Here she is.

Three-stripe Nike slippers. The weapon of my pride.

An everyday household item, and they despise it. Still standing on Oh Gwangjun’s face, I turned toward the sound.

A girl had come in through the back door of the classroom and stopped there.

The moment I saw her she filled my eyes.

The whole room seems to brighten.

In the old life, just looking at her made me shrink.

The daughter of a noble house, whom commoners are not permitted to look at.

“Still pretty…… seeing her again.”

The thought came out of my mouth without asking me first.

About a hundred and seventy.

A bob, and a small pale face without a single flaw on it.

Features perfectly even, nothing harsh anywhere, and a body built to the golden ratio.

Lee Hyoju, who they say collects agency cards by the handful the moment she steps outside the gates.

She doesn’t wear makeup like the other girls. Fresh young skin, and she shone on the strength of that alone.

Large eyes set under natural creases look straight at me.

Clear.

As far as I know, she went to Gogeuk University. And she——

“……??”

She — no, Lee Hyoju — rounds her eyes and asks the question with them.

A look demanding to know what I meant by that.

Nobody in this school has ever said such a thing to Lee Hyoju.

And the situation is very funny on top of it.

Oh Gwangjun, who has kept order in this class until today, is lying under a slipper.

Standing on his face and talking nonsense, I must look thoroughly strange.

“…… Ha Tae-ung’s actually lost it, hasn’t he?”

“He told Lee Hyoju she’s pretty!”

A commotion went up among the students.

I understand their reaction perfectly.

Lee Hyoju is a genuine chaebol granddaughter.

Granddaughter of the sitting chairman of Oyang Group, somewhere around sixtieth in the corporate rankings.

As with most chaebol houses, her father is CEO of an affiliate.

If that were the whole of it you’d think fair enough. There’s more.

Her great-uncle is the sitting chairman of Doa Ilbo, one of the three great dailies.

A core line in the tangled marriage networks the chaebol run across politics and business.

She belongs, naturally, to that apex group where money fuses with the press.

They’re different at the root. She carries the blood of Sangchon Lee Jangsu, the richest man in the country under the occupation.

And look at that soft gold aura spreading out from her.

Her bearing is haughty and the aura suits it, and together they make her stand out further.

And that Lee Hyoju——

A snort.

She laughs, as though she can’t account for any of it.

“Ha Tae-ung.”

She says my name, and gets it exactly right. It’s the first time my name has been spoken since I enrolled at Cheonghwa.

An honour to the family.

“Yeah.”

The first time our eyes have met, too. I looked straight into them.

“Can you handle it?”

Her gaze went to Oh Gwangjun, flat under the slipper. She knows as well as anyone.

Out of every student in second year, class three, I am the lowest of the low.

She’s reminding me of my own reality. I’m standing on one of the people I’m supposed to look up to.

“More or less.”

Oh Gwangjun’s father’s job is a concern. It isn’t a fear. A prosecutor?

I have ways of handling that side of things.

“Don’t do this again. No violence in my classroom.”

My classroom, she says. Lee Hyoju is our class president.

She’s close to a perfectionist. For someone who has to turn the presidency into a line on a record, violence in the room is unacceptable.

She didn’t ask why I’d done it to Oh Gwangjun.

Soft steps.

Having said her piece, Lee Hyoju passes by with a light step.

Shff. Tap.

Without any particular feeling she picked up a pack of wet wipes off somebody’s desk and dropped it in front of his face.

“Clean up your own filth.”

A clear voice with all the emotion taken out of it.

A shiver.

Still pinned, Oh Gwangjun trembles. A word from the Brahmin class is an absolute command.

“You heard her. Clean up your own shit, she says. Heh heh.”

I laughed at him the way he used to laugh at me. I’m not going to sit and take it any more.

This is how a wise school life is properly done.

Step on it and it should writhe. Show teeth, and you bite.

If I endure it the way I did then, I’m not Ha Tae-ung.

I lived enduring it, and the world didn’t roll the way I wanted it to.

One way or the other, the world rolled exactly the way it was always going to.

I’ve no attachment left to Cheonghwa. With what I can do now I could take the equivalency-exam route instead.

But——

“This is fun.”

The charity case’s school life, with the play button pressed.

Enormous fun. I have high expectations.

Rustle.

Lee Hyoju sat down and worked through the maths problems her tutor had printed for her. The pen isn’t moving the way she wants it to.

Her head is full of stray thoughts and it’s stifling. That dreadful scene from a few minutes ago.

The shock was considerable.

She had acted calm, and she had been afraid.

She’d come up through a designer private kindergarten in Gangnam and arrived here.

She’d seen small violences before. Never anything that extreme.

Ha Tae-ung, standing on a person’s face, laughing.

He’d looked like a safari hunter who had brought down a predator.

He’s certainly mad.

He was quieter than anyone in the classroom. Height and looks to rival a model, and the standing of a charity case.

He’d known his place and behaved accordingly.

Lee Hyoju had seen plenty of entertainers who threw their weight about on a face alone.

She’d had no personal curiosity about Ha Tae-ung whatsoever.

His academic results were decent, and they hadn’t got him through the charity-case wall.

