The first day of public school arrived with no ceremony, no packed lunch, and no hand to hold.
Jihoon had just turned thirteen. It should have been a milestone, a transition into adolescence marked by nervous excitement and possibility. Instead, he walked alone to the school gates with a secondhand backpack hanging off one shoulder and shoes that pinched at the toes. His body was thin, his face pale and angular, framed by messy chestnut brown hair that hadn't seen a comb that morning—or the morning before.
The school loomed large, an old concrete building with cracking paint and rusted fences. Students clustered in cliques by the gate, chatting and laughing with the unfiltered bravado of youth. Jihoon tried to avoid eye contact, his shoulders hunched, eyes fixed on the ground.
"Who's the weird kid?" someone muttered as he passed.
He felt it already—that sickening drop in his stomach, the quickening of his heartbeat. It was the same sense he'd grown to recognize in the orphanage: being the new one, the different one. He was a stray again, just in a new kennel.
Inside the classroom, the teacher barely glanced at the transfer sheet before waving Jihoon toward an empty desk in the back corner. No welcome, no introduction. It was as though he didn't matter. And perhaps, he didn't.
"Hey," a boy in the middle row whispered to his friend, "check out that kid's bag. It's falling apart."
Jihoon kept his eyes on his desk. If he could just shrink smaller, dissolve into air, he would. But the whispers followed.
It wasn't just the state of his clothes. It was the way he moved—quietly, cautiously. He rarely spoke unless called on, and when he did, it was in a soft, almost inaudible voice. That made him different. And in middle school, different was dangerous.
The first week, they tested him with whispers. The second, they took to tossing paper at his back. By the third, someone knocked over his lunch tray in the cafeteria.
"Oops," the girl said, her smile razor-sharp. Her friends giggled behind their hands.
Jihoon didn't look up. He picked up the tray, the rice and side dishes scattered on the linoleum like trash. No one helped. The cafeteria buzzed with life, but Jihoon remained a ghost, cleaning up his own humiliation in silence.
At home—if one could call it that—he returned to a shared room in the group home, tucked in a dingy alley behind a butcher shop. The staff weren't cruel, but they weren't kind either. They provided the basics: food, supervision, curfews. They didn't ask questions when he returned with bruises or tear-reddened eyes.
He never told them.
It wasn't just fear of not being believed. It was the certainty that even if someone did believe him, nothing would change. Jihoon had learned long ago: the world didn't rescue kids like him.
•
Seasons changed. Jihoon grew taller, his features sharpening into a delicate but striking face. Yet nothing else improved.
He wore the same three uniforms in rotation, carefully hand-washed in the group home's cracked sink each weekend. His shoes had soles reinforced with cheap glue. The more he faded into the background, the more some of his classmates seemed determined to drag him into their line of fire.
Sometimes it was gum stuck to the inside of his locker. Sometimes it was snide comments as he passed by.
"Charity case."
"Creepy quiet freak."
Even the teachers ignored him unless he was late or made a mistake. He existed in the margins of the school—unremarkable, unnoticed except when mocked. He was a shadow in a hallway of light.
There were a few moments he could breathe: early mornings before school, when he arrived too early to be noticed. He'd sit on a back bench near the field, where the dew clung to the grass and the air still felt clean. He'd stare up at the winter sky, overcast and pale, as if it too felt tired and grey.
It reminded him of someone. Not someone real—no one he'd ever met. Just a flicker of something. A presence. A wish. He didn't know why, but in those moments, he felt less empty.
Sometimes he wondered what his life might've been if his father had acknowledged him. If his mother hadn't left. If he were rich. Loved. Wanted.
But he always returned to the same answer.
It wouldn't have mattered. People like him were born unwanted. The rest was just details.
•
In second year, the bullying escalated.
One afternoon, after gym class, he opened his locker to find his uniform drenched in water, stuffed into the drain at the bottom. It stank. The classroom emptied out slowly, students passing him with amused or indifferent glances.
Jihoon pulled the wet shirt free, wrung it out as best he could, and changed into it anyway. The fabric clung to his skin, cold and damp, as he sat through math class shivering.
The teacher didn't say a word.
That night, he curled up in his cot, wrapped in a thin blanket, eyes dry but burning. He had stopped crying long ago. Crying didn't change anything—it only made his throat hurt and his nose stuffy.
So he stayed silent. Endured. Waited.
He had two more years before he could age out of the orphanage. Maybe then he could disappear entirely. Maybe then the ache in his chest would quiet.
Maybe.
Jihoon stopped trying to blend in. It became easier to simply not exist.
He stopped raising his hand in class. Stopped responding to small talk. Stopped eating lunch in the cafeteria altogether. He took to hiding on the school rooftop when he could sneak past the stairwell camera, scarfing down the dry bread and milk carton he got from the group home that morning. It was cold in winter and sweltering in summer, but up there, no one called him names. No one tripped him or shoved his books off the desk.
