Hello, I Love You (5 page)

“He probably deserved it,” she said. “Might be good for him, too. He’s not used to people doing anything except fall all over him.”

That makes two of us.

But that was it, all she said. Of course, I might have left out the bit about saying his music was lousy …

I fall into step behind a group of girls I think are Chinese, listen to their chatting and laughing, and watch their colorful backpacks bounce up and down on their backs. Envy blooms inside my chest. Not only do they have people to walk to class with, but they also fit in here, despite being from a different country. What have I got? My memories from Sophie showing me around yesterday and a campus map with words so small I need a microscope to read them.

I pull out my iPod and shove the earbuds into my ears, letting the sounds of the Black Keys sweep over me, a massage for my tense nerves. The jazzy grooves fill me with enough confidence to not break down in the middle of the sidewalk and cry until someone puts me on a plane back to America.

Too bad I couldn’t walk to class with Sophie, but her schedule is totally different than mine. We don’t have a single period together.

My first class is homeroom. I manage to find the classroom and sink into a chair ten minutes early with a sigh of relief. The room looks a lot like those at my old school, though maybe a little smaller, and it slowly fills up with students speaking various languages, representing all parts of the globe. I don’t see any other Americans, but I didn’t have high hopes that I would. Mr. Wang told me my first day that there are no American students this year besides me, since the only other two graduated last year. Figures.

Our teacher arrives last, banging the door against the wall as he enters and shuffling to the podium, his gaze fused with his shoes. He drops his briefcase on the desk with a clatter and finally looks up, his dark eyes moving nervously over each of us.

“Good morning,” he says with a slight British accent. “Welcome to homeroom. My name is Mr. Yun, and these students will be in your class for the rest of the year.”

He then launches into an explanation about the structure of Korean schools and how we’ll be in all the same classes together, and we’ll all be competing to be top of the class. I’m sure Sophie’s getting this exact same spiel in her homeroom and she’s lapping it up, ready to beat out all the other students to be number one.

He also explains that the school’s staff will not take part in any unnecessarily harsh discipline and that bullying will not be tolerated, unlike what we might have expected or heard. I make a mental note to ask Sophie later about how normal Korean schools are, because apparently, they’re more hard-core than American ones. Mr. Yun goes on to explain in-depth classroom policies, blah, blah, blah. I half listen, already thinking forward to my next class, Korean. Maybe it’ll be easier learning another language if I’m immersed in it.

I fight a snort. Nothing’s going to make language acquisition easier. At least, not for me. On a scale of one to ten, I’m a ten to the negative twelfth power in learning languages.

I’m still stressing over my future failure when the bell rings, and the class erupts in chatter. Unlike American schools, where we change rooms for each class, we stay in the same one and our teachers rotate in and out.

I absently flip through my blank notebook, trying to look busy and avoiding any glances from my classmates. Every seat in the room is full except for two, side-by-side in the front row. And the one next to me. We’re grouped in pairs at tables, and everyone else has a seatmate … except for me.

“Hey!” a voice calls, and my head shoots up.

A girl in front of me tilts her head and asks me something in a language I don’t recognize.

I hold her gaze for a few terrifying seconds, heat blistering my face, before I find the courage to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Oh, sorry, sorry.” She bows her head, fighting a smile, but when she turns back around, she and her table partner giggle together, and they both sneak looks over their shoulders at me.

I will my cheeks to stop burning, and relief explodes inside me when our next teacher enters.

“Everyone, take your seats please,” he says in a high-pitched and thickly accented voice, standing behind the podium.

The class quiets down, and I can finally take a deep breath. But a couple seconds later, the door squeaks open again, and everyone’s heads swing around, including mine. A familiar form in black skinny jeans, a red T-shirt, and red sneakers stands in the doorway, and my stomach plummets.

Jason bows his head. “Forgive me, sir,” he says, no trace of embarrassment in either his voice or posture. “I was sick this morning and couldn’t come to homeroom.”

