Notes: [1] jeon seungah is a fictional person I made up cause I needed a mega for the chapter

[2] im sorry for the delay… my sem’s finally over and I had too many things on my platter, also I extended the middle school days into a chapter and im glad I did cause the fic makes more sense now

[3] thank you for putting up with me……………
 

Sejeong was fourteen when Nayoung was shipped straight to the infirmary after taking an incoming ball for her. With her face.

The two girls who were forced to get to the menial work didn’t look too happy having to carry the mess of limbs that were Nayoung, but Sejeong believed it was also due to Nayoung being sweaty beyond belief after running laps for her remedial and getting forcefully hauled to the friendly volleyball match set up by their teacher. Sejeong’s team (sans herself) droned a “yeeeeeees” in a calculated unison when their teacher crane-dropped Nayoung into their team, knowing full-well that Nayoung wouldn’t last a set without dropping dead out of exhaustion or getting into a comical incident that would be forgotten by the next period.

That day it was a combination of both. Sejeong’s Keds squeaked against the gym floor as she pretty much flew to Nayoung’s side. Their teacher handpicked two bench-warmers to drag Nayoung’s unconscious body out of the gym, insinuating that Sejeong was at least in the field out there racking points for her team. Eyeballs slid. Someone shouted a demand to get on with the game and it was mutually agreed.

“Don’t forget to apologize to Kim Nayoung later.” The teacher said to Nayoung’s murderer of the day.

The girl, natural born queenka Jeon Seungah, sounded an insincere “yeeeeeeees” and scrimmaged back into her team. Sejeong was never fond of her queenie attitude, but the girl was generally well-liked as much as she was well-feared.

Sejeong swiped the sweat hanging under her brief nose and tried to get her mind back into the game, but alas, Nayoung stayed on her mind, and she missed all her points afterwards.

--

Being the closest thing Nayoung had to a close friend, she shouldered the duty of collecting Nayoung’s things with her to save the injured a trip back to the classroom. Her friends tried to rope her into a three-lady gossips over parfait conference, but she turned it down for the volunteer work of checking up on Nayoung, knowing that nobody else would take up the job. She’d get her payment in smiles and a free tutoring on her math homework.

Her friends called her “too nice”, Sejeong brushed it off with a quick joke, though she’d be lying if that didn’t riffle her a bit.

Nothing wrong with being a responsible citizen who’s willing to care for even the lowest of social pariahs.

Not that Nayoung was one, she was just… ignored most of the time, for being mostly unremarkable and detached from the rest of the class. She was never spoke of as the more attractive ones and she wasn’t particularly sterling in academics, and to make things worse, Nayoung wasn’t a part of any clique. She was that one sentient in every class that’s just there.

Sejeong, queen of charity work, somehow befriended her a few weeks ago after they were paired for a history assignment. Nayoung ended up doing the greater chunk of the work, but at least she gained a friend out of the whole ordeal – a Kim Sejeong, even. That should’ve given her a boost in her social standing by a jitter.

She made a quick stop at the changing room to get Nayoung’s uniform. Some blurred faces greeted her along the way, but she was way too distracted for anything more than a botched hey. A quarter past 4 PM, she alighted in the infirmary with both her and Nayoung’s bags.

The infirmary’s surly silence greeted her this time, the nurse unusually absent. The beds were emptied save for Nayoung’s, the furthest in the row, its occupant awake but laid like she was awaiting death. Sejeong intervened by suiting herself into the empty seat by her bedside, bags sidelined to the small nightstand. “How are you feeling, Sleeping Beauty?”

“Peachy.” Nayoung’s answer was stout but clear-cut, eyebrows kinked downward.

Sejeong’s eyes nitpicked on Nayoung’s swollen left cheek. “Your cheek looks like it’s growing another cheek.”

Nayoung looked unamused with the remark. Still, her hand came up to her cheek, gesture reeking of diffidence. “You’re welcome.”

