A Pure White Canvas
It happened back when Seoha had just uncovered the true identity of the book Yeoncheong had been secretly reading.
"Ms. Jisu...?"
"Yeoncheong? What brings you to the teachers' office?"
Her homeroom teacher rolled her chair back and looked up at the girl approaching her desk. Assuming she'd done something wrong, Yeoncheong had crept forward, glancing around warily, before thrusting a piece of paper out from behind her back.
A sheet covered in dense, cramped handwriting. Ms. Jisu tilted her head, wondering what it could be.
"What's this?"
"I'm sorry!"
Unable to bring herself to tell the truth, Yeoncheong bowed at a crisp ninety degrees and bolted for the door.
Blinking in confusion at the strange behavior, the teacher checked the contents of the paper — and couldn't help but chuckle. There, scrawled out by hand, was a chain letter promising good luck, complete with an apology from the very person who had written and delivered it.
Young. So young. It's adorable that she'd hand over something like this.
She had no idea why Yeoncheong had chosen her over all her many friends, but apparently the girl remained blissfully unaware of how endearing her own antics were. Ms. Jisu shoved the paper carelessly into a corner of her desk, restored her energy, and got back to work.
Just one more left to go...
Meanwhile, Yeoncheong, who had made a swift escape from the office, headed straight for the student council room.
"Senpai? What brings you here?"
Chaerin, newly installed as student council president, was inside. Yeoncheong, who had barged in without so much as a reason prepared, shifted her lips awkwardly.
"To congratulate you, I guess?"
"Th... thank you?"
It seemed an odd gesture — coming all this way just to offer congratulations — but if Seoha was Chaerin's favorite, then Yeoncheong, whom the girl adored, surely ranked a close second. Swallowing her puzzlement, Chaerin accepted the well-wishes.
"And also... there's something I want to give you."
"Is it a present?"
If you gave someone something alongside congratulations, it was naturally a gift. And if you defined a gift as the act of handing over something made with care, then a diligently handwritten chain letter was, technically, a gift — a gift was a gift. Apart from the fact that her conscience was stinging. A lot. Very, very much.
"Uh... yeah. That's right...?"
Under the shining, expectant eyes of her junior, Yeoncheong's blue gaze drifted naturally off to the side. She felt terrible about handing a chain letter to such a sweet girl under the pretense of a present — but if she only scattered them among her close friends, the odds of them coming right back were depressingly high. It couldn't be helped. Whether the thing actually worked or not, worrying about it any further was just exhausting.
"I'm really, really sorry~! If there's ever anything I can do to help, I swear I'll pay you back someday!"
Having delivered the letter and spilled every apology she could think of, Yeoncheong once again slipped nimbly out of the student council room.
Chaerin, wondering why anyone would apologize after giving a gift, quickly figured out the reason. Disappointment flickered across her face at the discovery that her "present" was a chain letter — but she consoled herself with the thought that senpai clearly felt comfortable enough around her to play pranks like this.
She let the senior who had blown through like a storm fade behind her and returned to her council duties as usual. Perfectly uneventful council duties.
"Hm? My mechanical pencil just snapped out of nowhere."
Could it be...?
Two friends who'd shared her class last year, Nayun who loved to tease her, Ms. Jisu, and her junior Chaerin — with every last letter distributed, Yeoncheong returned to the club room and flopped face-down onto a desk.
"Ugh... I'm dying of exhaustion."
At first it had been something only Suyeon did, but it looked so comfortable that Yeoncheong tried it a few times out of curiosity — and got hooked on the relief of it. The desks were several pushed together at slightly mismatched heights, so her back never ached; a breeze drifted in through the big window; and the sunlight came in at just the right angle to warm her face and no further. It felt incredible.
"You're later than I expected? I figured you'd finish fast once you started handing them out to your girls."
As if she'd been waiting, Suyeon scooted over and nudged her head in close. Yeoncheong brushed away the friend's hair, which dangled downward with gravity, and answered.
"Hey, your hair... you know it's just gonna end up back in my face, right? What do you take me for, an idiot?"
"You are Daengcheongi."
They say words have magic in them. Maybe her occasional(?) bouts of dumb behavior were all this nickname's fault. She'd been about to fire back a complaint about the teasing when—
"Yeoncheong~?"
At a voice that sent a chill down her spine, her head snapped to the right.