Two girls in the front row put their heads together and whisper behind their hands, and an excited titter rises up from the rest of the class. The eyes of every female in the room—besides yours truly—glue to Jason like he’s their dream incarnate. It triggers my gag reflex.

So he’s famous. Get over it, people. If you talk to him for five minutes, you’ll see how annoying he is.

The teacher dismisses Jason’s apology with a wave.

A girl sneaks her cell phone out of her purse and snaps a shot, but our teacher’s attention zeroes in on her. He frowns.

“Cell phones away, please,” he snaps, and the girl shrinks in her seat. “I will remind everyone that it is against school policy to take any photos on school grounds, especially of our”—his eyes cut to Jason—“students who don’t wish for any attention. Failure to obey school rules will result in being expelled.”

My eyebrows shoot up, but the teacher doesn’t say anything else, and I’m left wondering if Jason somehow bribed the entire staff to keep the other students from squealing to the public that he’s hiding out here.

Jason shifts away from the door, and I realize then that he still hasn’t sat down. He scans the classroom, and my pulse kicks up when I realize the only available seats are the two up front and the one to my left.

He steps past the front row, and I know exactly where he’s headed.

This is
not happening.
The thing about telling someone off is that it feels great at the time, but regret inevitably follows. No matter how obnoxious he was to me, he didn’t deserve my telling him his band sucks.

I stare at my notebook and pink pencil, trying to keep my hair as a barricade between my face and his eyes as he sits. He says nothing to me, makes no sign of recognition, and my irritation flares. He can’t not know who I am, right? I’m, like, the only freaking American at this entire school, and I can guarantee I’m the only white hipster walking around.

No, he’s just ignoring me.

I quickly learn that this teacher, whose name I discover is Mr. Seo, is even duller than Mr. Yun, and I have to pay close attention to what he says, since his accent’s so thick.

“Turn your books to page five, please,” he says. “First, we will talk about the speech levels in the Korean language.”

I skim the page, then look ahead at later chapters, which are full of characters and symbols that look more like miniature pieces of art than letters. Even the English phonetics beside the Korean characters baffle my brain, letters squished together and broken up to form unintelligible sounds and syllables I can’t even guess how to pronounce.

I am in way over my head, and it’s only the first day.

“The first level is called
Hasoseo-che,
” he continues. “It was used when a person talked to a king or official, but we don’t use this anymore except in the Bible.
Hapsyo-che
is next, and it is called ‘formal polite.’”

He keeps talking, but he’s already lost me. I peer out the window and let my mind drift.

“Perform the exercise on page six with the partner beside you,” Mr. Seo says, cutting through my daydreams. “Read the scenario and decide which speech level you would use to speak to that person.”

Shoot. I should have been listening. I cut my eyes over to Jason, who shares my two-person table, and cringe. We have to talk. I can’t ignore him, can’t pretend he’s not ignoring me. Marvelous.

I swallow the guilt weighing heavily in my gut. “So … do you understand any of this?”

He stares down at the page and doesn’t answer.

“Kind of a dumb question,” I mutter. “You’re Korean. Why are you in this class, anyway?”

Other students around us chat about the exercise, but I read back over the instructions again. What am I doing in this class? I’m definitely going to need a tutor. This does not bode well for my GPA.

“Why are there so many different levels of formality?” I ask Jason, praying he’s feeling gracious. “I don’t get it.”

“It has to do with respect,” he says, shocking me. “You want to give respect to people who have authority over you or are older.”

“Okay, I get that, but
seven
levels?”

“It’s just part of the culture. And it’s not like we use all seven every day.” He still studies the textbook like it will reveal the cure for cancer or how to achieve world peace. “You’ll need to be more culturally intelligent if you want to live here.”

Culturally intelligent
. Why didn’t he just say
You’ll need to stop being an American elitist?
That’s what he meant. I think.

“Why are you even in this class?” I ask again, fighting my instinct to call him on the insult. “Don’t you already speak Korean?”

He doesn’t deign to respond, and my irritation flares.

