Me and My Childhood Friend
I lived in Daldongnae.
Calling it Moon Village didn’t mean the moon showed itself any clearer there. The stars were no different. Maybe if I’d been born ten years earlier things would have been different, but the constellations had long since vanished behind the smog.
What I saw from those steep stairs was the glittering light of luxury apartments rising far off in the distance—and the neighbor’s shouting, the now-harmless drift of cigarette smoke, the rough feel of uneven asphalt under my palms, the precious glow of the few streetlamps that still worked. At the end of an alley so narrow our shoulders brushed the walls sat our house.
That was my whole world.
Elementary school is compulsory. Rich kids, kids with nothing—everyone had to show up. My classmates carried expensive backpacks and wore stylish shirts. I wore clothes stretched shapeless, and the only thing in my hand was a pencil case.
He stinks. He’s filthy.
That was why I never stood among them. Children are pure like that. Purely, they decided I was dirty and kept their distance.
When they became middle-schoolers, those pure children learned malice. Whether the school taught it or their mothers did, I never knew. Bullying became routine. The teacher barely cared. My one remaining parent didn’t either.
I had nothing. Not a mother’s love, not a teacher’s attention, not an expensive backpack, not a single good friend, not even the will to become something better. I possessed not one thing.
Classmates circled me and drove their fists in. Rotten milk sat waiting in my desk. Textbooks were stolen. My gym uniform was full of holes. Once I decided all of it had never existed to begin with, the sting faded. Friends, pure white milk, textbooks that still smelled of paper, a halfway decent gym uniform—none of them had ever been mine. They simply never had.
“….”
I watched a certain girl. She had transferred into our class only recently. Because of how dazzling she looked, the other girls in the class made her a target. It would be a lie to say her beauty left me unmoved. But that wasn’t the main reason. The main reason was that I saw myself in her—the me who had never fought back, who maybe never could.
For the first time, I swung my fists to change something.
The world did not take my side. The teacher and the parents of the kids I’d hit screamed about “school violence.” Honestly, I didn’t care. The world had never been on my side to begin with.
The girl I had saved tugged at my sleeve. My eyes moved to hers of their own accord.
“…Thank you for saving me again….”
She only said thank you. Yet for the first time I felt as if I had gained something.
Dark bruises mottled my arms; my lip was split and raw. Wounds that never would have existed if I hadn’t stuck my nose in. But… she was on the verge of tears. I wiped the drops that clung to her lashes.
“If anything like this happens again, tell me.”
“…Huh?”
“I’ll help you.”
“But….”
She was thinking hard. For the first time I tried a little swagger.
“It’s nothing.”
That alone was enough for me. Looking back, that must have been the moment a fourteen-year-old boy decided to live for a girl.
From that day on she trailed after me. Every time I asked why.
“We just happen to take the same road. Don’t get the wrong idea.”
“No matter how I look at it, that doesn’t se—”
Her face flushed scarlet in an instant. She tried to hide behind her long hair, but it couldn’t cover everything. Those damp ruby eyes glared up at me. The girl parted her lips the tiniest bit.
“That’s mean.”
I said nothing and hung my head. Talking to girls was impossibly hard. She let out a little “Hmph!” and turned her back on me. She looked thoroughly sulky. Wanting to soothe her, I caught her wrist. For a second her eyes went wide; then she quietly accepted my hand and walked on.
I took her somewhere I thought a girl would like—the stream near our neighborhood, where flowers bloomed in bright colors. She asked what we were doing with a puzzled look, then burst out laughing.
“You thought I’d like it if you brought me here?”
“Yeah. Girls like pretty things, right?”
She wiped the tears of laughter from her eyes and crossed to the far bank. There she plucked a dandelion heavy with fluff and blew it straight at me. She never told me to come over. My body simply moved first. I stepped across the stepping stones toward her. Halfway across, a moss-slick stone betrayed me.
—Slip.
“Aagh!”
I plunged into the shallow water with a splash. The cool stream soaked me through. She covered her mouth and laughed at the sight.
“You…! You’re dead!”
I splashed her back, and she fought me in return. That was a midday when the summer cicadas shrilled without end.
The sun had already begun to sink; it was time to go home. She sat on a rock by the stream. I pretended nothing was out of the ordinary and sat right beside her.
