The Never-Ending Rainy Season
Thankfully, all Seoha had done upon returning from the teachers' office was pull the two of them apart mid-squabble. She didn't ask why they'd been at it in the first place.
"Phew... Things had been so peaceful lately. Is this how Hasol feels whenever she has to referee you and Nayun?"
Their usual bickering over the most trivial of reasons had, unexpectedly, come in handy. If Seoha knew what had actually happened, her reaction was easy to predict — so Suyeon swiftly changed the subject.
"By the way, that took a while?"
"I stopped to ask Teacher Jisu if we could use the club room. Killed two birds with one stone."
When Seoha reported that they could start using it as early as tomorrow, Suyeon immediately messaged the good news to the other two friends as well.
In the meantime, Yeoncheong tidied her rumpled appearance and replayed what had just happened in her head.
Not getting swept along — in other words, taking the initiative — had been half a success. Judging by the final result, she and Suyeon had traded blows one for one.
Even so, she was deeply satisfied, and understandably so: the friend she liked had called her cool.
Since becoming a girl, she'd certainly grown to enjoy compliments like cute and pretty too. But the word cool still resonated somewhere different.
Thanks to that, the corners of her mouth kept twitching upward without her noticing — and Seoha was hardly the kind of friend to miss such an obvious tell.
"Yeoncheong, did something good happen?"
"Uh... no."
If you want to hide something, you shouldn't wear it all over your face.
There was a noticeable buffering delay before her answer, and the blue eyes that had stared Suyeon down so boldly moments ago were now scrambling to avoid Seoha's gaze.
"Guys, I'm gonna hit the restroom!"
"I... I need the bathroom too..."
Yeoncheong tried to make her escape on Suyeon's heels, taking advantage of the opening —
"Yeoncheong. You're not done talking with me yet, are you?"
Seoha's sharp-eyed, relentless pursuit followed, and the whole story had no choice but to come out.
Having learned every last truth, she gazed at her friend — the girl who'd been secretly nursing a grand dream beneath that moon-pale face.
"So you have that kind of ambition in you too, huh?"
"Th-that's obvious, isn't it..."
She seemed entirely unaware of how she came across whenever these things slipped out of her. Honestly, the very fact that she'd been thinking that way at all was nothing short of adorable.
Seoha stretched with exaggerated flourish, her lips curling slyly.
"Yaaawn~ I'm tired too, after getting counseled and all."
"..."
"Yeoncheong. Get up on the desk right now. I want a turn with your lap pillow."
Was this how the penguin plushie she always used as a pillow felt? Yeoncheong experienced the true meaning of putting herself in another's shoes.
Until Suyeon returned from the bathroom she'd claimed to be headed to, Yeoncheong remained helplessly pillow-bound.
And naturally, Suyeon — who sauntered back conspicuously late — gave Seoha an earful for hogging the fun all to herself.
The next day, after school, in the club room.
Seoha had gotten permission from Teacher Jisu for evening use the day before, and with exams closing in, Yeoncheong and her friends had begun studying together just as they had for the midterms.
Whirrr. The room's lone fan did its duty, and the club room filled with nothing but the scratch of pens across paper.
This time there was no need for talk of tests or wagers — Yeoncheong threw herself into final exam prep with the simple resolve to avoid remedial lessons by scoring her way out of them, clean and simple.
Regular admissions had always been her goal, after all, so she studied every single day anyway.
Only the location had shifted from home to school, and only the subjects had adjusted to match the finals. She wasn't about to whine over this much.
"Haah... When is this damn rain gonna let up? It kills the mood."
As if the sky had sprung a leak, a relentless downpour had been hammering down for days now. That was the problem.
Whether it was a reaction to Yeoncheong's grumbling or simple coincidence, Nayun — whose study stamina was about the same — set her pen down, stretched long and hard, and gazed out the window.
"Agreed. If it's gonna rain, could it at least not be hot? It just feels gross and clammy."
With two of the five chattering away, the others naturally drifted into the break as well.
The topic of conversation was, of course, the rain still drizzling down without pause.
