Seol Jihyo Has No Friends
Three days had passed since then.
Somi was fine.
Perhaps because Jiwoo had arrived on the scene and healed her with her Core right away, the puppy had recovered her strength that very same night and was wagging her tail again.
It was Lim Lisa, ironically, who was in bad shape.
She must have taken quite a beating while shielding Somi with her whole body, because she ended up hospitalized in the campus Medical Wing for five days.
And what happened to the rest of them?
Suspended. Every last one.
Property damage, animal cruelty, group assault — the list of charges went on.
Of course, word had it that the process hadn't exactly been smooth.
For one thing, there were no security cameras in the backyard.
And even with Lisa's testimony and the Dormitory Supervisor's, the punished students had fought back furiously, insisting it wasn't their doing.
But then.
For reasons no one could fathom, Jo Bitna had cleanly admitted to every single thing she'd done.
Whether it was giving up on herself or some change of heart, no one really knew.
All anyone could say for certain was that when the teachers pressed her — Why? Why on earth would you do that? — Jo Bitna gave no answer at all.
Either way, thanks to her confession, every student connected to the incident was disciplined without exception.
And that was why the school had been buzzing like a kicked beehive lately.
"Bitna got held back a year?"
In the Medical Wing, on a bed made up with stark white sheets, Lisa sat blinking wide, round eyes.
Across from her sat Jiwoo, fresh from her visit.
"Looks like it. Though I can't figure out why Jo Bitna got held back when the others only got suspensions."
"Maybe... because she got caught using her Core on people habitually?"
"Huh?"
"U-using your Core outside of class is against school regulations, so..."
...That regulation exists?
Wow. Gotta be more careful.
"Are you okay, Jihyo?"
"About what?"
"Back then. You stood up to Bitna and her crew to protect me and Somi."
Come to think of it, Lisa had passed out shortly after Jiwoo arrived — she'd never seen how it ended.
"......I'm sorry."
"Why are you apologizing all of a sudden?"
"During the Core Application class too, and... I feel like I just keep causing you trouble, Jihyo."
"How is that trouble? If it weren't for you, our group wouldn't have gotten first place."
At those words, Lisa pressed her lips together tightly.
After a moment's hesitation, she curled her hand into a loose fist, and the white sheets wrinkled softly beneath it.
"Back in middle school, I saw them picking on you. And I... I was scared the sparks would fly at me too, so I looked the other way. Even though I saw it."
"......"
"It keeps coming back to me. If I'd known you were this kind of person... no, even if I hadn't known, I should never have pretended not to see."
Watching Lisa mumble with her head bowed like a convicted criminal, Jiwoo spoke.
"You didn't, this time."
"...Huh?"
"You threw yourself in the way to save Somi."
"......"
Lisa's eyes went round and wide.
She blinked her eyelids a few times, then buried her face deep into the bed sheets and murmured.
"...I didn't think you'd say that to me."
After that, the two of them spent the afternoon together in the white hospital room.
Eating fruit, watching a TV that only aired tedious news, trading small talk about nothing in particular.
Lisa had been skittish at first, but as the hours slipped by, the number of times she laughed out loud grew and grew.
Eventually, as the sun began to sink toward the horizon,
Jiwoo handed over the class handouts and assignments she'd collected, then rose from her chair.
"Get better soon and come back. You're the only person at this school I can actually talk to."
"D-do you maybe mean..."
Lisa swallowed hard.
"...That we're friends?"
Uh.
Jiwoo stiffened for a moment.
"I don't know. Are we?"
"I-I don't know either..."
They stared at each other in silence — and then, neither first nor second, both of them burst out laughing at the same time.
"Then let's just say we are."
Having finished her visit, Jiwoo headed straight back to the dormitory.
The moment she draped her bag carelessly over her chair, her gaze caught on the empty hook where something should have been.
...Now that I think about it, I never did find the keyring.
Jo Bitna had definitely been holding Jiwoo's keyring that day.
After Hangyeol brought the Dormitory Supervisor, there'd been no spare moment to think about it, and by the time she went back to comb the backyard, the search had turned up nothing.
And now that Jo Bitna had been held back a year, the keyring was gone for good.
I feel terrible about that. It was Jihyo's gift.
Jiwoo turned around with a deflated look on her face.
That was when something unfamiliar caught the corner of her eye.
...Oh, right. The phone.
It was Jihyo's phone, which she'd stumbled across in a drawer of this room three days ago, then completely forgotten about in the days since.
Jiwoo picked it up and turned it over thoughtfully.
It was only natural that she'd never seen one before. These phones were issued to enrolled students, and they were never used outside school grounds.
As she understood it, they only worked on campus — they responded to a special network laid throughout the academy, and the instant you stepped off the grounds, they went dead.
Anything interesting on here?
Jo Bitna's crew had been punished, sure...
But there was still a chance that other members of the group who had bullied Jihyo remained at the school.
