The Rotten High School Girl (1)
I couldn’t quite guess what it was, but Kim Majin’s reaction told me it was no ordinary matter. I asked with extreme caution.
“Has Shinyong gotten caught up in a lawsuit?”
“No. I want to file a complaint because of what happened to her. My daughter has been suffering school violence for far too long. I thought sending her to a foreign language high school would prevent this sort of thing, but maybe I should have listened to him and sent her to an international school or abroad instead.”
“School violence? That’s not because you chose the wrong school, sister-in-law. The perpetrator needs to be severely punished.”
“Thank you for saying that.”
Kim Majin’s story that followed went far beyond anything I had imagined about school violence. A few days earlier, while Je-gyun was bedridden and she was sinking into depression, the housekeeper had taken the day off, so she had been cleaning the house herself. That was when she found a notebook in Shinyong’s room, its pages nearly filled with handwriting pressed so hard the pen had nearly torn through the paper.
Kim Majin had considered respecting her daughter’s privacy, but then remembered how quiet and withdrawn Shinyong had become over the past few months. She opened the notebook—and from the very first page, she was horrified. It contained a complete record of the brutal school violence Shinyong had endured for the past year.
Was it my fault for saying my dad’s name?
At first glance, it seemed unlikely that the granddaughter of a chaebol family would become a target of bullying. Yet that very fact had become the root of Shinyong’s relentless ostracism and vicious harassment.
It had begun about a year earlier. In Shinyong’s first-year class, one student dominated the social hierarchy: Bang Jiseon. She openly flaunted that her father was an executive at a major corporation, earning the envy of her classmates.
“Hey, what does your dad do?”
Bang Jiseon’s question caught Shinyong, who took after Kim Majin more than Kwon Je-gyun and preferred to study quietly without drawing attention. She answered matter-of-factly.
“My dad? He works at the same company as your father. QS Group.”
Until that moment, Bang Jiseon, the ringleader of the bullying, apparently hadn’t connected the dots.
“Even when you lie, at least make it believable. Do you think QS Group only has one or two subsidiaries? What’s the exact company name?”
“Ah, well…”
Shinyong’s hesitation was understandable. At the time, her father Kwon Je-gyun was president of twelve different affiliates.
“Look at this. Everyone claims to work at QS. If you really do, what’s your dad’s position? Or at least drop his name. Don’t tell me you’re lying? Maybe you know my dad—Bang Changho, Managing Director at QS Display?”
“Kwon, Je, gyun. He’s the CEO.”
“W-what did you say?”
Bang Jiseon stammered, and the classroom atmosphere froze instantly. A managing director at QS Display was barely at the edge of the group’s inner circle. Kwon Je-gyun, however, was a direct descendant of the chairman and a leading candidate for the next chairman—something even high school students knew.
In the class hierarchy built on fathers’ socioeconomic status, Shinyong had been the ultimate hidden powerhouse. Once revealed, anyone could see that Bang Jiseon should have backed down immediately. But Bang Jiseon knew that showing weakness would mean being trampled by the very girl she had always treated as a loser. Thinking about her future school life, she decided she couldn’t let that happen—and made a dangerous choice.
Smack—
She slapped the back of Shinyong’s head with her palm. Right after, the bell rang for the next class, and Bang Jiseon returned to her seat as if nothing had happened. The teacher entered, and the violence seemed to pause—but that was only the beginning.
Trapped in the snare she had set herself, Bang Jiseon realized she had to keep tormenting Shinyong to maintain her own rank. At the same time, she fell into the delusion that crushing the daughter of Kwon Je-gyun would elevate her own status to something close to the chairman’s daughter. The more frequently and intensely she bullied Shinyong, the more she believed her own position was rising. What had started as a single slap escalated rapidly.
Hiding Shinyong’s textbooks and workbooks to disrupt her studies became routine. Bang Jiseon even recruited her lackeys to extort money and valuables. She would block Shinyong from using the restroom all day under the pretense of “joking around,” and in the worst incident, locked her inside a stall in the boys’ restroom.
In the boys’ restroom, I felt as though I had already been violated. Every vulgar remark from outside seemed directed at me, and I couldn’t even knock on the door for help out of sheer terror. I could only pray for the time to pass quickly.
The abuse wasn’t limited to bizarre cruelty—ordinary violence also intensified. Punches and kicks became daily occurrences, and one time Bang Jiseon even pressed a curling iron against Shinyong’s bare skin.
Shinyong had tried to tell someone. Gathering her courage, she refused Bang Jiseon’s latest extortion demand and warned that if it happened again, she would go straight to the teachers’ office. Bang Jiseon’s whispered reply was chilling.
