Chapter Text
They are moving again.
Jisu’s parents said it would be different this time. Her dad got a better job, not one that would lay him off in a couple years again. They were moving to a house too, not another shitty apartment in the city. Jisu wouldn’t have to share a bathroom anymore, they’d have a yard and space and all that.
Jisu hasn’t seen the house yet, she stayed at Minhee’s apartment while her parents came down last month to look at places. They ended up buying a townhouse in some gated community, put all their savings down on the deposit, and only told Jisu once they came back to pick her up.
They’re going there now, Jisu slouched in the passenger seat as her mom drives, her dad in the rental truck ahead of them. It’s been a long drive, packing the last of their things early in the morning and Jisu’s now baking in the afternoon sunshine, only thirty minutes left on the GPS.
She’s not thrilled, obviously. This means leaving her friends behind, no more sleepovers at Minhee’s, no more going out for coffee and pastries after school. Means doing the last month and a half of the schoolyear somewhere new - not even in a school, her mom singed her up for this online school thing for the transition. Jisu’s already not great at making friends, but she’s absolutely sure that being alone in her bedroom all day won’t make anything better.
At least there’ll be more than just her bedroom, there’s a basement in the house and her dad promised she could set it up as a movie area. Also her bedroom is much bigger, apparently.
She stares at the gate when they turn in to the neighborhood; a heavy looking iron thing that opens only once her dad talks to the guy in the guardhouse. ‘Whitehaven Community’ is written in big letter above them, which Jisu has her reservations about.
It screams sundown town, which her parents had no idea where a thing until she brought it up. They swore it wasn’t like that though, despite the name almost everyone in the community is Asian. It was the thing that attracted them to it, initially.
“You can finally be somewhere where people look like you.” Her mother had told her, all wistful. Jisu didn’t mind being the odd one out, not much at least. She’d always been different, one of only a handful of Asians in each school so far. Being rare is how she met Minhee, who was probably way too cool to have talked to her otherwise.
Her parents didn’t grow up outsiders. They both immigrated from Korea before Jisu was born, spent their childhoods and early adult life surrounded by people that looked like them. Missed it, clearly.
The place is nice looking though, Jisung sitting up in her seat to look at the manicured lawns and pristine houses. It’s clearly a planned development, all the houses the same shape, same white siding and black shutters and carefully trimmed boxwoods by the front porch. A little much, but Jisu didn’t expect a ton of originality from people who wanted to live behind a gate.
They drive past a little manmade pond though, the road lined with the occasional tree between them and the sidewalk. “That’s the community pool.” Her mother says, pointing to a pale brick building beyond the pond, before turning down a side street and there’s the chain link fence of tennis courts to their left.
Jisu’s not exactly the active type, more the sit at home and read or watch movies, but it’s cool that this exists, she supposes.
The townhouses are very neat too, when the road curves to show a row of them on either side. Same white siding and black shutters, but skinnier. They’re not like townhouses in the city, all squashed together in one long strip. Instead, they’re more duplexes, set two by two down to the end of the road, two front doors flanked by a garage on either side.
Bigger than anywhere Jisu has lived in, which is promising for this not sucking. At the very least, if it does suck Jisu will have her own space to hide out in.
Her dad backs the truck very slowly, and very loudly, into one of the driveways close to the end of the cul-du-sac. The incessant beeping attracts people from the neighboring homes, and they are indeed all Asian as they start coming out of their front doors to say hi.
Her mother goes out to greet them, all smiles. Jisu isn’t that social, slinks out of the car and up to her dad who is getting the keys to the house from some guy.
“And this is my daughter, Jisu.” He says to the guy, a hand out to Jisu who tries to smile back. It’s probably really awkward, she’s been told before she has a nervous smile.
Is nervous in general, prone to anxiety and catastrophizing. Something her parents never really understood, claimed was western influence because no one was nervous like that back home. Minhee said it was just unlucky brain chemistry, that people are just like that sometimes.
Didn’t go over super well, her parents had frowned at her. Went back to calling it western influence, that Jisu just needed to study harder, like they had to as kids. Jisu stopped bringing it up.
