The second semester of third grade was already halfway over, and May had arrived.
A mild spring breeze swept through Central Park, stirring the dense green foliage. Drowsy sunlight spilled across the elegant limestone facade of the old building on Fifth Avenue overlooking the park.
For the first time that year, Jiyu wore a short-sleeved summer blouse beneath her uniform dress. Aejeong had volunteered to serve on the organizing committee for the school charity bazaar and could not pick her up that day, so she had asked Deaconess Song Soon-ye to come instead.
Soon-ye, now well into her sixties, had looked after Jiyu from time to time ever since she was a newborn. Although she had lived in America for nearly thirty years, she still spoke very little English. She was one of the main reasons Jiyu had grown up fluent in Korean.
Even the painfully shy Jiyu could chatter away like any ordinary girl her age around the kind and gentle Soon-ye.
As she walked toward Fifth Avenue holding Soon-ye’s hand, Hunter’s face suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
“Eek!”
Jiyu froze in shock and stopped dead.
“Come to the treehouse as soon as you get home.”
Hunter leaned close and whispered into the ear of the rigid, shrinking Jiyu.
Every child nearby turned to look at them at once.
Without waiting for an answer, Hunter disappeared into the after-school crowd as abruptly as he had appeared.
‘The treehouse?’
There was a treehouse with a slide in the courtyard of their apartment building. He must have meant for her to meet him there.
Whenever Hunter grew bored in the playroom, Rosa would take them down to the treehouse in the courtyard. Hunter was like a fireball, spraying sparks in every direction.
While Jiyu went down the slide a few times or sat on the swing, idly kicking her legs, Hunter was incapable of containing the explosive energy packed inside him. He would scramble onto the roof of the treehouse, spread his arms as though he were about to take flight, and leap off.
Simply watching Hunter was enough to drain Jiyu’s energy, so she would quickly retreat inside the treehouse and sit there quietly with a book.
Hunter, for his part, preferred turning the playground upside down by himself to playing with the irritating little bookworm who was always lingering nearby. And so the two of them occupied the same space while playing entirely separate games.
This was the first time Hunter had ever asked her to meet him somewhere. They already saw far too much of each other without making any special effort.
‘Why the treehouse, of all places?’
As Jiyu stood there looking puzzled, someone else suddenly leaned into her field of vision.
“Olivia! Are you friends with Hunter Hamilton?”
Sienna asked, her large sky-blue eyes sparkling with curiosity. She was the most popular girl among the third-grade girls.
Startled, Jiyu hesitated before answering.
“…No.”
Sienna had never gone out of her way to speak to her before. It was not that she bore Jiyu any particular ill will. She simply had no interest in the bookworm who sat quietly in a corner reading.
She only spent time with the children from the social circle her mother had so carefully cultivated.
Sienna’s mother, Rebecca Reed, was well known among the parents of the third-grade students. The previous semester, the children had been assigned a project on a female historical figure or another famous woman they admired. Sienna had made her presentation board about Rebecca and introduced her to the class with unmistakable pride.
Rebecca was an alumna of Aster School who had worked as an editor at a renowned fashion magazine before becoming a womenswear designer. With hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, she openly displayed her lavish, glamorous lifestyle to the public.
Sienna often appeared on her accounts as well. Thanks to that, mother and daughter were treated almost like celebrities at school.
Rebecca frequently hosted extravagant parties for Sienna at their townhouse, and the third-grade girls were desperate to receive an invitation to one of Sienna’s sleepovers.
Sienna tilted her head as she studied Jiyu.
“I feel like I’ve seen the two of you together before. Aren’t you friends?”
Was Hunter her friend?
Jiyu could not answer immediately.
Strictly speaking, Hunter was the gatekeeper who held the key to the treasure island that was the library in the playroom. If she wanted to keep going in there, she had to remain in his good graces.
But she could hardly say that aloud.
There was no denying that they spent nearly as much time together as family. Yet whenever they passed each other at school, they behaved like strangers, never so much as acknowledging one another.
There was no particular reason for it. They had been that way since kindergarten, and trying to greet each other now would only have felt awkward.
More importantly, Hunter hated her.
Jiyu was no longer as frightened of him as she once had been, but she did not like him either. That made Sienna’s question surprisingly difficult to answer.
What were you supposed to call a relationship in which two people saw each other as often as friends but were not actually close?
Jiyu spent so long searching for the right words that Sienna finally frowned in impatience.
“Never mind, then.”
She turned away, her honey-blonde hair swishing behind her. As she walked off, Jiyu heard her mutter,
“She’s so shy, it’s frustrating.”
Jiyu bit her lip and lowered her head.
She knew what the other children called her.
‘Shy girl.’
Some even called her ‘painfully shy’ loudly enough for her to hear.
Jiyu had been afraid of strangers for as long as she could remember. Even now, nothing frightened her more than suddenly becoming the focus of a crowd’s attention.
Aejeong found her painfully frustrating. In America, where extroverts were far more readily admired, she warned Jiyu that someone with her personality would be pushed around for the rest of her life.
She blamed Jiyu’s temperament on her father, Alan Parker.
Alan was a timid, introverted man who worked in the back office of an investment bank and was thoroughly dominated by Aejeong, who was twelve years younger than him.
Aejeong had recently begun making a tremendous fuss about enrolling Jiyu in a debate academy, but Alan tried to reassure her. He said he had been exactly like Jiyu when he was young and that she would improve with age.
Jiyu desperately hoped he was right.
She wanted to become cheerful, outgoing, and confident.
But there was little she could do about the temperament she had been born with. Whenever someone suddenly asked her a question, her mind went blank in a burst of white, and the words lodged in her throat. Ten bees seemed to buzz inside her stomach before stinging her all at once.
On the way home, Jiyu walked with her shoulders slumped in dejection.
It had not even been a difficult question. Why had she been unable to answer it?
She should simply have said that they were not friends.
She felt frustrated and stupid.
And she resented Hunter.
‘Why did he suddenly have to do something he never does?’
Hunter stood out no matter what he did. The moment he appeared, people’s eyes naturally followed him—and, by extension, anyone standing beside him.
Hunter probably did not care in the slightest, but Jiyu found the attention deeply uncomfortable.
It was not simply because his surname was Hamilton. At Manhattan’s most elite private schools, children with famous surnames were hardly unusual. In a place full of students whose ancestors appeared prominently in textbooks—Lafayette, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Kennedy—Hunter was merely one among many.
His exceptional build and athletic ability certainly helped him stand out among children from similar backgrounds. But Hunter was not the only tall, athletic boy at school.
What truly set him apart was the way he carried himself as though there were nothing in the world worth fearing.
Wherever he went, he held his head high and looked down on others from beneath his proud nose. He never shrank back, and everything he did was bold and fearless.
Had Hunter been confronted with a strange question out of nowhere, he would never have panicked the way Jiyu did.
If the question was difficult to answer, he would simply ignore it. If he thought it was stupid, he would snap back without hesitation.
And despite his overbearing nature, the other children followed him.
Jiyu had never once seen Hunter alone at school. He was always surrounded by a crowd of friends, and whenever he wandered off with a bored expression, they would call after him and chase him in a swarm.
Jiyu envied Hunter.
She did not envy his popularity in the slightest.
What she envied was his complete indifference to the eyes of others and the unshakable confidence that no one’s words seemed capable of disturbing.
She genuinely wished she possessed those things.
And so, when Alton School’s ‘popular boy’ suddenly approached Aster School’s ‘shy girl’ and whispered into her ear, it was only natural that the other children found it strange.