Bad at Being Good

(1)

*You call this a goal?
Sorry, I'm quite busy--
I don't have time for you.
Get out of my sight.
...and you call yourself my daughter?*

"AH!" She gasped. She scanned her room that was dimly lit by the moonlight peeking through her indigo curtains.

So that was all just a dream..? A stupid, stupid, stupid..stu..pid--

Her eyes were now starting to well up as she was remembering past reality. Yes, that's right. Lee Mijoo sat up in her bed and hugged her knees as she cried the pain away. This was a rare thing for Mijoo to think about nowadays. She had been so busy with her final year in high school that she didn't have time to think about this excruciating memory.

Growing up, Mijoo's role model was no other than her mother. Reflecting on the past, Mijoo didn't know why she looked up to her mother so much. She was a house wife who just kept herself busy...and graduated from a university with a degree in business.....and started up a fashion business.....sure, Mijoo obviously had absolutely no reason to look up to her (sarcasm) except that she technically wasn't her real mother.

*flashback*
"Mijoo-ah, be a doll an get me a glass of water please?" Mrs. Lee (Mijoo's "mother") shouted from her study.
"Yes, mother," Mijoo obliged. Mijoo was always delighted to be of aid to anyone, especially her mother because she wanted to grow to be just like her.  She was a daddy's girl but grew out of it as she became older.

Mijoo was an only child. Because she was an only child, she was very spoiled. She was very spoiled because her parents felt guilty. Her parents felt guilty because they were always working and hardly had time to see Mijoo, so whenever they did, they gave her everything she wanted and more. Her father was always on-call at the hospital due to being one of the best known heart surgeons in Seoul, and her mother started her own line of fashion selling accessories and purses. No one knew why Mijoo wanted to be like her mother. She was always so mean and bossy, but kind and sweet to her father when he's around. At a young age, she started verbally abusing Mijoo with her blunt words, but Mijoo always looked passed it and thought of it as constructive criticism. Later, her mother's words started to haunt her because she took them so seriously.

Mijoo always thought that she would follow in her mother's footsteps. She thought fashion was her calling. What she didn't know what that the person she called "mother," was actually her step-mother. At the age of 12, Mijoo stumbled across documents that were accidentally dropped when she was trying on a hat in her step-mother's study. She saw the truth. She returned the documents as they once were and pretended that she hadn't seen them. She acted as if everything was normal. Ever since, she had wondered what else her parents have been lying to her about.
*flashback end*

5 miles away, a boy named Mark Tuan was experiencing something quite similar.

Mark awoke suddenly from a nightmare, breathing heavily and panting as if he had just ran a marathon. He shot up in his bed with beads of sweat on his forehead. He turned his head to the clock on his nightstand: 3:27 AM. Mark flopped back down on his bed and brought an arm over his tired eyes.

Like Mijoo, Mark's dream was a past reality. Mark never really thought about this dream unless it was around this time of year. The time where his father left to a place called heaven. This particular dream comes back to haunt Mark. It was a continuous loop of the accident his father was involved in. Not the literal thing, but rather a scene Mark played up in his head every time he thought about it.

*flashback*
Mark's mother was washing up in the restroom before his family was about to leave a local restaurant they always went to after celebrating something special. In this case, it was Mark's father promotion. One moment, Mark was watching his father walk across the parking lot behind rows and rows of cars in the parking lot and the next thing he knew, there was a loud crash that can be heard even from inside of the restaurant. Mark didn't want to believe what he had just heard. He didn't want to believe that it was his car that was wrecked. Being the curious 10 year old, Mark couldn't resist walking towards the noise. His feet carried him to the site of the scene and what he had hoped to not happen, happened. Mark stood frozen in his tracks, observing the flames broken glass shattered on the ground, the dented metal in his father's car, the smoke that was seeping through the hood of the cars...and the blood he didn't know belonged to.
*flashback end*

Mark shook the thought away as best as he could and drifted off into dreamland. It was one thing to try to forget someone that made an impact in your life, but it's another thing when that person is now gone.

These two teens will discover that they're more alike than they thought. Or if not, they will see that their worlds are smaller than they imagined.

Mijoo swore she would never stoop down to a commoner's level of society, which includes affiliating with someone of a lower society class than her. It lies a mystery as to why Mijoo became such a bitch when her father was humble and sweet.

The two adolescents fell back asleep, preparing the the long day ahead of them. For now, they slumbered until the morning came. The both of them are in for an exciting day tomorrow.