Reviews of the First Video
"Haaahm..."
I woke just as the sun began to rise, no different from any other day. Bora hadn't come to shake me awake. Did that mean I wasn't going in to work...?
Turning the question over, I climbed down from the bed and threw the curtains wide. Sunlight slowly filled the room. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.
I lay on the floor and rolled around, savoring the warmth. Rolling in a patch of sun was the greatest pleasure there was, every single time. I was starting to understand why anyone would bother to sunbathe.
How many dozen minutes slipped by like that? Once the rolling lost its charm, I wandered over to the office to play. Lee Haru looked as if she had only just arrived, and Bora was pounding away at her computer, writing something with fierce concentration.
Baldy didn't seem to have come in yet. A department head, after all. He apparently possessed the rare power to set his own hours however he pleased.
Every last person under him had already clocked in, and the man who ought to have been setting an example was nowhere to be seen. I made up my mind to give him a proper glare later.
Hands clasped behind my back, I strolled into the office. Haru must have felt me there, because she came straight over.
And then she scooped me clean off the floor.
"Hiii~~"
One: hoist Hana into the air. Two: and then...
I had to bicycle my feet in empty air and beg to be put down before I could finally escape Haru's arms. Strange, how often she lifted me the moment she laid eyes on me.
Bora barely spared me a glance. No — the way she was hammering that computer, she had definitely hidden honey somewhere inside it.
I trotted over, pat-pat-pat, and stood at her side hoping for a look. Sadly, my short height made the screen a lost cause. I kept leaning and craning beside her, doing my best to announce that I was there. I was at an age when attention was an urgent bodily need.
Bora knew I had come. She drew me in and gathered me against her. Settled in that soft embrace, I could finally see what she was doing.
YouTube...? Ah, right. She had said she was uploading a video.
Whether or not the clip of me had blown up, Bora held me there and spoke.
"Hana, look at this. I don't really get it either, but look how many people like you now."
With that, she showed me one of the videos. It hadn't passed through a professional editor's hands, and to my eye the rough seams showed through, one after another.
Even so, Bora seemed to have tried her very hardest to make the me on screen look as cute as possible.
My hand drifted toward the subscribe button before I even noticed. Bora had read exactly what viewers wanted. Anyone who loved cute things would never scroll past this one lightly.
"Whoa..."
I couldn't hold back a gasp at the swollen view count and the subscriber numbers. On our institute's channel, where a video usually managed ten or twenty thousand views, mine had recorded a full hundred thousand.
The comments were praise from end to end. Some asked whether the institute had been hiding a kid this cute all along; others simply pressed like and slipped away.
The video was nothing but me watching TV and wandering around, and I hadn't known people would care so much.
I hadn't known South Korea held so many people who healed themselves by looking at cute things. The videos that usually trended were hunters showing off their abilities, or streamers playing games and running giveaways.
Daily-life channels existed, but there weren't many of them. The video I appeared in had only just clung to the tail of the popular list. It was still a first upload, and even with the algorithm's favor we barely had any subscribers, so the views were climbing a little short of what I had hoped.
"Bora, do we have to keep filming from now on?"
"Yeah... looks like you're going to have to suffer a little."
"Uweh."
I had no choice but to park my chin on the desk. There wasn't much of another way, so it was something I would have to bear. And filming, secretly, wasn't all that bad.
Having my videos go up was a little embarrassing, but it didn't feel bad. If anything, it felt kind of nice.
Without noticing, I had turned into an attention hound. I stayed in Bora's arms and watched her tend the channel with everything she had.
Bora really could do anything. Research, video editing — a person of many talents. I watched her work and passed the time in her lap, wondering when Baldy would show up.
Department Head Kim Jaeman arrived five minutes before the start time the company allowed. I glared at Baldy. The look must have been too fierce; he avoided my eyes and sat down.
As expected, I was the strongest one here.
Kim Jisu, a high school senior sitting the college entrance exam this year, was studying hard. These days, being good at school came with a strong chance of having a girlfriend.
Kids stuck in the middle of the pack tended not to have one, while the ones whose grades let them lounge near the top of the whole school had a much easier time dating. That was simply how it went.
Kim Jisu was that sort. His grades were high enough to put him in the schoolwide rankings, and he was seeing a girlfriend in secret from his parents.
They meddled in every corner of his studying. If they ever caught him dating, they would obviously press him to break it off.
So, through no real wish of his own, he was in a secret relationship. Ordinary dating already sent endorphins bursting through his head, and doing it in secret felt more than twice as good.
Not long ago they had even gone as far as holding hands and kissing. The feeling of lip meeting lip was so sweet he thought he could never bear to lose it, not even in death, and the moment was far too short.
He wished that instant could repeat without end. A girl's lips were much softer, much more yielding, than he had imagined.
If only there had been time enough, the feeling was so good he would have wanted to kiss forever. Soft lips meeting soft lips — for Kim Jisu, still in the thick of puberty, it was an unbearably vivid memory.
After that first kiss, merely thinking of his girlfriend set his chest fluttering. He was beginning to understand why people said not to date at all.
But they were already together. There was no turning back. He had to see it through to the end. The problem, though, was not the fact that he was dating her.
A boy and a girl at the height of adolescence locking eyes and falling for each other was only natural. The trouble was the grades that sank the longer he stayed with her.
Whether he was studying, eating, or simply living through an ordinary day, her face refused to leave his head.
Yeji, I love you! I saw your face yesterday, and I still want to see you today!!
If he had never started dating in the first place, maybe he would have stayed ignorant. But this body, which had already gone as far as a kiss, kept demanding his girlfriend without pause.
She even appeared in his dreams at night. That he had woken from a wet dream and done laundry in the middle of the night was a secret — but that was how completely Kim Jisu had fallen for her.
This green tea is supposed to raise your concentration?
While he was still stewing on all of it, a cup of green tea had been set out at the private academy he attended, there to be drunk. Supply was running short, and someone had written it in huge, blazing red letters.
Supply is short.
One cup per person. No exceptions.
He drank a cup of the deeply steeped tea, and his girlfriend suddenly looked different.
Hmm...
She was right there beside him, and almost nothing stirred. Compared with yesterday, it was night and day. Until the moment before the tea, every part of her had been filling his thoughts; now, as if sage time had come over him, he couldn't picture her body at all.
"Let's study, Yeji."
"Okay."
The two of them went in to study as if they had promised it. Their behavior was on another plane from yesterday.
They studied for a long while, and no other feelings rose. Feelings did stir, a little, but nothing like the unbearable desire from before.
By now he should have been inventing every excuse to sidle up to her, but today Jisu did not go to his girlfriend even once.
From her side, she never came looking for him either. The two of them only texted: if one of them ran into a problem they didn't know, the other taught it.
How long did they study like that? Only when it was time to head home did his heart begin to pound.
"Studying went well today, didn't it?"
"Yeah. Feels like I actually crammed for the first time in a while."
He took his girlfriend's hand, and it was exactly as it had been before the tea. His chest hammered. His heart felt ready to burst.
The two of them slipped into a quiet alley, kissed, and parted again.