He didn’t know how strong his grip strength was, but he’d squeezed this much, so wouldn’t the pain be considerable? Even if it was a crazy act, he had no choice. He’d rather have his nose broken than have his vocal cords injured.
“…Mmph.”
Hwang Jegu let out a faint moan in a hoarse voice. His expression seemed both like it hurt and like it didn’t hurt, both displeased and not displeased. With a puzzled face and narrowed brows, he steadied his breathing and let go with both hands.
Yeon Cheonguk staggered and leaned against the glass. What fell above Yeon Cheonguk, who was coughing violently, was silence.
Glancing forward, Hwang Jegu’s mind was elsewhere. He looked frozen for a moment. Hwang Jegu, who had been lost in other thoughts blankly staring at the booth floor, looked at Yeon Cheonguk again.
He feared what would follow. He didn’t remember when he’d last seen such vivid blood. The blood before his eyes was hot rather than red. Hwang Jegu lowered his gaze to the blood on the striped collar tee Yeon Cheonguk was wearing. It was blood that had just gotten on him from his body. His heart still surged from the power that had overwhelmed his body being so vivid.
Unable to endure the silence filled only with the sound of rain, Yeon Cheonguk mumbled something random.
“…It’s already past.”
“What?”
“……<The Eccentric Family> Volume 6 and the adult manga. The return deadline passed.”
Hwang Jegu’s pupils, having reached the limit of his patience, turned toward the high above.
“And if you’re absent without permission 15 more days, it’ll be forced expulsion.”
As he kept muttering in a self-abandoning mood, Hwang Jegu reached out his hand. Yeon Cheonguk flinched for a moment. Hwang Jegu placed both hands on top of the payphone and leaned his forehead on them. Twisting his head, he opened his mouth expressionlessly.
“Because I hang out with you, do you think we’re equals?”
“……”
“Canmoa boy… was it? If I want to see you, I can go there and see you.”
From the voice spat out while coldly rolling his eyes, a great weight and sense of fear came out and thud, pressed down on his chest. This kind of thing that suffocates people, drives people to the worst with trivial words, makes breathing difficult just by being together in a narrow booth—that must be his innate talent.
The fierce sound of rain stabbed his ears. Yeon Cheonguk’s breathing also gradually became rough.
“That part-time job is my livelihood. My family’s livelihood.”
While continuing to speak, he eventually ended up shouting due to the anger that gradually surged. With diaphragmatic breathing and even high-pitched vocalization added.
“Fuck…, just leave me alone. Leave me alone. These days…! Even without this dog-like shit, I’m having a hard time these days! Do you think you’re the only one in this world whose life is fucked up?!”
These were words he couldn’t confide in his lively girlfriend, his family, or his friends.
Yeon Cheonguk had rarely raised his voice in life except when singing. What just happened could be described as an explosion. Yeon Cheonguk, who was famous as a sleeping sloth all the time before making a name with Jo Seongmo, showed an emotional disturbance he’d never once shown in front of others.
There was no way to know what Hwang Jegu saw in the exploding Yeon Cheonguk’s eyes at that moment and what emotion he felt. The guy was silent for a while under the bright light.
Around the time Yeon Cheonguk’s breathing returned to normal, he swept his hair back greatly with both hands and straightened his body again.
“If you’re scared of getting hit, don’t mess around. If you’re going to make a pitiful scene, do it properly by groveling on your knees. If you just act prideful without doing anything earnestly, what changes?”
“……”
“I didn’t know you were such an insufficient bastard….”
Each word dug into his flesh. The throat and arm that had been grabbed tingled, and scratches were carved in his chest.
The guy was the biggest son of a bitch in Yeon Cheonguk’s life. If you had to pick the moment when his evaluation of him changed from indifference to hatred, it would be today.
“And, no.”
“…?”
“I said no.”
“……?”
“Expulsion. It’s not 15 days, you have 17 days left.”
Thump! Hwang Jegu finally shoved Yeon Cheonguk and left the booth. His breath was momentarily cut off from being hit hard in the chest.
Right after, something fell to the floor. Looking down, it was a bundle of ten-thousand-won bills.
He picked up the bills that had fallen on the rough scrap metal floor and counted them. It was a total of 180,000 won. It seemed like he’d returned the money Yeon Cheonguk had been extorted of earlier, but the amount was different. The money stolen was probably about 90,000 won.
If he’d given him generously with a rough estimate, it would be goodwill, but for goodwill, that bastard’s words and actions were shitty, and to call it protection money, he hadn’t even been properly hit once.
Anyway, he got money so that’s the end. He decided not to think deeply.
Hwang Jegu walked through the rain toward the meat refrigerated truck. Perhaps because passersby had cleared the area, the vicinity where the fight had just occurred was quiet.
Yeon Cheonguk took advantage of the quiet surroundings and escaped from the payphone booth.
