Found You
I found her.
When I pushed open the library door, a pleasant scent of paper washed over me. Along with it came a sound that had nothing at all to do with that smell.
At the table used for meetings, a few kids sat clustered together playing cards. The way they dealt while smothering their laughter made it clear this was not a skill learned overnight.
I'd seen the same sight yesterday, yet no matter how many times I looked, the scene never seemed ready to grow familiar.
Poker in a library that was supposed to stay quiet? And students, no less. Just how much had the culture shifted in the time I'd stopped coming here?
I shook my head and headed straight for the shelves farther in—to the corner seat tucked behind the romance novels, hard for anyone to spot. The place Kim Seol-ah hid every lunch hour to read romance novels. The place where I'd met her yesterday as well.
The desk was empty. The chair had been neatly pushed in. No trace that anyone had used it.
Just in case, I made a full circuit of the library. She wasn't there. The girl who claimed she fled here every lunch, of all days, today.
Maybe it was a day even books couldn't soothe. The more I thought about it, the more my chest tightened.
Out in the hallway I leaned against the wall a moment and turned the problem over. Not the classroom, not the library—then where?
The rooftop door was locked. People came and went from the nurse's office. Even spinning the whole school through my head, nothing surfaced. Korean schools, it turned out, had surprisingly few places to hide alone.
Then, abruptly, a very old memory rose to the surface.
The original work.
How long had it been since I'd seriously pulled that word out?
In the early days after I first opened my eyes here, I had chewed on it several times a day. But the busier life in this other world became, the deeper my ties with that girl grew, the farther the word was pushed behind me.
I knew perfectly well that this world had once been an anime. I knew it—yet the fact no longer felt real.
Nearly twenty years of eating, sleeping, and jostling among people here had left the original memories hazy, like a video watched ages ago.
I groped through that faded recollection for the first time in a long while.
Kim Seol-ah. A name that had existed in the original too. Childhood friend of the protagonist Ha Yu-jin, the sub-heroine whose feelings never quite reached him. She had carried enough weight that her settings had been filled out to some degree.
Digging through the memories, I found the boundary between what had been on the screen and what I myself had lived had grown blurry.
And there had definitely been that scene. The day Kim Seol-ah vanished somewhere. The place Ha Yu-jin had gone looking for her.
……The gym storage room.
That was it. The old equipment shed behind the gym. On screen it had been a moment that flashed past. Back then I had let it slide without a second thought; now that single frame felt like a straw to grasp at.
Could it still be true? Would a scene from the screen still hold now?
……No. It had to be there.
I pushed off the wall and started running.
Down the hallway, taking the stairs two at a time, cutting straight across the athletic field. A few kids kicking a ball glanced over, but I had no room to care. Breath was already clawing at my throat. How long had it been since I had run flat-out like this?
If someone asked why I was going this far, I would have had no neat answer. Only that I knew what it was like to curl up somewhere alone and cry. I simply didn't want to walk past that time pretending not to notice.
Yesterday, in front of the hospital, Kim Seol-ah had comforted me in her own awkward way. So this time the only thought in my head was that it was my turn.
Rounding behind the gym, I saw the old iron door with its peeling paint. Faint light leaked through the crack.
Without even catching my ragged breath, I pulled it open.
Between the stacked mats and the vaulting boxes, in that corner, Kim Seol-ah sat hugging her knees. She flinched and jerked her head up.
"……Found you."
Those three words barely escaped between breaths that felt ready to burst.
The smell of dust.
In the dim corner of a windowless storage room, I had my face buried in my knees.
When I breathed into the darkness between them, the world drew a little farther away. Because no one would find me here.
After bolting out of the cafeteria I had first thought of the library.
On days when everything inside me was noisy, fleeing into a novel had always been enough. What refused to work in reality could still work there, at least.
But today those words seemed to mock me.
The girls in the books all got loved somehow.
In the books, childhood friends always ended up together. The only one who couldn't, even after ten years at his side, was me outside the book.
So my feet brought me here of their own accord. The old storage room behind the gym that no one ever visited.
It was an old habit.
Whenever I wanted to hide from the world, I crawled in here. I could no longer remember when it had started.
