Chapter Text
Chapter 1
“They say the kids are gentle and nice because they’re country kids.” Gwang-ho adjusted the straps on Young-woo’s backpack as he spoke. “It’ll be all right. It’ll be different from Seoul.”
“Okay,” Young-woo replied.
She highly doubted that would be the case.
“Go straight to the teacher’s office.” He said has he bent down to her eye level. “Your home room teacher is waiting for you there, okay?”
“Okay,” she agreed again.
Her stomach was tied into knots and her palms were clammy.
“Go on,” Gwang-ho motioned with his hand.
She carefully picked her way up the icy path.
Her home room teacher wasn’t waiting for her after all. The woman at the front desk in the teacher’s office had to run and find her. Young-woo was late by the time she was finally entering the correct classroom.
All the students were already seated. She scanned the room with her eyes. They didn’t look very different from Seoul kids. Maybe a little less trendy, but nothing about them said “gentle.”
“Young-woo, introduce yourself to the class,” the teacher instructed.
Young-woo nodded. “I’m Woo Young-woo, I just moved here from Seoul. My name is the same forwards or backwards. Kayak, deed, rotator, noon, racecar. Woo Young-woo.” She bowed her head. She knew her autism was already obvious. She knew she was different.
Somewhere in the back of the room a boy snickered. And then as Young-woo raised her head, a girl in the front giggled. Suddenly the room descended into a cascade of laughter. Young-woo reached for her ears. It was too loud. She shrank back toward the door. Everything inside her wanted to bolt out the door and make a run for it.
“Thank you, Young-woo, please take a seat over there by the window,” the teacher said over it all.
Young-woo wasn’t sure but her tone sounded less than pleased.
She shuffled down the aisle.
Her foot caught on somebody’s backpack strap. Her body was still moving forward though, and her center of gravity was well past the point of no return. In a last ditch effort to avoid falling, her hand reached out, landing with a hard thud on the top of a student’s desk. It helped break her momentum. But the girl’s books flew careening into her lap.
“Sorry, sorry,” Young-woo bowed repeatedly as she righted herself and disentangled her foot from the backpack.
The girl’s mouth formed a tight, thin line. Young-woo recognized that expression immediately as anger.
More laughter, this time louder. This time from all around. She covered her ears and closed her eyes against the noise.
Above it all she could hear the teacher’s voice, unmistakably angry now, “Take a seat.”
Young-woo forced her eyes open and searched for the empty seat. Everything in her vision was black and white now. At last she found the seat. The desks were meant for two, but there was nobody sitting there at all so Young-woo picked the aisle seat.
The teacher started her lesson. It was a topic Young-woo was familiar with already. But then, academics had never been her problem. She was always first in her class. The problem was social interaction. And bullying. Always bulling.
Nobody ever knew what to think of the smartest student in the room, who could beat them at any test, quiz or spelling bee, and yet needed help opening a simple water bottle. Competitive students in Seoul schools never felt charitable to their competition.
After she’d come home one day with bruises covering her arms, her dad realized how bad things had gotten, pulled her out and moved them to Gangwha-do. He said he could sell gimbap anywhere and it didn’t matter where they lived. But Young-woo knew it was hard for him to uproot their entire lives and move them to a new town.
At lunch, Young-woo followed the crowd to the cafeteria. The smell of food was beckoning, and her empty stomach growled in spite of her.
The line was long but moving quickly. Young-woo made a few quick selections of food that looked relatively safe. Things that wouldn’t surprise her with uncomfortable tastes or textures. She picked up her lunch tray. It was difficult to find a place to sit. Every table was crowded and students were bustling past her, bumping her unceremoniously and jostling everything on her tray. She finally spotted an empty table in the back and wound her way through the large room.
She ate as quickly as she could. It was going to be a challenge finding her classroom again in the unfamiliar school and she wanted to allow plenty of time. She was just finishing her little bowl of soup when a backpack came sliding across the table at her. The force of the heavy bag easily sent the lunch tray sliding. She gasped as the contents of her lunch landed in her lap, and spilled down to the floor around her.
“Oh!!” She heard a girl gasping, “Sorry!!!!”
It was the girl from class.
She was joined by two friends now, both of them attractive, and suddenly struck by fits of laughter. “Sorry!” They mimicked Young-woo’s shocked expression.
“She’s covered in rice and milk!” One of them giggled, pointing a perfectly manicured finger at her.
Young-woo gathered the mess back onto the tray and began searching for a bathroom. By the time she got all the various sauces and ingredients out of her clothes as best she could, the bell had rung and the halls were empty. The uniform was probably saved from the worst of stains though, so that was something, anyway.
