After School
Nom, nom.
The ribs melted the instant they touched my tongue. I wore a blissful smile and savored every last bit of the flavor, while Haru and Bora were just as busy eating beside me. Ribs this good weren't the sort of thing you got to have often.
"They melt. They just melt in your mouth."
Bora was putting an appetite on full display that she had never shown us before. I was fairly sure she had said something about watching her weight... Curiosity got the better of me, so I asked her outright.
"Bora, didn't you say you were managing your weight?"
"Th-that was... Oh! Tomorrow! I decided I'm starting tomorrow, Hana."
"Oh yeah?"
If it started tomorrow, then today was fair game. I picked the pieces of meat stacked on my plate up one by one with my chopsticks and popped them into my mouth. I didn't even have to lift a finger. Haru and Bora kept setting perfectly cooked meat down on my plate themselves, and I ate only what the two of them brought me, like a baby bird opening its beak to be fed.
I did manage a vegetable now and then, but the share was tiny. Unable to watch any longer, Bora went so far as to lay a soy-pickled onion on top of my meat. Face scrunched, I had no choice but to eat it.
"Hana. Are you only going to eat meat?"
Haru asked. I nodded. A child, properly speaking, was always at a growing age, and meat was so much better besides. Vegetables still felt a little hard to face.
Smiling, I kept picking up more. As expected, meat tasted best when you ate it somewhere good. The moment it entered my mouth, it felt as if it melted away to nothing.
Wasn't meat supposed to need a fair amount of chewing before it would go down? These ribs were different. I barely got through a few chews before the meat slid smoothly past my throat.
For the first time in ages, I was able to feast on ribs until my stomach was stretched tight.
"Hana, you understand, right?"
"Haru, I'm not a little kid! I got it the first time."
Haru caught my hand and pressed the point again and again, as if she couldn't say it enough. If she kept stressing it like this, it had to matter.
"You must never take this ring off. And if it looks like something dangerous might happen, you press the button on the back of this necklace. Hard. All right?"
"Haru, don't worry. I'm not the kind of kid who doesn't listen!"
I said it with complete confidence, and Haru narrowed her eyes.
"Then who was the child who flooded the entire research building trying to make dalgona candy?"
"Ah! Aah..."
Haru had struck me dead center, and I had nothing left to say. Fighting dirty with facts! That was cheating. You were supposed to settle things fair and square—with fabrication.
"Anyway, Byeolbit Elementary is very safe, so try not to leave the school. And if you want to go somewhere else after school, you have to tell me first. Understood?"
"Okay!"
The ring held a magic that would keep me from so much as a scratch even if a ten-ton truck hit me, and the necklace doubled as a locator beacon that could find me whether I was buried in the ground or launched into the sky.
Accessories Haru had absolutely forbidden me to take off.
I wasn't the sort of contrary little kid who did the opposite of what she was told, so I fully intended to do as Haru said. Every morning she delivered the same speech and then sent me in through the gates of Byeolbit Elementary. I waved goodbye at her car as it pulled away.
Then I toddled along, step by step, into the school. At an ordinary elementary school, the guards were grandpas or older folks, weren't they? Byeolbit Elementary was strange. The people working security looked like the burly grown men you saw in the UFC.
They were nothing but muscle, and just looking at them was frightening—mean, intimidating faces. But I knew that underneath they were incredibly kind, so I waved and greeted them. The guards smiled and greeted me back.
The kids my age around me screaming and bolting was merely a bonus. The younger children were still afraid of the guards. Upper-grade elementary students, middle schoolers, and high schoolers, though, often ended up friends with them.
Those kids had been coming to school long enough to realize the guards were nothing more than ordinary uncles. And it was strange to fear people who never did us any harm and instead helped us get through school in safety.
On the way I ran into Yumi and Jiyu. We walked into the classroom talking about the ribs from yesterday. Chatting with the kids before the boring classes began was a great deal of fun.
"Hana! Hana!"
"Yeah?"
I turned my head at Jiyu calling me. It was nearly time to go home. It was only two in the afternoon, but the lower grades finished early.
For someone like me, who had lived through that awful stretch of high school—arriving at eight in the morning and not leaving until ten at night—a school day like this really did pass in the blink of an eye.
"Let's play at my house today! My mom bought yummy snacks and said to bring my friends!"
"Should we?"
I had been planning to go home and play games on Steam, but the moment Jiyu tacked on those delicious snacks, the urge to go welled right up. How good did they have to be for her mom to tell her to bring friends?
"I'm coming too!"
Yumi said from beside us. Tomorrow was Saturday, a day off. Which meant we could play late into the night without worrying about school the next day.
I took out my phone and texted Haru, a message saying I would be out playing and coming home late. Haru must have lived with her phone glued to her, because a reply arrived almost as soon as I sent it.
An all-clear: I could play until six in the afternoon.
And just like that, a new plan was born—going to Jiyu's house.
Thirty minutes later, school let out, and our little group waited for the bus in front of the stop. It had been so long since I had ridden a bus that I couldn't even remember when. I only ever traveled by car. There weren't many buses from here to the research institute. You had to transfer, and then transfer again.
Maybe that was why Haru and Bora always drove me to school. Getting a ride home in the afternoon was understandable enough, but having them drop me off first thing in the morning was, in its own way, almost enough to inspire awe.
I had heard that for working adults, having your commute time shift around without warning was genuinely hard.
"So yesterday, when we had the ribs..."
"Hana! That's the third time you've said that!"
"It is...?"
We talked about this and that until the bus arrived. We boarded as a matter of course, and I took out my wallet to pay the fare.
"Ah!"
The wallet was completely empty. There wasn't even a card.
This can't be happening...!
It came back to me that I usually used the card the institute issued, and that I didn't carry a personal one. I hadn't brought cash today either. In the end, I was cornered.
While I stood there looking troubled and fidgeting, Yumi took one look at me and spoke to the driver.
"Sir, two children, please!"
Beep! Child fare.
"Hana, let's go!"
"Sorry, Yumi. I'll pay you back tomorrow!"
"It's fine. You don't have to, Hana."
Getting help from a little kid left me a bit sheepish. I had meant to board the bus looking cool and tap my card like a grown-up.
"Let's sit in the back!"
Jiyu was already in the very last row, waving us over as if to say hurry up. Yumi and I walked to the back. Luckily the driver had good sense, and the bus pulled forward right around the time we sat down.
Meet an impatient driver, and they often took off before you even had a chance to sit.
"How many minutes from here until we get to your house, Jiyu?"
"Like twenty minutes, probably?"
Twenty minutes was an awkward distance—not that far, but not short either. In my case, even by car it took nearly thirty or forty minutes. The institute sat a little out of the way, so there was some distance to it.
With the bus rattling and bumping along, I looked out at the scenery.
There were a lot of people outside. Byeolbit Elementary was close to downtown, so that made sense. Kids in the same uniform as mine were walking around too.
"Hana, when we get to my house, let's eat lots of yummy stuff!"
"Yeah!"
The moment Jiyu said it, a picture of me eating delicious snacks painted itself in my head all on its own. Just imagining how good the snacks she had prepared might be had me incredibly excited.
A growing kid really did have to eat a lot.