“Miss this?” Sandwiched between the folded shirt and skirt were Nayoung’s glasses, which Sejeong pulled out slowly to avoid bending the frame any worse. “The frame’s bent though…”

She passed the pair onto Nayoung’s fingers. Under Nayoung’s scrutinizing glare, the glasses looked twice miserable.

“It’s okay, I’ll be heading straight home after this.” Nayoung said after pulling her bag from the nightstand onto her lap, ping it open, and gently pocketing the glasses inside the bag. “I’m gonna skip cram for today, both my parents are on business trips so I’ll have the house to myself.”

“I wanna go to your house.”

Nayoung looked taken aback. Sejeong let her; she was definitely not used to take in guests in the form of school friends.

“I hope you don’t mind?” Sejeong leaned a tad closer, tried to seek Nayoung’s eyes.

Nayoung’s eyes were downcast, gaze focused on finding incoherent pattern on the ruffled sheets. “There’s nothing there.”

“Fine, you don’t want me in the house. At least let me walk you back home?” She tried in a mock-angry tone complete with the slight tilt of the head.

The reaction she got was almost too immediate, Nayoung’s eyebrows panicking into twinning high arc. “I—okay, uh, fine, god,” and in a much smaller voice, she mumbled, “I really can’t win against you, huh…”
 

“I went to Nayoung’s house yesterday. The ceiling was high enough to accommodate three Thailand elephants put on top of one another. A grandfather clock stood tall in the living room and I’m pretty sure the thing is worth more than us three combined. My estimates? Million something won for something that tells you the time.”

Her friends promptly paused from their parfait snacking. Sejeong made a stretched pause before adding in the stinger. “Nayoung is rich.”

Eunwoo probed deeper into the curious world of Nayoung’s wealthy family while Chaekyung listened with a cocked eyebrow. Sejeong, at the time, understood the shock, as they were talking about the Nayoung whose fashion sense was in the negatives. Grandmothers of too-ripe age would somehow look funky when they’re put beside Nayoung.

“Then she’s a keeper,” Chaekyung concluded after a pop of cherry, “no wonder you guys are friends.”

Sejeong made a playful snort. She hoped it sounded playful enough.
 

She had an odd friendship with an upperclassman in the drama club. Lee Jaehwan, an affectionate nickname of “Ken” in his house, but more often than not, she heard people from his year call him feminine-sounding names. She supposed it was all due to his smoother gait, a contrast to the gruff masculinity guys his age tried so hard to emulate. His voice wasn’t as deep as the other guys, but she heard him sing before, and wondered if he was hand-crafted by god into becoming a future musical actor.

Club meeting was cancelled that day but she happened to miss the memo, so she found out from a lone, grumbling Jaehwan who wouldn’t shut up about his scheduled cleaning duty. Mostly because the other girl on duty ditched him for a coffee date.

“Me and some others hung around the clubroom yesterday and the current captain of the basketball team dropped by – what’s his name again. Rowoon?”

Jaehwan offered her the other broom. She declined by not even sparing it a glance. “Rowoon. We’re in the same class. Why?”

“Uh, I dunno. He hasn’t hit you up the whole day?”

She and Rowoon did greet each other during the morning, but it was nothing more than an exchange of pleasantries. The boy, towering in height and wide of shoulder, was stellar in attitude. Everyone was fond of him.

She then concluded, “He’s probably forgotten about it. Definitely nothing important though, I might be failing some classes but my attendance is a straight A.”

“Girl, lemme lay it down for you, a guy tried to find you, in sweats and outfit screaming BASKETBALL in bright red Chiller, and the school’s anniversary festival coming soon. Do the puzzle yourself.”

They had a week or so left until the school’s anniversary festival and it was among the hot topics. A bonfire dance was scheduled at the penultimate end, and people had been abuzz with talks of going to the dance hand in hand with someone else.

“Oh.” Sejeong casted her gaze onto the agglomerating dusts on the floor. “Is there a thesaurus for polite rejections?”

“God, give him a chance? Guy looks good. Or pass him over.”

