Shownu sat on the couch with his feet propped on a glass coffee table. His bandmate, Changkyun, came up behind him and, placing his hands on his shoulders, he leaned over his head to see Shownu's phone.

"What are you up to, buddy?"

"I'm just scrolling through fan comments."

"Oh, boy. Has it really come to this?"

"Yeah, it's really that bad," replied Shownu as he continued to scroll on his phone.

"Are you feeling bad about yourself or what, dude? Why do you need to look at fan comments?"

"I'm just having a rough go of it at the moment. I kind of got shot down by the girl I like and it's a bit of an ego-killer."

"Mm. Do tell. Who is this lovely woman of mystery you never bothered to tell me about?" said Changkyun as he flopped down on the couch beside his buddy.

"Well, you know I've been getting private English lessons, right? So, it turns out my teacher is really something, but she is so closed off. I don't know if she just doesn't like me or if she is always this closed off. It's kind of messing with my head, to tell you the truth."

"Well, try to connect with her over something you know she likes," advised Changkyun.

"That's just it. I literally know nothing about her. She is so professional and she never gives me a glimpse into her world at all."

"Oh, that is a tough one. But listen, buddy, you are the kindest, most sincere person I know. You deserve to be loved, and if she can't see that, then it's her loss."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better? The 'it's her loss' bit is kind of old. But I appreciate the sentiment. I really do," said Shownu as he rose from the couch and gave his friend a playful punch in the arm. "Wish me luck. I am on my way out to see her right now."

Shownu grabbed his house keys and a jacket and headed out the door. The sky overhead was dark and threatened to rain soon. He hurried to the coffee shop, hoping to outrun the raindrops. He barely achieved his purpose. As he ducked into the shop, the first fat raindrops began to splatter onto the windows. He ordered and sat down watching the raindrops join together on the window to make little rivers that flowed down to the brick of the outside wall. He saw Leann running toward the shop with her hands over her head. She had no umbrella and the rain had soaked through her clothes causing them to stick to her like plastic wrap. He ran to the door to open it for her and she ducked in under his arm to the safety of the warm shop.

"You are soaked through! My gosh, why didn't you bring an umbrella?" Shownu scolded good-naturedly.

"When I left, it wasn't raining. Anyway, I'm not made of sugar. I won't melt."

Shownu pondered the strange phrase, "made of sugar." Occasionally, Leann would say things that didn't make sense to him in either English or Korean. He wondered about her upbringing. Where had she grown up? Did she have a large family? Had she had a privileged life like he had? Leaving his questions for a later time, he ran to the counter to ask for a towel. He led Leann to her seat and draped the towel over the back of her neck. Her hair was soaked and her expertly-crafted French Twist was hopelessly sagging, leaving the bobby pins to hang listlessly along the side of it. When Shownu began to remove the pins, her hand flew up to her hair to stop him.

"It's OK. I can go to the bathroom and re-do my hair, "she said breathlessly.

"No, I got it. I have to let it down so I can dry it. I can't have you getting sick. You are the only thing between me and a life of terrible English pronunciation," he joked.

"I can dry my own hair, really. You don't have to do that," she protested, but her words lacked the usual finality that they typically held. Shownu sensed she was weary of the effort that went into keeping that wall up with him.

Shownu continued to remove the bobby pins as if he hadn't heard her, and finally, her shouldered relaxed. When her hair was finally released from the severe twist Leann had imposed upon it, Shownu saw that her tresses were quite curly and stretched half-way down her back. He gently pressed her hair between the layers of the towel, trying to squeeze out as much water as he could. Then he took the towel and began to massage her scalp with it.

Leann let out a small sigh and said, "I'll give you an hour to stop doing that."

Shownu laughed softly. When he had dried her hair the best he could, he went to the counter to order her a hot coffee. He moved her iced Americano out of the way and strictly forbade her from drinking it.

"You shouldn't drink cold things when you're wet," he cautioned.

