Wrooom. Skreeeek.

The bus stopped in front of me.

The bus that stops at the front of the village at the early hour of six forty is the bus that will take me to school.

Time, about an hour.

A trip that would take twenty minutes by car becomes an hour.

The school uniform of clean gray slacks and a blue shirt felt unfamiliar.

The name tag was on too.

On the white tag, the name Jang Tae-san was stamped clear.

My first commute to school in over a decade.

My feelings were strange.

When work life got hard, I had missed high school.

The emotional conversations I had shared with friends just coming to grips with life and puberty.

Looking back now it felt like playing house, but it really was good at the time.

“Hah… I’ve really become a high school kid again.”

My mind was in my thirties, but my body and my reality were a high school student’s.

The school uniform suited me better than I expected.

The problem was that my mind found it slightly hard to accept.

Unlike before, my new uniform was clean.

The new blue Nike sneakers were new too.

I bought the twins new uniforms as well — they had gotten too tall and their old ones no longer fit.

With graduation soon there was no point, but I bought them two blouses each too.

The same went for me.

The uniform I bought in my first year didn’t fit me anymore.

Before the regression I was thin enough to manage, but now, with the muscle on me, the clothes felt ready to burst.

Chssss.

The bus door opened.

I tapped my well-loaded transit card.

Ah… Another moment where tears threatened to blur my vision.

There had been times when running out of bus fare made it hard to breathe.

The allowance was set, but since my parents weren’t salaried workers, it was paid irregularly.

It always ran short, going toward bus fare, snacks, and the luxury of buying books to read.

But not anymore.

I had become a golden-spoon bourgeois.

The twins commuted to school in Dad’s car.

The school wasn’t far in the city, just in the nearby township, so the timing was no problem.

My father was very pleased with the new car.

The day he came back having used the bankbook I gave him to cleanly settle his debts, my father poured me a drink.

He didn’t say thank you.

Instead he treated me as one adult to another.

It was the courtesy of a man toward the son who had shared the weight of the head of the household.

That day I introduced my father to the somac. (TL Note: somac — 소맥 — is a mix of soju poured into beer, Korea’s most popular drink combo. The name blends 소주 and 맥주.)

Somac hadn’t caught on wildly yet.

This period was when the talk of it was just beginning to spread.

Back then, mixing whiskey and beer in a bomb shot was still the trend.

I stopped my father from pouring soju.

And I took the cold beer from the refrigerator, poured soju into the beer glass, and produced a somac at the ideal ratio.

In the middle of the evening meal, the whole family froze.

I, who didn’t drink, had made a somac with a flamboyant skill that would put a bar worker to shame, and they were aghast.

It was a technique I’d learned from a senior who worked as a waiter during school.

This trick had gotten me liked by my seniors back then.

The somac my father drank, so prepared, made him marvel.

He said he never knew beer could taste like this and knocked back several shots.

And my father…

Collapsed on the wooden floor and passed out.

It was the fate of an innocent farmer, trained only on makgeolli and soju, who did not know the fearsome power of the somac.

“Long time no see. My seat.”

There were plenty of seats left on the bus heading into town.

The bus route started close to our village.

And my seat, where I always had room to sit.

I always sat in the fourth seat from the back of the driver, on his side.

The bus had only one row of seats on each side.

A space that had felt enormous now looked small.

As consciousness grows, the space shrinks.

Same as always.

Most of the passengers on the morning bus were students.

Now and then an older person got on, but it was used like a school commuter bus.

I put my earphones in.

A familiar voice flowed out of the MP3 downloaded to my phone — a song by Lim Mun-se.

The song choice was not suited to my age.

I had heard that emotion-filled voice one tranquil day before I died, and been caught by it.

♪ Leaning against the bus window~ ♪

The bus pulled away.

My feelings were truly strange.

The low mountains, the rice paddies and fields, and the houses visible through the window were endearing.

The emotion of sitting back down in this seat after skipping years of time was quiet excitement.

Today is the day Seodang Online goes up in the afternoon session.

Going to school, but the investing didn’t stop.

My capital, at this point, was over one billion won.

The magic of credit was the express train leading me to cash heaven.

Against someone who knows the future and the information, the rings’ wild swings mean nothing.

The same went for Seodang Online, which I was about to buy today.

Through yesterday, its charts had been moving sideways in a long flat ripple pattern.

Both the weekly and monthly bars had kept all the moving averages from five to one hundred and twenty days crawling along the bottom for two years, sitting quiet under the surface.

The ants had all grown tired and dropped away.

The rings drawing the big picture and the ants who think only about the bait in front of them couldn’t be the same.

Most ants don’t invest in a stock with no movement.

Ants loved riding the wave on sharply rising stocks with everything they had.

It was the nature of an enthusiastic people.

Ants loved a one-shot gamble.

The rings exploit the nature of those ants to the fullest.

I had been one of those ants.

In the past I had been a stupid chart believer, food for the rings.

I had jumped in myself, among the human desires hidden inside the countless red and blue signals.

Since becoming a securities man in the past I had looked at every listed exchange, every KOSDAQ chart, overseas blue chips, futures and exchange rates.

As many as hundreds in a single day.

I had trained like an ascetic trying to find enlightenment, to pick out the subtle signals hidden inside the charts.

I got results to a degree, but that was the limit.

Against the rings, charts were meaningless.

Within the stock they worked, they were gods.

The only problem was when the gods occasionally betrayed each other; an ant could never beat them.

Just hitch a ride and take a bite.

