“J-Jang Tae-san… what is this?”

“What is what?”

“How did you get a perfect score…”

“Sir, that’s discrimination against a human being~.”

“Whoaaaaaaa!”

“What? Tae-san got a perfect score?”

“Sir, that bastard must have cheated!”

“The sun came up in the west today, didn’t it? Didn’t it?”

“We demand a thorough verification!!!”

It was the golden Friday closing homeroom.

The place went up.

I had always played on their level, and now that I had a perfect score my friends carried on worse than anyone.

This is why the sages said your enemy is always close at hand.

You bastards, try dying and coming back yourselves.

The world will look different.

“Jang Tae-san… don’t you think this needs explaining? In my whole teaching career there has never been a case like this.”

The homeroom teacher, too stunned to believe it, demanded an explanation from me.

The midterm report cards were being handed out.

Not one of my friends believed it.

Grades don’t go up overnight.

But what could I do about it — the questions were easy.

“The questions were really easy, weren’t they?”

“Easy?”

“Yes. In the hospital I studied hard, textbooks first. Since the concussion my head has felt different.”

“Wow! That bastard. Who does he think he is, the hero of a fantasy novel?”

“Textbooks first? Lie within reason, you smug bastard!”

“Boooooo! We demand the truth about Jang Tae-san!”

“…Punch me in the head once with your fist.”

They were half in doubt, but the result was the result.

My friends made a whole scene of it.

Fair enough. In their place I wouldn’t want to believe it either.

“Pizza for everyone today, on me.”

“…”

At the word pizza the classroom went quiet.

“Not enough? Then PC room money too.”

I threw out one more piece of bait.

“T-Tae-san was always smart, right?”

“That’s right! Our Tae-san used to study some.”

“I read on the internet that a concussion can wake your brain up!”

“Tae-san! I believe in you!”

“Sir! Tae-san is a genius!!!”

“Long live Jang Tae-san! Long live! Long live!”

Hahaha.

Three in the morning and four at night, the whole pack of them. (TL Note: 조삼모사 — “three in the morning, four at night,” from the keeper who fed his monkeys three chestnuts in the morning and four at night, and calmed their protests by swapping the numbers. Said of people fooled by a change that costs the trickster nothing.)

I know you bastards.

With the cheering thrown in, the misunderstanding was cleared up nice and clean(?).

It was a forced scene that could only work at an all-boys school.

Chuseok was over and the ease of the holiday was still hanging around. (TL Note: 추석 — the autumn harvest holiday, the biggest in the Korean year; families travel home for it.)

They weren’t third-years yet, so it was the season for kids to go slack.

With the one who fouled the air gone, peace had come to the classroom.

The school lunch had changed completely.

From the day after I faced the board chairman, the sly dietitian lady was gone.

A new dietitian noona in her mid-twenties, hired in a hurry, came in.

The dietitian noona, who looked like she had just left school and gotten her certificate, was full of enthusiasm.

My God! From lunch that day she started putting meat on the trays, beginning with spicy stir-fried pork, and at lunch today a whole roast chicken came up.

A Protect the Dietitian Noona Society was founded.

Pleasantly plump and cute, the noona went to number one in the school popularity rankings.

With the lunch changed, the kids’ nutrition improved.

Not just meat — good local produce was brought in for the side dishes.

With 1,500 people a day burning through that much material, the market vendors were full of praise.

One person changed and thousands tasted happiness.

It was close to the happiness the country tasted when the president was removed from office in 2017.

“That’s right! Tae-san has gotten impressive lately. Tae-san, congratulations. You’re first in the whole school! Everybody, a hand!”

Clap clap clap clap clap clap!

The applause rang out loud.

It was a ploy you could see straight through.

Which made it cuter.

“Whooooo!”

“I’m eating two pies, Tae-san!”

“Your wallet is mine! Heh heh heh.”

My friends had no interest in who was first in the whole school, and no envy in them either.

A perfect score put me somewhere past comparison anyway.

“All of you, keep it in bounds. Don’t cause trouble.”

The teacher ended homeroom with a smile.

A really good teacher.

He was one in the past and he hasn’t changed since.

“Attention! Bow!”

“We love you, sir.”

“Yeah, I love my boys too.”

It was the strange goodbye that only our class had.

With that, homeroom ended and our class stampeded downtown.

The line was a mess, of course.

Telling hungry wolves to line up in front of food made no sense.

The center of town, ten minutes’ walk from school.

Pizza Hat!

Four in the afternoon, long past lunchtime; there were plenty of seats.

Middle school and high school girls had settled in all over Pizza Hat and were enjoying their chatter.

And the wolves began their raid.

“Mother! Family size combination and cola! Lemon-lime soda! Spaghetti! And just bring a lot of anything!”

“Serve us first!”

“Mother. I’m starving! Me first!”

The wolves couldn’t wait; they crowded the counter and started ordering.

“What’s going on with my boys?”

The lady who owned Pizza Hat went by Mother.

Her eldest son had been a senior at our school, and she had another son in the first year.

The lady called the students of Jangju High School her sons.

“The guy who got a perfect score on the midterms is treating us today.”

“A perfect score?”

“Yes! And a while back he smashed the school’s delinquent!”

“The delinquent? Ah! Jang Tae-san?”

“You know him too, Mother?”

“Of course. My youngest bragged and bragged about how quiet the school had gotten. Which one is Jang Tae-san?”

“He’s over there. There.”

“Oh my. Tall and handsome, isn’t he~.”

“That bastard is handsome?”

Look at this, I was a public figure even here.

