Chapter 53: Birthday Fireworks

Yoon Heesung likes movies, likes books, and likes exercise. He hates coming to school, hits people without batting an eye, and feels no guilt about it. He was the kind of guy whose hobby was scaring people half to death right in front of them.

If that was all I knew, maybe I wouldn’t have hesitated. But I had a lot of guesses, too.

Maybe Heesung didn’t think the things I thought were pretty were all that pretty. Maybe he didn’t think the things I thought were important were important. Maybe he didn’t think the things I treasured were worth treasuring.

Maybe he thought the things I believed I shouldn’t do were fine to do…

If I stayed by Heesung’s side, there would be disappointments. I’d get my feelings hurt often. I’d keep being bewildered.

My heart would ache. I might take his side like I was doing now, and then, as if none of that had ever happened, I might come to hate him.

Heesung might become someone I hated.

But I didn’t want to hate Heesung.

I stammered.

“But why… suddenly… why fireworks? Because I said they were pretty before?”

But…

“Happy birthday.”

“……”

“It’s a birthday present. Do you like it?”

Midnight had passed while I walked here from home. It was my birthday, one that even I had forgotten. My mom had clearly forgotten it, too.

I was speechless. I couldn’t say anything.

How did he know? How did he find out, and why was he celebrating it like this? Why… you…

“How did you know my birthday?”

“I just know.”

Heesung answered casually. I quietly stared at the little flame. Fire was something I could see just by turning on a gas stove, but this was different.

Just holding it in my hand made it feel special. It was a shame it was burning down. I wanted to preserve it and keep it.

I wanted to take it out whenever life got hard. It felt like it would give me strength. Like I could get back up at any moment.

“…It’s pretty…”

“Yeah.”

Heesung really is like a wave. It splashes a ton of droplets, recedes far away as if pulling back, then surges up and ends up ruining your clothes. But a summer wave leaves you feeling pleasantly cool, so you can’t even get angry.

Heesung made it impossible to hate him or like him unreservedly. My firmly shut heart started to itch again.

It felt like it might open. Like it wanted to open. I wanted to overlook the past again, to ignore the things that troubled me.

Doubt crept into my resolve again. Was it really the right choice?

“Are you studying hard? You like studying at school, then?”

Heesung was taking a roundabout jab at me for not coming to the villa. I stammered out an excuse in a trembling voice.

“The exam is soon. I’m scared. Scared I’ll do badly…”

“You’ll do well.”

“……”

“You’ll do well since you study at school.”

Heesung, who had cheered me on like he was swearing at me, suddenly asked.

“Have you been doing well?”

“……”

“I couldn’t even go see you because I was afraid we’d get caught. You were happy about that, weren’t you?”

No, I wasn’t happy. I agonized over whether you might be doing something strange all alone. I wanted to brush it off as none of my business, but I couldn’t.

The last thing you said kept coming back to me, and I felt like I was committing a sin, not just against you, but against the world, against everyone.

If I’d never had good memories with Heesung, I could have hated him like I hated Im Namwoo’s gang. If Heesung hadn’t picked me up on the school field, hadn’t invited me to his house, hadn’t cared about my feelings when even my mom didn’t, I could have distanced myself from him quickly.

You, who came to get me with an umbrella because I might get caught in the rain. You, who came running without a second thought when I called you in a panic. If you hadn’t been that kind of person, I could have hated you, too.

Heesung made it so I couldn’t even hate him freely. And it didn’t stop there. The standards I’d held all along were wavering.

The basic premise that people shouldn’t hit other people, the belief that I shouldn’t keep someone like that by my side, kept trying to vanish. I felt like I was turning into someone other than myself.

“Heesung.”

Everything I’d resolved was about to snap. My carefully laid plans, and my conscience along with them, were on the verge of collapsing.

But whatever. It was fine if it all broke.

I could pretend not to know anything. I could pretend not to have seen everything I knew.

“Hey…”

“Why?”

Heesung answered properly, then took the stick from my hand and plunged it into the sand. When the flame on the charred black stick went out, everything before my eyes went dark. When even the crackling sound faded, all I could hear was the waves rushing in from a distance.

I felt like he could hear me swallow dryly.

I could picture Heesung’s expression clearly. It would be so expressionless and cold that I’d wonder whether the fireworks had really been his doing, or whether it was all my delusion.

That’s why I turned my head away. So that even if light suddenly fell from the sky and illuminated Heesung’s face, I wouldn’t be disappointed. Like someone who wanted to be far away, I fixed my gaze as far off as possible and kept speaking.

