“Hoho. I do wonder whether it suits your palate, Madam Treasurer. I did try to prepare properly.”

“It’s good. The omakase here is the real thing.”

“Isn’t it?”

“The botan shrimp is fresh.”

“The American president is coming before long and word is they’ll be putting botan shrimp on the table.”

“Really?”

“Yes. A hotel chef who got an invitation to the Blue House told me.”

Ran, an omakase sushi house in Cheongdam, Gangnam.

A dark interior, black throughout, lending the place a quiet sort of quality.

Among certain people of the upper class it has a settled reputation as somewhere good to entertain a guest.

Months after opening it was already popular enough that the next month’s bookings were full.

A Japanese-cuisine chef out of a five-star hotel in Japan goes down to Noryangjin fish market himself before dawn to buy wild-caught ingredients.

The prices are wicked to match.

The chef’s recommended lunch course runs to about a million won.

“Madam Jo, I really do like your character. Considerate, and full of affection for the school.”

“Nothing beside yours, Madam Treasurer. Hohoho.”

“We ought to work together next year. I think we’d suit one another.”

“Only entrust it to me and I’ll serve the school and the children with everything I have.”

Jo Huijeong smiled wide, her even teeth showing. Winning the treasurer over was finished.

Two years of effort hadn’t gone to waste.

Her husband is rich enough to own several buildings across Gangnam and Gangbuk, and there were still things that wouldn’t go the way she wanted.

Becoming an officer of Cheonghwa’s parents’ association above all of them.

She’d barely got a foot into a seat on the catering subcommittee.

What she needed now was a definite card.

The new-money label had to come off her. She needed the officer title that lets a woman put her face forward without flinching.

The first time is the hard part. Once you’re an officer you blend in among the Gangnam mothers naturally.

It works with more influence behind it than any business card.

You can slip into the gatherings of current and former officers as though you belonged there.

Belong to that organisation and your daughter’s future changes with it.

A gathering where power that works in all weather and every kind of high-grade information gets passed around. Reachable in ordinary life.

The future of a house built on property changes too. To get hold of it she’d spent money and time and spared neither.

Fortunately her daughter’s marks had held. Putting expensive tutors on her had worked.

President or vice president of the association is beyond anything she could presume to aim at.

The treasurer’s side, which values funds and sociability first, suited her nature better in any case.

The current treasurer’s term expires under the two-term rule. She’ll be moving across to the operating committee soon enough.

To get that seat, Jo Huijeong had been supplying gifts and meals for two years, at every opportunity that came.

The treasurer’s eye is set high enough that she won’t glance at anything short of proper luxury. One way and another, well over a hundred million won had melted away into it.

And now the time for the harvest had come.

Barring some variable, the next treasurer’s seat was as good as——

Tra-la-la-ring.

A Mozart symphony rang out pleasantly.

Background music chosen with some effort, to lift the tone to match the occasion.

Darling Daughter?

Jo Huijeong checked the screen. She wondered at a daughter calling at an hour when she should be in school.

The school is in its lunch hour right now.

Not a time they usually speak, either.

“Madam Treasurer, it’s my daughter. Might I take it a moment?”

“Take it, take it. It’ll be the school.”

“Yes. Hoho.”

Jo Huijeong smiled demurely and touched answer.

“Darling girl, it’s Mummy. What——”

—Waaaaaah! Mum, somebody hit me! Huh, huhhhhh.

The phone wasn’t on speaker and the sobbing came out of it loudly regardless.

“Hit? By— by who?”

She asked it loudly, over the crying. Jo Huijeong forgot where she was sitting and let her real temper out.

At the same time her head knotted itself up.

A daughter as highly strung as she is herself.

A scandal at this timing and the treasurer’s seat, all but in her hand, could fly away.

Her daughter being hit concerned her, and her head was busy with an arithmetic that mattered more.

—A charity case bastard hit me. Huhhhhh, huh huh.

“A— a charity case? Which little wretch was it?”

At the words charity case, the worry she’d briefly pressed down vanished on the spot.

Another family’s child would have been a problem. A charity case was fine.

—Ha— Tae-ung! Ha Tae-ung!

Ha Tae-ung? A name she had never heard.

Blazing.

With the confirmation done, flames went up in Jo Huijeong’s eyes.

The other party being a charity case, there was now nothing at all to hold back for.

“Wait right there. Mummy is coming to the school this minute.”

Kang Ari?

Living as a Cheonghwa student the first time round, I’d picked up this and that.

But at this point in the past I hadn’t got any real handle on Kang Ari.

That she was a cello major, and one of the school’s three great beauties. About that much.

What’s visible I know, obviously.

Around a hundred and sixty-seven. Proportions and a line that would do for a uniform catalogue.

A bob, always neat, always clean.

A girl whose looks bring a quiet ink painting to mind, the beauty of it very much of this part of the world.

Keep looking and the mind settles, and a pleased smile spreads across the face on its own.

“Are you talking to me?”

I asked again, checking, at a form of address I hadn’t expected.

Coming over out of nowhere and calling me oppa.

“Yes……”

“Why?”

