Chapter 3
A low, quiet voice read the words displayed on the screen.
“I want it. Jae.”
I slowly followed the large hand holding my phone upward with my eyes.
Slightly tanned skin. A neat school uniform that somehow suited his delinquent-like appearance. Wide, striking eyes and pretty lips that looked like they belonged to the kind of guy older girls would go crazy over and chase after.
“…Jung Eun-seong?”
It was Jung Eun-seong.
The last person I had seen before I fell from the rooftop, before my regression.
The man who, after all the members had left and after weathering countless controversies, incidents, and scandals, would become, eleven years later, one of South Korea’s undisputed leading actors.
But now…
He was still an eighteen-year-old boy, merely a trainee at a major entertainment agency.
A new face who had transferred into our class at the start of the new semester. The center of attention.
Along with Seo Jae-gyeom, he was the reason girls from other classes kept finding every excuse imaginable to visit ours—“Can I borrow your gym clothes?” “Can I borrow your textbook?” and so on.
After just two days, our homeroom teacher was so fed up that he had <NO STUDENTS FROM OTHER CLASSES ALLOWED!!!!> written in huge letters and plastered across the classroom door.
He was the only classmate whose future I knew.
“Oh, it’s Jung Eun-seong.”
“Eun-seong, hi!”
“Eun-seong, do you remember me?”
Even during the brief moment Jung Eun-seong and I stood facing each other in the hallway, girls giggled, waved at him, and passed by.
I gazed at Jung Eun-seong, who had suddenly become eleven years younger, feeling strangely moved.
Jung Eun-seong met my gaze as I stood there with tears still glistening in my eyes, and his expression turned awkward.
“Jung Eun-seong, you…”
“Kang Da-hye, you…
“You were short in high school?”
“Why are you crying?”
“……”
Oh, crap.
That was something I should have kept to myself.
Jung Eun-seong’s face twisted.
“I’m short?”
He looked up at the ceiling and gave an incredulous, “Ha. Ha,” then stretched his back straight.
Of course, that didn’t make him any taller.
I trailed off as I stared at Jung Eun-seong’s Adam’s apple right in front of me.
“No, but you really are kind of short…”
Objectively speaking, he might not have been that short. But if someone you’d had to crane your neck to look up at only a few hours ago suddenly became about ten centimeters shorter, anyone would have felt the same way I did.
For reference, Jung Eun-seong was 187 centimeters tall in his late twenties.
That was what his official profile said, anyway. There were even rumors that he was actually taller.
And now?
He looked to be around 179.
Hadn’t he already been over 180 when he debuted?
So did he shoot up that much in a single year?
Come to think of it, I vaguely remembered seeing Jung Eun-seong in his third year of high school, grumbling as he walked along that he had to buy a new uniform because he’d grown so much in just one year…
“It’s okay. You’ll grow soon.”
I tried to comfort him, but Jung Eun-seong didn’t even pretend to hear me.
Ignoring what I’d said, Jung Eun-seong lowered his gaze to the phone in his hand.
His thumb casually swiped across the screen, scrolling down.
Anyone would think it was his own phone.
Even snooping through a close friend’s phone that casually was rude…
“Huh?”
Come to think of it.
At this point, Jung Eun-seong had been at our school for less than a week, so there was no doubt we were still supposed to be awkward around each other.
Yet we were talking so naturally.
Why was he so comfortable with me?
“…Jung Eun-seong, do you remember too…?”
“Will this love that only I feel perhaps become boring? Even if I try to find nothing but your ugly habits.”
“…Huh?”
Jung Eun-seong cut me off before I could ask, Did you regress too?
He looked down at the phone in his hand with an arrogant expression and began reciting the lyrics I had highlighted in my playlist.
In a voice that sounded like he was bored to death.
“Even. For just. One day. I pray. That the one. By your side. Is me.”
“……”
“That you might come back to this changed love. Whenever you can. So you can fall asleep. In my arms. Pleeeeease~ Woooooaaaaah~”
“Stop! Stop!”
“Give it back!”
I snatched my phone away.
Despite gripping it so tightly a moment ago that it looked like he’d never give it up, Jung Eun-seong handed it over without a fuss.
He stared straight at my bright-red face and crooked up one corner of his mouth.
“You’ve bookmarked an endless number of lyrics.”
“That’s none of your…”
“You must be having quite the intense unrequited love affair.”
“……”
“Who’s Jae?”
“Can you shut up?!”
That Jae is right here in our class!
I scolded him while covering Jung Eun-seong’s mouth with my hand.
Jung Eun-seong merely lowered his eyes to look at my hand pressed against his lips. Then he tilted his head just enough to make me pull it away, as if it didn’t even tickle.
“Why did you read that?!”
“Was I not supposed to?”
“No!”
“Why?”
“Because it’s my private life!”
