She wanted to be first.

From a young age, Hye-yeon had been called a prodigy in the countryside, famous as the best student in a small county with a population of less than fifty thousand.

After her father’s business failed and they moved to the countryside, her mother fell into depression. Her father drank himself to death. But people didn’t look down on them because of Hye-yeon. They said that even if the family was struggling now, the child was smart enough to become something someday.

“Hye-yeon’s dad, we’re here.”

Every time Hye-yeon brought home a report card, her mother taped it in front of her father’s urn.

There was only one columbarium in the countryside, a temple called Eunseolsa, and she did it where everyone in the village could see.

The village grandmothers who saw this would raise their voices from their tractors whenever Hye-yeon and her mother passed by.

“They say Hye-yeon got first place again? At this rate, she’ll become president, won’t she?”

“President? That girl could conquer the world and still have energy left. She’s fierce, that one. There’s nothing she can’t do…”

“Stop it there. Her mother’s eyes are going to flip again.”

“I know, I know.”

With a loud rattling noise, the tractors passed by.

Every time, her mother would grip Hye-yeon’s hand tightly and hurry along the edge of the rice paddies, walking as if fleeing.

First year of middle school, summer.

Her mother, in her late thirties, wasn’t in her right mind after losing her husband. Her eyes were hollow, and she looked sickly, but she still got a job at a cosmetics store, scanning barcodes, determined to raise Hye-yeon.

Beep. Beep.

There was only one day her mother smiled.

“Our Hye-yeon did well again.”

Only on the day Hye-yeon brought home a first-place report card.

When her mother patted her back and stroked her hair, Hye-yeon’s goal in life was set.

To be first.

“You’ve never missed first place for three years straight. At this level, you could probably apply to a prestigious autonomous private high school in Seoul through a special admission.”

Hearing the teacher’s words during career counseling, Hye-yeon nodded without a moment’s hesitation.

“I’ll go. The private high school.”

She wanted to climb higher and prove herself. She thought that if she proved herself like that, her mother would be happy.

But… that was where the problem began.

“They say the top scorer on the class placement test this time is that kid?”

The eyes of the prodigies who had all been first at their previous schools flicked around.

Hye-yeon was no different when she saw her first-ever second-place report card.

Dazed, she turned around, and there stood a strange guy with severe frizzy hair completely covering both eyes. She looked at his name tag.

‘Tae Eun-seong?’

That was her first impression of Eun-seong.

Messy, like clumps of wool stuck together, and with nothing special about him except that he looked like a pathetic glasses-wearing nerd.

Yet judging by how many students already seemed to know him, his grades were truly exceptional.

She had always been the one standing at the podium during morning assembly, and now it felt like her spot had been stolen.

“First place, Tae Eun-seong. Come forward.”

When he stood up and walked to the front, Hye-yeon flinched and looked away. She couldn’t tell if their eyes met or not. His hair covered them completely, like a sheep weighed down with fleece.

But the jawline visible beneath the hair was slim and sharp, and his skin was pale to the point of looking sickly. He wore thick-lensed glasses, as if his eyesight was poor.

‘If he brushed his bangs aside, wouldn’t you be able to see his eyes?’

Maybe it wasn’t his eyesight but his shaggy hair that was the problem.

With that thought, she secretly hoped that maybe he was lacking in everything except studying. If so, she could beat him easily in other areas.

But then.

“Wow! Eun-seong is insane!”

Badminton was badminton.

“Tae Eun-seong! Pass it here!”

Soccer was soccer.

“Today, we’re going to learn sports dance.”

He was even good at dancing.

In truth, being first in the entire school meant excelling not only in Korean, English, and math, but also in arts and physical education. Hyeyeon, too, was the type to obsess over even the smallest points.

But Tae Eun-seong was simply on another level.

‘At least I’m confident in art.’

She had dozens of awards from art competitions she’d entered since elementary school.

Hye-yeon expected to be overwhelmingly ahead in this performance assessment, but the result was another crushing defeat.

“How is Eun-seong even good at drawing?”

Carrying a water container stained with mixed paints that were neither quite brown nor black, Hye-yeon passed by. Expressionless Eun-seong was surrounded by classmates.

‘They’ve got it easy. All he has to do is be a little good at something and they clap and praise him like he’s amazing. Aren’t they ashamed of being nothing but his extras?’

