I'm Still the Same
On the first day of school, I stopped for a moment in front of the gates. I didn't particularly want to walk right in.
I looked around. Parents. Friends of someone who'd suddenly Awakened. Reporters. People handing out business cards to kids in school uniforms. Parents hugged their children like they were something to be proud of; a few spoke to the students with tender, lingering faces.
Kids from some poor neighborhood — the kind who had no business being at a school like this at this hour — were here just to see their friends off. It felt like they were all looking at me. I'd been the only one who'd walked that friend all the way to the entrance, after all.
And I was watching the crowd with Sihyun unnie, sipping iced coffee.
I'd called her Lee Sihyun every single day, until at some point she told me to just call her unnie. We were colleagues now, she said. It wasn't exactly wrong, so I went along with it.
"This is my third time coming here."
"You said your friend goes to this place."
"I wonder if we even still count as friends. I faded out of the picture, little by little. Toward the end, I didn't even get a single message."
My brand-new phone only has two contacts. The number of Lee Sihyun, standing right beside me, and the number of that old man who supposedly runs the organization. Not that I'll ever need to use it.
"You know what you need to do, right?"
"Gather as much information as I can on the students with exceptional abilities, recruit them if possible, and map out as many of the school's facilities as I can."
"That's what I said, yeah. But I'd rather you just... had a normal school life."
"This was never a normal school to begin with."
"Well, that's true."
Students were starting to file into the building, following the staff's directions.
"I should probably get going."
At that, unnie rummaged around inside her coat and pressed something into my hands.
"...I'd rather you didn't need these. But I packed two months' worth, just in case."
A small handbag, stuffed with white powder, pills, and unmarked bottles.
I'd spent half a year pickled in drugs. At this point, it was practically a lifestyle. Without them, the depression would settle in until I wanted to die — until every sensation in my body registered as pain. A body like this had no way of scoring anything on its own, so all I could do was take whatever I was given. Even if I left that apartment and wandered the streets, there was nowhere I could have gotten them.
I fished a pill from one of the little bottles and chewed it dry. The bitterness flooded my mouth, but the gloom that had been seeping through my head seemed to recede, just a little. So I gave her the brightest smile I could manage and said thank you.
"Thank you, unnie. I mean it. I'm saying this from the bottom of my heart."
I don't know why, but the woman's face — which had looked so cold — crumpled again, like she was about to cry. I didn't want to see that expression, so I hugged her for a long time, calling it gratitude, then fled after the students heading into the building.
After that, I sat in a massive auditorium for about an hour, listening to some important person drone on about nothing, then went to find my assigned dorm room. That was the whole of it.
The excitement Seojun had talked about — a new life beginning, thrilling conversations with kids you'd just met, making new friends — none of that happened. Though there were plenty of kids giving me sidelong looks. Maybe nobody wanted to talk to someone who looked as gloomy as I did.
They were all meeting for the first time, and yet they were chatting away just fine. Nobody here looked like they'd been dragged in against their will. They all wore these satisfied expressions, like this was exactly where they'd wanted to be.
To me, this school was the place that had taken away the only thing I had. Maybe that was why someone like me had been so easy to forget.
I wiped the thoughts away and stepped into my assigned dorm room. A bed that looked fairly luxurious, a chair, a desk. The space was maybe four hundred square feet. A big television, speakers, and they'd even been kind enough to leave a router so I could use the internet.
I turned on the TV and flipped to a channel that just played music. A song I didn't know the name of drifted out. I looked around, then unpacked my things into the empty closet. Not that I had much — just the little handbag and a bag of clothes.
I unscrewed a bottle packed with powder, tapped a measure of white onto the lid, and laid it out in a long line across the table.
"Snnnfff. Haaah. Nngh."
The high came on light and easy, and I felt a little better. The stuff unnie had gotten me wasn't the painkillers they used at the Research Lab. It was the kind you could pick up on the street — the kind meant for fun. Maybe that was why it hit harder.
