The Loser Checks the Contest Results
After slipping out of the classroom, which had been thrown into chaos by the sudden transfer student, I headed for the library—the place I’d promised to meet my friends.
When I arrived, the first thing that caught my eye was the library door, shut tight, and the thick padlock hanging there.
At a glance, nobody would think there was anyone inside.
But if you looked closer, the lock was only dangling from the hasp; it wasn’t actually fastened to the door.
And if I pressed a little nearer, I could even feel cool air seeping through the crack in the door.
Looks like Han Sia and Yu Somi got here before I did and were waiting inside.
Summer vacation may have ended, and the days were getting shorter, but it was still August.
Which meant the weather was still hot and humid.
Even so, the classroom air-conditioning was under central control, so we couldn’t use it whenever we wanted.
That was why, ever since summer vacation, this place—the library—had become our favorite meeting spot.
...The library air-conditioning wasn’t under central control, so we could adjust the temperature however we liked.
Of course, using the place without permission was a violation of school rules.
If we could use it freely in the first place, the library would be packed with heat-stricken students at all hours.
And yet the reason we could come and go here was simple: as a member of the library club, I had duplicated the library key and secretly kept a copy.
...So what if we got caught?
Well...
We’d get scolded. But nobody was going to call the police over sneaking into the library.
To keep Han Sia and Yu Somi, who were already waiting inside, from getting startled, I sent them a message in advance, then opened the library door and stepped in.
...
The reason we had gathered at school on the first day back was to check the results of the UCC contest, which would be announced at 11:30 this morning.
Of course, I didn’t think there was any need to wait around like our lives depended on it just to see the results as soon as possible...
"If we win first place, then we’re throwing a first-place celebration party on the spot!!"
...That was just my opinion. My friends saw things differently.
If the participants of this UCC contest wanted it that way, then I suppose I had no choice but to go along with it.
Still, Yu Somi looked pretty eager for us to take first place.
"If the prize money comes in this time~ I should probably replace the computer at home~♫ It’s been lagging like crazy lately!"
Even though there were still more than ten minutes left until the announcement, she kept refreshing the internet page on her phone and seriously weighing what she should spend the prize money on.
By comparison, Han Sia was much calmer.
"There’s no need to be restless. There’s no way anyone could beat our result anyway. The prize money is three million won total, so we can just split it three ways and each take one million."
She was already certain we’d come in first.
Han Sia’s calmness didn’t come from not caring about the contest results—it came from overwhelming confidence in victory.
"The Seoul Mayor’s Award will definitely help with college admissions or job hunting later. When we take the photo, should Somi stand in the middle? It won’t matter much for Ian and me anyway..."
No, she was already planning the composition of the photo for the award ceremony.
What was she going to do if we somehow failed to get first place?
...
The contest results we’d been eagerly waiting on, while gulping down our own brand of wishful thinking, were...
Second place.
For the record, first place went to a video where foreigners sat in a traditional market eating kimchi while going, “Whoa...! Kimchi!! So spicyyo!! But so tastyyo!!” and then danced the shuffle in hanbok in front of Gyeongbokgung Palace.
"A million won... split three ways... that’s only three hundred thousand each... I can’t buy a computer with that..."
"How could our entry lose to that garbage? This contest must have been tampered with. I’ll tell my parents, have everyone involved reported and removed from their posts, and then demand a new judging process..."
"Damn it all! So that’s what they mean by national pride bait...! There’s no way we could’ve beaten that!! We should’ve hired foreigners too and made them eat kimchi...!!"
"...?"
Han Sia looked at me like she was asking, Are you sure your head’s okay? But I was dead serious.
...
After the little uproar, we canceled the first-place celebration plan and agreed to just sit around in the library, talk for a while, and then go home.
And now the conversation had turned to the atmosphere in each of our classes.
"It was nice seeing everyone in class again after so long~ If there was anything different, it’s that our class somehow feels a lot tidier than before?"
The one speaking now, seated primly on the sofa, was Yu Somi. Her delinquent-student styling was still going strong in second semester.
Bleached hair, her summer uniform blouse worn over a black T-shirt, and a skirt shortened just enough to shout, I’m breaking the rules.
She looked like an undeniable troublemaker, but the way she actually behaved had nothing to do with one, and that gap only made people’s brains short-circuit in confusion.
"Mm... to be specific, even the kids who used to sneak in piercings and things like that behind the teachers’ backs seem to have quit now. Some of them already had the holes close up."
According to Yu Somi, the students in Class 5 seemed to be giving up the delinquent act in general.
They hadn’t quit dyeing their hair or wearing makeup, but piercings, drinking, and smoking seemed to be getting phased out.
I’d always assumed delinquent high schoolers usually came to their senses around the end of their second year, after they’d been doing middle-school nonsense long enough to get sick of it.
So I had no idea why the delinquents in Somi’s Class 5 were being “reformed” so quickly.
"Lucky. I wish the smokers in our class would take a cue from Class 5 and quit the cigarettes."
I said it sincerely.
In their own minds, they probably thought they’d aired out the smell before coming back.
But once they smoked and then sat down in a cramped classroom, that disgusting stench spread everywhere and ruined the whole mood.
