⎡Height Difference⎦
Could you get that box of cheerios, @acayug?
“Eggs? Check. Milk? Check. Cereal? Um...”
Jihoon is a sheltered child.
Being born prematurely always has its complications, and Jihoon’s possibly received the full blunt of it despite being a child of two very healthy parents. As a baby, all he did was cry, and has had death knocking on his door more than once. It got better as he grew older and was able to take vitamins and solid food, but his parents remained overprotective of their one and only son and coddled him to the extreme.
They gave him what he wanted, to compensate for the thing they couldn’t give him. A healthy body. Jihoon gets what he wants with just a bat of an eyelash.
But it’s different in College. Here, they don’t coddle him, they don’t tell him not to do this or that and they treat him as any other student (just with an added concern for his health). It was a breath of fresh air and he liked it. He’s moved out of his house and into an apartment (which his parents picked for him, of course), attending a prestigious College, and basically gets to do whatever a normal person does.
That includes grocery shopping.
Armed with a small list of things to buy, his favorite oversized sweater and his wallet, he pushes the shopping cart further inside, eyes roaming around to look for which lane the cereals were in. When he does, he realizes he lacks the height to reach for said item and no employee in sight that he could ask for help. His cheeks flare in embarrassment at his current situation, cheeks puffing up as the only person he could ask for help is another customer in the same isle as him with their backs turned to him. Jihoon weighs his options and ultimately decides to ask the stranger for help.
He takes silent steps towards them and gives a small tap to their back, “excuse me, sorry to bother you on your shopping, but could I ask for a small favor? I can’t reach that box of cereal over there, so if you could, can you reach it for me?”