Parents' Observation Day
"Nngh…."
I stretched in front of the computer, light still spilling from the screen. While I was at it, I rolled my arms and neck this way and that until a series of satisfying cracks escaped my joints.
Come to think of it, I'd been feeling unusually stiff lately. A dull ache here, a knot there. Like my body was starting to wear down.
Maybe I should start working out, I thought. Ririyang had mentioned she'd taken up pilates, hadn't she? It wasn't about anything else — I just didn't want to waste this body.
If it had been my old, wrecked physique, maybe I wouldn't have cared. But I'd gone through all the trouble of getting Camilla's brand-new body. If I let this one fall apart from neglect too, that would be genuinely tragic.
I sat there blankly in my chair, lost in those thoughts. The stream had just ended a moment ago.
It was always like this after a broadcast. A kind of drained emptiness — all the energy would just pour out of me, and I'd stay like that for a while.
In that state, I went through my usual post-stream checklist. Checking how the Vtube channel was growing, looking over the reactions to my latest videos, browsing the gallery to see if anything special was happening on Twish…
And that was when something caught my eye.
A help request from Kim Jaejun, my editor and manager.
Kim Jaejun had never married, even though he was well into an age where that would have been expected.
There were any number of reasons. The job he'd once held had disappeared, leaving him in far shabbier circumstances than before. And his heart had grown too old to fall into the kind of aching, all-consuming love that made a person feel they couldn't live without someone.
But of all those reasons, the one that weighed heaviest was his young niece.
She had lost her parents far too early and grown up far too fast. It wasn't as though Jaejun was broke — he had money set aside — and yet he still hadn't struck out on his own, largely because of that little girl.
It wasn't the kind of arrangement people sometimes whispered about, either: a grown man living off his aging mother's back. He felt a deep sense of responsibility toward both his elderly mother and his young niece.
He was old enough that being called "uncle" no longer felt strange. He cut a decent figure, but he had a family to support. Starting a new household under those conditions would have been a heavy burden in every sense. No woman would particularly want to marry a man who came with extra mouths to feed.
Even so, Jaejun didn't resent his situation. From the day his older sister and brother-in-law had died in the accident, he had sworn he would take responsibility for the niece left behind for the rest of his life.
Lately, he'd even landed the editor position for the streamer he'd always wanted to work with, drawing a steady paycheck and living a stable life. His mother was still healthy, and though his niece could be a handful, she had become neighborhood friends with the boss. There was nothing left to complain about.
And so the peaceful days continued. Just as he was thinking life couldn't get much better than this, a problem appeared.
"Parents' observation day…?"
He'd found it by chance in his niece's bag — a school notice. Written on it were the words Parents' Observation Class.
And it was this Friday. Yet Sihyeon hadn't said a single word about it.
It was the kind of situation that set Jaejun thinking hard. Sihyeon was mature for her age, with a grown-up streak and a generally cheerful disposition — but she was still a ten-year-old kid.
Most likely, she hadn't wanted to burden her uncle or her grandmother and had kept it quiet. Or else she'd looked at her own situation — a girl without parents — and decided not to say anything out of despair.
Either way, for a man who thought of his niece almost as a daughter, it was heartbreaking.
Which meant he absolutely had to go to Friday's parents' observation class.
He looked it up and found that it wasn't unheard of for aunts, older sisters, or older brothers to attend in place of parents.
It'd be better if I brought someone else along…
Going alone was fine, but having even one more person there to watch over Sihyeon would be better.
His mother worked steadily on weekdays, so she couldn't come — and even if she could spare the time, finding out Sihyeon had hidden this would hit her hard.
Ideally, someone who already knew Sihyeon and could free up time during the week…
"…."
Only one person came to mind. That was why, after a great deal of difficult deliberation, Kim Jaejun had reached out to his boss.
What answer Kayak would give, though, was anyone's guess. Honestly, if she refused, Jaejun wouldn't have had a word of complaint.
Even if she and Sihyeon were neighborhood friends, she might just have been playing along the way adults do with little kids. And the boss was a working adult with her own schedule.
