A Good Example
Dating, huh?
Even though I had finally ended up sitting next to Seol-hwa for once, my eyes kept drifting toward Im Yu-hyeon in the seat right in front of the teacher's desk.
A delinquent, they said…?
While I was lost in other thoughts and half-ignoring the lesson, he was focused on class with a completely serious expression.
Always smiling, never losing that grin no matter who he was dealing with.
The word “perfect” must have been invented for guys like him.
His test scores lagged a little behind Tae-yang’s, but when it came to sports he was especially incredible. He wasn’t in any clubs, so people kept trying to scout him, and he turned every single offer down.
On top of that he was good-looking, so of course the girls flocked to him like rats after the Pied Piper.
This was before I met Seol-hwa. Once, on the way to school, I had run into him by chance.
I remembered him helping an old lady pull her handcart.
“He sure does all sorts of things,” I had muttered back then.
Sticking his nose into something that wasn’t even his business… I had thought something twisted like that.
“What’s the big deal? Helping someone else doesn’t cost you anything, right?”
But Yu-hyeon had just given me that bright smile of his, as if he were stating something as natural as the sun rising and setting.
I didn’t remember old things very well, but that particular moment had stuck with me somehow.
That same guy being some terrifying delinquent? I couldn’t even picture it.
“Did something happen?”
Before I knew it class was over. I was just about to stretch when Seol-hwa suddenly poked me in the side and asked.
“…Not really?”
The moment the question left my mouth, Ji-woo looked startled for a second.
She probably didn’t want it getting out… I brushed it off vaguely, and Seol-hwa just nodded with a soft “Okay…”
Looks like the lie had been spotted right away.
She didn’t press any further, but the slightly lonely expression that settled on her face made something in my chest twinge.
We promised during our part-time job that we wouldn’t hide things from each other…
I was just starting to feel awkward about how to comfort her when a knock came at the classroom door.
“Who is it?”
It was already after school; everyone who was going home should have left by now. Thinking that, I opened the door and found the same brown-haired girl from earlier.
“What’s up?”
“Could you spare a little time?”
“Would you like something to drink?”
“…I’m not sure.”
The three of us ended up gathering in the resource room from earlier that day.
“This place is kind of amazing…”
This time Seol-hwa was with us. It happened to be a day off from our part-time jobs, and Ji-woo had said it was fine.
Sitting beside me, Seol-hwa looked around the resource room with open curiosity, turning her head this way and that since it was her first time here.
“But school’s already out. Is this okay?”
“I have the key. They said I can use it freely. As long as I lock up properly there’s no problem.”
“So the topic is what happened earlier today?”
Instead of answering, Ji-woo gave a small nod and brought over steaming cups of coffee.
“Drink it before it gets cold. You too, Seol-hwa unnie, if you’d like.”
“Ah, thank you… I’ll have some?”
“I’m the junior here. You don’t have to speak so formally.”
“S-sorry… I mean, sorry…”
“You’re really tense, you know that?”
I patted her back and told her to relax a little. Ji-woo was watching the two of us with a fond look.
“You two get along so well.”
“Well, we are that kind of pair.”
Seol-hwa’s face flushed deep red and she ducked her head, and I felt a small sense of victory at having landed a hit.
“What about you two? You’re dating too, right?”
The coffee had a bitter taste. Was this just her preference?
I actually liked this kind of flavor, so it was fine for me, but I wondered if Seol-hwa would be okay with it.
“Exactly as you thought.”
…Maybe it really had been a bit too bitter.
Seeing the subtle expression on Seol-hwa’s face, Ji-woo smiled like a kindly grandmother, added some sugar for her, then took a sip of her own coffee as she answered.
“I still can’t really believe he used to be a delinquent.”
I didn’t think she was the type to lie. That only made it harder to accept.
That such a good guy had once been the kind of person who hurt others.
“He wasn’t the nasty kind. If he had been, I never would have dated him in the first place.”
“Yeah?”
