Chapter Fifteen: Nostalgia

Taehyung can see the clear sincerity in her eyes.

Those were the same pair of eyes that caught him mesmerized years ago.

“Taehyung, come,” his mother pulled his wrist to have him sit on the chair beside her. Taehyung didn’t fight back and proceeded to sitting on it. He made himself comfortable, not caring that beside and in front him were strangers he had never seen before. Oh, but the woman looked a bit familiar. Maybe he had seen her in some of his mother’s photo albums. Or maybe Taehyung just assumed this because he could sense a feeling of familiarity between his mother and the woman.

His mother slightly nudged his hand with hers, alarming Taehyung to look up. He glanced at the combination of familiar faces of his parents and siblings and the unfamiliar ones from people he was certain was never introduced to him, ever. Taehyung received curious stares from all of the occupants around the table, so he awkwardly started a greeting while his legs swung back and forth, “My name is Taehyung, and I’m five.”

“Oh!” the woman clapped her hands, surprising Taehyung. The woman chuckles before snaking her hands gracefully around the little girl seated beside her, “This is my daughter, she just turned five last month.”

“Hello, my name is Ryu Mi Ja. Nice to meet you,”

Taehyung couldn’t help but stare at the girl sitting in front of her. She had small, slender fingers that brushed through the table napkin occasionally. She had a set of long eyelashes that batted whenever she blinked her doe-like eyes. She had rosy cheeks but young as she was back then, it wasn’t artificially blushed. That was the first time Taehyung met Mi Ja.

Sitting in front him, eating pesto and chicken cleanly unlike Taehyung, wearing a white blouse loosely hanging around her narrow shoulders, was the person Taehyung didn’t know would eventually become his best friend.

“You two should talk to each other! It’s rare finding children of the same age by chance nowadays,” Taehyung’s mother chuckled faintly, ruffling Taehyung’s hair in a mess. He could see the smirk planted on his older sister’s lips and he knew that his sister was going to once they got home. Taehyung tried ignoring her sister and tried drawing his attention to Mi Ja.

She wasn’t the prettiest girl child he had seen, but she was pretty. And Taehyung believed that she would be prettier when she smiles genuinely.

There was just something about Mi Ja that interested Taehyung.

The adults started talking among each other, having a conversation the children probably didn’t understand. Mi Ja was the only child of the Ryu family, thus, her loneliness as a child resulted to the construction of her anti-social cocoon. Her mother and Taehyung’s mother were childhood friends who parted when they were already in college, and now, reuniting after many years. Mi Ja’s mother thought that this small reunion would be a good idea to expand Mi Ja’s world, so she asked her friend to bring along her family as well.

Mi Ja quietly sat on her chair, munching on her food, and she planned, even before she arrived at the classy restaurant, that she should remain like an incognito. Unnoticed and taciturn. It should have been an easy task, just like any other social gatherings she had attended. But unfortunately, Taehyung was there to ruin her plans.

Underestimating Taehyung must have been the best mistake she had done.

While playing with a strand of pasta speckled with dark green basils, Mi Ja didn’t pay attention to anything rather than the plate in front of her. Taehyung felt like catching her attention without speaking out would be difficult, so he picked up a boiled green pea and threw it at her plate. Mi Ja, astounded, backs away slightly from the table and glanced at the possible source. In front of her.

She looked up and met eyes with Taehyung, who smiled at her sheepishly.

He mouthed, between his palms, “Where do you live?”

Mi Ja didn’t reply, and instead, she poked the green pea on her unfinished pesto and threw it behind her. She returned to being a quiet existence and pretended as if nothing happened. Taehyung knew he just can’t ignore this as well, and he just can’t stop especially when he realized that his sister actually witnessed how he got ignored. He threw another pea at Mi Ja’s plate.

This time, when Mi Ja looked up with a scowl, Taehyung smiled while mouthing the words: “Your eyelashes are long. Just like a doll’s.”

“You have short ones,” Mi Ja talked, not intending to whisper or anything. The adults didn’t notice their little conversation anyways because they were too engulfed with their own. And the seemingly most outgoing one, Taehyung’s father, she assumes, went to the bathroom few seconds ago.

“Yeah, but my name’s longer than yours,” Taehyung grinned, “Mi Ja, Taehyung, Mi Ja, Taehyung.”

“They both have two syllables,” Mi Ja exhaled, not getting him.

