Karma
Looking back at the chain of events that led to this situation, it went something like this.
The truth was, I hadn't been seeing much of Lee Ye-eun lately. I'd catch her on the way to school, sure, but unlike middle school, high school still had a decent number of manager candidates in the baseball club, so she couldn't step into the role right away.
There were still two third-year seniors holding the position, so we figured there'd be volunteers soon enough. The plan was to wrap things up and hand over the duties by the end of March, then retire from the job. Only after that would Lim Song-ah and Lee Ye-eun become managers.
Outside of baseball club hours, the time I normally crossed paths with Ye-eun was lunch. The one thing this world had going for it that my past life didn't was... actually no — the one thing it had going against it was that there were no school-provided meals. Everyone packed their own lunch. Spreading out our lunchboxes and eating together, just the two of us, had been our routine since elementary school.
"Kim Yi-seon. My mom sent fruit today for you to—"
"Oh? Sorry. I've got to supervise the club guys' lunch drills. It's gonna be like this for a while, so I'll eat on my own. Tell your mom thanks for me."
But lately even that time had been hard to come by — I was too busy monitoring the guys' eating habits and dragging them through basic stretches. Herding cats whose diet choices were a disaster from the very first bite was a full-time job in itself.
"...So you came to school early today too. If you were going to change things up, you could've at least told me the day before. Why didn't I hear a word until I had to ask?"
"Ah, I'm planning to do some light workouts with the dorm kids in the mornings from now on. And I need to check whether they're actually eating breakfast. Left to their own devices, they keep skipping it."
On top of that, I'd started arriving at school earlier and earlier, determined to squeeze in even a little more training time. So the one window where we used to see each other — the walk to school — had been swallowed up too.
And when I announced I was moving into the dorm entirely... something must have been misunderstood.
Which is how I ended up now, dragged to a deserted corner of the school grounds where nobody gathers, facing Lee Ye-eun with tears welling up in her eyes.
"It's not like I'm avoiding you or anything. We just started our first year, and I have to work hard right now. I'm just busy for a bit. Just a bit."
Hearing her say I was dodging her did make me realize, belatedly, how it might have looked. It had honestly never occurred to me until this moment. But I had no reason to do that, did I?
"...Don't lie to me. Even if I never cared about baseball in the first place, I've been the club manager for you for over three years now. And it's not you who's busy."
"The team's busy, so I have to keep up with them. I'm the ace, after all, so—"
"I told you not to lie. Kim Yi-seon. Look me in the eyes."
Her eyes, already bloodshot, brimming right on the edge of spilling over.
"It doesn't make any sense. You, the ace? Since when does the ace act like a coach? Running training while babysitting every single player one by one?"
Hm... she had a point, honestly...
"I'm just trying to do the best I can, okay? I told you before — I want to play baseball for real, seriously."
"Then why Jeil High? No — even further back than that. Why Jeil Middle?"
"Huh?"
"You're not in any position to be playing coach or ace. If you actually wanted to do baseball properly, you'd have gone to another school — one that was strong and that you already had connections with. Why did it have to be here?"
Her expression showed ironclad resolve — this time she was absolutely going to hear an answer.
But I couldn't give her one. I couldn't exactly tell her I'd watched the future through a manga in my past life.
"Going silent again? What is it you're doing that you have to hide it even from me?"
"No, there are reasons for everything. It's just... hard to explain—"
"What exactly is this unexplainable reason? Something you can't even tell me?"
"I'm not trying to deceive you or hide anything, I really just can't—"
"How monumental can this reason possibly be, that it has to stay a secret from me? We've known each other for over ten years now!"
"Hey! Are you my mom or something? Why do you keep digging into everything!"
...Ah.
She'd pushed too hard, and it just slipped out. My body was deep in puberty these days, and my emotions kept running right along with it — I couldn't control myself to save my life.
I stole a glance at Ye-eun, wondering if she was shocked.
"Ha."
But she didn't so much as flinch. She just scoffed.
"...It was your mother who asked me to do this."
And looking closer, there wasn't even anger on her face anymore. Wait — my mother asked her?
"She said her son wouldn't listen if it came from her, so she asked me to check on you. What on earth are you thinking, what are you planning? Do you even remember the last time you had a long conversation with your parents?"
Uh... so that means...
"You don't remember, do you. Because there hasn't been one in ages. You've been strange lately. No — 'lately' is putting it mildly. You've been strange ever since middle school started. Do you know that? Is puberty normally like this?"
It seemed like a lot had built up inside her, because Ye-eun began pouring it all out at once.
"You know this latest excuse of yours is your most transparent one yet? A training camp? Does I look like an idiot to you? Baseball team training camps are a vacation thing. Why on earth would you schedule one in the middle of the semester?"
"You were never, ever the type to approach people first. You get lonely as easily as anyone I know. And yet the moment you saw Kang Min-hyuk, you just got chummy with him? What on earth possessed you back then?"
"Back then I didn't know much about baseball, so I let it slide — but thinking about it now, it makes even less sense. The facilities, the coaches, the scholarships, the commute — Jeil Middle was worse than other schools in every single way. Why did you choose it?
And then you just informed me you were going to Jeil High, with zero explanation? It never even occurred to you to ask what I thought? Or did you never plan on taking me along in the first place?"
"Do you still not know why I became a manager in the first place? You used to be a boy who wouldn't spare a single glance at a girl unless she talked to you first — even if a celebrity walked by. Then you laid eyes on Lim Song-ah and couldn't look away. That's why I started. I was hoping maybe... just maybe.
Do you have any idea what went through my head back then?"
