An Activity Approved by Half the Club
Yeoncheong's apartment.
Her desk and chair, which had served their role faithfully for so long, were finally granted a reprieve — which meant, of course, that her bed would now be putting in the overtime.
It was still too early to sleep, so Yeoncheong lay sprawled across the mattress, fiddling with her phone. No sooner had she fired off a reply to Hasol's message asking how her remedial exams went than Suyeon sent her one asking the exact same thing.
Suyeon asked with remarkable nonchalance. Yeoncheong, who had been lying flat on her back staring at the ceiling, rolled over.
A flurry of apologetic animal stickers came flying in one after another. Apparently the girl had a sticker set for every animal imaginable.
When the animals began papering over her entire screen, Yeoncheong put a stop to it.
Only then did the sticker barrage cease.
She put zero trust in that "okay," but Yeoncheong filed it away and circled back to the original question.
A surprisingly normal activity. Yeoncheong tilted her head.
The incident with the Ghost of the Library came to mind, but apparently in Suyeon's world, that hadn't counted as weird.
At that closing-the-conversation tone, Yeoncheong's fingers scrambled across the screen.
As if to say out with it, another question mark popped up on the screen.
Yeoncheong swallowed hard and waited for the reply. The wait felt like an eternity.
Yeoncheong allowed herself a moment of relief at the talk of it being nothing, then flinched at the words worse than that.
The near-disaster. The memory of Suyeon pressing down on her lower abdomen flashed through Yeoncheong's mind as she typed her reply.
She was dying to know what on earth Suyeon had witnessed, but she had no particular desire to open Pandora's box.
Yeoncheong tossed her phone carelessly onto the mattress beside her and stared up at the ceiling.
Something a friend could totally do... yeah, that's what it must be.
Girls understand girls, after all. Suyeon's words put her slightly at ease. It was a naive, hopelessly naive thought — from a girl who hadn't seen the look on Seoha's face that day.
The weekend came and went, and before anyone noticed, the days had slid to the border between April and May.
Rumors about the first-place prize the school was keeping tightly under wraps, classes already beginning their sports festival practices, the great deliberation over which class T-shirt to pick — the sports festival as an event was breathing fresh vitality, big and small, into the dull routine of daily life.
It was no different for Class 1 of the second year, where Yeoncheong belonged.
After school, in the club room — hardly distinguishable from a private hangout for two.
"Yeoncheong, thirty minutes. No wait, just ten. I only need ten minutes of rest."
"Ten or thirty, rest as long as you want."
Suyeon, apparently exhausted, flopped face-down onto the desk and sighed.
"Aaaargh... picking our event roster was easier than picking the class T-shirt."
Yeoncheong, who had sat through her classmates' heated debates alongside her, was worn out too. It went without saying that Hasol and Suyeon, who'd been up front mediating everyone's conflicting opinions, were running on fumes.
Having shoved several desks together to claim a full stretch of space, Suyeon lay across them and asked, "Which one did you like best, Yeoncheong?"
"Me? I don't really... have a preference."
A class T-shirt you'd wear once and be done with. To Yeoncheong, they were all the same.
"If we count the time before the festival, we need to pick by tomorrow to be safe... I don't know if we can manage it."
Every classmate's size had been collected and sorted. What they couldn't decide was what to actually put on them.
"If it comes to that, just pick whichever one you want from the finalists."
"That's my last resort... but it's better to buy something everyone's happy with, you know?"
Grumbling as she was, Suyeon kept turning the question over — which option really would be best.
There was plenty of mischief in her, but the girl almost never actually picked fights. Which was to say she understood everyone's boundaries and was careful around them.
Watching her from beside the desks, Yeoncheong raised a hand. Unconsciously.
Pat, pat.
Yeoncheong's petting was clumsy and tentative. Startled, Suyeon flinched and drew her knees in.
"Wh-what? What's this all of a sudden?"
"Hm? You said there's nothing friends can't do. Was I wrong?"
"Between friends...?"
Suyeon had no idea what Yeoncheong was talking about. Then — oh — she dragged a lock of hair over her face and murmured into it.
So this is what she meant by patting.
A hand that was awkward, but earnest — she was remembering how Seoha used to do it.
Suyeon had naturally been talking about friends roughing up each other's hair as a joke. Yeoncheong had asked with Seoha's pats as her reference point.
The result was two girls whose wires had crossed in the subtlest of ways.
Suyeon fidgeted restlessly, and Yeoncheong started to second-guess herself.
"Um... should I stop? If it's weird."
"No! Don't stop! Keep going. It's... it's not bad or anything..."
The shout that burst out of the startled girl trailed off, growing quieter and quieter.
Suyeon, who had sworn she'd lie down for only ten minutes, ended up not getting up for thirty.
Refreshed, Suyeon pushed the desks back into their original positions. She stretched both arms toward the ceiling, cracked her spine with a long arch, and stood up.
"Hrrgh... all right, shall we get to the actual club activity now?"
"You said researching the school's history. What's the plan?"
"You remember Seobin, right? She offered to help."
Seobin was apparently waiting in the library already, so Yeoncheong and Suyeon headed there first.
Sunlight filtered through the thin curtains, casting a gentle glow over the forest of books. Seobin, with her braided hair and eye-catching chest, was making the rounds of the library.
A faint smile and a light step. She brimmed with energy — a completely different creature from the girl trudging through her remedial classes.
