Where Pan Mang River Flows

8: Underground drama

Jae Hee walked towards Taekyung with big steps, and together with Haechan they started their daily walk to school. Gyong had arranged other appointments in the morning since a few days, so she would go to school with Ilhoon, and Jae Hee was left alone with Taekyung, since the location of their homes made it impossible for them not to run into each other.

One calm early morning, Taekyung quietly opened his front door to leave for school. He was startled to see a dark figure with bags standing right in front of him. He ran, but Jae Hee stubbornly followed him. He had hoped to lose her somewhere in the middle, but the child could run damn fast. This happened every morning since, each time they both arrived at school sweating and panting. One sad day, Taekyung realised he couldn't go on like this, and it was clear to him that he wouldn't be able to keep this up until the end of the year. So at some point he had given up.

Slowly but surely, he had grown accustomed to her presence. Now they ate most meals together, they spent most breaks in pairs or threes and they studied together. They had officially become friends. The better Jae Hee got to know him, the better she understood why he had no friends. He was a nerd. He studied until his nose bled and he read the strangest books. His flat was far too clean for a teenager living alone and 80 per cent of his room was filled with dolls of anime characters. He didn't know how to hold a decent conversation. Sometimes Jae Hee couldn't follow him even though she made the effort and sometimes she got utterly fed up with his mathematical problems, although she would never admit the latter.

"I have something for you," he said while studying. Jae Hee tried to hide her fear that it had something to do with mathematics.

"Look." Taekyung took out an origami bird. Jae Hee knew exactly how to respond to that. She took out a sheet full of physics exercises and started working on her own origami. She produced a physics origami in less than a minute and they exchanged the birds. Taekyung shyly studied Jae Hee's bird and noticed something, "We make it exactly the same way... strange, where did you learn this?" Taekyung had been the interloper of a break for once, and Jae Hee felt less guilty for all the previous times she had distracted him. "My father used to make them when I was young. You?"

"My... well not father, but someone I thought of as a father back then," he said with a melancholy look in his eyes, "I wonder how he's doing."

Jae Hee wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to stop studying and straightened up, "Come, we'll go for a walk and then you can tell me about this father figure of yours. I feel like going outside for a little bit."

Taekyung saw his friend's cheerful face and nodded. In a way, he had become less needy of 'studying to death' since he had met Jae Hee. His obsession with studies and his hatred of Do Hwan and himself were replaced one by one by thoughts of the girl sitting next to him. She had become a part of his life and he wanted to be a part of her life at all costs as she did to him.

"Tell," Jae Hee urged him as they walked between the artificially straight trees on a thin path in the dark. Taekyung wanted to tell her everything, and he wanted to know just as much about her, but he couldn't get all the bad memories out of his mouth without bursting into tears. So he told her about his best memories when he was younger: "My parents are away, you probably noticed. They are somewhere in the Separated States if I am not mistaken. So when I was younger, I stayed with another family. A sweet little family that was always very happy. Through them, I developed a love for mathematics and physics and with them, my best memories are filled." Taekyung cautiously waited for a response, afraid that he had shared too much with a girl he had known for less than a month.

"... Your parents are shit," Jae Hee mused. Taekyung looked at her amusedly, it felt like a burden had been lifted from his shoulders, he had told someone something about himself for the first time in a long time.