Two and a Half Steps of Cutting Ties
"Hey, Han Do-yoon. Stop acting like you know me."
Ha-eun's voice breaks open at the front of the classroom.
Acting familiar is a phrase you can use only with someone you still know. That she reached for it at all is proof we are not strangers yet.
It is before morning roll call, so the front door stands open. From the school hallway, students lean in one by one, phones in their hands. Whether they are filming or only holding them, I cannot tell. To me the two are the same thing.
I am standing beside the teacher's desk, the bag strap still hooked over one shoulder. It started the moment I walked in, so I never got the bag down. The belongings of someone stopped before they reach their seat always hang from a shoulder.
Ha-eun stands beside Sera, on Tae-min's side of the room, and looks at me.
"Did you hear me?"
No one in this classroom failed to hear. It is a confirmation wearing the shape of a question.
Between Ha-eun and me there are two and a half steps. For years we rode the same elevator in the same apartment complex, and the one who pressed the floor was always Ha-eun. Two and a half steps is farther than standing together in front of a button. For someone from the same complex, drawing a line in front of the class is not a comfortable thing. Sometimes the side that draws it has the harder part. Ha-eun's shoulders look like that side.
Before I answer, I settle my breath once. Settling your breath before a refusal is an old habit. In those few seconds the students by the front door wait for an answer, and the ones by the back door wait for there to be none. An audience always splits in two.
In the gap between them, I match the arrangement in front of me against memory.
Sera stands with her arms crossed. Students gather into a semicircle before the teacher's desk, broken open on my side. It is not a layout that traps anyone. It is staged so the way out will read as an exit, and if I take that path the steps will not be walking. They will be a walk-off. Because I can see that, I do not move from where I am.
Tae-min sits one step back, a hip set on the corner of a desk. Not a place for stopping this, and not a place for helping it along. A good place to watch. From there Ha-eun's face and mine come in together, and you can see, with the least effort, which of us breaks first.
Episode 1 of the original work ends on this scene. The loser, dumped by his childhood friend in front of the class, makes his exit.
I cannot say whether Ha-eun's first line matches what I read, character for character. The grain is the same. So are the places where people stand, and the number of students gathered. No one who read through to the final chapter would fail to know a scene like this. The trouble is that knowing it changes nothing.
Standing inside a scene you know is not the same as singing a song you know. You can have the tempo and still have your throat close on the note.
What would the Han Do-yoon who belongs in this spot have said?
In the memory of reading, there is one line. A line that holds on. Only the original Han Do-yoon already had his mouth open by this hour, and I have not opened mine. Up to now, that single difference is all that has changed.
I lift my wrist and look at the watch. The hands sit at four minutes before roll call. Four minutes is enough for Ha-eun to speak twice more and for the homeroom teacher to come in—a glance that measures how much length this scene has been allowed. At that one short look, the breath of the watching students falls out of step first. Someone starts to swallow and does not finish, before Ha-eun can even get the next words out. The student who stopped mid-swallow swallowed whatever they meant to say along with it. In this classroom today, words go down faster than they make it out of a mouth.
Looking at a watch is setting this scene on a timetable. The moment a spectacle is entered on a timetable, it loses its worth as a spectacle.
"Got it."
That is all. I do not say Ha-eun's name. I do not attach an excuse. I keep the name in my mouth and fold it shut. If this went the way I read it, my voice ought to crack around here. It does not. My throat is perfectly fine, and that feels stranger than a crack would have. That a pleading line was waiting in the script becomes, instead, the reason not to say it. Follow the script, and the ending follows the script.
Ha-eun's mouth stops half open. The chin she lifted to look tough cannot find anywhere to come down. It is the face of someone who prepared a reply in advance, and then never received the line it was meant to answer. What she prepared for was me crying, or clinging. That line had already climbed as far as her throat, lost anywhere to go, and sank back down.
Sera looks at her from the side. No one hands Ha-eun the next line. In that sidelong glance there is no scolding and no cheering. It is an eye that calculates whose this scene will be left to.
Tae-min does not take his weight off the desk corner. The watching look cools by degrees until his face is a blackboard in a classroom with the lights out. One finger taps the desktop once and stops. I do not know why his expression went cold. It might be that the show ended flat. It might be that this ending does not belong to him. The original never wrote his face down that far.
The murmur settles a beat late. From the hallway, someone says it low.
"What, is it over?"
That no one is there to answer is it over is the real ending of this scene. The person meant to end it has ended it, and the person meant to hold on has lost the words.