Oh Gwangjun crossed a line in the classroom occasionally, and never far enough to trouble her.

The world she’d watched all through her growing up simply worked that way.

Only the strong get to raise their heads. Lose any one of power, money or connections and you weaken.

And at that moment you bow your head. She had learned all of it in her own body as she grew.

And today a charity case, Ha Tae-ung, put a finger on a conviction of hers that had been solid.

He’d raised a flag.

He’s changed. Why?

He’d said it to her face. Still pretty, seeing her again. An impossible provocation.

Outside her own family there is nobody around her who would dare say such a thing.

And it hadn’t been unpleasant.

Their eyes had met, and Ha Tae-ung hadn’t looked away the way he did every other time.

“Hm.”

A small laugh escaped that she couldn’t account for. The punishment for today’s assault won’t be light.

By now the rumour has gone right round the school.

Oh Gwangjun, with a division chief prosecutor for a father, won’t let it lie.

And there are several foul-tempered boys who run with him.

“Just don’t make trouble for me……”

Lee Hyoju murmured it quietly to herself.

Since she came to Cheonghwa her position among her cousins had turned ambiguous.

It’s something chaebol children go through on the way to becoming adults, and it carries more than one meaning.

Soon it will be settled how much of the family fortune she’s allotted.

When she was young she’d dreamed of living freely, the way ordinary people do.

Not now.

Isn’t there a line in the Talmud about nothing being worse than an empty purse?

Lee Hyoju, chaebol blood, had seen through the way the world turns a long time ago.

Ding, ding, da-ra-ring.

Fourth period ended.

“Next week’s midterm covers everything up to today. And I don’t have to tell you speech and composition matters, do I?”

Han Yura smiles with her eyes, and there’s something fresh about it.

“You’ll set easy questions, though, won’t you?”

“Miss! Give us a hint!”

However high any of them fly, inside a high school classroom they’re the same schoolkids as anyone.

In front of an assessment that will be objective, chaebol and charity case stand on level ground.

“I’d like to. But you know what the other teachers are like.”

Second-year Korean. Three teachers set the paper jointly.

“It’s too hard……”

“The difficulty is the absolute worst!”

As befits an elite private school, the level is somewhere past reach.

Even among the famous top-tier Gangnam tutors, Cheonghwa’s papers get rated the hardest going.

“Enjoy your lunch.”

The cute teacher trots out of the classroom.

Shff.

I got up from my seat. This is the moment I’d been quietly waiting for since I got back to this school.

Lunch.

Cheonghwa’s canteen operates on an entirely different plane from other schools. Thinking about it alone makes me swallow.

Just as I was about to leave the room——

“Fucking bastard……”

One curse, packed with venom, from behind me. And I raised my right hand, straight up.

“Go eat shit, you little bastard.”

I put the middle finger up smartly and sent it his way.

Then I headed for the canteen with a light step.

Whatever anybody says, what matters right now is lunch and nothing else. My stride is confident, and there’s swagger in it.

The canteen was finished beside the main building a few years back. Unlike other schools they don’t split it by year group and share the space.

The zealous parents and committee members couldn’t bear to see even scraps of time wasted.

This canteen is built to hold the entire school. Third years have a separate one over in the new wing regardless.

Everyone can take lunch in the same slot.

Fully fitted with air purification and climate control, and comfortable with it.

Being an autonomous private school, it takes large donations from outside figures freely.

And it didn’t take donations from just anybody.

You need money first and power behind it before you can join the operating committee or sit on the parents’ association board. Those are the people doing the donating.

Think of Cheonghwa as the template for every luxury-school drama about people abusing their position.

Slide.

Even the toughened glass doors of the canteen are automatic.

The whole thing laid out in front of me.

“Oh.”

I stopped to admire it once, then picked up a plate.

Not the usual stainless steel compartment tray.

Cheonghwa’s school lunch is——

“A buffet. Heh heh.”

A chef out of a hotel’s executive kitchen and a nutritionist with a doctorate run this room.

It starts at organic vegetable salad and goes on: Jeju black pork, good beef, heifer hanwoo, great slabs of fried tilefish and king cutlassfish, side dishes of every kind to lift the appetite, pizza and spaghetti, seasonal fruit from a dozen countries, cake by the slice.

Food a charity case like me would likely never pay for once in his life, laid out in rows.

And the volume of it — two full sets down each side.

“Something this good. Why doesn’t anyone eat it?”

Only half the school uses the canteen on any given day. Large room, few people, and a peaceful atmosphere to it.

After I graduated from Cheonghwa, this was the one thing I missed. Food at that quality, handed over free.

I thought so as a working adult too. The famous hotel buffets can step aside.

Cheonghwa takes school lunch seriously.

And I love you fiercely for it.

“Hanwoo bulgogi. Japchae. Young radish kimchi.”

I loaded the plate evenly with dishes that make a man feel generous.

Free food, unlimited, provided to the charity cases.

I heaped on Koshihikari rice as well, and looked around.

Students scattered about in ones and twos, sitting with friends and eating.

Among them, one boy sitting alone at a table for four.

My mouth twitches on its own, and it’s gladness doing it.

“It’s been a while……. You frightening bear cub.”

(End of Chapter 9)