She laughed at Jaehwan’s hunched back as he attempted to sweep the floor. “You’re both guys, dumbo. Who’s gonna be the girl?”

“What? Us both boys.”

The concept was sort of foreign to her at the time. The idea of boy-and-boy didn’t quite fit the norm. The world of middle school didn’t have any room left for anomalies.

She swallowed back the “were your parents both dudes too?” quip that almost spilled out and opted to drop the topic entirely. “To be honest, I don’t have much opinion on Rowoon. He’s nice. And tall. He looks good,” Sejeong paused, taking the time to give the opinion some actual thinking, “he’d make a fine street lamp.”

Jaehwan’s laughter dissipated into thin silence the moment the door slid open to a sensually sweaty Rowoon. Sensually, she emphasized. There was no other way to describe the carefully pre-empted emission of pheromone.

Sejeong grimaced at the unwelcome stink invading her senses. Jaehwan showed his displeasure too.

Boys started being less and less of a prince and more and more of a discomfort during this age.

“Sejeong,” he said, voice an emulated gruff, and his words were minced by gratuitous post-team sports pant, “do you have some time?”
 

Nayoung was taken aback, to say the least. She could tell even though they were speaking on phone. “Why did you turn him down?”

“First of all, he was sweaty as heck.”

“That’s how boys market their masculinity. But that aside, he’s a nice guy!”

“Besides, our lord and savior Jeon Seungah likes him. Anyone—anything she likes, she’ll get.” Sejeong switched the phone to her left shoulder after feeling the cramp along the strained side of the neck. Rowoon was a good guy with even better track record – she could write an entire treatise on him based off her impressions and the girls’ locker room talk – but she really couldn’t bring herself to throw out the ‘sure’. I’m really sorry, I already have some plans myself came out instead. “You would turn him down if you were in my shoes too, Queenie Seungah aside. He smelled like horse.”

“Well…”

Rowoon was the third guy she had to politely turn down that week, so she was 3/4^th convinced that she’d end up skipping the festivity. There was only one other person in the whole school who would voluntarily miss out on such occasion, Sejeong was the surest to even the microscopic details. “You’re not going there right?”

“You know me so well.”

Sejeong idly did a half-spin with her spinning chair. “Let’s have a sleepover.”

“Sure. But won’t your friends expect you to attend?”

At Nayoung’s expected question, she tucked her legs in, flat against her chest. “I’ll tell them I’m already booked for a 5'4" date.”

“We’re both girls, you know,”

Then a raspy laugh resounded from the other end of the line and it tied Sejeong’s lips into a tight smile. Nayoung warned her that she would regret it, but Sejeong thought about a dense flock of one-off couples and sweaty guys and finalized her decision with a blown kiss over the line, and hung up halfway into Nayoung’s flustered stumble.
 

The rest of the week could be summed up like this: Rowoon had the persistence of a mold. Jeon Seungah’s evil eye on her got thornier with every passing day. Nayoung remained a sweetheart. Or some sort of herbaceous vine that kept her rooted despite the plain appearance.

This evening, she invited Nayoung to her house for the third time ever after thinking about how the girl would only come back to an empty house and emptier fridge. Dirt poor as they were as a family, her mom and Hakyeon would still stock the fridge with edible things. Nayoung was a clueless teen with money she didn’t know how to spend and hands with the sole skill of concocting instant noodles.

So she invited her in, since her mother and Hakyeon wouldn’t mind the company, and Nayoung was a pleasant one if not downright too-pleasant. Nayoung was the all-ears, no-mouth kind of friend.

A dinner of four in the household had always been a rare occurrence, but Nayoung fit snugly into the fourth seat of their four-person table and the sight of her mother chatting Nayoung up about school looked so mundane, Sejeong had a double-take once she realized that Nayoung was never a part of the family to begin with.

“Sejeong,” her mother snapped her out of her reverie, “you never told me you’ve gotten yourself a bestie.”

