Winding Down the Festival
"About time you got here. Hasol's over there trying to work herself to death right now, so hurry up and take over."
Fortunately, the cafe was packed wall-to-wall, so nobody said a word about the lingering flush on either of their faces.
Meanwhile, Teacher Jisu—who had made the mistake of dropping by with time to spare and gotten drafted by the students on the spot—was being run ragged off to one side.
Yeoncheong slipped over to Hasol's side and whispered.
"Hasol. Let's wrap this up and you go rest for a bit."
"Nyaa. No, I'm insane. Got it."
Hasol, who had answered on pure autopilot, shook her head side to side in embarrassment.
Even sweet-natured Hasol was being assimilated into a cat. Yeoncheong counted herself lucky she'd come back before it went any further.
She sent Hasol off to rest and threw herself into serving the customers who'd ordered the Special Menu all on her own.
Do anything long enough and you get used to it, apparently. Yeoncheong gave her own face a couple of sharp smacks with her fluffy paw gloves, then handled the seniors just as smoothly as before.
Thank goodness. My head was a total mess there for a second.
Between Suyeon's unpredictable antics—impossible to tell whether they were jokes or dead serious—Yeoncheong worked herself even harder trying to forget the whole thing.
Watching her bounce back as if nothing had happened, the other kids were in awe.
"Wow... she's honestly incredible."
"It's almost worthy of respect."
Meanwhile, apparently there was real demand for a grumpy, fluffy maid. Nayun, getting summoned this way and that, licked her lips as she watched her friend work.
"A total pro. A professional dog, through and through."
The way she absolutely refused to speak human language in front of customers, too. Honestly, was there anyone—or any dog—in their class who could handle the seniors better than her?
Come to think of it, it was the same at the sports festival, same with exam prep.
Setting talent aside, she was simply the type who gave everything her all, no matter what.
Just then, some first-year juniors who'd received their refreshments spoke up to Nayun.
"Senior, you're so cute! Would you take a photo with us? Just one?"
"Are you insane?"
Even as she said it, she sidled over next to the juniors and posed for the picture anyway.
While Yeoncheong and Nayun worked the customers out beyond the partitions, Suyeon ran into Seoha, who was helping out in the back.
Suyeon fell into step beside her without a word, checking orders and prepping drinks—but a subtle current ran between the two of them.
Others might not have noticed, but Seoha had caught the faint traces of heat still lingering on both their faces.
She held Suyeon's gaze and asked in a quiet voice.
"I get the feeling... but isn't hogging her all to yourself a little greedy?"
"I had no idea time could slip by that fast."
Suyeon felt bad about monopolizing Yeoncheong's break, but somehow the apology just wouldn't leave her mouth.
The grass is always greener, as they say.
It didn't sit right with her that Yeoncheong had brushed off her confession so casually—and maybe she was a little jealous of the smile Seoha had answered it with, too.
"Couldn't we just call it even? You took half her break, I got the other half."
The words slipped out instead of the apology she meant to say, and even Suyeon startled at her own voice.
The owner of those round red eyes barely managed to swallow the words that had almost escaped.
"That math... that math doesn't add up at all..."
A tiny mutter, barely audible.
She'd already complained once before about how little time she got to spend with Yeoncheong—and now, Seoha had never once regretted becoming student council president as bitterly as she did in that moment.
"Huh, the teacher's making a run for it!"
"Everyone! Let your teacher rest!"
"Catch the teacher!"
Teacher Jisu had seized a gap in her own students' surveillance and bolted.
"Woof! Woooof!"
"Wow. I can actually tell what you're saying. You were dead serious about telling us to get lost, huh?"
"Yeoncheong, should we just head home...?"
"Woof! Woof, woof!"
Siyeon and Seobin had genuinely come by on their break, and Yeoncheong barely managed to stop them from taking the joke at face value and turning back.
After that, she chased off Senior Seoyun with her leftover voting stickers—"one photo a day, that's the rule!"—ran into Chaerin, the junior who'd come to see Seoha, along with her childhood friend Soyul, and welcomed Hasol back into the fold, her humanity restored by her break.
The hours of the Hwaryeong High School festival slipped by in a blur, joyful and chaotic all at once.
And before anyone realized it, the Hwaryeong Festival was drawing to a close.
With everyone who was coming apparently already arrived, the classroom had grown noticeably quieter—when an unexpected guest walked in.
"I hear this is the most popular cafe of the bunch. That right?"
The students froze as Chairwoman Yurim strolled in through the door with an easy grin.
For all the good things said about her, she was someone they usually only glimpsed from a distance at school events, so it was understandable.
"What do we do? What are we supposed to call her?"
"How should I know."
