The Popular High School Girl (1)
The athletic grounds at Haram High School, out on the edge of Seoul, put every nearby campus to shame.
The field was vast, the facilities excellent, and real grass covered the pitch. For any middle-schooler who loved sports, it was the first-choice school as a matter of course.
It was fourth period. Only one class had gym this hour, and a pack of girls had the wide field to themselves, kicking a soccer ball around at their leisure.
The bottoms were all the same school-issue gym shorts, but the tops were a free-for-all. Some ran with their uniform shirts unbuttoned and flapping open. Some had thrown on the gym jersey. A few had stripped the whole thing off and were tearing around in nothing but a short-sleeved T-shirt.
A handful of the boys looked sour about it, but that was just because they didn't like the view. Nobody actually made a fuss.
One girl stood out from the rest.
She ran harder than anyone, and yet, oddly, she only broke a modest sweat. She was still in her uniform shirt and black pants, but something about her presence—maybe it was the face—set her apart. The match had barely started and she already had three goals to her name. The boys up in the stands watched her with easy, happy smiles.
Han Sehee. Seventeen.
For a while at the start of the term she'd looked like a model student, until rumors started circulating that she'd fallen in with a rough crowd. The shift in her whole atmosphere had been so stark that her classmates had more or less believed it—until, recently, people began saying she'd changed again.
With about ten minutes left in fourth period, she broke off from the sprinting and walked toward the stands.
"Sehee, game over already?"
A boy sitting with his friends asked. He liked her, privately, but that wasn't anything special. Sehee was a very popular student.
"Nah. I just wrapped up early."
"Why? You were winning, weren't you?"
"Pfft. There's no bet on it, so what's the point of winning? I've got stuff to do, so I called it."
The short exchange ended there. Sehee picked up the English vocab book she'd tossed aside and flipped it open.
Last time, Yuhan had told her he was making good money streaming. Sehee hadn't been able to find him on the site without a fight. The channel she'd finally dug up was a nobody stream with barely any viewers.
Sehee was quick on the uptake. She'd seen immediately that Yuhan had made her a promise he couldn't keep. And she'd seen, just as clearly, that he would never take it back.
Honestly, she hadn't even wanted to work out. She'd only been running because Yuhan had told her she had to keep at it, no excuses.
Thinking of Yuhan.
Thinking of the boy she liked, she steeled herself and went back to studying.
The boy wanted to keep talking, but he gave it up soon enough. The other guys were watching, and besides—until recently Sehee had been one of those kids who ran with people. Getting in her way was a little scary. He wasn't particularly disappointed, though. Watching a beauty of Sehee's caliber sit there quietly studying was pleasure enough on its own.
While he was at it, another boy who'd been staring at her for a while wandered over.
"What's with you, studying through gym?"
"What do you want, Park Sijun. Don't bother me."
"Kids who study during gym are always the worst at studying. Hmm. Kind of like you? Heh heh."
There was only one person who could talk to Han Sehee this casually after the months she'd spent going off the rails.
Park Sijun had been close with her since middle school. He came from money, he was good-looking, and his grades were excellent. More than a few people had taken one look at him and given up on Sehee entirely.
"If you're gonna be like this, why'd you even go off the deep end before? Wanted to play delinquent that badly?"
"Whatever. I'm busy. Get lost."
"Why'd you change again? Something happen? You can't even tell me?"
"If I tell you, will you leave?"
"I'll think about it."
Sijun was genuinely curious about why Sehee had flipped so suddenly, but that wasn't what mattered right now. He had a separate reason for dragging a maybe-private conversation out in front of other people.
This was a good way to show off how close they were.
While Sehee had been hanging around with the wrong crowd, she'd gone out of her way to avoid him. In her younger, smaller heart, his family's wealth had made her envious—and inferior.
After meeting Yuhan, that weight had lifted, and getting friendly with Sijun again hadn't been hard. But they hadn't really talked in months, so to everyone else the friendship wouldn't have looked all that deep.
So Sijun wanted to put his place on display.
A simple, selfish little motive—
"Someone I know told me to just study."
The answer was every bit as simple as the motive.
"…That's it? That's the whole thing?"
"Yeah. What else do you need?"
