Same Symptoms, Same Cause
October, a month crammed with far too many happenings ever since the orphanage volunteer trip, drew to a close at last.
And if something like this could even be called an event, November had arrived bearing what was quite possibly the biggest event of school life: the college entrance exam.
In the third-year classrooms, where classes had long since existed in name only and self-study reigned, an indescribable tension stretched tight as a bowstring. The building housing those classrooms stood completely separate from the main school building, where the first- and second-years carried on with their peaceful routines as if the entrance exam were somebody else's problem.
And here, in the second-year Class 1.
There was one student as transparent as the autumn sky, which seemed to grow clearer with each passing day.
Ha... this is driving me crazy.
When had she last stood this nervous in front of a classroom door? Ever since that day's parting—left without a single word—this was the first time Yeoncheong would have to face Suyeon, and she wasn't at all sure she could act as if nothing had happened.
"Yeoncheong, aren't you going in?"
Teacher Jisu, arriving at the classroom right on schedule, tilted her head.
"Did you forget something at home?"
"No. Nothing."
"Then hurry up and get inside. If you come in after your teacher, I'm marking you tardy."
With her homeroom teacher saying that, and the thought that she couldn't put it off any longer, Yeoncheong finally opened the classroom door.
A few classmates who had grown used to her morning routine gave her a brief nod of greeting. She was exchanging a light glance with them when—
those mismatched eyes met her own blue ones.
A collision of gazes lasting less than a second. Neither of them could claim to be the one who looked away first.
"Well... with Yeoncheong here, there's really nothing to take attendance for."
Teacher Jisu gently opened the door to the day with a joke. Thanks to her, the class started their morning in laughter—and in that laughter, Seoha, Hasol, and Nayun didn't miss the odd discord coming from their friend somewhere in the room.
A few days later...
Yeoncheong's friends—the ones practically glued to her side every day, especially Hasol and Nayun, whose eyes were not the least bit clouded by love—had figured it out.
If Yeoncheong acted strange for a day, she was simply in a bad mood. If it lasted two or three days, it was That Time of the Month. And if it went on for four days or more, something had actually happened.
Today was precisely the fourth day that Yeoncheong had been off her usual rhythm.
Certain there was something behind it, Hasol and Nayun put their heads together and whispered.
"What do you think happened to Yeoncheong this time?"
"She's totally fine with Seoha, so it's gotta be Suyeon, right?"
When a friend is acting strange, naturally the first step is pinpointing the cause. Using a rapid-fire process of elimination, Hasol and Nayun quickly deduced the source of the current situation.
"The way she keeps sneakily avoiding her—Suyeon must have done something."
"Probably something that happened at the orphanage."
Besides, Yeoncheong's odd behavior closely resembled her state after that long holiday. Same symptoms, same cause—with a very high probability. Working from that logic, the two of them pieced together the truth of the incident almost perfectly.
Whispering across a single desk, the two friends lifted their heads and looked at one person.
"Well? Are we right?"
"We're right, aren't we?"
"You two..."
The desk's owner, Yeoncheong, was smiling with her brow furrowed tightly.
To put it another way: she was forcing a smile to keep her anger in check.
"You both know everything, don't you. You're just messing with me."
"Nope, we have no idea."
"Right. Suyeon won't tell us a thing, after all."
Suyeon herself was presumably too embarrassed to say a word, her mouth sealed shut—so the two of them had simply switched their target to Yeoncheong.
"Come on, tell us what happened. It's hard on those of us stuck in the middle with you two being all awkward."
Hasol lamented the plight of the person caught in between.
"Seriously. It's a relationship problem again anyway—if you're hopeless at love, at least get advice like someone hopeless at love."
Nayun shrugged, as if long since used to all this.
"Keep your voice down. This is really..."
Startled, Yeoncheong slapped Nayun's arm and glanced around nervously.
It was that time of year, with the weather slowly turning cold, when cardigans and spring-fall uniforms mingled in a chaotic blur around the classroom. Nayun rotated her arm to prove she was perfectly fine.
"Good thing I wore my blazer. Doesn't hurt a bit."
"Next time I'll hit you harder. Don't worry."
"Save your fight for later, you two."
Hasol reeled in a conversation veering off into a pointless pride contest.
"So what happened that you two are still being weird with each other? Wait—did you two do something?"
"No!"
Yeoncheong shrieked on pure reflex, then frantically checked her surroundings.
It was lunchtime, a rowdy space where students streamed off to other classrooms or gabbed over their food—and her outcry didn't manage so much as a ripple.
Is it even okay to talk about this here? Her worry was moot; the classroom was far too busy minding its own business. These friends already knew about Seoha anyway—and thinking that at least her heart might feel a little lighter for it, Yeoncheong opened her mouth.
"So, here's the thing..."
At that same moment.
As if the biting chill of the season could do nothing to stop them, students armored in cardigans and blazers circled the playground once again today.
And without the friend who always claimed the middle spot, Suyeon and Seoha walked the field just the two of them.
They had gone around about twice when Seoha broke the silence.
"Suyeon, did something happen with Yeoncheong?"
The friend who used to stamp her attendance mark right alongside Yeoncheong's at the end of every class had been oddly meek for days now—and today, she hadn't even tried to hold Yeoncheong back when she said she was heading to the classroom first.
To anyone who didn't know the circumstances, the reaction might have earned a that's all it takes?—but Yeoncheong, for her part, had been carefully reading Suyeon's moods and keeping her distance all the same.