While I was at school taking classes, automated trades were being placed.

Thoroughly calculated and spread out.

Tens of billions including credit were moving.

So the rings wouldn’t be startled, the investment was spread across multiple stocks.

Buys and sells were executing like a precisely calibrated program.

I had bought two computers too.

The newest available in town, though the performance…

A graphics card over 1GB ran well past one million won.

RAM maxed out at four gigabytes.

The CPU was a Pentium.

Still, it ran fine.

Games and programs were still the light version in 2006.

Skreeeek. Wrooom.

The bus kept stopping and going.

The bus that had been roomy was filling up with students.

And then…

“I can’t believe it. Summer vacation is gone. Boo!”

“Why is your face this tan? Did you help with the pepper harvest or something?”

“No. We went to Gwangalli Beach as a family.”

“Really? I’m so jealous…”

Girls’ voices reached me.

Warmth came into my heart.

Girls mainly took the seats toward the front.

The city with a population of around three hundred thousand had ten high schools.

The bus I was on mostly ran through the outer village routes.

Hearing the chatting girls’ voices brought back memories one by one.

The name of the lively girl talking about the beach right now was Mi-jin.

I had seen her face every day but never exchanged a word.

The name of the friend next to her, the jealous one with acne on her forehead, was Na-yeong.

They were students from Jangju Girls’ High, which ran alongside Jangju High School as its peer.

“Your bag looks heavy — let me take it.”

Manners — that’s Jang Tae-san.

The girls in their summer uniforms swayed with the bus’s motion.

The fresh shampoo smell they gave off was pleasant.

Just looking at girls with no makeup was a pleasure for the eyes.

This is the reward of regressing, enjoyed to the fullest!

I couldn’t just watch the heavy bags hanging on their shoulders.

There was none of the embarrassment from before.

“What?”

The girls’ eyes went wide at my kindness.

Flowers bloomed all around me.

It looked funny, sitting in the middle of the girls, but I didn’t move to the back.

There were groups of boys commuting from town back there.

A dark aura drifted from that direction.

Rankings existed inside the bus too.

It wasn’t regional discrimination — they were discriminated against by school.

School uniforms of every color were mixed here and there, like so many different races.

The boundaries divided up in subtle ways.

The very back seats, most popular with the boys, were taken by the vocational high school kids.

The big-framed kids from what had been renamed Jangju IT Industry High sat in the long bench at the very rear.

From the back of the bus they swore coarsely, spat and threw out crude jokes at full volume without hesitation.

It wasn’t a knock on the school, but the atmosphere was easy enough to imagine.

Students from each school clustered in the space between.

Not many students from the township where I lived had gotten into the prestigious Jangju High.

There were two Jangju High students on the bus, at most.

Following the school’s classes was hard while commuting.

Only poor me made the longest commute route.

My friends either boarded in town or lived in the school dormitory.

For various reasons I couldn’t enter the world at the back of the bus.

Different middle school, different neighborhood.

“It’s heavy, though…”

“It’s fine.”

Mi-jin smiled a crescent smile.

Na-yeong, the bashful one, carefully held out her bag.

Their bags settled on my lap.

Sitting was better.

With mostly girls, if I stood while the bus was moving I risked being taken for a groper.

And that’s how five bags got stacked on my lap.

“Who’s that? I feel like I’ve seen him somewhere.”

“The face seems familiar…”

“You’re sure we’ve seen him somewhere, right?”

Girls from several schools around me were curious about who I was.

Their gazes swept over me.

My goodness, how much had I changed for them not to recognize me?

I had been taking this bus for the past year and a half.

And always using this general area of seats.

And the girls didn’t recognize me.

Joy and deflation crossed each other at once.

The past me, with no presence, was embarrassing.

And at the same time, the me who had changed to the level of plastic surgery was gratifying.

“Was there a guy this good-looking on this bus? Doesn’t his face look familiar?”

“The name tag’s hidden behind the bag, isn’t it?”

They were whispering, but my sharpened ears caught all of it.

“Should I ask?”

“Wh-what is she, crazy…”

They were still the innocent girls of the time.

Different from the bold girls of 2020 who’d take your number first.

Their faces weren’t pretty, but the fresh late-teenage girls were a balm just to look at.

The sweet smell of shampoo and lotion that drifted every time the bus moved warmed my heart pleasantly.

In age I was similar to the girls, but my mental state was thirty-two.

The youth protection law came naturally to mind.

A wry smile settled on my lips.

“Oh? He smiled.”

“He might have caught us — should we say something?”

Just the morning’s imagination was enough to make the girls happy.

It was the kind of imagination only youth just beginning to bloom could have.

Before I knew it, the girls had gathered near Mi-jin and Na-yeong.

Their quiet laughter rang like a line of poetry.

My gaze was fixed outside the window.

Then the bus stopped.

That place.

And quietly, a girl got on the bus.

She took a seat beside the empty row in front of me.

My gaze turned to her, as it had in those days.

My heart gave a thump and beat without my knowing it.

And from the earphones came Lim Mun-se’s song…

♪ Sitting at the window as the morning sun rises~ ♪

♬ Watching the clouds drift by in the distance~ ♬

♬ Old memories I’ve been searching for, drawn in my heart~ ♬

♪♬ I always want to stay by her side~ ♪♬

♪ I can’t leave… ♪

My eyes watching her grew hot.

The one I had wanted to meet again…

The one I had drawn in my heart all my life…

My first love… and unrequited one.

(End of Chapter 12)