"Guess what this is?"
In Seoha's hand, the corner of her mouth curling upward, was a book that looked somehow very familiar. Yeoncheong whipped her head to the other side and checked the bookshelf — the book that was supposed to be slotted there was gone. Certain now of what her friend was holding, her hands moved in a panicked scramble.
"Gimme that!"
But as if she'd anticipated exactly this reaction, Seoha shot one hand skyward while pressing the other down on the head of the prone girl, pinning her in place.
"I got curious about what you were reading, so I took a little peek."
"Wait, wait! I can explain everything! So just — give me the book first!"
Top pressed down onto bottom, the squashed Yeoncheong flailed both arms with a whimper while Seoha dangled the book just barely out of reach, teasing it back and forth like bait, thoroughly enjoying her friend's desperation.
"What? What's going on?"
Something had clearly happened while she'd been left out of the loop. Feeling distinctly sidelined, Suyeon edged closer.
"Don't keep it to just you two — if it's interesting, share with the class."
"No! You don't get to know!"
The moment even Suyeon's curiosity was piqued, Yeoncheong's resistance redoubled, her upper body bucking as she thrashed.
"Pass."
Judging that one hand wouldn't hold her much longer, Seoha tossed the book aside and simply pinned her down with her whole body.
"Hkk...! No!"
The Yeoncheong who had seemed about to rise collapsed back onto the desk. Their bodies were now stacked one atop the other — and yet the girl who would normally have raised holy hell over something so embarrassing was still fixated, stubbornly, on the book. What on earth had she been reading...?
Suyeon tilted her head and picked the book up.
"Kyaaah! Don't look! Please!"
No matter how much the Seoha-pinned Yeoncheong shrieked and squirmed, Suyeon focused single-mindedly on satisfying her curiosity. The cover was worn soft and slick from handling; she clutched it tight along with the book itself, and no sooner had she gingerly turned the first page than she heard a sharp intake of breath.
"Oh..."
At that, Yeoncheong buried her face in both hands and gave up the fight entirely.
"So you really were a guy after all. I never dreamed you'd be sneaking reads of stuff like this at school."
Only then did Seoha, who had been using her weight to smother the struggling, loosen her hold and let her up.
Yeongeong had plenty she wanted to say in her defense — but for a good long while, she stayed frozen like a stone.
The book Yeoncheong had been secretly reading was what you'd call a "dirty" book — or, to classify it more precisely, a genre absolutely stuffed with that charged, will-they-won't-they atmosphere between girls.
There was no telling why such a book had ended up wedged into the club room shelf, and if anyone asked why she'd been reading it, she had nothing she could say... but it wasn't as though she had zero defense.
Back when they'd been organizing the shelves, the book had definitely been sorted into the discard pile — only Suyeon's fickle sentimentality had saved it from the trash.
"That doesn't make it an excuse for reading it, though. Out of all those books on the shelf, this is the only one you actually read."
Seoha pointed at the book in Suyeon's grip. With the exact problematic point laid out so precisely, Yeoncheong just squirmed, unable to finish her sentence.
"Uh... ah. That's, um... well..."
Seoha nodded slowly, as if she understood the fidgeting in some particular sense of her own.
"It's okay, Yeoncheong. At our age, there's nothing to be embarrassed about."
"Huh?"
Something had gone off the rails somewhere.
"You're at the peak of curiosity, after all. Prime time for it."
"What!? No! That's not it at all!"
Presumably the theory was that, having once been a boy, Yeoncheong must be full of curiosity about such things. Considering that most people took it as a given for anyone their age, it was a fairly reasonable guess — and a complete misunderstanding. Just as she had once answered a mischievous question with silence, the only "experience" Yeoncheong had ever actually had was giving her own chest a tentative squeeze.
When she shuddered head to toe and denied it with everything she had, the red eyes that had been so full of certainty went round with surprise.
"Then why on earth were you reading it?"
"Th... that's. To study... sort of. Uuu..."
Apparently, dispelling one mortifying misunderstanding by confessing a different mortifying truth was an ordeal all its own. She drew her legs up onto the chair and curled herself into a huddled, maximally defensive ball — only then did anything resembling a comprehensible sentence begin to emerge.
"I-I don't really know anything, so... I thought I'd study, study a little about what the mood is like... and wh-whether this kind of thing actually feels good, I wanted to check, check it out..."
