Untitled: Best Friends Turned Haters

Chapter 2. A Grand Idea

Days Until Move-In: 26

Alarm? No. A voice. Her mom's. Minjung squeezes her eyes shut even tighter. It is summer break. There is nothing to get up for. She pulls away from her mom's touch and snatches the blanket back.

"Yah. Park Min Jung." Her mom is using that tone, surname and all. It's going to be that kind of morning. Or is it afternoon?

The sunlight is dizzying.

Minjung stares emptily at the backlit figure hovering over her.

"Look at you. You have no idea what time it is. Is this really how you want to spend your Graduate Summer?"

Minjung's mom speaks to glazed eyes. She confronts the face of a child hollowed of care. Minjung had many years to master disassociating from her parent's ignorant nagging. She got so good at it she no longer knows she is doing it. It happens on autopilot. Neither mom nor dad paid enough attention to figure it out, failing to notice before it was too late.

Her mom rattles on. Minjung lies like a log. Maybe one clump of words every minute makes it through her finely chained, mental mesh.

Other kids. Summer school. Internships. You. Wasting away. Waste. Waste. Waste.

"This is a waste of your precious time! You know that? A Waste! You think you have all the time in the world? What a waste all that time would be, spent like this!"

Minjung is drained enough as it is from the limbo and existential crisis that is this summer. Her lips twitch, parting a millimeter to say something--anything to make the harpy go away--and the last of her battery dies. Only air continues to slip in and out. It is a wonder the way a body has a battery of its own. How it keeps her alive without command, or will.

The insides of her mouth are dry and cotton-y. She needs water. She chokes a cracked voice out of those cracked lips.

"C-Can I.. God.. Can I just get some water?"

It isn't water but the silence in the air is quenching.

Minjung creeps out of her covers and steps gingerly around her brooding mother.

Water.

The cool kitchen tiles shock her bare toes.

Minjung holds a glass under the filtered waterspout and cranes her ears to detect her mom's next move. Soft footsteps pad out of her room, down the hall and trickle up the stairs. A deep sigh frees itself from her clenched chest. Down the water goes. She feels a little better.

The clock on the stove reads 2:25pm. Minjung also notices a plate of food covered with foil. For her. From her mom.

She can't tell if it is breakfast or lunch.

Lifting the foil, Minjung sees it was breakfast. Cold and lifeless, like the person it is for. Warm once upon a time, like the person it is from.

She wants to cry and snarl at the same time. Her mom cares, she knows. Minjung wishes the care would extend beyond-to the things Minjung herself cares about. While other families seem to relish their remaining time with their college-bound teens, the Parks seem always still more concerned with how their eldest daughter is matching up to her high-achieving peers.

They are so fucking worried that she isn't making use of her "Graduate Summer" the way others are. Hadn't she spent every waking hour of every micromanaged year of her life pleasing them? Satisfying them? She had made herself the premiere respectable eldest daughter. Her whole life was for them. It was not enough. Minjung realized it would never be enough. Like a carrot on a stick that never got any closer, the promises of freedom and acceptance that she imagined never came.