The Owner of the Notebook
"I wasn't that wrong, was I... Hiiiiek!"
The screams never stopped. Yeoncheong was curious what on earth was happening inside, but it wasn't the kind of curiosity worth risking her life over.
Before long, the spine-chilling screams died down, and Chairwoman Yurim emerged into the hallway with a refreshed expression, dusting off her hands. Suyeon gaped at her and asked,
"Um... what about Yeoncheong?"
"She's fine. Still alive."
Had she asked the wrong question? For a moment, Suyeon doubted her own ears.
She'd better be alive, shouldn't she?
She swallowed the question that had risen all the way to her throat.
Chairwoman Yurim read the brief, buffering silence entirely differently. She cracked the door open to show them inside and waved her lips carelessly, as if it were nothing.
"Ahaha, all that screaming was just an act. I told her to rest a bit before coming out, so don't worry."
Yeoncheong lay sprawled on the sofa, half-dissolved into a puddle of relaxation. She was twitching ever so slightly, so she was alive, at least. Merely alive.
Leaving her friend to rest, Yurim turned to Suyeon.
"You said you were looking for something interesting. Could I take a look too?"
"Oh, of course. Absolutely."
Suyeon handed over the old notebook from inside her coat. Just as Yeoncheong had described, the relevant pages were folded over as markers, so there was no need to walk her through them one by one.
"Wait, Yeoncheong even told you about that?"
"She asked me how I knew to look in there. So out it all came?"
It wasn't even torture. What had been done to her that she was spilling every last thing she knew?
What on earth had happened in there? Suyeon's curiosity swelled even as her desire to remain ignorant grew just as strong.
By the time Yeoncheong steadied herself against the wall and staggered out, Yurim had read every page of the written exchanges and returned the notebook.
"Wow. That notebook's got to be at least ten years old."
"Ten years?"
Her eyes gleaming at information she couldn't have gleaned from the notebook itself, Suyeon leaned in.
"Yep. There's a maple tree in there, isn't there?"
Had there been something like that? Suyeon flipped through the notebook again. She'd been scanning it for places—who would have paid close attention to talk of a maple tree? Details like that hadn't stuck in her memory.
Just as the Chairwoman said, the maple tree did appear in the notes. Suyeon looked up.
"Yes, it's there."
"Have you ever seen a maple tree at our school?"
"......Ah. No, I haven't."
She'd seen the sparse red foliage on the hill behind the school, but never a maple tree on campus. And yet, the notes made it sound like one had been close by.
Delighted, Chairwoman Yurim shared a story that Suyeon and Yeoncheong could never have known.
"The truth is, there used to be a big maple tree behind the annex."
"You mean that one?"
As if to say, the very one you're thinking of, Yurim gave a small nod.
"That's the one."
"That was a maple tree?"
As far as Suyeon remembered, there'd been a single dead tree standing behind the annex. Once night fell, it lent the spot such a bleak, forbidding air that students rarely went near it.
"Must've been ten... years ago, give or take. Lightning struck it. It's been completely dead ever since."
Shrugging, Yurim went on, gazing off toward the annex.
"It looked lovely standing there all on its own, and the students loved the spot. Such a shame, what happened."
At those words, it was as if a spark had jumped—Suyeon's mind flashed white.
She'd been buried in the hunt for places—the science room, the music room—and it had never once occurred to her that the answer might be somewhere no one ever went anymore.
That's it. Right there. With that thought, Suyeon grabbed Yeoncheong's hand. Pinning her feet to the ground, the girl didn't forget to thank the woman who'd helped them, either.
"Ah—Chairwoman, thank you so much!"
"Glad I could help."
Leaving Yurim waving them off with a wish of good luck, Suyeon headed around the back of the annex.
"Aaack! Hey, easy. Easy!"
Still rattled, Yeoncheong patted Suyeon's arm, begging her to slow down.
***
Inside was cold enough, but out here the weather was bitter—their breath hung visibly in the air.
"...I don't think it's here either."
Yeoncheong, who'd followed her friend outside and pulled her coat tighter, glanced around.
Among the bare trees stripped for winter, finding the maple tree Yurim had described wasn't difficult.
She'd assumed it just gave off a vaguely ominous vibe, but having heard the story behind the tree from the Chairwoman, it didn't seem quite as frightening as before.
"I've never come this close, but it really is big."
Measured against a person, it stood a full head taller than average. With no other trees nearby, its broadly spreading branches offered a glimpse of the vanished grandeur of its past.
What must it have looked like in autumn, dyed crimson? She was standing there gazing up at it when Suyeon, who'd already been scanning the area, smacked her lips.
"Sightseeing can wait. You look around too, and fast."
"Fine, fine."
Prodded along by Suyeon, Yeoncheong began searching around the tree as well.
Maybe there was a hollow in the trunk. Maybe something was hidden somewhere she could see on the tree itself. She went on searching, blowing warm breath into her cupped hands, for quite a while.
She was checking every visible spot in reach, but the results remained stubbornly zero. Hands stuffed in her pockets, Yeoncheong called out to Suyeon.
