Can’t open your eyes properly?”
Dooyoung didn’t understand what was wrong with his eyes that made a simple blink warrant a comment like that. It wasn’t as though he’d chosen to be born with eyes like these.
“Either go to the homeroom teacher right now and get it back, or pay me ten times over.”
At the absurd markup, Dooyoung looked up at Kim Jinho with both eyes wide open. Kim Jinho gazed at Dooyoung’s lips — reddened from all the chewing — with a quiet intensity as he continued.
“Hey, isn’t that funny? I paid for the errand out of my own money, and here you are chewing Juhak’s gum. Why?”
“That was… because he told me to……”
“Exactly!”
Dooyoung’s shoulders shot up at Kim Jinho’s volume. The few students still in the classroom couldn’t take the tension and filtered out.
“That’s what’s so funny! Did you actually suck Juhak off or something?”
“…What?”
“Why else would you do whatever he says like a good little pet. Unless you two are even closer than that? That bastard Juhak’s always running his mouth so who knows what to believe, goddammit.”
“I — I didn’t do anything like that.”
“Anything like that? A bit of a slip there, wasn’t it?”
Kim Jinho perched on the edge of Dooyoung’s desk and propped his foot up on the chair. Dooyoung looked down at the foot that had come between his legs. When the toe of the shoe grazed somewhere private, goosebumps crawled up the back of his neck and spread across his whole body.
“Then what do you think about Park Eunsik — the one that stuff actually happened to?”
Dooyoung’s eyes flared in an instant.
Park Eunsik. His friend. His first and last friend — someone these people had no business putting in their mouths.
Kim Jinho clicked his tongue at the sharpness that had come into Dooyoung’s eyes. Then he smacked him across the side of the head.
“The hell are you glaring at.”
Kim Jinho glanced around, grabbed Dooyoung by the collar, and shoved him into a blind spot. Then he pressed his mouth against his roughly.
Kim Jinho’s breath against his face was so foul it made Dooyoung want to throw himself out the window on the spot. He wanted to drive a spike through Kim Jinho’s eyes — those eyes staring at him with that sticky, wet gaze, the obscene sound of lips sucking sloppily. Dooyoung pushed against him with all his strength, and when he couldn’t get him to move at all, he bit down on his lip instead.
“Ow! You little bitch!”
Dooyoung scrubbed at his mouth roughly with his sleeve. Kim Jinho’s eyes filled with intent as he raised one arm. When Dooyoung didn’t back down and kept staring him down, Kim Jinho let out a hollow, derisive laugh.
“Hey, we’re close enough for this kind of thing, aren’t we.”
“…What kind of thing is that?”
“The kind that has Park Eunsik as the main course.”
Dooyoung felt it then — the sensation of plunging off a cliff from a great height. He couldn’t see anything. Only the desire to hurt the person in front of him. But before he could do anything at all, Kim Jinho’s force sent him slamming back hard into the front door.
Dooyoung slid down the door and crumpled to the floor. Crushed again, same as always. He blinked his blurred vision into focus and looked toward the spot where Park Eunsik had been sitting on the other side of the room. There was no one there.
His breath caught. His hands and feet trembled. He wanted to explain to him about that day — wanted to get on his knees and beg. And at the same time he wanted to disappear entirely, like dust drifting through the classroom, like something that didn’t exist at all.
Dooyoung reached a hand out toward where he had been. At that moment the classroom door was thrown violently open. His body tilted back on its own — but something solid caught him from behind and kept him from going down.
Without thinking, he lifted his chin and looked up. The light spilling in from the corridor made him squint. Dooyoung tried to bring the figure who had come with the light into focus. Only then did he realize that the person standing in the backlight was Hong Seungpyo. He looked like someone who had absorbed the light itself — just looking at him made his eyes ache.
Hong Seungpyo had been bracing Dooyoung against his shin. He applied a light pressure and set Dooyoung’s tilted body upright. Dooyoung came back to himself belatedly and shuffled sideways on the floor. He moved only his eyes back to the spot where he’d seen Park Eunsik. There was no one there.