Yurim caught the hushed exchange and flashed a sly smile.
"Call me whatever's comfortable. Chairwoman works fine. Unnie works even better."
No matter how young Yurim looked for her age, that was still strictly for her age.
And even if it was just a joke to break the ice—she was a senior schoolmate of Yeoncheong's father.
Yeoncheong, who couldn't possibly let that pass, let her true feelings slip—professional-grade immersion completely forgotten.
"Wow... that's a bit..."
Every eye in the room swung to Yeoncheong in an instant.
Only then did she realize her mistake, clapping a fluffy paw-glove over her mouth and swallowing the rest.
Still, in this entire classroom, Yeoncheong was the only one who could say that kind of thing to Chairwoman Yurim's face.
Yurim had come to Class 2-1 with the best of intentions—to see how this year's festival was shaping up, and to check in on Yeoncheong, who'd been so out of touch lately. Her mood shifted in a heartbeat.
"Yeoncheong? What was that, hm? You can't just stop mid-sentence. Now I'm curious."
"Woooof?"
There was no escaping her wrath no matter what she said.
Yeoncheong grasped reality fast and tried to dodge by letting out a puppy's whimper, but—
"You think you can run from me? You, of all people? Get over here, right now!"
Chairwoman Yurim had known Yeoncheong since she was little, and had zero reservations about closing the distance.
She lunged with reflexes unbecoming of her age, but outracing the raw reaction speed of youth was a bridge too far.
Yeoncheong, having nimbly dodged Yurim's grasping hand, opened her mouth.
In for a penny, in for a pound—she might as well say everything she wanted to say and die without regrets.
"No way! You're basically my dad's age! Calling yourself Unnie is pushing it, don't you think?!"
"You're exactly like your father—there's nothing out of your mouth!"
A chase erupted, circling the classroom round and round.
The classmates, who'd only heard rumors that the two were close back when Yeoncheong first transferred, stood there slack-jawed. Nobody had imagined it went this deep.
"You there! Yeoncheong, catch her!"
Then Chairwoman Yurim ordered the students to seize the fleeing Yeoncheong. The class hesitated, torn over what to do—
"I'll buy you all ice cream!"
"Guys, no! We're not doing that! Noooo—!"
At those single words, they became one great net and brought Yeoncheong down.
"You'd sell out a friend for one ice cream! For ONE ice cream!"
Yeoncheong thrashed and ranted, but there was no escape. Chairwoman Yurim came huffing and puffing over to her, and then—
"Sometimes you need a good scolding to knock some sense into you."
"Gya aaaah! I'm, I'm sorry... eeeeiiaaaah!"
The friends who'd traded Yeoncheong away for a single ice cream couldn't bear to watch the end, and everyone looked away.
Chairwoman Yurim returned, true to her word, with armfuls of ice cream.
The festival was all but over anyway; no more customers were coming, and the drinks and refreshments they'd prepared were nearly gone. The class each bit into an ice cream and started cleaning up a little ahead of schedule.
Under the sky flushed deep red with full-blown autumn, they wiped down desks and stacked the partitions that had divided the room into tidy piles against one wall.
When her friends told her she'd worked hard and should take a rest, Yeoncheong just gazed blankly out the window.
Chairwoman Yurim, who hadn't left yet, poked her playfully in the side.
"Ow. Watch where you're poking."
"Your first—and last—time working a festival. Looks like you had fun?"
"Fun? I will never imitate a dog again as long as I live."
All she had to remember was being tormented by mischievous seniors all day long. Disgust crept up on her, and Yeoncheong's lips jutted out without her meaning them to.
"And yet I bet you'll look back on it fondly. Your friends certainly seem to."
Yurim pointed at the kids still cleaning up.
Their mouths were stretched in wide smiles, but their eyes—the true seat of emotion, you might say—were brimming with something like loss. Wistful faces, bittersweet all over.
And along with them, today's memories flickered past like a lantern show.
A day that could never come again, impossible to recreate even on command. At the thought, Yeoncheong's face settled into the very same expression.
Click.
"Look. There's that same face."
Chairwoman Yurim, who had seized the moment to snap her photo, held the picture out to her.
Faced with an expression carrying exactly the feelings she'd just glimpsed on her friends' faces, Yeoncheong had nothing to say.
Yurim rose slowly from her seat, as if she'd hindered the students' cleanup long enough.
"Well, I'm glad to see you're doing well. I expect you'll keep up this silence of yours going forward, too."
"Was that why you came?"
"What else would I have come for, hm?"
Yurim gave a shrug, and with that, slipped quietly out of the classroom.
The traces of the festival dwindled fast.
