Nothing Much Will Happen Today
The dormitory. Park Jihoon's room.
I was lying on the bed, looking out the window. Maybe it was only the first day. Every class had ended after nothing more than a light orientation, and because of that the whole day had passed in a peace so complete it was nearly dull.
Or so I thought.
Then—
Bang!
The door flew open as if it might come off its hinges, without so much as a knock.
What?
At first I assumed Jack had barged in as a joke. The ones who actually came through, though, were large white men.
Not a face among them I've seen before.
I was still lying there, looking them over, when one of them spoke.
"You're Park Jihoon?"
I nodded.
"Where the hell did you pick up manners like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like what?"
The big one beside him cut in.
"Can't you tell by looking? We're your seniors!"
"Looking doesn't tell me. Not me."
"Get up."
I tilted my head. This was a scene out of an old film — you know the kind. Black school uniforms, military-drill class, kids throwing punches in some back street. That feeling.
They had this at a school for aristocrats, too?
"Come with us."
By temperament I wanted to demand what they thought they were doing. Still, if I thought of Peter, who hadn't done a thing, stepping outside was the smarter move for now.
"We'll be finished before dinner, won't we?"
"What?"
"I'm hungry."
The big one let out an empty laugh, as if he couldn't believe his ears.
We headed for the back of the school. In the movies, a place like that usually came with a trash incinerator or something of the sort, and the seniors would cluster in twos and threes, burning through cigarettes.
Hm.
Maybe because this was the Royal School. Even the stretch that passed for a back alley was dressed in handsome sculpture and climbing ivy, and off to one side someone had gone so far as to lay out a little pond. For ugly talk, the mood was far too precious.
I grinned.
"You smiling?"
The big one looked as if the whole thing were absurd. Whether he did or didn't, I took in the faces of the so-called seniors. Seven in all. Quite a crowd, just to grab one of me. None of them looked like much at a glance. They'd clearly done some training of their own, but to someone who had sweated in the mix with the national reserve squad, they were... merely all right.
"Scared?"
"Hard to say."
"Relax. Nothing much is going to happen today."
Good. Trouble on the first day would put me in a spot as well.
More than anything, it would reach Grandfather's ears.
I was just trying to settle into that relief when a roar came bellowing from far off.
"You're dead!"
Then the furious pound of feet, charging this way.
Wait. That's Jack?
But by the time I knew who it was, it was already too late.
Flash!
Jack launched himself like a leopard on prey.
Crack!
A flying knee stamped itself into the big one's face.
"Huh?"
It truly happened in an instant. So fast that even the seniors could only stare, blank, trying to work out what this was. By the time they had barely grasped the situation—
"Kill him!"
—every one of them, with no thought for who was who, had already flung himself at Jack.
However many came, Jack didn't hesitate for a breath. If anything, he looked ready to smash whoever happened to be in front of him.
Wham!
He swung an elbow, vicious and clean. A graze was enough.
"Aaaagh!"
Screams broke out on every side. I hadn't known it when we sparred with the gloves on. In this moment Jack was a warrior outright — a soldier who had leapt into the middle of the enemy to save a comrade. Even in the instant they somehow managed to ring him—
Crash!
Jack used a wrestling tackle and punched a way out with ease. Then, as if he meant to make an example, he hoisted one of the big ones high overhead.
"Stop!"
I caught him by the shoulder as I said it.
"Plant him like that and this turns into a real mess."
Instead of an answer, all he gave me was breath.
"Hoo. Hoooo."
The big one who had been thrashing in the air hit the ground with a thud, and only after his feet found the earth—
"..."
—did the fight fall into a brief lull.
In the blink of an eye, four of them were down. From the look of it, noses had caved in.
This just got troublesome.
I walked up to the one who seemed to be in charge.
"My friend seems to have misunderstood, but you weren't exactly in the right either. So how about we leave it here..."
"What, you son of a bitch?"
"You want to see it all the way through?"
"You crazy bastard..."
"If you're really set on ending this, bring every one of your friends. Right now."
Right then Jack started blasting excited breath through his nose. A sign he would move with me the moment I wanted. Perhaps the sight put them in mind of a beast. Sick of it, they hauled the injured up one by one and made ready to leave, limping. After they had vanished far off—
"You all right?"
He was the one who had fought, and he was asking if I was all right?
"How did you even know to come here?"
"Your roommate was sprinting down the hall."
"Peter?"
"Yeah. From what I heard, he was on his way to tell a teacher, and he ran into me first."
Which was how Jack, fury climbed all the way to the crown of his head, had chased the seniors down and gone straight in with a flying knee, no questions asked.
Still. I'm grateful.
He'd thrown himself in without a look ahead or behind, just to get me out. Of course, in more ways than one, things had also grown complicated. But judging by the state of those guys, this was a fight that would have blown open someday regardless. Fine. Call it a little early. That was all.
Once I'd sorted the thought, I said to Jack,
"You didn't take a single hit."
"Right? Surprised me too."
"Shall we go eat?"
