Chapter Text
The uniform was stiff. That was the first thing Eom Seonghyeon noticed. The collar sat too high, and the blazer pulled at his shoulders as though it had been made specifically for someone shaped only slightly differently than him. He stood in front of the bathroom mirror at 6:14 in the morning and adjusted his tie for the third time, pulling it looser, then tighter, then looser again, settling on something that looked put together without choking himself.
Behind him, the house was silent. His parents had already left. His father to the office, his mother to wherever his mother went on weekday mornings—he had stopped asking sometime around middle school, when it became clear that the question wasn’t welcome. On the kitchen counter, he found a note in his mother’s handwriting under a glass of water.
Do well today.
Three words. No name. No “good luck” or “we’re proud of you.” Just a demand disguised as care. Seonghyeon folded the note once and left it on the counter. He drank the water because it was there.
The bus to Yongsan Academy took forty minutes from the stop near his house. He sat with his bag on his lap and his earbuds in and watched the city pass by—glass towers and old storefronts and people who had been using these same buses for decades. He was busy thinking about the entrance exam he’d taken at the end of his last school year. He had placed first. His parents had just said “as expected” and then asked about the test by subject, trying to find his weaknesses in the way a doctor looks for pain.
Now here he was, riding a bus toward the first day of the next four years, and the feeling in his chest was not excitement or nervousness but something closer to a held breath. A suspension. The brief, quiet space between one performance and the next.
He adjusted his tie one more time. It was still too stiff.
Ahn Keonho almost missed the bus.
Not because he was late, he’d been up since 5:30, too wired to sleep, lying in bed staring at the ceiling while his brain cycled through every possible version of the day ahead. It was because his mother had cornered him at the door with a packed lunch, two extra kimbap rolls “in case you make friends who are hungry,” and a seven minute pep talk that involved both her hands on his face and the phrase “my brilliant, wonderful boy” delivered at a volume the neighbors could definitely hear.
“Mom,” he’d said, pulling himself out of her grasp gently. “I’m going to school, not to war.”
“You’re going to a new school,” she corrected, smoothing his blazer for the tenth time. “Which is worse. You don’t know anybody.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Of course you will. You’re my son.” She smiled at him with an intensity that was genuinely difficult to look at directly. “Call me at lunch.”
“I’m not going to call you at lunch.”
“Text me at lunch.”
He texted her on the bus. A single message—
On the bus. Stop worrying.
—and received back a string of hearts and a photo of his dog looking confused by his empty chair at the breakfast table, captioned
Cookie misses you already!!!
He locked his phone and leaned his head against the window, smiling in a way he would have denied if anyone had been paying attention.
Keonho had placed first on the Yongsan entrance exam at his school. His father had taken him out for dinner and spent the entire meal talking about a documentary he’d watched about octopuses, because his father was the kind of man who celebrated achievements by being in an aggressively good mood about everything rather than making the achievement itself the center of gravity. His mother had cried, which she did when she was proud, which was often, which Keonho pretended to find embarrassing but privately loved. They loved him in a way that was loud and present and slightly too much, and he carried it with him onto the bus like an extra layer beneath his blazer.
He wanted to deserve it. That was the thing people didn’t understand about having parents like his—the pressure wasn’t from them. Nobody was standing over him with expectations drilling into him. The pressure came from inside, from the simple fact that two people had poured their entire lives into raising him and he wanted, more than anything, to hand them something back.
The bus turned onto the road that led uphill toward the academy, and Keonho straightened in his seat, heart picking up speed.
New school. New people. Four years to prove he belonged at the top.
He could do this.
Yongsan Academy announced itself through architecture. The building was newer than most of the schools in the district, all clean lines and tall windows, the kind of place that looked more like a tech company than a high school. Students in identical navy blazers walked through the front gates in groups—some loud, some careful, all of them sizing each other up with the intensity of people who knew they had all worked their way here.
Seonghyeon arrived early. He found his classroom, chose a seat in the second row by the window—close enough to appear engaged, far enough to not always be called on—and set out his materials with the precision of someone building a small fort. Notebook aligned with the edge of the desk. Pen parallel. Bag hung on the hook to the left.
