16-year-old Lingling Sirilak Kwong hates Thailand.
Her home country of Hong Kong has erratic weather as well, but the sun was out to punish everyone in this country! She found the constant heat and humidity oppressive. The heat wave that the country is experiencing almost knocked her out the first week that her family arrived. She knows she needs to acclimatize first, and the heat is a matter of adaptability, but a month after they settle, she still experiences discomfort.
Her father's job left them with no choice but to move to Thailand. A country that she's not familiar with. People here have different sets of rules, customs, and ways of living.
The litter in the streets offended her, and the foods got a lot of spice and burned her tongue the first time her mother offered her some Gaeng Tai Pla. Everyone can jaywalk. What shocked her the most was how a motorcycle could fit four people and a dog. There's almost no law here, only strong suggestions. What's worse is the language. She couldn't understand, no matter how much she tried her best. She can speak and string simple sentences if needed. The reading is harder because she's having a hard time figuring out the word groupings and the writing. The hardest. Thai is a bit of a learning cliff with a gentle curve after. Learning to differentiate short from long vowels and some consonants fried her brains most of the day. There's even no verb conjunction or grammatical gender! They love to butcher English loanword pronunciation and abbreviate almost anything.
So it's no wonder that a month has already passed in her school, but she hasn't found any friends yet.
She sighed softly, staring at her textbook. It was lunch, and she was eating her sandwich while she deciphered her homework. She took a moment to glance around as she sipped her juice. Groups were scattered here and there, talking and eating. She shrugged a bit, then her eyes fell on the one group that bothered her for some reason. Almost all of her classmates were kind enough to greet them and introduce themselves to them, but the tall, amber-eyed, beautiful Queen Bee, Orm Kornnaphat, only glanced at her once and then passed through as if she's nothing but air.
She couldn't help but notice it. They were in the same class, and she's always sitting in the very corner of the room. Alone. But sometimes she caught the girl looking her way and then would just ignore her altogether.
No one bullied her, but it's not unusual for her to receive unwelcome glances from her schoolmates whenever she mispronounced some words. The whole school knew as well how she needed to start with basic subjects since she passed nothing but her English subject.