Because Nayoung never was. She might be the person Nayoung talked to the most in class (or the whole school even) but there was a galaxy of things she was yet to know about Nayoung. But to Nayoung, Sejeong’s Personal Advisor, she was probably an open book. The stars never seemed to align.

At her mother’s bestie comment, Nayoung stuttered with her filler reply and Sejeong chewed on her food.
 

Her mother asked her to go on an errand shortly after dinner, leaving Nayoung and Hakyeon to do the dishes. Sejeong casted her brother the look before side-walking out of the house as a grave warning.

Somewhere along the way, she sensed Hakyeon’s mischievousness blocks away from her house and quickened her pace, carrying a tight-lipped prayer.

She came back to the living room devoid of any human being sans Nayoung. Sejeong seized the other end of the sofa.

“Did Hakyeon tell you things?”

“He told me things,”

Of course. “Spill. Leave no single droplet.”

The TV was on and some popular game show Sejeong never bothered to watch came back on after a string of loud advertisement jingles after another. It casted this faint flow of blue and yellow along Nayoung’s side-profile, and somehow it was little moments like this that etched itself deep in Sejeong’s collection of middle school memories. These hard-boiled entries, ink bolder and pages chiseled too-deeply by the scrawled characters, stood out among the fading pages.

But Nayoung’s smile that night was lost in translation. “He told me to look after you.”

Sejeong sailed closer to the side of the sofa Nayoung was docked at. “Silly. Who’s the girl that’s been saving you from doing group projects alone?”

Nayoung grumbled her response, an index finger idly scratching the cheek where Salonpas was strained taut along a red patch. The left cheek. Sejeong remembered which side it was, because that night, she was drunk in the atmosphere enough to close the distance between her lips and Nayoung’s tight cheekbone, just above the Salonpas, and when she pulled back and told Nayoung, kisses win over pain reliever, trust me, she laughed at the color red spreading along Nayoung’s cheeks that won over the blue and yellow hue.

Kidding, kidding, she said, at the time, after Nayoung hurled the sofa’s pillow playfully at her.

I know, was Nayoung’s reply.

They had a sleepover that night, and somehow, Nayoung was the first of her middle school friends to ever spend a night in there. But also somehow, Nayoung hogged the furthest end and vehemently refused to scoot closer.

--

A day after the bonfire dance she didn’t attend, during the break, she realized too late that the rather demure feel of the class that day and the hushed whispers throughout the first half of the second period were all included in a giant cluster of a set-up Rowoon and his yes-men prepared beforehand.

She realized it all too late. The entire classroom had the entire thing choreographed along with a pre-planned chant of accept! Accept! and they have all the doors (and windows) blocked by a barricade of living meat shield, so Sejeong was out of option.

The influence Rowoon had on their class was show-stopping. Their cluttered bunch of skippers and cliques banded together for a juvenile confession scenario. Though her eyes couldn’t find Seungah among the blurring cheek-to-cheek smiles and loose laughter.

Rowoon had a bouquet of flowers. Sejeong felt herself coloring, all kinds of shocked.

“Go out with me?” He said, almost too meekly—

—she replied with an I’m sorry before he could finish his sentence.
 

She took the bouquet home – he insisted still, despite getting stream-rolled in front of his own class. On the way home, she offered it to Nayoung, but she looked too out of it to emit anything further than a curt no, keep it, he gave it to you. Sejeong rolled with it, giving the bouquet another whiff before pulling her friend into one smothering hug (Nayoung returned her a slight smile that was a bit too askew, but nothing more). They then parted ways.

The scent that lingered with her back home didn’t seem to be the flowers’.

“I didn’t buy this myself! Um, a guy gave it to me.” She explained to her mom’s arched brows before she could even articulate a question.

“Do you want to vase it?”

“Yeah,” her eyes jumped onto their age old dinner table and dragged it into an excuse, “the table could use some love.”

Hakyeon, his eyes still on the primetime evening TV program, probed into their conversation, “You keep sentimental flowers in your room.”