Eun-seong himself kept putting up walls, coldly ignoring anyone who approached him, yet people around him were always desperate to get close. The relationships around him looked like a seesaw tilted completely to one side, as if he held absolute dominance.

Going down to the sink, Hye-yeon turned on the water full blast and dumped the filthy paint water into it, biting her lip.

She knew it, of course. Once you left a narrow rural town, there were bound to be people better than you.

But Hye-yeon had grown up being her mother’s pride and the genius of the region. Honestly, she believed that if she tried hard enough, there would be at least one thing she could win at.

She wasn’t asking for much. Just one thing would have been enough.

Watching Eun-seong run far ahead without allowing even that, she felt a suffocating inferiority complex.

A vile emotion she had never felt in her life.

Sometimes she even wished he would suddenly go abroad or disappear forever. Unlike Hye-yeon, who lived in the dorms, he had a home in Seoul, and there were even rumors that he came to school every day in a nice car with a driver.

‘Looking at him, he doesn’t even seem that desperate. Then why does he work so hard?’

She couldn’t understand it. To Hye-yeon, Eun-seong didn’t seem to have any particular goal.

He was like a horse that ran purely on talent alone. A horse born knowing only how to move forward.

A person who didn’t have to struggle desperately like Hye-yeon, because running came naturally to him.

Maybe that was why it hurt even more. She couldn’t catch up to a horse that didn’t even look like it was trying.

If only you were desperate like me.

If only you had to try harder.

Then maybe I wouldn’t hate you this much.

* * *

All throughout first year, art class continued, and the weather outside the art room shifted from spring, through hot summer, into autumn as leaves fell.

She sat glued to her desk, studying like a caterpillar obsessed with nothing but books, and when she finally lifted her head, it was winter.

On a day when icy winds threatened to shatter the windows, near the end of the second semester of first year, she went back to the art room to retrieve something she’d left behind.

That was when she saw Eun-seong’s work hanging on the board for outstanding pieces.

She was about to pass by, but something caught her eye, and she stopped to look up at it. It was the first time she’d ever examined his painting so closely.

“Spring… is it?”

The painting was overflowing with spring, rendered in thick, pressed layers of oil paint like an Impressionist’s work. Forsythia, cherry blossoms, cornelian cherries, and spirea bloomed harmoniously in the school courtyard. In front of it stood a girl with a bag slung over her shoulder.

She shaded her eyes with the back of her hand, looking into the distance. Even though her gaze wasn’t explicitly drawn, it was clear she was looking toward the courtyard.

So many flowers bloomed brilliantly around her, yet the girl in the painting stared only at the rigid buildings. The title of the painting was <Averted>.


As if saying that you alone failed to see and let all this beauty pass by.

“Disgusting.”

Seriously.

So disgusting.

The art room, with no heating on, was so cold that her breath fogged the air. But unable to withstand the sudden blaze flaring up in her mind, Hye-yeon tore the painting off the board without realizing it.

With a ripping sound, the paper shredded violently, collapsing into pieces in her hands.

She knew.

She knew that doing this wouldn’t let her beat you.

She also knew that, to anyone watching, it would look like the ugly, villainous heart of a despicable person.

But she truly couldn’t endure it anymore. Because if she didn’t do this, you would appear even in her dreams and torment her. That was why.

While piling excuse after excuse inside her head, she crushed two thirds of the drawing she’d grabbed, crumpling it harshly into a ball and squeezing it in her fist. Then she lifted her heel and reached out, trying to tear off the remaining piece too…

“What are you doing?”

She’d been caught.

And of all people, by the one she least wanted to catch her.

Her face, already stained with tears, slowly twisted, and the part of the drawing she hadn’t managed to rip yet dangled from her fingertips.

“I asked what you’re doing, Jeong Hye-yeon.”

It was the hour when evening slipped into night.

The art room, with no lights turned on, had been swallowed by the dark blue shadows of early night, so quiet and distant it sent chills down her spine.

It seemed he’d come to lock up the art room, because a bundle of keys hung from his hand. Against the jangling sound of metal, Hye-yeon felt like she had become some kind of monster haunting the art room.

The red-eyed monster clutched the drawing and shoved Tae Eun-seong aside, then ran toward the hallway.

She ran wildly.

“Jeong Hye-yeon!”

Even when she heard his voice calling out from behind her, she never once turned around and just kept running. The moment this ugly feeling she’d kept to herself was exposed to someone else, she found herself unbearably disgusting.

