Chapter Text
If someone asked me why I transferred to Haneulwon Arts Academy, I’d probably say something vague. Something clean and simple, like “I wanted a stronger arts program,” or “I needed to focus without distractions.” And it wouldn’t be a lie, but it wouldn’t be the truth either.
The real reason was quieter. Something I couldn’t quite name, even to myself.
I wanted to disappear without vanishing.
I wanted to start over without losing who I was.
I didn’t want to run away, but I didn’t want to stay, either.
And that kind of in-between feeling led me here.
To a school nestled in the forested spine of Gangwon-do, where the skies were always a little gray and the windows always wore a sheen of dew like they were crying in secret.
A place where everyone seemed to already belong to someone, or something.
Except me.
The dormitory smelled like cold pine and floor polish. The matron handed me a key, told me the Wi-Fi password, and didn’t ask why my suitcase looked like I packed in a rush. My room was on the third floor, tucked at the end of a long hallway that hummed with muffled music and distant laughter.
It was empty, for now. My roommate hadn’t arrived yet.
The bed was stiff. The desk scarred. The walls held tiny pinpricks from old pushpins. Lives had lived here before me. I stared at the blank corkboard above my bed and felt the kind of loneliness that wasn’t sad, just… hollow.
I unpacked in silence. Sweaters, sketchbooks, a box of violin rosin, a worn paperback of Korean poetry I hadn’t finished reading. I tacked up a photo of my old dog even though she died last summer. Then I sat on the bed and listened to nothing.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t smile. I just sat there like I was waiting for something to start.
It began with laughter.
Not mine, hers.
High, bright, and a little mocking, like someone who found joy in things the rest of us didn’t get the joke to.
I’d wandered out that afternoon, trying to find the music wing, and ended up lost behind a hedge-lined path that led to a rooftop garden students weren’t supposed to use. But someone had broken the rules long before me, the lock was broken and the sign hung sideways.
She was already there. Sitting on the stone ledge with a lollipop in her mouth and a sketchpad on her knee.
Her hair was long, black, and slightly messy, like she forgot to brush it and didn’t care. She wore her uniform blouse untucked, her cardigan half-off one shoulder, and black socks that reached her knees. And she looked at me like she’d seen me before in a dream she didn’t believe in.
“You’re lost,” she said.
I nodded.
“You’re new,” she added.
I nodded again.
She grinned, slow and catlike. “Then you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”
Her name was Kang Hyewon, and even before I knew it, I felt it. That she wasn’t like the others. That she didn’t move through life, she made it move around her.
“Kim Minju,” I said quietly, introducing myself.
“Hyewon,” she replied, reaching into her skirt pocket and tossing me a candy without asking if I wanted one. “Grape or nothing.”
I caught it. Unwrapped it. Tasted it. It was sweet, artificial, and a little cold from her pocket.
“You look like you listen to too much Debussy,” she said, watching me.
“You look like you lie for fun.”
Hyewon laughed again. “I do. But not today.”
She went back to her sketchpad. I lingered.
“You don’t have to stand there like a freshman at confession,” she said. “Sit down. The sky’s nicer from up here.”
I sat, and she didn’t ask any more questions. Which I liked. Most people want your whole story on day one, like friendship is something you speedrun.
She just let me exist next to her.
We watched the clouds until the bell rang.
The first few days passed in a blur of unpacked boxes, uniform fittings, cafeteria food that always smelled like overcooked rice, and the realization that everyone knew who Hyewon was.
She wasn’t the top student or the prettiest girl or the teacher’s pet.
She was something else.
She was the girl you whispered about and followed with your eyes when she passed.
She was the one with sharp comebacks and softer silences.
She got detention twice in the first week, once for smoking behind the music building, and once for painting on a window that wasn’t hers.
She smiled in every student ID photo, even when she wasn’t supposed to.
People didn’t get too close. But they didn’t dare ignore her, either.
And for some reason, she liked me.
I met the others on a Thursday evening when Hyewon dragged me, literally, by the sleeve, to the dorm’s back stairwell.
“This is where the real classes are,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She pulled open the emergency door and grinned. “Intro to Surviving Without Selling Your Soul 101.”
Inside were three people.