Yeoncheong was a beat behind everyone else in getting swept up in the mood.
"You worked hard today."
Hair soft as silk brushed teasingly against her bare shoulder and arm. Yeoncheong answered without taking her eyes off the sunset beyond the window.
"Yeah, I did work hard today. The others ought to be bowing to me and Hasol."
"Knew I shouldn't have bothered saying it. Did not expect that reaction."
Seoha let out a soft laugh and moved closer beside her. But Yeoncheong caught something subtle in her voice and turned her head.
"Wasn't it fun today?"
"It was? Why would you think otherwise?"
Seoha met her eyes with a faint smile on her lips.
Compared to friends whose every feeling played across their faces, hers was sparse. Anyone else would have called that more than enough—but to Yeoncheong's eyes, it looked different.
"There you go again. All mouth-smile, nothing behind it."
Having been on the receiving end of her friend's feelingless smiles in more ways than one, Yeoncheong could read the fine differences.
She thought for a moment, then slipped on the paw gloves she'd set down beside her.
"You know, people kept saying how nice these felt. The kids must've picked good ones after all."
"Uh, yeah?"
Just as Seoha blinked at the totally random piece of trivia—
"Here."
Yeoncheong pressed both hands to her cheeks and began rubbing them with the fluffy, downy-soft gloves.
"I tried it on myself when I was alone once. Feels amazing, seriously. What do you think?"
Words failed Seoha completely.
The oversized gloves blotted out her peripheral vision, narrowing the world down to a single point—and in that narrowed world, there was only one thing: Yeoncheong's radiant, guileless smile.
The crooked feelings inside her melted away like snow under the sun.
At a scene too good to be anything but heaven, a natural smile rose to Seoha's face at last.
"Feel good?"
"It's the best."
Seoha layered her hands over the gloves caressing her face, savoring that fleeting happiness for a moment—
Then the red eyes that had been hiding beneath her lashes lifted, and looked at Yeoncheong.
"Yeoncheong. Is it really okay to do this much for someone just because they said they like you?"
"Huh?"
Yeoncheong yanked her hands back and started stammering.
"The kids in our class do stuff like that all the time as a joke, so... I mean, is that not something friends are supposed to do, regardless of the liking part?"
Humans are creatures of adaptation.
At a girls' school with nothing but girls around, that sort of mischievous teasing ran even more rampant, and so a lot of what she saw and learned was exactly that kind of thing.
Yeoncheong was absorbing it without even realizing.
"No, it's fine. I was just asking on the off chance."
Seoha shook her head as if she'd only been joking.
There was no need to hold back a friend who was growing more radiant by the day.
It worried her a little, how Yeoncheong might be with other people too—but she was far too precious to give up over something like that.
"Whoa! The sunset is unreal!"
"Guys, come on, let's take a picture!"
Just then, the classmates who'd finished cleaning caught sight of the sunset at its absolute peak and started shouting.
At the sky shifting color by the second, the kids scrambled to crowd the windows. The vice class president, glancing around, called out to Seoha and Yeoncheong.
"Seoha, Yeoncheong! You two hurry up and get over here!"
Seoha fell naturally into place with Suyeon and Nayun flanking her, while Yeoncheong got dragged to Hasol's side on the grounds that the star of the show belonged front and center.
"Okay, everyone—how many should we take?"
"Take as many as you want! I'll shoot the next round!"
The friend holding the camera nodded and stepped back a good distance.
The one who'd been hammering the shutter nonstop swapped out with another friend, and the new photographer, snapping freely for a bit, asked:
"Don't we have a group pose?"
"A group pose? Nothing's really coming to mind."
"...Then how about we commemorate this festival's MVP?"
At those words, Hasol and Yeoncheong, standing front and center, turned their heads at the same time.
It sounded vaguely like it was about them, but the two of them had no idea what pose they were supposed to strike.
"What's that supposed to be?"
"You'll just have to find out."
But the rest of the kids all seemed to know, and simply waited for the camera's signal.
"One... two..."
"Go! Hasol-cat and Daengcheongi—everyone strike whichever pose you like!"
At the vice class president's surprise attack, the whole group launched into puppy and cat impressions, while the two owners of those mortifying nicknames screamed.
"WHO CAME UP WITH HASOL-CAT?!"
"WHO TAUGHT THEM THE WORD DAENGCHEONGI?!"
Click!
Their twin shrieks and the count of three overlapped perfectly.
Between all the friends with their paws pressed to their cheeks doing impressions, the camera caught Yeoncheong and Hasol mid-scramble, springing up in a full-blown uproar—a gloriously dynamic shot.
And with that perfect group photo summing up the entire day, the Hwaryeong Festival drew its curtains.