Other students slowly filled up the room. He tracked them out of his peripheral without looking up. Handshakes, introductions, the weird social awkwarness of first impressions happening in real time. A boy with round glasses and an unhurried way of moving took the seat beside him and set down his bag with a quiet thud.
“Kim Juhoon,” the boy said simply, not extending a hand, not smiling too wide, just offering his name the way someone might offer a glass of water—take it or don’t.
Seonghyeon looked at him. The boy wasn’t trying to impress him. Wasn’t scanning the room to see who was watching them interact. He was just there, settled, waiting without expectation.
“Eom Seonghyeon.”
Juhoon nodded once and turned to unpack his own bag, and something about the lack of performance in the gesture made Seonghyeon exhale for what felt like the first time that morning.
Keonho arrived four minutes before the bell, slightly out of breath, sliding into a seat near the back. He’d gotten turned around on the second floor and spent an embarrassing amount of time pretending to read a bulletin board while actually trying to figure out which hallway led where. A boy with brown hair and an easy grin had fallen into step beside him somewhere around the third wrong turn.
“You look lost,” the boy had said in Korean that carried the faint, rounded edges of someone who thought in English first.
“I’m not lost.”
“You walked past this classroom twice.”
“…I was being thorough.”
The boy laughed and stuck out his hand. “Martin. Martin Edwards Park.”
“Ahn Keonho.” He shook it, and just like that, he had someone to sit next to.
Martin, as it turned out, talked exactly as much as Keonho needed someone to talk. He filled the silence with easy commentary—observations about the school, the other students, the teacher who walked in looking like she had already graded their futures and found them lacking—and Keonho found himself relaxing into it, the anxiety of being new fading away.
He didn’t notice the boy in the second row by the window. Not yet.
It happened on the third day.
Their homeroom teacher, Mr. Park, was the kind of teacher who believed in motivation through comparison—a teaching that had probably produced results at some point in his career and had certainly produced resentment at every point since. He stood at the front of the classroom with the entrance exam rankings displayed on the projector behind him, because at Yongsan, you’re your score before you’re human.
“Two students tied for the highest entrance score in this class,” Mr. Park announced, sounding pleased in a way that immediately made Keonho uneasy. “Ahn Keonho and Eom Seonghyeon. Stand up, please.”
Keonho stood. Across the classroom, the boy by the window stood too.
It was the first time Keonho really looked at him. Seonghyeon was tall—nearly his height—with sharp features and a stillness about him that read as either composure or caution, depending on how you interpreted it. He stood with his hands at his sides and his expression perfectly neutral, like someone who had been displayed before and had learned to hold very still while it happened.
“These two represent the standard this class should aspire to,” Mr. Park continued. “I expect great things from both of you. And I expect the rest of you to keep them humble.”
A murmur rippled through the room. Keonho felt the weight of thirty pairs of eyes staring, filing him and the boy by the window into a category neither of them had asked to be in. He glanced across the room and found Seonghyeon looking back.
For a brief moment that Keonho nearly convinced himself he’d just imagined, something passed between them. Not hostility. Not even competition. Just recognition. The quiet acknowledgment of one person seeing another and thinking:
Oh. You too.
Seonghyeon looked away first. They sat down. Mr. Park moved on.
But the class didn’t. Over the next two weeks, the comparison settled into the background of their daily lives. Teachers referenced them in the same breath. Classmates spoke their names as a paired set, a versus, a match to be watched. Who scored higher on the math quiz. Whose essay the literature teacher praised. Whose hand went up first.
Keonho found it annoying but manageable. Competition didn’t scare him. He’d always been the kind of person who worked harder when he knew someone else might beat him.
What he noticed, though—in the margins, when he wasn’t supposed to be paying attention—was that Seonghyeon didn’t seem to find it manageable at all. The boy worked with a focus that looked less like ambition and more like urgency. He stayed late. He arrived early. He carried himself through the school day like someone walking a wire, precise and controlled, never once letting the mask of composure slip.
Keonho didn’t understand it yet. But he noticed.
Martin, predictably, had opinions.
“Second row window kid gives me ice prince vibes,” he said one afternoon, laying across a bench in the courtyard. “Like, aggressively unapproachable.”
“He’s just quiet.”
