In sleep, nightmares chase her down familiar corridors of her childhood. Tall, silhouettes lurks lying in wait as she scrambles for safety. Sometimes, it is the boiler room that would swallow her whole, and sometimes it is the leering face of the man with the scalpel whose death she witnessed inside a van.
Ten whole years since, and she was still running from her past.
 
She managed to scrap past high school, and had not bothered at all about the college entrance exam. Jang Ahjumma who owned Sparkle Saloon near the school had been more than willing to take her in.
So-Mi's specialty was nail-art, the only person in charge of it in the salon of three employees. Once in a blue moon, she takes the liberty to paint a customer’s nail in yellow, and ink a cross-eyed face upon it in black. She always smiles at the memory and sometimes regrets for not having asked him if he had liked it.

In the evening, she takes the bus back to her apartment; a dingy, crowded place, not much of an upgrade from her past.
Mostly a dinner of ramyun as the second hand television runs a soap opera in the background. Sometimes, Soo young unnie, who also works at the parlor joins her. So-mi likes to think of these evenings as an improvement in her own social life. They mostly laugh over customers and neighbors, but Soo young sometimes talks about the boys in her church.

“Choi Min ho,” she would say. “Yes, he’s cute. You will like him. He’s perhaps a few years older than you. If you come with me this Sunday, I’ll introduce you to him.”

So-mi doesn’t care much. She smiles politely though. No other boys mattered, because all of her nightmares always ends with a familiar face reaching out to her. Those deep, dark eyes that could light up her evenings and the slight curve of a surprised smile when she had last saw him. She remembers more when awake- the messy mop of black hair that fell over his eye, his calloused fingers and knuckles and the angular slope of his jaw. 
Just as the nightmares chase her every night, she chased that face.