when they meet each other, approaches me and extends an arm. I shake his sweaty palm and I can almost hear the sound of our sweat mixing. I cringe.

“Nice to meet you, young man!” he bellows and despite the fact that he’s just trying to be a kind old man by giving me, this nice young boy, an optimistic greeting, I can’t help but be fuelled by my anger from this blistering heat to punch him in his wrinkly old face. “Welcome to the neighbourhood,” he says and then he lets go of my hand. “Kibum!” he suddenly yells.

And then that’s when I see him.

Kibum. Staring at his face was blinding because of the sunlight—plus the fact that the boy wears a halo on his head that accentuates the angelic flawlessness that is his existence. He walks out onto his front lawn and steps beside his father. Kibum’s skin is pale in comparison and much smoother. I like to imagine than running your fingers along his skin was like running your fingers along a velvet carpet. Kibum has a small nose but it’s perfect in the sense that it’s the cutest damned nose you’ll ever bestow your eyes upon in your life. His eyes are narrow and cat-like. He stares at me for one second. For one second he judges me. Then the next second he’s staring at the grass that tickles his toes.

“This is my son, Kim Kibum,” his father introduces. I don’t know where the rest of my family had gone. They had disappeared into the house without me, apparently.

“Hi,” Kibum’s says. His soft voice drifts through the air like the wind whistling in my ears and it’s beautiful. It’s like the orchestra.

“Hi,” I say.

And before I knew it we were disappearing into our respective houses.

It’s our first time having dinner at our new humble abode. Well, I wouldn’t class it as a ‘humble’ abode yet. It’s chaotic, if anything. Boxes are scattered in every room of the house and everything is coming together slowly. Its current state is an odd surrealist painting. Everything is everywhere. Everything isn’t where it’s supposed to be. The toiletries are in the living room. The couch is still outside. Mum is setting out plates fresh from the boxes.

“I hate this house,” Songdam whines. She stabs a piece of sweet and sour pork from the container—we are eating Chinese take-out—and she lets it drop onto her plate. Her bottom lip sticks out in a pout. I hear her heart exploding as she stabs the piece of pork again and pops it into .

“I think you’re being a tad bit overdramatic,” I say.

She looks up at me and her stare is like toothpicks stabbing my eyeballs. “You’re ing stupid.”

“Songdam!” both my parents snap simultaneously.

“I think you’ve shoved your jumbo tampon a little bit too far up your ,” I say to Songdam.

“Jonghyun!” my parents now simultaneously snap at me.

“I’m just expressing my concern over the insertion of her tampon and whether or not she has inserted it correctly,” I say.

“Shut up,” my sister barks.

“Can you two stop?” dad asks without much authority but we shut up anyway.

A thick silence dawns over the dinner table like a storm cloud. The sound of my sister’s heart being torn into microscopic pieces due to the fact that her precious boyfriend will no longer frequent her life shakes the Earth as she breaks down into sobs.

My mum goes over to comfort her, pushing her seat beside Songdam to be close enough to rub Songdam’s back soothingly. My dad and I exchange looks. As men, we are not adept nor are we even allowed to intervene in such a fragile, feminine issue. So we continue eating and I indulge myself in enough rounds of sweet and sour pork until my stomach fills with gas and I need to excuse myself to occupy the bathroom for the next ten minutes.

At an ungodly hour, approximately six in the morning on a Saturday, I am awoken by the suctioning sound of the vacuum consuming dust particles. Mum is in my room with a bandana wrapped firmly around her head and she is working vigorously to rid my new room of any dirt, dust or diseases that may be hidden in the crevices of the floorboards.

“Mum, I shouldn’t be awake. Being awake before twelve in the afternoon on a Saturday should be illegal. It’s just not natural.”

She can’t hear me. She plans on taking over my bedroom for the next half hour doing whatever it is mothers like to do in their son’s room. So I reluctantly resign from reigning my bedroom and hand over the job to my mother and I go downstairs. My father is on the couch attempting to get some shut-eye but it’s impossible when the vacuum sounds like a black hole tearing open the galaxy and demolishing our house from the inside like the end of Poltergeist.

I greet him a good morning. He mumbles in response.

My sister is in the kitchen with her phone lodged between her ear and her shoulder blade. She is muttering happily to whoever is on the other line. She’s making sandwiches. I take one away and she slaps my arm.

“Give it back,” she hisses.

I shake my head and take a bite and because I’m a cheeky little , especially towards my sister dearest, I swipe the phone from where it is lodged.

“Hey babe,” I say with a high pitched tone to inaccurately mimic Songdam. “I want your in my mouth.”

A male grunts on the other end of the line.

“Jonghyun!” Songdam squeals, the volume of which her voice echoes through the house battles the sound of the vacuum.

I run out of the kitchen and Songdam chases after me. It takes me a while to locate the exit to the backyard but I find it after circling the bottom floor three times. I run out onto the grass barefoot. The grass crushes beneath my feet and the morning dew splatters over my legs. I am only sporting my boxers. I do not care.

