Gyeongwon told his father that, due to the private tutor's circumstances, they would have lessons outside today.
[What difference does it make whether you do it outside or at home? Just tell her to come over.]
Click-
His father's call, delivered like a notice,was abruptly hung up.
Gyeongwon clenched his fists tightly, his anger rising at his father's rudeness.
'What kind of person acts like that?'
If the tutor said they were doing it outside, then that's what they should do. Who does he think he is to tell him otherwise?
Of course, it was a lie he had cooked up with the private tutor, but when met with such a rude response, Gyeongwon couldn't help but get angry.
'Yeah. It's not like I'm being twisted or petty.'
The problem is people who act this rudely because they think they're so great.
So it's not strange to wish for those bastards to meet their ruin.
Gyeongwon nodded to himself, inwardly reaffirming his own convictions.
Was it because his build or his appearance gave off an easygoing, pushover vibe?
For some reason, an unusually large number of arrogant people of this world were especially rude to him.
Right now, it included his father and mother living with him, his crush Hyejin, and even the Club President Lee Joon.
'Prez apologized for punching me and said he'd change from now on, but he only did that because he saw me as a pushover from the very beginning. The others are all the same.'
Gyeongwon picked up his phone and dialed the private tutor's number again.
"Hello? Yes, Teacher. I'm sorry, but my dad just said to do it at home, so..."
[Your father really is strict,Gyeongwon, I'll just call him instead and tell him directly that it's because I had a situation and it was urgent.]
"Oh, really? Yes, if you could do that for me, I'd really... thank you so much....."
***
Gyeongwon's private tutor, a Seoul National University student whom he called sister, and who was his mentor matched with him by the system as he leveled up, was the only person around Gyeongwon who was accomplished but not rude.
At first, when he heard she was a perfect scorer on last year's CSAT, he thought she might be an eccentric person who knew nothing but studying.
But when he actually met her, she turned out to be suprisingly sociable, with model-like looks, great conversational skills, anda
kind-hearted senior who always went around with a warm smile.
Even just now, she went out of her way to make excuses to Gyeongwon's father on his behalf, so he couldn't help but wonder how someone so accomplished could be this considerate.
"Hi, Gyeongwon~"
"Hello, Teacher."
Gyeongwon greeted his mentor, the Seoul National University student senior he had met outside, and immediately got down to the point.
"Teacher, I'm sorry, but something urgent came up. Could you please wrap up today's lesson early?"
"Why, why? Are you going to meet your girlfriend?"
The Seoul National University student smiled kindly.
Gyeongwon blushed and nodded.
"Yes... well, something like that...."
"If that's the case, you should have said so earlier. I could have helped you come up with an excuse. You're really not good at that kind of thing."
"...You're right about that."
"Then, you know, let's do this..."
The Seoul National University student mentor began checking Gyeongwon's plan on his behalf in a gentle tone.
And the newly devised excuse was that they would have a meal together after the tutoring session.
"I'll tell him that my plans suddenly got canceled and I have some time on my hands, so I'm treating you to a meal for working hard this semester and for your break starting tomorrow. That way, you won't have to go home until late in the evening."
"I appreciate it, but I wonder if that will put you in a difficult position... My dad is strict, so it's not easy to persuade him..."
"Don't worry, just go and have fun. I've always felt sorry for you, seeing how suffocating the atmosphere was whenever I went to your house for tutoring."
Gyeongwon gazed at his model-like Seoul National University mentor with an admiring expression.
Gyeongwon envied people who were this flexible, something he himself lacked.
"Yes, thank you. Well then... I'll leave it to you...."
***
That day, Gyeongwon finished his tutoring session early, and after taking a picture as a proof to show his father that he had studied with the teacher, he hurried back to his own apartment complex Clover Prestige.
It was an apartment complex lined with 35-story co-op buildings that are 50% taller than ordinary apartments, a complex that Clover, the world's largest company, promoted by calling it a masterpiece.
Of course, it had been 10 years since it was built, and in that time many more expensive apartments had also been constructed, so it was hard to still call it the top in Korea.
Nevertheless, if you were to rank them, it would always be within the top five, an apartment complex known to be the undisputed wealthiest in South Korea, and it was Gyeongwon's neighborhood, the place where his crush lived.
Gyeongwon arrived in front of the complex, which was installed with security gates right from the entrance like a medieval castle, and swiped his access card.
