Second Semester
Second Semester
I drove to school in the Porsche Cayenne, which I'd more or less gotten used to by now.
Several witnesses had already shared photos on the community forums,
so the fact that I'd bought a Porsche Cayenne was all over the place.
Even people who hadn't shown any interest in me before
apparently found the sight fairly novel.
To be honest, even I thought driving around in a Porsche was pretty novel,
so how novel must it look to other people?
I knew that a typical twenty-year-old couldn't afford the crushing insurance premiums
and couldn't even dream of buying a car.
So I was well aware
of just how abnormal my current situation was.
Jeong Hwan-yi and Lee Min-ho watched me step out of the car and smirked.
"That's some serious bait."
"Well, I sort of expected this much."
A-ra's Porsche 718 Boxster GTS hadn't drawn this level of attention.
After all, the person driving it had been A-ra herself.
If my wife really wanted to draw attention with a car,
it probably wouldn't happen until the Bugatti Chiron she ordered actually arrived.
"Anyway, let's just head inside. Class is about to start.
But why were you two standing out here anyway?"
"We were on our way up after getting coffee."
Jeong Hwan-yi showed me the coffee in his hand.
He was holding an iced Americano that anyone could see was loaded with an excessive amount of whipped cream and syrup, making it look sickly sweet.
"If you're going to do that, wouldn't drinking something like a caramel macchiato be better?"
"I don't like those. Too sweet."
On a rare occasion, Lee Min-ho looked at Jeong Hwan-yi and laughed in disbelief.
It was the opposite of how things usually went, which gave it a novel feeling.
What Lee Min-ho was holding wasn't coffee but a chocolate flatccino.
How unusual for him to be drinking something other than coffee.
"I worked out a bit earlier and felt like I was going to collapse from low blood sugar."
"Are you sure you're a guy? Not a girl?"
I took a refreshing sip of the coffee Jeong Hwan-yi had handed me and walked into the department building.
Looks like he put quite a lot of syrup in this one, too.
*
When we arrived at the lecture room, several people were standing outside instead of going in.
The class representative noona was there, and the oldest lady in our department, who was like an auntie to everyone, was also standing there.
Was the previous class still not finished?
I peered inside through the window in the door.
Inside, there were people I'd seen before
and about half were faces I'd never seen.
"There are quite a few new faces."
"Aren't they seniors who just came back to school?"
Seeing that all the unfamiliar people were women,
they must have been seniors returning to school after military service.
Even among all the women wearing thin clothes because it was summer,
the unfamiliar faces were the ones whose figures stood out especially, likely thanks to dedicated fitness work.
Their skin was also deeply tanned, so it looked like the military had really put them through the wringer.
"Sssip... This doesn't look like just a minor seat shortage."
We went into the lecture room to sit down because we were hot,
but there weren't enough seats, so there was nowhere to sit.
Even the seats that were empty
had belongings or bags placed on top of them.
Some of the people who had been standing outside were heading toward the department office,
so they must have been on their way to tell the assistant that there were no seats.
Our department's teaching assistant... well, she had a way of taking life very, very leisurely.
Soooo stifling...
Maybe because we were standing, even though the air conditioner
was blasting out cold air, it still felt hot.
The two of them had also started rapidly drinking the contents of their plastic cups,
and now only the melted-down, shrunken ice cubes were left.
"The AC is on, so why is it this hot..."
"I think cold air is coming out of it, though."
"It's hot..."
When I whimpered about the heat, Jeong Hwan-yi took out a honeybee-shaped fan from his bag and handed it to me.
A feeling reminiscent of a little kid holding a lollipop wafted strongly off it,
and I felt a bit embarrassed, but the dominant thought was that I was grateful to at least have this.
I waved my hand vigorously to generate wind.
The air, cooled by the air conditioner, was blown by the fan
toward the beads of sweat dotting my skin and began stealing the heat from my body, making me feel gradually cooler.
But that didn't last long.
Soon my hand started to hurt from fanning so hard,
and heat began building up along with the motion.
"...Hot."
I felt heat rising to my forehead, and soon sweat started beading up again.
This time, Lee Min-ho reached out his hand, asking me to give him the fan, so I handed it over.
True to his background as a former track and field athlete, Lee Min-ho began fanning with super-strong gusts
and in an instant, he vaporized all the sweat droplets that had been forming.
"Um, excuse me..."
Then, as if she felt sorry for us standing there dumbly fanning ourselves in front of the air conditioner,
a woman who had been wearing a wry smile spoke to us.
"You must be hot. Don't just stand by the entrance—come over here."
A few bags had been placed on the desk,
so the seats belonged to someone, but she cleared all those bags away and prepared spots for us, telling us to sit.
On top of that, these were the best seats, right in front of the air conditioner.
"Thank you. Thank you very much."
