Chapter Forty One

I didn’t realize what I was becoming.
What was coming ahead was the fact my father would, indeed, notice.

I transferred to Seoul Elite High to start my first year of senior high school. I joined the Debate Club and Soccer Team when I was in freshman year. It was during the sophomore year that I began making waves in Seoul Elite. It was all in the same year that I became the captain of two big organizations in the school, namely the Debate Club and the Men’s Soccer Team. I was also elected as the student council president, topping the poll against four other candidates, which included a member of the Debate Club, at the same time, a member of some ridiculous rumor-based publication going around the school. It was a publication released  quarterly.

It was named The White Tablet.

The first time I heard of the publication was during my freshman year, and the first adjectives that I came to associate it with were “useless” and “nonsensical”. What kind of a properly functioning human being would create such kind of written piece of literature with nothing but annoying unreliable hearsays and tattling stories printed on every page that I presumed to only attract perky gossipy girls? It was madly absurd. Because of this, I never laid a hand on any of their published work. And never will. 

Immediately, at the start of my presidential term during the sophomore year, I began questioning the existence of the White Tablet. Conducting a poll among my student council subordinates, almost eighty percent of the council members permitted the continual existence of the publication. It was only Lee Byunghun, the project commissioner and I who voted for the shutdown of the publication. My subordinates were pointing out that the publication was highly influential among the students and that dissolving it would probably lead to total chaos, not only ensued by the readers, which was approximately ninety percent of the student population, but also by the nine-member team of publishers themselves. They said that if we didn't want our faces to be printed on the front cover, we should just leave the publication alone, especially that the White Tablet was notorious for being an instant reputation-killer. Once your name and face were printed on any of its pages, you would become a walking time bomb. So I did. As much as possible I tried distancing myself in any matter relating to the White Tablet.

Particularly, I tried my best to prevent any kind of connection or linkage with the White Tablet editor-in-chief. I hadn't met her. However, I knew only two facts about her. First, she was on the same year level as me. Second, her name. 

Her name was Seo Myunjae.

Being considered as a model student in the school somewhat felt honourable. Being the debate team captain, soccer captain,  and student council president, students of higher and lower year levels smiled, greeted and bowed at me in the hallways, in the classrooms, in the stadium. Almost everywhere. I received respect and revere everywhere I went. It felt good. It felt good...for quite an ample amount of time. 

However, I was not the ideal student as what they thought I was in the first place.

It was during the start of senior high school when I met friends whom I later considered brothers, or perhaps, more than brothers. These friends were the soccer team members. There were many soccer team members, however, there were few who had been closer to me. Friends were supposed to have the same interests. Besides the fact that they and I had passion for soccer, I basically knew nothing much about them. They had been studying in the school ever since junior high school, compared to me, who had only started my freshman year. 

There was one thing I came to know about them later on: they would go partying in a club or somewhere else every once in a while, particularly about thrice in a month at maximum.

At first I was bothered by the said fact since Seoul Elite High housed “intelligent and well-disciplined students”, attributing to the fact that most of the students were children and relatives of company owners, celebrities, and political figures, and such kinds of people were more vulnerable to being objects of rumors and other stories, which unfailably attracted the eyes of the external media. What was worse was the fact that the school had its established “eyes and ears” for such kind of stories that was the White Tablet itself.

As anxious as I was for my soccer members, they didn’t seem to give a d.amn about it. They said they had been doing it for quite some time and had never been caught. They also said that the effect would not be that harsh on them since students already knew what most of the soccer team members were doing for their past time. 

They said it was what the students assumed of them to do anyway. They were the jocks and the “jerks”, though the terms didn’t offend them in the long run. Besid