Beep-
"Hello."
"Yes, hello."
After nodding back to the security guard who greeted him, Gyeongwon hurriedly stepped inside the complex.
'I can't let my parents find out I'm here right now. I have to be careful.'
By now, his parents must be having dinner alone, thinking Gyeongwon was out having dinner.
Gyeongwon looked up at the window of his own apartment building as he moved toward the adjacent building where his crush lived.
Looking up at the building from the entrance once more, he took in its dizzying height and the countless windows.
'I can't believe I've never run into her, even though we live right next door.'
Instead of loitering outside,Gyeongwon decided to go inside and think for a moment, so he took out his security card and swiped it at the main entrance.
Bzzzt-
An error sound rang out as if warning him.
Flustered, he checked and found that with his card, he could only enter his own apartment building.
'....Damn it. I didn't know this until now. What should I do?"
Gyeongwon sat on a nearby bench with an anxious mind, waiting for Someone to pass by.
"If it were Prez..."
Gyeongwon habitually thought of his
Club President Lee Joon.
As he had read in some book, he had heard that wisdom and knowledge are different; and while Gyeongwon was overflowing with knowledge, he completely lacked wisdom.
On the other hand, his Club President Lee Joon would have always derived the desired answer with just a small piece of information in any situation whatsoever.
"...."
After pondering for a moment,Gyeongwon took out his phone and opened the Instagram app.
"Right. Even if I just barge in, I don't know the home address, so what can I do? Finding that out comes first.'
The best thing to do was to contact her directly and ask.
Ask her what happened, since he heard she even left school early after that incident this morning.
However, perhaps because Hyejin changed her phone number after graduation, the KakaoTalk profile that remained in his phone had long since appeared as someone else's.
With neither KakaoTalk —nor her number, Gyeongwon hesitated for a long time, wondering if he should send a DM while looking at Hyejin's Instagram instead.
The account currently following Hyejin was a secret burner account that Gyeongwon deliberately made to keep tabs on her, and Hyejin had absolutely no idea it belonged to Gyeongwon.
Whenever Hyejin switched her account to private, Gyeongwon couldn't see her updates and felt resigned about it, so he set a profile picture of a handsome Chinese male celebrity, one that doesn't even show
up when searched for in Korea, and managed to get his follow request accepted.
Now, if he were to contact her through this account, it was obvious she would be disgusted and start calling him a stalker.
'..I'm such a pathetic loser.!'
Sitting on a bench in his own neighborhood, Gyeongwon suddenly felt a sense of clarity.
"What am I, really?"
What kind of person was he?
When he actively worked under the pretext of saving the world together with the Club Prez, he felt like he had become a new person.
He felt like he had completely forgotten all about his pathetic and miserable past, and had been reborn as a comrade of a savior with a noble mission.
But after running into Hyejin and looking back on things, Gyeongwon realized that he himself hadn't changed one bit.
He had simply gone from being a pathetic, nerdy guy in middle school to someone who was now not good at studying and whose dark side had only grown larger, and that was the reality.
Suddenly feeling disillusioned with all of this, Gyeongwon sat there blankly with Hyejin's Instagram open.
Forgetting that he had to save his crush.
Actually, maybe she didn't really need his help.
Just like when he approached her back in second year of middle school wearing that class president armband, even though it wasn't really needed; it felt like he was doing this all on his own again.
'Not necessary and completely useless .....
just like when I offered to show her around the apartment and got laughed at...."
And so, after a brief moment had passed, he picked up his phone again and looked at her posts.
Hyejin was still beautiful.
"...Pretty."
Gyeongwon sat on the bench, muttering vacantly.
Why couldn't he date a girl like her? Of course, he knew the answer, though.
As Gyeongwon sat there blankly on the bench scrolling through posts, he suddenly found his gaze fixed on one photo.
It was a selfie Hyejin had taken in her room, holding her study notebook, but the moment he saw it, he felt a strange sense of unease.
....Huh. Did our apartment have a room like this?'
The interior of the building was slightly visible behind Hyejin's wide-smiling face.
The finishing work there was completely different from the house Gyeongwon knew.
Leaving aside the fact that the patterns of the wallpaper or tiles were different, there was the finishing trim that ran all the way around the seam where the floor met the walls.
Its color and shape were of a completely different material from the finishing trim in Gyeongwon's own house.
