The Sound of the Heart (4)
Even after a quick shower and a change of clothes, not a single word passed between us on the way to the infirmary.
I was silently regretting what I had done in a fit of rage, while Yoon Seo-a… well. She was probably deciding exactly how she intended to cook me, which was why she kept quiet.
Because of that, the corridor leading to the infirmary was thick with silence. Aside from the faint murmur of lessons drifting from the classrooms we passed, only the soft sound of our footsteps followed us.
If she had started tormenting me the moment we stepped out—now that she no longer had to care about watching eyes—I might have been less afraid. Instead, this silence terrified me.
They say the night before the storm is the quietest of all. The thought had barely formed when Yoon Seo-a, walking ahead of me, came to a stop. We had arrived.
Knock, knock. At her rap on the door, a voice from inside told us to come in. The sliding door opened without a sound, and a fragrant scent washed over us.
It was nothing like the medicinal smell one expected. I was still registering my surprise when the school nurse—no, the doctor—spoke.
“I don’t suppose I need to ask why you’ve come. Would you take a seat over here?”
Without inquiring further, the doctor guided Yoon Seo-a to the chair opposite her own. It was only natural; anyone could tell at a glance that her cheek was swollen red from a blow.
“This may sting a little.”
Having fetched her instruments, the doctor said as much, then lifted a damp cotton pad with forceps and pressed it to the flushed cheek.
Seo-a’s back was to me, so I couldn’t see her expression, but the occasional flinch told me the wound hurt more than expected. And the more it did, the more my heart began to hammer out of control.
Because the pain she felt now was a preview of the violence she would soon visit on me.
Should I have just endured it after all? I had nearly died, yes—but in the end I had survived. She had both caused the wound and offered the cure, yet it was still Yoon Seo-a who had pulled me out of the water.
Acting on a momentary impulse had been far too rash. I had barely lived through it, and now something worse than death might be waiting for me.
While I trembled inwardly, the treatment seemed to finish. The doctor taped gauze over Seo-a’s cheek, then took a blue ice pack from the refrigerator, wrapped it carefully in a towel, and handed it over.
“Fortunately the injury isn’t serious. Keep the ointment on and it should heal quickly. But if you leave the swelling, it may bruise, so you’ll need to ice it all day today. And…”
When the doctor’s gaze turned toward me, I looked away. If my eyes weren’t deceiving me, she was staring at me with a look that said she could kill a person without a second thought.
She regarded me for a long moment, then leaned close to Yoon Seo-a and whispered.
“…How do you wish to handle the disposition?”
“Hic.”
The infirmary was so quiet that the whisper reached my ears anyway. At the doctor’s chilling words a startled sound escaped me; I clapped both hands over my mouth.
But a voice once let free cannot be gathered back up. Yoon Seo-a glanced my way and flicked her hand as if shooing a fly.
“I’ll take care of it myself. Would you give us a moment alone?”
“If the young lady says so.”
Was it only my imagination that the way she said “young lady” felt different from how ordinary people used the word? I shrank into myself as the doctor rose far more promptly than the swimming instructor ever would, brushed past me, and stepped outside.
Just before the door closed, our eyes met through the gap. She said nothing, yet I could have sworn I heard a voice in that look.
If you lay a hand on the young lady, I will not forgive you.
I’m the one being tormented here… Granted, this time I was the one who hit her… I stared after the doctor with a mixture of injustice and fear, but she shut the door without mercy and was gone.
“Ha-eun.”
I flinched. At the voice calling me from behind, I slowly turned my head.
It creaked like an ungreased machine. When I finally faced her, Yoon Seo-a was sitting with her legs crossed, holding the towel-wrapped ice pack to her injury.
Only then did I realize that in this space of roughly twenty pyeong, she and I were completely alone. Fear made my body tremble. Now she’ll take her revenge for the slap.
Looking back, I had been doing something utterly absurd. No matter how much I hated watching her bully Shin So-hye, unlike her I was a commoner with no backing whatsoever.
Refusing to bow, stiffening my neck just because I didn’t want to yield to her harassment—that was pure recklessness.
If she hadn’t still held some measure of goodwill toward me even while tormenting me, something terrible would have happened to me long ago.
And now that I had laid hands on her, that goodwill was surely gone. Realizing it, I opened my trembling mouth.
“Y-Yoon Seo-a… I-I was w-wrong…!”
“…?”
As I kept stammering, Yoon Seo-a tilted her head with a puzzled look.
I was just as frustrated. All I had to do was apologize, so why wouldn’t the words come out?
Yet every time I tried to say I was sorry, a voice rose from deep inside insisting it refused.
I’m the one who should be receiving the apology. I did nothing wrong.
I knew at once where that feeling came from. There was only one force that occasionally moved my body against my will.
Yu Ha-eun, you idiot. This is not the time to show pride…! I pleaded with her desperately inside my head, but my mouth moved first, cruelly.
“Y-you’re the one who was wrong, Yoon Seo-a!”
“…Ha?”
