I swerved as I neared the gravel pile, but not fast enough. I flew through the air for a brief second, and then hit the small mound of chipped grey rock with a thud and a scraping noise. I felt pain flash through my hand, and then down to my knees. Beom-Jin, my Korean friend, pedaled up next to me and jumped down. “Are you okay?” Only then did I look down to see the true extent of my injury. My knees were grazed, as I had landed hard on them, and a thin trickle of blood was running down my left calf. As I turned my hand over, I saw that several layers of skin had been peeled back cleanly in a circle, revealing a few layers of bloodied skin underneath.

I managed to get back home, and, when there, I dug the pieces of gravel out of my hand. I then poured some hydrogen peroxide over it, causing my open skin to sting like crazy. Beom-Jin, who had accompanied me back home, and kept on worrying that I was going to die, was sickened by the cuts, and so I refrained from showing them to him, remembering how he had been kind enough to accompany me home.

After taking some time to recover from the pain of my injuries and with a bandaged hand, I got back out on the road with Beom-Jin. Back on our bikes. And we tried to catch up to our friends and see what they were doing. We had just been playing a game of tag on our bikes, and Beom-Jin had been chasing me when I ploughed into the gravel pile and wounded myself. Looking for our friends, we pedaled furiously up and down the streets behind Victory Supermarket, a large department store that had been around for forever. They weren’t where we had seen them last, and they weren’t chasing each other in the neighborhood. We began to wonder where they had gone. After a fruitless ten minutes of searching, we decided to give up, and headed back to Beom-Jin’s house. When we turned onto his road, we found that our friends had abandoned their bikes by the side of the road and were now playing in a large yellow sand pile outside of Beom-Jin’s gate! They had been there the whole time that we had been searching for them.