I may be biased, but Park Sehee might be the cutest kid on the planet, I can’t lie.

She’s sitting at her desk, coloring in her notebook, just along the margins though, leaving the bulk of the paper free for notes. When I look over her shoulder, I can see the cute little messages to herself, wishing herself luck or trying to get herself to work hard for the lesson at hand, some words in Korean, some of the words in English.

I mean, all kids are cute being tiny humans and all, but Park Sehee might take the cake.

She’s got a front piece of her hair in a braid, a hot pink hairband along the end of it, and she keeps getting annoyed at it, brushing it behind her ear, just for it to slip forward again and bat her in the face.

Sehee reminds me of a little Raleigh, sitting there at her desk, taking notes, being diligent and disciplined, not paying attention to her surroundings, hyper-focused on the task at hand. It’s already the third week of the school year, and I don’t know what the rest of the year has in store, but there’s something about the kid that just reminds me of me.

No one’s super excited by the prospect of being in class—I don’t know of any kid that is, really, having to stick to a structured time where they’re supposed to learn a second language, and putting in the effort to try and understand it and use it.

It’s even worse since English and Korean are on opposite parts of the language spectrum, essentially speaking backwards in terms of the syntax of a given phrase.

I found it incredibly difficult to learn Korean the first time around, having to alter something in my brain to wait until the end of a given phrase to figure out what the subject or topic of the sentence was actually doing. Korean (along with Chinese and Japanese) are all subject-object-verb languages, completely backwards to a native English speaker.

So I get it, it’s not as easy as a jump from going to English or French, and certainly not as easy as going from French to Spanish or Italian, but it’s what I’m here for, and I’m gonna do my job as best as I can. And the kids, the kids are surprisingly good with English, the way their little sponge-brains pick all the lessons up, even if it’s only the third week of school.

Plus, they’re all really adorable trying to speak English with me, and me playing dumb at not knowing how to speak Korean, taking notes from my high school Spanish teacher, who had had refused to speak in any other language but Spanish to us, making us forge connections between the different words and meanings.

“You know the word!” Sehee flaps her hands in the air, as if she can snatch the English word out of the air, flopping back and forth between the limited English vocabulary she knows and Korean. “Apple! Apple! The word is apple!” she screeches, biting at her hair and waiting for me to either condemn her answer or applaud her for it.

“How many apples do we have?” I ask, enunciating carefully, pointing to the whiteboard that has some notes from last week’s lesson, and they should know enough rudimentary English to be able to understand my question.

One little boy, Lee Jaebeom, holds up his hand, and when I call on him, all he does is show me four fingers, grinning wide. He brings a hand up to cover his mouth to stifle his giggles, which only sets the whole class off, twenty kids giggling like maniacs after they’ve committed a crime and got away with it, no problem.

“So, what does that mean, if there are four apples?” I hold up four fingers to jog their memories of what we learned the week before.

“Oh, it’s apples! More than one. Right?” Sehee asks, shooting her hand up and speaking out of turn. Gosh, she’s cute, the absolute cutest.

I nod, and as if I’ve been run through a time machine, the lesson’s already at its end, the kids waving bye, leaving my class for the day so they can learn their other subjects.

The day goes by quickly for me, distracting me from the niggling in the back of my mind, wondering if Jaeyong is going to call me, borderline obsessing that he has not yet called, even as the week is coming to an end today, which is incongruous with the boy I knew—he always kept his word when we made plans.

But did you make plans, though? You gave him an out, remember?

Maybe you’re not the person he remembers either, huh?

I take the bus home, blinking as Seoul traffic goes by, wishing I had taken up my colleagues on going out for drinks, but knowing I’m gonna go home and sulk, and I’d rather be sulky all by myself, not dragging the mood all the way down around company, especially around people I want to be friends with.

Then again, drinking and eating out seems like a good reward for surviving another week, but I celebrate by going to the gym instead.

I kick my ass on the machines (gotta have an ass like an onion—looks so good you could cry), and then do a quick HIIT session until I’m dripping sweat, now on my way back home, muscles pleasantly sore.

I know I’m going to be the kind of sore that’s going to make me question my life tomorrow, but right now I’ve got the end of day workout glow.

I’m looking forward to wearing my comfy clothes, a pair of sweatpants that belonged to an old boyfriend, and I’m really looking forward to taking a hot shower and getting out of my bra, and my bus stop can’t come fast enough.

I’m finally going to brave the ordering out experience once and for all, as I’m still trying to figure out just how much I eat here, and how much it’s gonna cost me and affect my monthly budget for groceries and treating myself to a meal out. It’s different here, since you can get food delivered basically anywhere, twenty-four seven. If I’m hanging out by the Han River at two in the morning? Someone will deliver fried chicken and beer to me if I want it.

It’s dangerous to have that kind of power, and I’m cautious about breaking the seal, but I’m hungry and I don’t feel like cooking, and convenience is there for convenience’s sake, right?

