Chapter 13

According to Na Young, I was one of "those stupid girls." I certainly didn't agree with her but even I had to admit that I'd been blessed with certain qualities that I'd rather not have. For one, I was one of those girls whose breasts swelled up during her period which was why I had bras in two different cup sizes. I was also one of those girls who got really fidgety after eating too much sugar but most of all, I was one of those girls who fell for any guy who liked her.

It didn't really matter if the guy was tall or short, cute or not-so-cute but the minute I heard a guy had expressed some interest in me, I found myself intrigued. It was why Na Young could prank me and in the end, I embarrassed myself in front of a guy I later found out didn't even know my name. In fact, Min Ki was the only guy I'd liked on my own although my friends had insisted I started to like him because he'd begun to be especially nice to me. But whatever.

On to Ryan Cho. Till I received that fateful letter from Min Ki, as far as I was concerned, he was just a guy I'd become friendly with. We were cool and he was nice to me but that was about it. Nothing more. Possibly something less. But now that Min Ki had decided that he might have ulterior motives, all I could do was spend my time trying to see if anything he'd done or said had hinted that he was somehow attracted to me.

He'd certainly never smiled at me the way Jonathan had and I honestly felt he was pretty much just being nice to me because I was the new girl and we had a mutual friend in Ali. But was there more to it?

With these thoughts floating in my head, I decided to investigate.


Aside from History, he was also in my Physics class so when I walked into my third period class, I couldn't help but look for him. I didn't even know what I'd planned to do when I found him but luckily he hadn't arrived yet. I took a seat at the back of the class and a few seconds before the teacher arrived, he strolled in without a care in the world.

The only reason I was in AP Physics was that my old school's curriculum was more advanced than Brighton's and since I'd already learned about centripetal force, I didn't feel bad for not listening to the teacher drone on and on about velocity and mass and other boring stuff. I probably should have found a productive way to occupy myself but all I could do was watch Ryan write notes, stare out of the window, yawn, scratch his head, rummage through his bag, lend his calculator the girl sitting next to him and pop a Tic Tac.

Towards the end of class, when she returned his calculator to him, he smiled at her warmly, in exactly the same way he smiled at me. Surely it wasn't possible he liked her too, right? He wasn't just being nice to her so that he could get an opportunity to ask her out, right? Right?



***

"Su Jin, come here!" Ali yelled to the entire cafeteria. She waved for me to join her at her table. Since there were no guys with her, namely any ones with names beginning with R, I was perfectly willing to sit with her but did she really need to get the entire cafeteria to stare at me? Less than a minute later, I dropped my bag on an empty seat and smiled at the skinny blonde girl sitting next to her.

"Hi, I'm Su J—"

"You can introduce yourself later. You'd better go and get your food before all the good stuff's gone," Ali instructed.


About ten minutes later, when I returned with my tray, Ryan was sitting with them. I stood there rooted to the ground thinking of what to do. Should I go and sit with Seung Mi and the rest of my brother's fans or should I go back to Ali and Lisa?

"What's wrong with you?" Ali yelled from the table. "Aren't you coming to sit here?"

For the second time in ten minutes, the entire cafeteria stared at me as I walked to the table. I dropped the tray on the other end of the table so I could be as far away from Ryan as possible. The table sat about eight or ten people so it really wasn't a hard feat to accomplish.

"Do we smell?" Ali asked curiously. "Why are you sitting over there?"

I shrugged. "No reason."

She looked at me like I was crazy but to my relief, didn't press the issue. "Su Jin, I don't think you've met Lisa," she said, pointing her fork at the girl next to her. Other than her blonde hair, she also had blue eyes and heavily mascaraed dark lashes. She had quite a few freckles on her face but was quite pretty despite them.

"Hi," she said, waving at me. "You don't know me but you've probably heard the story of the pregnant girl in Switzerland."

"The one with the nuns?" I looked to Ali for confirmation.

"Yes, that one except the truth is far less interesting - she was only at fat camp," Ali said regretfully.


I began to laugh until the words sunk in. Fat camp? I thought as I tried to hide my shock. Looking at her, I wouldn't have guessed that she'd ever had a weight problem.

"Yeah, you've lost weight but I didn't think you needed to in the first place," Ryan said.

Lisa shrugged. "What Mummy wants, Mummy gets."

