First Story (1)
To Lee Ye-eun, a child who had just turned five, the world was absurdly easy.
Adults, as a rule, love children. And if that child happens to be a pretty, adorable little girl, there's really nothing more to say.
For Lee Ye-eun, who was born with a preternatural sensitivity to people's emotions and attention, a perk like that made living exactly as she pleased as easy as eating cool porridge.
An ordinary kid who threw a tantrum at the mart wanting a toy would have to squirm under her mother's blazing fury before giving up. Lee Ye-eun never needed anything so crude. One soft murmur to a familiar neighborhood auntie or an uncle relative — "Ye-eunie wants that one sooo bad..." — and within days it would arrive at her bedside.
And this wasn't limited to adults. Around the time she was graduating from daycare and entering kindergarten, even the other children were nothing more than easy pieces to move however she wished.
"Ye-eun-ah... this is so pretty..."
"Oh yeah? You want it?"
"Really? Yes!"
The girl in question was one who had originally kept her distance from Lee Ye-eun. But now, over a single worthless sticker, she had become Lee Ye-eun's instant best friend.
Stickers like that were the kind of thing you could get just by flashing aegyo at old Mr. Choi down the street. For sweet-talking someone who had been watching her from a corner of the kindergarten with that faint, unreadable gaze, it was cheap beyond cheap — practically free.
Did that little idiot realize that even her desire for the sticker was something Lee Ye-eun herself had manufactured?
It wasn't hard. For Lee Ye-eun, who stayed on the kindergarten teachers' good side, planting the idea that "kids these days just love these stickers" took almost no effort at all. No adult on earth suspects a small child of lying about something like that.
And once the teachers believed it, it stopped being a lie. The teachers began handing out pretty stickers as rewards, and when Lee Ye-eun roped her friends into pretending it was genuinely the latest trend, not a single child could hold out.
On top of that, if that girl's best friend (or so she believed — actually a spy Lee Ye-eun had planted) reported back a detailed read on her exact tastes, the game was as good as over. All that remained was the scene before her now: a girl losing her mind over a sticker that matched her preferences perfectly.
It wasn't only children who were so easily swayed. Adults were exactly the same.
Lee Ye-eun was a lovely child, but even so, there were always a few grown-ups who found her vaguely off-putting. Yet with the veneer of adulthood and a generous helping of childlike innocence (performed, of course), flipping their attitudes was a simple matter.
And so, for Lee Ye-eun, the world was easy. Whatever she wanted more or less ended up in her hands, and everyone liked her. The boys competed to be her seatmate, and the girls wore the title of Lee Ye-eun's best friend like a badge of honor.
"Oh my~ So you're Yi-seon? How did you get so cute? One look at you and I can tell you take after your daddy."
"Hey, watch your mouth, lady. My son obviously takes after me. Now, Yi-seon-ah, this is Auntie Ji-hye, Mommy's friend. And over there is Ye-eunie — she'll be going to the same kindergarten as you. Go on, say hello."
"Hi."
And when a boy with real value showed up in front of Lee Ye-eun like this, the future was obvious. Naturally, he was going to be hers.
"Hey. Why are you avoiding me?"
Ye-eun had been chattering away nonstop — what did he like, which daycare did he go to, had he ever watched such-and-such cartoon — and he had answered exactly none of it. Just flat-out ignored every word.
And now she was glaring at him with the kind of cold, chilling stare that made him wonder if five-year-olds were even supposed to have eyes like that.
But how was he supposed to explain himself?
Even in the original story, Lee Ye-eun was drawn as a beauty — but she was, pure and simple, the vicious harpy who had Kim Yi-seon wrapped around her finger. So how exactly was he supposed to tell her, to her face, that even as a tiny child she set off his instincts to run?
Being called a lunatic would be one thing, but the girl was clearly this scary even now. If he blurted out something weird here and triggered some unpredictable reaction, who knew what would happen. The priority was avoiding her attention altogether.
Kim Yi-seon, his brain running sluggish in its regressed five-year-old body, wrung it as hard as he could in search of an excuse.
Lee Ye-eun. Even in the original, her viciousness was the finest in the land — a genuine villain's position.
Kim Yi-seon himself wasn't exactly a well-mannered character, but Lee Ye-eun was a cut above even him. She got a small redemption arc near the end, but it amounted to little more than "ah, so Lee Ye-eun really does love Kim Yi-seon sincerely" — her rotten personality never actually changed.
Worse, in the Kang Min-ah arc she appeared not as the ringleader of the bullying but as the black hand pulling strings from behind the curtain. Which meant the obvious conclusion: stay uninvolved. He didn't even know yet whether he'd play baseball at all, but what possible upside was there in making an enemy of Kang Min-hyuk?
