“Let me take your bag.”

“No, it’s all right.”

“It’s heavy, isn’t it. And you’ll leave my hand hanging there.”

“…”

She looked at me.

How am I supposed to put it?

Black eyes of unknowable depth were looking at me.

Her gaze, which I had never once met head-on like this, was beyond imagining.

The characters for a crane among chickens came to mind.

On this bus she alone was beautiful.

She lived in a small provincial city, and her skin had the color of Joseon white porcelain that had never once seen the sun.

Her eyes were large, and her hair, tied neatly into a ponytail, ran with gloss.

About a hundred and sixty-seven centimeters tall.

The uniform looked like a suit tailored for her.

Every boy was interested in her, and not one of them could get near her.

In the past I had been one of them.

But today, for the first time, I had spoken to her.

Once you have died, you understand.

That life is short, and comes to nothing.

Thump! Thump! Thump!

Why… I don’t know why my heart is pounding like this.

Probably because she is a first love.

However old a man gets, it seems he turns into an idiot when he meets his first love.

After I started college I dated a few girls, but nothing ever went past what I felt thinking about her, my first love.

Because we never had anything together, the fantasy must have grown larger.

All the more so because she was the one who ruled this bus, alone.

The final answer on the number 32 bus.

Lee Ye-rin.

Except for the surname, the same name as the heroine of Cloud Warrior.

“Thank you.”

Good God! She had said thank you to me.

A smile showing a little between even teeth.

A killer smile.

“It’s a hard world. We have to help each other.”

At my words she only smiled.

The first button was done up right.

It had taken me a good ten-odd years to move up to that spot at the front where she always stood.

“I’m Jang Tae-san.”

“Sorry?”

“My name is Jang Tae-san.”

“…Yes.”

Out of nowhere, but I gave her my name.

I didn’t want to lose my first love to nothing all over again.

If I died without even letting her know my name, there was no point in having come back.

Vroooooom.

The bus pulled away.

Today too, five bags sat on my legs.

And one of them was my first love’s bag.

A line came back to me from a college classmate in the past: if a woman is all right, her accessories look pretty too.

A familiar melody came out of the earphones.

“The Beatles, easing into the opening of ‘Yesterday’…“

Lyrics that leave the corners of your eyes damp if you listen.

The Beatles were geniuses of feeling.

I looked out the window.

Before I knew it, rice ripening to yellow filled the fields.

The pastoral scene I had forgotten settled me.

The body was in its youth, but the mind belonged to a young man who had lived through a punishing age.

The habit of wandering through some day in 2020 was still left in me.

Jang Tae-san…

Ye-rin looked carefully at Tae-san, who had taken her bag and was gazing out the window listening to music.

The familiar strains of “Yesterday” coming over from Tae-san’s earphones went well with the scenery outside.

He’s changed. A lot…

Ye-rin knew Tae-san too.

A Jangju High boy who had started riding the same bus last year, slightly tall and thin, always with his shoulders curved in and nothing confident about him.

There was nothing much to distinguish him.

He was kind at heart and took the girls’ bags for them.

He hardly spoke.

Looking out the window alone and listening to music was all of it.

She was aware, at least, that the way he looked at Ye-rin now and then was not ordinary.

But that was exactly as far as it went.

Until summer vacation ended and she met Tae-san on the bus again.

He had changed a lot.

His build had shot up, and his eyes were full of assurance.

Even the air around him was different from the high school boys his age.

There was an oddly steady feeling to him, almost like her father.

And he had taken her bag for the first time, and told her his name.

His smile was not oily, and he did not appear to be paying Ye-rin any special attention.

The entrance exam was coming soon.

And at the end of this year she would go back to Seoul with her father.

But she did not feel bad about it.

Jang Tae-san, strangely changed.

Without meaning to, Ye-rin stole another glance at him.

“Poor bastard, back and straight into exams. Heh heh heh.”

“Psycho bastard. If it were me I’d stay holed up in the hospital and come out when the exams were over.”

“Too bad… the fun of swiping drinks in this bastard’s hospital room is goodbye now too.”