Honestly, I didn’t care whether they smoked or not, but if they were going to do it at school, the least they could’ve done was think about the smell.
Han Sia seemed to agree with that perception of mine, because she frowned and opened her mouth.
"Now that I think about it... there was always some bastard who seemed to think smoking made him look cool, and every time he came in front of me he’d make a point of saying he’d just smoked. He’d show up smiling and ask me to check whether he smelled like cigarettes. Every time he did, I felt like branding his face with a lit cigarette."
"Then why are you speaking in the past tense? You mean he doesn’t do that anymore?"
"He transferred schools. It was decided during summer vacation, so we won’t be seeing him again."
"..."
It was good that a student I disliked was gone...
But the way she said it with a smile on her face was a little terrifying.
If I asked her here why the smoker in her class had transferred away, she’d probably answer with something like, “Do you really want to know?” or “That’s not your concern.”
Still, it was kind of enviable that she could just send away an annoying student to another school.
Even if I got wronged in class, my only options were “meaningless resistance” and “Well, damn, that’s just my life.”
But hearing my friends talk like this... Somi’s class seemed to be reforming people automatically, and Sia’s class looked like she was personally pruning away the dead branches.
So why didn’t I have anything like that?
I wished I could just get rid of every student I didn’t like in my own class.
No, wait. Since I was a loner, if I expelled everyone I disliked, I might end up being the only one left in the room.
Then maybe it’d be better if Song Changwon, who had just transferred in, started acting up and stirring trouble by spouting off lines like “Shut it, Dog Hair.”
If Song Changwon became the public enemy in my place...!!
...
...
In about a month, there probably wouldn’t even be three students left in our class.
Maybe it’d be better for me to just keep doing what I was doing now—staying quiet and tiptoeing through school life.
...
Ah, right. I should probably tell Han Sia and Yu Somi about the two transfer students who joined our class today too.
It wasn’t common for two transfer students to come into the same class at once, so wouldn’t they both find it interesting once they heard?
***- Song Changwon’s POV
If I were to sum up Class 2, which Jung Ian belonged to, in one word, it would be...
average.
In terms of the college entrance exam, around a C-.
And to explain that a little more plainly...
They probably wouldn’t cause any major trouble, but they were bad enough that the thought, Are you really okay living the rest of your lives like this? kept springing to mind.
"Mm... would KAIST be better than Seoul National? It’s more specialized in science, so I get the feeling it’d be easier to find a job too. Still, I don’t really want to drop all the way down to Yonsei or Korea University..."
For reference, that was the answer I got when I asked a student who had given up on math what kind of department they were studying for.
Thinking he could get into a school like that without math scores... this bastard probably just listed the only university names he knew: Seoul National, KAIST, Yonsei, and Korea University.
There was also the question of why he answered with university names when I’d asked about a department in the first place.
As I listened to the students of Class 2 talk, I found myself wondering whether Jung Ian’s being isolated in class was actually intentional on his part.
Honestly, after watching these people grind out some kind of shallow acquaintance while listening to their idiotic comments every day, I started to think it might be better just to keep to myself in silence.
But... as I kept talking with the Class 2 students, I changed my mind.
"Ah... Jung Ian? We talked a bit at the beginning of the semester. But then rumors started flying around that he had a nasty way of speaking, or that he was just pretending to be good at studying... Once I put some distance between us, I never really talked to him again."
"Yeah, later it turned out to all be misunderstandings, but honestly, what does that matter? If he did stuff that made people misunderstand him, then it makes sense those misunderstandings happened."
At least through the early part of first semester, Jung Ian had tried to get along with his classmates.
But the gap between him and the rest of the class was so large that everything had collapsed under ridiculous misunderstandings and smear campaigns.
And now, it seemed like even Ian himself no longer had any desire to stay close to the people in his class.
...
When my father sent me here, he told me to look at the sight of sewage and oil sitting together.
But water is polar, and oil is nonpolar.
They don’t mix.
More precisely, the polar water molecules are so strongly attracted to one another that the nonpolar oil gets pushed out again and again, until it finally gathers in one place and floats there by itself.
Just like Jung Ian, who had tried to blend into the class, only to end up floating apart from everyone else.
"Hah... I’d been fretting over whether there might be capable people mixed in among all these nobodies without money or background, but that was a complete waste of time. The talented ones always make themselves obvious, even when they’re trying to hide it."
"Hm? What are you talking about?"
"None of your business. Anyway... you lot, have you ever heard the term Dog Hair?"
I raised my voice slightly, and the students gathered in the cafeteria turned to look.
Then Lee Narin, who had been eating kimbap beside me with a blank expression...
let out a long, weary sigh, as though I were a nuisance, and started gathering her things.
"Dog Hair can mean something useless or insignificant, but it’s also used when someone loses what they originally had. So you people, who wasted seventeen precious years from birth until today only to become useless human beings, are Dog Hair itself."
"...?"
The Dog Hair in Class 2 still didn’t seem to have the slightest clue what I was talking about.
So I’d have to explain it in a way even they could understand.
"I’m leaving. My time is too precious to waste eating with Dog Hair like you. Ah, but I’ll cover the bill for everyone here, so don’t bother following me and just stay put. And when we see each other at school tomorrow, don’t act like you know me. That is all."