Hong Seungpyo’s face was blank. His gaze settled on two things in particular: Dooyoung’s lips, which were unusually bright, and Kim Jinho’s lip, which had drawn blood. Caught off-guard by Hong Seungpyo’s sudden appearance, Kim Jinho hauled Dooyoung upright by the collar and called out to him with forced familiarity.
“Oh, hey. You’re here? Like Juhak said, make some noise when you walk up on people. Mutt — you’d better bring that thing back from the homeroom teacher today or you’re dead.”
Kim Jinho tapped Dooyoung on the backside to push him along. Kim Jinho shoving from behind, and Hong Seungpyo blocking the door in front — Dooyoung ended up wedged between them like the filling in a sandwich. He lost his balance and found himself with a hand pressed against Hong Seungpyo’s chest.
He glanced up without thinking, and paused. This wasn’t the dark, worn-out version of Hong Seungpyo he’d seen in the early hours. If anything, he looked utterly fresh — which was disorienting. It was like witnessing a vampire out for a morning jog.
“Move it, you.”
“Ugh, hang on——”
The humiliation of Kim Jinho pawing at him from behind kept boiling over. Then Hong Seungpyo wrapped an arm around Dooyoung’s waist and set him neatly to the side.
The cold quiet that followed threw Kim Jinho the most. He blinked his sycophant eyes open wide and looked back and forth between Dooyoung and Hong Seungpyo. Then he caught Hong Seungpyo staring down at him as though he were an inanimate object, and sneered.
“You come to school just for the cafeteria food?”
“Seems like it.”
Kim Jinho grimaced with exaggerated distaste when Hong Seungpyo answered without missing a beat.
“Ugh. Who eats that stuff.”
“Yeah? You seem to eat it pretty consistently though.”
“Because it’s a waste not to.”
“What is?”
“What do you mean what. The leftovers, obviously.”
“Why?”
“Why is this guy being so weird today? You said it was bad too.”
“I’ve never tried it. So I wouldn’t know.”
“What?”
“I don’t mind letting leftovers go to waste. That kind of thing — who’d want it. Right?”
Hong Seungpyo tilted his head slightly and addressed that last question to Dooyoung. The last thing Dooyoung had expected was to be spoken to, so he blinked several times before he could respond.
“What is this atmosphere?”
Kim Jinho dropped his voice and delivered the line with full detective-drama seriousness.
“Is the mutt working his way into Hong Seungpyo’s circle now?”
“Circle?”
Hong Seungpyo repeated it flatly. Kim Jinho tilted his chin toward Dooyoung.
“This one’s a slut. Clings to whoever’s useful and that’s the only reason he’s made it this far. If it weren’t for that, he’d already be——”
Dooyoung wanted to stuff something into Kim Jinho’s mouth to shut him up. There wasn’t a single word of truth in anything he’d said — but for some reason he cared about Hong Seungpyo hearing it.
And then.
“Doesn’t look like it to me.”
Hong Seungpyo, who had been listening without a word, cut Kim Jinho off cleanly.
“What?”
Kim Jinho answered blankly, but Hong Seungpyo’s gaze was fixed on Dooyoung as he added:
“You don’t look like a slut.”
Dooyoung slowly raised his head and looked somewhere around Hong Seungpyo’s chin. His hair was still slightly damp. The smell of wet earth after rain spread through the air. The stillness of it quieted the uneasy trembling in his chest.
Kim Jinho, who had been watching the exchange in silence, suddenly started herding Dooyoung out into the corridor.
“Are you listening to a word I say? Move!”
Dooyoung darted out like a quick cat. Hong Seungpyo brushed a hand over the shoulder where Dooyoung’s hair had grazed him, and watched the distant figure go — hair flying, running away down the hall.
He found himself wanting to see with his own eyes just how thin the body hidden inside that oversized uniform really was. The outcast’s nipples were almost certainly a pale coral.
Dooyoung arrived in front of the teachers’ office and paced in circles on the spot before carefully pushing the door open and stepping inside. The homeroom teacher spotted him and reached under the footrest to retrieve the confiscated bag of snacks, asking:
