The warmth we’d held in that moment when the lights came on vanished like a lie overnight.
Starting the next morning, Wonbin had switched back to full stranger mode.
If his awkwardness before had just been cute little pouting, this time it was a real wall.
Even when I entered the broadcast room, he didn’t spare me a glance, and with his eyes fixed only on checking the equipment console, he spoke only the words he needed, mechanically.
“The middle line on page 3 of the script is too long. Please cut 30 seconds.”
“Huh? Ah… okay. Wonbin, but about yesterday’s earphones”
“Go back to your senior’s seat. It’s 2 minutes before the broadcast.”
His attitude of drawing a line was so firm that I was left speechless.
The hand that had been fiddling with Wonbin’s wired earphones tucked in my pocket stiffened awkwardly.
But the real problem broke out outside the broadcast room.
It was right in the middle of the hallway, as I came out holding the message box after the lunchtime broadcast ended.
Someone from the third-year hallway smacked my shoulder hard and threw an arm around me.
“Hey, you’re good at broadcasting, huh? Did you coat your voice with honey?”
It was my classmate and childhood friend Minseok, who’d stuck with me since middle school.
Laughing as I pushed away the guy who was joking around, draping himself over my neck like usual, I suddenly locked eyes with Wonbin, who was turning the corner down the hall a little ways off.
In Wonbin’s hands was a folder of festival-related documents he had to hand to the club advisor.
“Oh, Wonbin.”
The moment I reflexively pulled Minseok off me and called out, his gaze dropped coldly from my face to Minseok’s arm, and then back to my eyes.
“Who’s that? A broadcast club junior?”
Minseok asked, looking Wonbin up and down without a second thought.
That careless look seemed to bother him; Wonbin’s brow twitched almost imperceptibly.
“The teacher said to bring the revised opening cue sheet for the festival. He told me to hand it to a senior.”
Wonbin came up to me and thrust the folder out with a tap.
There was no trace anywhere in his eyes of the tenderness from the night before, when our fingers had intertwined in the dark. His voice was as cold as ice.
“I heard you’re also handling the other club’s guest hosting for the festival.
Since the schedule’s getting messy, please sort out the broadcast room schedule first.”
“Wait, Wonbin. The guest hosting thing was just my name on it because the class rep asked me to”
“That’s not my problem. Just make sure the broadcast doesn’t get screwed up.”
Wonbin didn’t even try to hear my excuse; he whirled around and left.
Watching him move away at a brisk pace, it felt like a cold wind was blowing behind his narrow back.
“Hey, what’s with that guy? He’s seriously prickly.”
Minseok clicked his tongue, but I couldn’t hear a thing.
I squeezed the edge of the folder in my hand until it crumpled.
The unfamiliar wariness that had flickered across his eyes, and the wavering trace of something that looked like hurt, swirled in my head.
After school, while passing the hallway by the music room, guitar sounds leaked out through a door that had been left open by chance.
I approached carefully and peered inside. In one corner of the empty music room, Wonbin was curled up alone with an electric guitar strapped on.
Without even connecting it to an amp, the fingertips he used to strike the steel strings looked shaky.
The chords kept crackling and breaking apart.
He flung the pick onto the music stand irritably, then covered his face with both hands.
‘I heard he clashed badly with the homeroom teacher over his plans to major in practical music during the career counseling.’
The teachers’ conversation I’d overheard in passing while walking by the faculty office that morning flashed through my mind like lightning.
Between his shaky worries about entrance exams, the stress of festival prep, and on top of that last night’s incident and all the commotion around me, it felt like he’d been driven completely into a corner.
I reached for the doorknob to go in.
But at the rattling sound, Wonbin jerked his head up, and through the glass window our eyes met.
He wasn’t angry.
He looked dangerously wet-eyed, as if he’d put up a wall and was pleading for me not to come any closer.
Wonbin stuffed the guitar away as if shoving it into its case, then slipped out the back door before I could even open the door.
The timing was off the moment I came out of the studio.
Left unable to catch him or go near him, I could only stare blankly at the shadows stretched long across the hallway floor.
