Dream Me a Sonatine

1 - Albträume, Socks, and Candyfloss

Kim Hyunjin's eyes pried themselves open after a good minute of lying utterly frozen, and streaks of sunlight burst through her window and temporarily blinded her with their brightness. The morning was lively and fresh, and she sort of wanted to punch it. Instead, she sat up and got out of bed, pausing only to open her bedside drawer and put something fuzzy and weird in it, only giving the object a fleeting, reluctant glance.

She felt more tired than usual. Mornings were usually dull and fatigue inducing in her case, but this particular one weighed on her like a pile of bricks. She wasn't sure if it was because of the dream or because she was in her dorm room in a pretentious music school flooded with insufferable twats.

Hyunjin reckoned there were two types of people excluding herself attending Salzburg Musikakademie. First, there were the copy-pasted, money-laden, picture-perfect model students. They were a special species of snob, somehow managing to look down even on people taller than them, and born, raised, and suffocated in riches and fortune. Most of them were prodigies that had been tickling the ivories as soon as they were out of the womb, and they all played at least six instruments. They never failed to mention that they 'are studying music for passion, not money' because they were already eating off platinum coated silverware and shitting bricks of pure gold.

Hyunjin despised them, but she despised the second category a fraction more: the arrogant bastards. They seemed to live to demean and degrade those who were a few pennies short of being 'one of them' for example, an unlucky student would often wake with all the strings on their instrument removed or their sheet music ripped to shreds. They were unruly and reckless, deliberately wearing their ties slightly askew and studying once in a blue moon within a sea of blue moons. The most terrifying thing was their lack of fear and the school's lack of concern; bloody fistfights would end in broken limbs due to their sheer defiance and lack of empathy.

Lucky for Hyunjin, she was sharing her dorm with both types.

'Wakey fucking wakey, Vivianne, Hyunie-bunny.'

Of course Hyejoo was already awake, shaking the bedsheets with an unnecessary amount of vigour in Hyunjin's face. Behind her, the sun glared through the large stained glass window and onto the red carpet on which three beds stood: one against the window (Vivi's), one on the right side of the door (Hyunjin's), and one on the left (Hyejoo's). There was a large wardrobe and bedside drawer by each bed, and above Hyejoo's there was a small, hand-crafted tapestry that couldn't have been less Hyejoo-like. The sheets blew a gust of wind at her again. Hyunjin couldn't muster the energy to flip her off and instead sidestepped towards her wardrobe. She heard Hyejoo's derisive laugh — she was certainly in a good mood this morning — and with it came Vivi's loud yawn, which somehow managed to sound condescending by itself. The pomposity was doubled, however, as Vivi spoke,

'Morning all. Gosh, it is rather warm, isn't it? I fear I've stained my new nightgown with unruly amounts of sweat.'

'Nah, I emptied beer over you in the night.'

It wasn't difficult to tell which one was the snob and which one was the bastard.

'You're barely seventeen. How on earth did you manage to get your hands on al— never mind.' It was often wise to avoid wondering how Hyejoo did things. Sometimes you really didn't want to know. 'Hast du gut geschlafen, Hyunjin?' asked Vivi without looking at her. Careless. Confident. Fluent in German.

'Uh, ja, aber ich haben... ge... getraum...' Clumsy. Unfinished. Not at all fluent in German.

'Geträumt, corrected Vivi swiftly. 'There's an umlaut over the "a", so it's pronounced differently. You also need to conjugate the auxiliary verb to habe.'