The Worst Day (2)
Seo Jinhyuk hesitated for a long time before he finally worked up the courage to send his reply.
The moment his finger tapped send, regret washed over him. It sounded far too stiff and formal. Unable to take it back, he stared blankly at the screen, biting his lower lip.
Suddenly, the typing indicator popped up.
Jinhyuk held his breath.
Jinhyuk pushed himself up from the bed, his heart thumping against his ribs.
This time, he didn't deliberate for long and fired off the message quickly.
Jinhyuk's thumbs froze over the keypad. That wasn't it at all.
Before he even realized it, a soft smile crept onto Jinhyuk's face.
In the classroom, Lee Yujeong was a girl of few words who rarely smiled, speaking only when strictly necessary before turning away. Yet the Lee Yujeong inside this glowing screen was entirely different. She was chatty, cracked jokes, and teased him whenever his replies lagged.
So this is what she's like over text, Jinhyuk thought, tucking the observation away like a precious secret.
Their conversation stretched until the early hours of dawn. Jinhyuk barely slept a wink that night, yet strangely enough, he didn't feel the least bit tired.
The next few days slipped by in much the same way. Since he couldn't check his phone during class, Jinhyuk pulled it out the second each break started. At lunchtime, instead of heading down to the noisy cafeteria, he sat alone on the stairwell typing out replies. And once he returned home, the messages would start up again, carrying on deep into the night.
They didn't talk about anything extraordinary: how bad the school lunch was, which math problems were assigned for homework, or how boring some drama on streaming had turned out to be. Jinhyuk had never imagined that trading such trivial chatter could feel so wonderful.
Jinhyuk's breath hitched, his fingers tightening around the edges of the phone.
Jinhyuk read the lines carefully. It made complete sense. Not a single day passed without gossip swirling around Lee Yujeong. For every compliment about her striking looks, there was an equally vicious rumor, and Jinhyuk had overheard more than a few himself.
Jinhyuk paused, his fingers hesitating above the glass.
Jinhyuk stared at that final message for a long, long time.
Deep talks... with me?
The most famous girl in the entire school—someone everyone knew—was showing a side of herself she hid from everyone else, and showing it only to him. That was what her words meant, or at least that was how Jinhyuk understood them. A strange, sweet tightness gripped his chest.
That night, Jinhyuk lay awake staring at his ceiling until the darkness faded to gray. For the first time in his life, he understood what it felt like to feel special.
The following day after school, Class 1-3 had emptied out until Seo Jinhyuk was the only one left. Dust accumulated in gray wisps along the floor near the windows, and the blackboard remained half-erased. Cleaning duty wasn't even his this week.
The student assigned to the shift had pleaded that they were running late for cram school, and Jinhyuk had been unable to say no. His inability to refuse had been a habit for as long as he could remember. Throughout middle school, Jinhyuk had tried desperately to make friends—striking up conversations first, buying snacks at the commissary, running errands whenever asked.
Yet after an entire year of doing that, he was still left with nobody. If he had learned anything back then, it was that reaching out first accomplished nothing, and that simply yielding to other people's requests was at least the least awkward way to survive.
Scrape, scrape.
The dry scratching of his broom against the floorboards was the only sound echoing through the room when the back door slid open.
"...Huh?" Jinhyuk looked up, startled.
Lee Yujeong stood in the doorway. She seemed to have returned for something she'd forgotten, rummaging through her desk drawer before freezing as her eyes landed on Jinhyuk holding the broom.
Jinhyuk's heart kicked into an erratic gallop. The person he stayed up talking to until dawn every single night was standing right in front of him.
Is it okay to talk to her? he wondered, a flutter of hope blooming in his chest. Surely it's fine, right? We talked so much just yesterday.
Just as Jinhyuk parted his lips to speak, she beat him to it.
"You're not on cleaning duty today, are you?"
Her voice was low and clipped—the exact same cold tone she used every day in the classroom.
"Someone had somewhere urgent to go, so they asked me to take over."
"Haah... Why do you care about their problems? Do you just have time to burn or something?"
"N-no, that's not it, but, um, Yujeong—"
Jinhyuk snapped his mouth shut.
Right!
They had promised to pretend they didn't know each other at school. He had agreed not to bring up anything from their late-night chats. He had almost ruined everything.
Gripping the broom handle tighter, he blurted out the first excuse that scrambled into his head: "...I just, well, I like cleaning. And I wanted to get some practice."
"What?" Yujeong stared at him, her gaze lingering for a few silent seconds.
"Good grief... You're really something else." A sigh escaped her lips, and then, for the briefest fraction of a second, the corners of her mouth curled upward into a faint smile.
Jinhyuk froze, petrified where he stood with the broom in hand. She had smiled. At his clumsy, ridiculous excuse, she had actually smiled. He had never once seen Lee Yujeong smile inside this classroom.
...Just like when she texts?
Yujeong pulled a pencil case from her drawer, tucked it into her bag, and walked out without another word. The door slid shut behind her. Jinhyuk remained rooted to the spot for a long time, the broom handle damp with sweat beneath his palms.
He arrived home later than usual. When he flicked on the entryway light, the shoe rack was bare except for his own solitary pair of sneakers.
"...I'm home," he murmured softly.