“He didn’t bully people or anything. How should I put it… he just had a pretty strong aggressive streak. A battle maniac, maybe?”
“That’s a scary way to describe him.”
Imagining that refreshingly open-looking guy smiling while beating people up was honestly pretty terrifying.
But Ji-woo just kept smiling and said, “He probably wouldn’t deny it himself.”
“Yu-hyeon’s parents… their relationship isn’t very good.”
“Is it okay to talk about that when he’s not here?”
“I got permission for everything. He said it would be too embarrassing to come and spill his own past stories himself, hehe.”
“Well, I can understand that.”
Before I met Seol-hwa—more precisely, after that incident—I had lived pretty recklessly myself… so if someone asked me to talk about those days now, I would feel plenty embarrassed too. I could relate.
“He hated that kind of home, so he naturally drifted into acting out. While he was fighting as hard as he could, he didn’t have to think about the bad things… he told me that once, and I still remember it.”
Listening to the story, I suddenly felt a deep sense of admiration for the black-haired girl sitting beside me, listening so seriously.
Normally, going crooked like that would be the natural reaction.
It would have been the same for Yu-hyeon, and for Seol-hwa too.
But she was here now.
Upright, strong… still the same Yun Seol-hwa who always wore that gentle smile.
I could only feel gratitude in my heart for that fact.
Because I had met this girl who had lived without breaking, I had been able to change too.
“Yu-hyeon and I first met in middle school. We were in the same class.
But we never really had a chance to talk. I was quiet even back then, and Yu-hyeon was famous at school in a bad way.”
That hits a little close to home.
Was it just my imagination that the me from not long ago came to mind…?
As if she had read my thoughts, Ji-woo added, “Come to think of it.”
“Yu-hyeon and Yu-seong sunbae are kind of similar.”
“…Me and him?”
I was about to shake my head and say that was going too far, but Ji-woo just laughed. “Self-evaluations are never reliable anyway.”
“Then what about you, Seol-hwa unnie? What do you think?”
“Huh, me? About what…?”
She clearly hadn’t expected the conversation to come back to her so suddenly.
Looking thoroughly flustered, Seol-hwa answered, and Ji-woo casually asked, “When you’re with Yu-seong sunbae, how does it feel?”
“How does it feel… well, it’s really fun, and it feels like a dream, so I wish it could just keep going like this…”
“Hold on, why are you suddenly trying to kill me?”
Too much praise becomes poison.
I was definitely grateful she thought of me that way, but somehow… receiving a full-on praise barrage from these two was a different kind of awkwardness than what I felt with Eun-ha or Dojeon. I couldn’t handle it.
I told them not to mess around too much, but Ji-woo just turned it around on me. “Then how about you, Yu-seong sunbae?”
“You guys…”
I didn’t exactly love this atmosphere.
But… Seol-hwa beside me kept glancing at me with expectant eyes.
“I like it.”
I let out a helpless sigh and opened my mouth.
Before I met this girl, I had been sick of the whole idea of connections.
After I could no longer meet that person, even the dream I had always carried got smashed, and the reality I faced was far too heavy to bear alone.
I had thought it was better to be alone, that I didn’t need anyone… or at least I had wanted to think that.
But.
“When I’m with her I feel at ease, and I think it’s fun.”
This girl who called me a good person.
The person named Yun Seol-hwa who brushed aside my pathetic worries of “Is it okay if it’s me?” by insisting it had to be me.
The one whose eyes told me it was all right for me to be here.
The person who created a small but certain sense of happiness.
“I’m always grateful, so I try to treasure her… isn’t that obvious?”
By the time I finished saying that, the only thing visible in the seat beside me was a figure with her head bowed low, trembling.
“Hey now.”
You were trying to do pretty much the same thing to me, I thought, poking her back repeatedly with my finger. Ji-woo let out a bright “Ahaha.”
“You two really do get along well.”
“If that’s how it looks, then I guess that’s good.”