I was finished. The look of pure incredulity on her face made me want to clamp my mouth shut that very second, yet the dam had broken and the words poured out.
“You bullied Shin So-hye, and when I stopped you, you bullied me too! You had your followers lock me in a locker, and at the pool you held me underwater so I couldn’t surface! And you made me eat those grotesque, bizarre things—monkey brains, unborn duckling stew, tuna eyeballs!”
The shock of those meals had been so great that I still had nightmares sometimes.
Hundreds of ducklings trapped inside eggs swarming toward me, a tuna eyeball the size of my own body rolling over to crush me, or my body bound so I couldn’t move while the top of my head was opened and a monkey ate the contents—those kinds of dreams.
“And today you suddenly hugged me underwater and pinned me down until I nearly died! So isn’t a single slap perfectly justified?!”
Of course, if I recalled the me of that moment, one slap would never have been enough.
I would have kept striking her cheek without pause until someone stopped me. The resentment that had piled up was far too great to be released by a single blow.
I stood there panting after the long tirade. Yoon Seo-a said nothing, simply watching me.
Even after my excitement fully subsided and my breathing evened out, she only continued to look at me.
Yes. She just kept looking, as if inviting me to say more if I had anything left.
Only then did I realize what I had done, and my face went deathly pale. There was truly no turning back now.
Yoon Seo-a watched my expression and crooked the corner of her mouth.
“Well then. Have you said every last complaint? Not a single one left out?”
“…Yes! That’s everything. Of course there’s more I’d like to do, but that can’t be put into words, can it?”
I no longer cared. In a gesture of pure resignation I mimed slapping the empty air, and a muffled snort reached my ears. I turned in confusion and found her already holding an open fan over her mouth.
Even so, she could not completely hide the laughter that leaked out. A fan conceals a face; it does not block sound.
While I stared in bewilderment, Yoon Seo-a laughed for a long while, then folded the fan and wiped the corner of her eye with the back of her hand.
She had laughed hard enough to cry—had I really said something that funny? I looked at her with incomprehension, and at last she spoke.
“Hoo… Honestly, I never imagined you could be this entertaining, Ha-eun.”
“Hmph. When all you do every day is torment me without so much as a conversation, how could you possibly know me?”
“You’re right. Exactly as you say. That was my failing.”
“…What? Your failing?”
I had never expected the word “failing” to leave her lips, so my eyes widened of their own accord.
What she did next left my mouth hanging open as well. Yoon Seo-a actually bowed her head to me!
“I’ve been inconsiderate until now, Ha-eun. I never dreamed you disliked it quite so much.”
“How could you not know I disliked it? I’ve always… no, never mind…”
The moment she raised her head again and fixed me with a sharp gaze, as if she had never bowed at all, my voice shrank to a mutter.
So it wasn’t a real apology—just a formality. I hunched my shoulders. Yoon Seo-a straightened her posture once more and continued.
“Certainly, as you said, this incident was my mistake. It isn’t every day one endangers Ha-eun’s life. A single slap is something I can overlook.”
“Th-then…”
“But Ha-eun? That was a matter to be settled between the two of us alone. It was never something to be done in that place. I trust someone as clever as you understands.”
I stared blankly for a moment, then the realization hit and I sucked in a sharp breath.
The act of slapping her itself was something even Yoon Seo-a could accept. After all, she had been the one at fault first.
The problem was the location. Roughly twenty people had been present at the swimming pool during class.
Including the instructor, twenty-one. And aside from the two of us, not a single one of them knew what had actually happened between us.
All they had seen was me striking Yoon Seo-a across the face. Chae-rin, who understood our relationship, had given me a thumbs-up, but to everyone else it must have looked as though I had suddenly assaulted her out of nowhere.
Yet the real issue was not the chain of cause and effect. It was that roughly twenty people had witnessed the act. That alone had dealt a severe blow to Yoon Seo-a’s dignity.
It was no small matter: an upper-class young lady struck by a commoner—me—in front of so many people!
My own face and standing had been damaged as well, of course, but compared to hers there was little left for me to lose.
In pure terms of wrongdoing, her harassment and my slap might have canceled each other out. Their impact, however, existed on entirely different scales.
Think about it. What is the most painful thing for someone being bullied? Being hit and trampled? Being mocked and degraded?
No—it is enduring those things in front of third parties. People feel profound shame when others see them in pain.
Just as one feels humiliation when a professor publicly points out errors after a presentation, or when one is forced to engage in self-criticism before a crowd.
Call it a stretch if you like, but I could not deny that what I had done to Yoon Seo-a was the same.
A single slap, and somehow my guilt has become the deeper one… Isn’t something wrong with this? While I sat dazed with the thought, Yoon Seo-a spoke again.
“From that expression, it seems you’ve realized exactly what you’ve done. Then you already know what I’m about to say, don’t you?”
How am I supposed to know that… I looked at her with anxious eyes. She smiled sweetly.
“For the rest of today, you will nurse me.”
…What?