Blue Spring

THAT MEMORABLE DAY.

PROLOGUE- ROKSU

It's a day of joy. 

Commonly known as the Opening Ceremony.

It's a day when everyone is eager to put on their best uniform only to loosen up the next day as if a fashion show leaving a good impression was a wind blowing into nowhere. 

I've come across this saying in my nearly 18 years. And honestly, it's just like another normal day for me to breathe.

"You look normal, Roksu. And not in a fine way." Even the weird brunette who is standing next to me kept rambling about how important it is for the first day of school.

Choi Jung Su, my friend from the beginning of middle school when I was starting to be independent while away from my uncle's house. 

The first meeting with this girl—rather than a fateful one—was more like a disaster when we first met in a café. 

That time, I was holding a job application for a coffee shop near where I studied. And when I first put a foot through the store door, the first second, she greeted me with a cup of hot coffee poured all over me and the very next day we became seatmates. Obviously, by force and her awkward, stupid smile about making up for me by paying for sweets and desserts at the canteen.

Surprisingly, she was the kind of person who can dispel the darkness around me. 

And shamelessly, she stuck to me when I showed just a little homage to that dessert.

Dammit, she knew my favourite at first glance.

Since then, we've been a friend in a New York minute before I could realize when that title officially was labelled on me. And clinging to the ridiculous reason of fate, she who called herself Noonim decided to stay in the same inn when we promised, or just as she put it, to go to the same academy together when we went to high school. I had tried, at a low level, to enroll in the famous school that was the hardest in the country so that that terrible promise would turn into beautiful dreamlike bubbles that only the naive Jungsu could dream of.

So see my fucking surprise when Jung Su really, unbelievably, and terrifyingly managed to get an acceptable score across a board of thousands of names on it, on a cold winter's day. 

I'm pretty sure my heart was colder than the freezing wind that pierced my skin while my gawked eyes didn't care about my part but had a need to burn a hole at the unbelievable score of the kid who I hadn't turned to look yet could guess that she was dancing like a merry Santa playing, gifting, and hugging whoever had been standing near her in greatest joy.

Jungsu... She did her best... And I would compliment her with all my might and heart if the school she was assigned to was anything but mine..... 

But I soon accept that crude fact as Jung Su treat me and our owner at the place we worked with BBQ. At least my stomach got warm and solaced with the hot barbecue that was smokier than the frozen breath from our mouths. 

That is how we were standing in front of each other, in the same room that we got as close to the school as possible with an ideal price, not in a dorm—I don't fancy places where a lot of people and Jungsu needs a big place to put her martial arts things—and my already neat ribbon is gonna be a fucking rope to squeeze my neck unsettlingly when it got stretched to the fullest by this small but muscular hands. 

"That's enough. It's gonna get crinkled y'know?" I wrap my palm into that heated face when it stares too much at my costume with the eyes of an amateur's fashion. 

"Anddd you're perfect! You look like a model student right now!" Jungsu cheers and does not care about my nagging at all. 

She sway me to the large mirror in her room, which stunned me a bit out of her meticulous sense of appearance that much.