Be Careful What You Wish For
"Puhahaha! Stop fucking around already!"
"I'm serious! For real — I'll bet both sides if I have to!"
"You got hit on in Gangnam? With a face like yours, they wouldn't be picking you up — they'd be hunting you for sport!"
"Heh heh heh. Holy shit, that's actually funny. It's like some freak-show reject talking about walking a runway."
"You little bastard. You calling me a freak right now?"
"With a mug like that? Yeah, you're a freak. What the hell did you think you were this whole time? Hahahaha!"
A guy in a thoroughly delinquent getup — school uniform hanging wide open, dress shirt barely on — shoved back the friend charging at him with a snarl, then sauntered over toward the girls.
"Hey, Kang Soeun. You hear that? Min Youngchan over there got hit on in Gangnam yesterday."
"I'm not lying! I'll bet both sides! For real!"
Soeun slammed her phone down hard at that filthy phrasing, then fixed the boys with a glare.
"Bet what, you idiots. Shut up already. My ears are rotting just listening to you."
"Aw, Youngchan! You hear that? Your lies are so disgusting her ears are rotting! Hahaha!"
The guys kept right on yapping, completely unfazed by her venom. Soeun finally raked her bangs up hard with one hand, then opened her phone again and finished the text she'd been writing.
"Soeun. Your front line's all messed up. Let me fix it for you."
"Forget it. I don't care — leave it."
"Aww, come on. You just sit still and—"
"Give it here. I'll shape it."
The same guy from a moment ago had already peeled off from the pack of boys. He snatched the comb from the girl's hand and reached gently for Soeun's bangs.
She slapped his hand away hard and looked up at him with a murderous stare.
"Kang Haejun. Stop acting cute and get lost."
"Aw, that's cold. Can't even recognize pure goodwill when you see it."
"Pure lust, more like. Asshole. I'm not playing with you, so get the hell out of here."
Haejun made a big show of rubbing his reddened hand, then stared openly at Soeun's profile as she focused on texting someone he couldn't identify.
Ha... bitch. Listen to her talk. If that face were even a little less pretty, I'd have put her on her back a long time ago.
But that face more than made up for the attitude, and before he knew it he was swallowing hard. Even with the bare minimum of makeup, she crushed every XX chromosome in the school — so a flaw like that almost counted as charm.
Ah. Thinking about it, there's one exception.
The thought of someone flickered through his head — and right on cue the door opened and the person herself walked in. Proverbs really were based on reality after all.
Haejun turned his head slowly, tracking her footsteps with his eyes.
...Ha. You've got to be kidding me. How the hell do the two top beauties in the whole school end up in the same class?
And the fact that this blessed classroom wasn't his class sent a spike of irritation through him. He shoved up from the desk he'd been perched on and planted himself in her path as she walked past.
She looked straight at him. He was just forcing himself to open his mouth and say something when—
KWAANG—!
Soeun's kick slammed into a desk and a massive crash rang out.
His words died in his throat. She rose slowly and delivered a single line.
"You fucking— Kang Haejun. You think I'm joking?"
"...Huh?"
"Get back to your own class right now. I'm sick of watching you come around every break and hit on the girls."
Haejun looked back and forth between the desk toppled like a domino and Soeun herself, thinking,
What the hell kind of strength—
She'd kicked it while still sitting, without even setting her stance properly — and the force of it was better than most guys could manage.
The atmosphere was thoroughly wrecked. Haejun backed off under Soeun's continuing glare. She let out a small sigh and opened her mouth.
"Sorry, guys. I'll put the desks back."
Soeun slipped her phone into her shirt pocket and started righting the desks one by one. The girl who'd been watching quietly from the side finally spoke.
"Did you really need to make that much of a scene?"
"...What am I supposed to do when the irritation hits the top of my head? Hold it in and get an ulcer?"
"I thought you'd fixed that temper back in middle school. Guess not."
She helped lift the desks as she spoke in that calm, measured way — and Soeun felt a full-body shiver of revulsion.
"I get it, so stop lecturing. Im Chaeyeon, weren't you the one who stopped using that creepy way of talking after middle school?"
"The reason I talk like this is because I spent middle school cleaning up after every mess you made. You didn't know?"