He developed a rhythm. Wake. School. Home. Homework. Sleep. Repeat. There was no one to confide in, no one to confide to. The caretakers were overworked and indifferent. The kids in the home fought over snacks and bedsheets, not stories or secrets. And Jihoon had learned his lesson: when you exposed your softness, it only got torn open.
The only books he ever cared about were ones from the old school library. There, tucked between outdated encyclopedias and dusty fiction, he found a tiny corner of quiet that didn't judge him. Stories became his secret escape. He didn't care much about grades, but he did well enough to avoid attention. In literature, his teacher once left a comment on a book report that said, "Your insight is remarkable."
He stared at it for hours when he got home. Then he folded the paper carefully and placed it in the back pocket of his math textbook. He never told anyone, but on the worst days, he pulled it out just to read those words again.
"Your insight is remarkable." The first praise he could remember receiving from an adult.
•
It was during second year of middle school, when he was fourteen, that a rumor began to circulate.
"That Jihoon kid," someone whispered in the hallway, "didn't his mom abandon him?"
"I heard she worked in a bar and ran off with a customer."
"That's why he's so weird. He's got no one."
The laughter that followed was quiet, but sharp as broken glass. Jihoon kept walking, even as his hands clenched around the straps of his worn-out bag.
It wasn't the rumor that hurt. It was the fact that it was true.
The loneliness hardened into something dense inside him—a tired kind of grief that didn't cry or scream. It just sat, heavy in his chest, making everything feel distant.
He didn't want to die. Not exactly. But he often wondered what it would be like to stop existing. To fade out, just like that. To fall asleep on the rooftop and not wake up. Would anyone notice? Would anyone care?
He didn't think so.
•
One morning, he arrived at school to find his desk had been moved into the hallway.
It stood alone under the flickering ceiling light, dusty and forgotten-looking. His textbooks were stacked neatly on top, but someone had scrawled a word across the surface in black marker.
Waste.
He didn't say anything. He simply picked up his books and dragged the desk back into the classroom without looking at anyone.
The teacher paused briefly before resuming attendance, as if nothing had happened.
That was the worst part of it all—not the desk, not the marker, not the snickering. It was the silence that followed. The way adults always looked the other way. The way students laughed but never asked if he was okay.
He'd learned by then that being poor meant being invisible. Being quiet made it worse. He was too much of nothing for anyone to care.
•
One rainy afternoon, Jihoon stood outside the classroom waiting for the teacher to arrive. Students milled about inside, chatting, laughing, living their normal teenage lives. Jihoon leaned against the wall, listening to the raindrops hit the window. He didn't join them. He never did.
Suddenly, someone threw a wet paper towel at his head.
"Oops," a voice behind him drawled. "Didn't see you there, ghost boy."
A group of boys snickered. One of them, a tall kid named Minjae, grinned. "Why don't you say something for once, huh? Or are you too dumb to talk?"
Jihoon stared ahead, his expression blank. He'd mastered this part—detachment. Don't react. Don't flinch. Don't give them the satisfaction.
Minjae moved closer, shoving Jihoon lightly in the shoulder. "What? Cat got your tongue?"
Jihoon remained still.
Then came the slap.
It wasn't hard—more of a sharp pat across the cheek—but it echoed in the hallway. A few students turned, surprised. One of the girls murmured, "That's going too far."
But no one intervened.
Jihoon turned his face slowly back to center, not raising his hand to touch the red mark.
And still, he said nothing.
Minjae frowned, suddenly uncomfortable with how quiet Jihoon was. He scoffed and walked away.
Later that night, Jihoon lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, his fingers tracing the faint stinging line across his cheek. He didn't cry. He just felt tired. So tired.
•
Some days, he dreamed of what a normal life might feel like.
Coming home to someone asking how his day went. Sitting at a table with real food and warm light. Having someone press a hand to his forehead when he was sick, or braid his hair out of his eyes. The smallest kindnesses—ones other kids took for granted.
He didn't want money or prestige. He just wanted not to be forgotten.
But the world didn't have room for boys like Jihoon.
•
During the winter of his third year, an announcement rocked the school.
A transfer program was opening for select students to attend an elite private academy in Seoul—Yeonhwa Academy. It catered to chaebol heirs, politicians' children, and those considered academic elites. It was practically another universe.
Most students ignored the announcement. It was ridiculous. No one from a place like this got in. The tuition alone was a fortune.
But Jihoon, who happened to be in the hallway when the notice was posted, read it twice.
The air in his lungs seemed to pause.
There was a scholarship. One seat. Full ride. Based on academic performance and recommendation.
A path. A flicker.
Not hope—Jihoon wasn't foolish enough to call it that. But something… a crack in the grey sky.
•
He didn't make a decision right away. He didn't dare.
But that night, he found the piece of paper still folded in the back of his math textbook. The teacher's comment: "Your insight is remarkable."
He read it again. Then again.
And for the first time in years, he allowed himself to wonder—
What if?