I'll Just Eat Alone, Then
"You all understand, right? This isn't break time, so no going out into the hallway, and if you need the bathroom, go quietly and come right back. Don't be so loud that the other classes can hear you~"
"Yeeees."
Is there any day busier for teachers than the first day of the semester? Unless it's a festival day or some incident breaks out, I figure today is probably the busiest of their whole year.
Must be exhausting for them.
And naturally, the moment the teacher stepped out, the little gremlin children erupted, shrieking and running wild in every direction. The noise level was practically indistinguishable from a zoo.
"Come out here, whoever's playing Chloe. Big bro's gonna destroy all of you."
"Kim Hyun-min, you suck at this game. Everybody below me, stand down."
The boys had all clumped together in one corner for a mobile game showdown, while the girls had split into two factions, swarming around a single desk like ants that had discovered a breadcrumb, chattering away in a dense hum.
"Look at this. My photo card stickers arrived yesterday, but the quality is so trash I can't even use them."
"What is this? Where'd you buy it? Did you order it off Temu?"
"No? And it wasn't even cheap, and it still came out like this."
"Just buy from the shop you always use. Are you rich? Why do you keep throwing money on the ground?"
As it happened, Yu Choa's desk was right behind mine, so a bunch of terrifying little girls plopped themselves down at my desk, shoved their chairs right up against it, and bombarded me with conversation I could barely follow.
"Eve, do you collect photo cards too?"
"Ph-photo cards...? I'm not really into that stuff, sorry..."
Apparently they print tiny pictures of idols, slip them into cases, and slap stickers and rhinestones all over them — and honestly, I have zero understanding of that whole aesthetic. I was never into idols to begin with, and besides, what's the point of encasing a photo in a pristine case only to bury it under that many stickers?
Folding hand mirrors, the kind you'd keep on a desk, had materialized from who-knows-where, and there were already four of them sitting on my desk. Naturally they were plastered with stickers too, so just looking at them made my head spin.
"Wow, so Eve, what do you normally do then?"
"Me...? Just look at my phone...?"
"Do what on your phone? Reels? You don't do Taektok?"
"I don't do that one... Reels sometimes."
I figured if I mentioned anything about galleries or forums to them, it wouldn't lead anywhere good, so I kept my mouth shut.
"What games do you play?"
"Oh! Games, I—"
"Do you do Zepeto?"
"U-uhh...?"
The game talk didn't give me much to relate to either. They were already all friends with each other on every social media app, and they kept shoving their phones in my face — here's a trip I went on, here's the makeup I bought at Olive Young, film it and post it, tag a ton of friends so they like it, that sort of thing, constantly.
"Can't I follow you?"
"My account's a bit..."
"Just make a burner. Looking at your photos, you've got a ton of foreign followers."
"Don't you get like, a million sponsorship offers? So jealous, honestly."
"I guess I get some, but I don't really pay attention... I do check the DMs that come from companies..."
"Companies? For real? Is a million followers really that different? Have you worked with some brand?"
"Hmm... I think there's a confidentiality clause...? Or maybe it's fine to talk about now?"
Come to think of it, they did say the modeling work I did at Royal Mayfair would run in the March issue. It was probably okay to mention by now.
"I did a bit of a photo shoot... for a place called Mayfair."
"Mayfair? No way, seriously?"
"That place is insanely famous. How'd that even happen?"
"They just DM'd me asking if I wanted to try modeling, I said sure, went to England, and took some pictures. That's it."
"Wow, so you're a model? When do the photos come out?"
"They said the March issue, but I'm not sure."
The moment I finished talking, the girls sitting around me started tapping away at their phone screens. Maybe because these days you can buy and read magazines entirely online, it took less than a few minutes before they were shoving screens in my face.
"This one? Who's the girl on the cover?"
"Oh, that's Eloise—"
"You know her? Were you two following each other?"
"Yeah. She's my friend..."
"Wow, you have English friends too. Okay, I'm buying this. I'm buying it off you."
