Age 4

There’s a little boy standing under the slide over there.  

Silently.

She’s waving at him but he won’t wave back.  She’s turning daintily on her toes until the skirt of her flower-print dress flutters in the wind—the dress that mother bought especially for her birthday—but he won’t look at her.  She turns until the world is going round and round like the brunette curls bouncing on her shoulders.  But he won’t look at her.

He only looks at his shoes, made of leather and polished until they glint in the daylight.  He studies them as if he’s expecting that everyone else will do the same.  Maybe if they look at his nice shoes, they won’t notice his torn jeans or the dirt that’s been rubbed into the hem of his dress shirt.  Maybe they won’t notice that his uniform jacket is missing a few buttons, or that his hair hasn’t been combed properly for a while now.

But she notices.

She skips to him, her red mary-janes pummeling satisfyingly against the pavement with each step.  Pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat.  She likes the sound of it so she skips around him a few more times before standing beside him.  She follows his gaze to the ground and giggles at the way their shadows stretch so far under the light of the sun.

Shadows are a peculiar thing, she’s discovered.  They’re always so quiet.  She can run after her own shadow for a long time, but can never be faster than it.  They make her look taller than she really is, tall and graceful like the princesses she sees in the fairy-tale books before bedtime.  But most of all, they’re always stuck to her feet, even if she kicks at it and asks it to go away because she’s tired of playing with it—it doesn’t want to go.

Maybe that’s what the boy thinks of her. 

He doesn’t think she’s fun, or cute.  He probably doesn’t care that she wants to hold hands.  He doesn’t care about her flower hair clips.  He ignores her when she grins with crimson cheeks.  He must want her to stop bothering him so much.

But he doesn’t tell her that, so she bounds behind him like an excited puppy when he walks around the playground.  When he picks up a pretty rock from the grass, she picks up two.  When he skids down the twisty slide, she follows him, even if the metal burns her backside and wrinkles her skirts.  When he leans down to get a drink from the fountain, she does the same, even if she gets more water in her pigtails than .

She races and sprints with him on the soccer field like all the other boys.  Sometimes, she wants to cry because she can’t get to the ball fast enough.  Sometimes, her shoe buckle comes loose or her feet refuse to obey, and she falls onto her hands and knees.  Sometimes, he helps her stand up.  Sometimes, mommy scolds her when there are holes in her pantyhose. 

But it’s okay.

It’s okay because she likes to see him laugh.  When Jongin smiles, the lines around his lips sparkle and the sun radiates from his eyes.  When Jongin laughs, it’s a simple hahaha, but it seems to make the world spin a little faster, the sky a little clearer, and her day a little better.

It makes her want to give him a kiss.