We open at the reunion again, and this time Yoo-jung whispers that she’s “picked a date.” Er? A wedding date perhaps? Shi-won gasps that she’s fearless and tells her not to do it, but she swears she’ll be reborn as a Yoo-jung with a bigger chest. Ha, nice misdirect.

The boys ask what surgery and she says they needn’t know; it’s a surgery only women can have. As they laugh over her obvious plan to get implants (and Hak-chan gives a slow clap), Yoon-jae narrates, “There’s a surgery only men can have…”

 

 

 

Back to 1997, where Yoon-jae limps out of a clinic after getting circumcised. At eighteen? Ouch. Shi-won’s mom helps him out, and he asks her not to tell Shi-won about this, because it’s embarrassing. Mom swears her lips are sealed.

But just as she says it, Shi-won comes running up and jumps onto Yoon-jae’s back, “I hear you’re a man now!” He doubles over in pain and she teases him relentlessly, “Does it hurt that badly? I wouldn’t know. If you’re such a wuss about it, it’ll fall right off!”

He scowls at Mom, who insists it wasn’t her who told, only to have three random neighborhood shopkeepers stop to ask Yoon-jae how his surgery went. Oh no, that’s terrible.

Later that day, Shi-won practices her “Candy” steps while Yoon-jae looks for something in her room, and swears he can’t find it. She stomps in and digs through her backpack for him, handing him one item at a time without looking.

 

 

 

She doesn’t notice until it’s too late that they’re standing there holding onto each side of a maxi pad. They freeze like that, not knowing how to get out of this awkward moment.

A few days later, Tae-woong plays Go Stop with Shi-won’s parents, and Mom asks if Yoon-jae is healing okay after his surgery. Tae-woong says with a smile that he’s perfectly healthy.

Flashback to earlier that morning, when he found Yoon-jae hiding in the bathroom, washing his underwear. He snickers, “Did you have another dream? Who was it? Kim Hee-sun? Lee Seung-yeon? Uhm Jung-hwa?” Omg, dying of mortification for you.

 

 

 

Back to the game, where Tae-woong asks why Shi-won isn’t coming home. Mom says she ran away again because she fought with Dad, and they say it like it’s an everyday occurrence.

Flashback to two hours earlier. Dad opens the mail to find Shi-won’s report card. It’s got 48s all over it, as in 48th place out of 48 students. He flips his lid, while Mom just laughs, acting like getting last place is an achievement in and of itself.

He storms into Shi-won’s room, where she’s too busy listening to H.O.T. to hear anything Dad says. She says nonchalantly that she knows she’s last place. Dad: “What’re you going to be when you grow up?”

 

 

 

Shi-won: “Tony’s wife!” Dad: “Who would like a chicken brain like you?” He says that Yoon-jae is always first in his class, and Shi-won counters that the Busan Seagulls (Dad’s baseball team) are always in last place too. Ha, not the best approach, methinks.

Dad loses it and starts tearing up all the posters in her room, calling her certifiably crazy. Dude, did you steal this from my life? Or does every teenage girl’s dad do this at least once?

She screams bloody murder, while he shouts that if she ends up in last place one more time, he’s going to disown her and adopt Yoon-jae instead. He rips up everything in his path, leaving her clutching her posters in tears.

She sits on her floor sobbing, trying to tape all the pieces together. It’s both heartbreaking and hysterical.

 

 

Back in the present, Mom and Dad figure there’s only one place she ever ends up—with Yoon-jae, so they don’t even pretend to worry. Shi-won puts a coin in the payphone to make a call, but hesitates.

Yoon-jae sits at home, stewing about something else. Flashback to nine hours earlier in his day, when Sung-jae was insisting he had to listen to his new Yangpa tape. Yoon-jae calls her name ridiculous (it means onion) and her song “Youth’s Love” childish.

He scoffs that if a song like that becomes a hit, he’ll strip down and tumble ten laps around the field at the all-girls’ high school. Cut to a month later, where Joon-hee and Sung-jae watch, as Yoon-jae does cartwheels around the field, in nothing but his tighty whities. LOL.

 

 

 

Back to 9 hours before the card game. Shi-won shows off her latest idol magazine and judiciously gives her friends the pages with their oppas. They swoon over all the members of H.O.T. and then scowl when they turn the page to find rival idol group Sechskies (and a tiny baby Eun Ji-won) in the same zine as their oppas. How dare they?

She’s about to rip those pages out, when Yoo-jung asks for the page with Woo-hyuk oppa on it, which happens to have Eun Ji-won on the backside.

