Hunting the Flasher
Before any useless misconceptions could pile up, I spat out an excuse that barely even counted as one.
“An account book?”
“Yeah, it’s my mom’s.”
These days I sold off my imaginary parents without so much as batting an eye.
If a middle-schooler or high-schooler tried the same line while hiding a comic under a textbook, it wouldn’t have fooled a soul. But right now I was an elementary-school kid who, by all common sense, still looked clumsy when she lied. The sheer mismatch between that deadpan delivery and the existence of a household ledger itself was enough to plant a tiny seed of doubt: Did she actually grab her mom’s by mistake?
“All right. Textbooks only during class. Put it in your bag.”
“Okaaay.”
Whew.
I let out a long internal sigh of relief as I stuffed the ledger away. Drawing attention at this age just for being able to do basic arithmetic was a surefire way to get my cover blown. I was already swallowing my pride and deliberately missing easy questions just to keep my accuracy rate looking normal. Getting hyped up as some prodigy or genius over knowledge that was simply leftover from my previous life would only create a gaping disconnect with my age—nothing but a delusion waiting to collapse.
No choice, then.
I settled for filling the blank corners of my textbook, spacing the numbers two digits at a time, and continued mapping out this month’s spending plan.
Third period on a rainy morning: P.E.
Outside the windows the rain kept drumming away, a steady shhhk-shhhk.
No need to dig gym clothes out of the locker. I stayed planted in my seat and yawned. Theory class during P.E. had to be one of the most pointless stretches of the school day. In practice it was just free time dressed up with the empty phrase “indoor P.E.”
An hour of kids wandering around the classroom doing whatever they wanted. Even the P.E. teacher—the same guy who’d once chased a giant hornet during the field trip—was happily killing the meaningless time by staring at his phone from the desk.
“Hey, Kim Mari! What’re you doing?”
“Don’t bother me—get lost, panda.”
Some boy barging into my serious ledger calculations and invading free time that wasn’t his.
“Eugh-be-be-be—”
Even after I told him to get lost, the little shit flattened my notebook—my account book—with his palm like he was wringing out a rag. I stuck my foot out from under the desk and kicked him square in the shin.
“Ow!”
A clean shin-kick, perfectly executable even in indoor shoes. The second the kick landed I yanked my leg back into place before anyone could look over, then answered in the still-slurry pronunciation that kept dropping the “s” sounds:
“I thaid get lotht.”
“Teather! Mari kicked me!”
“When? You just bumped into the desk leg.”
“Don’t lieee!”
I met his righteous outrage with shameless, fabricated logic. Like most kids who treat whatever they see and feel as absolute truth, he got worked up and started grilling me. The racket finally dragged the P.E. teacher away from his phone; he ambled over.
“What’s going on?”
“He bumped into the desk leg himself and then claimed I kicked him.”
“Don’t lieee!”
Even I had to admit the excuse sounded pretty convincing. In kid arguments that try to sort black from white, the calmer one who doesn’t lose their temper usually gets the benefit of the doubt. On one side: a boy who only screamed “Don’t lie!”—a known troublemaker on any normal day. On the other: a quiet girl who calmly delivered a plausible false narrative and never caused problems. If you were the teacher, whose side would you take?
The P.E. teacher’s mediation drifted far from the truth.
“Suhyeon’s in the wrong. Apologize to Mari right now.”
“N-no… it’s true…! Wuh-wuh-waaaah—!”
They say the axe you trust is the one that chops your foot. Faced with a truth that even the teacher wouldn’t buy, the boy named Suhyeon burst into tears. Kids only cry like that when they’re genuinely, bone-deep wronged. And so truth lost, and lies won.
At a tender age he had already learned distrust of adults and the bitter taste of the world.
The noisy P.E. period finally ended, and then came the only stretch of the school day that actually meant anything: lunch.
Ohhh, braised short ribs.
For me and Siyeon, whose diet had calcified into endless delivery food, the school meal was one of the few plates that still showed some color. Sweet, sticky short-rib pieces and chewy rice-cake dumplings as the main dish, plus rice, egg soup, kid-sized cubes of radish kimchi and spinach, and a yogurt for dessert. I cleaned the tray and rubbed my pleasantly full stomach. The only remaining worry was how to fill my head for the last hour of class.
At last the final bell rang—dismissal time! Except…
Of course I’m on cleaning duty today.
Siyeon was waiting out in front of our classroom the way she always did on days we didn’t have plans with friends.
“Go on ahead. You can… get home by yourself, right?”
