Chapter 137: Chapter 137
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Sometimes, his different side made me wonder about something else about him. Could there be another persona, hardly seen from the outside, hidden behind his cute, innocent face?
As I remained silent, Jooin, who looked beside me hesitantly, opened his mouth again. He spoke with a smile.
“Mama.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t feel good about Yi Ruda…”
With my eyes wide open, I stayed quiet for a while. Touching his skinny fingers with prominent knuckles, Jooin dropped his gaze and continued his words.
“Since he is mama’s new friends in your new cla.s.s and you like him so much, I wanted to remain silent, but I just can’t help it. Some men in black are chasing him and… based on what I’ve heard from Chun Young, Ruda seems to be raised in a family with great fighting skills. Well, I’m not sure if he’s raised from a mafia family or something.”
After that remark, Jooin lifted his eyes to look at me. He still had those outlandishly sharp glares within his gold eyes. His words continued in his usual peaceful tone.
“I just wanted to say that you could be in danger with her.”
“…”
Ban Yeo Ryung and Woo Jooin differed from this aspect too. I nodded without saying anything.
When Eun Jiho and Jooin left the house, I sat on the computer chair for quite a while. I frowned while staring at the monitor. The club banner looked simple enough. Aside from their t.i.tle, which was ‘Ban Yeo Ryung’s Haters Club,’ there were neither other texts nor photos in it. There were forty-five people, who gathered and created this club to hurt and offend Ban Yeo Ryung maliciously, and they were all in front of me. I rested my chin on my palm while sitting still.
The sound of the rain lingered. I sat for a moment before slowly getting up to open the window. The cloudy cityscape over my rain-dripped window screen made it seem like the rain had sunk the world beneath the water. After looking at the scenery, I returned to my chair. With my chin resting on my hand, I looked outside the window before falling into thought.
The calendar where I wrote the words, ‘the day when the web novel began’ unevenly as soon as I entered middle school in 2004, didn’t exist anymore. There was a big, 2007 calendar on the wall instead. Three years… yes, three years had already pa.s.sed since then. It would have been one of my biggest lies if I said that never once felt jealous of Ban Yeo Ryung for the last three years. I envied her quite a lot.
I was jealous of her and wanted to stay away from her. However, we still became friends in the end. She was such a sweet and kind person. Not to mention, she’s also a funny girl. No… I wasn’t trying to repeat those meaningless words in a row.
Wouldn’t we still become friends even if she didn’t have a sweet personality? When a person likes someone or befriended them, it was no use to ramble on all kinds of reasons why that was the case; however, that wasn’t what I wanted to say.
Ban Yeo Ryung couldn’t live without me, and I could see that by reading her att.i.tude, words, tone, and gazes toward me. I was her last bastion. Even after three years, nothing changed at all. Ban Yeo Ryung would collapse without me. I knew this very well.
I carefully raised my hand to grab around my forehead. Still, the heavy rain rang through my ears.
I felt miserable for Ban Yeo Ryung for considering me as her last sanctuary. She was the target of my jealousy, but at the same time, the one whom I loathed the most. Meanwhile, both of us became friends. I had no idea how this happened… and the possibility of such a thing happening.
From that day three years ago, we had been in an amusing relations.h.i.+p. I felt jealous and miserable because of my friend, Ban Yeo Ryung. How could this be possible?
Jealousy was useless. Even if a fish envied a two-legged human being, it could never walk with two legs in just a day; therefore, being jealous of someone way out of my league was useless. It was indeed better not to envy anyone.
Many people, however, coveted Ban Yeo Ryung, who had everything that they didn’t have, for she had everything they craved. I was the same as them sometimes… The reason why I promised myself to never fall in love with anyone was that I was afraid of losing control of myself. If I fell in love with one of the four boys but noticed that Ban Yeo Ryung had caught their eyes instead forever… Then I would die out of heart burning jealousy.
I was afraid that if I, the last bastion of Ban Yeo Ryung, would turn my back on her, then she would collapse eventually.
Although we felt like a n.o.body compared to someone better than us, we were never ent.i.tled to curse, admonish, and gossip about someone just because they’re better than us. Some people, however, behaved that way unapologetically as if they had the right to hurt people. This was why Ban Yeo Ryung always had a hard time trusting anyone.
She couldn’t even trust herself because she would always think that it was, in the end, her fault for having such a negative side in her that made people hate her. Though she tried to hide those thoughts, it was still visible and apparent, at least, to me, since I knew her for many years.
I felt dizzy. The sound of the rain kept hitting my ears. Heaving a quiet sigh, I opened the desk lamp. The room shone a little brighter. ‘Let’s just study for the upcoming mock exam. I’ve gone throughs thoughts and incidents like this before. It’s just that I saw some anti-fan club of Ban Yeo Ryung, and the owner seemed like a close friend of hers. Those were what confused me for now…’
Moving around my pencil on the desk, I realized that Woo Jooin and Eun Jiho were hanging around his house, although the upcoming exam was within a week. It was quite unfair.
On rainy days, my body felt particularly stiff. Maybe I dozed off while solving a math problem. The inked page seemed to have stained my cheek. ‘Uh-oh…’ I sat straight before rubbing my cheek.
A heavy silence prevailed the s.p.a.ce. Except for where the desk lamp was, it was dark everywhere. It seemed that my parents weren’t home yet. Stretching myself with a yawn, my ringtone rang. I then frowned.
There were two missed calls. One was from Ban Yeo Ryung, and the other that just got disconnected was from… Yoo Chun Young. As soon as I understood that, my phone rang again. Surprised, I nearly dropped my phone. I opened my flip phone in a flurry. No word came on the other side of the phone until I brought it close to my ear.
‘Did he call the wrong number?’ As soon as I opened my mouth, a voice came over from the other side.
“Hey.”
“What’s up?”
I remained silent for a while. Since he was also at a loss of words for a moment, I think he was also abashed that we spoke at the same time. Holding my phone in anxiety, I later recognized how funny I was that I leaned on the back of my chair comfortably.
A calm and flat voice, as usual, broke the ice.
“Were you sleeping?”
“Yeah.”
“Wanna go back to sleep?”
“No, I’m about to study.”
‘Why did you call me?’ I tried to ask that but decided to go against it. Instead, I wrapped my knees with my arms and sat like that for quite a while.
This was our first phone call after 2 weeks, and his voice was so comforting to my ears; therefore, I just wanted to chit chat rather than asking the purpose behind this call. For now, that was what I longed for on the phone. Many people knew him in school, and most of them noticed him, so it had been quite a while since I had last seen his face.
While my eyes were directed on the ceiling, something unexpected came over the other side of the phone.
“I can’t remember… your face.”
“…?”
‘What?’ His sudden remark struck me dumb. We saw each other’s faces almost every day over the last three years. How could he forget my face just because he hadn’t seen me for two weeks?
‘Is he asking me to topple him or volunteering to apologize first?’ While I seriously considered what his words meant, Yoo Chun Young continued.
“I’m in front of your apartment.”
I held my breath for a second.