“The table could use some love.” She reasoned. And hoped it sounded reasonable enough. Her mother had the flower neatly arranged into the rather too fit vase and Hakyeon, with all the free time he had at the time, looked up the Sentimental (capital S) meaning of the flowers, and Sejeong waddled into her own room before she could get the flowers translated into a language she could speak.

Her room smelled of something different, not flowers, but close enough.
 

The confession left an aftermath that she just wanted to get over with. Rowoon was undoubtedly jumpy around her, but it was the way people would skirted around the topic of Rowoon around her that started to get onto her.

“These sad creatures really wished they could have had any semblance of love life. All they’ve got is someone else’s to poke their noses into.” Nayoung flared a spat at the class’ recent behavior. Sejeong agreed with a hum.

It wasn’t until later, when she found herself getting randomly grouped with Nayoung and Seungah for a biology project that required them to spend some quality time with each other in a rather secluded corner in the library. Seungah decided that she wants some place far away from the crowd of hunched backs after a couple of desk-hopping.

For a social butterfly in the making, admittedly, Sejeong never really sparked much conversation with Seungah unless needed. Something about clashing personalities.

Mostly because Seungah had Bad News as her everyday perfume, and Sejeong was particularly allergic to that one fragrance.

As they went on a prowl with their own reading material, to keep things the slightest bit groovy, her mind roamed listlessly among a sea of topics. She settled with something easy. “What’s new these days among the peeps?”

Nayoung kept mum while Seungah did the answering. “Nothing much. We’re still hot on the grand confession last week.”

She tapped Seungah’s knuckle playfully with a finger. “Move on,”

Seungah looked up from the phone nestled atop her open book. “It’s not that easy, Heartbreaker.”

“You tell me about it,” Sejeong flipped a page, and this was the part where her reading comprehension lessened and her conscience began to dissect words and look too much into meanings.

“Okay, I’ll lay it down for you,” Seungah had her fingers knitted atop the desk, “people have been doing some guess-work on you. We’re curious, what’s the secret between all these rejections?”

“What?”

“Is Kim Sejeong liking that status quo, or is she just,” Seungah pursed her lips in-between, sounding a tentative hmmm, “or just… not into boys?”

“What?”

“If you catch my drift.”

Something in her boiled. The question felt too prying and invasive. The idea of her classmates discussing it among themselves clung to her like weights.

She abandoned her own reading material to glare at Seungah square in the eyes and flexed stout shoulders. “It flew way past me.”

“What I’m saying is,”

“Girls,” Nayoung bladed into their seething exchanges, and she noticeably winced at her own decision to speak up, pausing before going on with the latter fraction of the sentence, “there’s a deadline to catch. Seungah, get your phone off your book before I surgically remove it myself.”

Seungah unlatched her attention off Sejeong and moved onto Nayoung. Sejeong found it funny how Nayoung said all that while also simultaneously avoiding Seungah in the eye. “You know, Kim Nayoung, this is the first time we really talk to each other. Didn’t you know you have it in you.”

“Seungah, we have no time for repeats.”

Seungah bared fangs this time. Metaphorically. “If you want to tell me things, at least look at me in the eye. My eyes are up there.”

Nayoung’s eyes stayed on her book. Seungah plowed onto hers soon after, every flip of page enunciated with unsubtle anger. Sejeong tried to make the best out of the tension – speaking was minimal, so she was able to regain her reading comprehension without mediating off a toilet break.

Until Seungah pickaxed the silence apart with a curious question, “How did you guys become so close anyway? Never seen you guys being that chummy with each other until, like, recently.”

Nayoung didn’t budge. Not even a quiver along the bottom lip. No intention to answer at all.

She gave Nayoung a side-glance, then settled with the best non-answer she could get. “We aren’t that close. We’re friends.”

“Oh, yeah, you’re friends with everybody.”

“I am. Right, Nayoung?”

A harsh flip of the page (which Sejeong didn’t try to decipher) and then, “Yeah, we’re just the usual friends.”

“Could you two be a thing?” Seungah questioned.

