Paper Cranes
The setting sun found Ling Xiaoyu chin-deep in layered blankets and pensive remorse.
If you happened to see her then, you'd think you were at the wrong house. Once bright brown eyes had lost their vigor, the darkened crescents beneath them telling of an inner struggle.
She wanted nothing more than to stay in bed for the remainder of the week, to close herself off from everything and just be.
Her bedroom, elegantly decorated with soft stuffed animals and colorful posters, did nothing to lift her spirits this time. Even the sight of Panda, her most loyal companion, had failed to soften her demeanor when she returned home from school that afternoon.
He was gone.
Gone, a state she'd come to find familiar when dealing with him, though never one she could be sure he was going to come back from.
She'd tried to help him with his familial turmoil. Tried, tried, and tried some more. And where did that get her?
She felt like a worthless failure.
The silence blanketing the room was disrupted by an abrupt knock at the door. She groaned in disappointment, impulsively hiding her face beneath the covers. She didn't want—no, need anyone to see her like this.
The knocking persisted. She had to get up.
She tossed the covers aside and descended to the polished wooden floor, slipping slightly due to the thick white knee socks of her uniform. Distracted, she'd completely forgotten to change out of her school clothes.
The door creaked ajar to divulge the small frame of Wang Jinrei, her grandfather and mentor.
"A package came for you today, Xiao," he said quietly, offering her a white box.
She forced a smile to show her appreciation and receded, slowly shutting the door once more.
She slumped on the edge of her bed as she tore at the folds of the box. The address on the side was written in a language she couldn't decipher, though it looked to be Korean.
The parcel contained a plastic cylinder filled with paper cranes, enough to reach the brim. They were relatively small in size, but vibrant, and Xiaoyu mused for a moment that she was holding a rainbow in a bottle.
Intrigued, she removed the lid and reached inside, retrieving a crane from the top layer that happened to be her favorite color, a pale hue of pink. She turned the paper crane over and over in her palm. It was then that she noticed a trail of black ink coming from the inside.
Taken aback, she carefully unfolded the crane and saw that there was writing on its underside. Letting out a sigh of relief that the script was in English, a language that she could interpret, she read it aloud to herself.
"Xiao! It's Hwoarang."
He was one of the last people she'd expected to hear from. She assumed he'd be out riding his motorcycle and staging fights in the lapse between tournaments.
Setting the opened crane beside her on the bed, she chose another from the cylinder, this time a yellow one.
"How are you? Chipper as always, I hope."
A purple crane. "If not, you know all you have to do is call and I'll be on the next flight to China."
The comment got a giggle out of her. He was definitely one to be protective.
A red crane. "I'm doing fine. And yes, I'm sure about that."
Xiaoyu occupied herself with reading the paper cranes that had been packed inside the plastic jar, leaning back against her pillow to further comfort herself. Most of his messages made her smile, while others made her shake her head and laugh, cleverly incorporated perverted jokes she'd become accustomed to.
One of his comments in particular, embedded within an orange crane, caught her attention.
"You're too good for Kazama. He doesn't deserve to have someone like you."
She blinked.
She wanted to help Jin, to save him from whatever he was running from. Yet he wanted no parts of it, and never even gave her a proper explanation. He had a silly way of making her feel unworthy of his attention, as if she were doing something wrong. For the first time it occurred to her that maybe—just maybe, it was actually the other way around.
A green crane. "There are one hundred cranes in this container. Go ahead and count them. I made one for every time I thought about you today."
Her conscience reminded her that that was most likely one hundred times more than Jin had.
It didn't take long for the guilt to sink in. An incredibly sweet sentiment from such an unlikely source, and who had she been thinking about all day?
She was always worried. She wondered what he was doing, where he was, if he was safe, if he was afraid.
For what?
Somewhere along the way, he had consumed her.
She nibbled on her bottom lip as she retrieved the last crane, which was a rich shade of blue. "To be honest, Xiao, I've thought about you a lot more than that. I always do. But the container wasn't big enough to hold them all."
Maybe, just maybe—
There was another knock at the door.
Xiaoyu, caught up in the suspense of the moment, jumped. The container tipped over the side of the bed and clanged loudly to the floor, making her cringe.
"Who is it?" she called, her voice tumbling over her lips softer than she'd anticipated.
"It's me," a familiar voice answered from behind the door.
When she answered the door for the second time that evening, the bounce had returned to her step.