# Chapter 9
“But why am I the dormitory fairy?”
Sunmin asked. Yumyeong looked at Sunmin as if he had nothing to say, then asked back.
“Would you prefer to be called the storage room fairy instead?”
Sunmin, feeling bewildered, said he didn’t like either option.
“My name is Lee Sunmin.”
“Is that so?”
Yumyeong wrapped his arms around himself and whined, “Ugh, it’s getting cold now.”
The two opened the window again and went back into the room. A warm sensation instantly enveloped them. After taking turns washing up, Yumyeong pointed to the top bunk of his bed and told Sunmin to sleep there. The empty bunk bed had only a mattress without any bedding, so Yumyeong pulled out a thin summer blanket from the closet and handed it over.
“Sorry. There’s no pillow.”
“It’s okay.”
After they each settled on their respective bunks, Yumyeong muttered, “Sleep well, dormitory fairy.”
The next morning, Sunmin quietly rose from the bunk bed when the roll call announcement began. He needed to return to his own room before the dorm supervisor came up. Yumyeong exchanged a silent glance with Sunmin and opened the door for him.
The moment Yumyeong opened the door, the door across from them also swung wide open. He unexpectedly made eye contact with the transfer student. While letting Sunmin bend down and slip past under his arm, Yumyeong grinned at the transfer student.
“Hello.”
Deep suspicion clouded the transfer student’s eyes, wondering why someone who wasn’t from their room was coming out of there. Regardless, Yumyeong ignored his gaze.
“Yumyeong! Don’t be shocked, but I’m telling you… I think I saw something this morning. There was someone else in this room besides us… Someone got up from your bed like a ghost, and now they’re completely gone! Could it be a ghost? They say our dormitory is haunted anyway. Am I seeing things because I’ve gone crazy from studying too much?”
Hanju, still half-asleep, was making a huge fuss, clearly terrified. Yumyeong clicked his tongue and dismissed this too with ease, saying, “That’s because you’re so weak-minded.”
As always, Yumyeong leaned against the open door with his arms crossed. The transfer student was also glaring at him, making no effort to hide his displeasure, but today it seemed even more intense. How should he describe it? It was like he was demanding an explanation with his eyes. The more sour the transfer student’s expression became, the sweeter the sense of victory that lingered on Yumyeong’s lips.
“Stand straight, attention! Morning roll call will now begin.”
The transfer student was the first to avert his gaze. His eyes were half-closed as he frowned slightly.
‘I guess I won this round of the staring contest today.’
Yumyeong made that assessment to himself after seeing the transfer student definitely close his eyes halfway.
At the same time, he seemed to be in a particularly bad mood today, and Yumyeong wanted to know why.
***
Without much thought, Yumyeong quickly figured it out. The transfer student’s suspicious reaction must definitely be because of the dormitory fairy.
Perhaps the transfer student had developed an interest in the dormitory fairy. Whether it was attraction or not, Yumyeong couldn’t tell, but in this small school, how much solidarity must he feel finding a gay friend in the same situation as himself?
Listening to his troubles, feeling a sense of kinship. It was the perfect setup for developing feelings. Moreover, the dormitory fairy was skinny and much smaller than the transfer student, with a somewhat faint presence. Yumyeong didn’t even want to imagine a gay couple, but the height difference between the transfer student and the dormitory fairy seemed somewhat plausible, and the image of the two of them together naturally formed in his mind.
‘Come to think of it…’
After finishing roll call, Yumyeong lay back on his bed, recalling the past as his eyes narrowed.
It was also strange that when he was in the laundry room, of all people, the transfer student came in. The way the transfer student attentively looked after the dormitory fairy who had been stuffed away in the storage closet, and how the dormitory fairy wouldn’t budge when Yumyeong told him to get up but immediately rose and left at a single word from the transfer student—all of this was suspicious.
There might be something going on between them that he didn’t know about.
After thinking that far, Yumyeong suddenly shuddered.
“Ugh, it’s disgusting.”
“What is?”
Hanju, who was in the middle of getting ready for school, asked. Yumyeong replied with a repulsed expression.
“I hate all couples.”
“Try to be more gracious. Just because you got rejected doesn’t mean you should take it out on innocent couples… Aack! I’m sorry!”
Hit by the pillow Yumyeong had thrown, Hanju exaggerated his pain and ran to the bathroom.
Flopping back onto his bed, Yumyeong used his arm as a pillow and thought.
‘I see, I got rejected.’
He had forgotten. With so many things distracting him lately, he had even forgotten the fact that Heeun had rejected him. How could that be? Yumyeong was dumbfounded at himself.