“I mean, if
I
were a famous rock star, I wouldn’t be in school at all,” I say, hoping my sarcasm is apparent. “I’m surprised you even have time for classes. I would have thought you’d be too busy answering fan letters. That’s what you were really doing this morning, right? You weren’t sick, you were checking online message boards, Googling yourself. Shouldn’t you have a private tutor that gives you all the right answers or something?”

He finally tears his gaze away from the book and looks at me. I mean, really looks at me, probably for the first time since we’ve met. I stare back at his dark eyes, jitters starting in my hands and spreading throughout the rest of my body.

“I came here because I wanted to go to a real school,” he says. “If I didn’t, I would have stayed in Seoul—with a tutor that ‘gives me all the right answers.’”

“Or America.”

“What?”

“You could have stayed in America, too. Then you wouldn’t be taking a class for a language you already know.”

His jaw tightens. “Maybe.”

“Sophie told me you were running away from something when you came here. What was it?” A small voice inside my brain screams for me to shut up. I’m crossing a million social boundaries right now. But I can’t seem to keep my trap shut.

“I wasn’t running,” he asserts, though his expression remains impassive. “I wanted to go to school.”

I’ve got him on the defensive. I keep pushing: “And there aren’t schools in Seoul?”

“None that I wanted to go to.”

I squeeze fake sympathy into my voice. “Because you couldn’t handle all the screaming fans? Yes, I’m sure that gets
so
tiring—being famous.”

Actually, it does. I grew up with both Dad and Nathan complaining about it. That’s why we didn’t live in L.A. or New York—there are more paparazzi and tourists, and you get hounded a lot more. I also read online the other day that some KPOP fans can be kind of insane—like, stalker insane—way more intense than what Western musicians experience.

But I choose to keep my understanding to myself. I’ve had my fill of musicians and their fan complexes. You see your boyfriend with his tongue down another girl’s throat after his show and the way the music industry destroyed your family, and you can’t take another egotistical guitar boy.

“You know, you’re pretty bitter for only being in high school,” he observes.

My mouth literally falls open, and I gape at him. “You—you—” I sputter.

He tilts his head, a slight smirk curling his lips. “You’ve finally run out of things to say.”

“And you’ve found your voice,” I grind out between clenched teeth.

A chuckle rumbles in the back of his throat, and if I wasn’t so pissed, it might strike me as cute. As it is, though, I just want to slap him. I’ve never met such an arrogant, provoking boy in my entire life.

“Class is over,” Mr. Seo pronounces just before the bell, cutting into my glaring at Jason.

Jason gathers his things and stands as the rest of the students disperse for a scheduled break between classes, throwing over his shoulder in a voice thick with sarcasm, “See you around, sunshine.”

My fingers clench around the edge of the table until my knuckles turn white, and I watch him disappear through the doorway. I don’t care if Sophie is my roommate. I hate him. No, seriously. I’m about to get on his band’s Facebook page and say all the slanderous things I can think of, then Google translate those insults and post them
again
—but in Korean.

It’s going to be a long year.

Chapter Four

Thursday brings more classes, but they aren’t as eventful as my first day.

Sophie and I meet up for dinner in the dining hall at five thirty, and I’m unpleasantly surprised to find the three members of Eden sitting together at a table in the corner, away from the other students, who all stare at the band—while trying to look like they’re
not
staring.

I drag my feet behind Sophie as she rushes over to the boys and plants herself as close to Tae Hwa as is socially acceptable. Which leaves the seat by Jason on the other side of the table or the tiny space between Yoon Jae and the end of the bench.

I choose the latter.

Yoon Jae graciously scoots over to give me some more room, and I flash him a grateful smile. He really is cute. And nice. Take that, Jason!

“What did you think about our math teacher, Sophie?” Yoon Jae asks between bites of some soupy tofu concoction. “You were worried he would be difficult, yes?”

Sophie nods. “Yeah, but I really liked him.” She leans her head toward Tae Hwa and presumably translates for him.