The next day, the classroom air was thick with the mingling scents of dry erase markers, old textbooks, and the faint metallic tang of sun-warmed window frames, sitting heavy on the skin like an invisible film, pressing into the back of necks and pooling in the hollow between shoulder blades.
Fluorescent lights, buzzing with a tired stammer that never quite matches the rhythm of the fan overhead, bleed a cold, colorless pallor over every surface, leeching the life from skin and paper alike, turning the students' faces into blank, barely distinguishable masks, eyelids fluttering, fingers twitching restlessly, knees jostling beneath desks that groan with age and neglect.
Taejun sits motionless amid it all, not from laziness nor fatigue but from a kind of internal stillness that feels cultivated, almost learned, the result of too many nights spent listening for footsteps, watching shadows lengthen behind doors, and breathing through the thick silence that settles after truths go unspoken.
His arms fold in front of him, not for comfort but for protection, his chin resting on the curve of his wrist with the weight of someone who doesn't care whether the class continues without him, whether the teacher calls his name, whether the rest of the world remembers he exists at all.
His gaze drifts, not to the blackboard cluttered with math problems or the flickering projector screen struggling to hold an image, but to a distant point beyond the window where the trees sway in lazy arcs, their leaves trembling against the wind with the uneasy grace of something waiting to be shaken loose.
From outside, noise filters in, not in the way pleasant sounds do, but with the haphazard urgency of something uninvited. The echo of children shouting drags along the hallway, tethered to the rhythm of a bouncing ball and the squeak of sneakers twisting across concrete, the sound rich with movement and momentum.
Still, none of it penetrates whatever cold shell has settled around Taejun's thoughts. He doesn't flinch. Doesn't follow the sound with his eyes. Doesn't even blink in recognition of it.
Instead, his focus lingers on nothing in particular, his expression unreadable, his presence in the room tenuous, as though at any moment the desk beneath him might be found empty, the chair still warm but the boy already gone.
One of his fingers brushes the edge of a page he hasn't turned. The margins are filled with numbers that mean less than they used to, half-erased attempts at solving problems that don't matter anymore, smudges of graphite where the side of his hand has dragged across the paper too many times.
The ceiling fan turns once more, and something falls, a soft rattle, then a sharper clack against the wooden floor.
His pencil, pale yellow and bitten near the eraser, rolls off the desk and strikes the ground with a dull clatter that startles no one but seems to echo louder than it should, rebounding beneath nearby chairs before settling at an angle beside his foot.
He makes no effort to retrieve it. Not even a glance downward, no shift of posture, no flicker of awareness in his eyes, only a prolonged stillness, the kind that feels deliberate, like a test of how long he can remain invisible before the world demands something of him.
A few heads turn lazily in his direction, students whose attention is already fragile and fraying, but they don't linger. They lose interest as quickly as it came, returning to their notebooks and daydreams and half-whispered jokes beneath breath that smells of morning snacks and forgotten toothpaste.
The teacher, Ms. Jang, her voice trailing off mid-equation, pauses just long enough to glance toward him, her eyes scanning across the rows of faces before catching sight of his.
There's a silence there, not awkward, not yet pregnant with consequence, but a pause that hovers in the air like a question no one wants to ask. Yet nothing is said.
She continues, her tone resuming its upward rhythm with only the slightest change, like a conductor turning away from a missed note, unwilling to draw attention to the place where the melody cracked.
Taejun exhales, a long, barely audible release of air through his nose that carries none of the relief such a gesture should. Instead, it feels like a surrender, a release of tension, not because it has passed but because holding onto it serves no further purpose.
He closes his eyes, not in sleep, not even in rest, but in a momentary retreat from the overhead glare and the endless rows of questions he no longer wishes to answer.
When he opens them again, slower this time, he looks not toward the lesson but to the far corner of the room, where the light through the window doesn't quite reach and where the wall meets the base of the bookshelf, casting long, uncertain lines across the floorboards that seem to move whenever he looks away.
Something there, barely perceptible, pulls at his attention with a quiet insistence. Not a sound, not a shape, but a presence, the kind felt rather than seen, the sort that creeps beneath thoughts and whispers behind the ribs.
Eventually, he bends slowly and reaches for the pencil. His fingers graze the wood, lingering for a moment before closing around it with a grip that lacks urgency, as though the act is more habit than need.
