Where I Can Lean On
The moment I opened my eyes, I turned on the computer out of sheer habit.
While it booted up, I went to the bathroom to at least wash my face.
It was as if I could hear the next-door woman's nagging in my ear — If you're going to be a girl, you should at least wash your face.
Not that anyone was going to see me, so whether I was a girl or not hardly mattered. Still, once I'd started paying attention to hygiene, skipping a daily shower or waking up without washing my face left me feeling vaguely unclean.
I supposed you could call that inertia too.
Well, even the inertia of a rolling ball only exists because someone pushed it in the first place. The fact that I washed my face at all owed a great deal to the woman next door.
She had a knack for showing up like a ghost the second I did anything that pricked my conscience, that woman.
I grumbled about it under my breath for a moment, then rinsed the soap from my face.
Lifting my dripping face to the mirror, I found skin so unpleasantly smooth it looked like porcelain. The pallor made my red eyes stand out even more. Looked at calmly, it was just a quiet, unremarkable face — but the memory of my father calling those eyes ominous, demanding to know why I opened them like that, made the sight turn sour for me too.
The funny thing was, maybe because the face in the mirror was mine, meeting its gaze produced no real revulsion beyond that faint unease.
"Haa. If I'd just turned into an ordinary black-haired girl…"
If I'd simply become a woman who took after my mother, maybe our family wouldn't have fallen apart. At first, neither of my parents would have been able to accept that their only son had vanished, and the grief would have been enormous. But in time, they might have welcomed a new daughter.
…Even knowing I'd never been anything more than a well-behaved trophy they could show off.
Apparently the urge to go back was something I couldn't help. It was like that scene in The Matrix — people who knew the world was a lie and still wanted to live inside it.
But reality was a one-way train. You couldn't reverse direction and climb back into the past. Like it or not, the only way left was forward.
I roughly towel-dried my face and stepped out of the bathroom. Maybe it was because I hadn't eaten yesterday when I felt too drained to bother, but a brief wave of dizziness hit me. Luckily I'd been crawling out already, so I managed not to hit the floor. Instead I just collapsed onto the cold tiles and lay there still.
Before, I probably would have wallowed there wishing my breath would simply stop. But I had things to do now. I rested only until the dizziness passed, then got straight up and went back to my room.
The League of Champions client, already logged in automatically, was waiting for me. Between the scattered banners for new promotional skins and patch notes on the main screen, other banners hung like grand gates — showcasing pro players' highlights and interviews.
Of course I knew that outstanding talent in any field could shine that brilliantly. But those were faces I could never become, and I couldn't help envying them a little.
…Well. A firefly might yearn for the moon, but it has no right to be jealous of it.
I pulled my gaze away soon enough and opened the game select window to queue up — though I didn't hit the matchmaking button right away. My empty stomach was bad enough to have spun my head a moment ago. Eating something first seemed like the priority.
So this time I dug through the gift vouchers on my phone. What should I try today?
Just thinking about food was enough to clear the gloom that had been hanging over my mind. Maybe hunger really did make people more negative. If that was the case, I wanted to fill my stomach before anyone showed up on stream. Viewers preferred a positive attitude over a sour one, after all.
Pizza was out, for starters. Sure, there were plenty of kinds and they all tasted different, but after days of nothing but reheated pizza I wanted something else. The gift vouchers were all hamburgers and fried chicken anyway, so the range wasn't exactly wide. What mattered was which burger, which chicken.
Except the hamburger vouchers couldn't be delivered through CocoaTalk. You had to go to the store in person to redeem them.
…Those could wait for a day I actually had somewhere to go.
Which left me circling back to chicken. That had its own problem, though. No chicken place opened this early in the morning. Checking the store info on each voucher, even the earliest ones didn't open until ten. It was eight in the morning now. I'd have to wait at least two hours.
While I was still rifling through gift vouchers, a familiar viewer entered my stream. I couldn't leave them hanging, so I queued into a ranked game right away.
"Ah, hello. I haven't eaten yet. I was going to use one of the gift vouchers I got from a stream goal, but every place opens pretty late."
"Yeah, that makes sense. Sounds rough."
Before becoming a girl, I'd lived an excessively wholesome life. I'd never ordered delivery as a late-night snack, but I could roughly imagine how it felt. Living on a different schedule from everyone else could wear you down in ways like that. And it wasn't just delivery food — most facilities only opened during the day. Trying to see a doctor meant flipping your whole routine upside down.
Even if none of it had anything to do with me, when a viewer talked about that kind of inconvenience, a streamer needed to offer a reasonable amount of empathy. No — not as a streamer. Just as one person to another. And then they'd take an interest in me in return.
I liked that.
"If I just sit here doing nothing until the delivery opens, I'll get bored and so will the viewers… At least if I play, the two hours should go by faster."
"If I eat something now I won't be able to finish the chicken later. I'll be too full."
Not that empathy always helped.
A snack — did they mean something like chips? A single bag of snacks cost more than my entire daily food budget. And if I tried treating cup ramen like a snack… even that alone would fill me up enough to ruin the chicken. Besides, I was sick of cup ramen.
Ah. Come to think of it, I'd received the settlement money now. At one meal a day, I probably wouldn't have to go back to living on nothing but ramen. Used carefully, I could eat whatever I wanted and live a little recklessly until Mom got out of prison.
Given that, maybe buying a bag of snacks the way the viewer suggested wouldn't be so bad. Something small might be fine.
But just stepping outside still felt like a massive expedition. I decided to stick with gaming and wait out the chicken.
"If I play about two games, order the chicken, then play one more, it should arrive around then, right?"
"It's the kind of timing where you shove the wave a minute before an objective spawns and then rotate. Did that sound completely Top-sin-byeong-ja of me?"
Viewers were starting to trickle in. Whether they'd come from my stream alert or just stumbled onto someone broadcasting this early, I couldn't tell. But the ones talking seemed to be people who'd watched yesterday — anyone who knew about the next-door woman had to have heard me talk about her then.
"That unni has to go to work in the mornings too. On her days off she drops by sometimes to nag me — clean this, do the laundry, take a shower. Luckily she didn't come today."
"I showered before bed. Washed my face when I got up too. Cleaning and laundry… I'll do those later. There's nothing that really needs doing right now."
Good grief. Now even the viewers were trying to turn into the woman next door. It was affectionate teasing, sure — but something about it still needled my conscience, and I couldn't quite take it as pure jokes.
"Huh? Is it?"
And now even comments like that were popping up out of nowhere. I didn't mind, exactly — I did find her nagging annoying sometimes — but maybe it was because I knew she had no ulterior motives. Maybe, deep down, I was comfortable with her too.
"I guess so. Thanks to her, I feel like I'm living like an actual person."
I admitted it lightly. Without the woman next door, I probably would have been living like an animal. Maintaining even a civilized appearance was, more likely than not, entirely thanks to her nagging.