“Then you know what? You’ll die.”
Shinyong thought dying might be better than living in this pain. As she headed for the teachers’ office, Bang Jiseon grabbed her shoulder and added one more line.
“If the teachers find out, our parents will obviously get involved too—yours and mine. You’re hoping for that, aren’t you? My dad’s at QS Display, which is under your uncle’s line, not your dad’s, so nothing will happen anyway. Your dad’s already losing ground to your uncle in the race for chairman, right? They’re both desperate to take each other down. You want to make things worse between them because of you?”
Shinyong froze. She could accept dying herself, but the thought that she might ruin her father’s position took over completely.
Seong-gyun had once said something similar in that abandoned building.
Those people (Kim Majin and Shinyong) are my sister-in-law and niece too.
If Shinyong had known Seong-gyun’s true feelings, she might have realized that reporting the bullying wouldn’t necessarily damage the relationship between Seong-gyun and Je-gyun. But still a child, she only half-understood the adults’ world—and the result was far more devastating than ignorance.
Her hellish first year of high school had ended. Now, as she prepared to enter her second year, Shinyong lived in constant terror without being able to speak a word—because she had been assigned to the same class as Bang Jiseon once again.
While recounting the long story, Kim Majin finally burst into tears. She opened one page of Shinyong’s notebook and showed it to me. A single page was filled with four large characters:
I'm Hungry
“Bang Jiseon flipped over Shinyong’s lunch tray and caused such a scene that the poor child is starving. Sob.”
For a moment I thought she could at least buy bread at the school store, but the next page erased that thought.
Those devils who used to demand 60,000 won a day only asked for 50,000 today. Is this mercy? No. They found out my daily allowance is exactly 50,000 won.
So Shinyong had been handing over her entire allowance to Bang Jiseon. Of course she couldn’t go to the store.
This rotten high school girl.
“I’ll destroy that Bang Jiseon girl you mentioned—and her father who’s so proud of himself.”
Once the tears cleared from Kim Majin’s eyes, a fierce venom remained.
“Can you really do that? I’ll do anything I can.”
Of course I could. Just last month I had beaten up a chief prosecutor whose father was a National Assembly member. Compared to that, the opponent here was just a high schooler whose father’s only backing was a managing director at QS Display? They would collapse at the slightest touch.
“You don’t need to step forward right now, sister-in-law. I’ll let you know if I need anything.”
“Thank you. This notebook might be useful as evidence. Should I leave it here?”
“I’ll have one of my staff make a copy. From what you’ve told me, I understand why Shinyong didn’t want this to get out. I’ll put it back exactly where it was so she won’t feel burdened. If I need her opinion, I’ll contact you separately.”
A staff member from the headquarters office soon arrived at my summons, took the notebook, copied the entire volume, and returned. Kim Majin received the original back, stood up from her chair, and bowed deeply.
“Thank you so much. Once this matter is settled properly, I think I’ll finally have the peace of mind to accept the position of President of QS EnM that you mentioned earlier.”
After Kim Majin left, I began drafting both the criminal complaint and the civil lawsuit simultaneously while calling Seong-gyun.
“Hyung, are you busy right now?”
Seong-gyun’s reply was curt, still unaware of the situation.
Even if I’m not busy, I’d rather say I am if it’s your call.
The meeting with Je-gyun in the abandoned building must have been quite a shock for him. It was understandable that he wanted to avoid me, who had been there. Or perhaps, since Je-gyun was now completely out of the succession race, he simply didn’t want to exchange pleasantries with his only remaining rival. Maybe, given Seong-gyun’s personality, he was already plotting a long-term, secret strategy to stage a comeback in the race for chairman.
But what I was about to say had nothing to do with any of that. It concerned the family he cherished so deeply.
“It’s about Shinyong. Are you really busy?”
What? Shinyong—Je-gyun’s daughter?
“Yeah. Kim Majin just stopped by the Central Management Division. The kid’s been through something serious at school. You’re not entirely uninvolved either. It’d be better to talk face-to-face. Can you come to QS Tower for a bit?”
What does Je-gyun’s daughter’s school life have to do with me? If you’re up to something weird…
“A daughter of a QS Display employee has been bullying Shinyong for a year because she didn’t like that she’s the granddaughter of the QS Group chairman. The father’s name is Bang Changho. Position: Managing Director.”
Even though I had only given him the surface details, Seong-gyun’s attitude changed instantly.
I’m not busy. I’ll drag that bastard to QS Tower right now. Wait for me.