Smiling on the outside while under pressure no child should have been able to exert, Kim Yi-seon produced the most age-appropriate, most universally accepted excuse he could muster.
"Boys don't play with girls."
There it was. Boys this age got teased mercilessly just for hanging around girls, and they were ashamed of it. Though somehow Ye-eun always seemed to be the exception to everything.
But Lee Ye-eun showed no reaction to this answer either. No — if anything, she broke into a wide smile and replied,
"Okay, got it. Come talk to me if you change your mind."
Her pride stung a little, but fair enough. It happens.
Ye-eun was no stranger to boys giving her that particular reckless, thick-headed brush-off. Quite a few had, in fact.
And every one of those boys now hovered around her, desperately hoping she'd choose them as her seatmate.
How? Simple. If someone didn't want to play with you, you just made sure there was no one else for them to play with.
"Ye-eun-ah, what's wrong?"
"It's nothing. It's just, Yi-seon and me..."
"Yi-seon and you what?"
"Nothing."
First, she let the mood seep out among her friends and followers. A face that looked melancholy, wounded — but artfully calibrated, showing just enough tears to signal something irreparable without ever actually tipping into open crying.
Her friends, long since fluent in Lee Ye-eun, read the signal instantly. Kim Yi-seon made Ye-eunie sad!
Stage one, complete.
But this alone couldn't fully isolate Kim Yi-seon.
"Ye-eun-ah, what are you drawing?"
"My friends in the cat class. This is Ji-hye, and this is Se-ah, and—"
"...Then who's this boy right here?"
"That's Yi-seon."
A picture of Ye-eun playing happily with her friends while a mean-faced Kim Yi-seon shoves away the version of her trying to join them.
The teacher's expression turned faintly grave, and she lapsed into thoughtful silence.
That was stage two.
And the final stage three...
"Did my princess have fun playing again today?"
"Yep! We played princess AND freeze tag~"
"Aww, did you? And who did you play with today?"
"With Ji-su and Hui-jae and... and..."
"Hm? Ye-eun-ah. Is something the matter?"
"Mm-mm... it's nothing."
Planting subtle hints with the parents, too. Naming Kim Yi-seon outright would be amateur hour — that way the situation could be flipped back too easily. No, the parents had to hear that name strictly from the mouths of other children and the kindergarten teachers.
Layer the groundwork like that, stage a few more scenes of her approaching Kim Yi-seon and getting brushed off, and then—
"I won't sit in the seat Kim Yi-seon sat in!"
"Yi-seon-ah, your teacher's been worried about you lately."
"Son? Can we have a little talk with Mommy?"
And just like that, everyone around him turned their backs on Kim Yi-seon in one clean sweep.
Easy, as always.
Wow. This girl is rotten to the core.
I stayed uninvolved precisely because I saw this coming — I just never imagined that simply declining once would earn me a grudge like this.
To be fair, it wasn't confirmed that Lee Ye-eun was behind all this. She never showed her hand directly, and in fact she was the only one who still came up to me and spoke to me in a friendly way even amid all this.
But if you can't see it, you're an idiot. Childish as the execution was, the method was almost identical to what I'd watched in the manga.
Not crude "don't play with him" ostracism, but agitation of the "that kid is a bad person" variety — branding him. And she didn't stop at the kids; she pulled in the teachers and the adults too.
This girl was born doing politics. Incredible, honestly.
"Kim Yi-seon virus~"
"Hey! Don't touch me!"
Then again, the opposition was only at about that level, so it was bearable. I never planned on joining the kids' games in the first place, and brutal as the method was, wasn't this exactly what I wanted?
The adults, for their part, treated me less with anger or contempt than with worry — I was still just a child, after all. Which meant the lectures from teachers and parents never rose above the "you should get along with your friends" tier.
Seriously — as the price of severing ties with a venomous girl like Lee Ye-eun, this was cheap. Look at the Kim Yi-seon of the manga. There, he's written as a guy who holds mild affection for Ye-eun but no real romantic feelings, and she becomes a deranged obsessive who drives off every girl around him in one-sided jealousy.
One of the actual episodes was the heroines taking pity on him and helping him deal with her. The more I think about how she made people who'd been cooing at her one second prior feel that way about her, the more absurd it gets.
Better to get vaccinated now, early, and shake her off fast. I can't even imagine how hard it would be to pry her loose later.
"Hey! Hey! Kim Yi-seon!"
"You think you can use your eraser like that?"
"Who cares, Ye-eunie gave me a new one. The old one's for this. Take that! And that!"
