Nae Chingu (My Friends) Chapter One

Nae Chingu (My Friends)

Chapter One

It seemed so long ago that I first passed through these high school doors as a freshman and faced the horrors that came with it. Of course, being a freshman is hard enough but when you are being sent to a new school with no friends in a foreign country on top of it, well, the experience was more than horrifying. 

The recruiter must have done a real mind-bender on my father when he said "You can travel the world" because my father joined the Navy shortly thereafter and hasn't stopped travelling since. At first my mother, a newlywed at the time, was ecstatic at the thought of traveling around the world. So far I have lived in England, Spain and Germany. However, moving to South Korea was apparently too much for her because after nearly 20 years of marriage  she called it quits and moved back to the States. I could have almost hated her for leaving me here if she hadn't been so distraught at the thought. She assured me as soon as she was settled in America she would bring me home with her but there was a problem. By the time she got settled, I had already settled into Seoul and had no desire to leave. That was three years ago.

The last three years have been tumultuous at best but I had found my niche at Seoul Foreign Language High School, SFLHS for short as the students liked to call it. The schoolwork was grueling but that was to be expected considering it was one of the most prestigious schools in Seoul. The only reason I got to take the entrance exam at all was because my father was a well known Navy personnel and because I had spent almost 7 full years in Germany and could speak the language fluently. Because the school specialized in languages such as German, I was almost a shoe in  but I still had to study day and night for the entrance exam and that was nothing compared to the interview! Three years later and I still pitied everyone who had to partake in both entrance requirements. 

Now, sitting in my homeroom waiting for school to start, it all seemed so long ago. It was the first day of my senior year and this would prove to be the most difficult year of my entire high school experience. Listening to my iPod, I impatiently waited for my best friend to show up but like always she was habitually late. Kim Mae Ri, Drama Writing Extraordinaire as she liked to call herself, finally burst through the door a little while later with her usual flamboyant flair and plopped  herself down at the desk in front of me. I no longer batted an eye at her sometimes outrageous outfits which was saying something considering we were required to wear plain tan uniforms. Although the skirt was mandatory for girls, we were encouraged to wear nylons under our skirts to protect our modesty. Because of this, it wasn't uncommon to see girls wearing knee or thigh high stockings or, if you were Mae Ri, pink and white horizontally striped nylons. Her long, black hair was braided into two ponytails which were each accented with a pink and white polka dotted bow. I had no doubt that Mae Ri had matching eye-shadow and under normal circumstances, would have applied it to her face except our school had rules against wearing make-up. Not that she needed make-up to look absolutely stunning. Like most Koreans, she was slender from her feet to her face which I couldn't help being jealous about. Not that I was fat by any means, I just would never be able to exchange clothes with Mae Ri, not unless I wanted to become anorexic in the process. 

It was hard not to feel inadequate when you were constantly surrounded by above-average looking people but I stopped letting it bother me a long time ago. Although my father was as white as white bread, I had my mother to thank for my tan skin. It was her Native American ethnicity that saved me from being as lily white as my name which also happened to be Lily. Back in Germany, most people had short hair so I tended to keep my hair shorter to help feel like less of an outsider so it wasn't a surprise that when I was moved to Korea, I tended to keep my hair longer for the same reasons. As long as it was, I still wasn't able to make it look as elegant as Mae Ri's always seemed to be but then again, she woke up almost two hours before she had to in order for it to look that way and I valued my sleep way to much to sacrifice two hours of it for such a frivolous reason.

    "Mae Ri-ya, tangshineun gugeoseul bolsseubnikka*?" I asked her as soon as she sat down. 

    "No, my dad wouldn't let me watch it! He told me I should be studying but honestly, school hasn't even started yet!" As she replied in Korean, her voice reached the high pitch it usually did when she felt like she'd been wronged. In my opinion, I totally understood her annoyance. "How was it?" 

    "I can't tell you," I smiled smugly knowing that by lunch she would get the truth out of me anyways. 

