The aura he’d given off in the early morning hours had been as heavy as a winter wind. His lightly sun-bronzed skin, eyes black and clear as ink, the graceful upward curve of his lips — all of it had a mischievous quality, like a boy full of tricks. His chin was lifted with a kind of arrogance, yet somehow it didn’t come off as posturing.
At school, he always looked half-asleep, but maybe that was just the way he was born — naturally languid. Because despite the tired cast of his face, his lips looked warm with color.
Just then the front door of the classroom let out a screech and swung wide open. Lee Juhak walked in, his frame filling the doorway. Kim Jinho followed right behind him, attached like a buy-one-get-one deal.
Lee Juhak tipped the last piece of a snack into his mouth and brushed his hands clean, finishing it off perfectly. He passed the empty bag to Kim Jinho without a word. Kim Jinho took the trash with a practiced ease, the faintest crease forming between his brows. It was exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from the right-hand man of someone who ran the place.
Lee Juhak smacked his lips and pulled an apple-flavored juice pack from his already-bursting pants pocket. The force with which he sucked on the straw was practically superhuman. The juice pack was crushed flat in barely two sips.
“Ugh, I’m starving.”
Still unsatisfied, Lee Juhak whined about his apparently bottomless hunger. His voice carried like a megaphone. Anything within a ten-meter radius got crammed into your ears whether you wanted it or not.
Just now, that had included the information that he’d watched Japanese porn the night before and gotten off twice in a row. Dooyoung had the urge to stab himself in the ears with the pen rolling across his desk.
Then that rough, booming voice thundered through the classroom again — this time not as a monologue, but calling out to someone specific.
Every single student in the classroom looked at Dooyoung in perfect unison, as if they’d rehearsed it. Dooyoung chewed on his lower lip and raised his head carefully. His eyes met Lee Juhak’s immediately.
“Hey, mutt. You not gonna say hi?”
Lee Juhak closed the distance and cracked Dooyoung across the back of the head with his thick palm. Dooyoung’s head snapped forward and he accidentally bit down hard on the inside of his lip. The taste of copper spread through his mouth in an instant.
With a blank expression, Dooyoung sucked on the split skin. More than the stinging at the back of his head, more than the busted lip, it was the eyes of every student in class watching him that brought the most crushing feeling of helplessness.
The classroom, which had gone quiet at Lee Juhak’s entrance, came alive with noise again. Whatever happened to Dooyoung, no one showed the slightest interest. This too was something Dooyoung was used to. In a small voice, he said,
“Hey……”
Kim Jinho, who had been chatting with the group, snickered and sauntered over to Dooyoung. He ruffled Dooyoung’s round head like he was patting a dog, taunting him.
“Aw, is the little mutt gonna cry?”
Mutt — dongae — was the nickname Lee Juhak had given Dooyoung back in their first year. The only people who called Dooyoung that were Lee Juhak and Kim Jinho. It was their own petty little unspoken rule.
Since Lee Juhak claimed to have anger management issues, everyone else tended not to touch Dooyoung — so as not to set him off. That too was their ugly, self-serving way of keeping the top dog satisfied.
As a result, plenty of filthy rumors circulated around school linking Lee Juhak, Kim Jinho, and Dooyoung together. The content ranged from homosexuality to compensated dating, love triangles, and sex videos. If you gathered all those rumors in one place, you’d have a full book with ease. Most of it was baseless hearsay, of course. Most of it.
“You here?”
Kim Jinho said it looking toward the front door.
Without thinking, Dooyoung’s hand tightened. He glanced up. Hong Seungpyo was walking into the classroom with quiet, unhurried steps. He returned Kim Jinho’s greeting absently, and then, without warning, his gaze landed on Dooyoung. Dooyoung dropped his head immediately and started picking at a hangnail.
He was anxious that Hong Seungpyo might go around talking about what happened this morning. He’d kept it hidden for three whole years — if Lee Juhak ever found out the truth, he’d undoubtedly be dragged out to that apartment complex and left stranded without a stitch of dignity to his name.
Just the thought of it made cold sweat gather in his palms and his fingers curl inward with a chill. He was letting out a sharp, trembling exhale when, from a short distance away, the scrape of a chair dragging against the floor cut through the air. He looked up. Hong Seungpyo was slouched in the seat by the window, draped loose and easy as a damp cloth left to hang.
It was such an anticlimactic reaction that all that anxiety felt like a waste. Dooyoung let his shoulders drop and watched blankly as Kim Jinho made his way over to Hong Seungpyo. Kim Jinho reached out to put a hand on Hong Seungpyo’s shoulder, then spotted the earphones in his ear and turned away. It was a cautious move — one that read the other person’s mood before acting.
