The silence seeping out from behind the mic was far heavier than I’d expected.
Lunch radio time. Normally, right after the opening line, this was the moment when we should’ve been trading song titles and exchanging playful glances.
But today, Wonbin never once looked at me inside the booth. His gaze beyond the glass was fixed only on the blinking level bars of the sound meter.
"...I'll be back after the next song. It isn't a requested one, but it's a song that goes well with today's sky."
After finishing the line, I pulled the slider down. While the music spread through the school speakers, I took off my headset and opened the booth door.
Click.
Even at the sound of my footsteps entering the control room, Wonbin didn't so much as move. The fingertips of the hand gripping the console's volume fader had gone white.
"Wonbin."
"...There's a typo in the script. Page 4, second line."
"I didn't come here to talk about the script."
"We're on air. Go back to your seat."
His voice, snapping sharply, was utterly dried out of emotion. The shaky expression I'd seen in the music room yesterday, the warmth of our fingers tangled together in the dark—none of it was there. He had built a hard, transparent wall around himself again, locking the door so no one could get in.
"I saw you playing guitar... in the music room yesterday."
Wonbin's hands stiffened ever so slightly.
"I heard the teachers talking about your future plans too. I canceled the festival MC gig first thing this morning. It was just a class president joke anyway, and from the start I wasn't planning to do anything besides prep for the festival broadcast with you"
"What does that have to do with me?"
Wonbin jerked his head around.
In those eyes he always kept hidden behind a calm or sleepy mask, sorrow and sharp thorns were tangled together. The reddened corners of his eyes were trembling.
"What do I care who the senior is close with, or whether the senior MCs the festival or not? Why do you keep... butting in and making people uncomfortable?"
"Wonbin."
"Sure, everything's easy for you, isn't it? Popular at school, lots of friends, good with words. So I guess you're just helping a junior because you're bored. But I'm not like that. I'm barely keeping up with my own stuff, I'm scared out of my mind every day... and then you suddenly come barging in and shaking everything up, so of course I'm losing it."
Each word he hurled out as if he were out of breath pressed down on my chest.
Wonbin's voice was angry, but his eyes were holding back tears. To him, my kindness wasn't a warm comfort—it was an overwhelming wave that made an already shaky daily life even more precarious.
"...I wasn't messing with you."
At my low voice, Wonbin's breath stopped.
"I may have teased you, but I never once played with your feelings. I'm sorry I didn't realize how worried you were... but you're not just some junior passing by to me."
Wonbin bit down hard on his lip. He glared at me with eyes that looked like tears might spill any second, then jerked his head away rough and fast.
"One minute left on the broadcast. Get out."
I couldn't get any closer to his back as he kept pushing me away to the very end.
When I returned to the booth and sat down in front of the mic, the ON AIR light burned red again. My voice, reading out the last closing line, trembled faintly.
"That's it for today's lunch radio. Everyone, have a good day."
The bell rang, and at the same time Wonbin shut off the power and picked up his bag. By the time I opened the booth door and stepped out, only the sound of the broadcast room door closing was echoing through the empty hallway.
On the desk, the cue sheet he'd left behind sat alone. In the corner were tiny musical-note doodles, as if he'd pressed hard with a pen and scraped them in, and marks where he'd written something, then scratched it out.
Like a frequency full of static, words that never reached anyone were scattering into the cold air of the studio.