My class was making a racket and nobody was frowning at it.

It was a premium only the students of the area’s best high school got.

Even in a fistfight with a student from another school, you could end up the victim before you were the attacker.

In uniform, ask a shop near school to lend you bus fare and it works eight or nine times out of ten.

In downtown Jangju, our school was a business card.

Even now the girls were stealing looks at my friends.

Full of curiosity, but enrolled at a high school for the single since birth, so none of them knew how dating actually worked.

Sold on the food, they had no idea they were standing before a panel of girl judges.

Then the girls looked at me and started whispering.

“Mother. Feed these guys till they burst.”

I went up to the counter and said it with some cheek.

“To feed this crowd till they burst… can you handle it?”

“Even pigs don’t eat till they burst. Don’t worry.”

Mother, the mistress of Pizza Hat, looked at me quietly.

She was a woman who knew how much growing boys eat.

It wasn’t as though I didn’t know either.

“All right. Then let me put out some real pizza.”

Adults know from the eyes alone.

People in business especially have a feel for it.

She had caught the smell of money on me.

And it began.

In my past life I couldn’t have dreamed of it.

One family-size pizza was over twenty thousand won.

Forty pigs went at the pizza like they meant to put away one each.

They really ate.

Spaghetti, smoked chicken, salad, all of it shoveled down.

The drinks they just opened their throats and poured in.

Are these bastards really my friends?

Even if I said it myself, shouldn’t a friend worry about me?

Not one of them asked about the state of my pocket.

Pig bastards, every one of them fit to die with a split stomach…

“Urrrp~. I think I’m going to burst.”

“Then drink cola, bastard. Burp and more goes in.”

“Should I? The lemon-lime soda I had earlier feels like it hasn’t gone down.”

“Jong-cheol went to the bathroom, threw up, came back and kept eating.”

“Wow! Hardcore bastard… I should learn from that.”

“Let’s blow a hole in Tae-san’s wallet! He’s good at studying and vicious in a fight, and if he’s got money too, our lives are a joke!”

“Right! More fighting spirit! Till our jaws split!”

Fighting spirit overflowed all around me.

Waaah… I really love you. Bastards!

Just watching my friends’ heroic struggle filled me up.

Still, if not now, when would I ever get to give to my friends?

Today’s take alone was several billion won.

A man who pinches even a million won is no man.

I sat alone on the folding chair by the counter, watching my crazy friends, and drank cola.

A shame it wasn’t beer, but what could I do — that’s my situation.

I ate one slice of pizza.

Back when I had no money this was the pizza I wanted so badly, and now Mom’s soybean-paste soup came to mind more.

Age is age, it seems.

“Excuse me…”

Just then a girl came up to me shyly and called out.

“Yes?”

She was a fairly good-looking girl.

No — looking again, she was a lot better than that.

The way she had grown… was different from the other girls’.

I had the strange feeling I had seen that figure somewhere.

What is this familiar face?

She was a first-year at Jangju Girls’ High.

“You’re a second-year, right? Oppa, do you have a cell phone number?”

Oppa!

The strange feeling, nothing like when my sisters said it, made my skin prickle.

Whoa? Hold on, am I getting my number asked for right now?

A historic moment.

Ah! So this is what getting picked up feels like.

The situation was not bad at all.

“Oh! God above!”

“Oppa, she says! Jang Tae-san, you smug bastard…”

“May you be cursed with three generations of impotence!”

The hostility of my friends, stuffing themselves with pizza, came at me from every direction.

I feed the bastards like that and they’ve got no loyalty.

I hadn’t made the move — the girl got in first — and they still aimed their hostility at me.

The girl was beaming.

It was a face I had seen a lot.

Still, I was a man who had seen his share of idols.

I turned her request down, coolly.

“There’s a girl I like.”

“What?”

What was that? That baffled expression?

That expression was not an ordinary one.

It was a style you very rarely saw in this town.

I could even feel the shining aura they say only comes off the entertainers who make it.

“Are you going out with her?”

The girl had nerve.

That would be how she could walk up to me in a place crawling with boys.

“No.”

“Then why?”

“It wouldn’t be right to her. A one-sided love is still love, so it should stay pure.”

“Pff, that’s a lie, isn’t it?”

Wow, and I can’t cut my heart open and show her.

But why is my heart shaking at that smile?

This is that heart-skip thing, isn’t it?

I could see the name tag on her uniform.

Kim Seo-ryeon…

Seo-ryeon? Don’t tell me. That Seo-ryeon?

Boom!

A shock wave rolled through me like a hammer to the head.

I had it — where the familiarity came from.

Kim Seo-ryeon.

In the near future, wasn’t she the idol who represented Korea!

Seo-ryeon, given the title of the greatest star our city ever produced.

She was the center of the group FOB and the one in charge of looks.

At one point she was called the best of the girl idols.

Her popularity faded later as she got older, but a Chinese drama in 2019 was a monster hit and made her the hottest Korean Wave actress right up until I died.

And that woman was asking me for my number right now.

My God… is this a dream or is it real?

Ding-a-ling.

Just then the door of Pizza Hat opened and three girls came in.

It had gone quiet, so their entrance pulled every eye.

“Hah!”

“Whoaaaa…”

“K-killer.”

My friends, who had been seething at me, gasped at the girls walking in.

What is it? Who is it?

Whatever it was, it had stolen the eyes of kids who were lost in Seo-ryeon!

I looked at the entrance too.

And then a woman whose eyes met mine.

“Jang Tae-san?”

(End of Chapter 22)