Hyejeong's POV

Its been a few weeks, or maybe even months, since our first tryst, and thinking about it even now still made me blush slightly.

It was that good.

But Seolhyun, especially recently, seemed a little off colour. A tad lacklustre, if you understand what I mean. Her questions started to peter off, and when called upon to speak in class she seemed dazed and generally off tangent.

And she seemed more withdrawn as well. During the days that I have class directly before recess (once a week), I saw her slink off by herself, friendless, with an alarming regularity. It seemed as if she was slinking back into her empty, hollow shell, the shell that the events of the past episode has let me to believe she had shed.

And it pained me to see her like that.

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Come to think of it, could it have been me that caused her to be like that? I mean, she might have been a lot more awkward in class because of our tryst, and maybe that transition led to her being ostracised. And, maybe word of our leaked out, and they all hated on her for being gay.

It seemed all too plausible to me. And that scared me. Surely, I didn’t want to be responsible for the social death of a student just a few months of my tenure.

At least, even if I had such a penchant of destroying the social lives of my students it would be limited to this cohort. I’d be leaving teaching soon anyway for university.

In any case, I understood the feeling of this ostracisation all too well. I was, after all, the only student from my cohort to not come from a rich family, and in terms of bullying and ostracisation I bore the full brunt for it.

Well, to be fair there were 3 other students like me, and none faced it to the same extent I did.

Maybe its just because I .

But I digress. Perhaps those who browse this a few years down the road won’t be able to understand this feeling, especially if one always had the social skills to overcome it in the first place. But I lacked this, and was therefore the kid that was picked last for anything, and thus lacked the platform with which to recover and repair my lack of a social life.

And so gradually I preferred to be left alone. And aside from a few bullying incidents, all the students that I have met have generally treated me the same way.

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You know, I am probably just massively overthinking things here right now. Maybe she was just moody, or naturally quiet, or just an angel in class but a devil off it. There is no way a girl like her could have gone through the hell that I survived for the entirety of my schooling life.

Besides, what’s with her fashion style recently? She seems to have taken a fancy to wearing long sleeved sweaters, wearing a slightly different one everywhere every day.

Some girls are just able to pull off the sweater look, but Seol was not one of them. Charitably put, she looked horrendous.

It couldn’t be because she thought the sweater made her look good; I give her more credit than that. Perhaps she was just trying to hide something, like a scar, or a bad bruise.

Or maybe she just has a bad fashion sense. And maybe it was that that led to her gradual ostracisation by the rest of the class. Overthought and unrealistic, but nevertheless it assuaged my concerned heart.

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Did I just allude above