"U-uhh...? Thanks...? But isn't that expensive...?"
"Eloise has 1.84 million followers too. Together you two are at three million."
No idea why they're adding them together, but a Mayfair magazine isn't exactly something you can just pick up on a whim, I'd think. Maybe around twenty bucks a copy?
The girl who'd bought the magazine swiped through the pages until she found my spread, then passed it around to the others and made an enormous fuss about it.
"Oh my god, you're really in here. Hey, hey, look at this."
"These were taken in England? For real?"
Come to think of it, Ophelia had recently posted an actual photo of the magazine on my account. Was promoting the account part of the contract too? The cover, of course, featured Eloise — kid model, ambassador, and influencer. I vaguely remembered chatting with her briefly when the magazine dropped.
Our conversation had been pretty patchy, since our time zones didn't line up.
"Your England trip is on your feed too. Isn't Claridge's like, crazy expensive?"
"I-is it...? Mayfair just arranged the place..."
"So this is what an influencer is."
"I'm telling you, Ham Si-eun is literally just a famous liar."
"Agreed."
From context, I gathered Ham Si-eun was a sixth-grade senior with twenty thousand followers on Taektok.
"Okay, listen to this, Eve. She stopped Minseo in the hallway and chewed her out for not saying hello while walking past. And you know what she actually said?"
"Wh-what did she say...?"
"She said if she made this public, she'd drag her account down into the gutter. Like that's even possible?"
"With twenty thousand followers...? That seems like a bit of a stretch..."
"Right? It's ridiculous. But Minseo just humors her in person, and now she acts like she's somebody."
Minseo — who had gathered eight thousand followers by dissecting juicy stories of teachers getting their comeuppance, all while fidgeting with a slime toy — absolutely shredded the Ham Si-eun senior she'd never even met, right in front of me.
These are elementary schoolers? Where did all the innocence I remember from my own elementary school days go? Even back when I was a kid, I don't think we were like this.
"Oh, right. Want me to show you her account?"
"Ah, mm."
"Here it is. She can't dance for crap either, I'm telling you, it's hilarious."
On the screen, a girl with caked-on heavy makeup was dancing to a song I'd heard even on Reels, in a dark room flashing with what looked like gamer rainbow lighting. It seemed to be a karaoke room, with friends or whoever sitting on a couch in the background gripping microphones.
Hold on a second. These are elementary schoolers? She looks at least twenty.
Should I call it mature-looking, or prematurely aged? Either way, the sense of dissonance was staggering, and I don't think I could give it a compliment. Her face was slathered white with makeup, clashing horribly with the color of her neck, her eyes were painted like some kind of artwork, and her eyebrows looked like they'd been cut from a strip of seaweed and stuck on.
Do they genuinely think this is pretty? The skin-tight clothes, the tiny skirt... just looking at it made me feel briefly dizzy.
"Uh, sorry. I'm just not into this stuff."
"Right? She looks like an absolute clown."
"Go say something to her, Eve."
What was I supposed to say to someone I'd never even properly met? I just laughed awkwardly and brushed it off, and Kim Minseo shook her head with a heavy, dramatic sigh.
"Eve, don't you have any stories? Like hunter stories. Choa never tells us anything."
"Sorry, but I haven't really done any proper hunter work yet."
"Oh, really? Sorry."
"I don't think I have anything interesting anyway. There's a lot I can't talk about because of confidentiality clauses..."
"See? Eve gets it. Everything hunters do is classified."
"Choa, you're not in the Union yet, are you?"
"My mom's in the Union, and once I start hunter classes I'll get a provisional license, right? Then I'll be a Union member."
"Oh? What about you, Eve? What's your affiliation?"
"I don't have a guild."
"What, seriously? Eve, come to the Union. I'll take good care of you."
"Ahaha... But I've got a collaboration... thing going with Nova, so that might be hard."
"Ugh, Nova sucks, seriously."
I genuinely couldn't tell if I was talking to elementary schoolers or if I'd wandered into an office job at a female-dominated workplace. Half my mind checked out as I drowned in the endless torrent of gossip, and then the bell rang.
