Butterfly

Chapter One

Kimberly being my only friend and apparently also the only person in my life that cares about my happiness and education, had been extraordinarily helpful in helping me figure out which college I should apply to as well as figuring out the whole application process. She herself is already in a local college and works in the diner to pay for her tuition. Luckily for me, she had a collection of old college brochures from her application season that she never got to throw away.

While we were looking through her mighty collection, I found myself losing hope that any school in the US would pique my interest. I was stretched out on the floor next to Kim's bed whining out about my hopelessness in ever finding a college when she came back with the next 10 brochures for us to look at.

"C'mon Soyeon, you're the one who wanted to do this, get up here and look through these with me", Kim's voice wiggled its way into my ear and unfortunately reached my brain and processed. I begrudgingly began the process of getting up by looking towards the bed where she sat and saw a thick crumpled piece of paper under the bed with a vaguely smushed building shape on it.

I reached over to grab for it realizing it was possibly a forgotten college brochure of some time, "Kim, you've got to clean under here, there's a whole brochure under here. Crumpled and all.", I said and finally sat up to begin my ascent to reach the bed.

Kim peered over at me, looking at the crumpled piece of paper in my hand. A look of recognition passed her face and nostalgia glazed over her eyes.

"Oh, that pamphlet...that's from the University of Southern California. I got upset that I got put on the waitlist for it and tossed it under the bed to try and forget about it."

I started straightening out the brochure to finally get a good look at the advertisement for this school. The look of a big red brick building that had both an antique and modern look to it caught my attention. Flipping through the pages, there was a bright deep red spread across the page with the face of a man with a big feather helmet and a big gold SC next to it.

"The school is appealing, isn't it? It's even prettier in person, I got the tour the school and it's a breathtaking building", Kim said at me, but not truly looking at me, instead opting to make herself look busy by pretending to sort out the pile of brochures in front of her. "You wanna try to apply for that school? It's the only one you've looked at for more than 10 seconds and it wouldn't hurt to try..."

"...I guess it wouldn't hurt to try...", I replied with little to no faith in myself.

In the end, Kim helped me tremendously with creating a beautiful application and I applied to the school by the end of the month. All that was left to do was wait.