The Delinquent (1)
Three weeks ago, when I first visited Gapdong here in Hayeon City to scout out a place to live, a single thought crossed my mind.
What a safe little neighborhood.
Cramped as Gapdong was, it had an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school all packed inside it—one or two campuses of each. A thoroughfare with that many students tramping through it every day had to be a safe one, or so the logic went; parents would never have settled down somewhere they didn't trust.
Confined, at least, to the Seoul I was born and raised in, that logic held without a flaw. It was, in fact, the main reason I'd chosen this neighborhood as my new base.
But this was not Seoul. The point being: don't expect the kids here to meekly shuttle between home and cram school like the studious children of Seoul's famous school districts.
Every evening I suffered under the thunderous footsteps of the troublemaker living upstairs. Then, just as I tried to drift off around one or two in the morning, noise would come pouring in through my window. Booming voices rode the growl of tuned motorcycle exhausts, and they sounded unmistakably young—the boys and the girls alike.
That green, unripe timbre belonging only to voices not yet six or seven years past puberty, layered with the gravelly huskiness you can only earn by burning through two packs a day...
Ah, how familiar. The voices and laughter of the bastards who always claimed the very back row of the tour bus on middle-school retreats and field trips.
That's right. Thoroughly rotten, bike-gang delinquent students. For someone who'd spent his school years passing through two of Gangnam's eight famous school districts, they were a breed I'd rarely had occasion to tangle with.
And yet here, those types materialized without fail the moment the clock passed one or two in the morning, followed inevitably by the short wail of police sirens chasing them down.
At least Cho A-ran upstairs had seen fit to gift me the occasional sweet treat; those bastards, for their part, would periodically pull up in front of this villa and gift me nothing but secondhand cigarette smoke.
My pet theory—that a neighborhood full of students was a safe neighborhood—collapsed in spectacular fashion.
The ground floor of the villa building I lived in housed a convenience store. This, too, had been one of the major reasons I'd picked this place. My weekly routine demanded at least three stops there, after all. What kept drawing me back with such clockwork regularity—despite my never touching cigarettes—was the energy drinks on 1+1 promotion.
That day, too, worn out from serializing, I'd gone down to the store in search of an energy drink. And that day, too, the store's tables were squat-occupied by a pack of punk high schoolers.
"Ha... fuck. I'm seriously dying for a smoke right now."
"Hey, you all out? Should we ask Ha-jeong unni?"
What is this world coming to? Kids wearing what was, to anyone with eyes, a school uniform—styled to look as little like one as possible—tossing out lines like that without a flicker of shame.
And speaking of which—Ha-jeong unni?
Sounded like an adult had mixed into the pack they ran with. A grown woman spending her adulthood playing cigarette mule for the underage kids she'd befriended.
"Ooh, right on cue—there she is. Unniii!"
Before I knew what I was doing, my eyes followed the direction one of the punks was waving toward. From far down the street, a girl—the so-called 'Ha-jeong unni'—was making her way toward this convenience store with a bright, bouncy stride.
"Uh, I'm busy right now. I've gotta stop by home."
With that, she gave a careless wave and swept past the punk pack without meeting a single pair of eyes.
She didn't feel like a cigarette errand-girl in the slightest. If anything, she radiated the presence of the pack's ranking officer. A girl with a youthful bob and such tidy, adorable features, exuding seasoned charisma—the gap was staggering.
Once you stepped out of the convenience store and rounded the outside of the villa building, just a few paces brought you to the shared entrance. The moment I reached it, I began punching in the passcode. And then, from behind me, came a bright, bouncy patter of footsteps.
[Tap tap tap tap]
The owner of those approaching footsteps was none other than 'Ha-jeong unni' herself. So the home she was in such a hurry to stop by turned out to be this very villa. We were neighbors, then.
The girl named Ha-jeong stood silently behind me, waiting until I'd finished keying in the entrance code without a hitch. And with her just standing there behind me without a word... ugh, damn it—try as I might not to notice her, it was impossible. Sure enough, I botched the code a full three times.
I felt like some burglar caught in the act; my hands trembled for no reason and my heart lurched wildly.
[Tap tap]
Jolted by the sudden touch against my back, I flinched, hunching over like a social recluse as I turned to look. At some point, the girl named Ha-jeong had come to stand directly behind me.
Right. So she'd knocked on my back.
"Mister, may I press it for you? It's urgent."
Was she desperate for a pee or something?
"Huh? Sure..."
I stepped aside in a daze. And so, thanks to that girl's help, I managed to break through this unbidden obstacle known as the shared entrance.
Seeing the elevator waiting on the first floor, the girl blurted out, "Phew, thank goodness." She looked so bright and cheerful that I thought, just maybe, she was a little cute.
But then, why would a girl like that run with punks like those...? I found myself feeling inexplicably bitter.
Since my home was Unit 303, I pressed the button for the third floor. The cheerful girl who'd somehow ended up sharing the elevator with me pressed the button for F—the fourth floor, directly above mine.