“You said you were a returning student.”

“…….”

Kang Ari answered with a slight colour coming up in her face.

Different from the flat stares of the others watching.

Purity itself. Eyes without a speck in them.

“Thank you, that day……”

“Hm?”

“A— Ari! What are you saying?”

An Aram grabbed her arm, thrown by it.

The message being to keep her distance from the charity case who’d been throwing bombs around the school since morning.

“That day…… do you remember? The day it rained……”

Was it the eyes that did it? At her words the day came back to me, from before the regression, like something out of a lie.

It was recent. Early in the term.

Or, counting in the time I’ve already lived through, a spring more than ten years ago.

For me a great deal of time has passed since that day.

It rained.

It was March and it came down hard. Rain that hadn’t been in the forecast, at that.

The downpour started in the afternoon.

Every day back then was time spent drifting.

It was more than I could carry.

I’d fallen deep into wondering whether to withdraw from the school.

I was standing there blankly, facing rain that had arrived out of nowhere, when a girl stopped beside me.

A first year.

She looked thrown by the weight of it.

A large cello case over her shoulder. I could see her weighing something.

I had a fairly large umbrella in my hand.

I wondered for a moment about giving it to her. It would have been no use.

The rain was coming down hard, and carrying a case that size she didn’t look able to manage an umbrella on top of it.

“……Your car?”

I asked without much thought behind it. School rules keep the commuting cars from coming inside the gate.

“It’s waiting…… in front of the gate.”

She answered with her round eyes bright. Kang Ari was the name on her tag.

“Do you want…… to walk together?”

I asked knowing she’d refuse. The atmosphere in that school had most of the children looking at a charity case the way you look at an insect.

“……Thank you.”

Kang Ari’s response was different. She broke the expectation, thanked me, and bowed her head slightly on top of it.

Snap.

I opened the umbrella as though I’d been waiting for the answer.

And Kang Ari carefully stepped in beside me.

“That…… give me the case.”

I put a hand out and she looked at it for a moment.

Then handed over a cello case worth several hundred million won at the very least.

I put it on my left shoulder. Backpack still on my back.

She and I matched our stride and set off.

Tap tap. Tap-tap-tap.

Crrrack!

At the hard rain and the thunder she took hold of my arm, carefully.

That day. The first and the last of it.

And that girl was the Kang Ari standing in front of me.

Somebody I’d shared one passing moment with——

“Then buy me a meal.”

Now that I know, I am glad about it. Half joking, half not, I threw out whatever came.

A great many students in the canteen were still watching us.

Refusal is the natural next step.

Nobody wants to be associated with a charity case who’s been committing violence——

“010-9XX9-1009.”

Kang Ari said the number almost in a whisper.

“……??”

“Call me when you have time.”

A small bow.

Looking at my confusion, she bowed her head slightly and stayed entirely composed.

“L— let’s go.”

An Aram pulled her away in a hurry.

“…….”

Silence swallowed the space around us straight after.

“Whoa……. Ha Tae-ung. You……”

Park Jiung let out something full of respect.

Apparently my walking away with the number is past what he can process.

The lunch hour ended in a direction I hadn’t asked for.

Spectacular events, all of them inside a few hours of walking through the gate.

I already know.

That the real beginning starts from here.

“When a function z = f(x, y) has continuous partial derivatives fx and fy, and x = Φ(u, v) and y = Ψ(u, v) are partially differentiable as functions of u and v……”

Straight after lunch, fifth period is maths.

The life I’d already lived through was no different from a battlefield.

A war where sometimes you fall back, and where taking the advantage and attacking means getting your teeth properly into the throat if you want it finished.

And when you mean to finish a war, you go at it all out, with death accepted as part of the price.

I lit the spark of it in myself.

I enjoyed the maths lesson too, hearing one again after so long.

Maths used to be one of the subjects I most wanted to avoid.

Cheonghwa’s maths problems were harder than the worst entrance exam anybody sat. However hard I wrapped my head around them I couldn’t keep pace.

After I got to university I took a course from the maths department as a general elective.

There was some connection to my own major.

And at a particular moment during that degree I understood the pleasure the discipline has in it.

The wall of maths I’d never got through. That was the moment it came down.

Now I can work a problem like the one on the board through in my head, to a fair degree.

I can’t solve all of them.

I’m no genius at it, so the working still has to go on paper to some——

Hm? But it’s solving?

“Insane.”

The word got out of me before I knew it was coming.

“…….”

A maths lesson as silent as the dead.

They must have heard me swear and not one of them lifts a head or turns round.

At this same point in the old life they’d have screwed their faces up and glared murder at me.

They know the rumour about this morning’s charity-case revolt, and they’re working hard at ignoring me. Only——

Knock, knock.

Slide.

A knock, and then the front door of the classroom came open roughly.

And a middle-aged man came through it, face flushed red, boldly and completely bald.

“Teacher Oh, my apologies.”

“Yes……”

The maths teacher stammered, thrown.

The man swept the room fast, looking for somebody.

And then.

“Hey! Ha Tae-ung! Get outside right now, you little bastard!”

(End of Chapter 14)