Before I knew it, on every upsetting day my feet simply stopped in front of this door.
The dark corner that smelled of mat dust was strangely the most comfortable place in the world. More than home. More than the classroom.
I had only been caught here once.
Elementary school, maybe. Some day when I could no longer even recall why I had been crying. Hiding and sniffling as usual when the door burst open. It was Yu-jin oppa, come to fetch a ball.
Far from startled, he grinned and said, "Hey Kim Seol-ah, you playing hide-and-seek?" then poured out a stream of silly chatter without even pausing for breath. I burst out laughing mid-sob, and he, as if asking whether I was done, scooped up the ball and vanished like the wind.
He was a person like the wind. Blowing in with a whoosh, shaking everything loose, then gone before you could catch hold.
Maybe that was the day I started liking him. It had been so long I thought the feeling should have dulled by now.
Today I learned it hadn't dulled at all. Instead, ten years' worth of feeling came crashing in all at once.
In the cafeteria she had asked. What color does Yu-jin oppa like? What food does he like, what does he do on days off?
Blue. He can't handle spicy food well, and on free days he catches up on variety shows while working out.
When it came to Yu-jin oppa I could rattle the answers off even half-asleep. Because I had watched from the side for more than ten years. Because I remembered every day I had learned each of those things.
But what meaning had those ten years even held?
My heart dropped all the way to my toes just because a girl who had barely known him asked those questions. And I, who could answer every one of them so smoothly, felt the more miserable for it.
Not that I could get angry at her. Her face really knew nothing. In front of a face that innocent, you couldn't even throw a tantrum.
So I barely managed an "uh." The anger with nowhere to go simply stacked itself in my throat. No one had done anything wrong, yet I alone kept getting hurt—that was the most unfair part of all.
And then Yu-jin oppa arrived.
'So Han-gyeol and Seol-ah know each other. Weird.'
Weird. That single word hurt in a strange way.
He could have just said he was glad. Weird only meant unexpected. Meaning that me and her sitting in the same place was, to Yu-jin oppa, a combination that ordinary.
To Yu-jin oppa I had always been like that. Someone whose presence was so natural there was nothing new about it. So the moment I watched him sit down next to her so easily, I couldn't stay seated any longer. I set down my spoon and left.
I was first.
I was clearly the first to stand beside him, the first to like him. Why did I keep having to confirm that being first meant nothing?
I was first—so why was the order of calling always me last? Why did thirteen years get shoved aside by a single semester?
Burying my face in my knees, I swallowed the sound. Crying over something like this wounded my pride. But the fact that I was even weighing pride already meant it was all broken.
That was when it happened.
From outside, noisy footsteps drew near.
My heart dropped with a thud.
In this storage room, only one person in the world had ever found me.
Could it be. Yu-jin oppa. Again.
It couldn't be. After that day he had never once opened this door. And yet my heart was already racing on its own.
Foolishly, even then I hoped. The second the door burst open and a silhouette stood against the backlight, I almost called that name.
But it wasn't him.
The one standing there, shoulders heaving as he fought for breath, was Lee Ji-an.
"……Found you."
Three words barely forced out between bursting breaths.
The moment the word "found you" landed in my ear, I understood.
I had never wanted to hide.
From that day on I had been hiding while hoping to be found. Waiting just one more time for the moment the door would burst open. Waiting so long behind a door no one opened that I had mistaken it for wanting to hide.
I finally knew when this habit I claimed I couldn't date had begun. From that day.
Not because I wanted to hide from the world. Please—just find me.
But the person I had waited ten years for never came. And the one who had been watching over the girl who took that person's attention ran until his breath hit his throat and said those words.
Found you.
A tear plopped down.
Once one drop fell, the rest could not be stopped.
Beyond vision blurred by tears, Lee Ji-an was still gasping for air. And yet the face looking at me was written all over with worry anyone could read.
A face more at a loss than me, the one who was crying.
Looking at that face, a thought quietly bloomed in a corner of my heart.
Ah. So this is what warmth is.
Having someone worry about me is this warm.
And that warmth was so very sweet.
Sweet enough to make me want to keep it.