The bell rang. Dooyoung was charging stupidly up the stairs when he slipped and went down hard. His shin cracked against the edge of a step and throbbed, but collecting the precious snacks back into the bag took priority. Dealing with the pain could wait. With slaps accumulating by the minute, he couldn’t afford to fall any further behind.
Getting his face washed in toilet water would honestly have been preferable. Lee Juhak’s hands were big and thick — one hit was enough to knock the sense clean out of you. A lit cigarette pressed to skin was also something he’d rather go without.
Dooyoung tore down the corridor in a panic and stumbled through the half-open back door of the classroom. But something was off. The room was too quiet.
Dooyoung carefully lifted his gaze from the floor. The homeroom teacher was standing at the front. Only then did he register the dozens of eyes in the room all turned toward him.
The bag of snacks was confiscated. Dooyoung took his seat without a word. His desk happened to be right in front of the podium, so the teacher’s scolding came down on him like thunder at close range. He sat with his mouth sealed shut, cold sweat streaming down his back from the weight of Lee Juhak’s murderous glare boring into him from the back of the room.
Class finally started. Dooyoung reached up to pull his bag down from the desk — and found it wide open. He hadn’t opened it once since arriving at school today, had only been using it as a pillow. While he’d been at the school store, Lee Juhak’s crew must have gone through it.
Dooyoung stole a glance at the teacher writing something on the board, then checked the bag’s contents. A crumpled home notice, a few notebooks. Nothing seemed to be missing at first. Then he spotted the front pocket hanging open and bit down on his lower lip. His wallet was gone.
It was a wallet with not a single won in it anyway. Never knowing when money might get taken from him, he kept it hidden under his shoe insole or in a secret pocket sewn into his uniform that only he knew about. Still, the hollow feeling in his chest was unavoidable.
Dooyoung swallowed the sigh rising in his throat and pulled his textbook from the desk drawer. He pressed down on the stiff, unbent pages with the heel of his hand.
He spent the entire class period shaking his leg in dread of the fallout from the errand he’d failed to complete properly. Time moved without mercy, and the break between classes arrived quickly. The moment the teacher left the room, Lee Juhak called out to Dooyoung from the back row.
“Mutt. You gonna make me wait all day?”
Dooyoung dragged his feet over to Lee Juhak. On the way, he knocked his thigh against the corner of a desk. Hong Seungpyo’s desk, of all desks.
Hong Seungpyo, slouched loosely in his seat, looked up at Dooyoung. Dooyoung remembered what had happened that morning and dipped his head low. He murmured in a small voice.
“Sorry……”
Hong Seungpyo just looked at him with an unimpressed expression. At that moment Lee Juhak yelled Dooyoung’s name.
“The fuck are you doing, get over here!”
Dooyoung’s shoulders jerked. He hurried over to Lee Juhak — and immediately took a blow to the back of the head. He lost his footing and caught himself on a desk with both hands, but Lee Juhak knocked his arms out from under him and made sure he went all the way down on all fours. Then Lee Juhak placed his foot on Dooyoung’s back and pressed down steadily.
“I said one slap per minute you’re late, didn’t I? You’re fifty minutes late, so that’s fifty hits.”
Dooyoung snapped his head up at Lee Juhak’s twisted logic. Counting class time was cheating. Lee Juhak’s lips curled into something ugly.
“Pick one. Fifty hits — or crawl to the trash can on all fours like a dog, and……”
Lee Juhak spat out the gum he’d been chewing and added,
“Eat this.”
One of Lee Juhak’s friends took the gum, dropped it in the trash can, and returned to his seat. Dooyoung watched the sequence of events from the floor, the hand braced against the ground curling slowly into a fist. He wanted out of this situation as fast as possible. The silence that had spread through the classroom with him at its center felt like it was suffocating him.
Dooyoung extended one hand in front of him and began to crawl across the floor like a four-legged animal. The trash can just ahead of him felt impossibly far away, like something he’d never be able to reach. The floor felt soft and yielding, like slime. His muscles clenched and released as he fought to keep his elbows from buckling under him.
He reached the trash can. He hesitated for a moment, then tipped it toward himself. His wallet was in there alongside the gum. So that was why Lee Juhak had made him do this — to show him his own discarded wallet. To drive the point home.
Lee Juhak did this sometimes. Used moments like this to carve into Dooyoung’s mind exactly where he stood. As if he could ever forget.
His place at the very bottom.
Dooyoung reached his hand into the trash can and put Lee Juhak’s chewed-up gum in his mouth. A few students watching let out exaggerated gagging noises.
Lee Juhak called Dooyoung back in front of him and patted his head the way you’d praise an obedient dog. Dooyoung’s neck, barely holding on, swayed unsteadily under the hand.
And then. A shadow fell over Dooyoung’s head like a stormcloud. He looked up without thinking — and his eyes went wide. Hong Seungpyo was standing behind Lee Juhak, looking down at Dooyoung with a steady, unhurried gaze. He said,
“Got a light?”