Put bluntly — why would she care about some subordinate's niece's parents' observation day?
Even if Kayak cooed over Sihyeon every time she saw her, and even if she and Jaejun kept a relationship more horizontal than boss and employee, the two of them were still fundamentally a business arrangement. Taking personal time for something like this would be genuinely rare.
So Jaejun hadn't gotten his hopes up. When he called Kayak over and started explaining, he watched her reaction carefully and took his time getting the words out.
What he got back, though, was nothing like what he'd expected.
"Huing…."
Before he knew it, she was sniffling, fat tears rolling one after another from those big eyes of hers. Jaejun finished his story in a fluster and tried to calm her down.
I never would have guessed there was a story like that behind it. He'd called me over out of nowhere, and what he told me was the kind of thing that made a corner of your chest ache just listening to it.
I wasn't a stranger to the hearts of kids who grow up too fast. My own parents had died in an accident, after all.
Granted, I'd been in high school rather than as young as Sihyeon — but I could still roughly understand how she felt.
"Here, wipe with this."
"Okay…."
What I hadn't expected was that I'd start crying myself.
I'd never been the type to tear up easily, even at famously sad movies or genuinely miserable situations. Was Camilla's body just wired with extra-sensitive tear ducts?
Well, she was a dancing artist, so… yeah. People in the performing arts tended to be emotionally rich, right?
Either way, my heart had already made up its mind. Kim Jaejun had contacted me to ask if I'd go to the parents' observation class with him.
Was that really such a big deal that he had to sit there looking this tense? If he'd just said, Sihyeon's got a parents' observation day — want to come with me? without all the long-winded backstory, I still would have said yes.
"When is it again?"
"Yerin, is your mom coming, or your dad?"
"Both of them!"
"Both your mom and dad are coming?"
Whoa, that's so cool — Yerin's mom AND dad are both coming—
Sihyeon did her best to ignore the chatter drifting over from across the room. Just in case anyone asked her whether her mom or dad was coming, she stayed slumped over her desk, pretending she didn't feel well.
Recess was over. In ten minutes, the parents' observation class would begin. Any moment now, her classmates' families would start arriving.
No one from Sihyeon's family would be coming. She hadn't told them about it at all.
The reason was simple. Sihyeon didn't have parents.
She had an uncle and a grandmother, but… for some reason, she hadn't wanted to call either of them. It was a complicated feeling she couldn't quite explain even to herself.
Still, listening to her friends talk like that made a small part of her wonder if she should have at least asked her uncle.
But it was already too late. The next period was the observation class — she couldn't exactly call him now and tell him to come.
Maybe I should just go to the nurse's office.
Tell the teacher she felt sick, then lie down in the nurse's office for an hour. That was the plan she was putting together —
"All right, everyone, take your seats. Class is starting."
— except she'd overthought it for too long, and now it was too late.
Sihyeon bit her lip lightly and opened her textbook.
For a little while, she followed along with the teacher's lesson. Then people began filtering in through the back door, one and two at a time.
"That's my mom…!"
"Dad!"
Some kids whispered toward the back of the room; others waved outright, openly acknowledging their parents.
"…."
Something she didn't have. Something she hadn't been born with.
Sihyeon lowered her head for a moment, then lifted it again. All she had to do was focus on class. Wanting something desperately didn't mean you could have it.
And then it happened. Just as Sihyeon had shut out the outside world and fixed her eyes entirely on her textbook, the other kids started murmuring.
"What? A foreigner? Whose mom is that?"
"She's so pretty…. Like the white snow piled up outside."
"That's not a mom — isn't that an older sister?"
Even as the whispering grew louder, the teacher made no move to stop it.
That was strange enough that Sihyeon looked up at her — only to find the teacher herself staring toward the back of the room with a faintly startled expression.
Who on earth had shown up to make even the teacher react like that? She couldn't help being curious. The resolve not to look behind her cracked right then and there.
And when Sihyeon finally turned around, what she saw was —
her uncle, raising a hand in an awkward little greeting,
"…Unnie?"
and the neighborhood unnie, dressed up far more carefully than usual, meeting her eyes with a smile.