"Suyeon, it's not here either."
"It is here. It has to be."
Same as everywhere else—they'd found nothing. But Suyeon didn't stop. If anything, she picked up a fallen branch and started raking through the dirt with it.
When Yeoncheong asked what on earth she was basing this conviction on, the only reply she got was an utterly incomprehensible:
"A woman's intuition."
Granted, Yeoncheong knew a woman's intuition was nothing to sneer at. But even intuition had its domains—romance, say, or other areas where it clicked.
Whether it extended to treasure hunting was another question entirely.
"...Once we finish checking around here, we're going inside, right?"
"Yep. It's definitely somewhere around here."
Voice full of certainty, Suyeon straightened her back for a moment and lifted her head.
"If you're cold, Yeoncheong, you can head in first."
Suyeon rubbed her hands against her flushed cheeks. Bare hands fumbling around outside in this weather—of course she was cold.
Same as with club activities—once this friend dug her heels in about something like this, she was nearly impossible to talk down.
But she couldn't exactly go inside and rest alone while Suyeon froze. Ruffling her own hair in surrender, Yeoncheong headed into the building.
Suyeon watched the spot where Yeoncheong had disappeared for a moment, then turned back around.
Guess she went in.
She told herself it couldn't be helped.
If she'd whined and begged Yeoncheong to stay, the girl probably would have. But she wasn't shameless enough to ask that of anyone in this bitter cold.
She was just bending down to look a little longer before going in when—
Clang.
An iron skewer came skittering across the frozen ground and landed at her feet.
"You poke around the dirt with that. If anything's buried, it'll catch on it."
Yeoncheong's voice. Apparently she'd made a trip to the classrooms, because she was putting on her shoes, and in her hand was a shovel she'd fetched from somewhere.
"Where'd you get that?"
"There's that club that maintains the school flower beds, right? Borrowed it from there."
To be precise, she'd taken it from a pile of poorly put-away tools without asking. But as long as it went back where it belonged, no harm done.
Yeoncheong stepped over casually and tapped the ground with the shovel, muttering.
"Wow... is it because it's winter? The ground is ridiculously hard."
"Aren't you going inside? You're helping me the whole time?"
Yeoncheong gave her an incredulous look and smacked Suyeon on the forehead.
"Ow!"
"Don't say stuff you don't mean. We're finishing this spot, and then I'm going inside."
Something about standing still being too cold, apparently. Yeoncheong drove the shovel into the nearest patch of softer earth.
"Yeoncheong... I think I'm falling for you all over again."
The words slipped out of Suyeon before she could stop them.
"What?"
There was no one else around, and the cold winter wind scattered even her voice before it could carry far. So Suyeon said it again, packing in all the feeling she hadn't managed the first time.
"I think I've fallen for you again."
"Ugh. I'm leaving?"
Whether Yeoncheong shuddered and recoiled in horror or not, Suyeon just grinned and clung to her friend's side.
"Hurry up and find it already! If it's not here, you're getting hit with this shovel! I mean it!"
Yeoncheong might help her just because they were friends. But it was this personality of hers, every single one of these little gestures, that kept tossing the hearts of Suyeon and the others into disarray.
***
"Grah! Unbelievable!"
Yeoncheong stabbed the shovel into the ground and slumped against it.
"Bury it in some half-assed spot like this and of course the notebook's owner never found it!"
Beneath the tree, the ground was churned up in patches everywhere. Yeoncheong's stubborn, see-it-through-to-the-end determination finally paid off—in the ambiguous, neither-here-nor-there stretch of ground halfway between the annex and the tree, where they unearthed a steel box.
"Still, you found it. Yeoncheong, you really worked hard."
Suyeon kneaded and patted her friend's shoulders, sparing no gratitude for everything she'd put up with.
"Want me to give you a kiss?"
"Spare me. Hurry and check what's inside."
Thankfully, the steel box was shut tight, but there was no lock in sight.
Even so, a box that had slept in the frozen earth all these years had no intention of opening its mouth easily.
"Nngh... this thing is sealed shut."
"Move over."
Yeoncheong came at it using the shovel as a battering ram, and after a few hard blows, the box finally opened.
"Is this okay?"
"Eh, whatever."
Shrugging, Yeoncheong urged her friend to hurry up and look. From inside, Suyeon drew out a single photograph, a ring, and a letter.
The photo had faded to a blurry wash, and the ring—no engraving, no ornamentation—was nothing much to look at. The letter, thankfully, was still legible.
Holding the letter up between them, Suyeon and Yeoncheong read through it together.
A moment later.
White breath puffing from their lips, the two exchanged an awkward glance. Part of it was the content itself—but mostly, it was the name signed at the very end.
"This is... her, right?"
"I think so."
"Should we go ask?"
"We've come this far. Backing out now would be stranger."
Having made up their minds, the two headed for the teachers' office.
***
Whatever slack the students had slipped into while waiting for winter break, the teachers—working adults, after all—were each buried in their own tasks.