“There’s quiet and there’s whatever that is.” Martin motioned towards him. “You tried talking to him?”
Keonho hadn’t. He’d thought about it. He’d nearly turned around after a shared glance in the hallway once, but something in Seonghyeon’s posture always stopped him. Not unfriendliness exactly. More like a door that was closed but not locked, and Keonho couldn’t decide if knocking would be welcome or intrusive.
“I might,” he said.
He didn’t get the chance. Not the way he’d imagined it.
The first real exam landed three weeks into the semester like a stone dropped into still water. Everyone felt the ripple. Study groups formed. Complaints circulated. The library stayed full until closing.
Seonghyeon studied until two in the morning the night before, his desk lamp the only light in the house. His parents were asleep down the hall. He went through the material thoroughly, leaving nothing to chance because chance was not something his household had room for.
He walked into the exam feeling a little unhopeful but prepared.
He walked out feeling certain.
The results were posted two days later. Mr. Park, because he was Mr. Park, read the top five aloud.
Keonho. First.
Seonghyeon. Second.
The gap was three points. Three points out of five hundred. A margin so thin it was almost meaningless, except that it wasn’t, because first was first and second was not, and Seonghyeon’s mother did not care about margins.
He felt the number land in his chest like a stone. Around him, classmates shuffled papers and compared scores and made the small disappointed or relieved sounds of people for whom this was just a measure of effort. For Seonghyeon it was something else. A report card to him was like a private file sent home to his parents who would read it the way analysts read quarterly earnings—looking for the gap between projection and performance, flagging anything below target.
His phone rang during the break between third and fourth period. He saw the name on the screen and felt his stomach contract.
He found an empty classroom at the end of the second-floor hallway—a small room with desks pushed to the walls, used for overflow and storage, always abandoned at this hour. He closed the door behind him and answered.
“Second place,” his mother said. Not a question. Not even a hello or an opening to a longer conversation. A statement, delivered the way she delivered all assessments—flat, changed only by the slight downward pressure on the final syllable that told him everything about the weight of her disappointment.
“The margin was three points,” Seonghyeon said. He did not know why he said it. It wouldn’t help.
“The margin is not the ranking.”
Silence. The kind his household specialized in, not the absence of sound but the presence of something withheld. He could hear her breathing, even and controlled, the way she breathed when she was deciding whether the conversation was worth continuing.
“Your father and I expected the transition to go smoothly,” she said finally. “You said you were prepared.”
I was. I studied until two in the morning. I gave everything I had and a boy I’ve never spoken to was three points better and you’re calling me during the school day to make sure I know I failed.
He didn’t say any of that.
“I’ll do better next time,” he said, because that was what the script required. The words came out steady, practiced, empty.
“We expect that you will.”
She hung up. No goodbye. Goodbyes were for people who had earned the warmth of a proper closing.
Seonghyeon lowered the phone from his ear and stood very still in the empty classroom. The fluorescent light buzzed above him. A crack ran along the edge of the whiteboard like a road on a map to somewhere better than here. He pressed his back against the wall and let himself slide down until he was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, phone held loosely in one hand.
He was not crying. He was doing something worse than crying. He was sitting perfectly still and trying to feel nothing at all, which is what you learn to do when you grow up in a house where sadness is not comforted but noted and judged.
The door opened.
Keonho had been looking for a quiet place to eat the extra kimbap his mother had packed. That was all. He had two rolls left and Martin had already gone somewhere with a second-year he’d befriended in the span of a single hallway interaction. That boy moved through social situations like water and Keonho wanted just ten minutes alone with his food and his thoughts.
He pushed open the door to the storage classroom expecting emptiness.
Instead he found Eom Seonghyeon on the floor.
For a single, suspended second, neither of them moved. Keonho stood in the doorway with one hand on the handle and the other holding a paper bag. Seonghyeon sat against the far wall with his knees up and his phone in his hand and an expression on his face that Keonho had never seen directed at him. It was a look he had never seen on anyone at school, actually, because it was the kind of face people only make when they believe they are completely alone.
Gutted. That was the word. Not angry, not frustrated. Gutted, like something essential had been scooped out and the remaining structure was holding its shape through force of habit alone.