A girl with icy pink hair in a hoodie that said "Don’t Text Me Unless You’re God." She gave a nod that felt like a contract.
A tiny girl with bangs and dimples, eating banana milk and tapping a pencil on her thigh in perfect 6/8 rhythm.
And a slightly older girl with short, dark hair and a school cardigan worn like a fashion statement, flipping through a dog-eared copy of Kafka on the Shore.
“Minju,” Hyewon said dramatically, “meet the brain, the buffer, and the bitch.”
The pink-haired girl raised a brow. “Excuse me?”
“Relax, Sakura. It’s alphabetical.” She pointed. “Sakura. Hitomi. Chaewon. My dysfunctional little constellation.”
Hitomi grinned and offered me banana milk.
Chaewon waved. “We’ve heard of you.”
“You have?”
“New transfer. Classical focus. Second-year. Pretty. Quiet. Probably smarter than you look.”
I blinked. “…Thanks?”
“See?” Hyewon smirked. “They’ll love you.”
That night, I didn’t go back to my room until curfew.
Instead, I sat on the stairwell floor with them and listened to the strange rhythm of their world.
Sakura plotted how to hack the student council's sound system to play jazz instead of school bells.
Hitomi recited strange trivia about composers who died young and why.
Chaewon debated the ethics of burning out for the sake of art.
Hyewon? She just leaned against the wall and watched the ceiling like it was telling her secrets.
And me?
I sat between them and felt like maybe, just maybe, I was part of something.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Not because I was restless, but because Hyewon had looked at me like she wanted to say something but didn’t. So I found her again on the rooftop.
She didn’t flinch when I opened the door. Just scooted over on the ledge and offered me the last of her candy.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“Good. That makes two of us.”
We sat in silence again, but this time, it felt like something between us was speaking.
After a long pause, I said, “I used to play the violin because I liked how it made me feel.”
“And now?”
“Now I just play so I don’t have to feel anything at all.”
Hyewon didn’t speak for a while.
Then: “That’s why I draw people I’ll never show. It’s easier to live in fiction than admit the real version of you stopped showing up.”
We didn’t touch. We didn’t cry. We didn’t promise anything.
But I think that was the moment we became something more than friends.
Two nights later, Sakura burst into the stairwell with a flashlight and a devilish grin.
“I have an idea.”
“Oh no,” Chaewon muttered.
Sakura ignored her. “The student council elections are tomorrow. Let’s… alter the ballot.”
Hitomi perked up. “Like, actually?”
“Not the real one,” Sakura said. “Just enough to make everyone laugh before they realize.”
“What’s the plan?” I asked.
“We replace the names with... fictional ones.”
Hyewon leaned forward. “Like Lady Gaga for president?”
Sakura grinned. “Exactly.”
By the end of the night, we had printed ballots with names like Park Jimin, IU, Gandalf, and Mickey Mouse. We slipped them into the stacks just before curfew. No one ever found out it was us.
The next morning, the whole campus was buzzing.
Hyewon looked at me and whispered, “You’re officially one of us.”
A few days later, I found Chaewon in the music building alone, humming a song on the piano in a dark room.
“You sing beautifully,” I said.
She looked up, startled, but smiled.
“I don’t perform for people,” she said.
“I don’t either. Not really.”
We sat there in the dim silence, surrounded by echoes of unspoken things.
“You like Hyewon,” Chaewon said finally. It wasn’t a question.
I nodded.
“She’s dangerous, you know.”
“I know.”
“She doesn’t mean to be.”
“I know that, too.”
Chaewon looked at me for a long moment, then simply said, “Just… don’t lose yourself trying to find her.”
And somehow, I knew what she meant.
Hyewon took me to the lake on the first day of spring.
“You’re not officially Haneulwon until you’ve touched the water,” she said.
“Why?”
“It’s a baptism,” she replied, “or a curse. Depends who you ask.”
We didn’t talk much that afternoon.
She tossed stones into the ripples. I watched her.
She looked like someone trying to remember who she used to be.
Later, she asked, “Do you believe people can be known?”
I thought about it.
“No,” I said. “Only remembered.”
Hyewon looked at me, then smiled.
Soft. Sad. Sharp.
“That,” she whispered, “is my favorite answer so far.”