/
After flipping on the light in Yi-heon room, Se-kyung tossed his bag on the chair and collapsed onto the bed. He didn’t stir as he lay on the sagging mattress, and only after a while did he turn over. His long bangs fell to the side, revealing a furrowed forehead, and a hint of anguish lingered on face. His eyelids gradually slowed as he stared at the ceiling, blinking distantly, with a face that straddled the line between man and boy.
Tiring. His sensitivity to sound made the room full of students and the constant small noises grated on his nerves. He didn’t study well enough, and the number of questions he got wrong in the March mock exam exceeded two fingers.
However, his grades aside, he still wants to find Song Yi-heon.
Not the one who thrives on the basketball court and mingles with the kids in his class, but the one who comes to him, shaking and begging for help.
The look of resentment in his eyes in the darkness, the only light being the moonlight reflecting off the rain, stuck in his mind. Se-kyung knew instinctively. Only by making sure Song Yi-heon was okay would he be able to get out of the quagmire of guilt.
“Ha.”
Se-kyung roughly untied his tie and yanked it off. He stretched his palms toward the ceiling as the loose red cord coiled in his palms, rubbing lightly against his collar. The dangling tie tickled the corner of her mouth.
He jiggled the tie, loving the sensation of the blunt end of the folded fabric brushing his lips.
He remembered how Song Yi-heon’s bare face had looked when he came to his door on a rainy day. Se-kyung fumbled for the memory. It was blurry with tears, but the eyes themselves were similar to Song Yi-heon’s with his hair cut short. Although their moods were opposite, their eyes seemed to be similar.
Just then, the cell phone in his pants pocket vibrated, breaking Se-kyung out of his thoughts. He took it out of his pocket and saw a message from Song Yi-heon on the screen.
How long?
Even though he had only read it, she felt the illusion of his gruff tone echoing in his ears, and he gasped slightly. He wondered what he was doing, and before he could reply, her phone buzzed with a series of messages.
Two pictures of a math problem were sent.
‘It was at the back end of the range where I’d been grumbling at the end of the night about how I’d already started studying at home when it hadn’t even been an hour since the end of the night. A new message popped up.’
Release me.
It was an easy one. He could have written the answer on his phone from where he lay. But Se Kyung’s hand went to the call list instead of the message app and hovered over the handset button. When she checked her messages and there was no answer, her phone vibrated once again.
Sleeping.
he went back to the Messages app and wrote down the solution to the math problem. As soon as she sent the short solution, her phone rang.
Good work.
It was a neat reply that left no room for interpretation. Se Kyung grabbed his phone and pondered. Normally, Se-kyung would have said a standard greeting and ended the conversation, but he didn’t want to lose touch with the person she was talking to right now.
‘I didn’t have to pretend to be nice, I didn’t have to be frustrated, I didn’t have to be nice. It was no wonder I enjoyed talking to the changed Song Yi-heon. My sleepy eyes turned to shit.’
“Hmm?”
Meanwhile, another message arrived, this time with an image. He checked it out, thinking it was another math problem, but it was a picture of a scenic nighttime ocean. “Thank you for a wonderful and beautiful night, thank you for a wonderful life,” he wrote, apologizing for the latenight math problem. Se-kyung’s teeth gritted as he smiled weakly.
If he’s going to pretend to be Song Yi Heon, he’s going to do it straight…….
What kind of normal high school student sends this kind of image? It was the kind of image that his almost-forty-year-old father would send her once in a while, with a blossoming flower in the background and words like “I love you” and “Be happy” written on it.
Irritated, Se-kyung stared at the screen, then left the chat room, entered the chat room where she exchanged greetings with her big brother, downloaded a suitable image from him, and sent it to the abomination pretending to be Song Yi-heon.
‘I tossed my phone aside in frustration. I wasn’t advertising myself as someone else, and if I claimed to be Song Yiheon with my own words, I should have acted more believably.’
A vibration sounded in the quiet room. Se-kyung jumped up like a lightning bolt and grabbed her phone, only to be disappointed to see that it was someone other than Song Yi-heon. Without checking the notification, she collapsed back onto her bed.
Hi breathing became regular as he tried to regain his composure in the silence of the room, which didn’t even have a ticking clock, but when his phone vibrated again, he quickly snatched it up. Nerves that had bypassed his brain moved her fingers as Song Yi-heon’s name appeared on the screen.
Good night.
A single, unspaced message. For a moment, he felt a sickening sense of satisfaction at the insincerity of a single line, and then his chest tightened at the change of a single line. But if denying it would make it go away, she wouldn’t have recognized it in the first place.
Forced to be kind and good, Choi Se-kyung didn’t exist with Kim Deuk-pal. He had to put aside his good behavior because he was trying to find Song Yi-heon, and even when he was pushed hard, Kim Deuk-pal handled her skillfully. With Kim Deuk-pal by his side, he could be herself even when she was emotional.
“Ha, hahaha…….”