“Jonghyun! Give me my phone back you sneaky ing midget!” Songdam yells and I stop running.

“Oh, Songdam. You’re going to regret pulling the short card on me,” I say and then chuck her phone over the fence that separates our house from Kibum’s house.

The scream that tears through Songdam’s throat is almost satanic. She sprints back into the house and I stand there feeling a fulfilling sense of accomplishment until I hear the sound of the window screeching open from the top floor.

“Jonghyun!” mum yells, her upper body poking through the crack in the window. Songdam appears beside her with a playful smirk and a vengeful glint in her eye. “You get your sister’s phone back right now!”

“She was being a !” I yell.

“He took my sandwich!” Songdam yells back.

I’m a little bit appalled because Songdam’s phone is lost, scared and alone and disconnected from our currently poor wifi in our neighbour’s backyard, and the thing Songdam decides to be mad about is the fact that I had stolen her sandwich. The girl has certainly got her priorities straight.

I succumb to my mum’s lecture about how it was wrong of me to impulsively hurl Songdam’s phone into our neighbour’s backyard. I quickly head back inside to get dressed and put shoes on and then, instead of being a good boy and rocking up to the front door to ask to retrieve Songdam’s phone from their backyard—skipping the backstory behind why it had gotten there in the first place, I elect to jump the fence.

Most of my upper body is over the fence when my eyes trail up the thick tree trunk of the tree in Kibum’s backyard and notice Kibum sitting up high on the first branch that protrudes from the body of the tree. I hop down from the fence, re-entering our side of the fence.

“Hey, Kibum!” I call out to him.

Kibum is like a statue that had been carved on that tree. He sits there and doesn’t move a muscle. From here I cannot make out a blink. I do not think that this situation is particularly weird. In fact, the weird thing about this isn’t the fact that Kibum is in a tree. I feel that if birds can be in a tree then people can be in trees because as animals we all have equal rights. I’ve nothing against humans being in trees. The weird thing about this is that it is way too early to be doing vigorous exercises like climbing trees. And here is Kibum. In a tree.

“Kibum!” I yell again.

He doesn’t flinch nor does he look down to acknowledge my existence. He stays perched up there on the tree branch.

I give up and trespass into his backyard to retrieve Songdam’s phone which is in less-than-alright condition but still, miraculously, fully functioning like the flawless organism that it was before it had gone airborne and crash landed into Kibum’s backyard. Before heading back into the house I glance at Kibum one last time perched up in his tree in what appears to be a solid state of solitude.

A week later the house has gradually transitioned from a surrealist image to a realist sketch with everything placed where they’re supposed to be, and Songdam and I are deemed fit and ready to start attending our new school much to our dismay.

“Can you please not try and communicate with me throughout the entire day? Even if some dude bullies you for being short or for living a ty, unneeded existence, I still don’t want you to talk to me because I will not care. Do you hear me?” Songdam hisses in my ear, tugging me closer to her with a death-grip on my collar.

She pushes me away and before we both part ways I manage to say, “It’s so cocky of you to think that I’d try to talk to you.”

She flashes me the middle finger, the sparkly nail polish she wears glittering in the sunlight. I jokingly blow her a loving kiss.

I wish I could punch her in the face.

To my utter delight I was assigned the electives that I had chosen prior to joining the school; music, drama and whatnot. Despite that little bit of luck, bad fortune had struck when my schedule told me that I had math first. I had attended the class and I was seated next to a guy named Onew who then invited me to sit with him at lunch. Bad fortune: 1. Good fortune: 2.

But then just as the bell for recess period chimed Mr Kwon had quickly assigned two exercises for homework which was due next period—which was the next day.

Bad fortune: 2. Good fortune: 2.

Onew and his friends and I sit in the shade. Despite the mild coolness of the shade I still feel like I’m simmering.

“Guys, Jonghyun. Jonghyun, guys,” Onew casually introduces me to his friends. I am warmly welcomed but it is clear that the sun has gotten to all of us, most of Onew’s companions sporting irritated facial expressions.

They discuss a few topics that I cannot participate in so I eat my lunch and just watch their mouths move, spitting arguments at each other like a heated freestyle battle. Most of the recess period goes down that way until the skinny one, Taemin, I believe his name is, says something about someone I know: Kibum.

“He’s so annoying. Why did he choose dance as an elective if he doesn’t even try? Don’t choose a creative subject if you’re not going to try,” he says bitterly.

I feel offended but I’m not sure why. Kibum’s just my neighbour. Not my boyfriend or anything.

“What’s so bad about Kim Kibum?” I ask.

Everyone looks at me simultaneously like they’re robots programmed to do things at the same time.

“Nothing. He’s just…”

“Quirky,” the tall one, Minho, finishes.

“How so?” I ask.

“He doesn’t talk to anyone and when people try to talk to him he gets all defensive. He’s a ing brat, I tell you,” Taemin swears and it catches me off guard because Taemin seems like the person who wouldn’t hurt a butterfly and who would scold people for using such language. I guess people are constantly surprising you.