Sejeong torpedoed into a quick shut down, “God, no, we’re just friends. I don’t like girls that way.” And Seungah broke into a laugh, and shot a prodding finger at her knuckles, and it prompted a playful god, no, gross! out of Sejeong, and she closed the topic off with a snort. Hopefully for good, at least until Seungah decided there was no story to milk off it.

Nayoung remained quiet for the rest of the session.
 

On the way home, Sejeong asked Nayoung to join her family for dinner tonight, and Nayoung was so out of it she told Sejeong the homework was the English workbook, page 89, starting from the first part. Sejeong called her silly and gave the Salonpasless left cheek a thick pinch and Nayoung forgot to react.

And Sejeong laughed, but the laughter felt way too lonesome.
 

Things escalated a bit way too quickly for her to handle. From their botched presentation of said project (Nayoung and Seungah would rather eat a live mole rat than cooperating with each other), to the waves of exam weeks third years were force-fed of, to Eunwoo and Chaekyung dropping the bomb.

Over a delicacy made by cross-breeding waffle and ice cream, Chaekyung took the time to ruminate on her words. “Sooo, like, I don’t really know how to break the news gently enough so you won’t go on a rampage. Those guns could definitely break my calf in half.”

Eyelids low and mind elsewhere, Sejeong replied in autopilot, “Go on.”

She hadn’t been sleeping well even though they were past midterms. There was not much rest for third years as everyone broke legs to make it to all the high-ranking high schools. Sejeong was never studious to begin with and she felt the need for big leaps in order to catch up. Sleep was made a sacrifice (one of the lots).

Eunwoo cut to the chase, patience running thin, expressed through her gesture of leaning closer. “According to the rumor mills you and Nayoung—Kim Nayoung—are involved in some kinda scandalous lesbian relationship. Blink if that’s how it goes.”

Sejeong blinked. Out of confusion. “What—“

“Oh my god,”

“No!” She raised her voice, patience low on fuel. “God, what the hell?”

“It’s spreading like wildfire,” Eunwoo continued, a little more hushed, “you might not want the teachers to catch even a whiff of this…”

It was middle school, and while the prospect of getting called into the counseling room with Nayoung over some untrue lesbian rumor gave her goosebumps all over, it was the idea of her schoolmates tagging her as the lesbian of the year that drained the color from her. It was middle school; the spectrum of uality was a concept too foreign and anything out of the norm was a human too alien. To fit in was the goal of many, to rank in the hierarchy was the noble goal of a few.

Sejeong stood a secret guard to her own identity, which she would later question for years. She couldn’t afford being a dime in a dozen, too much things at stake, and Sejeong was born a calculating person because she knew with all her conditional limitations, there were so few choices to make and take.

“It’s Seungah,” Sejeong seethed, eyes on the dessert she ordered for the sake of ordering, “it can’t be anyone else. She’s crazy enough for this. She’s crazy enough for a daylight axe murder.”

Chaekyung piped in, eyebrows furrowed. “She’s been trying to get into Rowoon’s heart—or pants—so I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s pulling a green-eyed not-girlfriend kinda stunt on you.”

Sejeong burrowed her face into a sweaty palm. “This …”

Eunwoo made a joke (Sejeong laughed a little at -ah), Chaekyung fueled her rage with Nasty Seungah Rumors, and Sejeong occasionally took bites from the chocolate dessert, yet it melted all too quickly into something too stale. Her tongue tasted like fear. It went unfinished.

Later that night, she couldn’t focus on anything else but her phone, trying to get to Nayoung’s side, and Nayoung picked it up after three missed calls. “I’m really sorry, I left my phone in the living room. I didn’t notice… um, what’s up?”

She must have known something was up. The three missed calls read like an urgency.

And Sejeong transformed into a woeful story teller that spun the rumors into a story, Seungah into a child-eating demon, sentence breaks into frustrated curses, and Nayoung into overly quiet. Her harbored hate on display and her furious sobs on clearance sale, Nayoung then spoke up with a voice too calm.