Gakseori, wearing a vest over flashy pants, ran toward Hwang Jegu. The refrigerated truck with its door closed departed somewhere. He didn’t know where they were transporting the losers, and didn’t want to know.
“Cheonguk-ah!”
Kim Yuyoung ran out from inside the subway station. She held an umbrella in one hand. He hugged her tightly as she rushed at Yeon Cheonguk.
Yuyoung’s eyes, which had been checking on Yeon Cheonguk’s well-being with the umbrella opened, suddenly widened.
“Over there… is that person possibly that person…? Hwang Jegu?”
Yuyoung pointed somewhere over her shoulder. Turning around, Hwang Jegu was sitting at the karaoke entrance avoiding the rain. When he nodded, a blank voice was heard.
“To actually see him….”
That’s how Yeon Cheonguk remembered Hwang Jegu.
Manga. The smell of money and the smell of blood. Fire blazing fiercely in the monsoon rain.
Until he scrubbed himself clean and lay in bed, the heat mixed with the smell of blood from the guy’s body was vivid.
The explosive power and mass of energy that had to break and beat someone down seemed to have ignited a spark in Yeon Cheonguk’s extinguished soul. He could have become an Icarus whose wings melt when going close to the sun, but to Yeon Cheonguk of that time, that fire was the vitality of life.
That night when he watched Hwang Jegu’s war up close, a wave of great energy crashed into Yeon Cheonguk’s chest. Something moved Yeon Cheonguk’s life.
When he held the bills stained with fresh blood to his nose, the smell of blood was still vivid. Yeon Cheonguk threw the bundle of bills into his desk drawer.
Tracing it back, Yeon Cheonguk had already been an exception to Hwang Jegu from that time. From the very beginning.
***
June 22, 2002, the night Korea beat Spain 5 to 3 in a penalty shootout.
Hwang Jegu also won the war he had to wage someday. That was literally a war. As someone who was at the scene, he couldn’t attach the word “fistfight” to it.
In June of that year when their too-different lives began to mesh, Yeon Cheonguk went in and out of Kkaebi Video rental shop again before going to school, and Hwang Jegu went to school receiving protocol from comrades at surrounding schools in turns.
The truth was revealed. The reason he couldn’t be contacted for two days straight was because the alliance process took time. He pacified the area with the message that if you don’t ally, you become the enemy. It was called peace negotiations, but in reality it was close to a system where one person held full authority.
The next day, Hwang Jegu passed through the school gate with crutches. Faint fresh blood still seeped from the cast wrapped around his arm.
Even after going through such a thing, he didn’t seem to have any intention of being expelled for unauthorized absences.
“If I get expelled, grandpa will really die, he’s making a fuss.”
He was trying to avoid expulsion at least to keep alive the old man who was his only blood relative. After making the technical high school guys kneel miserably so they could never raise a rebellion again… his dreams are big.
That fight that would be talked about for a long time was an abyss of danger as Yeon Cheonguk had seen. Yeon Cheonguk would never understand even if he lived his whole life why he had to risk injury and endure threats to his life to press down the delinquents of each high school.
Anyway, because of that incident, Hwang Jegu also made a name for himself among the police.
A detective from Dongdaemun Police Station who had been watching him until he became a second-year finally moved. They said he resolved to pull Hwang Jegu onto the path of good.
He was a detective who went to the violent crimes division after going through the juvenile division, and he came to Hwang Jegu’s butcher shop and ran his mouth before leaving. He heard Gakseori doing an impression.
“You, you know, you’re a guy who’ll either become a great man or a big boss. All or nothing. If you beat up innocent citizens, you become a criminal, and if you beat up criminals, you become a hero, man.”
A hero? That’s funny. After Hwang Jegu sneered at him, Yeon Cheonguk hated that bastard even more.
— If you just act prideful without doing anything earnestly, what changes?
He was more angry because it was true. He just wanted to return to the past when they had no connection.
But for some reason, Hwang Jegu’s thoughts seemed to be the opposite of Yeon Cheonguk’s. Afterward, he persistently came and went through Yeon Cheonguk’s daily life, tormenting him.
Thus began Yeon Cheonguk’s second era of suffering. It was suffering, but, you know, it was kind of… an ambiguous era of suffering…….
***
First of all, that bastard prohibited Yeon Cheonguk from singing at school.
It was when he went to Class 7 to bring manga. When Gakseori and several friends pointed at Yeon Cheonguk and raised their voices saying that bastard sings well, Hwang Jegu suddenly growled.
“Fuck, not even a dick’s worth of interest.”
He sprawled in his seat decorated with a magnificent tiger-striped mat and golden blanket, the so-called ‘throne,’ and raised his voice. While frowning terribly on his straight forehead with scars as if chunks of flesh had been gouged out.
“Haah… Just thinking about guys belting out those cattle-herding high notes makes my dick droop and shrivel up.”