Normally, this would have been the time for evening supplementary classes. Students who went to private academies left for them, and only those who wanted extra lessons stayed behind.

With a household already stretched thin just covering living expenses, Hye-yeon couldn’t ask for academy tuition or private tutoring, so she attended every supplementary class the school offered without fail.

But that day was an exception.

For the first time, she skipped class and fled the campus as if running away. And then, truly pathetically, she borrowed the bookstore owner’s phone and called her mother.

“Mom, I want to go home. Right now, quickly!”

The next day would be the start of winter break.

When her mother asked what was wrong, Hye-yeon burst into sobs and, for the first time, threw a tantrum.

“I’m sick. It hurts so much. Hic… so Mom, please. Can you come pick me up? Please?”

Thinking back on it, it felt like such an unfamiliar emotion that fear had come first.

She was afraid she wouldn’t have the courage to apologize when she saw Tae Eun-seong’s face. To say she was sorry, that she’d torn up his artwork because she was jealous of him.

So Hye-yeon ran away at full speed.

On the bus back to the countryside, she cried for a long time before falling asleep. When she woke briefly and rubbed the frost-covered bus window clean, water streaked down in rivulets.

Her eyes were swollen.

Outside the window, it was nothing but pitch-black night.

After winter break ended, she returned to the dormitory and continued studying. From then on, she kept a slight distance from her friends as well.

‘What if Tae Eun-seong spreads rumors about what I did?’

That anxiety suddenly raised its head, but by the time spring of second year came, they’d been placed in different classes and rarely crossed paths, so it turned out to be an unnecessary worry.

Occasionally, they brushed past each other while swapping the field with other classes during PE, but that was all.

From second year on, she deliberately avoided choosing art class. Just in case, she secretly checked the art room bulletin board, and the spot where Eun-seong’s drawing had once been was now left perfectly empty.

“I heard from the art teacher that someone stole Eun-seong’s drawing from the back.”

“That’s crazy. Isn’t that a stalker?”

As her classmates giggled and talked about the drawing, Hye-yeon pretended to be calm and put her AirPods in.

What would happen if people found out she’d torn up the drawing? Would she be branded as a complete weirdo and a bad kid at school?

Her heart pounded with anxiety.

‘I shouldn’t have done it.’

No matter how much I hated it, I should’ve just endured a little longer.

Throughout second year, she walked on eggshells, watching Tae Eun-seong’s mood whenever they crossed paths in the hallway or the cafeteria.

Every time their eyes met, it felt like her heart dropped straight to the floor, but Tae Eun-seong simply turned his head away as if nothing had happened.

“……”

A little strength crept into the hand holding her pen.

At first, she’d thought the bangs that looked like they’d block his vision were kind of ridiculous. Now, those same bangs made her afraid of Eunseong. It felt like the strangely oppressive black eyes hidden behind them were dissecting her into pieces and observing her transparently.

Why didn’t he ask anything? If he’d confronted her, demanding to know why she’d done it, or spread malicious rumors to torment her, she could’ve understood that.

‘Should I ask him first?’

Do you remember me tearing up your drawing before winter break? Honestly, I hated you so much. Why do you study so hard? Your family’s well-off too, so why don’t you go study abroad? If you’re going abroad, can’t you just give me your grades? You don’t even need them anyway.

‘Like… that?’

Hye-yeon shook her head side to side. No matter how she thought about it, it sounded like a stupid question, so she clamped her mouth shut and only clicked the innocent pen in her hand. Inside her chest, an unknown anxiety quietly grew, taking root deeper and deeper without her realizing it.

* * *

She became a third-year in high school. Perhaps because the looming anxiety of the college entrance exam was approaching, Hye-yeon often had strange dreams where Eun-seong appeared.

And every time she dreamed, her heart would waver, and she’d mess up her tests. Some kind of jinx? This time, too, she’d gotten five questions wrong on the mock exam.

“Ha…”

After ripping her score report to shreds, Hye-yeon shot a brief glare toward the front. She was already hyperaware of him, so why did they have to end up in the same class again?

And this time, her seat was diagonally behind his.

As always, Tae Eun-seong sat there with his bangs hanging down heavily, solving problems in a workbook.

She usually kept her distance, not even wanting to step on his shadow, but that day her gaze kept drifting to him.

‘What is he solving?’

What kind of problems would get you a perfect score on the next mock exam? With desperate curiosity, she thought she might steal some kind of secret…

A sigh slipped from Hye-yeon’s lips.