In other words...
It wasn't a man and a woman — it was a woman and a woman. Wasn't she saying that for the sake of a certain future that might someday come, she'd been doing her own brand of "studying," having made a mental note of the book she'd stumbled across by pure chance?
What a cunning reason. It honestly felt like she was being tested — just how far will this girl hold out?
"Haha... You were already imagining things going that far?"
"N-no. It's really just... in case. For, for contingencies."
Letting out a hollow laugh as she turned her friend's words over in her mind, Seoha decided to throw out one more question, just in case.
"Don't tell me... you've never once done it since becoming a girl?"
"Done what?"
Yeoncheong shot back the question while hiding her scarlet face behind her sharply raised knees. Friend or no friend, and given what the topic of conversation already was — most people simply never asked things in that direction, so it made sense that she couldn't parse it.
When Seoha leaned in and whispered the explanation in her ear, Yeoncheong's head shook violently, as if she'd been electrocuted.
"Never! My body didn't even feel like mine back then... and by the time it did, I was too busy adjusting to school."
Human speech carries far more information than the speaker intends. It was only Yeoncheong herself, the one talking, who had no idea.
Phrased differently, what she'd just said was that her life had now settled into enough stability for her to have leisure time for books like that.
"I never said any of that!"
When Seoha pounced on that exact point, even the way Yeoncheong jerked her blazing-red face upright was unbearably cute.
Meanwhile Suyeon, who had skimmed through the contents at remarkable speed, closed the book and fixed its owner with a sidelong, knowing look.
"Yeoncheong... you perv."
Being mistaken for a pervert when the truth was the exact opposite — well. She'd endured crisis after crisis of mortification to come clean about her other embarrassing secrets, and the verdict she got back was this... Yeoncheong very nearly lost her mind on the spot.
"No! I said it's not like that! Did you not hear a single word of this entire conversation?!"
Suyeon just tilted her head, as if to ask what conversation. She'd buried herself in the book through all that racket...
Admirable concentration, admittedly — flawed only in its direction.
"Hnnngh. And now I can't even explain it all over again!"
She would rather die than repeat the whole confession. As she stamped her feet in a frenzy trying to figure out how to dispel the misunderstanding, Seoha broke into a meaningful smile.
"Don't worry. I'll summarize it nicely for you."
"Wh — summarize? Don't. If you're going to do that, I'll just explain it again myself and then disappear."
Yeoncheong lunged to cover her friend's mouth, sensing the alarm bells of pure instinct — but her mouth was faster than her hands.
"Suyeon. Yeoncheong isn't a perv — if anything, she's closer to a pure white canvas."
"A canvas? What's that supposed to mean?"
"H-hey! Stop! Saying it like that makes it sound so weird!"
Pushing back the girl who'd latched onto her trying to shut her up, Seoha carried on her whispered explanation with quiet dignity.
"It means she's completely untouched, as far as anything lewd goes. We can paint her however we like from here on out."
At those words, a pair of eyes went wide, and their gaze swept over the untainted friend before them. Top to bottom. Then bottom back up to top. Slightly, pointedly, overtly.
Yeoncheong normally lived in drab-colored hoodies and sweatshirts, so it was usually only in her school uniform that her figure showed through in full — a body that could turn even another girl's head once. And with a body like that, her mind was supposedly a pure white canvas? Even Suyeon, hardly the most resilient soul where lewd thoughts were concerned, couldn't help the images that came flooding in.
Her face went red, as a matter of course.
Yeoncheong threw a tantrum, demanding to know what on earth the two of them had talked about to make her friend act like this.
"GRAAAH! What did you two talk about!? What did I even do so wrong to deserve this?!"
"Reading dirty books at school is what you did wrong."
A casually tossed remark from her friend. And, of course, dead on target.
Yeoncheong had no rebuttal left in her. She simply went silent.
Book returned to its original place on the shelf, Seoha's lips twitched into a smile.
"Yeoncheong. You're not planning to skip club activities this weekend just because you're embarrassed, are you?"
"Oh, right. You remember we've got something scheduled this weekend?"
"Of course I do. And if you two didn't tease me so much, I wouldn't even have to worry about that... would I?"
Here she was, worrying about escaping in the middle of everything else — honestly, if they were going to push her this far, couldn't they have just pretended not to notice from the start?