As If Writing a Diary
3 days left until the proposal deadline.
I got back from school and sat straight down at my computer.
I opened my notebook and turned on the fan.
KaTalk.
A message preview popped up.
= How's the proposal going?
It was from Hana.
A smile crept onto my lips when I saw her name.
'Hana's advice helped more than I expected. I should treat her to a meal or something later.'
Feeling grateful, I opened the KaTalk window.
But above the message I'd seen in the preview, photos were strung out in a row.
"Ack? Cough, hack!"
I choked in surprise.
A tennis skirt, panties caught on her thighs, the mound visible between them.
The photos she'd taken in the clubroom today had been sent. There was even a photo from the study session, where she'd slumped down and showed her reddened butt. When had she even taken that?
'I told this kid to rest and she was taking photos like this....'
She must have taken them while I went to get the mop.
"Ahem."
I saved them first.
She sent them, so what could I do? I should move them to my secure folder.
"And I need to scold her a bit too...."
- Hana, you absolutely cannot send photos like this to anyone else. I don't like nagging either, but I'm saying this because you could get into real trouble.
= lolololololololol
- Don't just laugh, answer me.
= heh heh. I only send them to you.
= And I deleted my Bback-sa account too lol
- Sigh. Anyway, thanks.
= Thanks? Want me to send more photos?
- No, not that! Thanks for the advice!
= ahh.
- I got a feel for it thanks to you. I'm going into intense focus mode now so I won't be able to reply.
= heh heh. If you get tired while working, look at my photos and rest.
I deliberately didn't reply to the last message.
Instead, a hollow laugh escaped me.
"She's a completely different person on messenger, I swear."
How should I put it — it was like I could see 'Bback-sa' and 'Juha' rather than Ju Hana.
Feeling oddly amused, I let out a chuckle and shook my head.
"Now I really need to focus."
This time I truly opened my notebook and entered focus mode.
A blank white page.
I hadn't made any progress for an entire week, but today was going to be different.
The scenes I'd brainstormed during lectures were now swirling chaotically in my head. Things weren't clearly organized yet, so my mind was a mess, but it was far better than before when absolutely nothing came to mind.
'If I can't create from scratch, then from my own experience....'
I would unfold the story as if writing a diary.
First, let's organize the core keywords.
'Childhood, middle school, bullying, dropping out, life in the corner of my room, community ghost, CSAT, college, change....'
The theme would be something like 'A Hikikomori's Escape from the Corner of the Room.'
Now that I'd set the theme, I needed to flesh out the details. And to bring those details to life, I needed to recall the memories more clearly.
"These are old memories, though...."
For the first time in a long while, I dredged up the past I'd been trying to forget.
Not just thinking in fragments like "oh yeah, that happened" and moving on — I pulled out the memories in as much detail as I could manage.
*
When I was young, I was always at the center of the group.
My personality was extremely bright, I was active, and I made friends quickly with anyone. In elementary school, I held something of a ringleader position.
Then around the time I entered middle school.
I moved far away from the neighborhood I'd lived in. By chance, my childhood friend Ahn Seong-hyeon also moved to the same neighborhood, and we always walked to and from school together.
That's how middle school life began, and not long after, I started getting bullied.
Why was I bullied?
The incident unfolded like this.
Someone in my class was being harassed by the group of so-called iljin kids, and I jumped in saying I'd help them.
As a kid, I was brimming with a sense of justice, and because I had acted like a leader of sorts all through elementary school, I liked to step forward. Also, back then I was the type who could talk normally with the kids people called iljin, so I figured if I told them to stop, the harassment would end.
The harassment did stop, just as I'd thought.
Except the target simply shifted to me.
From that day on, I was marked by the iljin kids, and I ended up getting harassed even worse than the kid who had originally been their victim.
I tried to fight back in my own way, but it was useless. As a kid, unlike now, I was on the short side. Even if I'd been tall, it would have been the same. I was alone, and the iljin kids were many.
Erasers flying at me from behind during class.
My gym clothes or textbooks disappearing.
Those things were bearable. No, actually, I think I liked those moments. At least during class, I wasn't getting beaten out in the open.
As time passed, the wounds on my body multiplied. My face stayed fine though — they didn't hit my face because it would show. But everywhere else... what happened was bad enough that recalling it remains painful.
Getting hit was routine, and the psychological torment wore me down to nothing. For a middle school kid, having your pants — no, your underwear — pulled down in front of everyone during gym class was deeply humiliating.
What was harder than the iljin kids' harassment was the bystanders' stares and whispers.
