Can We Be Friends? | jjk

Intro

"Okay, that's enough for today!
Everyone, 5 rounds around the school yard!" Mr. Henricks shouted.

Of course, run 5 rounds around the yard after an exhausting training of, well... 2 hours! I sighed, our martial arts teacher was a damn slave driver!

Sometimes I wonder, what I am actually doing here. I could have gone to any public highschool. But no - my stupid younger ass thought that it would be awesome to go to one of the best martial arts schools in the world. Welp, I admit that it is great at CA (Crane Academy) though...

Practicing martial arts since I was a little girl, it just came naturally to me to go to CA. At first I was sceptical when my Vietnamese Kung Fu teacher Mr. Ho told me about this opportunity. A private boarding school? And with that one with a great reputation? That would be waaaaayyy too expensive for my grandma. Even though I was the best swordfighter at my former school (compared to CA it was a club), I declined the offer at first.

Explaining that my grandma would not be able to pay for tuition and that I'd be better off at a public highschool I asked Mr. Ho to pick someone more suitable for this school.
My grandma raised me since my parents passed away. And I never missed anything growing up at her place. She is the most lovely, caring and wise person on earth, who would do anything to make me happy. Even though she had not a lot of resources, she always wanted to give me anything I wanted. Knowing that she did not earn well with the small book store she owned, I never asked for something unnecessary and always tried to be the best student at school to show her my gratitude and to be able to give her something back in the future.

With that I was the top student of my grade, the greatest nerd, that did not care about fashion at all and that had no friends.
Going to school to get straight A's, helping out grandma at the book store, while doing some stuff for school, leaving for Kung Fu training then going back to grandma's place to close the store together in the evening, just to get back to our apartment (right above the store) to have dinner. That was basically my daily routine in the small town I used to live with granny.

However Mr. Ho reassured me by saying that they'd offer scholarships to students like me. Though I was intrigued about going to CA, which is only a 30min bus drive away from my small town, I could not imagine myself going to a boarding school.
In the end my grandma already did know about this offer even before Mr. Ho talked to me.

She convinced me to go since she has waited for this offer to come for me for years! "I did not let you do your Kung Fu stuff to waste your talent!" were her goodbye words at the bus station, when she sent me of for my first year.

I smiled thinking of grandma. It's been 2 years since my first day at CA. Now I am the student council's president of this school, that has around 1500 students. One richer than the other and some of them are spoiled kids, that would put more efforts in taking selfies of their body than in their techniques. But there were also scholarship students like me - we were just the minority.

That's probably why I got elected to be the student council's president: I was a scholarship student with straight A's and an experienced martial artist. It was not that I was an attention seeker or extremely popular, that got me into this position.
I was just lucky, I guess.

"Yaah, are you listening Kyungmi?" panted Jimin.

I looked to my right, vice president Park Jimin was trying to close the distance between us.

I grinned "No talking hyung. Otherwise you'll get a stitch."

Yepp, I call my male elders "hyung" because I hate "oppa". It was just too cringy and since I was close to him he laughed it off, when I explained it to him the first time I used the honorifics "wrong". When we finished the fifth round I jogged to Jimin who was nipping at his waterbottle. "Hyung, what did you want to tell me?"

He sighed: "Are we going to discuss the incident with the council this evening?"
I nodded.

The incident happened last week, when a student of our school posted a hate speech about Mrs Quinn a math teacher, who is known for being extremely strict. The anonymous student did not only offend the teacher personally ("she smells like...") but also accused her of being biased towards male students because of sexual attraction. The accusation was totally baseless.
Of course the speech spread around quite fast, so the teachers heard about it.

I did not know any of that until the rumors spread, because I wasn't active on any social network sites. I just never understood the reasons of having 10 000 fake friends and uploading selfies just to get complimented.

I mean, yes, I have a messenger app!

It's not that I am living under a rock!!! But that's because the app is useful and not a waste of time!

However I had a meeting with the school board about the incident last week to deal with the damage that the rumour had made and a way to punish, whoever made it blow up.

Since the speech was already taken down by the IT-experts of our school, we had to think of a way to make the students aware of cyber mobbing.

"Do you think everyone is coming?" Jimin asked, while we were walking back to our dorms.

"Of course! I made very clear that I am going to kick their butts if they don't show up!"