I’m forestalled by ordering as soon as I get into my apartment, my dumb heart jumping at the name displayed on the screen of my phone, holding it upright and squinting at it, as if that’s going to fix my vision.

“Hello?” I press the phone to my ear, confused at the sound—is he in a car? Is that the air-con I hear going on in the background?

“Yeah, Raleigh? It’s Jaeyong.”

Well, shit.

I don’t feel the need to point out that he is the only friend-type contact I have on my phone since I’ve been living in Seoul, so I don’t. “Yeah. Hi. How are you?”

Jaeyong sighs, deep and long, like he’s trying to move a weight off his chest. I walk into my bedroom, start stripping off my sweaty clothes, fighting with my compression leggings sticking to my skin (gross), and have a quick flash of panic on how I’m going to wiggle my way out of my sweaty, too-small sports bra without the assistance of another human being.

Maybe I’ll be stuck forever, who knows?

“Oh. Good, thanks. Yeah, good.” There’s a beat of silence in which I stop moving, straining to understand something, anything in the silence that follows. “Uh, I know we were supposed to hang out today.”

I snort. “We didn’t make plans. I know you’re busy.”

Jaeyong groans. “My parents decided to leave early, so I drove them to the train station, and they wanted me to call you to apologize, and that they want to reschedule that dinner.”

I head into my bathroom, check out my flushed-as-hell reflection, my hair sticking down along my hairline, roots greasy with sweat. But hey, my six-pack is coming through and there’s a lot there to be proud of, a whole six abdominal muscles’ worth. “Well, you are a diligent son. Thanks for calling and letting me know.”

“Don’t be like that,” Jaeyong says, and I freeze, deer caught in the headlights, staring through my reflection and wishing I could see him in person, read what’s on his face. He’s the one that sounds weird and I’m just picking up what he’s throwing down.

“I’m not being like anything, Jaeyong. I’m not, I promise you.”

“You used to do this to me, too, back in the eighth grade. Hasn’t enough time passed for us to move on?”

I squint at myself in the mirror, wondering where he’s going with this, shivering as the sweat cools my body way down and I start shivering, needing that hot shower a lot quicker than I thought. “I don’t know what kind of answer you’re looking for.”

“Stop saying my name like that,” he snaps, and I glance down at my phone, sure as shit that there’s something wrong with it, that it has to be possessed by a ghost or something, ’cause the kid I knew wouldn’t ever snap at me.

Maybe you didn’t know him at all then, eh?

“That’s your name, yeah? Jaeyong. Jaeyong! Jaeyong!”

“Stop being a brat. You know what I mean.”

I bark out a laugh, whirling in the bathroom to turn on the shower, the whole open space concept without a glass door or shower curtain, something, still throwing me off even if I’m in here on the daily. “I promise you, I don’t.”

“Can I come and see you? Please?” he asks, voice laced with a thread of desperation that I’m sure I’m hearing wrong. It’s been so long, I don’t know this person at all, don’t know him at all.

I stop, stare at my shower knob, ready to turn it on full throttle to boil me from the outside in. “What? Why?” I still have to get my sports bra off, still need to wrestle it off my body somehow without pulling a muscle or getting stuck.

“Don’t you want to hang out with an old friend?”

“Sure,” I say, before my brain can catch up with what my mouth is saying, but it’s not like I can take it back now. “Uh. I need to hop in the shower though, so I need like thirty minutes.”

Jaeyong groans again, and I snap. “You can’t just expect me to drop everything, buddy. I’ll text you my address, but I’m telling you I’m not gonna be ready half an hour from now. All right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it, I got it. What do you want to eat?”

My stomach growls at the mention of food. “Surprise me. Shit, I don’t have any beer, either.”

“I’ll take care of it. Send me your address, and let me know when you’re ready, please.”

I nod, then think again. “Yup. See you in a bit.” I disconnect the phone call and whimper in distress ’cause my apartment is not ready for a visitor, especially one like Jaeyong of all fucking people.

Oh, shit. Oh, shit!

I’m able to wrestle myself out of my sports bra without breaking a bone and end up rushing through my hot-as-hell shower, scrubbing at my scalp with shampoo and scrubbing at my body to get all the sweat off, foregoing the full twenty minutes I usually walk around with a hair mask and then rinse it out.

These are desperate times, and desperate measures demand I abandon the hair mask and toss my hair in an old t-shirt to coax out my natural waves, and speed clean the apartment for the next twenty or so minutes I have left.

Cushions are re-arranged, plates are speed-washed or hidden away in the oven, pissed off at Past Raleigh for not having the forethought of a random visitor popping up. It’s not her fault, though, ’cause I haven’t invited anybody over yet or been on a date or anything to invite anybody over, so I can’t be that pissed off to begin with.

I’m finally finished straightening out my bed (I’m not the type of person who just makes it as soon as they wake up, although I definitely should be—I bet those are people who wake up early enough in the morning and have a full breakfast and a delicious cup of coffee before feeling like they can conquer their day, too, but alas, that ain’t me), when Jaeyong calls me, my thirty minutes up before I can call him.