Because I'm Thinking
The classroom felt a little heavier the next day.
Maybe it was because the boy who looked at me with such open contempt was sitting there so thoroughly wilted. Or maybe it was because of me. There weren't many human beings who'd had blood poured into their bodies and been kept alive for as long as I had.
The boy was still clawing at his ear like something possessed, hard enough that a scab had started to crust along the lobe. And even so, he hadn't stopped coming after me. I'd assumed the worst he'd manage during class was a wad of trash. Instead he started throwing scissors, box cutters, pencils honed down to a vicious point.
I hadn't bothered to draw the bruises out of yesterday's welts, so I looked even more wretched than usual. I could see it myself when I checked the mirror that morning. My face was lightly scratched. I'd been hoping it would at least look presentable when we met.
What would happen if I just tore his head apart, right here? If a student suddenly started spraying blood from every hole in his body and died without the slightest warning. The curiosity flickered through me and I nearly popped him open — then I fished a pill from my bag and chewed it absently instead. Today was the day I'd decided to go see him, after all.
The teacher kept the lesson moving. I spent the hours the way I always did, staring out the window, and lunch arrived before I knew it. Fortunately they didn't seem interested in dragging me off during the meal, so they left me alone. I went back to the dorm, peeled off a uniform that had gone faintly red, and looked myself over. From the neck down I was a map of open wounds and darkening bruises.
I stripped off the rest and checked everywhere. On all that snow-white skin, there was hardly a single unmarred patch left except my face. I had the card Sihyun-unni had pressed on me, telling me to spend whatever I wanted without worrying — but I didn't particularly want anything that tasted good. I finished a light meal of cheap instant coffee and a cream puff I'd stashed in the corner of the room, then tried once more to summon his face.
I'd come all the way to the same school, after all. Being locked in that lab, enduring everything they did to me — it couldn't have been completely meaningless. My arms and legs, my fingers and toes, piled high in buckets and shipped off to this facility and that. It definitely hadn't been for nothing.
But what had I done all of that for, exactly? Had I really needed to go that far just to see a friend who didn't even remember me? A friend who'd dumped me in that nightmare and run off alone to some happy place?
If he'd sent a text once a month. Even just that. I would have stayed there waiting for him. If I'd become a prostitute, I would have been the cheap kind who spread her legs for free. If I'd died waiting, I would have died happy, clinging to the hope that he was coming for me soon.
Because that was the kind of child Yu Harin was. Kind. Useless. A sloppy mess who couldn't survive without leaning on someone. She didn't have a single thing going for her compared to the other kids clustered around the protagonist. If anything, now she was nothing but hysteria, and even the few good qualities she'd once had were gone.
"God, I look disgusting."
I wanted to rip out the faintly murky red eyes staring back at me from the glass. I stopped at the thought, since I wouldn't be able to see afterward. I wanted to dye this snow-white hair black. My original hair had been black, I was fairly sure.
I stared at the mirror for a long time, then picked up the cup from the table and hurled it. It shattered. I lay down on the bed and watched the ceiling for a long time after that. Did I even need to go to class, really? I hadn't enrolled here to graduate or become someone important. I had come to see my childhood friend. That was all.
Now that I thought about it, I didn't even have a clue how to find him. I knew the classes were divided by ability. I knew that even if your power was pathetic, you could climb into a higher class if you just scored well enough on the exams. F-class started at the absolute bottom, of course, and almost no one ever climbed out of it.
But I wanted to see him. I did. I had waited so long — left behind, I had waited so terribly long for even a single word. Come to think of it, I just needed to look for the students wearing the same uniform that blue-haired girl had been wearing yesterday.
One pill wasn't enough, so I tipped the rest of the bottle into my mouth and chewed. They'd said it was a two-month supply. Almost gone already. Leaving drugs in an addict's hands in the first place was insane. Then again, me coming all this way just to see him was pretty insane too.
I just needed the drugs because I couldn't do this sober. Having your whole body wrecked, having pieces of you cut away — that was not something you endured with a clear head. That was why the Department Head and Team Leader Joo had kept me on them. Though by the end, that man hadn't even bothered to put the needle in properly.
All I'd done was kill one son of a bitch who'd locked me in a cage. I shouldn't have killed him like that. If Sihyun-unni hadn't come to pull me out, I could have done whatever it was I'd wanted to do. What had I wanted back then? What had I been hoping for?