For a split second Dooyoung thought Hong Seungpyo was talking to him and his lips parted. But Dooyoung wasn’t the only one who reacted. Lee Juhak — just as physically imposing as Hong Seungpyo — gave a pronounced flinch.
“Jesus, Seungpyo, make some noise when you walk up on people!”
Hong Seungpyo’s gaze stayed fixed on Dooyoung as he gave a small flick of his hand. The message was unmistakable: shut up and hand over the lighter. Dooyoung, mortified at himself for having assumed, quickly cast his eyes down. He swept the inside of his now-empty mouth with his tongue. He’d been so thrown off by Hong Seungpyo that he’d swallowed the gum.
Lee Juhak handed over the lighter with a look that made his displeasure plain.
“Bring it back.”
Hong Seungpyo pocketed it and strolled out through the back door. As he left, he cast a brief glance at the trash can. Dooyoung watched his retreating figure from behind the fringe of his hair.
Hong Seungpyo didn’t belong in the pack-based world of school. He looked like a predator locked in a cage. And just like that, Dooyoung found himself thinking again about that glimpse of him half-undressed in the early morning. His build, his presence — both were plainly different from the rest of the delinquent crowd.
“Goddamn annoying bastard.”
Lee Juhak muttered under his breath, his lips curling. On the day Hong Seungpyo had transferred in, Lee Juhak had been the one to welcome him most eagerly. He’d been practically hanging off him, running his mouth about how they were cut from the same cloth, asking if he’d been a trainee or something, clinging like a beggar. What Lee Juhak had wanted from Hong Seungpyo wasn’t money — his family was reasonably well-off — it was the aura he gave off. It wasn’t just Lee Juhak; his whole crew had latched on. If Lee Juhak was a mosquito, the rest of them were the larvae.
Having clocked this somewhere along the way, Lee Juhak couldn’t bring himself to openly disrespect Hong Seungpyo — so instead he sniped at him behind his back. His personal philosophy: if you can’t have something, it’s better to reject it.
For a moment Dooyoung wondered if there might have been something in him too — something Lee Juhak couldn’t possess — and then let out a quiet, self-mocking laugh. There was no way anything like that existed in him.
Every single moment, Dooyoung was fighting to keep from being devoured by something shapeless. It had been born somewhere deep in his unconscious and it grew larger by the day. If he let that nameless thing catch him, he would sink all the way to the bottom of a pit — a place where no sound reached, no light existed, a place where he’d have to believe he was already dead.
The only way out was to hurt himself. He had to make a wound he could see — something to jolt himself awake when the current started pulling him under. That was the only way to escape the monster he had made.
Dooyoung sat in his seat without getting up once, didn’t even use the bathroom, until the end of the school day. His tailbone had gone numb, but that pain was nothing — nothing at all compared to chewing someone else’s used gum.
After Hong Seungpyo borrowed the lighter, Lee Juhak left Dooyoung alone for the rest of the day. He couldn’t make sense of why. It was Kim Jinho instead who watched Dooyoung throughout every class period, like he had something to say.
And it wasn’t just today. There were moments when Kim Jinho’s gaze carried the same quality as Lee Juhak’s when his eyes swept over Dooyoung’s body. It was a gaze Dooyoung wanted absolutely nothing to do with.
Dooyoung had come to the incinerator area behind the school building to throw out the trash. The name made it sound more official than it was — you just chucked things into the garbage truck and that was that.
He scanned the area around him, confirmed no one was nearby, and deliberately loosened the slipshod knot he’d tied in the garbage bag and opened it back up. A stale, musty smell spread immediately.
He shoved his sleeve up past his elbow and dug through the trash. His hand found the wallet eventually. He pulled it out and looked it over. It was dirty, but it was a cloth coin purse, so it could be washed and used again.
Dooyoung ran his thumb across the small embroidered cat on the front. His grandmother, who had no particular skill with her hands, had gone to the senior employment center and spent a full day making it. It had been a plain, solid-colored cat — now it was a calico.
With a gloomy expression, Dooyoung shook off what he could from the wallet and stuffed it into the front pocket of his bag. He had no time to mope around here. If someone happened to come by, they’d see the class outcast digging through the trash — and that would be all anyone needed.
He gathered the garbage that had spilled around him, put it back, and tied the bag shut tightly. Just then, a gust of dust-laden wind skimmed across his eyes. The stinging sensation made him blink rapidly. The grit still wouldn’t clear, so he pressed his eye against his raised shoulder and rubbed.
“You crying?”
The quiet question came like a sign from the sky, and Dooyoung lurched. He spun in circles like a kitten chasing its own tail, scanning in every direction — nothing.
“I’m over here.”
A voice carrying the trace of a smile delivered another sign. Dooyoung lifted his head in the direction of the sound. Up on the emergency staircase landing between the first and second floors of the annex building, Hong Seungpyo was smoking. He had his elbows propped on the railing, looking down at Dooyoung with an unhurried, indifferent expression.