Straightening once more, he does not resume writing. Instead, he turns his head just slightly toward the classroom door, the movement subtle but meaningful, his eyes narrowing by a fraction as he studies the way the doorknob reflects the fractured sunlight.
It is closed, locked, perhaps, but the silence around it feels tight, wound like thread pulled taut, waiting to snap.
Across the aisle, the silence between them thinned when Aecha shifted in her seat, not abrupt, not clumsy, just enough movement to disrupt the weightless stillness surrounding Taejun like fog.
Her elbow reached out in a gentle nudge, subtle and wordless, landing softly against the edge of his desk as if to remind him he still existed in a world where people noticed things, where someone might care enough to look twice. Her presence wasn't loud or demanding; it lingered like the scent of chalk dust, familiar and unspoken.
She leaned just slightly toward him, her eyes trained on his face with an ease that came from shared routines, those early morning glances, half-laughed inside jokes, group projects scrawled last-minute in the margins of torn notebooks.
Her expression held none of the exaggerated concern adults used when they sensed weakness, nor the casual cruelty of kids who liked the sound of their jokes. It was simpler, more instinctive, an unpolished kind of care.
"You okay? You look like you got haunted," she whispered, the words barely more than breath across the woodgrain between them. Her voice was just a thin layer of teasing stretched over something steadier, the kind of tone someone used when they hoped to be wrong but already knew they weren't.
Taejun didn't answer right away. He blinked at her, as though recognizing her presence for the first time in hours. His gaze was slow to settle, like it had to drag itself back from somewhere far off and unwilling.
He tried to smile, a faint twitch at the corners of his mouth, but it was a hollow thing, all effort and no warmth. His face, pale under the flickering fluorescence, looked drawn, not with fear exactly, but with the kind of exhaustion that seeps in after too many nights spent wide awake, listening to houses breathe.
"I'm fine," he said, the lie as dry and brittle as paper left too long in the sun.
It didn't rise to meet her concern. It didn't even pretend to.
The words hung in the air for a moment, then dropped like dust, unnoticed by the rest of the class but loud enough between them.
She didn't argue. She didn't raise a brow or roll her eyes or press him for more, even though she easily could have.
Instead, she nodded once, small, and turned back to her desk.
Her pencil began spinning again, slow revolutions between her fingers, her posture folding inward like she was giving him back his space.
She didn't look at him again, but her silence felt more like a shield than a retreat.
And so the distance between them resumed, paused, held in a quiet place where it could wait.
The hallway stretched out ahead of Taejun, long and sterile, as if it had been emptied minutes before his arrival and left untouched in his wake.
The air carried a stale stillness, faintly chilled, the kind that settled around old classrooms and forgotten stairwells.
The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly above, not loud enough to notice directly but persistent, as if something high in the ceiling refused to sleep.
The sound of his footsteps echoed back at him in quiet defiance, each step tracing the emptiness behind and ahead with the rhythm of someone moving through a place meant to be louder.
There were no other students, no doors half-cracked with laughter inside, no stray sneakers left outside the gym.
It was late morning, a time when the school should have been thrumming with breath and motion, but here in this stretch of corridor, all that life had folded itself inward.
The walls felt unnaturally close, not in distance, but in attention, like they had turned slightly inward when no one was looking, leaning in with the still patience of stone.
Taejun walked slower now, his hands grazing the sides of his pants, eyes drawn not forward but across the quiet motion of habit, of someone who didn't trust his peripheral sight, as he passed beneath a recessed window set high along the left-hand wall, something caught his attention just long enough to freeze the muscle in his calves.
There was someone in the glass.
At first, he assumed it was just himself. A passing glance. A routine acknowledgment of movement that bounced from surface to surface.
But the reflection did not echo the way a mirror should. The boy in the window stood still in a way that felt carefully arranged, arms resting at his sides with an unnatural balance, head inclined slightly off-center, as though listening.
The face was familiar, unmistakable: same worn eyes, same uniform slightly askew at the collar, same smudge of graphite near the wrist from resting his hand on too many half-finished drawings.
And yet, the posture belonged to someone else. It held no hesitation, no slouch.
Taejun turned sharply, heart pressing against his ribs, expecting to catch someone standing just behind him or across the hall.