Fiddling with the phone, Jiwoo carefully powered the screen on.
The first thing she checked was the contact list.
The numbers saved in the phone. She wanted to see who Jihyo had actually been close to.
And then—
— Homeroom Teacher
— Student Counselor
— Dormitory Supervisor
"......"
Far fewer than she had expected.
Three. That's it? Three contacts?
With a bewildered face, she scrolled the list down—
And one more contact, hidden at the very bottom, slid into view.
This one was not a "teacher."
— Nam Raein
Jiwoo's brow creased at the name on the screen.
I feel like I've heard that name somewhere before.
But wherever she'd heard it, the memory refused to surface.
After a moment's hesitation, Jiwoo lightly tapped the name. A message history — presumably between the two of them — appeared.
There was nothing lengthy or elaborate.
Only two lines, in fact.
The conversation, begun with a message cold enough to frost the screen,
ended with a reply from Nam Raein that was colder still.
...And that was all there was.
A long, immaculate corridor.
"You know Bitna's little clique from Class 2? Did you hear? Suspended, the whole lot of them, Kim Yeonhee included."
"Obviously. But Bitna got held back a year, they say?"
"Wait, why Bitna?"
The news that Jo Bitna's circle from the first-year Class 2 of the high school division had been punished had spread like wildfire through the halls.
"You know that gloomy girl in Class 2 who talks to bugs? Word is Bitna lured her and Seol Jihyo to the backyard for a group beating. Even some upperclassmen joined in — it was bad."
"Didn't they smash everything in the dormitory backyard too? Ugh. And I heard something about animal cruelty."
"No, the real thing is — Bitna got caught walking around using her Core on everyone around her. Her Core is Charm, you know. She was playing queen bee with it."
"Chills... I think she got me with it once. I lent her this insanely expensive lip balm ages ago and I still haven't gotten it back."
A girl shuddered as if shaking goosebumps off her whole body, then darted a glance to her side.
"Hey, you're listening to us, right?"
At the center of the crowd that had clustered noisily in the corridor,
someone standing there lifted his head.
Bright blonde hair, as if it had drunk in the falling sunlight whole. Holding those glittering, sand-on-a-beach strands loosely in place was a small pin studded with cubic zirconia.
On the ear that showed beneath it glinted a delicate, intricate piercing.
"Oh, sorry. What were you saying?"
"Tch. Knew it. By the way, what's that pin in your hair? It suits you."
At the familiar flattery, he smiled faintly and touched a hand to the pin.
"This? Hmm. Is it too girly?"
"No, not at all! It's gorgeous."
"Yeah, yeah — you look like a celebrity!"
"Wear the pin I gave you tomorrow, okay? Promise?"
Even as the compliments poured over him in a wave, his face showed not the slightest trace of embarrassment as he laughed and said, "Sure, whatever."
With accessories adorning him here and there, he might easily have tipped over into looking flashy — but somehow, he didn't.
Setting aside the jewelry, his uniform itself was neat and proper, though oddly enough, his tie alone was knotted loose. Through the gap in his collar, the smooth line of his collarbone showed.
He surely knew it, too — and yet he made no move whatsoever to straighten it.
Ding-dong, dang-dong─
The bell chimed through the corridor speakers.
"Oh? The bell already? Let's go."
"Ugh, math next. Barf."
One by one, the students who had been swarming around him began trickling back to their classrooms.
He, the one at the center of it all, was about to follow at the very end when he suddenly stopped mid-step.
In the corner of the corridor.
Something glittered.
He bent down and picked it up.
"......"
A butterfly keyring, made of translucent blue beads.
One wing had been shattered — trampled, perhaps, by the feet streaming up and down the corridor.
He set the broken keyring in his palm and stared at it silently.
And then, up ahead, someone let out a startled cry.
"Whoa — look, it's Seol Jihyo."
Drawn by that voice, a pair of eyes the deep violet of amethyst flicked sideways.
At the far end of the opposite corridor,
Seol Jihyo of Class 2 was walking along — alongside that... gloomy girl who talked to bugs.
The students, puzzled by the strange sight, began to whisper.
"Isn't that Lim Lisa next to her? Wasn't she hospitalized?"
"Guess she got discharged. But why are those two together?"
"No idea. Maybe they became friends or something."
Overhearing that, he let out a small, involuntary snort of laughter.
"Doubt it."
Jingle. The butterfly keyring swayed from his hand.
He shoved it deep into his pocket and said,
"Seol Jihyo doesn't have any friends."
With a sharp turn, he strode into his classroom.
The students scrambled after him.
"Hey — Raein, wait up!"
Just before the classroom door closed, his violet gaze brushed the end of the corridor one last time.
Seol Jihyo and Lim Lisa.
He watched the two of them from behind as they slipped into the Class 2 classroom — then, a moment later, looked lightly away.
As if he had never been looking in that direction at all.