Seoul Central High School.
Seoul Central High School.
Starting in the second semester, Seoul Jungang High School introduced a system that set it apart from other schools.
The class hours were the same.
In the morning, teachers with decent academic credentials taught the standard curriculum focused on mock-exam problems.
In the afternoon, instructors whose credentials utterly dwarfed those of most university professors would teach your chosen subject—you picked what you wanted to study individually.
So, naturally, there were some less-popular courses: the arts and athletics electives, like P.E., music, and art.
Da-yeon had separate tutoring at home after school, so she didn't want to keep studying into the afternoon.
That's why we chose swimming.
Kim Tae-oh and Park Ji-hoon were made to study at home too, urged on by their parents, so they must have wanted to at least be free at school—the two of them coordinated and joined the same class.
Normally, as Da-yeon's bodyguard, Kim Tae-oh would have been required to follow her and pick the same elective.
But that bastard Kim Tae-oh, ever since he found out I was Kang Han-seong, started paying less and less attention to Da-yeon.
Along with the change in teaching structure, the afternoon classes had a novel system:
you had to download the school app and reserve your weekly class slot via your phone a week in advance.
In other words, once a class was full, you had to take a different one.
Because of that system, every single week, when it came to high-competition subjects like law, biology, physics, math, or economics, a ton of brats would submit their applications the split second the clock hit noon.
Which brings us to right now. To get ready for afternoon class, I was changing clothes in the locker room with Da-yeon.
"I've been so busy lately... I wanted to swim with you, Si-yoon, back at home..."
"It's okay~"
Our apartment's pool got way too crowded in the evening, so it was a terrible place to actually practice.
The school didn't issue its own swimsuits, so Da-yeon and I had both put on white rash guards.
Seeing Da-yeon's body in that rash guard, I just... lost all words.
"Whoa..."
She and I were clearly wearing the same sports bras, and yet the sight of Da-yeon was enough to pull a gasp out of me.
The design promised to stop eighty percent of bounce and kept everything tidily front-and-center instead of letting it splay sideways, but on Da-yeon, it had a presence all its own.
We had the exact same product, so on me it reduced things to a negligible hill, but on Da-yeon, even like this, she still looked bigger than I did without a sports bra on.
Honestly, given the drag in the water, it looked like the kind of size that would slow you down swimming...
"...Does it look too tight...?"
Da-yeon flinched under my gaze, and just to make sure, I gave hers a feel—no problem, it was sturdy and definitely locked down properly.
Da-yeon seemed embarrassed that I kept touching her chest for so long, and she gradually backed away until she was on the far side of the locker room from me.
"Stop it! Touch your own."
"You should touch mine too, Da-yeon."
If a guy saw Da-yeon right now, he'd probably react with a simple, "Whoa... those are big," and nothing more.
Any woman who saw how little bounce there was, on the other hand, would instantly realize the sheer pressure being contained in there and wonder how in the world she was enduring it.
Da-yeon had been cutting her hair progressively shorter, and by now it was practically bob-length, almost a full short cut.
That look only made her cuteness stand out even more.
She said she'd cut it short for now because it was uncomfortable, and that she'd grow it back out once we were third-years in high school.
"How could I possibly just touch my own when I've got these in front of me~"
"Go away! Don't come near me!"
The two of us goofed around inside the locker room for a good while, then finally headed out to the class.
And of course, the stares hit us like a wall...
We were screwed.
Way more students were here than I'd expected.
And it wasn't just that I was complaining about a big class size...
It was a total sausage fest.
"".....""
I should have thought to ask myself why the girls' locker room had been completely empty.
Not that it would have changed anything regardless...
A silent, collective gaze, all boring into one spot.
Even the students who'd been warming up or already doing laps had stopped dead.
Fine, the students are one thing... but if the teacher's zoning out too, what the hell is the point of any of this...
Just thinking about having to sit through three full hours of this class now was giving me a headache.
Is it really okay for the staring to be this intense, this blatant...? Well, I get it, I guess.
Two girls dropped into a sea of nothing but guys—we probably do look like a couple of rabbits tossed into the lion enclosure...
Da-yeon flinched under the gaze and instinctively slipped behind my back.
The swimming instructor who assessed the situation and came over to us was a fairly famous person named Jeong Da-woon.
He was a former Korean national team athlete who'd once represented the country at the Olympics.
"Oh, is this your first time taking this class?"
"Yes."
Mr. Jeong Da-woon fired off a string of questions at Da-yeon and me.
"How well can the two of you swim...?"
"We can swim well enough."
"Si-yoon, I really enjoyed watching your freediving on Neotube."
"Ah, thank you."
"Shall we... start with our warm-up stretches, then?"