If she lived on F, then that little troublemaker surely did too. I found myself wondering whether the noise didn't carry to the unit next door as well. Curiosity got the better of me for a moment, but I let it go without asking.
[Ding—]
The elevator finally stopped on the third floor and its doors slid open; without exchanging so much as a parting word with the girl, I stepped out. Trudging down the narrow corridor toward my apartment... hold on. Mister?
That's right. That girl had called me 'mister' in the most natural tone imaginable. Between the shock of learning that a girl who ran with the local delinquent toughs lived in the same villa as me, I hadn't had the presence of mind to register it. Only belatedly did that word—mister—come crashing over me like a high wave, and my spirit crumbled helplessly.
That's right. I was now, no two ways about it, a mister.
Head hung low, I opened the front door of my apartment. I'd only gone out to buy an energy drink, yet somehow the trip felt as though it had drained every last drop of energy I had. Sinking into the sofa, I heaved a long, deep sigh.
My stockpile of pre-written chapters had all been posted and spent, and now I had to finish an entire episode within four hours—with less than five hundred characters to my name.
Back when I was serializing Human Guilty, I'd already been sketching out my next work on the side. Next time, I'd vowed, I would write an adult web novel set in a fantasy world rather than grounded in reality. True to that vow, I had been quietly building out a vast fantasy setting in the cracks of my spare time.
After wrapping up Human Guilty and taking roughly two weeks of rest, I at last began serializing that fantasy web novel. The reputation I'd built with Human Guilty was thick enough, but the moment I dared to switch genres, my readers began holding me to an even stricter yardstick. Well, of course—when it came to fantasy, plenty of them had far more mileage under their belts than I did.
Grateful for their feedback, I threw myself into revising my pre-written chapters again and again—until the stock ran dry, and now I had to hammer at my laptop keys feeling like a man standing at the very edge of a cliff.
Ha... and what comes next? My protagonist has just arrived in a new village, quietly kindled a flirtation with the village chief's daughter, and now he's supposed to devour the chief's little girl...
Perhaps because I'd been serializing adult web novels nonstop since Human Guilty, not a single fresh sex-scene idea would come to me. And in the middle of all that, that cheerful girl's face kept creeping up on me to torment me—it was enough to drive a man out of his skull.
What? Called me mister, did she?
[Knock knock knock]
Faintly, I could hear knocking. Was it because the touch against my back kept resurfacing in my memory? The face of that girl who'd rapped her knuckles on my back as if it were a front door came creeping in again...
Begone, I say! I had a novel to write, damn it.
"Mister, are you not home? You should be..."
Ha, honestly. So now she'd come to torment me even as an auditory hallucination. If I wanted to exorcise this demon-girl, an energy drink was the only answer. I cracked the can open with a crisp snap and raised it to my lips, and then—
"Excuse me, mister. You do live here, don't you?"
Hm? That wasn't a hallucination?
The voice coming from beyond my front door was, for some reason, remarkably distinct. Too concrete to be a hallucination... Half hoping, half dreading, I carefully opened the door.
"Oh, I was right. You do live here."
Good lord. Standing squarely before me was that bright, cheerful delinquent girl. A white tank top and black track pants snug as leggings—the girl named Ha-jeong. The very one who'd called me mister...
"Excuse me, mister."
Ah, please, make it stop.
"Ah, yes, um—what brings you here...?"
I answered in polite form without thinking. Had the word 'mister' been more familiar to my ears, I might well have answered casually instead. That's right—I was not yet a mister. The very fact that 'mister' sounded this unfamiliar to me was proof positive.
"Mister, I hear you serialize web novels?"
"I'm sorry?"
"...You do, don't you?"
In that moment, I felt as though I'd become the protagonist of The Truman Show. The world I knew had come crashing down around me. So everyone had been watching me. Everyone had recognized me. Which meant everything I'd done—all my atrocities—had been laid bare to the entire... good lord.
"Mister, are you okay? You seem flustered."
"Huh? Oh, um..."
"I know because my mom told me. Anyway, you are a web novelist, right?"
Severely rattled, I nodded along like a man who'd lost his mind. Brow furrowed tight, I kept nodding as I chewed over every word the girl before me had just said.
Mom? Whose mom?
Had I ever revealed that I was a web novelist? Ah, right—I had told Cho A-ran from upstairs. Don't tell me... she was the mom? So she didn't just have that emotionally unstable boy—she had a daughter like this too?
But wasn't she born in '90? The girl before me was an adult, so she had to be at least an '06er... no, hold on—it's 2026 now, so an '07er. Time really does fly. '07ers were adults already.
"Mister? Are you okay?"
Just how long had I been lost in my own head? The girl was sending me a look of genuine concern.
"Oh, I'm fine..."
Having said that, I pressed on with my questions.
"So, what exactly brings you here...? And how on earth did you know where I live? Why show up out of nowhere like this..."
Leaving my unanswered questions piled up behind me, I fumbled through one question after another. The cheerful girl named Ha-jeong, on the other hand, lit up her sparkling eyes and delivered these words as though reciting lines she'd prepared in advance:
"Teach me how to write web novels, too."
