𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐘𝐨𝐮 - 𝒋𝒆𝒏𝒌𝒂𝒊.

don't leave me

Flashback scenes are written in italics.

Jennie ended her birthday today by putting her daughter to sleep. After giving a small peck on Jinri's forehead, she put the little girl's favorite story book on the shelves beside her bed and walked out of the already dark room.

Before Jinri went to bed, there are things they would always do. It's story time for today, meanwhile on some other days, the two of them could just cuddle in bed and talk about any topic that Jinri found interesting until the little girl fall asleep.

Closing the door to her working room, Jennie chuckled to herself. An old memory of a four year old Jinri suddenly flashed.

"Wow," Jinri clapped her chubby hands enthusiastically. "WOW!!! How could she do that?!"

"Well, she probably went through so much hardships to do a perfect pirouette — just like the one you saw," Jennie answered, an amused chuckle left her lips when she saw how amazed Jinri was by the movement of the ballerina. "Now be quiet, Jinri-ah. The others are watching seriously-"

"Eomma," Jinri cut her mother's warning. "I want to be a ballerina. I think I want to learn ballet."

"What?" Jennie asked, surprised at the sudden determination she saw on her four year old girl.

"Can I? I really want to be like her." Jinri looked again at the big stage where many ballerinas performed The Nutcracker.

"Uhm, okay," Jennie said, still unsure. "We'll talk about this later."

What she thought was just a five minutes interest (like most children was), turned to be an admirable journey with years of practices and constant effort from Jinri. Jennie quickly realized that Jinri have this amazing persistence quality within her once she knows what she wants. For five years, the little girl had been working hard to be the best ballerina.

She wasn't lying when she said she was Madame Dupont's favorite student, Jennie thought to herself.

Whenever she came to the practice room, the perfectionist lady always showered Jennie with praise, making all the other mothers looked at her with envy. Madame Dupont even went so far by saying that Jinri was the best student she ever had in her twenty years of teaching.

The old lady was also the one who introduced Jinri to her acquaintance who worked as a photographer in a famous magazine. They needed a child model, she said, and Madame Dupont think that her star student would be perfect for that.

"She has this star aura, Mrs. Kim. It's almost as if she was born to be put under the spotlight. Do you really want to let that rare potential wasted away?"

Jennie who was familiar with potentials being wasted and the pains that came with it obviously wouldn't want the same fate for her baby girl. But as a cautious mother, she still asked Jinri on her opinions. Apparently the little girl is pretty vocal for her age.

"Do you want to do it, baby? Being a model?"

"Well, it's only for this one time, Eomma. Why is it such a biggie?"

"It's a biggie because it's a big and famous magazine you're photoshooting for," she said, flipping the pages of the magazine to show to her daughter. "If and only if they're interested in you, they might want to recruit you as a model the next time they needed one."

"When that time comes, there's no going back, Jinri-ah."

After hearing her mother, Jinri was quiet the rest of the way home. She truly thought her decisions through despite the fact that she was only eight years old. Sometimes Jennie felt her daughter is so much older than the amount of candles she blew on her birthday.