How their shoes and legs got soaked on the way to and from school and it felt awful. How it was hot and humid, leaving their skin sticky all over. How none of them could even remember the last time they'd seen the sun.
Everyone had more than their fill of complaints about the endless rainy season.
"Ahh~ There's no way I can do this today. Let's work with some music on."
Declaring that she couldn't stand the gloomy atmosphere a second longer, Suyeon pulled out the Bluetooth speaker that had been sitting on the bookshelf purely as a decoration.
"Shouldn't it let up for a day or so by now?"
"Tomorrow's just gonna be overcast."
Meanwhile, when Nayun muttered this while studying the sky, Hasol double-checked tomorrow's weather on her phone to shore up her own prediction's credibility —
"How are we supposed to believe that?"
"Weather forecasts aren't always right, are they? Today they said it wouldn't rain either..."
Unfortunately, the forecasters' own credibility was so abysmal that not a single friend believed them.
Of course, predicting the distant future is a difficult thing. Add in talk of climate anomaly this and freak weather that — with the weather now following patterns unlike anything before, it was doubly true.
There were even those who argued we should simply be grateful if forecasts could nail the weather one or two hours out.
But since nobody went around checking the forecast every hour of the day, being accurate just one or two hours ahead hardly satisfied anyone.
Hasol understood that feeling all too well, and smiled awkwardly, her lips wavering.
"Ahaha... Well, the chance of precipitation is only ten percent, so. You've gotta trust me here."
"Oh! It's connected! What should we listen to?"
Just then, Suyeon finished the Bluetooth pairing, and the grumbling break time came to an end.
From then on, the music did brighten the deflated mood considerably — but when people start bouncing in their seats and humming along, can that really count as studying? Halfway through, Seoha locked the playlist to lyric-free classical music.
The words that's the top-ranked student for you practically rose on their own...
But Yeoncheong, who had honestly been having fun studying, felt a little wistful about it.
Several more days slipped by.
Just as Hasol had predicted, the rain did stop for a day — but it seemed that had merely been the storm catching its breath.
The rainy season picked up right where it left off. And today, with the wind whipping up on top of it, the discomfort index of every student trudging to school skewered the sky.
"Ha... I want to just block out the sky."
"Tell me about it. Today's especially bad."
Nayun grumbled as she peeled off her soaked socks, and Hasol nodded in agreement, staring out the window.
At some point the wind had grown even fiercer. When the two of them had arrived, the rain had been falling at roughly a sixty-degree slant; now it was practically coming down sideways.
BANG!
Suddenly a violent gust rattled the window hard, and every student in the classroom turned to look outside.
There wasn't even a typhoon — what on earth was going on? As the weather outside worsened by the minute, one particular face naturally came to mind.
"I wonder if Yeoncheong made it here okay."
"Oh, right."
Nayun, who had half-heartedly toweled off her damp feet and slipped her slippers back on, remembered the friend she'd completely forgotten about.
Even the two of them, who rode the bus most of the way and only walked a little, had suffered from the rain. It was impossible not to worry about the friends who walked to school — and not just Yeoncheong.
And exactly as the two of them expected...
SLAM!
Yeoncheong burst through the back door, flinging it open with reckless force — and she was a sight to behold.
She'd brought a fairly large umbrella, but apparently nothing could be done about the rain driving in sideways.
Had she gone for a swim on the way? As though she'd been dunked halfway in and pulled back out, her skirt was soaked through, and water dripped one bead at a time from her shirt and her blue hair.
Half-dead with exhaustion, Yeoncheong moved to sit at her desk — then froze. What was the problem? Fidgeting in place for a moment, she left her bag on the desk and headed straight for Hasol and Nayun.
"Anyone got spare PE pants?"
Maybe it was because she was drenched to the bone, but her aura was colder than usual, and Hasol hesitantly raised her hand.
"I-I have some. In my locker..."
"Borrowing them."
Without waiting for an answer, Yeoncheong fished the PE pants out of her friend's locker. Her shirt seemed wet too, but it was apparently wearable enough.