It would've been better if they'd just watched in silence... The kids who at first clearly pitied me, at some point started laughing at me. As if I had something wrong with me that made me deserve the bullying.
The girlfriend I'd briefly dated broke up with me the moment I started getting bullied. Then she dated the ringleader who harassed me and led the mockery from the front. Thinking back on it now, she was at the center of the bystanders who laughed at me.
Back then, I had nowhere to lean. Because even Ahn Seong-hyeon, my closest friend, turned his back on me.
Ahn Seong-hyeon, who had witnessed me being dragged into an alley and harassed.
When the iljin kids asked him if he was friends with me, he denied it and said no. From that day on, I stopped walking to and from school with Seong-hyeon.
By that point, even I started wondering if maybe there was something wrong with me. I began blaming myself, thinking my mistake was butting in where I didn't belong in the first place.
During the time I was being bullied.
The reason I didn't tell my parents or teachers right away was because the iljin kids threatened me.
- Go ahead, snitch. You think it'll stop? Nah, then we'll just make it worse.
- You live in that ○○ Apartments, right? Rat us out and we'll go torch the place. Your parents too....
Looking back now, it was nonsense, but back then, it was a terrifying threat to me. I was worried sick that something might really happen to my parents because of me. So I kept the bullying completely hidden.
But if you leave tracks long enough, you get caught.
The iljin kids had been extorting money from me, and the amounts they demanded grew larger by the day.
In the end, I started frequently dipping into my parents' wallets and piggy bank, and one day my parents found out.
And just like that, the bullying that had gone on for over a year came to an end.
When my parents learned about my state, they were sad beyond words, and they blamed themselves, and they raged. That rage soon turned toward the school and the iljin kids, and the bullying I'd been so terrified of came to an end so anticlimactically it was almost hollow.
The incident was huge, and the evidence was clear.
The matter didn't end at the school level. It made the news and was reported in the media. Under public scrutiny, a nationwide survey on school violence was conducted.
Meanwhile, the ringleaders who had harassed me all went to trial.
Protective Disposition No. 10.
Detention in a long-term juvenile detention center for up to 2 years.
That was the ruling handed down to the ringleaders.
They were all 14 or older, and the nature of their crimes was so severe that the maximum sentence — 2 years in juvenile detention — was decided.
But my parents didn't forgive the perpetrators there. They demanded an appeal to somehow get them criminal punishment, and in that process, Ahn Seong-hyeon appeared as a witness, and the kid who had been harassed before me also came forward to report the damages.
Group ostracism, school violence, cigarette burn scars, extortion, threats of murdering family members, and more.
On top of already vicious crimes, additional testimony and victims stepped forward. And it was a trial unfolding under no small amount of public attention.
The perpetrators ultimately received criminal punishment.
Though the Juvenile Act applied because of their age, they were sentenced to 5 years in prison.
While the trial was being settled.
I holed myself up at home.
For 5 years.
*
During the remaining 3 days.
I went straight back to my rental room the moment lectures ended and buried myself in working on the proposal. Ideas might have started flowing, but time was still tight.
Except this time, unlike before, I wasn't just sitting blankly in front of my desk. My hands moved nimbly, like when I got an R-18 freelance commission.
'Man, I really suck at writing too.'
I'd thought I was only bad at pure creation, but putting things into written words wasn't easy either. If it were essay questions with set answers, I could've written them easily, but organizing a story was a different problem entirely.
So I expressed it through drawings.
Just like Hana had attached a simple storyboard to her proposal.
Of course, I couldn't draw every single scene as a full illustration. Even though I had a reputation in the industry for having fast hands, there was no way to draw that much story in just 3 days.
I drew the storyboard by extracting only the core, only the parts a reader would need to understand. Even doing just that, the volume was staggering, and I felt like my wrist was going to snap.
"It's done!"
Dawn of the third day.
With hollow eyes, I threw my hands up in triumph.
"Haven't felt this level of fatigue in a while...."
It seemed like the first time since I took 'Yusi's' emergency request early in the semester. My eyelids drooped heavily from the deep exhaustion.
Without even washing, I staggered toward my bed.
Flop. The moment I lay down, a flood of sleep washed over me.
'Ah, but what if they figure out it's my story...?'
I'd been so focused on finishing within the deadline that I hadn't thought about it at all.
'It'll be fine, right? I mean, the protagonist doesn't even have my name, and college slice-of-life stories are a dime a dozen.'
Isn't a story about a bullied protagonist meeting good friends and gradually changing a common trope? So it would be fine.
Yeah, it'll be fine....