Siiiigh...
Had I just been adopted by these kids? Honestly speaking, I'd rather hang out with the quiet ones playing up front, but the girls around here were way too intense for me.
"Eve, let's go eat. Awakened students have to eat first and then move seats."
"Oh, really? First I'm hearing of it."
"You fell asleep during the opening ceremony, huh."
"Wha..."
Clutching Daengdaengi, who was sleeping soundly through all the racket, I got up from my seat, and Choa, who'd been sitting behind me, sidled up, slung an arm around my shoulder, and started talking.
"And Eve, if it gets to be too much, tell me."
"U-uhh...?"
"The girls talk a lot and it's exhausting, right? Honestly it's easier to just tune it out and let it wash over you."
"I-is that so..."
For a split second I almost blurted out, 'God yes, it was torture, please tell them to never talk to me again' — but then I hesitated, wondering what if this was some kind of sting operation.
One wrong word here and I could just imagine it: 'Eve thinks she's all that, blah blah blah...'
"Anyway, we have hunter classes from fifth period today, and starting tomorrow, after second period ends, everyone in third period is dead to each other. I'm closer with the hunter seniors than with these kids anyway."
"Oh... really?"
"Mm. Except on days when something comes up and we skip hunter class, I eat all my meals with the seniors too. I've known them since first through third grade, so I just hang out with them."
Though hearing her bring it up again later, I started to wonder if she really meant it.
The cafeteria wasn't the school-lunch-tray setup I'd imagined; it worked more like a highway rest stop — buy a meal ticket at a kiosk, hand over the receipt, and pick up your food. There were so many students that the cafeteria was split across two floors, and the middle and high school seniors were there too.
Wow, those must be the first-graders. They're tiny.
There were also the super-tiny kids lining up for food under their homeroom teacher's supervision. Honestly, from where I stood, fourth grade and first grade were one and the same, but looking at them now, the first-graders really did seem impossibly young.
"Choa, are you heading straight there after lunch?"
"That's the plan. With Eve."
"Where's 'there'?"
"The hunter classes. I told you, remember? It's in a different building from this one."
"Ah, I see..."
The kiosks were crammed with an absurd abundance of mouthwatering-looking food. Back in my elementary school days, if chlorella rice and burdock root stew showed up on the menu, cafeteria windows would shatter one by one — but here you could pick whatever you wanted to eat. So convenient.
"Eve, look over there."
"Hm? What is it?"
Choa, waiting behind me to place her order, tapped my shoulder. I turned around and saw a cluster of students with every hair color imaginable sitting together eating. Judging by their size, definitely not elementary schoolers — middle or high schoolers at a glance.
"The Hunter Class seniors. Let's go eat over there."
"Oh, okay. Got it. Daengdaengi, card out, please."
— Beep...
I ordered the pork cutlet set, rubbed Daengdaengi's butt against the card reader until the payment went through, handed the receipt to the lunch lady, and after a short wait the food came out quickly.
"Choa, are you close with the seniors...?"
"I am. The middle and high schoolers come around to the third-grade classrooms and check in on the little kids' faces, you know? They're all really nice, though. Don't worry."
"Mm. Okay."
Food in hand, Choa and I headed over toward where the awakened students were gathered, and then—
"Hey, Gyeong-won. Your shot-calling yesterday was absolute dogshit."
"Orders tend to be a little hard to follow if you don't study."
"The hell did you just say? I'll smash your grandma's entire soy sauce crockery stand."
"My grandma got rid of her crockery stand three years ago."
"Why do grandmas these days never make their own soybean paste anymore. Gyeong-won's grandma's paste was insanely good, man."
"Because she passed away, you absolute dumbass."
"Hey. An Gyeong-won. Na Byeong-ho. Elementary division behind you. Watch your mouths."
"Huh?"
"E-uh, um... th-that is... I mean... you shouldn't f-fight..."
High schoolers are terrifying these days.