“Here.”
I held out a ring I had woven from clover. Even now I don’t know why I did it. I just wanted to get closer.
“…You’re giving this to me?”
“Yeah. How is it?”
“It’s completely terrible.”
“Hey.”
She giggled, hand over her mouth. Every time she did, my heart hammered. Then she slipped that “completely terrible” ring onto her ring finger.
“Why that finger?”
“My mom always wears hers there.”
My own mother never wore rings, so it was news to me. So that was the usual place. The girl stared blankly at the ring for a moment before speaking.
“It’s pretty.”
She turned her hand this way and that as she said it. In the dying light of the sunset she looked beautiful—the girl and the ring both. For some reason the sight made my chest race. It wasn’t fear, yet all day long it had kept thudding. Afraid she might tease me, I turned my head a little. She tapped my shoulder. When I looked back, her raised index finger poked my cheek.
“What’s your name?”
My name. She already knew it—from roll call, from glancing at my textbooks. Yet she asked again. The child I was then didn’t understand why.
“Kang Igyeol.”
“So I can call you Igyeol?”
“Yeah.”
The conversation seemed to demand I ask in return.
“What’s yours?”
“Han Seorin. Call me Seorin.”
“Sure….”
She extended the pinky of the hand wearing the ring.
“Promise.”
I linked my pinky with the girl’s and made the promise.
After that, every single day belonged to the two of us. We split ice cream in half while sweat poured down our faces. On rainy days we walked under the same umbrella. We raced through the empty hills near the neighborhood. We never once said “Let’s be friends,” yet we poured whole days into each other. There couldn’t have been a closer pair of best friends in the world.
At school we were the same.
“See you tomorrow!”
“Yeah.”
We walked to school together every morning, met in the library every break, sat side by side in the cafeteria, and went home together. Laid out like that, it sounded more like dating than friendship—yet nothing of the sort was going on. It wasn’t that I lacked those feelings. I simply refused to let an inability to control my own heart wreck what we had. Enduring had been my specialty since I was little.
Long black hair, eyes that sparkled like rubies. A light white dress and a yellow straw hat to keep off the sun. She was more beautiful than any other girl our age; just looking at her made my chest tremble. Day by day my heart swayed more, but it never became unbearable.
We became each other’s everyday. An inseparable piece of life itself.
On the way to school she would greet me first.
“Morning. How’s today looking?”
“…Same as always, I guess.”
“Tch. Don’t be like that.”
“Not bad, I think.”
In the library during free periods she would whisper,
“This one’s really good. Want to try it?”
“…I’m a guy. Romance novels aren’t really—”
“Come on, it’s seriously fun.”
“Maybe someday if I feel like it.”
At lunch she always added the dishes I liked to my tray.
“Here—fried shrimp. You can take more of the spicy pork too.”
“You don’t have to… mmmph….”
“You’re already eating it.”
“Throwing food away is a waste.”
On the walk home she always told me about her day—what had happened, how she felt. And at the very end she always asked for mine. I could never bring myself to say the truth: that watching her made my heart race every time. So I sidestepped.
“It was… pretty okay.”
“I was happy because I got to talk with you.”
“….”
If I answered out loud, the joy might spill out. I nodded quietly instead. I was glad she didn’t hate me. We walked in silence for about a minute before I finally spoke. Only then had my heart settled.
“I didn’t say anything funny.”
She shook her head.
“You don’t have to say funny things. I still like it.”
“Oh….”
I scratched my cheek, flustered, and looked away. A strange silence settled between us.
…Honestly, I still didn’t understand. Why did Seorin want to be with me? I wasn’t fun, my personality was lousy, and I had no friends. I couldn’t see why a girl as pretty as her would come near someone like that.
Just as curiosity pushed the question out of me, she murmured first—so softly.
“I guess I’m the only one who remembers the old days….”
“Remembers?”
“No, it’s nothing!”
She changed the subject poorly and said goodbye. Talking had made us lose track of time. She waved as she spoke.
“See you tomorrow!”
“Yeah.”
I thought every day would keep repeating like that. I thought nothing could ever break our routine. But the next morning she didn’t come to school. Not long after, I heard the news from the teacher. The moment I heard it, my feet were already moving.
I headed for the Funeral Hall.