I turn my back on them and walk. From the teacher's desk to my seat is six rows of desks. Six rows is not short—long enough for a remark to be thrown at my back, and just barely the right distance to walk without breaking into a run. Window side, third row from the window, second seat from the back. The chair is pulled halfway out.
I hang the bag on the hook, draw the chair in, and sit. The scrape of the legs on the floor is the loudest sound in the room. It is loud because the room is quiet, not because I pulled hard. Nothing to feel wronged about. I feel wronged anyway.
Eyes follow. Two rows in front, one to the side. The habit of counting turns up here too; treated as a number, even stares are something I can stand. On the desk lies a meal coupon someone left behind. It is not mine. I slide it toward the drawer. Finding the owner would mean speaking to someone, and today that is the hardest thing there is.
I take the pencil case from the bag and set it at the upper right of the desk. The zipper is half open, and inside there is only one mechanical pencil. The lead is 0.5. I check how many sticks are left. Three. One pencil and three leads will get me through today. There has not yet been a day that asked me to write more than that.
The student in front turns halfway around. Their mouth opens, then shuts—a face with too many questions and no idea which to take out first. I close the pencil case all the way. The sound is small. It is the only sound I can offer in place of an answer, so I close it slower than I need to.
A chair drags near the front door. Ha-eun, going back to her seat. Sera's whisper follows, but no answer from Ha-eun comes back. I do not turn around.
Tae-min is still at the front of the room, pretending to read the timetable on the blackboard. It is last week's. This week's has not been posted. With nowhere else to put his eyes, he looks like someone standing there only because the board is all there is. I just did the same thing with a pencil case.
The bell rings. The homeroom teacher comes in, and the voice calling attendance travels from the top of the list downward.
"Han Do-yoon."
When it reaches me, I finish in a single line.
"Yes."
The homeroom teacher does not keep their eyes on me. Eyes that are careful not to linger. A one-line rumor will already have reached the faculty office. Ha-eun does not answer her name, so the teacher calls it again.
"Seo Ha-eun."
Only then does a small yes come.
"Yes."
Being late to your own name means your mind is somewhere else. I can guess where Ha-eun's has gone. I do not say so.
The original work does not record the Han Do-yoon of this hour. I sit up straight and open the first-period textbook. Someone has doodled in pencil on the first page. I start to erase it and stop, leaving it as it is. It is not my doodle. The cartoon in it has a mouth drawn as a single line, and maybe my hand stopped because the expression looked like mine.
First period is a single line. The writing on the board traveled from the front of the room to the back, and I filled two pages of notes. The handwriting is mine, and it is strange to me. The hand of this Han Do-yoon writes a little rounder than the hand I remember as my own.
At break, the doorway on the hallway side is loud. Around my seat it is quiet. Gaps of about a handspan have opened in the aisles between the desks. Footsteps that were coming my way change direction halfway down the aisle. Twice. The third time they do not manage the turn, and a shin hits the corner of my desk.
"Ah—sorry."
"It's fine."
That is the whole conversation of this hour. The student who hit me goes back to their seat and rubs the shin. The apology was a reflex, and the reflex is evidence that they still count me as a person. I wipe the corner of the desk once. There was nothing there to wipe. Even the motion of wiping gives a hand somewhere to go, and a habit from the convenience store finds a use for itself here.
Ha-eun does not look this way once in all that time. I can see she has fixed her neck so our eyes will not meet. The keychain on her bag sways beside the desk, then stops. I do not know what it means. I leave it unknown. For this hour the keychain is Ha-eun's only line. I could interpret it if I tried, but the cost of misreading is too high, so I do not.
Second period is Korean. The teacher is writing characters on the board, and the chalk is regular. A regular chalk sound is the kind that invites sleep, but today that regularity sounds more like someone knocking at a door. Under the desk I glance at my phone once. The screen is dark. It is on silent. The battery is still full enough, and it is strangely easing that the bar which sat in the red at the convenience store is full here.
While the teacher has turned to the board, the phone shivers once against my thigh.
The screen comes on. Kang Tae-min. His number is saved in this phone. The problem is the other direction.
I run back through the memory of what I read, from the start. The student council scenes, the rooftop, the scene where Ha-eun cries, all the way to the last sentence of the final chapter. The faster I turn through it, the harder the certainty sets. Looking for something that is there slows you down. Confirming that something is not there speeds you up. Nowhere is there a passage in which Tae-min gets my number. No scene where he asks for it, and no scene where someone else passes it on. If there had been one, I would remember. I am a person who checks a receipt total twice. So this number did not come by way of the original work. It traveled a road this world made, and I do not know which road.
