“Hey, Grace. Are you at the school yet? Let me know. But don’t call if it’s too early here because you know I need my eight hours of sleep. Call soon. Bye.”
It’s nine o’clock and home is fourteen hours behind, so she’s most likely about to wake up and get ready for her yoga class. Later, she’ll probably be carting around my younger sister, Jane, and making plans for a lunch date with one of the wives of Dad’s partners. I’m just surprised she took the time to call before going to bed last night. There’s no message from Dad, though that’s not surprising. I can’t remember the last time he initiated a conversation with me.
I click over to the celebrity gossip site I frequent, reminding myself—as I do every time—that this is pointless. I scroll through the latest articles, but none of the headlines catch my attention. With a sigh, I toss my phone onto the bed and ignore the curious eyes of Sophie, who watches me like I’m some kind of museum exhibit.
After a few good punches to my pillow, I settle in deep beneath the blanket I insisted on bringing from home, the one my aunt quilted for my sixteenth birthday. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, and I wish I had thanked her properly before she died last year. But now it’s one of the few things that remind me of home. It still smells the same—like lilac fabric softener and my favorite perfume. I take in a deep breath and swallow the sob that catches in the back of my throat.
The heavy silence of the dorm room presses against my chest, and I blink back hot tears. What have I done? Why didn’t I listen to Momma and Dad, and just stay in Nashville? I kept telling myself as I packed up my things, as I boarded the airplane, that this was the right thing. If I wanted to keep any sort of relationship with my mother, we needed to be separated for a while. I still have no idea why I decided we needed an entire ocean between us or why I even chose Korea—it was just the first place that popped up on Google when I typed in “international boarding schools,” probably thanks to Jane’s search history, since I’m not the only one who considered getting out of Tennessee.
My fingers curl tighter around the quilt and press it against my face in hopes of muffling my sniffles. I’ve got to hold it together. I didn’t cry leaving the States. I didn’t even cry over the “incident,” as Dad liked to call Nathan’s downward spiral. So why am I barely holding it together now?
I scramble for the first element in the periodic table, but my sleep-deprived brain is at capacity. Out of sheer frustration, I put my earbuds in and flip on the sleep playlist on my iPod, letting the soft melodies wash away all thoughts. I spend the next hour holding back tears and the crippling loneliness that echoes inside my head, competing for dominance with the music reverberating through my ears, until I finally slip into blissful sleep and escape.
*
My sleep is cut short, however, when sunlight blazes through the blinds and right onto my face. I fumble for my phone and see that it’s only seven o’clock, but I’m completely awake. I lie in bed, tossing and turning, until I hear Sophie shift atop her mattress above me.
She climbs down from the top bunk, stands in the middle of the four-by-four-foot square floor space and stretches her arms above her head. Yawning, she waves at me.
“Did you sleep well?” she asks.
I murmur a yes, though my sore limbs and aching head protest.
Sophie and I throw on clothes, and once we’ve both deemed our hair and makeup good enough to be seen by the outside world, she says, “Do you want to go to breakfast with me? I told Jason I’d meet him at eight-thirty.”
“Sure.”
I stuff my feet into a pair of ankle boots and clap on a straw fedora I found at a consignment store in Nashville. After tossing my phone and Korean phrase book into my satchel, I follow her out the door.
Students pass us in the hall, and they all smile and bow their heads in greeting. Although most of the girls we see are Asian, I spot a few that look Filipino or maybe Pacific Islander and others with darker complexions and hijabs, maybe from India or somewhere in the Middle East.
When I researched the school, I was drawn to the fact that it boasted all classes taught in English and that it’s apparently more relaxed than most Korean schools, which can be intense in both academics and discipline. Because it’s targeted to foreign students who speak a myriad of native languages—mostly kids of foreign dignitaries, high-profile CEOs, or wealthy European expatriates—English serves as the common language for them all, a fact that still baffles me. I complained every day about the two years of Spanish I took—my sister, Jane, is the one with the ear for languages. But the people here have been taking English classes their entire lives. America is seriously behind the foreign language instruction curve.
But while English may be the common language, most students we pass stick with other kids who look like them and speak their own languages. A group of girls pass us, their black-haired heads bent close, giggling. One points at me, and heat climbs up my neck. But I force down the embarrassment; she probably wasn’t even talking about me.
Sophie leads me out of the dorm and onto the plaza I saw when I first arrived. More students occupy it than last night, some boys playing with a soccer ball, another group just sitting and laughing.
A greenery-lined path leads around the plaza, which is circled by a ring of classroom and administrative buildings that stare down at me with condescension, like they’re daring me to fail, like they know I can’t handle this. A sidewalk leads a little farther up the mountain to more buildings, which Sophie tells me are the boys’ dorms.