Young-woo poked her head out into the empty hall. She was slightly disoriented and wandered around the halls looking for her classroom before she remembered she’d gone down a floor to the cafeteria.
She turned on her heal to retrace her path to the stairs.
“It’s confusing, isn’t it?” A voice asked.
A boy was standing in the hall about ten feet away from her. He wore round rimmed glasses and carried a black backpack and smiled easily, as he motioned down the hall. “This school has a really odd layout.”
“Yeah,” Young-woo nodded, avoiding looking at his face again.
“What room are you looking for?” He asked.
“103,” she answered.
“I’m going that way too, I’ll take you,” he motioned with his head for her to follow him.
It was up the stairs, as Young-woo had just been beginning to suspect. The cafeteria was on what was officially considered a basement level.
The boy walked to the door and opened it, motioning again with his head in a sort of “this is it” motion before heading in, propping the door open with one hand for her to follow him.
“Lee Jun-ho,” the teacher droned. “You’re late, do you have a slip?”
“Yep,” he produced a small paper from his back pocket.
Young-woo slipped past during this little exchange.
“Young-woo, wait, why are you late?”
Young-woo froze in place. The girl from the lunchroom, comfortably seated at her desk, tilted her head with what could only be described as a triumphant expression on her face.
Young-woo turned back to the teacher’s desk where Jun-ho stood now waiting his turn.
“I spilled my lunch on myself and had to wash it up so my uniform doesn’t stain,” her voice was small and timid even to her own ears.
She could see Jun-ho glance down and notice the wet splotches on her jacket and shirt and skirt. Her cheeks burned with embarrassment.
“Fine, sit down. See that it doesn’t happen again,” the teacher sighed, barely looking up. Her brows knitted together reading the note Jun-ho had given her.
Young-woo moved to sit down. She pulled out her book, laid it open on the desk and bowed her head over it, letting her hair fall around her face to hide the tears that were welling in her eyes.
“Excuse me,” she heard a soft voice say as somebody moved past her to sit in the seat by the window.
She didn’t look up. It had to be Jun-ho, the boy who’d shown her the way to the classroom.
Her heart sank, she’d really hoped this desk would be empty. People never wanted to sit by her and it was humiliating to hear them complain about it.
The teacher didn’t have anything very interesting to talk about in the afternoon either. It was all material Young-woo had covered in her classes already. She used her time to begin reading through the textbook open on her desk.
She didn’t dare to look at her desk mate. Every once in a while, out of the corner of her eye, she saw his arms moving around on the desk, turning the page of a book or writing something.
She noticed a dark, braided bracelet peaking out from under his uniform. She was pretty certain that was not allowed per the dress code she’d been given at registration.
The last class of the day was math. And there was a quiz. Young-woo hadn’t been there to learn any of the material, but it was pretty easy to figure out the correct answers. The teacher made them pass their papers to the left to grade each other’s quizzes.
Young-woo used one finger to slide her quiz across the now-empty desk.
The teacher read out the answers one-by-one and Young-woo dutifully marked the paper she’d received from across the aisle. It belonged to a girl with handwriting that left much to be desired. Young-woo quickly calculated the girl’s score in her head. Eighty percent. And then the teacher was walking down the aisle, gathering the quizzes back up. The boy next to her handed Young-woo her quiz back. She glanced at the score before stacking it on top of the other.
One-hundred percent.
She handed it to the teacher.
A few moments later they were dismissed. Young-woo gathered her supplies back into her backpack.
“You did great on that quiz,” Jun-ho said.
Young-woo looked up in surprise.
He was smiling.
She dipped her head once. “Thank you.”
“You must be really good at math,” he said, dropping his books into his black backpack. “You weren’t even here for the classes.”
Young-woo nodded again. She knew better than to brag, but there was also no denying it.
“Hey, I was wondering,” he was going on, “do you think you could—maybe—tutor me?”
Young-woo looked up then.
“I’m—“ he let out a breath that was also a laugh, “—not great at math. I mean, I’m not…I’m not horrible. I’m teachable!” He slid his glasses up his nose with his fingertip. “I could use some help, and you seem to know the material.”
Young-woo blinked and touched the strap of her backpack lightly, trying to distract herself from the growing knot in her stomach. “I’m sorry, I can’t.” She said with a small shake of her head.
“Oh, okay,” he nodded, clearly disappointed. “I understand.”
He had long bangs that fell into his deep brown eyes as he spoke.
Young-woo realized with a jolt, he was beautiful.
She pushed away from the desk and pulled the backpack onto her shoulders.
She’d had crushes before, but nobody ever liked her back. She was sure if she fell for this boy, it would be no different.