“Sejeong?”

“Yes…?”

“It’s gonna be okay.”

“God, no, it’s easy for you to say that ‘cause they have always seen you as the weird one. Things can’t be looking more sinister for me.”

“Exactly. But okay, if you ask me, this is kinda hilarious.”

Nayoung lost her at ‘hilarious’. “That asks for elaboration.”

“Like—I mean, the idea of two girls dating. Is it that repulsive?”

“It’s… not that acceptable here.”

“Do you find it repulsive?”

“I don’t know,”

“Would you date me?”

The question slaughtered Sejeong’s mood even further. Confusion fragmented her conscience apart. She wished she could just straddle death. “God, I don’t know,”

“Would you date me if I’m actually attractive?”

“I’m gonna hang up.”

A chuckled transferred over the line. “Jokes. But point is, it’s gonna be okay.”

“Optimism, that’s rich.”

An elongated silence. Then, “I’ll look after you. I already told you that… remember?”
 

The peak was the girls’ locker room confrontation after P.E. Messy Seungah went head to head against her own messy self, and it turned the humid changing room reeking of body odor into a boxing ring that smelled like blood-thirst.

It all started like this.

“Hey,” Seungah attracted others’ attention like a honeycomb, and it subdued the others’ buzzes into a quiet, “us girls can’t really change when we have predators in here.”

Seungah said all this while also going through her own locker without pointing an accusing finger at anyone in particular, but Sejeong knew the plural predator she tried to bait.

Seungah spoke up again too soon. “Doesn’t matter if you’re particularly attractive or not, these predators prey on anyone wearing skirts, so…”

“What’s your problem?” Sejeong was at her wit’s end. She approached Seungah in larger steps. “What’s your problem with me?”

Seungah was all ice even though she was the MVP of today’s volleyball bout. “You are the problem, Sejeong. We can’t change with you and your girlie around. Busy outside.”

That one popped a vein. “Your mouth is the one in desperate need of a job. Gossiping someone up into a lesbian is so low.”

“It’s not a make-believe and it’s already made clear.”

“What’s your damage?”

“I felt the need to expose you to people – of how you actually are. There’s a serpent beneath the girl next door persona you charm boys with.” Seungah bared fangs, after a decade of their sleep. “It’s a school, not a pet zoo, Sejeongie. We’re taking the snakes out.”

Sejeong balled her fists harder, she felt the skin stretching atop jutting knuckles. “It’s Rowoon, isn’t it?”

“We don’t talk about your 108^th victim.”

“You’re so ing disgusting, Seungah. All this just because of a boy.”

“Look, maybe it’s not him. Maybe it’s just, well, you.”

“You like him. Who likes me. You want him, who wants me. The whole thing is such a low jab, but if anyone’s here going all time low, it’s you,” and Sejeong seethed, “you cheap .”

It triggered Seungah into throwing a claw into Sejeong’s shoulder, who then wriggled free and paid Seungah back with a shove, and it escalated into a fight then turned into a five-way battle royale fast as the other girls jumped in to wrench her and Seungah away from each other. When Seungah’s stray palm landed a clean hit in the side of her face among the confusion and the mess of limbs, Sejeong was about strike back until she saw a blur of someone charging straight into Seungah.

Nayoung shoved Seungah hard onto the locker next to her, and the noises died down for some time. Disbelief washed them all over.

Seungah was the one taken aback the most.

But it took her too quickly to launch back her feet and took a fistful of Nayoung’s hair and gave it a harsh tug from the front. Her voice was almost a reminiscence of some Goethe demon, “Glad the other dyke finally outed herself.”

“We aren’t a thing and you need to leave Sejeong be!” Nayoung shouted in a strain.

“If you aren’t a thing then what? You’re saying it’s a dramatic one-sided lesbian soap opera all along?”

Nayoung was quiet.

Seungah took the cue to make her hair her own leash and pulled it harshly, the ugly clang and thud resounded the moment Nayoung’s back made contact with the locker. To make things worse, her cronies began to fill the gaps, almost circling, but still open for an audience comprised of the classmates and a confused Sejeong.