“Argh! And I never got the private-room nurse noona‘s number! Why the hell is this bastard coming back to school!”

The moment I walked into the classroom my friends swarmed over.

Dae-seon, Jong-seok, Hyeong-cheol, Do-jung, Bong-seok and Hee-cheol surrounded me like hyenas that had spotted prey.

Guys who before would have smacked me in the back of the head were careful, maybe because of the word concussion.

No — the sight of me wrecking the delinquents must still be sitting in their memory.

Whatever anyone said, the top dog of Jangju High School was me now.

Even guys I had never been close to showed goodwill with their eyes.

There was gratitude in it, for clearing away the garbage.

The air in the school had gotten clean.

A school with every piece of garbage gone had a different feel.

The cancerous ones in every class would be keeping their heads down.

They had seen clearly how Hong Seong-hyeon went.

The scent of freedom drifted around the school.

Ah! Good.

“Nothing much happen?”

“Plenty happened.”

Hee-cheol answered my question.

He must not have brushed his teeth; red chili flakes showed between them.

Filthy bastard.

His hair was matted too, as if he hadn’t washed it in days.

“What plenty?”

I asked Hee-cheol as I sat down.

I wasn’t expecting much.

“School without you was heaven.”

“Bullshit.”

“Kek kek kek.”

I don’t know why an exchange like this is funny, but Hee-cheol came apart.

They think you have to take a mouthful of abuse to be loved and to have friendship overflowing.

A mental age in the thirties has trouble understanding it.

At this age a sentence didn’t work without a curse in it.

Words built on fuck and dog branched into prefixes, suffixes, interjections and the rest, and were put to every possible use.

Insane.

“Hey! Shut up and let’s study a little! It’s midterms today. You thick-heads!”

Some guy, edgy about the midterms, shouted.

“Punk. Starting now is already too late. Just give up and play, like Tae-san.”

In the past I had hung around a class rank somewhere near the number of fingers and toes added together.

But from today, the word give up was declined.

Say it a hundred days over that I’m not the me of the past and all you get is a sore mouth.

Show them what you can do and it’s finished.

I ignored my friends, sat down and looked out the window.

The campus turning color by color was as worth looking at as the school’s history.

Autumn had come to the school too.

Rattle.

The front door opened with force.

The kids sat down with a clatter.

“My beloved little rascals~. All done studying for the exams?”

Tin-Can, our homeroom teacher, came in with a wide smile.

Out of the five second-year humanities classes, ours was last.

Hong Seong-hyeon’s violence had muddied the study atmosphere badly.

“…”

The kids met the teacher’s question with silence.

“Sure, sure. I’ll be watching closely to see which of you smears his homeroom teacher’s face with shit this time. And send me a wedding invitation later, all of you. I’ll pay my thirty thousand won and check what your wives look like!”

The warning the teacher gave with a smile dug into the class’s chests.

Even at a regional prestige school, the ranks divide inside it.

Everyone had enough to get into a provincial university without trying hard.

But for the school’s honor, what was needed was IN Seoul, and specifically the Hanguk, Goyeong and Yeonji nameplates.

“Tae-san, you’re all right?”

“Yes, sir! Thanks to you I’m in fine shape!”

“Good. You did well. My boy.”

That was enough.

He was a teacher with no connections and no power, who had come to the hospital room seven whole times to say he was sorry.

That was what a private-school teacher’s post was.

Falling out of the board chairman’s favor made you a semi-non-permanent employee, worn out for life.

“All of you. Do well on the exams. Don’t figure out later that you miss this time and end up regretting it.”

“Yeeeees!!”

The kids shouted back.

But the only ones in that classroom who knew what those words really meant were the teacher and me.

The measuring stick you are held to the moment you step out into the world is a cold one.

Region of origin, school of origin, then specs and even looks — everything was an object of comparison.

Which is exactly why school days are all the more precious and beautiful.

The friends who would surely have come when I died are none but the ones here.

The midterm exams began.

Hah. This is a total cakewalk.

The moment I took the first-period math paper I smiled.

Another day unlike the past went on.

I broke through the math problems fast.

(End of Chapter 19)