Da-yeon and I followed the teacher's lead through the warm-up, while the stares we were getting from all sides felt like absolute dogshit.
Da-yeon's face was bright red as she did the stretches; she was making it painfully obvious how much she hated this.
I was trying my best to be understanding, but I couldn't just keep letting this slide.
"Sir."
"Hmm?"
"Could you please say something to the other students? Because of the way they're staring at us, we're about ready to walk out right now."
The teacher took a look around after hearing what I said, then eventually nodded.
When every single student in the pool ignored swimming and just gawked at us, who the hell would want to keep going...?
It was so goddamn uncomfortable, for real.
Mr. Jeong Da-woon looked around, let out a sigh, and—apparently unable to actually say a word to the kids—seized on an excuse and said to us,
"Ah... that's because the students who actually sign up to swim here are very few and far between..."
In this school, the teachers were pathologically cautious when it came to handling the students.
Which, well, I do understand.
The moment they casually tell someone to look away and it gets reported to a parent?
Next thing they know, they'll be accused of calling their precious son a pervert, or given the line of, "It's not like they can't look at a girl in a swimming pool."
And because these students' parents held such high social standing, any clash could easily turn into an accusation of abuse of power.
What is a teacher even supposed to say when they're in that kind of situation...?
I understand it, but still—the fact that the staring was absolute dogshit didn't change.
"I'm truly sorry, but all thirty-five people here are doing nothing but staring at us. We're not dolphins at an aquarium, are we?"
"...I'm sorry."
In the otherwise silent pool area, I spoke in a low voice.
"And that's exactly why you've got zero girls here... the fuck is this, staring and being a goddamn nuisance? If you're all shit at swimming too, why don't you just do your drills and cut the crap..."
"Si-yoon!"
Da-yeon was horrified at my rude language, spoken right in front of the teacher.
But it was actually the male students and the teacher who flinched back instead, not saying a single word.
"".....""
Voices echo inside a pool facility, so every last person here would have heard exactly what I said.
If Park Ji-hoon and Kim Tae-oh had been here with us, the stares probably would have been cut in half, and just thinking about that made my irritation boil even higher.
I let out a frustrated sigh, half-assed the rest of the warm-up, and got into the water.
A few of them even got out of the water, clearly determined to keep watching us.
Seeing that level of shamelessness even after hearing what I'd just said to them... it was genuinely a serious problem.
Under those blatant stares, a disgust I hadn't felt before began to well up.
Even I, who was completely used to unending scrutiny, was feeling this way—what must it have been doing to Da-yeon?
Da-yeon was beside herself, unable to settle.
She looked like she was on the verge of a panic attack.
"It's okay~ Let's just focus on swimming and not come back starting tomorrow~"
"Yeah..."
Hearing me, Mr. Jeong Da-woon let out a regretful sigh.
Only a sigh, though—he couldn't manage to say a single word.
And then, the swimming began.
The kids who were training to be competitive swimmers had their own lane, and we showed them exactly what overwhelming superiority looked like.
Even the male students who'd been staring at us with lewd, sticky eyes were shocked the moment they saw us.
Especially Mr. Jeong Da-woon.
I'm decently famous, so he probably expected me to be a decent swimmer, but Da-yeon's speed was already enough to leave the wannabe competitive swimmers in the dust; that must have been a real shock to him.
Judging from what I'd casually picked up watching Mr. Jeong Da-woon's form in the water...
Da-yeon's swimming ability was probably on par with his.
And as for me...
I'd been operating as a "human torpedo" since childhood. When I actually put my mind to swimming fast, I was at a level comparable to the competitive men's world stage.
More than anything, my lung capacity.
In the sport of breath-hold freediving, I'd already transcended what's supposed to be humanly possible.
Literal, overwhelming shock spread among them...
Faced with the sight of us swimming as if we were fish returned to water, the blatant stares became a lot harder to find.
We'd shown Mr. Jeong Da-woon that there was no need for us to attend this class at all.
After we finished swimming and got out, we dried ourselves with towels and sat on the bench.
"Did you have fun?"
"Yeah, I finally got to blow off some stress~"
"Glad to hear it~"
I wrung the water out of Da-yeon's hair.
The stares directed at us sharply decreased, and the others actually started focusing on swimming.
If the teacher can't control his students, then it's as simple as us removing ourselves.
"Next time, let's just come with Ji-hoon and Tae-oh."
"Yeah..."
One male student suddenly walked toward us.
He was the one who'd been staring at me from the very start.
The sight of him swaggering over while flexing nonexistent muscles was so absurd it was baffling.
"I like..."
He'd been giving me the most disgusting look all class, and now he was trying to confess; I cut him off.