I was still trying to soothe Seol-hwa, who showed no sign of calming down, when I noticed the bottom of the coffee cups had already become visible.
“One more cup.”
I accepted another cup of steaming coffee and took a sip. Ji-woo started speaking again with “As for me.”
“Even in middle school I wasn’t much different from now. My family was pretty strict. Thanks to that, I ended up becoming the kind of kid who… well, other people might see it differently, but I found it hard to find any fun.”
Ji-woo still hadn’t lost her smile as she spoke, but for a moment I thought I saw her trying not to let any loneliness show on her face.
In my eyes she was a good kid—kind and open-hearted.
But from her own perspective?
Maybe that worry had shown on my face, because when our eyes met, Ji-woo told me, “I’m fine now.”
“But the old me secretly hated this kind of life. I felt like this was just ‘the me created by my parents,’ not the real me… I got tired of it that way.”
It was a common enough story.
A life crushed under the weight of expectations, unable to show one’s true self.
Even someone who seemed like nothing but a good person to others would naturally have one or two things like that.
“One day, out of nowhere, I got a confession at school.”
“A c-confession…?”
Seol-hwa’s voice trembled. She probably had no resistance to stories like this.
Honestly I was the same, but I was trying harder than her not to show it.
“It feels weird to say it myself, but I was pretty popular at school. In other people’s eyes I was a good person, after all. But like I said earlier, I didn’t feel like that was really me.
Liking a fake would only lead to a half-baked ending… so I turned them down in a roundabout way.”
“That was the right call.”
Doing something like that out of nowhere in a school where everyone’s eyes were already on you was, to put it bluntly, a nuisance.
Whether the other person liked it or not, they would feel pressured. If you really liked someone, you should call them aside or set up a proper time when it was just the two of you. That was the right way, I thought.
Hanging around with someone who couldn’t even think that far would only end up half-baked in a different sense.
“They must have been waiting on the way home from school, because they came looking for me. Saying I’d embarrassed them, and so on…”
My guess had been right… and it was even worse than I thought.
“That’s the worst.”
A guy with not a single good point about him.
At my extreme evaluation, Ji-woo calmly agreed with a “You’re right,” then gave a helpless little smile.
“But at the time there was nothing I could do. They deliberately chose a secluded spot and suddenly said those things… just as I was starting to get scared, Yu-hyeon helped me. You could call that our first meeting.”
“Sounds like the plot of some third-rate comic.”
“Maybe so. Back then Yu-hyeon was a real hero. That sunbae got scared of him and ran off, but since they might try something again later, he walked me home.
As we did that, we naturally started talking. That’s how I heard about his family situation too… I thought it was pitiful. To only be able to feel your own existence by fighting other people. That’s a sad thing, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is.”
Having nothing. Living while fully aware of that fact is incredibly painful… I nodded in agreement with Ji-woo’s words.
“Just listening wouldn’t have been fair, so it didn’t take long before I started talking about myself too. After hearing my story, Yu-hyeon told me that if it was that hard, I should at least put it down while I was with him.
He said I could just be myself. The fact that he accepted me as I was… that made me so happy. Once we opened up about our circumstances and feelings, becoming close happened quickly.
But somehow my parents found out, and that became the problem.”
“…I doubt they reacted well.”
Parents who pushed their child that hard would never accept someone like Yu-hyeon, who already had a bad reputation. At my words Ji-woo also sighed, “Right.”
“They opposed it furiously, saying I shouldn’t hang around with low-class kids like that… When Yu-hyeon heard that, he said, ‘Then I’ll just change.’”
“And that’s how he became the way he is now?”
If the story I’d heard was true, all I could think was that he was an incredible guy in a lot of ways.
Saying it is easy, but actually putting it into action is hard.
How much effort had he put in to become who he was now… I couldn’t even imagine.
“That’s also around the time he got to know Yurim sunbae. She was one of his few acquaintances, and she helped him a lot with fixing his lifestyle.”
