December kicked the door down with a sub-zero draft that turned the hill up to Kirin Arts into a sheet of black ice.
Poke.
"Yah. Mountain. Wake up before Ms. Choi uses your forehead as a chalkboard eraser."
I jolted upright, a sharp pain radiating from my side where Kang Min-ah's index finger had just ruthlessly struck my ribs. My cheek was covered in a patterned red imprint from the grain of the wooden desk, and a faint line of drool was dangerously close to my history notebook.
Across the aisle, Jun-seo and Ha-neul were watching my structural with matching expressions of amused pity. Jun-seo leaned over, shielding his mouth with a hand as he whispered directly into Ha-neul's ear, loud enough for my red ears to catch.
"Yesterday during H-Wnot practice, he literally fell asleep mid-strum while we were composing the bridge for the Winter Festival song. He didn't even drop his pick."
Ha-neul let out a rare, genuine laugh, shaking her head as she adjusted her glasses.
"Honestly, I think I've been seeing more of sleeping San than awake San recently. It's like living with a giant, exhausted sloth."
She was joking, but the reality was an absolute, unadulterated hell.
The last week and a half had torn my existence into ragged, overlapping pieces. My life had devolved into a military-grade survival loop: sprint to Kirin, survive the idol-track judgment, drag my heavy frame to the School Bands club room to track our new song, rush to the Golden Triangle evening academy for extra lessons, and then stagger back home to sit at the kitchen table while the pink-pajama dictator rewired my brain for Calculus.
Then there was Lee Sora. We had managed exactly one proper date in late November, but my perception of time was so warped that I couldn't even remember the exact date. It felt simultaneously like an ancient historical event from a previous life and something that happened five minutes ago. Time in Korea was moving like an accordion—stretching and compressing until my internal clock was completely fried.
My social circle was expanding faster than my vocabulary, too. I vaguely remembered freezing my nose off on a weekend walk with Min-ah and Jin-hyun, followed by another chilly afternoon stroll through Insadong with Ha-neul, Jun-seo, and some guy from a other high school, who supposedly went to the same evening school as we. What were their names? Lee Seok-mal? Someone else? Nevermind. My brain was too full of formulas to store peripheral data.
But amidst the academic static, one specific mystery kept pulling at my attention, an tangled knot I couldn't stop trying to untangle.
Ever since the Autumn Festival, the explosive, toxic edge between Jun-seo and Myung-dae had shifted. It was... less strained. The threat of a fistfight had evaporated, but the cold war was far from over. Even now, as we built the skeleton of our new winter track, they flat-out refused to interact directly. They operated entirely through proxies.
If Jun-seo wanted the bassline dropped an octave, he would turn to me or Jin-hyun and say, "Tell the bassist to damp the E-string." If Myung-dae wanted the vocal dynamic changed, he'd stare at the floor and mutter to Leo, "The frontman is rushing the chorus."
It was deeply disappointing. I kept looking back at the digital copy of the old W-Naut photo on my phone—the one where Jun-seo, Myung-dae, the Kim twins, and Jin-woo were all locked in a chaotic, radiant group hug. They used to be a single unit. Chae-rin had given me a brief, jagged piece of the puzzle after meeting the father of Jin-woo, but it wasn't enough. I needed the full, unvarnished truth.
'Who in this entire city possessed the master key to the secrets of both Kirin and Hanyeong?'
I raised my disheveled head from the desk, not even bothering to run a hand through my hair. I hadn't styled the "Comma" look in days; my dark hair just fell naturally across my eyes in a messy, unruly thatch. Sora had whispered that it looked "cute" when she passed me in the hallway on Monday, so I had officially retired the hair gel out of sheer laziness.
I blinked the sleep from my eyes and turned my gaze directly onto Kang Min-ah.
She was currently busy using her pink Samsung phone to cross-reference a rumor on Kirin's Secret, her face illuminated by the blue light of the screen. The more time I spent in her company, the more the old, paranoid exchange student defenses melted away.
She truly, deeply considered me her best friend.
And I felt the same way now. I shared some details and often complained to her.
If I can't trust the Queen of the Database, I thought, I can't trust anyone.
That would be the dumbest thought, though.
I cleared my dry throat, leaned across the gap between our desks, and opened my mouth before my survival instinct could stop me.
"Hey, Min-ah... could you please tell me exactly why Jun-seo and Myung-dae argue?"