    "Ya!*" she flounced while she turned around in her seat in feigned annoyance. 

    "It's the first day of class, how could you two be fighting already?" I turned and looked at Kim Jong Hwa, another classmate and good friend of mine. You know those memes about nerdy guys being cute, well, Jong Hwa was the very reason for those memes. I had a serious crush on him but I also knew he held a torch for Mae Ri so our unrequited love triangle couldn't be helped. Jong Hwa wore square framed glasses on his oval face but it really was his overtly friendly nature that was so endearing. Even though he looked like he stepped off the pages of GQ--you know, if GQ had a high school, nerdy edition--he also had the smarts to go with the whole package. You had to be relatively smart to even get accepted into SFLHS but Jong Hwa was genius level and put most of us--most of the school--to shame with his brains. 

The only person who really challenged his smarts was Lee Ji Soo. He too was ridiculously smart and made it look effortless so studying with him was hard. Ji Soo, Jong Hwa's best friend, casually walked in behind Jong Hwa and took a seat at a random desk. He was the exact opposite of Jong Hwa and was often perceived as arrogant but the three of us knew different. Underneath his egocentric exterior was an inconceivably kind and caring person that only a few were privy to. I was lucky to be one of them. It saddened me that he wasn't in our class but in a classroom down the hall. He swore the people were stupid and primal in his class so he usually hung out in our room until school started. If I were the plain one, Mae Ri the beautiful one and Jong Hwa the nerdy guy then Ji Soo was the equivalent to the female fashionista. He always seemed to have the perfect accessories and today it was a soft looking fedora that perfectly framed his expertly coiffed hair, he had rings on nearly all of his fingers and the necklace was nothing short of complimentary to his entire ensemble. He made the ugly, tan uniforms look cool. I knew back in the States his sexual orientation would have been questioned but in Korea, it was almost a crime to not look your best regardless of whether you were a male or a female. It was one of the many things I appreciated about the Korean culture. 

    "So what're you two fighting about now," Ji Soo asked as he settled into the chair.

    "She missed "Snow Water" last night," I explained as she 'humphed' at me. 

    "Oh, it was a good one too," chimed Jong Hwa as he studiously pulled out his text books and prepared for our first class. He had to duck or else be assaulted by the pen Mae Ri whipped at him. He chuckled as he picked up the pen and passed it back to Mae Ri fearlessly. Jong Hwa didn't even like TV, he only watched it because Mae Ri wanted to be a screenwriter for TV dramas when she graduated and felt that watching them at least gave him some common ground with her. 

    "Ya! Seriously, the both of you are being too much don't you think?" She complained.

    "It doesn't feel like school unless Mae Ri-ya is complaining about something," said another newcomer, Shin Joo Jin, as he walked through the door followed by his normal entourage, Mool Min Gook and Mool Bin Gook--twin brothers. We all laughed except Mae Ri. 

Slowly the classroom filled up and the ambient noise increased as people reconnected with friends after the school break. Everyone knew everyone else because we had been in the same classroom with the same classmates for three years. This was a new transition from changing classrooms every forty-five minutes like in Germany. Oddly, being around the same people day in and day out with only the teacher changing was comforting and more conducive to learning.

Soon the homeroom teacher, Seonsaengnim Cho, arrived and welcomed us all back in her usual perky manner before promptly kicking Ji Soo back to his classroom. It was hard to not to like our homeroom teacher, though, because she was  always so bright. 

    "Long time no see, everyone! Did everyone have a good break?" She chirp. Several "Ne*"'s and "Anieyo*"'s were murmured in response, "Well, this will be a difficult year so I hope you all rested up!"

And just like that....school was back in session.

To Be Continued...
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*tangshineun gugeoseul bolsseubnikka : "Did you see it?"

*Ya : Korean exclamation for "Hey!" An admonishment, sometimes.

*Ne : "Yes"

*Anieyo : "No"