Keonho’s first instinct was not to leave. Later, when the memory had been rewritten by everything that followed, he would forget this, but his first instinct, the real one, was to step forward. To say something. He opened his mouth.
Seonghyeon’s eyes focused.
The shift was immediate, like watching a door slam in someone’s face. The raw, hollowed-out expression vanished, replaced by something hard and defensive. His spine straightened against the wall. His jaw set. And Keonho watched, without understanding, as the boy on the floor became someone else entirely. He became the cold, precise, untouchable version of himself that the rest of the school knew, except right now the precision had a blade’s edge to it.
Seonghyeon looked up at the boy who had taken first place. The boy whose three-point margin was the reason his mother had even called in the first place. The boy who was standing in the doorway witnessing the one thing Seonghyeon had sworn nobody would ever see.
“Enjoying the view?”
The words came out quiet. That made them worse. A shout could be dismissed as heat of the moment, a flare of temper that would burn out. But Seonghyeon’s voice was controlled. It was low and even and precise, every syllable placed with the care of someone who had learned that the calmest cruelty cuts deepest.
Keonho blinked. “What?”
“Don’t you have somewhere to be, number one?” Seonghyeon tilted his head slightly, and the light caught his eyes in a way that made them look glassy, which Keonho might have recognized as unshed tears if he hadn’t already been flinching backward from the tone. “Or did you come to see what second place looks like up close?”
The unfairness of it hit Keonho like a physical thing. He had walked in here with the rest of his lunch. He had opened his mouth to ask if this boy was okay. And now he was standing in a doorway being spoken to like something scraped off a shoe by a person he had never done a single thing to.
Something hot and defensive surged up his throat.
“I didn’t come here for you,” he said, and his voice was harder than he meant it to be, but he didn’t soften it. “Trust me. I had no idea you’d be in here feeling sorry for yourself.”
The word landed.
Sorry for yourself. Seonghyeon’s expression didn’t change, but something behind it did—a flinch so deep it never reached the surface. Because that was exactly what his mother would have said. That was exactly the interpretation he feared most: that his pain was just self pity, that his struggle was weakness, that sitting on the floor of an empty classroom after being told his best wasn’t good enough was something to be ashamed of.
“Close the door on your way out,” Seonghyeon said.
Keonho did.
He stood in the hallway for a long moment afterward, the paper bag crushed slightly in his grip, his pulse loud in his ears. He didn’t understand what had just happened. He had tried, or he had been about to try, to be kind, and it had been thrown back at him with a heat that felt personal in a way nothing at this school had felt yet.
Fine, he thought. Fine. If that’s what you are.
He walked away. He didn’t look back.
Inside the classroom, Seonghyeon sat with his knees drawn up and his phone pressed against his chest and his eyes burning with something he would not allow to fall. He replayed the moment on loop. The boy in the doorway, the open mouth that might have been pity or bragging or something else entirely, and his own voice, calm and sharp and perfectly designed to ensure that Ahn Keonho would never try again.
Good, he told himself. Good. Better this than—
He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t need to. The alternative—being seen, being known, being vulnerable in front of someone who could use it—was so terrifying that cruelty felt like the safer option.
He pulled his knees tighter and waited for the bell.
The next morning, Seonghyeon arrived at school looking the way he always looked. Composed, pressed, exact. If his eyes were a little shadowed, if his jaw was held a fraction too tight, these were details only someone paying very close attention would catch.
Juhoon caught them.
He didn’t say anything. That was what Seonghyeon would come to understand as the grace of Kim Juhoon, he noticed everything and demanded nothing. He simply sat in his usual seat beside Seonghyeon, unpacked his bag with the same unhurried calm, and at one point, without looking up from his notebook, slid a carton of banana milk across the desk.
Seonghyeon stared at it.
“You didn’t eat breakfast,” Juhoon said. It wasn’t a question.
“How do you—”
“You never eat breakfast when you look like that.”
Seonghyeon wanted to ask what “like that” meant. He wanted to argue that he looked perfectly fine, the same as always, that there was nothing to notice. But Juhoon had already turned back to his notebook, giving Seonghyeon the space to accept or refuse without being watched.
He drank the banana milk.
