A Thousand Purple Stars (JinJi)

Misremembering

"Wait! Aren't you that peach girl?" said a boy sitting in the center of the room. Jisoo looked up and stared at him with alarm. How? How did he know? How dare he? The rest of the classroom turned and looked at the boy, too, and they started whispering among themselves. Jisoo started panicking. No. Don't listen to him, she thought.

"Kim Peachu!" the boy said. The children started giggling, but the boy looked confused. Jisoo's heart started pounding. The teacher clapped his hands, demanding the children's attention.

"That's enough," the teacher said, and then he turned his gaze over to the boy who spoke up. "Jinyoung, what did I say about talking without raising your hand? It's very rude."

The boy, Jinyoung, looked sheepishly down at his hands and apologized. After that, the teacher decided that Jisoo had introduced herself well enough and then instructed her to take the empty desk, which happened to be the one in front of the boy, Jinyoung. Jisoo walked toward her empty desk slowly, trying not to look up, thinking that if she did, all she'd see were the boys and girls' judgmental stares. As she got closer to her desk and saw the boy who called her Kim Peachu, her blood began to boil. He ruined her first impression.

The lesson started shortly after she took her seat. Jisoo took out her notebook and tried to forget the last ten minutes and just focus on math. But about halfway through the lesson, she heard the boy behind her scooting his seat up and leaning forward.

"Hey!" he whispered in her ear. "You live on the peach farm, right?"

Jisoo tensed in her seat. She tried to ignore him, pretend she didn't hear. But he didn't quit.

"Is the farmer your dad?" he asked. "I've been there once!"

Jisoo still ignored him, though she had started clenching her fists. This boy just didn't know when to stop. He just kept talking and rubbing it in that he knew who she was, knew that was just a stupid country girl.

"My mom bought two dozen peaches, but half of them went bad and we never got to eat them. But they were good!"

"Stop talking to me!" Jisoo shouted, slamming a fist down on her desk and turning around to give the boy a poisonous glare. He was so startled that he nearly fell off his chair. The children were all staring at her now, equally stunned looks on all their faces. The teacher calmed everyone down and scolded her for shouting in the middle of class.

Great. Day one and she was already getting on the teacher's bad side. Jisoo gave the boy one more glare before turning back to her notebook. This was all his fault. Now everyone knew where she came from and he made her look stupid in front of the whole class and he made her lose her temper in front of the teacher. She hated him.

For the next couple of weeks, Jinyoung wouldn't let up. No matter how many times she yelled at him to stop, he kept leaning forward in his desk and trying to talk to her. Evidently, he hadn't realized just how much she despised him since his little stunt on the first day of school. Jisoo, meanwhile, tried to ignore him as best as she could and focus on the lessons.

Which were much harder than she realized. At her old school, it was hard to focus on the work, especially when she was constantly watching for kids who might pull on her hair or dump peaches on her head or snatch her work and crumple it up. She was on defense mode all the time, she didn't even realize that she was falling behind in school.

She'd stay up in her room agonizing over her homework hours. Literature class and art class were easy enough, but math and science were hard. She wanted so badly to catch up with the other kids and prove to them that she wasn't stupid or air headed.