Unlike wallpaper and the likes, which the homeowner can change freely, that finishing trim is applied uniformly from the very beginning of Construction, and even if one were to remodel the interior, it's not something there would be any reason to go out of one's way to replace.
Gyeongwon hurriedly scrolled through Hyejin's posts again, looking to see if there were any taken at home.
"..Ah, This is it.'
A video of her playing with the dog she raised at home.
Gyeongwon hurriedly played the video.
[Woof! Woof!]
[Hahaha... Over here! Over here!]
[Woof!]
The sound of the dog happily running around the living room, and Hyejin laughing as she filmed it.
Gyeongwon set aside the flutter in his heart that Hyejin's laughter stirred once more, and intently examined the interior structure of the house that was briefly visible beside the dog.
"...I'm sure of it. This isn't the place.'
Gyeongwon sprang up from his seat and looked toward the neighboring building directly behind him.
'She definitely said she lived here.'
She said she lived here, at Clover Prestige.
She even asked him to give her a tour of the apartment, since it was the neighboring building.
However, even the posts she had uploaded around the time she said those words to Gyeongwon showed that the structure of her house was different.
Hyejin had never lived there, at Clover Prestige.
"..A lie...?"
Gyeongwon, feeling a sense of incomprehension, pushed his glasses.
"...Why?"
When he approached her as the class president, it was back when she hadn't shown any strange signs at all yet.
On the contrary, back then, Hyejin was glad that someone would talk to her when she was alone, and she even felt fondness toward Gyeongwon.
"But why did she lie about her home address...."
Baffled and unable to make sense of it, Gyeongwon pushed up his glasses and pondered deeply.
But whatever the case, if Hyejin didn't live here, then there was no reason for him to stay any longer.
'My parents will finish dinner soon and come out to play tennis. Let's leave before then.'
Gyeongwon walked back out of the apartment complex and headed to a nearby internet café.
Then, he opened Hyejin's Instagram and meticulously scrutinized her posts to deduce the location of her home.
After that, he compared a few possible places with the interior photos posted on real estate sites, and estimated the
location.
Since collecting information and organizing data was Gyeongwon's specialty, the process did not take that much time.
'...I think it's roughly around here.'
Gyeongwon jotted down the estimated location he figured on his phone's map.
Hyejin always flaunted her wealth and went around boasting about living in a luxury apartment, but surprisingly, the place Gyeongwon discovered by snooping on her social media was neither luxurious nor even an apartment at all.
It was just an ordinary apartment complex tucked away in a corner of ShinLim Neighborhood.
'...She lives in a place like this, yet her dad is the president of a trading company and her mom is someone who releases artwork at a gallery.'
It looked like a place that didn't match Hyejin's description at all.
Gyeongwon stood up from his seat at the internet café, intending to leave, but something weighed on his mind, so he sat back down.
'....Still, going to find her after digging around behind her back like this would look too shady. I should at least let her know first.'
After some deliberation, Gyeongwon created a new Instagram account and sent a DM to Hyejin.
[Ahn Gyeongwon: I heard you left school early today after taking that letter from our clubroom this morning, claiming to see ghosts.]
[Ahn Gyeongwon: There's something I want to talk to you about regarding that. If you name a place, I'll come meet you.]
After sending the message like that, Gyeongwon waited for Hyejin's reply and did some web surfing for a while.
While spending that time feeling anxious and impatient, he watched a YouTube video and then went back to check Hyejin's Instagram, only to find that a new photo had been uploaded in the meantime.
"...!"
The moment Gyeongwon saw that photo, he flinched.
It was a photo that Hyejin had taken by holding her phone up close, filling the entire screen with her face.In the dark background, Hyejin's face, illuminated by the phone's flash, wore a distorted, beaming smile, one she had never shown before.
Taking a picture with the flash on in this kind of darkness, and wearing a beaming smile so wide it distorted her skin in the light, neither aspect was at all fitting, making it an unsettling photo.
Underneath it, as befitting someone with many friends, a few comments quickly appeared.
[Heh. What is this, lol --;]
[Is this some kind of bizarre concept?]
[It's a bit weird. Delete it.]
[Nig what is this lol]
Without thinking further, Gyeongwon stood up from his seat and left the internet café.
Although she hadn't replied to his DM yet, Gyeongwon hailed a taxi and headed towards her house.