I can see you looking at me

The note landed atop my right hand, having drifted over like a sunflower petal. It was yellow, a replica to the one I had discovered on my kitchen counter. His handwriting looked a little less elongated this time, probably because he hadn’t just been visually assaulted by my half- body. Now, it was still attractively scrawling, but there was more refinement in his symmetry – Junhong was confident, particularly composed in our current environment while my internal organs were shaking with nerves. It had always been a skill of mine to infer how someone wanted their message-receiver to feel, just by the way that they formed their characters. What I could tell was that, for whatever clandestine reason, he intended to intimidate me.

It was working. My hand trembled as I read over the words several times, careful to translate it correctly.

I’d stopped conversing with Hazel and Carina after Junhong entered the room; the class was already halfway over, and the room was in absolute silence as individual-study was required for this portion of the period. Just passing the note was against the immediate classroom regulations. Junhong wasn’t just declaring dominance over me in passing this note; he was disregarding the authoritarian teacher at the front of the room, risking both of our transcripts with this misdemeanor.

Even with that credible hazard in my peripheral vision, I couldn’t convince myself not to scribble a response directly beneath his pen, my own pencil marks looking sloppy and unorganized under his skilled hand. It was hard to learn Korean characters after writing in the English alphabet for seventeen years. But my message was fairly clear, if you could locate my uncertain spacing between syllables.

You’re pretty full of yourself to think I’m looking at you.

It was a weak retort, because I had actually been glancing at him quite often over the past twenty minutes. He must have noticed the conspicuous tilt of my head as I tried to peer through the layers of my dark hair. Although I knew he would