The ones who made a bigger fuss about Shin Yumyeong getting rejected might have been the people around him rather than himself. While the entire school was buzzing with surprise about this news, Yumyeong, the protagonist of the rumors, had completely forgotten about being rejected and was instead writhing in irritation about the transfer student.
Instead of being appalled at himself, Yumyeong decided to be impressed. He knew his mental fortitude was extraordinary, but he was proud of showing such resilience even in the face of rejection.
“But you’re lying down again? I was wondering why you’ve been getting up so early these days. You’ll be late at this rate!”
Hanju, who had come out of the bathroom, broke through his thoughts and started nagging again. Yumyeong snorted.
“Hmph, you’re talking like I’ve ever been late before. I never do such pathetic things.”
“Wow, completely shameless. Anyway… it’s so strange.”
Hanju, who still didn’t know Yumyeong’s secret, turned away with a bewildered face.
Yumyeong subtly asked, looking at his back, “Hey… should I confess again?”
“What? Absolutely not.”
Hanju replied sharply.
“Why?”
“Do you even know why you were rejected?”
“How would I know what’s in her mind?”
Despite grumbling, Yumyeong pulled from his memory what Heeun had said.
“Are you sure you really like me?”
The reason why he was rejected—it clearly existed. However, Yumyeong couldn’t accept it. Moreover, Heeun wasn’t really asking out of curiosity. It was as if she had already drawn a conclusion, as if she had seen into his heart. That’s what upset him.
“At least give it some time. If you confess again right away, you’ll just get rejected again.”
“Haah.”
“But why are you so determined to date anyway? You were friends, right? Just keep being friends like before. Honestly, I think you made a reckless move.”
“Shut up…”
Yumyeong muttered glumly as he stared straight ahead.
The low ceiling, which was the bottom of the upper bunk, was densely covered in writing. These were the traces of those who had used this room and bed in the past. Just like the current Yumyeong, lying down and scanning one scribble after another had a magical power that naturally made you want to reach out and leave one of your own.
The dormitory was set up to switch the boys’ and girls’ floors every year. After completing a major cleaning during the vacation when most students left school, students would receive new room assignments the following year.
When the new academic year began, they would encounter these traces left on the beds.
It was too short in history to be called a tradition, and it wasn’t a particularly meaningful practice either. Still, this was a sentiment shared only among students, unknown to teachers or dorm supervisors. Students who used the dormitory knew that all the beds had scribbles on them. Some simply left their names, while others anonymously left worries they couldn’t share elsewhere. There were also plenty of unaddressed criticisms. Savage comments like ‘Don’t live your life like that/Just wait, you’ll have no friends left later’ could be seen here and there, but the most common were short diary entries or doodles.
Yumyeong had also left a scribble on the bed he used last year.
[I’m going to be famous ⌒____⌒]
He deliberately didn’t write his name, but someone recognized it and spread rumors. Shin Yumyeong received gentle criticism for having an oversized ego.
And now, on Yumyeong’s bed, there was a short phrase written by Heeun.
[My poor love, trapped in an empty house. Heeun.]
Yumyeong wondered if there was a reason she had written this line from Gi Hyeongdo’s poem. The content of the poem had touched his heart, and it felt like fate that he ended up using the bed Heeun had used after the room assignments were reshuffled this year. It was probably from then that he began to see Heeun differently.
‘You know. If maybe, you’re lonely too…’
That small sense of empathy made his heart flutter. He wanted to have a relationship that wasn’t just friendship, not like the countless relationships that trip you up, but a unique one-of-a-kind relationship. He thought he would like to have at least one person who was truly on his side. They say that when you’re in love, even if the whole world betrays you, you feel like that one person will be on your side. If having a girlfriend could give him that feeling, he wanted to experience love.
“Hanju, you don’t understand. There’s something that feelings beyond friendship can fill.”
At Yumyeong’s words, Hanju made a disgusted expression.
“Hey! If you break up, it’s worse than being strangers. The school is already this small, how will you face each other after breaking up? My parents told me, if you want to attend alumni reunions later, don’t date your schoolmates.”
At Hanju’s words, Yumyeong deeply frowned. And so, the two looked at each other with expressions that said they found the other pathetic and were sick of each other.
***
It was near the end of lunch time. Yumyeong, passing by the practice room on the first floor, unexpectedly discovered the transfer student sitting alone inside.
“Hey. Transfer student.”
When he flung the door open and called out, sure enough, the transfer student looked at him with slight surprise.
“Hehe…”
Yumyeong deliberately approached the transfer student with a provocative swagger. He wasn’t sure exactly what the other had been doing, but there was a sketchbook placed in front of him. Yumyeong jabbed at it with his hand like a delinquent picking a fight and said…