“Yeah, she’s always been pretty nosy.”
If she had heard that, she probably would have kicked me for saying unnecessary things. Thinking that, I let out a small laugh, and Ji-woo nodded. “That’s true.”
For better or worse, before I met Seol-hwa she had been the only one in class who ever butted into my business.
I just felt like, so she’d always been that kind of person.
“There were various things, but now we’re doing well together. It’s just that because of what happened in middle school it could get noisy, so for now we’re still hiding the fact that we’re dating.”
“So there was a reason for that iron wall of his.”
The number of people who had confessed to Yu-hyeon and gotten rejected had to be at least in the double digits. I had thought he was a strange guy, but I never expected there was a backstory like this.
“You have to keep it a secret.”
“My lips are sealed, so don’t worry. Though this one here might be a problem.”
She was so bad at lying that she might slip up while trying to brush things off.
When I asked if she would be okay, she answered that she could do it when she had to, so it would probably be fine… probably.
“Is the story over?”
We were just starting to clean up when a knock came and the door opened.
“Yu-hyeon, you’re here?”
The moment Yu-hyeon appeared, Ji-woo’s expression completely changed.
To other people it might have looked like her usual smile, but I could tell.
The moment she saw his face, it was the expression of someone so happy she could barely stand it.
If they had been dating since middle school it had been quite a while, yet the affection visible in that expression felt like that of a couple who had just started going out.
“It’s colder outside than I thought, so I bought some hotteok. I got some for you two as well—want to eat together?”
“Thanks, I’ll have some. You too.”
I nudged Seol-hwa’s side with my elbow. She still hadn’t fully relaxed, so she stammered “Th-thank you…” as she accepted the hotteok.
“Thanks for earlier today.”
“I don’t really care about seating, so it was nothing.”
He really did give off that open, refreshing impression. I still couldn’t quite believe this guy used to brawl with people.
“Watching Seol-hwa somehow reminded me of Ji-woo, so I butted in a little.”
“Is that so?”
Hearing Yu-hyeon’s words, I rolled my eyes to look at the two standing side by side.
Certainly, the two quiet, calm-feeling people matched in atmosphere if not in looks.
“Ah.”
Looking at them, something came to mind.
“Go on, ask, friend.” I patted the back of Seol-hwa, who was tilting her head in confusion. Her eyes went wide.
“Uh, uh…?”
The other two seemed to roughly grasp the mood from my words. They grinned and started chiming in with “Do your best” and “I’d like to hear it too.”
“Um, um… that is…”
“Yes? What is it?”
“I-if it’s okay, would you be my frie… no, will you be my friend?”
I wondered when she would finally get used to other people. She still had a long way to go.
But the fact that she was improving was certain. For now I should be satisfied with that.
“I’d be happy if you would be my friend too.”
In contrast to the extremely tense Seol-hwa, the calm Ji-woo took Seol-hwa’s hands in hers and smiled brightly.
“Uh, uh… is it okay?”
“Of course. Nice to meet you, Seol-hwa sun… no, in this case would it be better to call you Seol-hwa unnie?”
Eun-ha’s little sister had called her that before, but this was probably the first time someone her own age had called her unnie.
In fact Seol-hwa just kept blinking and repeating “Un… unnie…” under her breath.
While I was watching that fondly, Yu-hyeon suddenly clapped me on the back with a solid thump.
“The semester’s almost over, but let’s get along.”
Saying that, Yu-hyeon held out his hand to me.
I had been constantly worrying.
Could I change? Could I become someone worthy of living alongside Seol-hwa… I just couldn’t feel any confidence in myself.
But Ji-woo had said that self-evaluations couldn’t be trusted.
“Likewise. Looking forward to it.”
I took the hand Yu-hyeon offered and managed an awkward smile.
A good example had appeared, so I would do my best to learn from him while standing right beside him.
Seol-hwa was changing. She was moving forward, even if only little by little.
I would be the same… I decided to believe that.