Teacher Jisu, homeroom teacher of Class 2-1, was busy preparing supplementary lessons when—
"Ms. Jisu?"
At the sound of her name, she turned around.
"Oh my, have you two been out playing in the cold?"
Their cheeks and both hands were bright red—no doubt from coming in right after standing around in the freezing air. Suyeon waved it off, insisting she was fine, and pulled the letter, the ring, and the photograph from her coat.
"This is yours, right, Ms. Jisu?"
Teacher Jisu took the letter, read the first few lines—and shot to her feet.
"Girls, is there anywhere quiet around here?"
For quiet, there was nowhere better than the club room, where only Yeoncheong and Suyeon ever set foot.
There, the homeroom teacher read the letter again and again. Gazing for a long while at the faded photograph and the ring, her eyes brimmed with longing.
"Where did you find this?"
They told her the whole long story, from discovering the notebook in the library. Teacher Jisu nodded slowly through all of it.
"So it really was... there."
Yeoncheong and Suyeon quietly looked at each other.
She never said it outright, but they might as well have heard the answer.
The owner of the notebook filled with their written exchanges, the author of the confession letter dripping with affection—it was the homeroom teacher standing right in front of them.
"That's why she told me to find it by the weekend, no matter what..."
"What happened on the weekend?"
At Suyeon's question, Teacher Jisu opened a dusty drawer of memory.
"She emigrated overseas. I went to see her off—and when I told her I couldn't find it, I was crushed."
"You two must have been really close."
If she'd gone all the way to see her off, they'd hardly been ordinary friends.
"Oh, yes. She always latched onto me—nothing like how prim and proper she looks now. She was a handful."
Teacher Jisu chuckled as she looked down at the letter in her hands.
In that smile—normally so composed, so adult—a distinctly youthful freshness shone through.
"She could say anything to my face, day to day, but for something this important, she had to write it in a letter..."
Setting aside the fact that their homeroom teacher was a school alumna and senior—the owner of the notebook she'd searched for so desperately, and now this confession letter pulled from the box.
Washed over by this sudden wave of revelations, Yeoncheong and Suyeon could only sit there stunned.
Teacher Jisu folded the letter, tucked it into the notebook they'd handed over, and stood up.
"Anyway—thank you, girls. Thanks to you, I got to take a stroll down memory lane. It was lovely."
"Oh, no, it was nothing. It's not like we were looking for this on purpose..."
Suyeon rose to see the teacher off, her mouth opening and closing wordlessly.
Why hadn't she found it back then? What would she have answered if she had? Should she try to contact her now, even after all this time? There was so much she wanted to ask—but the mood was all wrong for asking.
"Ms. Jisu—if you had found the letter back then, what do you think you would have answered?"
The teacher, one step from the club room door, froze in place. Suyeon's eyes went round, as if she couldn't believe Yeoncheong of all people had asked that.
"Just the recklessness of youth, I'd say?"
"Still."
"Hmm..."
Yeoncheong showed no sign of backing down, and the teacher actually seemed to wrestle with it. Suyeon's ears perked right up.
"Se.cret."
And with that, the teacher stepped out of the club room—flashing, for one instant, a smile so fresh and girlish they might have mistaken her for a classmate.
As always, the room was left to just the two of them.
"Ahh..."
Yeoncheong had half hoped she might hear something useful for her own situation. A sigh of disappointment slipped from her lips.
"Yeoncheong, that was brave of you."
"...I thought she was going to answer."
Disappointed, Yeoncheong stared at the firmly closed door. Suyeon came over and patted her friend's shoulder.
"Me too. I could sort of guess, but I wasn't sure, so I wanted to hear it straight from her."
"You sort of know? What's that supposed to mean?"
"She's a teacher now, isn't she? Did you not read the letter properly?"
At that nonsense explanation, Yeoncheong crossed her arms and glared at her friend.
"Your head was in the way. I couldn't read the bottom part."
"It was written near the end of the letter. 'I've always said it—you'd make a wonderful teacher someday.'"
***
After Teacher Jisu, the owner of the notebook, had left.
"Yeoncheong, just so you know—I'm never emigrating."
"Mm-hm."
Suyeon had latched onto Yeoncheong and was now repeating the same question over and over.
"You're not going either, right?"
"You never know with people."
Neither Yeoncheong nor her father had the slightest thought of emigrating—but you really couldn't predict what life would throw at you. She wasn't a woman for nothing, after all.
Besides, she had no intention of handing over the answer Suyeon wanted so obediently.
When she refused to give it up to the very end, Suyeon changed tack.
"Fine, then. Yeoncheong, you can emigrate."
"Why?"
At the absurd non sequitur, Yeoncheong's head turned of its own accord.
Suyeon, chin propped on one hand, beamed as if she'd been waiting for exactly that.
"Because I'll follow you."
If only she'd done something—flicked her on the forehead, shoved her away, shot back a stinging quip. Anything. Instead, Yeoncheong could do nothing at all, and simply turned her head sharply away.
