When I am seven and my best friend Ah-Rim is six, a new boy transfers to our homeroom.

Half of his face is ravaged with tiny red dots, pricks of inflamed skin roughly textured like Braille. When he enters through the sliding door, the entire class breaks into excited whispers. Half of me wants to avoid his embarrassed gaze, turn around and pretend he doesn’t exist, but the other half can’t stop staring. It looks as if he dunked the right side of his head in hot oil.

Our teacher curtly introduces him as Min-Jeong. She says that he’ll be with us this semester, and she expects us all to treat him with courtesy and respect.

By the time Min-Jeong has settled into his seat, looking as stiff as a corpse, it’s gotten around the whole room that his new name is Disease Boy. Ah-Rim elbows me and snickers. My deskmate leans across and hisses, “We’ll greet him properly at the statue after school. Pass it on.”

I laugh. I pass it on.

It’s always struck me as funny how adults assume you can’t remember anything from early childhood. These memories are like frames of a film in my head, crystal in clarity and glaring with color and life. “That’s not a memory,” they’ll say, laughing, and pat your head condescendingly. “You probably saw a photograph and you’re mistaking it for something that happened much later.” I wonder if the more we grow, the less we remember, like those memories are captured in sheets of negatives that will keep piling on top of one another over the years, until the original picture is so blackened by what came after that you can’t even recall what it was in the first place.

It’s an unusually cold day for May. Min-Jeong stands by the statue, a stone memorial of the school’s founder, and waits, bookbag clutched defensively to his thin chest. Disease Boy isn’t stupid. He’s seen the looks and heard the hissed insults, felt the quick, lithe feet shooting out from beneath the desks to trip his large, clumsy ones, and sensed the unanimous, hushed response from the class. His eyes are like the stones that my dad and I used to skip across the lake: hard and glassy and reflecting the gray sky.

“What is he, stupid?” Ah-Rim mutters to me. “Why isn’t he running?”

Already a small throng of kids has gathered around the statue. Nothing is really happening yet, just some minor taunting and name-calling. Min-Jeong is holding his own. A few adults walk by on their commute from work and glare at us. We pull faces and sneer back at them.

My deskmate, the one who gathered us here, steps forward once a crowd has formed. You can tell he’s glad to have an audience. He slowly picks up a rock, a solid piece of gravel about the size of my fist. He tosses it in the air and catches it.

Toss, catch. Toss, catch.

We watch the rock as if hypnotized, following its path as it arcs through the air and lands with a smack in his palm. Min-Jeong stares stoically at the ground.

The rock suddenly sails through the air and hits Min-Jeong on the shoulder.

It’s like the world was on mute and a switch has now been flipped. The sound rushes back with full force, boys screeching in wild abandon, girls screaming and giggling in excitement. Everyone hunts for rocks on the ground. Pebbles and stones and chunks of gravel hurtle through space and hit or miss Disease Boy, who’s not responding; he just stands there, an island amidst the cacophony. The statue behind him smiles down benevolently on the scene.

“Help me look for rocks,” Ah-Rim is saying. The tips of her straight black braids brush the ground as she bends, searching. “Everybody’s taking the good ones.”

What happened next, I don’t remember well. I think I ran away or pretended to help Ah-Rim look for a while. I did not help the boy with the spots on his face.

Throwing rocks at him with the rest of my classmates would have been less cowardly.

I realize later, much to my unrestrained horror, that Min-Jeong lives in my apartment building. We wait together in interminable silence for the elevator to reach the lobby. The first thing he says to me, quietly and without making eye contact, is, “It’s not contagious.”

“I never asked,” I respond.

Then, in the elevator, feeling as if I’ve got to say something, as if I have to redeem myself to this boy whom I watched get pelted with stones: “Why didn’t you run away? You waited for them like an idiot.”

He steps out at his floor without replying. I realize much, much later that the silence was all the answer I needed.

Slowly but surely, Min-Jeong and I become friends. I do all the talking; he listens. If not for the answers he gives our teacher, and what he said in the elevator, I’d be sure he was either deaf or mute. Sometimes – not often – I get the impression that I’m conversing with a brick wall, and I scream at him to say something, anything, so I don’t feel like I’m talking to myself; but he simply looks at me and smiles, and that’s enough for me to apologize and fall into shamed silence.