The teacher turns. I push the phone down between my knees. The teacher's eyes pass me and go on to the back row. Eyes sliding past me are either luck or courtesy. Today I take them without sorting which.
The chalk starts again, and I lift the screen halfway.
I saved a seat already assumes I will come. A sentence that leaves no opening for a no, and if you read it as kindness, it is kindness.
The cursor in the reply field blinks. I do not type. Above the board, the second hand of the clock moves one mark.
The teacher sets the chalk down and pages through the attendance book. The phone is still between my knees. Near the top of the screen, in small type, a read mark appears and vanishes. That I was the one who read it will already be stamped on his screen too. Reading and not answering outlasts a refusal. A refusal ends in one line, but being left on read makes the other person run the numbers again at every break.
I settle my breath. I fold my thumb in so it cannot reach the reply field. There are three choices for lunch: the school cafeteria, bread from the school snack bar, or not eating. All three can be managed alone, and two of them need no seat.
I turn the phone face-down and press it to my thigh. It does not buzz again.
Diagonally ahead, the back of Tae-min's head. His shoulder tips half a handspan toward the desk—the posture of someone looking at a phone. He holds it for about ten seconds without moving. The back of a person staring at a screen where the message shows as read and the answer does not come. It is hard to believe that back belongs to the same person who sat on a desk corner this morning. The height is different.
Sera, in the seat beside him, nudges his arm with an elbow. Tae-min slides the phone into the desk drawer. Her mouth moves, but the sound does not travel this far. Tae-min shakes his head once. I cannot know what she said. Only that the direction of the shake is no. What the no is refusing is the most expensive piece of information in this row.
Ha-eun, a row away from the two of them, looks only at her textbook. The hand turning the pages is a beat too fast each time. Her neck does not come back toward me. The keychain on her bag strikes a chair leg and makes a short sound.
"Kang Tae-min."
The teacher looks up from the attendance book and calls.
"Yes."
"Come up front and read this. You were dozing just now."
Low laughter settles through the room. It is not on Tae-min's side, and not on mine. No one has managed to file this morning under either camp yet, so they laugh at the nearest thing that looks easy. Tae-min stands. Getting up is half a tempo slower than usual, and the sound of the chair sliding back is long.
"I wasn't dozing, though."
"Then read it."
Tae-min walks out to the board. Two hours ago, in this same place, he was sitting on a desk corner with the students gathered in front of him. Now he is alone before a blackboard filmed with chalk. The whole classroom looks at him, and no one is waiting for him to speak. I do not examine whether any of this quiet is mine. If I did, I suspect it would come out that it is.
"…Su-gu-cho-sim."
That the words he happens to be made to read today are su-gu-cho-sim is a coincidence. I know it is a coincidence, and I still cannot laugh, because I am someone who has read the original.
"The meaning."
"Even when you die, you turn your head toward home."
Correct. Nothing in the answer is wrong, and still the classroom looks at him the way you look at someone who missed it.
"All right. Go back."
That one line from the teacher is the end of it. Tae-min walked to the board and walked back for the sake of receiving it.
He returns to his seat. I count the steps. Seven. This morning he would have loitered the same seven. Now there is no slack between them. Even on the diagonal that passes in front of my desk, his eyes stay forward. The cuff of his sleeve just barely clears the corner of the desk on the aisle side.
The student in front half-turns, then faces forward again. This time the mouth does not even open. Not opening it means less that the question was given up than that an answer has already been guessed. A guess is usually stingier than the fact.
I open my notebook and copy the characters from the board. Su, gu, cho, sim. The four characters have so many strokes that, while I write them, there is little room for any other thought to get in. Half the reason I chose to take notes is that. I count the strokes under my breath. Twenty-five, and on the last one the lead snaps. I open the pencil case and take out a refill. Two left now. Two leads left means I can ruin today's notes twice more. I hope there is nothing left to ruin.
The phone, face-down, cools against my thigh. I did not write an answer, and even so the day keeps moving through this classroom. In what I remember reading, nothing is written about what I am supposed to do at this hour. So the only work on the desk is the notes. I did not know an hour that was never written down could be this long.
From the crack of Tae-min's drawer, the light of a phone screen leaks once. On, then off. No one saw it. By this classroom's accounting, the fact that I alone saw it does not count as it having been seen.
In my drawer, the meal coupon I slid in this morning is still there, one corner slightly bent. There is no one to take a bet on whether I find the owner before lunch, or whether the coupon folds first.