Even though he knew there was no one to answer, he said it anyway. It was an old habit. His mother had passed away several years ago; the police had told him she took her own life. For a long while after that, Jinhyuk had barely managed to attend school, drifting through days he could scarcely remember.
Even now, he wasn't completely healed. On evenings when the apartment grew too quiet, an overwhelming lethargy still pinned him down. Yet he still cooked his meals, finished his homework, and went to school the next day. Because as long as he was alive, he had to do something. That was how he had endured for years.
...But lately, Jinhyuk thought as he set down his bag and sank onto his bed, waking up in the morning doesn't feel so heavy anymore.
Checking his phone had become the part of his day he anticipated most, and nightfall was something to look forward to. He couldn't remember how long it had been since he felt that way.
Ding.
His phone chimed, and he instantly woke the screen.
Jinhyuk chuckled softly.
For several moments, only the typing indicator flickered on the screen. Then, her message popped up.
Jinhyuk's hands froze in place. His heart hammered so violently it felt like it was beating thirty times faster than normal. A desperate urge to lie tugged at him. If he said no, they could keep talking like this without changing anything. If he said yes, there was no telling what would happen. But his trembling fingers moved before his mind could stop them.
The second he hit send, Jinhyuk flipped the phone face down onto the mattress. "Haaah..."
His entire face burned with heat. Resting his elbows on his knees, he buried his head in his hands. If she asked him why he liked her, Jinhyuk already knew the answer. Because she was pretty? Of course she was gorgeous—the prettiest girl in the entire school, and everyone knew it. But far beyond that, Lee Yujeong had become someone special to him, even if that feeling was entirely one-sided.
...The drawing.
When he was young, Jinhyuk loved to draw, and his mother had loved it too. She used to stick his sketches on the refrigerator, proudly showing them off whenever guests visited and boasting about how gifted her son was. Jinhyuk kept drawing simply because he wanted to hear that praise. But one day, she stopped looking at his art altogether. When he held out a paper asking her to look, she pushed it away, and eventually, she wouldn't even spare it a glance.
And then came that terrible day.
"Is this garbage the best you can do?!"
Right before his eyes, his mother tore the drawing in half. She folded it again, tore it to shreds, and scattered the pieces across the floor. Jinhyuk had stood frozen, watching the scraps drift down, unable to even reach out and pick them up. From that day forward, he never showed his art to a soul. He never expected to hear anyone say he was good at it ever again.
...Until that day.
Earlier that semester, inside the noisy classroom, a slender hand had picked up a fallen sheet of paper from the floor.
"You're really good. Are you preparing for art school?"
It had lasted only a brief moment before Yujeong walked back to her desk. She probably didn't even remember saying it. But Jinhyuk had kept that scrap of paper tucked safely away. Because to a boy who had never been able to gather his torn drawings off the floor, someone had finally picked up his art and placed it back into his hands.
Bzzzzz—!
The vibration startled him, and Jinhyuk hurriedly flipped the phone over.
Jinhyuk stared intently at the display, his breath hitching.
Jinhyuk reread the messages several times, his eyes tracing every single syllable.
His heart wasn't just beating; it felt as if it were about to burst straight out of his chest. Jinhyuk scrambled up from the bed and yanked open his desk drawers. He didn't have any proper letter paper. Tearing a page out of a school notebook would be unthinkable, so he threw his jacket back on and rushed out into the night.
Jinhyuk sat at his desk writing until deep into the night. The pack had contained plenty of stationary, but he threw away more than half of the sheets. He discarded one because his handwriting looked crooked, tossed another because the phrasing sounded childish, and crumpled a third because he pressed down so hard out of nervousness that the nib tore through the paper.
Finally, he produced a draft that looked halfway decent.
The contents were simple and earnest. He wrote that he was grateful to her for picking up his drawing, that it was the first time in years anyone had praised his work, and that he truly liked her—that out of all the girls he had ever seen, she was by far the most beautiful.
Jinhyuk folded the letter neatly and tucked it into the deepest, safest pocket of his backpack. After managing barely a few minutes of restless sleep, he headed to school.
Not a single lesson registered in his mind that day. Only two racing thoughts occupied his head: when should he hand it to her, and what should he say?
Lunchtime was drawing to a close. It was the perfect moment. Lee Yujeong was still sitting in the classroom, and the group of girls chatting nearby had just stepped out into the hallway, leaving only the two of them behind.
...Now.
Jinhyuk stood up from his seat. His hands trembled as he reached into the bottom of his bag and pulled out the crisp envelope. Lee Yujeong was just sitting quietly at her desk, gazing absently into space. Jinhyuk walked across the room, his footsteps heavy with anticipation.
"Um, Lee Yujeong... I, I really like you."
Seo Jinhyuk held out the letter.
At that exact instant, the classroom door rattled open and students flooded inside. The boisterous chatter and laughter in the room vanished in a fraction of a second, swallowed by a sudden, chilling silence.
Jinhyuk's arm remained stretched out in the air. Yet no hand reached forward to take the letter.
From somewhere in the crowd, someone let out a stifled snicker.
Only then did Jinhyuk look down and notice the violent tremor shaking his fingertips.
...Wait, this isn't how it was supposed to go.