Leann made no comment, but instead began rooting through her large bag for her workbook. She pulled out various items --- a compact, a pair of sunglasses, a water bottle, a small picture album. She lay each item on the table as she cleared her bag enough to be able to find the workbook which had found its way to the bottom of the bag.

Shownu looked at the album and instinctively picked it up to leaf through it. Leann was still busy unearthing the workbook and didn't notice he had grabbed her album. When she looked up, she let out a small cry of surprise (or pain). Shownu wasn't sure what it was.

"Oh, my gosh! Don't look at those! I look so bad in those pictures. I just carry them so I can see pics of my family since they aren't much for smartphones. They are like the last people on earth still getting prints of their pictures," Leann explained with a hint of embarrassment.

Again, Shownu pretended not to hear her as he continued to flip through the pictures. Each one showed a similar cast of characters. There were several of an old woman with her hair in loose curlers hanging about her face. Others featured an old man, presumably the old woman's husband. He wore the same faded overalls in all the pictures. Some were of young children playing in a yard that was mostly mud. One showed these same children jumping from one haybale to another. Shownu paused on one photograph and looked at it with a mix of admiration and horror. There was Leann dressed from head-to-toe in hunter orange and holding a long rifle with the barrel pointed at the ground where there was a large deer with a fatal wound in the shoulder.

"Did you kill this deer yourself?" asked Shownu.

"Yes," was her reply as she stared at her hands. "But it was a long time ago. I don't hunt anymore," she said quickly, in the hopes of shutting down this line of questioning. "Pap always made me skin my own deer and I got tired of it."

The thought of her delicate fingers tugging on the skin of a bloodied deer carcass was almost more than Shownu could imagine. So, he decided to re-direct the conversation.

"What means 'Pap'?" he questioned as he studied her face which wore the wistful expression of one who had been away from home too long.

"Oh, where I come from, we call our grandpa and our grandma 'Pap' and 'Mamaw'. But that's not standard English, so you shouldn't learn it that way." Leann had spent a lifetime ensuring that any vestige of her Appalachian roots was eradicated from her speech. In fact, her family had taken to calling her "Prof" because, from a young age, she insisted on speaking standard English, which was a far cry from the language of her mountain heritage. But she found herself letting some of those colorful phrases creep into her speech now that she lived half-a-world away from them.

Shownu flipped to the next picture and saw Leann with a tall boy in a faded tie-dye shirt with a Grateful Dead logo.

"Is this your Oppa?" he asked.

Leann's voice was barely a whisper. "Yeah, that's my Oppa."

"Did you fight with your Oppa?" Shownu asked, noticing that Leann's eyes were becoming red and threatened to allow tears to leak from them.

"Yeah," she reminisced. "We used to fight like two pigs in a poke," she said. Seeing Shownu's puzzled expression, she quickly amended, "We used to fight a lot." "But we don't fight anymore." She paused and took a deep breath, "Um, my Oppa's gone now. He died of an opioid overdose," she revealed as she reached for the album to take it from Shownu's hands.

Shownu sat in stunned silence for a moment. He had read about what people were calling an "opioid epidemic" in the US, but he had never known anyone who had died in that way before. "I'm so sorry," he said, his voice revealing genuine empathy for his lovely friend and the world where she had grown up which was so different from his own. He and his friends mostly thought of Americans as people who had enjoyed significant privileges and wealth. Here was his dear friend who had suffered poverty and lack, and most tragically, the death of her beloved Oppa from circumstances that didn't have to happen. It was more than he could hold in, so he allowed the tears forming at the corners of his eyes to flow freely down his cheeks.

Leann looked up and saw his tears. She reached to wipe them with a napkin just as he reached out to wipe hers with his thumb. Her face felt soft as he rubbed his thumb over her cheeks and finally took her face into both of his hands.

Leann felt her body lean forward as she let out a deep, cleansing sigh.

"I got you now," said Shownu as he gazed into her open face which no longer seemed to hold a "No Trespassing" sign.