Call Him Here. Now.
After a four-hour drive, Park-hyung arrived near the high school Woo Hwi-gyum had once attended and stepped out of the car, saying he needed the bathroom.
“……I don’t think Chan-su uses SNS.”
Woo Hwi-gyum spoke, thoroughly dejected.
Ye-chan nodded as usual.
“He dropped out too, right? He might just be avoiding old classmates, or he might not use it at all.”
Ye-chan spotted Park-hyung approaching from a distance and opened the car door.
“Let’s get out. It’s only six, so we can grab something to eat with FD and then catch a little sleep in the car.”
Ye-chan set the brimmed hat he’d borrowed from FD on the hesitant Woo Hwi-gyum’s head and climbed out first.
“Don’t be afraid of being recognized. You’re not the one who did something that should make other people fear you.”
Only then did Woo Hwi-gyum begin to climb out of the car, inch by awkward inch.
“We can eat and sleep?”
Meanwhile Park-hyung covered his mouth with one large hand as if he’d just heard something impossible.
“When PD called us I thought sleep was completely off the table for today……!”
It felt like getting a fresh, unwelcome glimpse of the entertainment industry’s darker habits.
They finished a meal at a gukbap restaurant in the busy downtown stretch, dozed briefly in the car, and by the time they woke, school start time was nearly upon them.
“Shall we head over?”
At Ye-chan’s words, Woo Hwi-gyum adjusted his hat.
Park-hyung, still in the driver’s seat, also rose.
“I’ll go with you.”
“No need. FD, you can sleep a little longer.”
“Uh…… Then if anything happens, call the number I gave you earlier.”
Leaving Park-hyung behind, Ye-chan and Woo Hwi-gyum moved closer to the school’s front gate. Ye-chan checked Instagram.
“That account is……”
Woo Hwi-gyum, peeking at the screen over Ye-chan’s shoulder, seemed to recognize the owner and spoke up.
“Yeah. Your old homeroom teacher.”
The post uploaded about five minutes earlier showed a pair of dress shoes photographed inside a bus.
If the former teacher hadn’t used SNS or had owned a car, they would have had to start by getting visitor passes from the admin office. Fortunately he was both an SNS addict and a pedestrian.
Contacting him through SNS was an option, but Ye-chan deliberately chose to show up in person.
Students arriving for school began to crowd the gate. Quite a few of them glanced sideways at the two tall men with hats pulled low, finding them suspicious as they passed.
Ye-chan, who had been leaning casually against the wall, finally spotted his target and started walking.
“Teacher Kim Eun-su.”
The man staring at his smartphone screen stopped at the voice calling his name and lifted his head.
Meeting that gaze, Ye-chan removed the hat he was wearing.
“Hello. Could we talk for a moment?”
Ye-chan pulled Woo Hwi-gyum forward from behind him, set him at his side, and smiled brightly.
The teacher’s mouth, already open at the sight of Ye-chan, dropped even wider—as if his jaw might fall off—when he confirmed Woo Hwi-gyum.
“Huk! It’s Ha Ye-chan!”
“For real? Wow, he’s with the Korean teacher?!”
“Who’s the one in the hat next to him?”
“Isn’t that Woo Hwi-gyum? He used to go here.”
Ignoring the sudden noise around them, Ye-chan patted Woo Hwi-gyum’s back.
The rigidly frozen Woo Hwi-gyum bowed toward his last homeroom teacher.
“It’s been a while, Teacher.”
Ye-chan waited for Woo Hwi-gyum’s former homeroom teacher at a café near the school, stirring the ice in his drink with a straw.
Glued to SNS all day, he has to know exactly what kind of situation Woo Hwi-gyum is in… Well, even without that, there’s no way he wouldn’t know.
Just as Ye-chan had guessed, the man showed no sign of wanting to step forward and clear his student’s name.
……Honestly, what am I even supposed to say.
Ye-chan spotted the teacher waiting for the light at the crosswalk across the street after morning assembly and poked Woo Hwi-gyum with his elbow.