“Yep!”
Her answer was bright and confident. Unlike Gomtaengi, Siyeon’s mascot stuck close to her side, so even though she was “alone” I could send her off with a relatively easy heart. I’d already told her that if anything ever looked truly dangerous she was to transform first and ask questions later—identity be damned.
Today’s cleaning crew was all quiet girls, so the job finished smoothly, nothing like the chaos that happened when the boys were involved. We only stayed the extra length of cleaning duty, yet the school already felt hollowed out and empty. Yawning lazily, I picked up my indoor-shoe bag in one hand, opened the umbrella with the other, and started the walk home.
Crossing one winding residential alley after another on the way from school, the last few kids who’d been walking the same stretch gradually peeled off until I was alone. These were the kind of unnecessary, twisting backstreets cars never bothered with—the kind where, on the rare occasion someone passed, you usually recognized the face.
…Or at least that was how it was supposed to be.
“Hey, kid.”
“Yes?”
A voice from behind me where, moments ago, there had been no one. I turned around and found a walking advertisement for “I am not a respectable person”: black baseball cap, black mask, gray hoodie, and baggy, rumpled track pants. The second our eyes met he yanked the pants down.
Of course, the thing that appeared was something I no longer possessed. Even that was only half-visible through the thick curtain of rain.
“….”
Not even worth whipping out, and he still bothers…
An exhibitionist straight out of urban legend. After a brief, unimpressed appraisal of the blurry shape, I simply turned around with a blank face and kept walking home at a leisurely pace.
“Wah-huh?!”
“Mm.”
Siyeon’s sunny voice greeted me the moment I stepped inside. The damp, rainy smell that had invaded the house was already rising from the laundry basket.
“But I’m heading right back out.”
Just like that, today’s schedule became a sudden mission: instead of monsters, I was going to catch a raving pervert. He’d polluted my eyes, sure—but more importantly, he was bad for Siyeon’s emotional health.
I left the slightly damp backpack and indoor-shoe bag near the entrance, grabbed the umbrella again, and stepped back into the rain. Once I found a decent spot I transformed, then carefully took to the sky so the umbrella wouldn’t tear. Even in transformed form, I hated getting soggy.
There he is.
From above I counted eight black umbrellas. Most of them were just people going about their business; one, however, was parked in place with the unmistakable look of someone waiting for a mark. And the idiot was still lurking near the same stretch of alley I’d just walked through. He was watching the side branches of the alley, hoping another girl might pass alone.
A small umbrella came into the alley from far off. The black umbrella began drifting toward it, target acquired. I glided after him like a bird of prey that had locked on.
“Baby shark, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo♪”
Splash-splash. The cheerful sound of little feet stomping through puddles. What housewives found disgusting about the monsoon rain could still be pure joy to an innocent child. And the black umbrella was closing in to ruin that child’s day.
“Hey, little—”
The same black voice, the same approach he’d used on me, started to speak—
“Yaaak?!”
A sudden yelp cut the words off before they could reach the child.
“Huh?”
The little girl turned around at the voice that had seemed to call her, but the only thing left in that spot was a black umbrella rolling ownerless in the wind.
And directly above that umbrella, Sun had the pervert by the hood of his hoodie, dangling him where the clouds nearly brushed the rooftops.
Buildings looked like little beans from this height. The man who’d been smiling a moment earlier now clung to his own clothes like they were a lifeline, face pure terror.
“Ugh, huuuuhhh!”
“Stop thrashing or I’ll drop you.”
I arrived at the nearby police station with the miraculously well-behaved pervert dangling from one hand. Since I didn’t have a free hand, I tilted the umbrella and tapped the glass doors with it. A few officers who’d been sitting around with nothing better to do on a rainy day spotted the familiar figure outside and hurried out.
Their voices carried through the glass all the way to my ears.
“Wait, is that Sun?”
“Whoa, first time seeing her without the balaclava in person.”
The glass doors clattered open. A fairly senior-looking officer fiddled with the brim of his cap and greeted me warmly.
“Welcome. So, uh, what brings you in today?”
“I caught a guy who only targets elementary-school kids and pulls his dick out in front of them. What should we do with him?”
“I-I don’t only target elementary—!”
The second I listed his crimes, the pervert in my grip tried to open his mouth even though a hundred mouths wouldn’t have been enough to dig him out of this hole. I kicked him in the gut while he hung in midair.
“Ghk!”
“Proud of it, you fucking bastard?”
Turns out my professional-level shin-kicking skills still came in handy more often than I’d like.