Seo Juhan, who had been slowly moving his steps, looked out the window toward the athletic field.
Soccer was in full swing. The hulking figures were swarming around like dogs chasing a ball day and night. Their brains were filled with muscle, so their mobility was good, but their formation was a complete mess.
Since March, he had never seen any sport other than soccer being played on the athletic field. Likewise, he had never seen the supervising P.E. teacher either.
Seo Juhan’s brown eyes traveled along the window frame toward the wall.
The cracked fissures and peeling paint made one feel the passage of time. It looked even dirtier because of scribbles scrawled with indelible ballpoint pen.
From the graffiti written in red ballpoint pen with high visibility, Seo Juhan found numbers.
The number 3 lying on its side had two dots stuck to it. Breasts. Similarly, the infinity symbol had a pillar erected on it. A male genital.
Besides that, countless phrases cried out that they wanted to have “ssex.” Not “sex” but “ssex.”
“Alright, now let’s check if it’s correct.”
Seo Juhan turned his eyes away from the mindless expression of overflowing testosterone.
“This doesn’t go to infinity but to negative infinity, right? You could substitute negative x with t, but first let’s see if you can solve it intuitively.”
Standing at the teacher’s desk again, Seo Juhan mumbled soullessly as if reading a script.
Since its opening, Yangseong School had consistently been in charge of the lowest ranks nationwide.
The March mock exam results were also disastrous. Seo Juhan had actually seen the numbers 8 or 9 stamped on mock exam score reports for the first time.
It wasn’t even just one or two. The majority of score reports willingly took on the extreme ends of the normal distribution while sacrificing their own lives.
As a natural consequence, university admissions were also the worst.
Yangseong School was strictly an educational institution that served as a “fence” for youth aged 19 to 24 according to the Framework Act on Juveniles. It was a public secondary educational institution that helped them reach university admission or employment without discrimination.
However, the reality was that it was merely an institution cultivating criminals or lower-class laborers. Most of them would immediately jump into the startup field and engage in unscrupulous and illegal fraud.
Even the kids who chose to go to university mostly went to two-year vocational colleges, and the rest went to third-rate local universities that wouldn’t get them jobs even after graduation. They would donate money to enter private universities that couldn’t even fill their admission quotas due to the low birth rate.
A minority pioneered career paths other than university admission—those were the kids already scouted in advance by the organized crime gangs who ruled Jeonghan City’s old downtown.
Teaching calculus to such kids was enough to make Newton faint in shock.
Leibniz would also jump out of his grave saying he’d pass the credit to Newton rather than teach these brats.
“After this, the natural constant e comes up.”
At that moment, the bell signaling break time rang loudly. It was before Seo Juhan could even finish his sentence. Even the bell was unspeakably tacky.
The punks with builds as big as mountains jumped up abruptly even though he hadn’t said class was over. Chair legs dragged back noisily, making harsh scraping sounds.
The kids moved chaotically, stretching like hippos with their mouths wide open.
Various noises rushed into Seo Juhan’s eardrums. Vibrations came from the soles of feet wearing slippers. They probably didn’t care what he had been talking about.
If it had been the first day, this would have been a situation where he’d curse them as clueless bastards, but now he didn’t even get angry anymore.
Since he had long been accustomed to not losing his reason even in the middle of a bustling marketplace, Seo Juhan quietly organized the books on the teacher’s desk. He left the noisy classroom carrying the College Scholastic Ability Test Special Lecture book that he didn’t know why they told him to buy.
The narrow hallway was thick with the heat of delinquent souls who couldn’t escape outside the school.
It was just like a chicken coop. Since these were the kind who could turn into fighting cocks at any moment, it was quite an apt metaphor.
Seo Juhan walked down the musty hallway with a faint smell of cigarettes and returned to the staff room.
Going to his seat, Seo Juhan rolled his chair wheels backward and glanced at the male teacher in his mid-50s sitting next to him. A baseball game was in full swing on his laptop screen.
He was covering all entertainment sports, not just the KBO League. Just what Seo Juhan had seen included the K-League, V-League, UFC, amateur golf league, and even Go.
On the first day, he was shocked, wondering how someone could so blatantly goof off during sacred work hours. But now he thought that might be his survival strategy. To survive in a world of lunatics, you had no choice but to become a lunatic yourself.
Still, it wasn’t the attitude of a senior teacher he wanted to respect. Seo Juhan shook his head and sat down.
As soon as he tapped the laptop keyboard on his desk to release it from sleep mode, a large message window popped up. It had come through the internal messenger.
