My vision is a blur of colors passing me by; of sounds, of cars, of crying. There's a split second where everything escapes me — my surroundings, weight and breath. I'm in the air like something mythical, something magical, but gravity pulls me, a crushing reality in my ribs and elbows and head. I roll onto my back and with a glimpse of the sky, I think that the world is big enough to encompass all of my happiness and still small enough to steal my balance, to make me fall.

My vision is a blur of upside down colors, passing car lights, footsteps that walk far and away. Far and away.

You approach me uninvited, like you're really a fallen blossom brought down by complete chance, by the wind.

It's the first time in a long time that I can see with such clarity of details.

You're brighter than you have any right to be.

"Your friend is weird."

She doesn't look up when she says it, still absentmindedly drawing a flower on the corner of her notebook. The hands of the clock seem to stand still above the blackboard, a beginning that hadn't quite begun, chairs being scraped across the wooden floor. The morning is the color of faded summer in photographs.

"Why is that?"

The flower under her touch grows and grows in folded petals, the stem reaching across the top of her page, just like the blush coming from deep inside of her, up and up it goes, all the way to the tip of her ears.

"He asked if he could kiss me."

She does look up when her friend laughs obnoxiously loud, a laugh that draws the attention of every student in the classroom and scares away the birds in the trees outside the window. She kicks his chair and the action causes him to choke on air. A couple seconds later, he's hiccupping. It's a punishment hardly anyone deserves, she knows, but a fit of hiccups is hardly as curious as a goodhearted laugh, and soon all of the heads are already turning away from where she hid herself behind her own hair. Teenage attention is fickle and vain, she thinks thankfully to her flowers on her notebook.

"That doesn't sound like him," her friend says between hiccups and she looks at him without lifting her head.

"But he did ask."

Kim Baek Ah rests his hands on the back of his chair then his chin on top of them, blinking up at her; a comical pair of tall and short beauty regarding each other from different points of their usual view.

"At least he asked."

She hits him on the head with the notebook and the attention it grants them is quickly dismissed by the sound of the bell. Homeroom starts and she collects herself in perfect posture and imperfect attention, his image tickling at the back of her mind with a kind smile and long eyelashes, his eyes low like Baek Ah's had been, head resting on arms, his black hair being softly blown aside like the first leaves in the autumn wind.

She opens her books as noisily as she can, fighting the memories away like a warrior with a dragon, and all of her efforts are missed by her classmates, each one of them with a battle of their own to fight. Mr. Choi speaks of stories like they've truly existed, prose and poetry coming alive out of his mouth. When he speaks, Hae Soo listens, enjoys, daydreams of the images he creates, and all other thoughts disappear. Later on, Baek Ah will ask her about underlying symbolism and meanings and she could tell him all of it because she saw it all. In Mr. Choi's classes, Hae Soo forgets all, every disappointment and sleepless night, every ripped letter, every—

Can I kiss you?

She wishes she could jump inside the books and a thousand years into the past to escape that stupid boy.

He does pay attention. His eyes flicker through her notes and her books and he follows her directions, the tip of her mechanical pencil, and he seems to hang onto her every word and explanation. But whenever his eyes focus on her lips, she's self-conscious and she hates it. Baek Ah said he needed tutoring and she was happy to tutor, she's always glad to help, but now he makes her uncomfortable and she just wants to run away.

"Why?" He asks and she blinks back into reality, back into his dark and confused eyes. She looks down at their subject spread out across the park's table, and she can't seem to find his trail of thought in the natural disaster of her emotions. "I mean, why is she such a remarkable woman in this period if she posed as a man? Wouldn't it be braver to reveal herself as a woman from the start?"

Hae Soo's eyes light up. They had covered so many things that day, they had talked of art and history and literature, until they finally arrived at his assignment, at all the critical writing he had to write on a film. Soo's hands browse the books with ease to find all the pictures she wants to show him, her words running without brakes. She loves female artists and it shows with every exaggerated gesture, with every example she gives, brave women who changed history, books that would never be forgotten. Soo talks until her throat begs for water.

It is only then that she notices him at that particular moment. The way he had leaned sideways, eyes barely blinking, fully paying attention to her. She had barely noticed Wang So was good-looking on the day they met, the eternity of a month ago, but it had only become glaringly obvious after he had asked to kiss her. It's been a week. The whole time since then, she'd notice the particular way in which he'd smirk, the arch of his eyebrow when understood something, the way he'd chew on his straw when he was engrossed in reading, and mostly the way he looked at her like she was a never-ending source of amusement.

She tries not to throw water on his face and flee the scene.

"Baek Ah was right," he says, closing a few books and putting them away. "You really do make things clear and easy."

Soo pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose. She would have retorted if he didn't seem to be genuinely praising her, not even looking up at her to watch her reaction. He lays the math textbooks on the table and she groans.

"Must we?"

Wang So has a way of looking at her like he's unveiling his eyes, like he knows a deeper truth that makes him older and wiser, like he reflects the very sun in his irises. But when he leans forward and smirks at her, he's only a teenager, none the wiser, eager to make a fool out of her.

"I thought you had a mock exam next week."

He sits beside her so she can look as he lays out formulas with ease, so she can accompany his reasoning behind every problem and graphic, and he never once asks her to kiss him, not that day, just like every other day since he had first asked. She tries to consciously avoid touching him even though they're sitting close, but every once in a while, she leans a little closer to pay attention to his explanations, to point at something she didn't understand.

She closes her hands in anxiety as he looks over her shoulder at her resolution of a particularly complicated problem.

"Hae Soo, you do realize your numbers are still incredibly hard to read."

"Hey!"

He's so close when she turns her head to yell at him that she quickly faces her notebook again. The thing she truly can't understand above all, above math, above literature and history, is why he made her sway on that day he had asked for a kiss, and why she wouldn't stop swaying at the sight of his white teeth and honest, brief laughs. The question twists inside of her like a knife.

At the end of that afternoon, crushing leaves under her feet on the way home, Hae Soo thinks Wang So is much more of a mystery than trigonometry, and she has no formula to figure him out.