"You say you don't want to get hurt, that you're going to play baseball for a long time — and then you've been a full-time starter since your first year of middle school, constantly straining something, getting hurt, always beaten to a pulp — and you smile and say it's fine?
Wouldn't you have gotten hurt less at a school with proper training facilities and teammates who actually had skill? Why fill in every one of those gaps yourself while your mouth says you won't get hurt?"
She kept firing off grievance after grievance, then at some point stopped, drew in a deep breath, and said:
"And one last thing, really the last... What am I to you? Watching you lately, it feels like you're just toying with me. You like me too. Don't you? Or — no. I thought you did. But now I don't know anything anymore."
Lee Ye-eun was finally letting the tears she'd been holding back fall, and I couldn't answer any of it. Not properly.
Either I wasn't allowed to say it, or even I couldn't be sure of it myself.
When I just stood there opening and closing my fists without a word, Ye-eun turned away from me on the spot.
"Let's take some time... I can't stand by and watch you in silence anymore. I just can't."
And I couldn't bring myself to hold her back as she left those words behind and walked away.
From that day on, the training camp began, but I never saw Lee Ye-eun's face again.
If I had to sum up Kim Yi-seon's behavior in the days that followed in a single phrase, it would be: a training zombie with no romantic sense whatsoever.
Even in that state, he insisted on doing what had to be done. Were we supposed to call that impressive, or just call him a lunatic?
Either way, the original training camp plan suffered no disruption whatsoever. No — it went beyond that. His efficiency was actually superb.
"Good grief, you'd croak after two rounds of what that boy's going through with his girl," Nam Kang-min drawled in his thick Chungcheong accent, and he spoke for every last one of us. Because Yi-seon couldn't get his head straight, the training intensity had only gotten more brutal.
Before, he'd at least adjusted things to each individual's level and condition. Now it was maximum intensity, maximum difficulty, all the time, for everyone.
And that wasn't all. What little trace of humanity he'd had vanished entirely. The manga and web novels he used to read before bed? Not a single page. He just went straight to sleep.
His brief idle chats during school breaks had been replaced by a new daily routine: walking all the way to Lee Ye-eun's classroom to stare at her blankly.
Even that got shut down after Ye-eun relayed a threat through her friends — keep showing up and I really will never see you again — and now he just spaced out in his own classroom instead.
In this sorry state, though, one thing held true: since that day, Lee Ye-eun never once showed her face at the baseball club. She still talked to some extent with her friend Lim Song-ah — and though she claimed she just needed a little time, Song-ah said she still seemed put off by the whole thing.
In Kang Min-hyuk's judgment, that thoughtless fool had unambiguously screwed up. Hearing the whole story from Lim Song-ah, he could hardly believe his ears. What kind of student announces a training camp to his parents as a done deal?
To Kang Min-hyuk, an upright young man of sound morals, it felt like Kim Yi-seon needed to be taken down a peg and get his head on straight. At the very least, training itself wasn't suffering, right?
That was his thinking as he steeled himself to be ruthless for his friend's sake — when Kim Yi-seon drifted into his field of vision.
"...What are you doing right now?"
"What do you mean. Eating."
"This?"
"Gotta eat a lot if you want to bulk up."
Kim Yi-seon, dead-eyed, mechanically shoveling food into his mouth.
And that food consisted of exactly three items: frozen chicken breast of the diet-plan variety, cabbage chopped up carelessly enough that calling it a "salad" felt generous, and a mound of plain white rice.
A mountain of it, stuffed into his mouth with no emotion whatsoever, a vacant look on his face.
This was definitely... getting serious. A sense of crisis crept over Kang Min-hyuk — leave him like this, and the boy would fall apart before he ever came to his senses. Like it or not, this was a core member of the baseball club, and a friend he'd watched for four years.
That very day, Kang Min-hyuk summoned every single club member, and a meeting convened on how to resolve this crisis.
But the problem was this: the handsome first-year boys in question — good-looking beyond all reason — had absolutely zero romantic experience to show for those faces. Thanks to that, nobody had the faintest idea how to handle a situation like this.
The only female club member present, Lim Song-ah — who knew both of the people at the center of it all — wasn't exactly gifted at untangling complicated relationship problems either. If she were, she wouldn't still be circling Kang Min-hyuk without ever making a move.
And so, with the baseball club's marathon meeting producing no viable solution, Kang Min-hyuk turned to the one other girl his age he actually knew, and started consulting her about the situation.
"Haaah... so you're telling me he's completely lost his mind, like a puppy that's lost its owner."
"Hmm... the metaphor's a bit off, but yeah, roughly."
He'd gone to his own little sister, Kang Min-ah.
"...I see. Fine. I'll handle it, so tomorrow you just go tell the Coach for me. That I'm going to pay a visit to the Jeil High baseball club. Knowing his personality, he won't flatly turn down a familiar face."
The moment she finished speaking, Kang Min-ah swiftly tied on her apron.
"S-sis? So... do you have any ideas for how we should fix this?"
"Fix it? If a stray dog shows up, first you take it in and look after it."
Shooing her brother out with a look that plainly said you're in the way, get lost, she headed into the kitchen.
With the capable Kang Min-ah on the case, a resolution certainly seemed possible... and yet something about it felt off to Kang Min-hyuk. An instinct he couldn't put into words — deeply jarring and vaguely unpleasant.
Being even more oblivious than Kim Yi-seon himself, Kang Min-hyuk couldn't articulate the feeling — but if someone had translated it for him, it would have read as follows:
Has Min-ah ever cooked for a single person in her life? Because I know I've never gotten any...