First Step
"What are you talking about."
I knew what she meant. Even so, I asked again.
No answer came, of course.
Soaked through by the rain, she looked almost pitiful. Droplets fell from her jet-black hair and traced their way down between those red eyes. Whether the pools gathered at the corners were rain or tears, I couldn't tell. But the sadness came through clearly enough.
I stood there watching her in silence.
How long did that go on? Eventually I managed to place her. Yun Seol-hwa. She'd transferred in maybe a month or two ago.
For someone like me who could count on one hand the people whose names I even remembered at school—let alone outside it—the reason I knew the transfer student was her family. They owned a building in a prime Seoul location near a subway station and ran a private hospital there: one of the wealthiest households even in a rich neighborhood.
Seongun-dong, where I lived, was a rural backwater most people had never even heard of. Why a rich girl like her would end up at a school out here in the sticks was beyond me.
Reactions had varied, but overall the response had been pretty heated. Neat features, pretty short black hair, ruby-red eyes like gems set in place, a petite frame. Objectively speaking, she was cute enough. And on top of that, a so-called silver spoon.
But there was something off about her. She looked somehow haggard—that was the word. Dull, damaged hair without any luster. Fingers and cheeks that seemed too thin. A sense of dissonance you wouldn't expect—shouldn't even exist—in a rich girl.
Even so, she was pretty, and she was a rich man's daughter. That didn't change. That fragile look of hers even stirred protective instincts, and the reactions from hormone-starved high school boys had been especially enthusiastic. Some people felt inferior around her, or resentful, or just tilted their heads wondering why someone so put-together would come to a dump like this.
But in the end it was herd mentality. Majority opinion is simpler than you'd think. Think of a tug-of-war. The side with more people wins. Positive opinions clearly outnumbered the negative ones, so every break period her desk was swarmed like bees on honey.
You might expect a rich girl to be arrogant and stuck-up, the annoying type. But Seol-hwa answered every attitude, every question diligently, with a smile. Enough to make you think maybe preconceptions weren't such a good thing.
But they say a sandcastle built too easily washes away with the smallest wave. Seol-hwa's popularity, unfortunately, didn't last long.
Not long after, while walking and talking in the hallway, she collapsed without a sound—like a puppet with its strings cut. That was the start of the trouble. After that she started coughing up blood sometimes, and missing school became routine. The teachers finally told us her health wasn't great.
At first there was still an atmosphere of looking out for a struggling classmate. But a world where free goodwill keeps going forever without any return—that kind of place doesn't exist in reality, at least.
"Isn't it annoying?"
Whose mouth did that come from? But it might have spoken for a lot of people. When you decide someone's different from you, or that there's nothing in it for you, you start keeping your distance. That's just how people work.
...At least, that's how I see it.
Taking her to the nurse's office, calling the hospital—that kind of consideration is fine once or twice. When the hassle keeps piling up, it's not surprising. Maybe even natural. Swallow the sweet, spit out the bitter. Basic principle.
It didn't take long for the positive force to break and the negative reaction to gain strength. She takes help for granted. Her attitude toward people is too mechanical, you can see the forced smile, she's laughing at us inside—and so on. Eventually it turned into low-grade gossip: a boring, annoying burden...
At first a few people, then the class, then the whole grade. The circle just kept spreading like a contagion. The subtle bullying poured into the water glass like a contaminant, quickly fouling the contents. Interest in Seol-hwa vanished like a toy kids had gotten bored of and thrown away, and she grew more and more isolated.
A month or two later, she'd reached pretty much the same place as me—almost zero interaction at school.
"...You're the one getting soaked."
It was already pointless with her drenched, but I opened the umbrella I'd been holding closed and held it over Seol-hwa, breaking the long silence.
What am I doing, something that doesn't suit me at all.
A stupid thing to do. Even I thought so. From that day until now, I hadn't taken an interest in her—or anyone else. A life where I didn't approach anyone, and no one came to me either. If Seol-hwa had somehow ended up alone by accident, I'd been alone from the start. I had to be.
I figured if class was a pain I could just skip it. I wasn't the type to throw punches or anything, but the Han Yu-seong people saw around them was definitely a delinquent. Whether someone got soaked in the rain or not, you just keep walking your own path and mind your own business. That was all there was to it.
But I couldn't do that. More precisely—I couldn't leave her there.
It wasn't just that she looked pitiful soaked in the rain, or that a frail kid like her might be in danger. There was something else. In the side profile of her crouching there, drained of strength, I saw something familiar.
"I've realized it."
Seol-hwa said that with a smile. No—a sneer might be more accurate. A hollow laugh mixed only with resignation, filled with nothing but self-pity. Seol-hwa opened her mouth.
"I am a being this world has no need for."
Why. Why could she say something like that as if it were obvious.
Only breath escaped my lips. The words circling inside me couldn't seem to make it out. Despair was visible with startling clarity. No—I could see it. Those empty eyes filled to the brim with nothing but loneliness: that was what convinced me.
I felt sad. Was "sad" the right word? I didn't know how to describe this feeling. Just that everything in this moment seemed designed to provoke sadness.
I'd thought of Yun Seol-hwa as someone born to the right parents, success guaranteed—a person from a different world than mine. But I couldn't find even a trace of that in the girl in front of me. Clothes and hair hanging limp, soaked through by the rain. A voice that sounded wrung out with effort, every scrap of energy stripped from it.
The kids in class called Seol-hwa a doll. Not because she was cute like a doll—because she kept collapsing like one at the drop of a hat. That was the nickname. But what filled my vision now was worse than that. It might be rude to compare a person this way, but more than a doll, she gave the impression of a pale corpse walking around.
I knew why. Not knowing would have been stranger. No one cares what happens to her. That much was true. Right now, the class's impression of Seol-hwa was "annoying," nothing more and nothing less. And she herself would feel that better than anyone.
And I'd spent all this time looking the other way, telling myself it was none of my business. A guy like that couldn't exactly deny everything that had happened with easy words, so I couldn't say anything.
But the silence didn't last long. No—it couldn't. After the brief gap created by my lack of answer, Seol-hwa's eyes went unfocused and she started to collapse to the ground.
"...Hey!"
I threw aside the umbrella I'd been holding over her and managed to catch her falling body in time, then let out a mental sigh of relief.
"You..."
I couldn't even get the words out. Her eyes were unfocused, her cheeks flushed, and her body was burning hot like a furnace. It clearly wasn't normal, so I pulled out my phone to call an ambulance—but Seol-hwa raised a hand with difficulty to stop me and shook her head.
"I don't... want to go to the hospital."
She was a patient. Common sense said that no matter what she said, I should ignore it, call an ambulance, and send her to the hospital. It might leave a bitter taste, but I could sleep it off. But something told me I shouldn't. The look that said she really didn't want to go—the feeling that this, at least, she couldn't stand. If you asked how I knew, it was probably because I'd been in a similar situation myself.
"...If it gets any worse, I'm sending you to the hospital no matter what you say. Got it?"
I couldn't just leave a kid like this and walk away. She didn't seem to have fully lost consciousness, so there was nothing for it. Even though she was a girl, she was so light I couldn't believe she was a teenager in her prime. I hoisted her onto my back and opened my mouth with a sigh.
I felt a small nod against my back, and at the same time a voice as tiny as an ant's reached my ear.
"...Thank you."