“Ah… yes.”
His clear eyes follow me as I step aside. Wondering what he’s looking at, I scratched the back of my jaw awkwardly — and Seon Eunhu’s gaze dropped to my fingers, then landed a little further down. Right around where my sleeve had stretched out unattractively.
Embarrassed by that, I put my hands behind my back. Seon Eunhu blinked slowly and looked back up at my face. My cheek prickled so sharply that it felt less like his gaze sweeping across it and more like a round chestnut burr.
Despite the tension I’d built up, Seon Eunhu passed by me without a word. In his retreating figure as he rejoined the group and walked away, there was no longer any trace of that sharp reaction. Even his voice, drifting over occasionally, was mild.
…Was I imagining things?
I think I must have been. All I’d done just now was greet him — there was no reason I would have earned his dislike for nothing.
Just before stepping into the TA office, I found myself remembering that he was an Alpha and drew in a deep breath. But naturally, what a Beta could sense wasn’t an Alpha’s pheromones — only the gentle lingering trace of cologne.
What does it mean to be alive.
I hadn’t fallen into this profound contemplation when my parents died. Nor when, only a few years later, I lost the grandparents who had taken me in and raised me in an accident. I had been too young then to properly understand what death meant.
They’ve gone on a long trip, so you’ll be able to see them again someday. They’re watching over you from heaven.
I simply took at face value the lies the adults told to comfort my five-year-old self.
Then one day, a snail we’d been raising at the orphanage died overnight, and I felt a loss so profound it was as though my body had been torn to pieces. Only then could I understand the message that had been drummed into me over and over.
Is life still meaningful after all this?
Even still?
Even now?
…….
The death of that snail, experienced once I was a little older, kept pushing me into corners. It felt as though I was somehow responsible for all the deaths that surrounded me, so I read voraciously and meditated relentlessly, trying not to blame myself. And gradually, I came to accept it. That life holds no meaning in particular.
If anything is more fair than life, it is death — and death, too, is the beginning of another life.
Death is not an end.
Only after reaching that understanding was I able to find psychological peace. And quietly, privately, I began to dream. That I wanted to live as still as grass, and then on some exhausted, painful day, disappear without a trace, like the wind.
“Hello.”
“Oh. Hey.”
I’d been lost in that harmless, contemplative thought while waiting for woodworking class to begin. A few upperclassmen came into the woodworking studio and drew everyone’s attention. They returned my greeting with a casual wave and settled into the corner opposite from where I was sitting.
Woodworking was only in the second-year curriculum, making it a required course for the male returning students who had skipped their second year due to military leave. Which meant —
“Hello.”
“Hey, guys.”
— that Seon Eunhu, the only Alpha in our department and a returning student, was in the same class.
In a casual department jacket with a black backpack slung loosely to one side, Seon Eunhu returned the greeting. This was the second time I’d seen him since the opening ceremony.
With that relaxed smile resting on his smooth face, it was impossible to look away. He had both a fresh, clean-cut quality and genuine good looks — even the texture of the skin on his forehead, visible through the gap in his bangs, was flawless.
“Oh?”
Seon Eunhu, who had been striding past the front of the classroom, stopped when he noticed someone sitting in the front row.
“You’re in this class too? Ah… right, this is a second-year major course.”
“Yes! Hello.”
“Hold on.”
Seon Eunhu shifted his bag to the other shoulder and pulled something from his pocket. Inside colorful wrapping was a bag of gummy candies.
“This is all I’ve got on me. Share them.”
“Wow! Thank you so much. I actually really love these gummies!”
The classmate who received them made a fuss and lit up with delight. And it wasn’t just her — the friend sitting beside her, and the classmate sitting one seat further, both had their faces brighten up as well.
“What. You’re making me embarrassed, getting that excited over something so small. Let’s go eat sometime. My treat. You saved me a hospital bill yesterday.”
Seon Eunhu gave a light smile to the girl nodding her head vigorously, then headed toward the section where the other upperclassmen were sitting.
Are they close? How long has he even been back to have gotten that friendly with her?
Attributing it simply to her being his junior seemed like a stretch — considering that just days ago, Seon Eunhu had looked at me like I was an actual earthworm. What had happened between those two? And what was this about a hospital bill…
I was so curious that my gaze became fixated, and before long I made eye contact with Seon Eunhu.
But it was only for an instant. Unlike last time, there wasn’t even a moment for his expression to shift — his gaze just passed right over me and moved on. He seemed so thoroughly uninterested in me that I almost wondered if the contempt I’d felt in front of the TA office had been a figment of my imagination.
“Hey, this is really good. Try some.”
The girl chewed away and held the whole bag out to the friend beside her. Her friend fished out a gummy worm and popped it in, then her entire face scrunched up with sourness.
“Ugh, it’s so sour!”
Sour as it was, they kept reaching into the bag. I worked my mouth slightly in time with the girl’s chewing. Maybe I’d buy one on the way home. Just imagining the sourness made my mouth water.