Sijun knew Sehee wasn't the type to tell a cheap lie about something like this. Which meant that painfully straightforward reason really had changed her.
The fact that someone out there could move her that easily sat very, very badly with him.
"…Who said that?"
"You're curious about that too? Oppa said it."
"Ah… your real older brother?"
He saw Sehee's eyes tighten, just a little, and knew he'd put his foot in it. He knew she hated talking about family. They just hadn't spoken in so long that he'd forgotten for a second.
Sehee tried to let it roll off like it was nothing. Sijun still hated the slip.
"Just. I know an oppa."
And the existence of that oppa started to leave a sour, unplaceable taste in his mouth.
The bell rang.
"What, it's over already? Sijun, I'm out."
Even when Sehee had gone off the rails, it had never felt like this.
Today, for some reason, she felt far away.
One in the morning, after the stream had ended.
I realized I had nowhere left to run.
Every human being has it, and in my old world men felt it especially hard. I'd been in the gender-reversed world for going on three weeks now, and I hadn't jerked off once. I considered that a record worth noting.
Honestly, between work and trying to get my bearings, I hadn't had the bandwidth to feel horny at all. But after the collab with Ari, my viewer count had been holding in the triple digits, and with a little room to breathe, everything I'd been holding back came flooding in at once.
If it weren't for all the half-naked pictures of men popping up everywhere, even streaming would have been rough. If I'd been in this state the night I slept at Ari's place… I probably wouldn't have slept at all. I'd have been up till dawn.
pornhud.com
Looking at those English words sitting in the address bar, a wave of self-loathing started to rise.
I'd come to a reversed world with a face like this, and this was what I was doing?
I didn't particularly like mixing bodies with people I didn't know, but still. Or maybe, thinking about it, that was obvious?
The women anywhere near me were Sehee, who was underage, and Ari, who had a boyfriend. Yebin, the college student who volunteered at the orphanage every Sunday, wasn't even that close.
Forget it.
I liked things to happen naturally. A good connection would come along eventually.
With that thought, I hit Enter.
Yeah. I should have prepared myself a little more.
I started to hate my own fingers with a murderous intensity.
"Ah, fuck!!"
Thud.
"Ack! Shit!!"
The first curse was aimed at the thumbnail: a zoomed-in shot of a naked man. The second was aimed at my own knee, which I'd just driven into the desk in shock.
Damn it, why hadn't I thought of this?
If I'd approached it with even a little more caution, I could have guessed what an adult site would feel like in a reversed world.
Men here. Men there. Men everywhere.
The guy photos I'd seen around the internet I could more or less get used to if I looked long enough. Fully stripped men was another matter. Women's bodies showed up here and there too, but the moment I drifted toward Asian content it was nothing but heavyset ajummas as far as the eye could see.
Looking at that, I remembered a legendary piece of work I'd seen years ago and successfully forgotten: Auntie Shimura.
Was this… hell?
I wanted to wash my eyes. No—factory-reset my brain?
A male-oriented adult site becoming a female-oriented adult site produced a dystopia without equal. I liked our East Asians. I liked Asians…
Swearing under my breath without pause, I searched for another site.
hidomi.la
God was dead.
Sure, even in my old world this site had hosted a fair amount of female-oriented work, but the core audience had still been men. Now the core audience was women. That was the point.
Every so often something decent-looking would turn up, but in the end the one getting wrecked was always a guy.
Yeah… maybe this was the pirate's reward. Even if I'd paid legally, there still wouldn't have been anything to watch.
Which left the last resort.
There's a piece of trivia most people don't know. If you type gay into Pornhud's search bar, it dumps you onto an entirely separate site dedicated to that. I'd found that fact online, searched it out of curiosity, and taken psychic damage.
Which meant… I was supposed to search lesbian.
That wasn't my thing. Not homophobia. Just a matter of taste.
Yeah.
Today, life felt unusually hard. I'd been through all kinds of crap, but my lot had never felt this pathetic. I didn't even know what I was doing anymore.
I'd sacrificed my eyes and my sanity and all I'd gotten for it was self-loathing. So this was how a post-nut clarity hit without the nut.
I force-quit the computer and collapsed onto the bed.
Nofap. Coming up on three weeks.
It was a night wet with tears.