Ah-Rim and I don’t hang out anymore. On the rare occasions that we make eye contact, she glares at me and turns to whisper something to the beady-eyed girls who have been following her lately, like faithful pets trailing after their owner.

This is why I’m dubious when she appears at my door one morning and asks me to go rollerblading with her.

“There’s something I want to do.”

“Okay.”

My apartment complex is on top of a hill; the buildings slope up on a gradual incline toward the sun. There’s only one way to leave the complex: down the main road, which is dangerously steep and flattens into the heavy rush of perpetual traffic. Parents go to great pains to keep their scooter- and rollerblade-loving children off the hill. Once you gather enough momentum, which doesn’t take long due to the hill’s steepness, it’s almost impossible to turn at the last second into the alleyway to avoid the busy intersection. We’ve had accidents before – none fatal, thankfully, but enough to establish the hill as a serious hazard.

“We’re going to skate down the hill,” Ah-Rim declares, eyes shining. “It’s easy. Just watch me.”

She sails effortlessly down and makes a slow, wide turn into the alleyway. A few minutes later she reemerges, skates in hand, and begins the trek up the hill in her bare feet, face turned toward the sun. She motions for me to skate down too.

I don’t move.

She reaches the pinnacle of the hill, standing next to me once again, flushed and bright-eyed.

“Well?” She gestures toward the road. “Are you going to do it or not?”

There’s a string coiled between us, taut with tension, worn thin. She’s testing its durability, gently tugging. It’s up to me to break it completely, I realize.

“Sure.” I fasten my helmet. “No big deal.”

Skating down the hill is like flying. I feel weightless, buoyant in the whip of the rushing air current, arms spread as if I’m going to take flight. The alley draws up beside me all too quickly. I angle my feet and turn into it, exhilaration and satisfaction plunging through my veins. What I am not expecting, however, is the concrete wall waiting too close at the other end of the alley.

“Ai-goo,” my mother says to me later, “how could you have been so stupid? How many times have I told you not to go down the hill?”

By the time I’ve struggled back up the hill, one side of my face scraped and bleeding, Ah-Rim has vanished. That stings more than the burn of the salve my mother applies with her birdlike fingers, her delicate touch light and airy.

Min-Jeong and I wait for the elevator, watching the numbers light up one by one. He thoughtfully contemplates the ragged scars that cover the left side of my face. The doctor says it will be quite a while before they fade completely.

“I didn’t run away,” I say.

His understanding gaze says enough: It’s not the same thing. I shrug and grin at him, an expression of joy and recklessness that only a seven-year-old could wear.

He smiles back.

We match, he and I. The scarred sides of our faces are turned toward each other like reflections in a mirror.

I will leave for America in less than a year, as the scratches raked across my cheek are just beginning to fade, and will not tell a soul about my departure. When my parents ask me why, I tell them I forgot. To them it is a small offense, easily forgotten. After all, I am only seven.

I know, however, that what I did – leaving Min-Jeong without a word of explanation – is unforgivable. I will berate myself in the years to come, but ultimately, this guilt too will pass.

The boy with the spots on his face phases quietly out of my life. He is blotted out as the stills of my memories pile up and blend into one another in their mutual transparency.

My new school has a statue of its own. It peers humbly down through spectacles at the mass of students and faculty that enter and leave the doors each day. I get into the habit of dropping a stone I’ve picked up on the way to school at its base, like a sort of offering. It feels a little silly after a while, and by the time I graduate from that school, I have forgotten the routine altogether.

My scars have completely disappeared now. A part of me wishes they had remained, because I know his will never go away.

What I’ve come to realize, though, is that forgetting doesn’t mean never remembering. Writing this was a practice in restraint – a battle against the urge to throw in every spare moment we spent together, to fill in the blanks and gray areas with my own interpretations of what might have happened.

I cannot spend my life in the darkroom of my mind, scrounging up old memories and waiting for them to develop properly. But I’m allowed to recall a reel of events now and then. I will do this, sometimes, when I need to remind myself why my little sister does reckless things, or why I can’t run away from the things I fear. I take down a film reel of afternoons walking home from school and remember. I play it back again.