“A pretty little thing, aren’t you.” The guy says, and Jisu focuses on holding the smile. Her dad laughs at that though, and Jisu wishes he would get the keys quicker.
“She gets it from her mother.” He says, which – gross. Jisu would prefer if he kept his thoughts about banging her mom far, far away from her. The new guy laughs, mouth wide and lots of teeth, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. They just stare, at Jisu – through her really.
“Can I see what the house looks like?” Jisu asks, trying to hurry things up. There’s some more laughing, some small talk about how they’re going to love it here. The guy unlocks the door himself instead of handing the keys over, though he does leave them in the door.
“Once again, welcome to the community.” He says with a flourish as he pushes the door open and Jisu nods quickly before shuffling in.
It’s very white, just like the rest of the neighborhood. White walls, whitewashed wood floors, white trim. It’s whatever, Jisu has grown up in apartments and they were all white too – she just put a bunch of posters up.
They own this place though, so maybe she’ll be allowed to paint her room. She’s not sure what color she’d want, maybe something dark – like a forest green or some variation of burgundy. Something fun.
There’s a staircase to the left, also white, and a door on the wall to the right that leads to the garage when she opens it. Further back there’s a kitchen and a big sliding glass door out to a grassy backyard, with only one side fenced off. Just enough to not be on top of their neighbor to the left, but when she sticks her head out the right side neighbor is only a maybe ten foot gap away. Not super private.
Whatever, the outside is mostly lame anyways. Too hot and full of bugs for Jisu.
Instead she doubles back, finds a door that leads down to the basement. It’s just an open space, with two doors on the side wall. One to a laundry-and-half-bath, and another to some storage room type thing. It’s lined with shelves, no space for anything else. Jisu’s pretty sure they don’t have enough stuff to warrant this, since they came from an eight-hundred square foot apartment, but sure.
She can see the vision for the rest of the basement though. Their couch against the staircase wall, the TV between the two doors. There are built-in shelves after the stairs, enough to store all of Jisu’s and her mom’s books.
There are people in the house when she goes back up the stairs. Neighbors, she’s pretty sure, that are helping unload the truck into the garage, Jisu’s mom directing them to put the boxes in different piles.
Jisu wants nothing to do with them, so she scurries back to the front door and up the stairs to see the last of the house. The first door is her parents’ room, she thinks. Assumes as much when she sees the ensuite bathroom.
She abandons that room pretty quickly, going back out to find the hall bath that she assumes will be hers, and then finally the second bedroom. A bit smaller than the master, but much bigger than what she had in the apartment. Her bed and her desk won’t need to touch, and she might even have the space to get a little love seat to tuck into a corner as a reading nook. Maybe one of those monstrous bean bags that she’s seen all over Instagram.
Her room also overlooks the street, and she can see over a dozen of their neighbors outside helping unload the truck. It’s going fast, with that many hands, their furniture splayed out across the driveway and lawn as they empty the truck bed. There are people unloading their car too, which Jisu has mixed feelings about. Her bag is in there still, with all her things.
This means that she won’t need to lift much though, not like the effort it took to pack it all up. Her dad had paid some neighborhood boys to help them load the furniture into the truck, but all the boxes and bags had been packed in by her and her parents alone. Her arms still hurt from that.
“That one goes into her room.” He mom says out in the second floor landing, and the door to her new bedroom opens as two men carry her desk in.
“Where do you want it?” One of the men asks, in Korean, a guy probably as old as her dad and maybe his teenage son on the other end. It’s hard to tell if people are related or just look similar here, there’s more Asians than she’s met in her whole life crawling in their house right now.
Jisu points to the windows, and they put the desk down so that it’ll be up against the outer wall. Others come with the pieces to her bed, nightstand, and dresser in the next few minutes, Jisu pointing each piece of furniture against different walls, all nicely separated. A couple guys even start working on piecing her bed together, not that it’s terribly complicated.
They’re working around the things still coming in, boxes with her name on them getting piled in the corner. The empty space is very quickly running out, and Jisu doesn’t like feeling cramped with other people in her room. Perfect strangers, even though her parents are acting like they’re old friends.