Now that he thought about it, Hong Seungpyo had always been a little strange. From his very first day transferring in, he’d made friends easily, yet there was not a drop of effort in any of it. Hong Seungpyo looked entirely accustomed to people gathering around him. That ease showed clearly in everything he did.
“Look at those eyes darting around.”
Lee Juhak noticed Dooyoung’s restlessly moving gaze and sneered. Dooyoung flinched and ducked his head. He hadn’t even realized he’d been staring openly at Hong Seungpyo. Kim Jinho, who had already circled back, set a crumpled thousand-won note on Dooyoung’s desk and announced:
“Hey! I’m buying snacks for everyone! Tell me what you want!”
Kim Jinho had a defined role as Lee Juhak’s right hand: roaming the school, shaking down whoever they had their eye on, and keeping people in line. On top of that, he handled various flavors of clowning around and making a spectacle of himself.
Lee Juhak’s crew began rattling off snack orders that no amount of a single thousand won could cover. Dooyoung committed the long list to memory with a flat expression. No matter how many times this happened, he never got used to it — it ate at him from the inside. But he didn’t let a trace of distress show on his face. That was the last shred of pride he had.
“Hong Seungpyo! What about you?”
Dooyoung, who had been fidgeting with the crumpled thousand-won bill, went still. Kim Jinho walked over to Hong Seungpyo — who hadn’t answered — and asked again. Watching Kim Jinho faithfully carry out his assigned duties, Dooyoung felt stomach acid rise up to the back of his throat.
Hong Seungpyo pulled out his earphones, listened to what Kim Jinho said, and then let his gaze drift over to Dooyoung. The moment their eyes nearly met, Lee Juhak shoved his wide, flat face right into Dooyoung’s. Startled by the horrifying close-up, Dooyoung recoiled visibly before he could stop himself. Lee Juhak’s face was not something anyone, even out of politeness, could call pleasant-looking.
Radiating unmistakable irritation, Lee Juhak said,
“This little shit just flinched at my face, didn’t he?”
and flicked Dooyoung in the forehead with a finger. Kim Jinho, watching the scene from a distance, grinned and chimed in:
“You did, you did. Stick that face in anyone’s business and even a stray dog’s gonna piss itself on the spot.”
“The hell — guess it takes one mutt to know one.”
Dooyoung rolled his downcast eyes slowly. He felt genuinely terrible for having offended Lee Juhak — but also, honestly, a little wronged. Lee Juhak had a big frame and a substantial amount of bulk packed on top of it. On top of that, he was so deeply tanned from what looked like a lifetime under a scorching sun that his nickname was Jeju Black Pig. His eyes were pulled into a slant that made him look permanently furious.
And since he was always attached to Kim Jinho — who had the body of a dried anchovy — Lee Juhak’s build was only thrown into sharper relief. The teachers’ lounge had already taken to calling them Chubs and Beanpole behind their backs. It was a painfully accurate pair of nicknames that only the two of them were in the dark about.
“Be back before first period starts.”
Lee Juhak said it with a face gone cold and sour.
Dooyoung’s eyes flickered to the clock. Three minutes before first period. This wasn’t an assignment — it was basically a prayer for him to fail. Dooyoung gathered himself and headed toward the classroom door. His feet felt weighted down.
“Hey! Why aren’t you running? One slap per minute you’re late!”
At Lee Juhak’s bark, Dooyoung broke into a sprint toward the school store. The old corridor wailed under his feet. No matter how far he got from the classroom, their laughter clung to him like a shadow. They had no real interest in someone weaker than them. To them, Dooyoung was simply something easy to handle however they pleased. Every word they aimed at him was disposable.
School was a microcosm of the law of the jungle. To avoid being cast out, you needed a clear scapegoat — someone whose suffering could quiet your own anxiety. Watching Dooyoung scramble toward the school store in a panic, some felt superior, some felt relieved.
Standing in front of the school store, Dooyoung stared down at the crumpled thousand-won note in his fist with a hollow feeling. It looked so much like himself right now that he wanted to throw it in the trash.
He pulled the money he’d hidden under the insole of his shoe and slowly, haltingly recited the order to the store owner. When he trailed off in the middle because he’d forgotten part of it, the owner somehow already knew and pulled out the items one by one without being asked.
“Cold out today, isn’t it?”
“……”
This was the moment Dooyoung dreaded most. He was sure the man saw him as pitiful. He didn’t need that.
Dooyoung took the bag of snacks the store owner held out with a blank expression and walked away. The further he got from the store, the more the self-reproach came flooding in.
“You’re right, it is cold today. Does it stay warm in here for you?”
He muttered the words he hadn’t been able to say, quietly, inside his own head. Regret settled over him layer by layer, like frost.