I watched as Ryan and Lisa interacted and other than the familiarity that came with knowing someone for a reasonable length of time, he really didn't treat her any differently from how he treated me.

I sat and ate, watching the three of them as they talked about their Labor Day festivities and Ali joking about a party where they had to bring their own meat and I felt a little jealous that I wasn't in on any of their inside jokes. The three of them were kind by trying to include me in their conversation but I couldn't help but feel left out. They reminded me so much of hanging out with Na Young, Tae Ran and Il Woo that I promised myself to email them as soon as I got out of the cafeteria. I really did miss them. I sat there and wondered if I'd ever develop that kind of friendship with anyone in America.

"You're such a pair of panties," a male voice said, interrupting my thoughts. I looked up and saw one of Ryan's friends shaking his head and laughing.

His friend smiled to us as a greeting and we smiled back.

"What happened to bros before hoes?" his friend asked.

"Who's a ho?" Lisa and Ali asked in unison. For my part, I didn't know what garden tools had to do with us.

"You and your big mouth." Ryan crumbled up a napkin into a ball and threw it at him. "Hey girls," he said, getting up and picking up his tray. "I need to get something from that idiot over there. I'll see you later."



***



Ryan nodded at me before occupying the seat next to mine. It was History class and we had about two minutes before Miss. Saunders walked in and started dictating her notes.

"Hey," he said, putting his hand on my shoulder.

This minute I felt his weight on my shoulder, my heart started beating heavily. I'd already decided that we were just friends and he felt absolutely nothing towards me but why was he touching me? Why?

The longer it stayed there, the heavier it felt and I could already feel my body buckling under the weight. From the corner of my eye, I looked at his long fingers and chewed up fingernails and didn't know what to do. Should I just casually slap his hand off? Or could I move my shoulder in a way that made his hand fall off on its own?

I was in the middle of eenie-meenie-minie-moe when I noticed him moving closer to me. His head moved closer to mine and I noticed a weird glint in his eye. I bit my lip. I'd seen enough American movies to know what was coming next. Help!

I glanced at the rest of the class but everyone else was lost in their own world. No one was looking at us and nobody cared that Ryan Cho was about to assault me.

I looked back at him and his eyes locked with mine. As he moved closer to me, reflexively, I inched back. The horror movie had begun and Min Ki had been right. I couldn't even tell him to back off because my lips had been clamped shut and my arms had transformed into planks of wood.

"What is wrong with you?" he suddenly asked.

I gulped. "Nothing?"

He frowned. "Nothing? Was that a question or an answer?"

What the hell was wrong with me? I had a boyfriend and I was a strong woman so there was no need to cower because some guy was moving close to me. "Can you move back a little?" I said with my newly found confidence.

He rolled his eyes. "What's your problem? I'm just giving you my notes," he said, dropping another stack of stapled sheets on my desk. He sat back straight in his chair and just shook his head.

"Oh," I said sheepishly, feeling like the idiot I was. "But you don't need to make copies, you know? I can just copy them off you."

"Sorry," he said, shaking his head. "I don't trust anyone with my notes – I've been burned too many times."

I stole a glance without him noticing. If he was interested in me, wouldn't he be so aware of me that he'd flinch or at least move if I looked at him? But with him, nothing. I looked at him one more time and he just kept reading his textbook, completely oblivious of me. I sighed. There was absolutely no way this guy had a thing for me because while I was sitting there, red faced and sweaty, he was completely unaffected. In fact, I wasn't even sure he realized that I was a girl. I wasn't disappointed but dang. I picked up the notes he'd given me and flipped the first page over. His handwriting was unnecessarily neat. I sighed. Oppa was wrong but what he didn't know couldn't hurt him, right? There was no harm in keeping Ryan as a friend without his knowledge. Right?




***



Now sure that Ryan only thought of me as another girl in his class, I felt pretty good about hanging out with him and Ali. And even though Min Ki was right about finding new friends, I at least felt fine hanging out with Ryan and Ali, together or separately. As time passed, we hung out at school and even progressed to calling one another on the phone after school hours. So one fateful evening, while I was at a bookstore entertaining myself as my brother picked up one of his school books, I didn't hesitate to pick up the flyer that was practically calling Ryan's name. And why wouldn't I? It was something friends did.