It’s a lot, and all at once. She decides to leave the rest of the room for later, and navigates the sea of boxes in the house to get to the car and grab her bag out of the passenger seat.
Also send a picture of the new house to Minhee, who was as curious as her about what it looked like.
It’s cute, for a suburban hellscape Minhee messages back as Jisu puts all her things back into her bag from the trip, making Jisu smile. It is very suburban hellscape, no one has ever helped them move like this before, all neighborly and stuff. People in the city stuck to their own lives.
Jisu’s not sure how she feels about it, but her mom clearly loves it. They’ve been here basically an hour and the truck is already almost empty, the garage full of boxes instead as she directs the furniture into their spots.
“You wanted the couch in the basement, right?” her mom asks right as Jisu reaches the stairs again, and she nods quickly before disappearing back into her room. The bed is up, mattress put on the frame, and the men who built it gone. Thankfully.
Unpacking takes longer than packing, and she’s only just started to figure out what box contains what when her mom comes into her room and tells her that her dad is going to return the truck.
“Don’t you need to go too, to bring him back?” Jisu asks when her mom says she’ll get started on the kitchen.
“Oh, no.” She says. “Joonyoung was kind enough to offer to drive out with him. Everyone is so nice here.”
That’s cool, Jisu supposes. Would never happen in the city, Jisu’s never even really known any of her neighbor’s names. It continues too, the friendliness. Jisu’s barely done with the first box of clothes when her mom calls her down because someone brought them dinner.
Her dad comes back as they’re trying to figure out where the chopsticks are in the pile of boxes labeled kitchen. They don’t find them, finding spoons and figuring it’s close enough for the container of rice and stir fry that is in the middle of boxes and wads of bubble wrap on their table.
They continue unpacking afterwards, until it’s dark outside and their arms hurt. It feels a little like being at a hotel, when she gets ready for bed. Everything feels foreign, different.
It’s also eerie, that night, how quiet everything is. Jisu misses the sounds of life outside, the distant scream of an ambulance. It feels isolating. Uncomfortable, twisting and turning in her hastily made bed, things spilling out of all the boxes she opened to try to find her sheets.
“It might take some time to adjust, but I think you’ll really like it here.” Her mom says the next morning when she brings it up. She’s said that the other times too, and technically she was right eventually, but this one feels like such a jump.
The doorbell rings before Jisu can say anything back, her mom walking down the hallway to open it to yet another neighbor.
“I saw you guys walking around and figured you still didn’t have the kitchen up and running. Moving in is hard work!” Some woman says in flawless Korean, and her mother gasps like it’s not vaguely creepy.
“Aren’t they so kind?” She says as she comes back, new containers of something in her hands. Fried rice in the flat one, soybean sprout soup in the tall one. It’s good too, the way Jisu’s mom would make it if the kitchen wasn’t a giant mess.
Her parents comment about that a bunch, how nice it is to be back amongst their people again, even if it’s just a little island of it. To be able to speak their language with everyone.
Jisu’s language is English, even though she speaks Korean at home. Only at home, she tried the language classes for a while, met Minhee through them, but they’re expensive. Far away too, and her parents didn’t like her taking the metro alone.
Jisu goes back up to her room once they’re done eating, to try to finish organizing her stuff. Her online school starts tomorrow, so she needs to get her desk fully set up. Her dad starts work tomorrow too, but that’s out of the house somewhere, so he’s working on carrying the last of the boxes to their appropriate place so he can park the car in the garage.
“Jisu, can you come down?” Her mother calls in the afternoon, Jisu’s room half put away and the hallways by the stairs a minefield of flattened cardboard boxes. Her dad’s been picking them up as she tosses them out of the room, bringing them wherever.
The kitchen is fully in the cabinets when she makes it down, her mom pulling the steamer basket off the pot on the stove and unwrapping the cheesecloth around the pat-sirutteok. “Can you deliver these to our neighbors? They’ve been so kind.”