I was ready to close my eyes and cover my ears.

“I wish you would act like before. Like the old days…”

‘I want to go back to how things were with Heesung.’

“Like before. When you weren’t acting strange.”

Back to the old days, when Heesung wasn’t doing strange things.

If he said he’d hide it well, if he said he’d never hit another person again, if he said he’d stop risking his life so recklessly, I planned to cover all of it and move on. I would stay by Heesung’s side without hiding how I felt.

That was the plan…

Heesung spoke in a voice that sounded troubled.

“What are you talking about? I’m still the same.”

“……”

His tone said he genuinely didn’t understand why I was acting this way. He even looked awkward, as if he didn’t know how to respond to such an out-of-the-blue remark. I wished I hadn’t seen it, but the light coming down from the villa was illuminating us.

Had it been like that all along, and I just hadn’t noticed? A moment ago, it really had been pitch dark before my eyes.

But my vision soon went hazy. It darkened, blurred, and before long everything turned foggy, as if an opaque cloth had been thrown over my head. It happened at the same moment Heesung stepped toward me.

“Are you crying?”

“……”

“Why are you crying.”

Like a whimpering puppy, Heesung looked left and right, not knowing what to do, then raised his hand and wiped my face. He didn’t wipe it roughly. He wiped it gently, patting softly.

As if it were a task given to him, he wiped my face meticulously.

“Don’t cry.”

Actually, I’d known for a while. Why I couldn’t let go. Why I kept hoping.

Why, even though I thought Heesung was strange, I kept making excuses and couldn’t leave his side…

The way he comforted me first without even knowing why I was crying, the way he acted like he didn’t care if he drowned and died but flew into a rage when I tried to follow him in, the way he remembered my birthday when even I had forgotten it and my mom showed no interest. I was desperate for that kind of kindness.

The first affection I’d ever received in my life was sweet.

No matter how strange Heesung was, that mattered more to me. He was the only person who was kind to me.

But Heesung said he was the same as before. He said he was unchanged, just the same.

‘How can you say that? Sometimes I feel like you’re one of the kids who used to hit me. It’s getting scary.’

I couldn’t understand.

Maybe I’d been holding onto something I couldn’t understand, trying to understand it all this time.

Heesung was a book written in a foreign language I didn’t know. He was the kind of existence that, no matter how long I looked at it, I would eventually have to give up trying to decipher.

****

This year’s rainy season started late and ended late. It dragged its feet, seeming like it would end but not quite. Still, it ended.

Seasonal changes come out of nowhere. They seem to change gradually day by day, but then they’re sudden, as if several pages of the calendar had been torn out at once. Around the time I thought, ‘It’s gotten much colder than yesterday,’ I took the college entrance exam.

“Yunwoo, you were smart to write a high-tier department for rolling admissions. If you’d written lower, your score would’ve been wasted.”

Maybe because I’d immersed myself in studying until right before the exam, my score came out better than my practice tests.

The homeroom teacher said happily while looking at the monitor. Once the score reports came out, the teacher ran through college consultations one after another. Because he only knew I was aiming for rolling admissions, he didn’t even bring up regular admissions.

He just kept saying it was lucky I’d aimed high.

“I knew you’d do well, but you really did well. With this score, you’re in just by applying. You worked hard.”

“Yes…”

Under the teacher’s shower of praise, I hemmed and hawed. It felt wrong to deceive people, after all. Even if he found out, the teacher would be disappointed, but he’d take on a new class next year and forget about someone like me in no time.

People forget quickly once someone’s out of sight.

“Two students from our school are going to Seolhan University this year. Both from our class.”

It wasn’t hard to guess who the other person was. The teacher patted my shoulder and said.

“Thanks to you, Yunwoo, Heesung is graduating. He’s going to college, too.”

“…No. I didn’t do anything.”

“Come on. Heesung has been coming to school since fall. I saw he came today, too.”

The teacher wasn’t at fault either. It wasn’t his fault that Heesung said he’d listen if the message was delivered through me.

“No, really. …I’ll get going.”

“Yeah. Heesung said he didn’t want a consultation, so no need to call him.”

“Yes. I understand.”

I walked down the hallway in a padded jacket whose filling had gone flat. The air was cold. Cold enough to sting the tip of my nose.

Winter had taken a big step closer in an instant. The trees, stripped of all their leaves, stood bare and trembling.

I stared blankly out the window, then slowly returned to the classroom.

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