I bowed my head to the senior who had abandoned her classmates to provide us with shelter,
feeling grateful.
"Wha... it's nothing... More importantly, I'm really enjoying your Qtube. Back in the military, whenever one of your videos went up, our whole squad would gather around and watch."
"It makes me happy to hear that servicewomen enjoyed them."
Could you even watch Qtube in the military?
No, more than that, my thanks were heartfelt.
In that mind-crushingly boring military life, instead of watching videos of idols dancing,
they were watching my Qtube. I was a little curious about what on earth they found entertaining about it,
but I refrained from asking for no good reason.
To think I even had fans in the military.
I idly imagined whether the cooks might secretly hate me.
If they ever came after me in their mess dress holding shovels, that would definitely be a military cook who'd built up a grudge against me.
About ten minutes after I sat down,
the teaching assistant arrived at a leisurely pace, checked how bad the seat shortage was,
and began cross-referencing against the enrollment count.
Oh, come on. Surely she didn't just stuff us into any random lecture room without doing the math first, right?
"Everyone, please move to the lecture room next door. From now on, you'll be meeting in the adjoining room instead of this one.
I'll post a notice in the Katalk chat room later, so please make sure to tell anyone who hasn't arrived yet to check it."
They say 'surely' can kill a person, and watching the way she worked, it looked like she was going to get fired before her contract ended.
Only after the assistant finished speaking did a few people start voicing their complaints
as they got up and began moving to the other room.
From their perspective, they'd come early to secure good seats,
only for it all to go up in smoke because the room was changed, so they had every right to be extremely annoyed.
*
"Seong-hwan-a, give us a ride."
The new lecture room we'd moved to must have been recently repainted because the windows couldn't be closed,
which meant the air conditioner couldn't be turned on at all until class ended.
The saying 'adding insult to injury' really applied here...
So the two of them, on the verge of becoming dried squid,
were following me and asking for a ride.
"Since I'm giving you a ride anyway, I'll take you all the way home."
"Thanks! I love you, Yoo Seong-hwan!"
Lee Min-ho was overcome with emotion as he got up and climbed into the back seat.
Jeong Hwan-yi, groaning as if he were sick, climbed into the passenger seat and started buckling his seatbelt.
Seeing that, a wry smile slipped out of me.
Then I glanced at the clock.
There was still quite a bit of time left...
After all, even if I went straight home, no one would be there.
"We finished early today. How about going somewhere to eat something cold? Sulbing?"
"Sulbing sounds great. I'm getting the melon patbingsu."
"I'll have injeolmi."
The two of them, who had already chosen their orders before we'd even arrived,
were already floundering in a swamp from which they could never escape.
"I'll have the strawberry macaron."
I had been swept up in the same mire with them, so my eyes had rolled back too.
My sole desire was to eat patbingsu as soon as humanly possible.
***
The two women drinking cold beverages at the cafe were Song A-ra and Seong Hwa-young.
Since it hadn't been long since Hwa-young returned to Korea, she was still in the middle of adjusting to the time difference,
and she was looking up at A-ra with a face that suggested she could fall asleep at any moment.
"I'm trying to send Seong-hwan a text..."
"But what could you possibly be agonizing over for that long?"
Hwa-young could only manage a wry smile.
It had already been well over an hour since she started murmuring to herself while holding her phone.
The cup she'd been drinking from had been full of ice,
but by now it had all melted into water, which was proof of the time that had passed.
"It's incredibly hot today, right?"
"It hitting up to 40 degrees was record-breaking."
"But somehow, I'm really craving spicy fish stew."
Hwa-young burst out laughing.
Craving spicy fish stew in this sweltering weather.
Hot, oily, and spicy—spicy fish stew has all three of those qualities
and is one of the hardest foods to eat in the summer.
There's a saying about fighting heat with heat,
but even so, eating it on a day this hot could genuinely kill you.
A-ra could endure wanting to have fun or wanting to rest, but there was one thing she couldn't endure.
And that was craving something to eat.
When A-ra had something she wanted to eat right then, she wouldn't feel satisfied until she ate it.
But she felt too sorry toward her husband to ask him to make spicy fish stew in this blistering heat.
That was why she was agonizing over how to phrase the text message.
"If you told Seong-hwan you want to eat something, he'd even cook lava for you. What are you worrying about?"
"But still... it makes me feel sorry..."
A-ra put on a tearful face as she thought of her husband, who suffered badly from the heat.
Even last night, they had slept with the air conditioner on, but when she woke up midway through,
he had been sweating profusely, so she remembered lowering the temperature even further.
The amount of body heat he carried around must have been enormous—even in the dead of winter, he walked around the house in short sleeves and shorts.
"Uugh..."
In the end, A-ra, who had only been making a miserable face and hadn't managed to send the text,
could think of no other way than to just call and assertively push her request forward.