Jisu wants to say no, with everything in her body. She doesn’t like talking to strangers, especially ones prone to small talk. They’ve honestly never done this before, Jisu only recognizes the red bean and rice cake layers because she’s seen them in kdramas.
Her mom is puttering around like this is the best thing ever, some return to normalcy instead of horribly foreign. The neighbors are all Korean though, from what Jisu can tell. They’d appreciate it and all that bullshit.
“Fine.” Jisu sighs, her mother smiling at her before cutting pieces of the cake and saran wrapping them. Jisu types out a complaint about her mother forcing her to do this to Minhee before she gets a serving plate full of little bundles and is shooed out the door to give some to everyone in the houses nearby.
The first one is easy, just two feet from their own front door. Someone answers only a few seconds after she rings the doorbell too, a woman with a toddler on her hip and big smile on her face. There are the faint sounds of another kid deeper in the house too, so Jisung offloads the first package of rice cake and then awkwardly disengages to go give out the rest.
Her mom made like ten of the things, she realizes as she counts the stack walking down to the next house. That’s way too many, Jisu is not built for this kind of socialization. Definitely not for this much awkward smiling at complete strangers, who greet her in Korean even after she says hi in English.
It’s weird, honestly. She knows Korean, obviously, speaks it with her parents because that’s what they’re comfortable with, but she’s never talked to other people with it. Only really Minhee, and even then they mostly default to English because everything they talk about is in English. Memes, songs, weird horny fanfics Minhee sends her because she thinks it’s funny when Jisu gets grossed out.
That one only worked for so long before Jisu was desensitized to it, reading about gobbling slick without even batting an eye.
Small talk with her new neighbors is not something she can handle though, and her smile is fake as shit by the last couple. One house doesn’t have anyone answer the door, and Jisu takes the excuse and runs with it, bolting off their doorstep as soon as she can.
“One of them weren’t there.” She announces as she gets back to their house, recognizable amongst the identical masses by the laser cut wood wreath of sunflowers that her mom likes to have on their door. It’s a little kitch, with its three different fonts on the ‘Welcome to our Home’ in the center, but it’s grown on Jisu.
She flops on her bed once she’s back in her room, updating Minhee on how harrowing her task was. Minhee’s at their favorite coffee shop, trying to make Jisu jealous with pictures of the pastry display that won’t load because of the half a bar Jisu’s working with.
Jisu doesn’t even know if there’s a coffee shop nearby, what she remembers of the drive in was just residential sprawl and woods. A search on google maps shows that yeah – that’s about it. There’s a gas station half a mile out from the gate, and then it’s a long while until you reach any type of commercial building. An industrial park too, nothing interesting.
No public transport either, and since Jisu doesn’t know how to drive that means walking ages just to get anywhere.
Jisu groans, this is going to fucking suck.
You’re going to need to learn how to cook Minhee texts back at the news, which makes Jisu groan some more. She’s avoided needing to learn any of that so far, hates being in the kitchen with a burning passion. It takes time away from consuming media. I can teach you how to make cheesecake.
You know id burn it Jisu texts back.
There’s no-bake versions Minhee texts back, followed a few seconds later with a link to a recipe that can barely load on the shitty cell service.
She sighs and gets up, making her way to her parents’ bedroom where she can hear boxes being emptied.
“When are we getting the internet installed? The service here is shit.” Jisu asks from the doorframe, her mother putting clothes away into the closet.
“Oh, the neighbors said we could share theirs!” Her mom says, and that sounds suspicious. Everything here is weird though, maybe it’s just how people behave when they don’t live in loud apartments with thin walls. “I have the password somewhere around here.”
The password is dumb, one of those nightmarish strings of letters and numbers that are impossible to remember. Jisu takes a picture instead, and then enters it into her phone, the recipe now loading pictures – a necessity because Jisu wouldn’t be able to work off of just words alone.
They probably don’t have any of the ingredients, and who knows if the sugar and that stuff even got unpacked yet. She saves the link though, just in case she can make it one day.
She goes back to her room, enters the wifi password into her computer. Finds out that it’s riddled with parental controls, twitter, TikTok, and Instagram fully blocked. Which sucks, because there’s no way she’ll be able to keep up with any of her old friends like this.