He couldn’t deny it anymore. Choi Se-kyung is attracted to the changed Song Yi-heon. Not the shivering Song Yi-heon who showed up at Se-kyung’s door on a rainy day, but the confident Song Yi-heon on the basketball court. he’s drawn to him, to the point where He wants to believe that the original Song Yi-heon hasn’t been replaced by someone else, that he’s changed, as everyone else has said.
So when the altered Song Yi-heon acts differently from the original Song Yi-heon, he gets annoyed. He wanted to believe that they were the same person, but they kept making him doubt it. Sensitive Choi Se-kyung couldn’t ignore the gap between them.
“Oh, I don’t know…….”
‘I wonder if I shouldn’t just pretend I don’t know everything. If I don’t stand out and pretend I don’t know…. The temptation was like the tree of knowledge of good and evil. All I wanted to do was sit back and enjoy the sweet fruit without struggling. It would be easy. If I didn’t have to fight it, if I could just forget about last winter…….’
Recalling the comfort of his time with Kim Deuk-pal, Se-kyung suddenly jumped to his feet. His heart raced as if it had been doused in cold water. He couldn’t believe he had been tempted.
No, no.
Se-kyung couldn’t give him up. He couldn’t leave her shivering in the rain, making feeble threats.
The changed Song Yi-heon told him to wait, but Se-kyung couldn’t wait. Before he could fall completely in love with the changed Song Yi-heon, she had to find the original Song Yi-heon.
He would do anything to find him.
Read only at salmonlatte.com
* * *
Outside the window, the shouts of students in gym class sounded like a lullaby. Sitting in the corner of the art room, Song hid behind a big guy and nodded off, clutching a 4B pencil. Every time his head bobbed, his sketchbook scribbled a short line, and when the bell rang to end the class, he scribbled a bold line in frustration.
“Hmph-.”
Kim Deuk-pal stretched and stood up. Even though he had the stamina of a teenager, he hadn’t slept well for the past few days preparing for the midterm exam, so he was drowsy. He rubbed his eyes, grabbed his sketchbook, and followed the rest of the class.
“It’s supposed to rain tonight, did you bring an umbrella?”
“Uh, no, I didn’t bring an umbrella, won’t it stop when we’re done?”
Kim Deuk-pal arrived late, walking calmly as he listened to the other children’s conversations, but when he sensed that the atmosphere in the classroom was tense, he straightened up. The source of the disturbance was a group of girls huddled in a locker at the back of the room. He grabbed the nearest one and asked.
“What’s going on?”
“They said the money they saved to buy supplemental English books was missing.”
“Why is it missing?”
‘I don’t know. I put it in my locker, but it’s missing.’
Kim Yeon-ji, the deputy class leader, walked in ten thousand yuan to order English supplementary textbooks as a group. Song Yi-heon, her partner, was the first to pay for Kim’s wipes, and often saw her taking money from the kids and putting it in an envelope. This morning, she said she was planning to go to the bookstore to buy the books she ordered after school. However, she brought all the money she had collected and put it in her locker.
At the back of the classroom, where she had pushed her way through a crowd of kids, Kim Yeon-ji had taken out all the things she had put in her locker and was searching for them. But no matter how hard she searched, she couldn’t find the envelope. She gripped the book spine upside down and shook it out, but only dust fell.
“Did you put it somewhere else?”
The girl who had watched her overturn the locker from the beginning asked. The locker lock was still in place, but the money envelope was missing.
“My friends saw that I put it inside the locker and put the lock on it…….”
“Yeah, we saw that.”
Her friends echoed Yeon-ji’s words, her voice trembling as if she were about to cry. Her best friends and Song Yi-heon were the only ones who knew her locker password. They’ve been with her since she walked into the art room, so they can’t be the culprits, and the only one left is…….
“Well.”
Kim Deuk-pal answered the suspicion eyes with a single syllable. The children, overwhelmed by the rush momentum, were distracted.
“No. He’s not that kind of boy.”
The children soon agreed, recognizing the luxury sedan Song Yi-heon drove to and from school and the expensive clothing he wore. They recognized Song Yi-heon’s ability to sneak in and out of the cafeteria, steal the love of the cafeteria lady, and steal snacks from the kids they met in the cafeteria. He was never short of money.
“It’s my fault, it’s a lot of money. I should have been more careful.”
When the arrow of suspicion fell on her classmate, she blamed herself, and her friends made excuses to relieve her of responsibility.
“You couldn’t stop her from stealing it.”
“Let’s talk to the homeroom teacher first. Where did Se-kyung disappear?”
We were in trouble, and the class leader, Choi Se-kyung, was nowhere to be seen. Let’s find Se-kyung and speak to the homeroom teacher, and that would have been it. If it weren’t for one word: suspicion.
“…Hong Jae-min, did you come to school today?”
The children were silent. It was still the same meaning behind the silence. The class looked back at Hong Jae-min’s desk at the end of the fourth quarter, where only an empty bag hung loosely.
“He didn’t come to art class.”