A Sabaeja's Clever School Life (3)
There she was! Her!
My three-stripe Nike slippers. The weapon of my pride. To them, nothing but contemptible everyday junk. I kept my foot planted on Oh Gwangjun's face and turned toward the sound.
A girl had just stepped through the back door of the classroom and frozen mid-stride. The moment I saw her, she filled my entire field of vision. The whole room seemed to brighten around her.
In my past life, just looking at her had made me shrink. She was the young lady of a noble house—someone commoners like us weren't even supposed to dare stare at.
"Still pretty, no matter how many times I look…"
The thought slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it.
About 170 centimeters tall. A short bob. A tiny, flawlessly white face without a single blemish. Perfectly balanced features and golden-ratio proportions. The girl who got flooded with agency business cards the second she stepped outside school—Lee Hyoju.
Unlike the other girls, she didn't even wear makeup. Fresh, youthful skin. Pure innocence that shone all on its own. Beneath her natural double eyelids, large eyes locked straight onto me.
Clear.
As far as I knew, she would go on to enter Korea University. And that girl was…
"……??"
Lee Hyoju's eyes went round. She looked at me with pure question, demanding an explanation for the sudden remark. No one at this school had ever said something like that to her face.
And the situation itself was ridiculous. Oh Gwangjun, the one who'd been running the class like a drill sergeant, was pinned under my slipper. Me, standing on his face and spouting nonsense—of course I looked insane.
"……Ha Taewoong, you finally lost it, huh?"
"He just called Lee Hyoju pretty!!"
A buzz rippled through the kids. I understood the reaction perfectly.
Lee Hyoju was the real deal—the granddaughter of an actual chaebol family. Granddaughter of the current chairman of the Oyang Group, roughly sixtieth on Korea's corporate ranking. Like most chaebol families, her father served as CEO of one of the affiliates. But that wasn't all.
Her great-uncle was the sitting chairman of the Doa Ilbo, one of the three major daily newspapers. She sat at the very core of the tangled web of political and business marriages that bound the chaebol together. Wealth and media fused into a single apex predator class. She belonged there by birthright.
Her bloodline went all the way back to Sangchon Lee Jangsu, the richest man in Korea during the Japanese occupation. Look at that soft golden aura radiating from her entire body. The proud bearing and the aura together made her stand out even more.
And that Lee Hyoju…
She let out a short, incredulous laugh.
"Ha Taewoong."
She said my name correctly. The first time anyone had called it since I entered Cheonghwa. An honor for the family name.
"Yeah."
Our eyes met for the first time as well. I looked straight into her pupils.
"Think you can handle it?"
Her gaze dropped to Oh Gwangjun under my slipper. She knew. Out of every student in Class 3 of the second year, I was the super underdog. She was trying to wake me up to the reality of standing on one of the top dogs I was supposed to revere.
"More or less."
Oh Gwangjun's father's job bothered me a little, but it didn't scare me. A prosecutor? I already had ways of dealing with that side of things.
"Don't do this again. No violence in my classroom."
My classroom, she said. Lee Hyoju was our class president. A near-perfect perfectionist. To someone who treated even the class presidency as another line on her résumé, classroom violence was simply unacceptable.
She didn't bother asking why I'd done it to Oh Gwangjun.
Soft footsteps. After that single line she brushed past me with light steps.
She casually plucked a pack of wet wipes from someone's desk and dropped them in front of Oh Gwangjun's face.
"Clean up your own filth."
A clear voice stripped of all emotion. Still pinned under my foot, Oh Gwangjun trembled. A single word from the Brahmin caste was absolute command.
"You heard her? Clean up the shit you made yourself. Heh."
I gave him the same laugh he used to give me. I wasn't going to take it anymore. This was how you lived a clever school life. When they step on you, you thrash. When they show their teeth, you bite. If I just endured the way I used to, I wouldn't be Ha Taewoong.
I'd endured, and the world still refused to roll the way I wanted. Either way, the world kept rolling exactly as it always had. I had no more attachment to Cheonghwa High. With my current ability I could just take the GED route if I wanted.
But…
"This is fun."
The school life of a Sabaeja, play button pressed. Peak entertainment. I was looking forward to it.
Lee Hyoju sat down and tried to work through the math problems her tutor had printed out for her. The pen wouldn't move the way she wanted. Her head was stuffed full of stray thoughts and she felt stifled.
The disastrous scene she had just witnessed. The shock still lingered. She had acted composed, but she had been afraid. From a luxury private kindergarten in Gangnam all the way to Cheonghwa, she had seen petty violence before, but never anything as extreme as what had just happened.
Ha Taewoong, standing on someone's face and laughing. He had looked like a safari hunter who had just bagged a wild beast. He was definitely crazy.
In class he had always been quieter than anyone. Model-level height and looks, yet a Sabaeja. He had known his place and behaved accordingly. Lee Hyoju had seen plenty of aspiring idols who strutted around on nothing but their faces. She had never felt the slightest personal curiosity about Ha Taewoong. His grades were decent enough, but he had never broken through the Sabaeja wall.