“There’s your old homeroom teacher coming.”
“Ah. Yeah.”
Woo Hwi-gyum, tension plain on his face, fiddled with the cup in front of him with both hands.
Ye-chan decided to give the pure, unworldly little lamb some advance warning so he wouldn’t be too badly shocked.
“There’s something you should know first.”
“Huh?”
While Ye-chan spoke at some length, Woo Hwi-gyum never once interrupted.
Only the fingers gripping the glass trembled faintly.
“Did you wait long?”
The man who had dashed over the moment the light changed sat down across from Ye-chan and Woo Hwi-gyum.
“No. We’re the ones who showed up out of nowhere without any notice.”
The man smiled back, seeming to relax at Ye-chan’s bright expression.
“Haha, of course I’d make time when a welcome former student visits. Hwi-gyum, it’s been really long.”
Woo Hwi-gyum bowed his head at the teacher’s words.
“W-wow. Hwi-gyum’s still a man of few words, haha.”
Ye-chan spoke kindly again to the awkwardly smiling teacher.
“Thank you once more for making time even though you’re busy. I’m Ha Ye-chan—I’m on the same program as Hwi-gyum.”
“Ah, I’ve been watching Choose My Prince well. Um, Ye-chan-ssi? Ye-chan-gun?”
“Please call me whatever’s comfortable for you, Teacher. If you were Hwi-gyum’s homeroom teacher, you’re a teacher to me as well.”
Ye-chan completely set aside his usual cold expression and smiled gently.
“You can guess why we came, right?”
“Ah. Yes.”
The teacher rolled his eyes uncomfortably.
Seeing thick beads of sweat cut across his cheek, Ye-chan held out a tissue.
“I’ve heard the situation from Hwi-gyum. We’re planning to sue the person who wrote the post for spreading false information and defamation.”
Woo Hwi-gyum’s eyes went wide at the first he’d heard of it.
Fortunately the teacher was too startled to notice Woo Hwi-gyum’s expression.
Ye-chan pinched Woo Hwi-gyum’s thigh under the table.
Confirming that Woo Hwi-gyum had returned to a blank face after collecting himself, Ye-chan continued.
“But Hwi-gyum said he really wants to meet that friend first. Even though they didn’t graduate together, they were classmates in the same class, and he wants to hear whether there was some misunderstanding. So—do you happen to know Ji Chan-su’s contact information?”
The teacher hummed in difficulty.
Ye-chan spoke in the most benevolent voice he could produce.
“I thought it would be better for Chan-su as well to talk things through rather than suddenly receive a lawsuit.”
“No, it’s not that kind of problem…… Haah.”
The teacher let out a deep sigh and shook his leg anxiously.
“Th-the person who posted the exposé isn’t Chan-su.”
“……May I ask why you think that?”
At Ye-chan’s question the teacher furrowed his brows.
“Chan-su isn’t in any condition to write a post like that right now.”
“……What do you mean?”
The teacher downed the iced americano on the table almost in one go and laid out the story.
After Woo Hwi-gyum dropped out, the fake school-violence committee incident left Ji Chan-su something close to a social outcast at school.
Unable to endure it, Ji Chan-su submitted a dropout form just before winter break. The teacher who went to his house to talk him out of it learned from Ji Chan-su’s parents that the night before, Ji Chan-su had attempted suicide, failed, and been hospitalized.
“The school side said that if word got out this happened because of bullying it would be a disaster, so process the dropout application quickly and wrap it up.”
“Was there no pushback from Ji Chan-su’s family?”
“Chan-su’s parents also had their own circumstances and didn’t want to make a big deal of it.”
“Um…… How is Chan-su now? He’s okay, right?”
Woo Hwi-gyum, who had only been listening until now, spoke in an anxious voice.
When the teacher’s eyes met Woo Hwi-gyum’s, tears suddenly welled up.
“Teacher?”
Looking at Woo Hwi-gyum’s face—sincerely worried about Ji Chan-su—the teacher felt ashamed.