Or like, culture at large. Even Facebook is blocked, though who uses that anymore.
“They have little kids, it makes sense they’d want to keep them safe.” Jisu’s mom says at dinner, Jisu pouting about the blocks. “Your school website is ok, right?”
“Yeah.” Jisu mutters, having actually checked it only because she got an email from the online school about some orientation guide they wanted her to do before she logged on for her first day. It was just a really slow tutorial showing her what all the icons do, she had gone through it while texting with Minhee because there was no way to speed it up.
“Then you’re all set. It’s probably a good thing honestly, being on social media isn’t healthy for a young mind.” Her mom says, and Jisu has to hold in the whine that bubbles up her throat. Her entire personality is centered on being chronically online, though her parents wouldn’t understand that at all. They’re both the type to forget their phones charging on their nightstands all day.
Jisu turns the wifi on her phone off later, so she can open up Instagram and check what people from her old school are up to. Everything loads slow as shit, because they’re surrounded by acres of fucking woods and nothing else, but she manages to get one of the cat memes Minhee sent to load and heart-reacts it.
Videos are a lost cause, all of TikTok unusable. She searches on google how to get around a parental block, staring angrily at her phone as even that takes a million years to load. A VPN is the answer, which means the computer is not going to be usable probably, but she can download one onto her phone.
It’s still slow to load anything, because even ignoring the blocks the internet plan is shit, but she can load a few of the videos to watch as she lays in bed.
They get a knock on their door the next morning, not with a free breakfast this time. Jisu’s mom is actually cooking them breakfast, so Jisu is the one sent out to open it, dad already gone to work.
“Hello, sweetheart.” A very put together woman says, her smile tight. “Are your parents around?”
“Mom’s making breakfast.” Jisu responds, in Korean again, frowning a little when the woman keeps glancing at the wreath thing on the door between them.
“Could I talk to her?” She asks, weirdly tense. Jisu shrugs, the woman stepping over the threshold when she turns to go get her mom.
“Mom! There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.” She tells her mom, but the lady is right behind her in the hallway instead of hovering by the door. Real desperate to say what she wanted to say, apparently. “I need to log into school soon.” Jisu adds, because she doesn’t want to hang around if she can help it.
“Take some breakfast before you go up.” Her mom says and Jisu hurries to the stove to scoop some of the dumpling soup in a bowl.
“I know you just moved in, it takes a moment to get acclimated to the rules, but the HOA has guidelines on what decorations you can put outside.” The woman says once Jisu’s mom has wiped her hands and gone closer to her. “We didn’t fine you for it yet, but the thing on your door is technically in violation. Ten dollars a day, if it’s not removed.”
“Oh! We had no idea.” Her mom replies, sounding as shocked as Jisu is. Ten dollars a day over some wooden sunflowers?
“Of course, that’s why we didn’t fine you this time.” The woman says, voice much softer. “We’re very strict about keeping with the rules here though – you understand how it can impact resale value if even one house looks off. I recommend reading through the HOA rules just to be safe, they should have been in the folder with all the mortgage paperwork.”
Jisu slinks behind them at that, juggling the bowl of soup in one hand and a smaller one of rice in the other. She’s texting Minhee the moment she puts them down though.
Of course you’re in an HOA. You live in a gated community, that’s like NIMBY Karen paradise Minhee replies as the school portal loads.
This is going to suck so bad Jisu replies as she adds some of the rice to the broth before taking a big spoonful up to her mouth.
Have fun fighting over curb appeal~~ Minhee texts back and Jisu tells her that they apparently already are.
Online school is dumb.
She did it for the pandemic too, which had sucked ass. Now she’s got a bigger room to sprawl around in and half-listen to the lectures. She spends the first day finishing putting away her things while someone drones on and on about things her old school had already covered.
That night over dinner her dad finds the mortgage stuff and pulls out extremely thick stack of paper, the staple at the top barely holding on. It’s apparently the HOA bylaws, regulations, and other assorted bullshit they get to mandate. And mandate they do, there’s a list for the types of bushes they’re allowed to plant in the front, the height and species of grass that they have to maintain.