Oh Gwangjun sometimes crossed the line in class, but never enough to really bother her. That was simply the world she had grown up watching. Only the strong were allowed to lift their heads. Power, wealth, connections—if you were missing even one, you became weak. And the moment you became weak, you lowered your head. She had absorbed that truth into her bones as she grew.
Yet today the Sabaeja Ha Taewoong had reached out and touched the solid creed she lived by. He had raised a flag of rebellion. He had changed. Why?
He had looked at her and said she was still pretty. An impossible provocation. Outside her own family, no one around her would ever dare say something like that. And yet… it hadn't felt bad.
When their eyes met, Ha Taewoong hadn't looked away the way he always used to.
"Heh."
A small, inexplicable laugh slipped out. The punishment for today's assault wouldn't be light. Word had almost certainly already spread. First of all, Oh Gwangjun—with a chief prosecutor for a father—wouldn't let it go. And he ran with several other foul-tempered bastards as well.
"Just don't make this my problem…"
Lee Hyoju muttered quietly to herself. Ever since entering Cheonghwa, her position among her cousins had become awkward. It was one of those things chaebol children went through on the road to adulthood, carrying several meanings at once. Soon it would be decided how much of the family fortune each of them would receive.
When she was younger she had dreamed of living freely like ordinary people. Not anymore. Wasn't there a saying in the Talmud that nothing is worse than an empty wallet? Lee Hyoju, born of chaebol blood, had long since grasped how the world really worked.
Ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling-ling~♬
Fourth period ended.
"Next week's midterm covers everything we did today. I don't need to tell you how important speech and writing are, right?"
Teacher Han Yura offered a bright-eyed smile.
"You'll make the questions easy, right?"
"Teacher! Just a little hint!"
No matter how special they were outside, inside a high school classroom they were all the same teenagers. When it came to an objective exam, chaebol and Sabaeja stood on equal ground.
"I'd love to. But you know the other teachers' standards."
Second-year Korean. The exam was jointly written by three teachers.
"It's too hard…"
"You teachers' questions are the worst!!"
True to its reputation as an elite private high school, the difficulty was on another planet. Even among the top-tier instructors in Gangnam, Cheonghwa High's questions were considered the absolute peak.
"Enjoy your lunch."
With quick little steps, the adorable teacher slipped out of the classroom.
I stood up. This was the moment I had been quietly waiting for ever since returning to school.
Lunchtime!
Cheonghwa High's cafeteria operated on a completely different level from any other school. Just thinking about it made me swallow hard. I was about to leave the classroom when—
"Fucking bastard…"
A curse thick with hatred came from behind me. I raised my right hand nice and straight.
"Eat shit, you bastard."
I flipped him a clean middle finger and headed for the cafeteria with light steps. Right now, no matter what anyone said, lunch was the absolute priority. My stride was bold and full of swagger.
The cafeteria had been newly completed beside the main building a few years earlier. Unlike other schools, they didn't cram every grade into the same space on a staggered schedule. The hyper-competitive parents and committee members couldn't stand the idea of wasting even a scrap of free time. This cafeteria was big enough to hold the entire student body. The third-years had their own separate cafeteria in the new annex, so everyone could eat at the same time. Full air-purification systems and climate control were installed throughout.
As an autonomous private high school, Cheonghwa freely accepted enormous donations from outside figures. Not just anyone's money, of course. You needed both wealth and power to join the operating committee or the parent association. Those people were the real donors. If you wanted a textbook model for those luxury-school power-trip dramas, Cheonghwa High was it.
The reinforced-glass doors of the cafeteria slid open automatically. The panorama that opened before my eyes—
"Whoa!"
I let out a single note of pure admiration and grabbed a plate. These weren't ordinary stainless-steel cafeteria trays. Cheonghwa High lunch was…
"A buffet. Heh."
A former hotel executive chef and a nutritionist with a doctoral degree ran the place. It started with organic vegetable salads and moved on to high-quality meats like Jeju black pork and premium Korean hanwoo beef, oversized fried fish like tilefish and large hairtail, an array of appetite-whetting side dishes, pizza and spaghetti, seasonal fruits from every country, and even sliced cake. Food a Sabaeja like me would probably never buy with his own money in his entire life, lined up in abundance. And there were two full sets of everything on either side.
"Why doesn't everyone eat this good stuff?"
Only about half the student body used the cafeteria each day. With so much space and so few people, the atmosphere was peaceful. After graduating from Cheonghwa, this was the one thing I had missed. The high-quality free meals. Even as a working adult I had felt it—this put famous hotel buffets to shame. Cheonghwa High, you take your cafeteria seriously. I love you with all my heart!!
"Hanwoo bulgogi! Japchae! Young radish kimchi!"
I loaded my plate with a generous, heartwarming selection of dishes. Unlimited free food for a Sabaeja. I heaped on a big scoop of premium Koshihikari rice as well and scanned the room.
Students sat in loose clusters of friends, eating. Among them, one student sat alone at a four-person table, quietly having his meal. My lips twitched with automatic delight.
"Long time no see… you scary little bear cub."