When their eyes met, Suyeon gave a casual wave. Seobin came over and guided the two of them to the reference room next to the library.
"I talked to the librarian and pulled the materials we'd need ahead of time. You can't touch anything else, and nothing goes out of the room — you know that, right?"
Suyeon thumped her chest and told her not to worry.
"No concerns there. And as for putting things back—"
"Just leave everything. Everything has its proper place, so we'll do the reshelving."
"Thank you."
Suyeon broke into that beaming smile characteristic of the extroverted. Flustered by it, Seobin took a small step back.
"I-it's nothing. Anyway, just holler if you need anything."
Glancing around her awkwardly, Seobin all but fled the reference room.
"Okay, let's get to work too."
"What's the theme going to be? You want a central focus, right?"
An uncharacteristically sharp question from Yeoncheong. Suyeon's hand, mid-flip through a binder of documents, stopped for a beat. After a brief hesitation, she laughed awkwardly.
"The incidents and accidents that have happened at the school, maybe?"
"Huh?"
Yeoncheong, who had been sitting and examining something else, closed the binder.
"You're... hunting for the school's ghost stories, aren't you."
"W-well, those are part of the school's history too. I haven't said anything false."
When cornered, Suyeon always emerged bold and utterly shameless.
Yeoncheong had been on the losing end of this more than once — but she wasn't about to fold this time.
"No. I'm not doing this one."
"Doesn't matter whether you agree or not. It's an activity approved by at least half the club membership."
With her rest finally taken, Suyeon's brain was whirring along at full speed.
"Hey, our club is exactly two people. All of us."
"Exactly. So more than half agreed, right?"
"Since when does the law work like that?"
Yeoncheong crossed her arms, wiped the expression from her face, and stared straight at Suyeon. Blue eyes sparking like struck flint. The one to raise the white flag first wasn't Yeoncheong — it was Suyeon.
"This time it's just research, I swear. No midnight school exploration or anything like that."
Yeoncheong mulled over the offer, then held out her pinky finger.
"Promise."
"Huh?"
"Promise me. You said it yourself, remember? These things are supposed to be burned into the body as memory."
Those were the words Suyeon had said to her back at the midterm afterparty — a pointed reminder to keep her promise this time, without fail.
Suyeon nodded and hooked her finger around Yeoncheong's.
"So we're doing the research now?"
"Fine."
Yeoncheong let out a soft sigh and opened the binder again.
And Suyeon's promise was, without question, kept.
The promise not to go on a midnight school exploration, that is.
The midnight school expedition had ended in farce, undone by bad information. That failure had only made Suyeon prepare for the second opportunity she was certain would someday come.
The two of them had spent the entire day combing through old school newspapers and archives, and finally emerged from the reference room. Seobin, still keeping watch over the library, came over to them.
"Did you find everything you needed?"
Suyeon nodded with a face full of pride. Yeoncheong's nod was considerably grimmer.
The school's history went back a fair distance, so they'd collected plenty of strange rumors that traced back to incidents and accidents of one size or another.
The school newspaper had proven especially useful. Reading the meticulous old articles, it seemed that back in the day there had been a student rather like Suyeon — someone with a taste for ghost stories.
Seeing her look so pleased made Yeoncheong uneasy, but she chose to put her faith in the weight of the promise.
"You found everything so fast because you'd pulled it for us in advance. Thank you."
"Oh, it was nothing. Siyeon helps me out plenty in the regular days, so it's only fair."
"Funny how life works — turns out I owe her one too."
The one left out of the loop was Yeoncheong, who excused herself first and waited outside for Suyeon.
When Suyeon finished her goodbyes and came out, Yeoncheong fell into step beside her, a question nagging at her.
"By the way — who's Siyeon?"
"Huh? You don't know?"
Yeoncheong's face said she genuinely knew nothing at all. Suyeon's eyes went wide instead.
"My little sister."
"If she's your sister she should be a first-year. If she knows Seobin, is she in the library club?"
"No, she's my twin."
Yeoncheong's footsteps stopped on their own. This time, the blue eyes went wide enough to pop out.
"I didn't know that?"
She found herself ridiculous too, judging by the hollow laugh that escaped her. But Suyeon, without a second thought, plunged the dagger straight into her chest.
"Can't blame you. Yeoncheong, you don't have a single friend outside our class."
"Ugh."
Outside our class — the specification was airtight. A girl who had never so much as set foot near another classroom had no rebuttal available.
Suyeon belatedly noticed the blood she couldn't see pouring out of her friend, and scrambled to patch things up.
"W-well, you did transfer, so it can't be helped. I'll introduce you sometime."
Still reeling from the internal injuries, Yeoncheong couldn't muster a reply. Suyeon hastily changed the subject.
"A-anyway, sports festival practice starts tomorrow, right?"
"Yeah. Wait — are you really not going to help me write the club activity report?"
"Obviously not."
Suyeon's expression suddenly turned grave.
"More important than club activities is winning the sports festival."
Flames smoldered in her mismatched eyes. The heat was enough to cauterize the wound she'd just inflicted, and Yeoncheong took a step back.
"First Nayun, now you. Fine — basketball's a guaranteed win, we bank the points, plan's already done, right?"
Apparently the whole scheme had been drawn up without the consent of the person actually playing.
"So practice hard. And win. No matter what."
"O-okay. Got it. I'll give it my best."
"No, don't give it your best. Win."
Swept up in the sheer momentum, Yeoncheong could only nod along, head bobbing.