Being doled out a "proper dose" every day, being told I'd have to quit someday — that was its own kind of torture. All-day depression was the baseline. My body would go slack and I wouldn't want to do a single thing. On the bad days, it felt like someone was driving needles through every inch of my skin.
Who said the world was a terrible place? It's this beautiful. It's spinning a little, sure, but it's glittering, and I can't feel a single thing that hurts.
This is enough.
I pulled a dagger from inside my coat, drew it lengthwise down my wrist, and used the blood that welled out to change the channel on the TV still pumping out that shitty music. Pop songs, whatever idol track was trending, electronic, classical — I kept flipping until I landed on a channel blasting loud jazz, then collapsed face-down on the white bed and let every bit of tension drain out of me.
I think I fell asleep like that.
When I woke up, the sun was in the sky. Figuring it was morning, I set one of the instant coffee sticks unnie had bought me on top of a paper cup I'd prepared, then walked into the bathroom.
"......Ah."
I looked at my wrist. Blood was still pouring out. Normally, wounds just closed up on their own. What was the problem this time?
I stepped back out of the bathroom and looked at the bed. It was soaked red. Anyone who saw it would have thought a murder had happened in here. I wasn't dizzy, though.
I gathered up every last drop of blood in the room and poured it into the bathtub. I'd have to keep an eye on the bleeding and just keep it plugged for now. Whether it was a side effect of the drugs or something else, the wound showed no sign of closing.
That said, I didn't want to live depressed.
I washed up quickly, wrapped my wrist in a scrap of white cloth, changed into my uniform, and checked the time.
Eleven in the morning. A little late to still be calling it morning.
Crawling into the dorms only to show up late on day one. Then again — nobody was going to lecture me except unnie. Nobody else wanted anything to do with me. And I didn't approach anyone either, not with those flashes of pity I kept catching in their eyes.
I was already late. A little more wouldn't hurt.
I poured hot water into the paper cup, drank the coffee, then fished out a pill and swallowed it. My head felt clearer. I left the room with a light step.
Unnie had said it was two months' worth, but I could always pick up a little hobby later and find my own supply. I'd figure it out. Or, you know. I could just be a little depressed for a while.
I'm not an addict.
Probably.
"You're a student... isn't today your first day?"
The moment I walked into the classroom, every pair of eyes locked onto me. I wondered if it was because I'd come through the front door. Then again, the back door probably would have been the same.
"I'm sorry. It's my first day, so I got a little lost."
The teacher looked at me like I was unbelievable, clicked his tongue, and said,
"Sit in that empty seat over there. If you're F-class, the least you can do is show some diligence."
Awakened have ranks, apparently. Unnie had said that if I listed my real ability — bursting people open with blood, cutting them apart — any researchers who might still be around could catch on. So we'd gone with something simple: a sturdy body.
I wasn't sure ranks even mattered. In the end, I was no different from the test subjects in the basement of the Research Lab. A fairly successful experiment. A fairly high-ranked Awakened. They both looked like livestock to me.
I'd thought that if I just got out of that basement, everything would be fine. That I'd be happy. But that wasn't how it worked. This was how I'd always been treated. Even in the Slums, where everyone got looked down on.
It had been everyday life after my parents died. The neighbor who'd come sniffing around, saying I was young but he'd still have a taste. The thugs who'd promised to dump me in the underground brothel once I got a little older. The neighborhood kids who'd never stopped tormenting me.
And the childhood friend who always came to save me.
Who isn't here anymore.
I propped my chin on my hand and looked around the classroom. The person I'd come here to find was nowhere in sight. Of course he wouldn't be in a place like this. The way he'd shone beside me had never looked cheap or small. Unlike me, whose arms and legs just grew back if they got torn off.
Half a year locked in the Research Lab, and nothing had changed. I'd thought I'd changed, in my own way. But no matter where I went, I was still me.
This wasn't the kind of thinking I'd come here to do. I'd come because I wanted my one and only friend to remember me. To need me.
That's right.
Maybe I have changed, a little.