"Get lost. You're my number one candidate for someone whose eyeballs I want to gouge out."
"...Huh?"
"Didn't catch that? Want me to do it right now...?"
People like me who do freediving tend to keep a small, point-tipped massage tool for pressing into muscles in our pockets.
Well, obviously it's not an object meant to stab other people; strictly speaking, it's a massage tool designed for digging into pressure points when you get a severe cramp in a real crisis situation.
Although right then, I had pulled it out for a different purpose.
The moment I stood up holding the massager, Da-yeon hurriedly tried to stop me.
The brat, who'd flinched back at my bloodlust and was suddenly embarrassed by his own reaction, glared at me and stepped closer.
"Go ahea..."
I threw my fist and brought the massager up close, but Da-yeon was standing in front of me, so the tool stopped right in front of the brat's eyes.
Of course, I never had the slightest intention of actually stabbing it in, and Da-yeon knew that too.
"Go ahead, you said? Want me to? Too bad... Maybe if you'd leaned in just a little closer... I could've turned you into a cripple..."
"Si-yoon!!! Calm down!"
The brat collapsed to the floor, horrified by the implement that had stopped five centimeters from his face.
"If you want to look at women that badly, go beat your meat to porn, you son of a bitch..."
Da-yeon, who's taller than me, grabbed my face and forced my eyes to meet hers.
"Si-yoon. Stop it..."
From a distance, Mr. Jeong Da-woon came running.
"What's going on here...?"
"He's been running his filthy eyes over our bodies this whole time, then he confessed, so I shot him down."
Mr. Jeong Da-woon looked at the brat still sitting on the floor.
"...Is that true?"
But the brat ignored the whole context and just jumped to the claim.
"That crazy bitch tried to stab me in the eye with the thing she's holding..."
Except my hands were completely empty.
"This is ridiculous... Are you even a man? Just drop the act."
"Si-yoon... he's still older than you."
"I've seriously seen everything now... Older than me? Hah... Sir? I understand that you're afraid of dealing with their parents and want to avoid the situation, but don't make that someone else's problem. If you're going to do that, maybe don't be a teacher."
At that, a horrified Da-yeon looked at me, her expression gone dead serious.
"Si-yoon, you just crossed the line..."
"Sorry... but I still have to say what I have to say."
Seeing a teacher who couldn't take any action at all even after hearing me say all this was giving me cancer.
In Korea, isn't rigid discipline the bare minimum for any physical education or coaching environment...? And on top of that, Mr. Jeong Da-woon was from the national team.
I was honestly curious what kind of experience he'd gone through to make him act this way.
"You've got them staring at us like we're putting on a strip show, and you're not going to stop that? Hell, even while we were actually swimming, they were blatantly watching from above, practically on the verge of jerking off to it."
"".....""
"This is the first time in my life I've ever found an experience this revolting and filthy. We're leaving. Don't try to stop us. Take care."
Da-yeon looked around nervously before following me out.
The school that Lee Jin-seok personally chose for us... Now I could see its flaw.
The arts and athletics teachers were incapable of doing their jobs as teachers.
The teachers who taught academic subjects had active support from the parents and could directly affect grades, so they held a certain amount of power.
But parents who backed the casually enjoyed arts and athletics electives were a very rare minority, so those teachers held absolutely no power.
I felt sorry for Mr. Jeong Da-woon, but I was just starting to think that I needed to flip this whole mess upside down when Da-yeon called my name.
"Si-yoon..."
"Haah... maybe I shouldn't have suggested swimming..."
"No! It was fun!"
"Sorry... Da-yeon."
"Really, I'm fine, honestly..."
The two of us pulled our uneasy, unsettled feelings together, showered, and got dressed.
"Si-yoon."
"Yeah?"
"Don't make a big incident out of this..."
"Got it. I won't make a big one. Instead, I'm going to have to bump up the arts and athletics teachers' authority a little."
"...How?"
"Not me. Somebody else is going to do it. Someone with influence."
"....."
The moment we headed outside, we immediately switched our elective.
Right now, I'm in Lee Jin-seok's study, sitting in on a face-to-face meeting—the three of us: my dad, him, and me.
After hearing a full explanation of everything that had happened at the school, Lee Jin-seok and Dad both had expressions that said they were about to storm right into the school this very second.
I calmed the two of them down as I spoke.
"The teachers were scared of the students."
"".....""
"If you two jump in like, 'How dare anyone do this to our daughter?', it'll probably just make things worse, won't it?"
"".....""
"So we need a fundamental solution."
The two of them looked at me, their faces curious, as if wondering whether I had any other opinions on it.
"Let's just raise the teachers' authority inside the school."