“You see, I’ve always known you have it in you to be a gross ert in the closet. You’re too quiet to function in class.” Seungah started, the calm creeping back into her voice. “It’s always the quiet ones. You e to the photos we uploaded on our SNS, huh?”

“No—ack!” Nayoung winced hard at another pull.

Sejeong lunged forward, but two girls stopped her dead in her track. She couldn’t reach the captive Nayoung.

One of the girls gently pulled Nayoung’s glasses off her bewildered face and placed it on the bench, folded and safe. Sejeong knew that marked the start of something bigger.

“So, say, Nayoung,” Seungah peered closer into Nayoung’s reddened eyes, “between you and Sejeong, who’s the lesbian?”

“None of us, you —OW!”

It was beyond horrifying. Bullying stories were something passed from a generation onto another. Jaehwan faced some for acting ‘sissy’. Chaekyung told a story of how a kid in her elementary school got bullied for looking unconventionally ugly. Sejeong had heard herself a plenty, but never an active participant.

This was the first time in her life where she was actively roped into one – attractive, popular swans in a semi-circle around the class’ ugly duckling. It didn’t surprise many.

It didn’t resonate with many, either, because it was middle school, and everybody wanted to fit in.

And she wasn’t any different. She wanted to fit in.

And when her eyes finally met Nayoung’s murky, tear-ridden ones, it was her point of no return.

“…it was me,” Nayoung choked on her own sob, “crap, it was me,”

“It was you what?” Seungah threw the bait.

“It was me! I’m the effin’ lez!” Nayoung broke into a derisive laugh. “I like her, ugh, satisfied?”

The rest was an anthology of things Sejeong would wish she could forget forever, but no matter how many times she tried to tear the pages, to rip all the parts where Nayoung would look at her as they slammed her against the locker, to burn the part where jumped for a save when it was all too late, they stayed there. Documented in high definition to haunt her for years to come.

It was Nayoung’s ed up smile that stayed with her the longest, the one she procured after she called Seungah something so thoroughly insulting, she got a hard slap that sent her to the floor.
 

“Got into a fist fight, Yakuza?”

She walked past Hakyeon, zipped into her room before her mother could catch her looking like she just came back from a one-fourth physical three-fourth emotional warfare.

She washed up, chose a cold shower over a warm one, and made it all quick, breaking records of time spent from all the instances of her avoiding the mirror just so she wouldn’t have to see the coward staring back at her.

The hardest part was when her pride conceded and she dialed Nayoung’s number, and Nayoung picked up on the second ring. “Hello?” Her voice came out too unsure than intended.

“Sejeong,”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,”

“There’s nothing okay about this—Nayoung, I,”

“When tomorrow comes, please don’t talk to me anymore.”

“No, no,”

“No, I mean, Sejeong. I went extra miles to get you out of this. Don’t undo all the beating I got for you, please…”

“This isn’t how it’s supposed to go at all,”

“I know—please don’t cry—middle school’s gonna be over soon enough.”

The rest of the call was mostly nondescript silence, Nayoung’s faint sobbing, and Nayoung’s whispered I like you, Sejeong, I like you a lot.
 

Nayoung didn’t attend the graduation ceremony, but she had been skipping school except for the important test days. Nobody batted an eye. To everybody else, it was a good riddance, even. One less creeper to be worried about.

(Hakyeon stayed with her throughout that night and she never knew she needed a company until she broke down against his back.)

Nayoung locked herself in the house every time Sejeong forced a visit. Knocks went unanswered. Messages went on read.

Nayoung moved out of the town but she only realized it a week later. None of her neighbors knew where the family departed to.

Seungah got into a private all-girls, hearsay said that she assumed her throne as immediate as her first day there. Rowoon stayed on the status quo and he lied to her that he had moved on. Sejeong lied to him that she believed him.

It was an end of an era. Sejeong survived it, but not without bearing scars.