Seoha was certain: something had definitely happened.
"Now that you mention it... you two went to that volunteer thing together last weekend, didn't you?"
Suyeon, who had been exercising her right to remain silent, flinched.
A deep sigh followed. Judging that she could hide it no longer, Suyeon forced the words out with difficulty.
"Well... I know now. So does Yeoncheong."
"Know... what?"
Even from her friend's contentless reply, Seoha extracted the core of the matter.
"Don't tell me you confessed to Yeoncheong?"
Suyeon replayed the memory for a moment. Who knew what she was thinking—hiding cheeks that had flushed faintly red, she shook her head.
"Not... quite a confession."
"Then what on earth happened?"
Honestly, Seoha rather envied Suyeon's position.
They were in the same club, so they were together all through the after-school hours. And unlike Seoha, who had already laid her heart bare, there was no lack of moments where Yeoncheong treated Suyeon freely, without a hint of self-consciousness.
Why she had given up such an advantage—Seoha found it hard to understand.
"It's just..."
Suyeon glanced around nervously as she recounted what had happened that day.
The moment she finished speaking, she hung her head low.
I'm insane. Genuinely.
Even to herself, it was laughable that she'd snapped at a boy simply for talking about getting married.
Her kiss with Yeoncheong, born of envy over the handmade gift Seoha had received—and now this incident, too. She found herself realizing all over again: had she always been someone with such poor self-control?
Seized by a moment's emotion and blurting everything out in a rush, Suyeon heaved sigh after sigh.
And then—
Couldn't really blame her, though, could you?
Seoha, now fully briefed on the incident, gave a small shake of her head.
If she had been there in Suyeon's place, could she have held back? Even Seoha, who resolved any problem that crossed her path with ease, could not give a confident answer to this one question.
Meanwhile, Yeoncheong—her heart laid transparently bare—had also come clean about the festival incident on top of everything from the orphanage.
"What do you think?"
How would all this look through a third party's eyes? Nervous, Yeoncheong swallowed dryly.
"Suyeon got impatient, huh?"
"Right? I never thought she'd go as far as a kiss..."
The news that Suyeon had admitted to liking her had drawn only a lukewarm reaction, but at the mention of a kiss, even Hasol and Nayun looked startled.
Stroking her chin, Nayun murmured quietly.
"Funny how Suyeon's the one all embarrassed about it. Seoha seemed basically fine."
"Seoha's probably just a special case. Normally, Suyeon's the standard reaction."
"...Can't argue with that."
The tangled web of relationships around Yeoncheong had become the one bright spot in an otherwise tedious school life, so the two of them were getting rather carried away.
"When one seems to pull ahead, the other catches up in a single stroke. That's how it usually goes, huh?"
"I'm telling you, the back-and-forth is exactly like watching a basketball game."
As the two of them tittered away—what about Seoha, what about Suyeon—Yeoncheong could only stare at them in disbelief.
"Hey... I didn't work up the courage to talk about this just so you two could make yourselves a drama to giggle over?"
"Ah, right. Ahem. Ahem..."
Only then did Hasol clear her throat and steer the conversation back on course.
"The thing is, the best advice we could give you is something like 'just follow your heart.' You know that, right?"
Setting aside the fact that everyone involved was, well, a girl—
it was hard enough to weigh in carelessly on anyone's romantic troubles, and with Seoha and Suyeon being friends of theirs besides, they couldn't very well take sides with either one.
"Exactly. It's not like anything changed except Seoha swapped places with Suyeon. The situation itself is identical."
"Nothing got swapped. It went from one to two—you've got Seoha and Suyeon both now."
One becoming two was, plainly and simply, a different thing entirely, Yeoncheong corrected, revising Nayun's statement.
Ever since the movie-date incident, she had given real thought to where she stood with Seoha—which meant she could approach the Suyeon question much the same way.
And she arrived at an answer similar to the one she'd reached for Seoha.
For now, she didn't consider her feelings toward Suyeon to be anything beyond friendship.
She'd asked for advice, and somewhere along the way she'd ended up agonizing all on her own. Watching her quietly, Hasol's lips parted.
"For now, maybe that's enough."
"What?"
"You're seriously thinking about Suyeon's and Seoha's feelings now, aren't you? I think that's enough for the moment."
That Yeoncheong could even agonize like this was a situation made possible only because both of them had merely revealed that they liked her while putting off any actual confession.
Rushed for time, people all too often answer before they've even properly understood their own hearts. Seen in that light, Yeoncheong was one of the lucky ones.
Hasol folded her hands over her friend's, which lay carelessly on the desk, and went on.
"But one thing is for sure: whatever choice you make, you've got friends who'll respect it and cheer you on."
A boy who became a girl overnight. Love between girl and girl.
The stares of the world, destined to keep pounding at Yeoncheong's head, were countless. And in the face of all that, unable even to offer proper advice on a romance tangled this hopelessly—this was one of the few heartfelt truths Hasol had to give.
"Hasol..."
The warmth passing through their joined hands was every bit as warm as Hasol's words.
Those blue eyes, having confirmed the sincerity of her friend, grew moist and shimmered.
Entirely apart from the love troubles that had only grown more complicated—the original purpose of the whole exercise, peace of mind, had at the very least been thoroughly achieved.
"...Hey. If you're going to stage such a touching scene, either let me in on it or do it somewhere I'm not. Pick one. Just one."
Uncomfortable with this saccharine atmosphere, Nayun scratched her head.