To die, maybe. Or to do something — anything — to the person who'd been tormenting me. Or for Seojun to come save me. That last one was absurd from the start, of course. What was supposed to happen to me again?
Probably this: my mind would have died a long time ago, and only the body would have kept living, smashing everything around it — a monster that clawed its way out of the Research Lab. In the end we did meet, though. So maybe going into the lab hadn't been such a bad choice after all.
"Yu Harin. The teacher asked me to check on you today. Even if we are F-class, that doesn't mean you get to skip class. You're still a student."
Thanks to all of that, I'd also learned that as long as I had white powder or a handful of pills, the entire world became simple. No complicated thoughts required. So in the end, nothing that bad had really happened, I supposed.
When I saw him, what should I say first?
I missed you. Why didn't you come find me.
No — he didn't even need to come find me.
Why did you abandon me. Why did you leave me there. Why did you leave only me behind and go.
No. I didn't just want to ask why. There must have been some reason. There had to have been. So what was I supposed to say, then?
I wanted to see you. For such a long, long time.
That sounded like a little girl in love. The child from before the lab might have said something like that. But I was born in the Research Lab. That wasn't me.
It might not be love, I suppose. I used to think it was, though. I used to be certain it was the kind of love that would last forever. The worthless, lightweight kind of love a girl from the Slums — no education, no power — might dream up for herself.
So it wasn't because of love. It was something. I had definitely been waiting because of something.
Because being alone is lonely.
A fist slammed into my solar plexus.
I turned my head. The boy was standing there. The boy whose name I still hadn't even heard. His usual cluster of friends stood behind him, the ones he always dragged around.
"...I told you I was thinking."
The boy and his friends looked a little different from usual, though. They had been run through with sharp skewers of blood and turned into slabs of meat. I must have misjudged the force. The boy's insides already seemed to have melted. Blood was gushing from his nose the way water gushes from a broken bathroom faucet. I gathered it in the air as it came, at least, so it wouldn't stain the room.
"How do I clean this up."
"Uh. Y-Yejun...?"
There was still someone alive. I must have only turned them into skewers in that first startled instant. So the boy's name was Yejun. I didn't know his family name. The girl who always clung to his side was staring at him with a vacant, emptied-out look on her face. Her insufficient little brain probably couldn't process what had just happened.
That was an illness. The treatment was simple. You opened the lid of the skull and stirred the brain around with an electrified metal needle. Then the stupid human who used to live in there got pushed to the back, and a brilliant, perfect human like me opened their eyes.
So I opened her head to help. I didn't have any electricity, but I stirred her skull with blood instead. Her limbs twitched a little. Then she stopped moving entirely.
I gathered the dead things and the spraying blood into a sphere in the air and spent a long time wondering how to dispose of them. A presence brushed the edge of my attention. I turned toward it.
It was the blue-haired girl who had approached me yesterday. Our eyes met. The look in hers was different from yesterday. Like she was looking at prey, I suppose.
I started to go after her, then remembered what was floating in the room and stopped. And even if I caught her — then what? There was nothing I could do. I'd just been caught pushing back a little against the children who'd been bullying me. That was all.
This is a bit of a non sequitur, but back at the Research Lab, whenever my thoughts stopped I felt like I might disappear. Especially when some part of my body was being cut away. I wanted to hang my mouth open and become a drooling idiot who couldn't do anything at all. But I never gave up on thinking. I was afraid I would fade. The me locked in that basement was just too wronged.
So it wasn't my fault.
I compressed the clump floating in the air, smaller and smaller, down to something that would fit in a palm. See? If you wish for something, everything comes true. I wished I could have an ability like my friend, and I got one. I wished desperately to get out of the Research Lab, and I got out. This time was the same. I wished I could make this inconvenient trash small enough to throw away, and I squeezed it down to the size of a tennis ball that sat neatly in my hand. The texture was a little disgusting, though.
When I looked outside, it was already night.
It hurt my heart terribly, the fact that I had done this to students who had such bright futures ahead of them. I wanted to sink to the floor and wail until I couldn't breathe.
So he wouldn't hate someone like me. Surely not.
The kind hero who saved everyone.