The subject line was <To Our Dear Yangseong School Teachers>. The sender was the principal. The principal often sent out messages, perhaps because he was bored sitting alone in the principal’s office with nothing to do.
Seo Juhan pressed X to close it without reading even a single line of the large Gungseo font sentences. His time was too precious to read this crap.
He then accessed the work portal. He had thought teachers only taught classes, but once he actually became one, there was a lot of administrative work to do, from processing trivial official documents to inputting into the Educational Administration Information System, commonly known as NEIS.
He was tapping away at the keyboard working on office tasks when his phone vibrated.
Seo Juhan glanced at the cell phone he had left on his desk. The name <Lee Donghyuk> appeared on the screen flickering with green. He was a high school friend.
Lee Donghyuk would contact him sporadically even when there was nothing particular going on. Normally, Seo Juhan would have been reluctant to engage in meaningless phone calls. But today, the guy’s call was welcome.
Seo Juhan picked up his phone and got up from his seat, thinking he’d get a change of air.
“Yeah. What.”
He answered the phone while sliding the staff room door closed behind him. His voice was as blunt as usual, but his pleasure was evident.
[Are you busy?]
Lee Donghyuk asked point-blank as always.
“No. Why?”
[You’re not seeing anyone, right?]
“Yeah.”
[You don’t have anyone you’re particularly interested in either?]
“Yeah. I don’t.”
Seo Juhan gave short answers with the phone to his ear as he went down the stairs with quick taps. The second staff room on the top floor made cardio exercise mandatory.
[Doesn’t that school have female teachers?]
“There are some.”
[Aren’t they pretty?]
“I don’t know… I don’t really have occasion to see them all day.”
Seo Juhan recalled a hazy face whose name he couldn’t remember at all. The last time he’d seen her was at the welcoming ceremony in early March, and he hadn’t even passed her in the hallway since then.
“Why? Want me to introduce you?”
Seo Juhan asked casually.
[What are you talking about. I only have Yuyoung.]
Lee Donghyuk got angry.
[Is that so.]
Seo Juhan said indifferently, letting it slide.
He remembered they had met and started dating in their first year of university, and he was newly surprised that they were still seeing each other.
[I’m doing this to set you up, you.]
“Me?”
[Yeah. You.]
Seo Juhan went “Hmm” as he opened the central main hall back door. It was the door on the opposite side from the athletic field.
Refreshing spring air rushed in. His hair, receiving the sunlight, took on an even warmer hue. The hair fluttered and tickled his forehead and ears.
Seo Juhan inhaled deeply enough to make his lungs heave. Thanks to being located at the foot of a mountain, the air around the school was quite clean.
The problem was that the school itself was the source of environmental pollution. It was because of the cigarette smoke that everyone was puffing out without exception.
[You’re okay with older women, right?]
“Older?”
[Yeah.]
Seo Juhan didn’t have enough interest in people themselves to form preferences for older or younger partners.
“What does she do?”
He wasn’t particularly interested, but since he didn’t have much else to say, he asked while moving his steps.
[There’s this incredibly glamorous noona in the HR team here? She owns several apartments.]
“Ooh.”
Seo Juhan made a meaningless exclamation with dry eyes.
He could see the annex building in the distance, separated from the main building. The old-fashioned building located right below the mountain ridge surrounding the school grounds was more shabby than the main building.
The place where the current Yangseong School was located had originally been an alternative school for elders who hadn’t acquired their education on time.
The average age of the mature students had been 84. When they all graduated and new students stopped coming, it faced the crisis of closure. Then it was repurposed as Yangseong School.
That’s why although Yangseong School had only been open for just over 6 years, everything was old and worn out. The buildings were aged both externally and internally without exception, and various equipment and facilities were old models.
The annex building was especially shabby. Originally, the annex had been the existing main building as one wing, and later when the main building was built, it became the annex. So it must be the oldest building in this area.
He had heard that club activities took place in the annex once a week, but homeroom teacher Seo Juhan had been excluded from that duty, so he had no particular reason to go there. He’d heard there were also subject classrooms like technology room, art room, and science room, but they were rarely used.
Even without anyone telling him, he roughly understood why. It was proper to prevent the punks from carelessly accessing dangerous chemicals or experimental equipment.
Additionally, there would be many who couldn’t contain their sense of liberation as soon as they got outside air and would completely desert the school grounds.
The annex was an old-fashioned building made of reddish-black bricks. Built below the mountain ridge, it gave an even stronger feeling of a closed rural school. It even had a desolate atmosphere, but he liked that it seemed sparsely populated.
Seo Juhan walked toward the annex with his phone to his ear.