At the question, Jack nodded, big.
The school, inevitably, went up in an uproar.
Of course it did. Four second-year boys with fractured nasal bones — if that failed to cause a scene, the lack of one would have been the stranger outcome. The small mercy was that the school had a hospital, so they received emergency treatment at once. The worst of it was that, because they'd been treated on campus, the rumor spread in no time.
As rumors usually do, it grew flesh. The junior had picked the fight with his seniors first. Four fractures were only the broken bones; injuries large and small numbered more than ten. And so the second-year student-council president was lying in wait, good and furious. Not even a few hours had passed since the fight, and every kind of story was already making the rounds.
"You going to be all right?"
"Hard to say."
I answered a terrified Peter.
"It's my first time too. I don't really know."
"Your face... you don't look worried at all."
"No?"
He nodded. Why wouldn't I look that way? If I were truly seventeen, being scared stiff would be the natural thing.
The trouble is, I know too much of the world for that.
If I couldn't settle it on my own, I could report it to a teacher.
That was when someone knocked, only once.
"Eek!"
Peter startled hard. He must have thought the seniors had come again. But the person who opened the door and stepped in was someone entirely unexpected.
The same hour. The second-year student-council room.
"The first-years jumped us first?"
"...Yeah."
"Really?"
"I—I'm telling you, that's how it was."
Carl Bernstein lifted the corner of his mouth as high as it would go.
"A junior raising his hand against his seniors, then..."
With this, he had a pretext as solid as anyone could ask. From now on, no one would dare breathe a mockery of the sort that said he was only tormenting Park Jihoon because he feared the Grosvenor ducal house.
He grinned. The remaining assignment was how thoroughly he could grind that Park Jihoon brat into the ground.
"Should we go right now?"
"Idiot."
"...?"
"He knew perfectly well they were seniors and still went crooked out in the open, didn't he?"
"..."
"A temper like that is bound to make trouble with Tennessee Grosvenor."
"Y-yeah. Probably."
"And if we step in then and tidy him up for them?"
"We could... keep a good relationship with Tennessee Grosvenor, too?"
A nod.
"Ah — of course! As expected!"
Expected, his ass. A maggot who only managed a thought once it had been spooned into his mouth. Only then did Carl Bernstein rise from his seat, looking light at last.
The one who opened the door and came in was, astonishingly, Olivia.
She must have heard the rumor. A thread of worry lay across her face. But once she'd taken the measure of my condition — such as it was — she smiled, small, and spoke.
"They said seven of them jumped you. You're fine?"
"They didn't fight me."
"Then who?"
"A friend of mine fought in my place."
She lifted her head and looked at Peter. Peter waved his hands at once, as if the notion were absurd.
"Not me... there's a guy. Name's Jack."
"Is that so."
"Th-that aside... should I... clear out?"
"No. We'll go."
She turned toward me.
"Walk for a minute? Or have those thugs got you a little rattled?"
"Not at all."
Olivia and I headed out of the building like that.
Night had already dimmed. Above the dormitory a crescent moon hung, precarious. Fortunately there were lamps all through the grounds, so a walk was no trouble.
"You weren't scared."
"Why do you assume I wasn't?"
"Just because."
Olivia thought a moment, then went on.
"A leopard doesn't lose its head just because it meets a few stray dogs."
I let out a breath of a laugh.
"If a fight looks awkward, it can always climb a tree."
Instead of answering, I kept the smile where it was.
"Need help?"
"No."
"I thought so."
Olivia walked on with a calm face. Perhaps because she had already taken a fair share of life's weather, she didn't seem the type to sway when a crisis came.
"Not worried anymore?"
She nodded.
"Then that's settled."
She turned toward me as she spoke.
"Earlier I heard something strange from my dad."
"...?"
"He said you've got quite a large business. Not something your parents handed you — that you grew it yourself?"
"..."
"And I thought that was odd. Why wouldn't you have told me? So I tried working it out."
She went on, a little prim.
"The conclusion I came to is this. You're not the type to boast about that sort of thing in the first place. And once we got closer, you meant to let it slip. Well? How's my thinking?"
Instead of answering, I asked her,
"When you heard I was running a business, how did it feel?"
"It was surprising."
"That's all?"
"Just... I felt a little sorry for you, too."
Sorry for me?
"I got smeared from every side just for winning a single contest. Try running a business that young. How much talk do you think comes pouring in, from everywhere?"
So that was it. Ordinarily, if you decided someone had hidden something from you, the hurt ought to come first.
Far from taking it wrong, she even worked out a reason of her own, just so she could understand me?
And in a direction that favored me, at that. Perhaps she read what I was feeling.
"Wild guesses are going to be flying everywhere as it is. No need for me to add my voice, is there?"
Olivia tacked on the short explanation. I grinned.
Thank you.
That was when.
"Why are you smiling?"
"I wasn't."
"You were. The corner of your mouth went up."
"Only the corner went up."
"That's what smiling is!"
We walked the grounds for a while. The night air was sharp, but it wasn't a cold night.