There was nothing but the empty corridor yawning quietly in both directions, as still as before, as if nothing had stirred at all.
He looked down. His shadow stretched thin and straight across the tiled floor, undisturbed.
Swallowing hard, he tried to ground himself, let his fingers brush the edge of the tiled wall, feel the gritty texture of paint that had seen years of coats and peeling.
His pulse was climbing higher than it should have, his throat drawing tight not from fear, but from something more uncertain.
He took a breath. Each step after that felt measured not in distance but in effort.
The hallway remained quiet, but that silence no longer felt empty. It carried weight now, like a room just vacated, like breath lingering where no mouth had spoken.
The cafeteria brimmed with the messy thrum of a hundred intersecting voices, a chorus of chatter and metal clatter echoing off the high ceilings and tiled floors, but none of it seemed to anchor Taejun where he sat.
He lingered at the far end of a long plastic table, back slightly curled, shoulders sloped as though beneath a weight only he could feel.
His lunch tray sat untouched in front of him, rice slowly cooling in congealed clumps, a few pieces of seaweed pushed aside with the edge of a dull fork that trembled faintly between his fingers.
His eyes, half-lidded and unfocused, remained fixed on the tray as though it might rearrange itself into something meaningful if he stared long enough.
Then the atmosphere around him shifted.
Not loudly, no shouting, no slamming, but with the kind of quiet, precise movement that slipped beneath the noise and carved out space.
A tray was set down beside his, not clumsily but with intent, the edge aligned almost perfectly with his own. The sudden presence at his side wasn't accidental.
Aecha stood beside him, her presence like a wall where there hadn't been one a moment before.
Her uniform blazer was buttoned but slightly wrinkled at the shoulders, as if she'd been moving through places where she shouldn't have lingered, where people didn't see her come or go.
Her expression was unreadable, neither stern nor soft, but there was something buried in her gaze that made Taejun sit up a little straighter without realizing.
Her eyes scanned the cafeteria quickly, methodically, not because she was curious but because she was measuring it, weighing something invisible against the noise.
She didn't greet him.
Instead, she lowered herself into the chair beside his and leaned in just slightly, her voice low, not whispering, but pitched in a tone that knew how to cut through sound without inviting notice.
"You haven't eaten anything, Taejun. Here, have a bite," she murmured, not quite a question.
Taejun opened his mouth, closed it again, then forced out something brittle, as if the act of speaking hurt more than silence. "I'm not hungry... yet. But, thanks."
Aecha's gaze flicked to his hand, the fork still trembling faintly between his fingers, and her eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, not with judgment but with recognition.
There was no warmth in her voice when she spoke again, only a kind of hollow certainty, the way someone might mention that a storm was coming, or that they had seen smoke on the horizon. "It's starting again, isn't it?"
He didn't answer. Not at first.
Something in the way his shoulders curled, in the way his fingers gripped the edge of the tray as if to steady himself from a fall no one else could see, made answering redundant.
"I don't know," he said finally, his voice barely audible over the din, but flat. "I thought it was over. But..."
Aecha didn't respond right away. She just sat still, hands folded neatly on her lap, as though she were waiting for a decision he hadn't realized he was meant to make.
After a long pause, she reached into her blazer pocket and pulled out a folded napkin, careful, precise movements again, too smooth to be casual, and placed it in front of him.
It was wrapped around something stiff, rectangular. Paper, maybe. A photo.
"Don't throw this away," she said softly, her voice carrying that same clinical detachment that made her seem older than she was. "Not until you're sure, one hundred percent, understood?"
Taejun stared at the napkin but didn't move to touch it. "What is this?"
Aecha's lips pressed into a thin line. "Something you left behind back then. Your face reminded it earlier when I talked with you in class."
Her eyes didn't leave his. "And something that's coming back."
Then, without another word, she stood. Her tray remained untouched, just like his.
She gave the cafeteria one last long glance again, not looking, but scanning, then walked away, her footsteps silent even in a room so loud.
Taejun sat frozen, staring at the folded napkin as if it might move on its own. His hand hovered over it, hesitant, unsure whether to open it or leave it shut forever.
Around him, the cafeteria noise rolled on, careless and loud, but the seat beside him remained empty, and the food on his tray grew colder still.