“Ah.”

If her seat hadn’t been diagonally behind him.

And if Eun-seong hadn’t been so focused on his workbook that he let his guard down, she would never have seen this sight.

Sitting by the window, midday sunlight poured down in soft strands, dyeing his black hair into a translucent brown. Through the slightly curly strands, his neat, well-defined features peeked through.

Honestly, truly honestly, she’d never seen a man that handsome in her life.

His skin was pale and luminous, like someone who’d never been touched by sunlight, and even his straight, expressionless lips looked gentle.

Every time his long eyelashes fluttered, his hands moved ceaselessly and diligently. The workbook he was solving, when she looked closely, was math.

He flipped through an academy workbook filled only with advanced problems, solving them smoothly, without the slightest disturbance, without even the smallest ripple of emotion. Just calm.

Does he even breathe?

‘…He’s amazing.’

Her gaze naturally fixed in one place and stopped moving. Then, reflexively, she thought:

‘He’s like space.’

Quiet and beautiful, yet terrifying to the core.

You’re… how should I put it.

Sometimes you don’t even seem human.

Like a being living in a different world from mine.

Before she realized it, Hye-yeon had even forgotten how to breathe.

When the bell rang to signal the end of the ten-minute break and the math teacher entered, starting to talk about the mock exam, Eun-seong picked up the thick-framed glasses he’d momentarily set on his desk and put them on.

For a brief moment, she felt his gaze.

Hye-yeon forced herself to inhale. Pretending she hadn’t seen him, she slowly closed and opened her clear eyes. Then she pressed her lips together and took out a couple of pens from her pencil case.

“Alright, which problem on this mock exam did you find especially difficult?”

When the teacher opened the floor for answers, Hye-yeon shot her hand up.

“Number twenty.”

“Right. This exam was tough, but Hye-yeon only missed that one question.”

Her classmates let out impressed murmurs mixed with envy. At the reaction, almost like light heckling, the teacher continued speaking and unfolded the mock exam paper.

Thanks to that, she was able to escape Eun-seong’s gaze, but the tension lingered, and throughout the lesson her heart thumped, thump, at a steady rhythm.

An unfamiliar feeling.

A heart beating in a strange tempo.

Hye-yeon bit down on her lip and forced herself to act as if nothing was wrong, fixing her eyes on the podium.

* * *

That day, she dreamed of Eun-seong again.

‘Is it another dream?’

But… today was a little different from usual. The man had a leash fastened around Hye-yeon’s neck. Pulling her close by the leash like a dog, he drew her right up to him and smiled faintly.

‘Wh-what is this…?’

Normally, his face had been hidden behind dark clouds, but today, perhaps because she could see his face, it was clearly Eun-seong.

A face far more refined and handsome than most celebrities approached her. He rested his forehead against hers and murmured softly.

‘You like me.’ Hye-yeon jumped in place.

‘No? It’s not like that!’

As a flustered Hye-yeon tried to pull away from his arms, Eun-seong smiled with knowing eyes.

‘Liar.’

Her face burning red, Hye-yeon muttered,

‘It’s just, just because it’s fascinating! There’s no one around me who looks like you…’

When she averted her gaze, Eun-seong closed his eyes and nodded. Yes, yes, of course. Naturally. As if mocking her.

Feeling like he was teasing her, Hye-yeon grabbed his collar tightly and shouted,

‘I mean, that’s how it is! You think your classmate is a loser, and then suddenly, ta-da, he’s a celebrity. Who wouldn’t react like this?’

She rambled on without restraint. Then Eun-seong bent at the waist and brought his face even closer.

Her body tensed all over.

Close enough for their breaths to touch. At a dangerously intimate distance, as if he were about to kiss her, Hye-yeon moistened her dry lips with her tongue. Eun-seong’s gaze, fixed on her, deepened.

‘It’s a secret. That I’m handsome.’

Shh.

He covered her lips with a finger and pressed down gently. As her small, plump lips were squashed, his gaze locked onto them.

Then, as if claiming the price of that secret, he slowly leaned in and kissed her. As their soft lips met, it felt like a hot mass of emotion tightly coiling inside her stomach.

Her breathing grew ragged, and dopamine exploded in her head.

Overcome by the strange sensation, Hye-yeon impulsively laced her fingers with Eun-seong’s hand and held on. As they clung to each other’s lips like they might devour one another, their breaths growing rough…

“Gah!”