It’s dumb as hell. There are rules about what décor is permitted, what colors the houses have to be, how quickly they need to clean leaves off their lawn. What they can do with the backyard too, when they need to get the bins in after the garbage collectors stop by.
“It’s different, I know.” Her mom says when Jisu stares at the packet with distaste. “But soon you won’t notice it at all. And it’s safe here, I don’t need to worry about you walking around alone anymore. And there’s a pool!”
Jisu doesn’t know who she’s trying to convince, honestly. Up until this point her parents were pretty explicitly pleased with the move, and it’s not like they weren’t aware that there was an HOA. That seems like a thing you are told during the purchasing process. Probably.
Jisu wasn’t around for it at all, sleeping over at Minhee’s like every other time her parents traveled. Jisu doesn’t know where she’ll go now when they leave off on their trips – would she end up with one of the neighbors? Is she old enough to stay in the house on her own now?
She misses Minhee, obviously. Is pretty sure Minhee misses her too, even though she tried to hide it by talking about how Maria wore a miniskirt to class today and it was really hard to focus. Maria is Minhee’s white whale, mostly because she is painfully straight and painfully dumb, but has a very nice butt.
Anyways, if her parents are happy with this weird neighborhood and its restrictive nonsense, she won’t push it.
By Wednesday she’s got out of stuff to put away to distract herself with during the droning lectures, so she’s sitting in her chair, legs propped on the desk and watching the neighborhood kids play on the street. The neighborhood does seem safe, since there’s no adults watching over them as the little kids run around in the grass. They’re only supervised by kids who would maybe be in elementary school.
She glares at them from her desk, because shouldn’t they also be stuck doing this shit? A nine year old should definitely be in classes of some sort, right? Not just watching their little brother yank at the Zoysia grass. Specifically that one, because it’s the only type allowed by the HOA.
The quizzes are easy though, despite the anti-cheating software really struggling with the limited bandwidth. Enough that she fails one of the tests on cheating charges and has to have her mom call the school hotline to get the eye-tracking removed. The bandwidth dips apparently caused skips that made it look like she was behaving like some possessed spirit, and that got flagged.
The software runs smoother after that, though it does crash weirdly one time and just keeps the internet block on well after Jisu has finished the quiz, and she has to force shut down the whole computer and emails her teachers in case that somehow killed her quiz score too.
All of it is dumb, the constant near-bricking of her computer thanks to the mountain of nanny software that is on it is very frustrating. Her phone isn’t much better, and it took maybe ten minutes one night to discover that the TV is similarly impacted by the parental blocks. If she gets truly bored she might try to figure out what Bebefinn is about one day, but right now she’s still got standards. So she’s moved on to unpacking the boxes of books that just got piled by the shelves in the basement.
Most of them are her mother’s romance books, which she bought and read compulsively for a while. There’s a good number in English, since she was trying to get better at it, but there’s also a ton in Korean that Jisu can only sort of read.
She talks it fine, but her reading and writing are pretty bad. It’s a phonetic language at least, and she does know the characters. Has a very basic lexicon of words she knows too, whatever’s left of the language classes. It does mean that reading anything more complicated than a kid’s book involves Jisu sounding half the words out loud to figure out what they are, and it’s both slow and stupid looking.
She puts those at the top of the shelves, out of the way. A desperation move if she gets truly bored here.
Her own books are all in English, mostly fantasy and sci fi YA novels that were popular enough to get talked about at school, and too in demand to get from the library.
Fuck, she doesn’t have access to a library.
Another issue to throw onto the pile, for now she has her books and her mom’s weird trashy romances. And a trip out to the gate with her mom after her classes on Friday because apparently deliveries get dropped off there. Sounds dumb, not convenient at all as Jisu gets to wheel their metal grocery caddy in front of the entire neighborhood.
It’s a long winding road to the gate on foot though, and they have to walk past the tennis courts and the pond where the community’s entire school-age population is watching the new kid with her granny cart.