“But why did Eunhu give you those? Did something happen between you two yesterday? Why did you save him a hospital bill?”
The friend lowered her voice to ask. Whether it was fine as long as Seon Eunhu couldn’t hear it, I could catch every word from where I was sitting.
“Oh, it’s just…”
“What. Why is your face going red? Did something actually happen between you two?”
“No, no! It’s nothing like that!”
The two of them bickered and then burst out laughing loudly.
“Seon Eunhu—, do you have any more snacks?”
At the same time, a voice drifted over from the upperclassmen’s section and caught my ear. Like a spider skittering eagerly toward prey caught in its web, my gaze snapped reflexively toward the sound.
“I’ve been running on empty since earlier, give me one gummy.”
“Yeah? Hold on.”
Seon Eunhu reached his hand into his department jacket pocket. While his right hand rummaged inside, the muscles in his wrist flexed the entire time. My gaze was caught by the firmness of that wrist — hard enough that you could practically sense its density just by looking — when the girl in front spoke up and reached my ears.
“It’s really nothing… it rained yesterday, right? I happened to run into him at the general building, and he mentioned he didn’t have an umbrella, so we walked together under mine to the major studio. He joked that if it hadn’t been for me, he would’ve caught a cold. That’s why. Nothing much.”
While I was picking up that conversation, Seon Eunhu kept rummaging through his pocket, and the upperclassman kept steadily holding his hand out. Then a mischievous smile flickered at the corner of Seon Eunhu’s eye. At that, the upperclassman finally let out a groan and withdrew the hand he’d been holding out until it hurt.
“Wait, Eunhu, your pocket’s completely empty, isn’t it.”
“Ah — what a waste. I could’ve kept that going till sunset, but your face was just too funny, I couldn’t hold it.”
“You insane bastard.”
The upperclassman laughed and nudged Seon Eunhu’s arm. Seon Eunhu’s eyes went wide and he said, “Hm? You don’t want one?” — and the upperclassman, reversing course entirely, quickly held his hand out again. After waiting a good while as Seon Eunhu shamelessly pretended to rummage through his pocket in the exact same way as before, the upperclassman finally realized he’d been fooled again and slung his arm around Seon Eunhu’s shoulders, laughing.
Seon Eunhu laughed along with him. Then he removed the arm draped over his shoulder and, reversing it, lightly draped his own wrist over his friend’s instead. It was half a shoulder hug at best.
“If you want some, go buy it yourself, you idiot.”
Seon Eunhu let the corners of his eyes crinkle long and laughed with a playful brightness, and laughter followed from all around. Most of the students in the woodworking studio had been watching their antics.
I watched them warmly and felt a faint smile come to my face as well. Now that I understood that Seon Eunhu had given the gummies to his junior simply as a return of kindness, something settled cleanly inside me. It was a bit dramatic to call it a long-held burden lifting when it had barely been five minutes — but either way, I felt that much lighter.
It wasn’t that Seon Eunhu thought of her as someone special. It was simply the organic give-and-take between people. Put simply — if it had been me in the general building yesterday instead of her, I would have been the one who got the gummies.
The steps the two of them had taken together from the general building to the major studio, sharing an umbrella, would have been roughly three thousand — no, since they were walking quickly through the rain, maybe around two thousand. In this cycle of being born and dying upon this earth, walking that much together was a briefer flash than a solar eclipse.
The reason I’d been so fixated on the relationship between Seon Eunhu and that classmate was simply because he was an Alpha.
Alphas, with their strong reproductive drive, were predators at the top of the human food chain. So when Alpha Seon Eunhu returned and I instinctively worried that he might have been targeting her to establish dominance over the Sculpture Department — that, too, was just nature.
Though of course, since it is also the order of nature, we Betas ought to simply comply.
In the warm atmosphere, I smiled faintly and let my imagination wander to Seon Eunhu. Seon Eunhu piling students up like a mountain and climbing to the top as if to conquer it, waving a flag. His arm muscles rippling with imposing force befitting a reproductively dominant Alpha, and his thick chest. And standing proudly between his two legs, the majestic and grand… thing?
Huh.
I had no idea how Seon Eunhu’s anatomy had made its way into this mental map, but regardless, the Seon Eunhu in my imagination was from the waist down unclothed.
“Seon Eunhu, look at that. All your juniors are staring at you. Next time you have gummies, don’t play favorites with the underclassmen — share with everyone.”
Laughter broke out here and there at another upperclassman’s teasing remark. Hearing that people were looking at him, Seon Eunhu glanced our way and smiled faintly, seemingly a little embarrassed. Then his eyes landed on mine. In my head, a video starring him was playing out magnificently.
“…….”
“…….”
In that moment, I was certain. The contemptuous gaze I’d felt in front of the TA office a few days ago had not been my imagination.
It was a subtle shift in expression — but as the subject who had, once again, become a biological earthworm, I could tell perfectly clearly.