Just how cunning and crafty this girl really was—
"Kim Yi-seon pooped his pants at kindergarten!"
"Hey... are you allowed to just spill water like that?"
"So what. It's Kim Yi-seon, isn't it."
—an honest man like me couldn't even imagine it in his worst nightmares.
"You Kim Yi-seon? Hey, answer me."
"Dae-hyun, that's enough."
"No way, he's disrespecting my little bro."
So yeah. I figured I'd just let it roll off me, take it in moderation.
"Ugh, this is pissin' me off."
Turns out I can't.
"Get over here, you little punk. Yeah, you — who else is standing here right now?"
Swallowed anger festers into disease.
Lee Ye-eun was thoroughly confused by the situation.
What on earth was happening?
"...I honestly don't get what's so great about Kim Yi-seon. He just goes around hitting kids all the time."
"Right? Ji-su's brother got hit just last week."
"Isn't Ji-su's brother seven?"
Her friends, gossiping about how awful Kim Yi-seon supposedly was. Ha — what a joke. If anyone looked at Lee Ye-eun's friends right now and genuinely believed they hated or feared Kim Yi-seon, she'd advise them to see an eye doctor immediately.
Every single gaze was unmistakably laced with admiration and affection. All this badmouthing was, purely and simply, them watching their own backs.
"...Wouldn't Kim Yi-seon actually be the number one at Jamsil Kindergarten?"
"He's only five and a half. Jae-min's the number one."
"But Dae-hyun's the number two, and he got flattened by Kim Yi-seon. Number one couldn't even do that, could he?"
"Guess we'll find out. Number one's still Jae-min."
And on the other side, the boys whispering among themselves. Their eyes, whenever Kim Yi-seon came up, held not just fear but a strange, unmistakable glimmer of awe — and Lee Ye-eun was hardly the sort to miss it.
She couldn't understand it. How had things come to this?
Her plan had never been crude enough to involve directly administering violence. Sure, the occasional hot-headed brat would swat at Kim Yi-seon now and then, but the board she had laid out was designed to flow entirely through words and social exclusion.
So her side had merely said words — and Kim Yi-seon was the one who had answered with one-sided violence. The other children had simply been the ones hit.
Unprovoked violence, in the eyes of adults and children alike, might inspire fear, but it earned no goodwill. In fact, part of her design had been to quietly bait him into swinging first.
Naturally, Kim Yi-seon was not the first boy among those she had artfully cornered to react this way. That much had been within her calculations.
But normally, a boy who swung like that got written off as a gorilla — either shunned by the children and kept at arm's length, or sternly disciplined by the adults until his spirit broke and he turned timid. It was always one of the two.
Lee Ye-eun's judgment had not been wrong. If Kim Yi-seon had been an ordinary boy his age, that's exactly how it would have gone.
But sitting inside Kim Yi-seon's childish head, obliviousness and all, was the mind of a college-educated working adult with his military service done.
He wasn't about to crumble because adults lectured him that violence was bad or doled out a little corporal punishment, and he certainly wasn't afraid of a scrappy scrap with soft, everyone-wins adjudication where drawing blood counted as victory.
And if he had lost even once, he'd have been written off as nothing but a violent lunatic. Instead, having battered his way through kids all the way up to elementary schoolers, Kim Yi-seon now sat on the throne of Jamsil Kindergarten's undisputed king.
Human nature is to worship even unreasonable violence when it reaches its extreme — and on children, still slaves to their nature, it works all the more powerfully.
"I actually like Kim Yi-seon... Do you think I could confess?"
"Hey, watch it! Don't let Ye-eunie hear!"
And with that, the situation began slipping completely out of Lee Ye-eun's control.
The mature Lee Ye-eun of the future would have called for a tactical retreat right here. No — she'd never have attempted such a clumsy scheme in the first place.
But five-year-old Lee Ye-eun, who had looked at the world as easy for her entire existence, had never once seen things refuse to flow the way she intended.
And so, Lee Ye-eun played the worst possible move.
"Ji-su. What were you all just talking about?"
"What?! No, it was nothing! Just stuff we know about, among us."
"Really? Then why do I feel like I heard Kim Yi-seon's name?"
The interrogation and purge of a traitor, on the spot. Lee Ye-eun, who was always everyone's friend and never once took sides, chose a side in that instant.
"Ji-su, don't even think about playing with me anymore."
"Ye-eun-ah?"
"Why do you like Kim Yi-seon!"
A tantrum the old Lee Ye-eun would never have thrown. Everyone's friend, everyone's seatmate — in that moment, she set down the total command she had always held.
And just like that, the situation slipped entirely from Lee Ye-eun's grasp.