“And he’s obsessed with trees,” Onew says. “He’s always sitting in a tree. Apparently when he was five he wouldn’t come down from the tree in his backyard and his parents threatened Kibum that if he didn’t come down then they’d chop the tree down with him in it—and they weren’t kidding. They had dudes with chainsaws and everything. Then Kibum started crying. Then he came down only for his parents to ground him for three weeks.”

“You can’t blame the kid,” Minho replies. “He’s probably one of those kids who didn’t get enough hugs when he was little.”

“,” Taemin scoffs, “If I were his parents I wouldn’t hug him. The guy has demon eyes.”

I disagree. I think Kibum has particularly beautiful eyes.

The bell goes. We depart.

“How was school, Songdam?” dad asks at the dinner table. We’re having Chinese take-out again because neither of us is bothered to learn how to work our new stove. Hell, dad hasn’t even bothered to set up the microwave. We’re a family of procrastinators, what can I say?

“It was . But there is this cute boy in my chemistry class.”

“Can we say you two had…chemistry?” I joke.

Songdam commends my humour by hurling a prawn at me. Mum scolds her briefly then proceeds to interrogate me on my first day at the new-school.

“I learned things,” I reply vaguely.

“Do you like your subjects?”

“I guess.”

“Can someone pass the crispy chicken?” dad asks.

The conversation ceases there.

I’m still attempting to triumph over the two math exercises I was unfairly assigned today—damn Mr Kwon to hell—when in the corner of my eye I see Kibum high up in that tree. It’s ten at night.

I open up my window and I’m just about to yell out Kibum’s name, the Ki syllable just about to rip through my throat, until I realise that if I do so I will awaken everyone in my household and potentially the inhabitants of the houses that our house is stuck in the middle of. So I decide against it.

I slip on my shoes and I proceed to exit the house not bothering with a shirt. The humid air suffocates me and it feels as if I’m inhaling and exhaling thick smoke. I rise on my tiptoes and rest my arms on the top of the fence. The wood makes my arms itch.

“Kibum!” I say loudly.

He doesn’t respond but I see his feet swaying back and forth like he’s on a swing. I look around and spot a stone. I pick it up and try to accurately throw it, targeting Kibum’s foot. It manages to graze the heel of his foot. Finally, Kibum acknowledges me.

I see his face for a snippet of a second and then he’s gone. Suddenly he’s hanging upside down on the branch. His shirt is tight and presses against his skin so it doesn’t fall with him. I can only see a brief patch of milky white skin and a thin trail of hair leading down towards the top of his pants.

He takes out his earphones and they hang upside down with him. I’m breathless. I’m breathless because I think Kibum is a spectacular creature and also because I don’t want him to fall and crack his skull open.

“Hi,” he says and waves.

“It’s late,” I reply as casually as I can, though, I still can’t help but continually imagine Kibum falling and his brains painting the green grass red. “You should be sleeping.”

“You too,” Kibum responds. He’s swaying back and forth. My heart rate increases to a dangerous speed.

“I’m doing something productive,” I reason.

“What would that be? ing?” Kibum jokes.

I force a laugh despite my dangerous heart rate and my immense paranoia. Though not a bad thing to do at ten o’clock to help me fall asleep faster. Lord knows how tiring ion is.

“H—homework,” I choke.

“You’re really pale,” Kibum responds quickly. He smiles. He starts swaying back and forth faster.

“That’s really dangerous,” I finally end up voicing my concern—fright, more like it.

Kibum scoffs. “I’ve been doing this since I was ten. I used to be really afraid of heights. Like, I was so afraid that my parents recommended I start seeing a psychiatrist. But if there’s one thing I’m more afraid of than heights then that’s being stuck in a room with a person for a certain period of time wherein I’d have to talk to them. So I decided to conquer my fears by myself and I climbed this tree. I did it once and then I never did it again. Now I have a different reason to climb trees as opposed to conquering my fear of heights—which I think is safe to say I have finally conquered.”

I hang on every word Kibum says—mostly because with each word he speaks he starts swaying faster and faster. At the same time, I am genuinely surprised and flattered that Kibum is so open about sharing a small section of his life story with me.

He finally stops swaying and assumes an upright position. My heart rate dies down. I stop holding my breath. Kibum lays stomach-first on the branch and looks down at me.

“That enough for show and tell?” Kibum asks.

I’m startled when I hear the sound of my name being called. Mum is yelling down at me from her bedroom window to get back into the house because young man it is way past your bed time and if you do not get your into this house in the next three seconds you’re grounded.

I trudge back into the house in defeat and mum watches me as I get into bed. She yells at me one last time. Songdam wakes up just for the purpose of contributing in the yelling. Dad wakes up and tells us that goddamn it it’s ten o’clock at night and I have to get up at six-thirty can’t we postpone the lectures until another time—preferably when it’s not ten o’clock at night. The door closes and it’s dark except for the moonlight filtering through the window. I get up just to look outside. Kibum’s still up in the tree. We make eye contact and I swear he smiles at me.