Jisu’s mother waves at them though, with a smile on her face like it’s not humiliating.
“You should go play with them when we’re done.” She states, and Jisu sighs. She doesn’t want to make new friends, was fine with the old ones before her parents moved her here. Minhee is still funny via text, even though her pictures don’t load.
“Maybe.” She says, catching the eye of another girl around her age that smiles at her before Jisu looks back at the ground.
She thought part of the benefits of getting a house meant that they no longer needed to take trips to package rooms, that things would come to their door, but no. The gatehouse has a little spot for the guard to sit and watch the street, and right beside it is a big room full of boxes addressed to the various residents. “For your safety,” the guard states when Jisu asks. “Who knows who these delivery drivers are.”
Probably just delivery drivers, but her mother nods sagely and Jisu keeps the eye roll to herself. Her mom has always been a little paranoid about people knowing where they lived, if they were home or not.
Normally the men pick up the packages, she learns. The guard will just tell them that they have stuff when they come back through the gate after work. Her dad is still at work with the car, and one of the deliveries is apparently food so there’s a rush this time.
There are so many packages. More than they can carry back, her dad will have to pick up what they leave behind. They sort through the mass and pick all the groceries and smaller items to lug back. The girl that smiled before is outside the tennis courts when they walk by them again, offering to take one of the bags Jisu is carrying on top of dragging the cart.
“Thank you, you’re so kind.” Jisu’s mom says, as Jisu hands the bag over.
“No problem. I’m Hyunjin, by the way.” She says, walking with them with a spring in her step and a smile. She feels annoying, honestly. Jisu has only ever made friends with the weird grouchy losers, not the hot popular girls.
“This is Jisu.” Her mom says, when it’s clear that Jisu won’t be introducing herself. “She’s sixteen.”
“Oh! I’m seventeen. I can be her unnie, show you around!” Hyunjin says and Jisu hates her immediately. She has an unnie already, thank you very much. Minhee would take offense too if she was here. Would probably deck Hyunjin in her delicate face for the insinuation.
Hyunjin shows up the next day too, saying a bunch of the girls are going to the pool and she was wondering if Jisu wanted to come too.
Jisu’s not the one that answered the door, so she’s not the one who gets to decide. Her mom says yes for her and then she is forced to go upstairs to shave and change into a bathing suit so she can make friends.
“I know you’re still getting used to everything, but you can make the best of the situation. Just hang out with them a little, they seem nice.” She says, and Jisu groans. She’s too much of a people pleaser though, especially without Minhee around, so she eventually changes into her bathing suit under a big shirt and baggy shorts. Slips a book into the bag that holds her towel though, because she’s not yet convinced that these girls aren’t vapid as hell.
It's very ‘not like the other girls’ of her, but these are all silly little gated community girls. Jisu grew up on the streets.
Not like, on the streets, really. They always lived in pretty decent areas, but sometimes there’d be drug deals near their apartment at night. It’s definately rougher than the HOA-and-a-pool types.
Hyunjin waves at Jisung from below a big floppy hat as she walks up to the pool. It feels a little weird to be able to just walk up to it, not ticket counter or anything, but Jisu figures that was the gate. The lounge chair next to Hyunjin has been reserved for her though, so she throws her towel across it and settles down to… sit and talk.
Just sit and talk, none of the girls remove their linen summer dresses or even indicate that they might. This is purely a gossip session in the vicinity of water, and Jisu knows none of the names they’re discussing. Hyunjin makes an effort to include her every so often, but that ends soon after Jisu pulls the book out.
“What’s it about?” Hyunjin asks, pointing her chin to the book.
“I don’t know yet.” Jisu says, because it’s one of her mom’s and she just started it. “Romance probably, who knows what else.”
“Oh, fun.” Hyunjin states, but it’s clear that Jisu’s dismissal has been received. She turns to the others and talks about one of the guys that is playing basketball with the pool-side hoop. At least, Jisu’s pretty sure, the girls do cheer and clap when he gets the ball through the hoop.
Jisu’s immersed in her romance with a side of murder-mystery and isn’t looking.