“That song is your private life? A song that already swept the charts decades ago?”
“It wasn’t decades ago! And great songs never go out of style!”
“Right. Great songs never go out of style. And since it’s a famous song, obviously it isn’t your private life either.”
“It’s not the song, it’s the phone! My phone is private!”
“Oh, Kang Da-hye’s unrequited-love playlist? Yeah, that definitely counts as private…”
“Hey!”
I was embarrassed.
That was all. I was embarrassed.
What the hell was wrong with me eleven years ago? Why had I been so ridiculously sentimental…
Seeing me huff and puff, Jung Eun-seong tilted his head slightly toward his shoulder.
“What? Are you embarrassed about your love for Jae? You’ve collected… ninety-eight songs.”
As he said “ninety-eight songs,” Jung Eun-seong craned his neck forward and peered at my phone.
“Can you mind your own business?”
I answered curtly as I took my phone back and furiously tapped the screen.
Delete this stupid playlist! Delete!
“Why delete it? It’s a party of great songs.”
“The party’s over.”
“……”
This guy didn’t remember.
One hundred percent, he didn’t.
If he remembered, there was no way he could say things like that.
I kept my mouth shut and glared at Jung Eun-seong.
His still-boyish face stared right back at me.
His skin was still clear, without the scar on his cheek that his fans would later feel so sorry about.
If his face had been fully matured eleven years later, then right now, as a boy, he had the kind of face that made you think he had a promising future.
Even in the middle of all this, I was so distracted by his face that I answered Jung Eun-seong’s call a beat late.
“Kang Da-hye.”
“…Huh?”
“If you keep shouting your lungs out from behind someone and they keep pretending not to hear you, that love is already dead.”
“Give up and find another guy.”
“Oh, and don’t forget to share the playlist with me before you delete it.”
“You fucking…”
“Heh heh heh…”
“Hey, what are you two doing in the hallway?!”
A homeroom teacher from the class next door, who was approaching from a distance while striking the wall with a bamboo clapper, broke up the confrontation between Jung Eun-seong and me.
“Get inside, now!”
Just you wait.
I glared at Jung Eun-seong.
Jung Eun-seong caught my glare, gave me a quick grin, and went into the classroom first.
I followed him in.
But the door slammed shut right in front of my face.
Through the closed classroom door, Jung Eun-seong smiled at me with his eyes.
This little bastard.
—
Was Jung Eun-seong always like that?
[What I Know About Jung Eun-seong]
– He had already appeared in several commercials and music videos when he transferred to our school.
– If you searched Jung Eun-seong’s name on a portal site, his photo, age, and the high school he attended (our school) would come up.
– Before my regression, fans would occasionally come all the way to our school to see him.
– So, was Jung Eun-seong always like that? I don’t know! I can’t remember!
“Da-hye, are you okay?”
“Huh?”
“You were crying earlier.”
“Oh. I’m fine. I’m not upset anymore.”
I quietly replied to the friend sitting beside me—the one who had shown me my seat earlier.
In the music room, everyone was seated in an S-shaped arrangement from the front according to their numbers. In the back, Seo Jae-gyeom was completely ignoring me, responding to the teacher’s jokes with exaggerated cuteness.
Jung Eun-seong’s side was quiet.
Jung Eun-seong’s personality… I really don’t know. What was he like?
It was only later that we started talking because we ended up in the same club and such, but at the beginning of the semester, we hardly spoke at all.
I suppose you could say we were simply two people who happened to exist in the same class, nothing more and nothing less.
I was still a little surprised that Jung Eun-seong had suddenly become like this after my regression.
“So, everyone. You know you’ll be having a singing test as part of your performance assessment, right?”
The music teacher, sitting in front of the piano, broke me out of my thoughts.
“You guys don’t study very hard for music anyway. You always say you don’t need it for college. So starting this year, I’m going to increase the weight of performance assessments. You’ll have a singing test in the first semester and a composition test in the second.”
“Composition?!”
“Are we allowed to plagiarize?”
“Yeah, yeah, quiet down. You’ll get to choose the song for the singing test yourselves. What do you want to sing?”
“The Aegukga?”
“Can you memorize all four verses?”
“Then rejected.”
“No suggestions?”
“If nobody has any suggestions, we’ll sing the school song.”
Not the school song.
Our school song had a rap section.
Someone, please suggest something.
With that thought, I turned around, only to meet the eyes of Jung Eun-seong, who was resting his chin on his hand and looking straight ahead.
When Jung Eun-seong quietly blinked at me,
I smiled at him.
Then, all of a sudden, Jung Eun-seong shot his hand into the air.
“Teacher.”
“Oh, yes. Eun-seong, do you have a suggestion?”
“Kang Da-hye knows a lot of great songs.”
“……”
…This fucking guy????????????