“Yeah, but, mine has a lot of ,” he wrote on the surface of the table with his index finger and counted how many it took him. He then wrote Mi Ja’s, “14 for me, 10 for you. Loser!”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Mi Ja giggled slightly as she found his twisted logic a bit amusing.

Taehyung smiled, “We have a good combination, don’t we?”

“I don’t know, how do you judge that?”

“Please, Mi Ja, look at how great our conversation is,” Taehyung laughed, “We should be friends. Friends?” Taehyung lifted his right hand and pretended to want to shake her hand despite the distance. Mi Ja stared at his hand for a short while before laughing. She propped her hand up and shook it up and down slowly.

“Sure.”

Mi Ja moved into the neighborhood a year after that encounter.

As usual, her mother invited Taehyung’s family, who ‘coincidentally’ occupied the house in front theirs, for dinner. Mi Ja didn’t hate the idea that strangers are going to bombard their house with noise and presence again, only because the family that was going to visit them was her very first friend’s.

“I bought you new clothes, sweetie,” her mother had reminded long before their move, “You should wear that on our first dinner with our neighbors there.” Of course, that time, she didn’t know that it was actually Taehyung’s family her mother was referring to so she nonchalantly complied.

She slipped into the clothes her mother picked out for her especially. Loose white dress and a pair of silver sandals. It wasn’t anything extravagant as she had expected, fearfully, and she was grateful that it wasn’t. Her mother checked up on her later that day to fix her hair in a kind of messy bun and curled sides. Her mother also put baby powder around her neck and on her chest and back, making her look more decent than how she was hours ago.

“You’re beautiful, sweetie,”

Her mother said, smiling proudly as she held her daughter’s hand while walking down the recently tidied stairs.

“Ah, so pretty!”

Taehyung’s mother, Mi Ja assumes, clamped her hands together as she dreamily stared at Mi Ja.

Mi Ja wasn’t used to the attention everybody was suddenly giving her. Even Taehyung’s older sister patted her shoulders and told her she looked beautiful tonight. Taehyung’s dad said childishly, “I didn’t recognize you for a second there! You look beautiful, kiddie.”

Mi Ja only smiled and bowed her head at them, and even when they were already eating dinner, Taehyung uttered no word and remained quiet with his red, chubby, cheeks. He would look up from his filled plate to gaze at Mi Ja’s features from time to time, and apparently, this action of him caught not only his sister’s attention but also their youngest brother, Jaehyung. Jaehyung pulled the plastic fork from his bowl and gestured at Taehyung, “Taetae-hyung[1] was looking at Mi Ja-noona[2]! Taetae-hyung will curse Mi Ja-noona!”

Taehyung, and likewise the rest of the family members, got taken aback by Jaehyung’s sudden pointing out. Jaehyung yelled, “Taetae-hyung was looking at Mi Ja-noona! Does that mean he hates her?! Taetae-hyung is bad guy!”

Taehyung didn’t know what to do when he finally realized that his stealing-a-glimpse-of-Mi Ja was revealed to the two families dining together. His sister broke into laughter and said, “Good job, Jaehyung!”

His mother, his father, and even Mi Ja’s parents, were all laughing so hard that even if they tried to stifle their laughter, it would still slip out into light chuckles. Taehyung was already flustered, panicking, as he waved his hands at Jaehyung to tell him to stop. Jaehyung thought that he was trying to make him laugh, so he did. And in no time, everybody in the dining table was laughing – except for Mi Ja and Taehyung.

Taehyung was redder than the unfinished spaghetti on his plate. The obvious shame showed in his face and disgruntled expression. Mi Ja was as blank as ever, as if she was the same person she was a year ago on that restaurant. There wasn’t any expression plastered on her face, not even a smile on her lips.

She didn’t look like she cared about what had happened.

But that wasn’t because she didn’t feel anything at all.

But because she felt all kinds of emotions surge inside her, tickling her sides, and brightening her soul.

She was happy and it was weird.

And everything became weirder when Taehyung bade goodbye that night along with the line, “You look like an angel. Good night!”

Mi Ja said the most refined words that kept Taehyung quiet for few seconds.

She had a sharp tongue, she liked cats, and she wasn’t the same quiet girl Taehyung had met three years ago. Mi Ja had already adapted to the new environment and somehow, her friendship with Taehyung was blooming. She liked how Taehyung had changed her taciturnity and converted her into someone almost as loudmouthed as him. She liked how every morning when she arrive at school, she wou