Only after swiftly changing her bottoms and wringing out the hopeless, waterlogged skirt in the bathroom did her expression improve a little.
With the problem solved and her composure restored, she turned to thank Hasol.
"Thanks for lending me the PE uniform. Mine's at home."
"No need to be so formal between us. More importantly... are you okay?"
"No. I'm not okay."
An instant reply.
Unable to manage even a polite I'm fine — the moment the question left Nayun's mouth, a vigorous head shake and a firm negative came right back.
"My underwear got soaked too. It's unbearably gross."
So that was why she'd been standing there shifting around uncomfortably all this time.
Nayun, recalling her friend's drowned-rat appearance, asked:
"You did use an umbrella, right? I get the shirt, but why is your hair wet?"
"Haah... The wind gusts so hard on the way here I thought the umbrella was gonna fly away."
"Ah."
The wind had blown hard enough that every student in the classroom had turned to look out the window — and Yeoncheong had apparently been walking through it right at that moment.
The deep sigh that escaped Yeoncheong as she stared into the distance offered a vivid glimpse of just how grueling her commute had been, so the two of them decided against pressing for details.
Not wanting to leave the mood awkward, Yeoncheong steered the conversation away from her harrowing journey to school entirely.
"Haah... Nothing dries these days, so the drying rack's completely out of space too. It's rough in so many ways..."
"Hehe. My mom says the exact same thing at home."
Hasol's sympathy got the conversational Current flowing again, and Nayun smoothly rode the changed tide.
"If nothing's drying, just use the dryer on the washing machine."
"I know. The problem is, by the time I get home I'm so tired I forget to run it."
Perhaps because someone could be seen studying in real time right beside her...
Studying with her friends sharpened her focus, but that made the fatigue waiting when she got home all the heavier, and more often than not she'd shower half-heartedly and crash straight into bed.
"What happens when you run out of clean underwear to change into, then?"
Nayun snickered as she painted the worst-case scenario —
"Ha! How many years have I been the one handling all the housework? You think I'd let that happen?"
Yeoncheong scoffed at the needless worry.
The familiar scene that greeted her the moment she opened the door.
Yeoncheong had once again studied with her friends late into the night and had only just gotten home. And that damn rain had irritated her the whole way back, too.
Thud.
Like shedding a skin, her bag slid off her shoulder and dropped — but she couldn't have cared less. She'd just grab it on her way out tomorrow morning.
"Uuurgh..."
Dragging her zombie-like, swaying body behind her, Yeoncheong made straight for the bathroom first.
She flung her clothes off in a heap.
She'd only sweat again the moment she woke up tomorrow and have to wash anyway, so she gave her rain-soaked, sweat-sticky body a quick rinse with nothing but water, then emerged exactly as she came into the world.
With no one else home, and thoroughly worn out from recent days besides, her body had simply taken the most efficient route available.
Picking out only the items that actually needed washing from the discarded pile, she headed for the small room. She tossed her clothes onto the mountain of laundry, and just as she turned to go, Nayun's words suddenly floated back to her.
Wait, did I have any underwear left?
Come to think of it, the set she was wearing right now might well have been the last one in her dresser...
The underwear hanging on the drying rack was still damp to the touch, so she picked out a few pieces and loaded them into the washing machine.
That was a close call...
She'd almost woken up tomorrow morning raising hell about having no clean underwear.
"Phew~aham~"
A sigh of relief soon melted into a fatigue-laden yawn. She felt especially drained, probably from getting rained on.
After wetting her throat with some bottled water, Yeoncheong headed for bed. Wearing nothing but her panties, she only then pulled on her neatly folded dolphin pants and tank top before crawling under the covers.
With one arm flailing about, she plugged the charger into her phone, then hugged the giant penguin Suyeon had given her — preparations for sleep, complete.
She'd expected it to be nothing but a burden, but it was fluffier than she'd imagined, and she'd grown genuinely attached to it.
A short while later, despite the fact that the house was supposed to stay quiet no matter what, only shallow, ragged breaths — rising and falling in color — filled the home.
Even though this was exactly the kind of situation where quiet was not supposed to be an option...