"Please. You were so busy we barely even saw each other at school — what cleanup?"
"As you know, your parents stay in touch with me a lot too. Even more so back in middle school."
"...For what?"
"They asked me to keep an eye on you from the side — rein in that habit of flying off the handle without thinking."
So the person in question hadn't even known?
Chaeyeon smiled faintly, finished aligning the last desk and chair, and walked to her own seat. Soeun watched her back and muttered under her breath.
"...In elementary school she was worse than me. Acting like this now is just cheap."
All that endless fencing practice had definitely made her calmer — but dealing with her as a friend had gotten a lot more complicated.
Still, friend was friend. One way or another, Soeun would just have to get used to it.
She went back to half-heartedly entertaining the popular girls who sidled up again pretending to be close, and let out another small sigh.
This boring school life. Wonder if something interesting will ever happen.
And exactly twenty minutes after that thought—
Soeun had no choice but to regret it like a madwoman, wishing she could take the thought back.
"Uweeeehk!"
A sealed classroom.
The raw terror of death he'd felt from the walking corpses, the stench of blood, the vivid sight of human guts and chunks of meat burned into his brain — a boy finally couldn't hold it and emptied his stomach in a spectacular heave.
"That fucking piece of—"
Haejun surged forward in a flash of anger at the display — then caught the two pairs of eyes fixed on him, backed off, and muttered instead.
"We're all hiding in here and this asshole starts puking. Piece of shit. If the smell gives us away, I'm killing him before I die..."
"...There's so much blood-smell outside already. Odds of them noticing are low."
"How would you know, sunbae? You some kind of monster? You know how good their noses are?"
Haejun glared at the bespectacled guy like he wanted to eat him alive. Soeun cut in.
"If you're that scared, wipe it all up with your clothes yourself."
"...Why the hell would I clean that up? He's the one who sprayed it."
"Then shut up. Everyone else is already having a hard enough time without you making it worse."
"...Fuck."
Whether from the ragged breathing of all that running or pure rage, Haejun kept huffing as he glared at the first-year who'd thrown up — then finally clutched his forehead and dropped into a chair.
"This is so fucking shitty. Seriously... why do I have to deal with this..."
"....."
Once Haejun finally stopped running his mouth, Soeun looked away from him and scanned the room.
Five people total. Herself and Chaeyeon, a third-year male sunbae, a first-year male underclassman, and Kang Haejun.
The place they'd barely escaped those unidentifiable monsters and hidden in was the third-floor science lab. From Soeun's perspective it looked completely useless as a choice of hideout — but the situation had been too desperate to be picky.
She carefully checked beyond the windows. Shapes that could have been monsters or people were sprawled and tangled everywhere, creating every kind of horrific scene imaginable.
Soeun's home environment had made her the type who didn't flinch at most danger — but even she didn't think facing those things would end well. Afraid their eyes might meet, she yanked the curtains shut.
While everyone else was exhausted and gasping, she spotted Chaeyeon alone reinforcing every door and window on the hallway side, and walked over slowly.
"What are you doing?"
"Preparing for the possibility of zombies looking in through the windows, and for them breaking down the door."
"...Zombies? You mean those monsters, right?"
"Yeah. They look exactly like zombies."
She said it like something she saw in movies and dramas all the time, hauling desks into place. Soeun could only stare at her in disbelief.
Movies and dramas were one thing. This was reality — living, existing things — and the way Chaeyeon accepted it so easily didn't look normal at all.
"...Im Chaeyeon. How are you this calm even in a situation like this?"
"I don't know. I'm plenty tense right now."
"That's tense?"
Chaeyeon met Soeun's eyes with the same composed gaze as always.
"I don't want to die any more than you do. The more scared and tense you get, the more panicking only makes things worse. Isn't that obvious?"
"...Yeah, it is."
But no matter how obvious it was, the people who could actually put it into practice were rare.
Especially when that person was just an eighteen-year-old high school girl.
"Think of it this way. When you're about to show how scared you are, imagine how embarrassing that would be."
Soeun blinked at what was, in a way, a completely absurd piece of wisdom — then let her friend's composure rub off on her, settled her heart, and managed a hollow laugh.