You were coming out of ESL class as I was turning the corner to go to seventh grade math class. We almost ran into eachother, and were startled. You, being a simple country girl straight from rural South Korea, couldn't remember how to "excuse me" in English; and I, inexplicably, tried to think of how to say "excuse me" in Korean, but was equally stumped. So we were both sort of at a loss for words until I simply and absurdly said "huh-unh" and moved on.

I often wondered if you assumed that "huh-unh" meant something, like some forgotten completion of the set of better-known English interjections "hunh!", "unh-hunh!", and "nuh-unh!".