Class starts and the teacher asks why Shi-won didn’t do her homework. She says she really wanted to, but couldn’t because her friend borrowed her book. The teacher wants a name so she says Yoon-jae’s…

But when interrogated, Yoon-jae denies it. Shi-won sits the rest of the class with her arms in the air, out in the hallway, cursing him.

 

 

 

Seven hours pre-game. Joon-hee comes by during lunch to tend to Shi-won’s sore arms, while she calls Yoon-jae one syllable short of a son of a , incidentally meaning “dog bird.” The air is still icy when he comes by to eat with them.

Shi-won cuts herself opening a can, and Joon-hee immediately takes her hand in concern, while Yoon-jae scoffs, “You won’t die.” She gives him a kick in the shoulder for being an .

In the present, Mom wonders where on earth Shi-won went if not to Yoon-jae. Shi-won does call Yoon-jae’s pager, but lets out a long sigh, not knowing how to proceed.

 

 

 

Four hours pre-game. Shi-won searches for something in the grass and grins. On their way home from school, Yoon-jae apologizes, and Shi-won asks if he’s really sorry. She tells him to put out his hand.

She gives him something and closes his fist around it. In voiceover he says: “There are two things I am afraid of in this word. Sung Shi-won and frogs.” He opens his hand to find a little green frog and he flips out.

Shi-won picks it back up and chases him all the way home, cornering him with it and taunting him endlessly, to his utter horror.

Suddenly the ruckus stops. We pan down to see them at the bottom of the steps, frozen. In his haste to get her to stop, Yoon-jae has put both his hands straight out in front of him… and right onto her chest. Hahahaha.

 

 

 

They’re both stunned so speechless that they just stand there, as the frog leaps to his escape.

Now we know why they’re both cringing in the present. Shi-won holds the phone up, just listening to the dial tone. She finally puts it down, unable to make the call.

She calls Yoo-jung instead and leaves a voicemail that she’ll wait at her place, and as Yoo-jung listens to the message, she takes off running in a panic.

Ooh, suspense. Shi-won gets closer as Yoo-jung runs. Her mom lets her in and Shi-won heads upstairs. She opens the door to Yoo-jung’s room…

 

 

 

She opens the door, and sees something. Yoo-jung arrives behind her, with a panicked expression on her face. Oh no, is it going to be what I think it is?

At the same time, the Go Stop game is building to a high point, and Mom thinks it’s in the bag. She plays her hand and starts her victory cheer, when Tae-woong and Dad initiate their reversal. Mom slaps Dad upside the head, and everyone gasps.

Back to the girls. Shi-won sneers and looks back at Yoo-jung, who’s near tears by now. She looks back at Yoo-jung’s walls… covered with posters of Sechkies, and of Eun Ji-won in particular, surrounded by hearts.

 

 

 

To add insult to injury, there’s the page from her magazine that Shi-won gave her earlier, only now it’s clear that she wanted it for Ji-won oppa.

As the parents break out into a fight and Yoo-jung calls Shi-won in tears in the aftermath to say that it doesn’t mean she loves H.O.T. any less, Yoon-jae narrates:

 

 

 

 

Yoon-jae: Go Stop, a game where you have to match the same shapes to get points. There was a time when we struggled to be the same. But in one moment, we began to be different. That we were becoming different types of people—why was that so hard to acknowledge back then? People are all different; that’s the law of the universe, the law of human growth. Eighteen. We were maturing into different people, and having to accept those differences meant we were faced with yet another consequence of growing up.

Sometime later, Shi-won comes out to find Sung-jae washing up after gym class and they tease each other about whose chest is bigger. She comes around the fountain and has a very different reaction to Yoon-jae.

 

 

 

He narrates that it was 1997, and already a while since their second stage of maturity had begun, when they had already become different. He says he wanted in that moment to confirm, if what they were feeling was embarrassment over having discovered that they were different…

Or if she had become his first love.

He inches closer to her and then stops. He says just one word: “Confirmation,” and kisses her.

She blinks in surprise, and as they kiss, we get flashbacks to their childhood together.

 

 

 

As he pulls away slowly, he narrates that by the law of maturity, a boy grows into a man and a girl will grow into a woman. But the problem is when a boy who grows into a man, and the girl is still a girl. When the timing is wrong…

She kicks him in the shins, “You crazy bastard!” Ha. She attacks to cover up her embarrassment, and chases him up and down the schoolyard.

Back to 2012. The boys swear there was a month during their junior year when the girls didn’t speak to each other. They’re like, “Us?”

And as they chitchat, Shi-won’s bra strap falls out of place, and Yoon-jae leans over to pull her shirt back in place. They smile. Hm.