Hye-yeon shot up from her seat, her face burning red.

Apparently she’d dozed off during break, because her friends passed by and added comments one after another.

“Hye-yeon just made a weird noise.”

Overcome with an inexplicable sense of guilt, Hye-yeon bit her lip hard and ran to the bathroom. She turned the faucet all the way on and splashed her face until water sprayed everywhere.

When she lifted her head, she saw her own flustered reflection, water streaming down her face. Long, straight hair without bangs. A thin body. A neatly worn school uniform and a clear, bare face.

Seeing herself only made the self-reproach worse.

‘What am I doing?’

There weren’t even a hundred days left until the college entrance exam.

At a time when even focusing solely on studying wouldn’t be enough, she shouldn’t have the luxury to pour her emotions elsewhere.

‘Don’t waver. From now on, thinking about Eun-seong is forbidden.’

She blinked her water-beaded eyelashes a few times, and droplets fell like tears.

Covering her ticklish, wet face with one hand, Hye-yeon sank down where she stood, her heart refusing to obey her thoughts.

There was one strange thing.

She was the one shaking and falling apart, so why did she not hate Eun-seong more?

If she were being honest, Eun-seong had never openly bullied her, gotten angry at her, or confronted her even once.

She was the only one who had fallen into inferiority on her own, indulging in forbidden thoughts like, ‘What if Eun-seong disappeared from the world, or suddenly died in an accident…?’

But those unspeakable thoughts and condensed complexes had piled up and piled up until now.

And if they had been accumulating for three whole years, it was an emotion bound to become something.

Every day felt like hell whenever she saw Eun-seong.

Being trapped in the narrow, competitive society called school, unable even to avoid him, was slowly driving her mad.

‘So once the college entrance exam is over…’

Everything would improve as if washed clean. If only she could cut off all concern about him after the exam…

With that, Hye-yeon soothed herself and decided to run straight ahead until the exam.

Suppressing every desire, solely for the sake of achieving a result she could be satisfied with.

* * *

And so came the long-awaited day of the college entrance exam.

“Ha… Hye-yeon. Mom… Mom, what do I do.”

Her mother burst into tears.

After seeing the final score report Hye-yeon had brought, her mother’s legs gave out and she sank down in front of the cosmetics store register.

School had ended early, and since it was Friday, Hye-yeon had come straight home. Only now was she seeing, for the first time, what her mother wore and how she worked during the day.

Clutching her score report to her chest, Hye-yeon crouched down beside her sobbing mother and patted her shoulder.

“Why are you crying?”

It felt awkward. She’d never comforted someone like this before.

But when she placed her hand, however clumsily, on her mother’s thin shoulder, a sharp emotion shot through her chest like an electric current.

Her mother said it felt like her own life’s report card.

“You were the only thing I had left. Maybe that’s why. The report cards you bring home feel like my own.”

I know. I know it became a burden to you, even if you never said it.

“I didn’t have a report card, so I never knew if I was doing well or not on my own. But when you do this well… it feels like I’m being told that all my suffering wasn’t meaningless.”

At those words, Hye-yeon flinched.

As she tried to comfort her mother, she felt emotions surge up without warning. It felt like she was finally being rewarded for all the hardships she’d endured, nosebleeds and all.

“Don’t cry. Why are you crying like this?”

She shook her mother’s shoulders irritably, then pulled her into a hug, and wondered if her mother had always been this small.

Even if she wanted to live crookedly, even if she got tired and wanted to live carelessly sometimes, she couldn’t, because of this person.

That was why Hye-yeon had to succeed even more, had to become an even more perfect daughter. Given their strained finances, her goal wasn’t just getting into Korea University, but securing a full scholarship, including living expenses.

And yet…

Korea University’s entrance ceremony. When Hye-yeon saw the person stepping onto the stage, she instinctively grabbed her hair with both hands and gaped.

‘I’m doomed!’

Standing on the podium as the freshman representative, Tae Eun-seong greeted the crowd, drawing everyone’s attention in a neat suit instead of a school uniform.

And on top of that, he was the representative of the same Department of Computer Engineering as Hye-yeon.

‘I thought it ended with high school, and now I have to be stuck with you in college too?’

The second-place trauma she’d thought was over began to convulse through her entire body. Hye-yeon clenched both fists tightly, tears pooling in her eyes.