“I’m sorry, Hwi-gyum. You’re the one who was really wronged and had it hard, yet you’re worrying about Chan-su like this…… I should be helping you, but when I think of Chan-su I don’t know what to do……! It sounds like an excuse, but it was really hard.”
For someone having such a hard time, you sure post on SNS with enthusiasm and commute with a light step.
Ye-chan looked down coldly at the teacher who had bowed his head, fully immersed in the drama.
It was truly ridiculous.
“So what is Chan-su’s condition now?”
“He’s hospitalized. Probably will continue to be……”
The teacher who had fully inhabited the role of tragedy’s protagonist lowered his eyes as if bitter.
Hearing that even simple communication was difficult for Ji Chan-su, Woo Hwi-gyum’s expression grew heavy. Ye-chan’s eyes gleamed coldly.
“Not bad for a scenario you just cooked up. Or did you write it the moment the school-violence post went up?”
“What?”
The teacher raised his head in bewilderment.
Ye-chan met his eyes and smiled brightly.
“You seem quite close with your cousin, Teacher Kim Eun-su.”
The teacher hurriedly turned toward Woo Hwi-gyum.
Woo Hwi-gyum, who had already been tipped off by Ye-chan about the relationship between Ji Chan-su and the teacher before the man even entered the café, averted his eyes with a bitter look.
The teacher’s voice trembled as he looked back at Ye-chan.
“W-what are you talking about……”
Instead of answering, Ye-chan turned on his smartphone screen and slid it across the table.
On the SNS interface that had briefly been popular a few years earlier was a playful photo of a much younger Kim Eun-su putting a headlock on a Ji Chan-su who looked about elementary-school age.
Leaving the phone on the table, Ye-chan scrolled down far enough to show the caption as well, then made a pitying face.
“Looks like you forgot to delete it since people don’t use that site much these days.”
“S-stalking people like this is a c-crime, you know?”
“I simply saw what was posted for everyone to see. And as for crime—”
Ye-chan’s eyes instantly turned cold.
His long index finger tapped the table in a steady rhythm.
“Wouldn’t it be things like fabricating incidents that never happened and pinning them on someone else, or a teacher covering up the truth to protect his cousin?”
At Ye-chan’s voice, cold as frost, Kim Eun-su was on the verge of tears.
Ye-chan laid the situation out for him with perfect clarity.
“As you know, Teacher, it was really sloppy. Even without this site, dig a little and the relationship between you and Ji Chan-su would surface. Spend a bit of time and tracking the IP to find who posted that is no trouble at all. Ah—you weren’t thinking that uploading from a PC bang would make it untraceable, were you?”
Kim Eun-su hunched his shoulders and stared at Ye-chan with eyes full of terror.
Truly disgusting.
Reading the barely contained rage on Ye-chan’s face, the startled Kim Eun-su began clinging to Woo Hwi-gyum.
“Hw-Hwi-gyum. Chan-su’s been having such a hard time lately—that’s why. I’ll talk to him properly, make him delete it and explain!”
“Well, the homeroom teacher held a school-violence committee without any real investigation, swapped victim and perpetrator, and if that perpetrator turns out to be his cousin, the fallout would be pretty severe.”
Kim Eun-su couldn’t even manage a rebuttal; he only looked at Woo Hwi-gyum with desperate, terrified eyes.
“And Teacher. If you could persuade him like that, you should have done it long before things got this big. You clearly knew this was going on.”
At Ye-chan’s words—each syllable bitten off deliberately while he suppressed his disgust—Kim Eun-su hung his head low again.
Looking down at him as if he were pathetic, Ye-chan let out an exaggerated sigh and continued.
“But I don’t want to drag this out, so I carved out time I don’t have to come here. This is luck for you and for Ji Chan-su. Don’t make things bigger for no reason. End it here.”
Ye-chan leaned back arrogantly against the sofa and this time pointed at the table with his index finger.
“Call Ji Chan-su. Here.”
Confirming that Kim Eun-su was carefully looking up at him, Ye-chan coldly added two words.
“Now.”