Across the room, Keonho sat between Martin and an empty seat, recounting the previous day’s encounter with a tone that suggested he had already decided what it meant.
“I walked into a room. He was in there. He acted like I’d personally offended him by existing.” Keonho shrugged. “Ice prince vibes confirmed.”
Martin raised an eyebrow. “That’s it? You walked in and he just went off?”
“Pretty much.”
“Weird.” Martin considered it. “Maybe he was having a bad day.”
“Or maybe he’s just like that.”
It was easier to believe the second thing. Keonho was not someone who held grudges easily, his mother’s warmth had made him resistant to holding anger against other people, but being spoken to with that kind of cold, deliberate contempt had landed somewhere tender. He had been about to be kind. He had been punished for it. The lesson was clear even if the reason wasn’t.
Don’t bother.
A voice interrupted from behind them—loud, cheerful, and belonging to someone who had absolutely not been part of the conversation.
“You two look like you’re planning something. I want in.”
Keonho turned to find a second year leaning over the back of the empty chair beside him, grinning with the energy of someone who had decided that personal boundaries were a suggestion rather than a rule. He was tall with hair that looked like it had been styled enthusiastically and then slept on.
“We’re not—” Keonho started.
“Zhao Yufan.” The boy stuck out his hand. “Everyone calls me James. I’m a second year. I was walking by and you two looked like you needed a senior presence in your lives.”
“You’re one year older than us,” Martin said.
“Which makes me your senior. It’s right there in the math.” He dropped into the empty chair like he’d been sitting there all semester. “So what’s the situation? First month drama? Academic crisis? Girl problems? Or possibly boy problems?”
“Neither,” Keonho said.
“Both,” Martin said, at exactly the same time, and then laughed at the look Keonho gave him.
James looked between them with an expression of pure delight. “Oh, I’m absolutely staying. This is the best thing that’s happened to me all week.”
He stayed that afternoon and every afternoon that followed, as if his presence were a law of physics rather than a choice. Within a week, he knew their schedules, their lunch preferences, and the exact pitch of voice that meant Keonho was annoyed rather than actually upset. He gave unsolicited advice about teachers, cafeteria strategy, and the best route to avoid the vice principal’s hallway patrols, all delivered with the confidence of a man twice his age and the attention span of a golden retriever.
He was, Keonho would realize much later, the first person who looked at him and Martin and decided, without being asked, that they were worth investing in. Not because they were top students. Not because they were useful. Just because James had walked past and seen two first years who looked like they could use a friend and had decided that friend should be him.
It was such an easy, generous thing. Keonho didn’t think twice about accepting it.
He didn’t think about how different his first year might look if easy, generous things were not something he’d ever been taught to expect.
By the end of the first month, everything was set in place.
Keonho had his people. Martin at his right hand, James orbiting like a cheerful, chaotic satellite. He had a rhythm: study hard, do well, go home to a family that would love him regardless of the outcome, but whose love made him want the outcome to be spectacular.
Seonghyeon had Juhoon. Steady, quiet, immovable Juhoon, who sat beside him every morning and knew when to speak and when to simply be present. He had a rhythm too: study harder, do better, go home to a house that would measure the result and find it either acceptable or lacking, with nothing in between.
And between the two of them there was a wall.
It was invisible and absolute. They did not speak to each other unless forced to by classroom mechanics. When their names were mentioned together—and they were, constantly, by teachers and classmates who had already turned the comparison into a narrative—both of them responded with carefully performed indifference. Keonho rolled his eyes. Seonghyeon looked away. The class read it as rivalry, which was accurate enough, though neither boy could have explained exactly how it had started.
Keonho would have said:
He looked down on me the first time I tried to talk to him. He’s cold and arrogant and thinks he’s above everyone.
Seonghyeon would have said:
He saw me at my worst and I can never let that happen again. If he’s my enemy then he can’t get close enough to hurt me.
Both of these were true. Neither of them was the whole truth.
And somewhere in the space between their two versions of the story, in the doorway of an empty classroom, in the words that were said and the ones that weren’t, something that could have been a friendship quietly bled out and was buried before it ever drew breath.
The school year continued. The rivalry sharpened. The wall held.
For now.