Always With You | BTS (Kids)

2

"Now, children. Have you all brought pictures of your family?" The teacher said.

"Yes!"

"Good. Let's learn to make a family tree today." The teacher's cheery voice echoed through the classroom. The children were excited, leaping about, shouting which colours they wanted to use, and who gets to use the glue first. Since the kids were so distracted, the teachers went around passing out crayons. As if on cue, all of the children picked out yellow, pink, orange, bright green and other light colours from the colours they have in their coloured pencil boxes. Jimin and Tae only looked at each other. But I don't want to use yellow and green today, I want to use black and white. Jimin's eyes seemed to say. Both twins picked up dark blue, dark brown and their black and white crayons instead.

"We are ready, Miss Yerin!" All the children shouted so the teacher could carry on.

Miss Yerin showed them how to draw the skeleton of their family tree. The paper already had a template starting with two at the very top to represent their grandparents or parents, whichever they wanted to put first.

The children got to work, drawing suns here, rainbows there, and some girls drew flowers at every corner they could find, while some boys coloured cars and trucks. Once they were done with their skeleton structures, the children began pasting photos of their mom, dad and pictures of their siblings. Everything looked light and colourful.

And happy.

On the other hand, Jimin and Tae had only drawn seven boxes in a straight row. There were no bright and happy colours, only dull pencil strokes. While the other children filled in the outlines of their boxes with colour, Tae silently began using the dark blue colour to shade in his boxes. Jimin watched and began doing the same with a grey crayon. They shared their same artwork (of course they should anyway, they're twins!)

Jimin waited for his turn to use the glue, and when he did, he carefully painted glue over seven photographs. He headed back to their workspace, and filled the seven boxes with one photograph each.

"There, we're done!" Tae announced proudly. "Miss Yerin! My brother and I have finished our family tree."

Miss Yerin headed over to check their work. Only a row of seven were filled with photographs of adorable young boys, while the two boxes at the top of the tree remained blank. While the other children's papers were filled with all sorts of colours, the twins' family tree was covered in streaks of black, grey and dark blue.

"Where are the pictures of your mom and dad? You forgot to bring them?" Miss Yerin asked, pointing at the two blank boxes.

"I don't want to put their photos in." Tae answered.

"Why not?" Miss Yerin was astounded. The other children had multiple photos of their parents and were debating which ones to paste, yet the twins refused to put even a single one?

"Let me ask you then. How many people are there in your family?"

"Seven." Jimin said.

"Means there should only be five kids, right? Two parents, five kids, that makes seven."

"No, miss. Seven kids."

"Yeah, just seven boys."

*******

Once the school bell went off, Jin dashed out of his classroom and made a beeline for the first grade class to meet Yoongi. He waited for Yoongi to pack his things and greet his teacher before grabbing his hand and running out of school.

They stopped at the kindergarten. "Right on time." Jin huffed, just as the first child stepped out of the glass doors of the kindergarten building and ran into the open arms of his mother. Yoongi and Jin waited outside for their five younger brothers, taking the chance to gulp down some water because there would be a lot of nagging, scolding and chasing to do on the way back.