The Top Student Hides Her Regression
Chapter 6
Back in my sophomore year of high school.
There was a girl in our class named Woo Do-yeon.
Woo Do-yeon was pretty.
She had gone to a different middle school than me, but even kids at my school knew who she was.
Some boys even enrolled in the hagwon she went to just to catch a glimpse of her.
‘I ended up in the same class as Woo Do-yeon.’
‘Is she pretty?’
‘Yeah. Insanely pretty.’
Woo Do-yeon was also from a wealthy family.
Her father, with his neatly slicked-back hair and nice car, would often drop her off right in front of the school gates.
Her uniform and shoes were always immaculate, and all her school supplies looked brand-new.
She was good at her studies, too, making her an absolute favorite among the teachers.
‘Why doesn't Do-yeon read the next sentence? My goodness, how is your pronunciation so wonderful? You said you lived in New Zealand when you were little, right?’
‘Ah, Do-yeon. Collect the handouts for this class, will you?’
The aging male geography teacher openly favored Woo Do-yeon, bypassing the class president to give every errand exclusively to her.
The boys looked for any excuse just to talk to her, while some of the girls viewed it all with bitter resentment.
That spiteful scrutiny reached its peak when the boys held a class-wide beauty ranking among the girls—and placed Woo Do-yeon at number one.
‘Woo Do-yeon is first and Han Ji-soo is second? No way.’
‘Is Woo Do-yeon really that pretty? I honestly don't see it.’
Shouldn't they be angry at the boys who dared to rank people by their looks, instead of misdirecting their rage?
To make an excuse for them, this was the past.
These kids hadn't gotten their mindset update yet.
‘I think Ji-soo is way prettier.’
‘Same here. Ji-soo is genuinely pure and classy, but Woo Do-yeon is… honestly, kind of cheap.’
‘I know what you're thinking, but you can't say it out loud, right~?’
‘Woo Do-yeon's family has money. What if she sues us?’
It was unmistakably jealousy.
Woo Do-yeon was pretty, smart, rich, and popular.
Ji-soo was all those things too, of course, but to tear down the infuriating Woo Do-yeon, they needed Ji-soo to play the role of the "her" in "she's so much better than her."
Even so, it could have ended there.
Not every girl was blinded by envy.
It could have just blown over after a bit of backstabbing from a handful of girls.
The problem was that Woo Do-yeon possessed a remarkably icy personality.
‘Do-yeon, are these Seunneuel? They're so gorgeous. Can I try them on just once?’
‘No.’
‘Huh?’
‘I said no. If you want to wear them, buy your own pair.’
‘…What a bitch! Who does she think she is, treating people like beggars?’
‘Pfft… That's what you get for asking to wear someone else's shoes.’
‘Ugh, I was just curious and asked!’
The boys who had previously taken Woo Do-yeon's side during her clashes with the girls quickly turned on her the moment she gave them that exact same cold shoulder.
‘She doesn't even know how to be grateful.’
‘She needs to get taken down a notch to come to her senses.’
And so, at a time when countless students were sharpening their knives for Woo Do-yeon…
The rumor broke out.
‘Hey, did you guys hear? The reason Woo Do-yeon doesn't have any friends is because in middle school, she went to Neverland alone with her friend's boyfriend and got caught.’
‘Are you crazy?’
‘Wow. I knew it. She looked like she was boy-crazy.’
‘Isn't she still like that, actually? Acting all innocent while flirting with the boys……’
What started as a rumor about seducing a friend's boyfriend gradually grew wilder and wilder.
Supposedly, when a male classmate went to Woo Do-yeon's house in their freshman year for a group project, she had been lying on her bed, patting the spot next to her.
Supposedly, she was dating the national history teacher in his early thirties who had just gotten married last year.
Supposedly, she was seen crying on that crowded Yeouido Yunjung-ro street, screaming at the teacher, ‘When on earth are you going to get a divorce!’
I know.
It was utterly absurd.
Yet when we were young, everyone believed it.
‘At this point, didn't Woo Do-yeon seduce the geography teacher first?’
‘Wait, so the geography and history teachers are fighting over Woo Do-yeon?’
‘Ugh, gross. That's disgusting.’
From that moment on, Woo Do-yeon became the school's public enemy.
Whether she was listening or not—or rather, deliberately making sure she could hear—people cursed, sneered, and mocked her right to her face.
The glances and suffocating silences that passed between the kids every time the geography teacher favored Woo Do-yeon in class, or whenever the clueless history teacher spoke to her.
And how did it end?
Woo Do-yeon, who had endured all the mockery and humiliation with a calm face, opened a classroom window one day and jumped.
Only then did the kids who had trashed her write letters saying, ‘We miss our pretty Do-yeon,’ piling them high on her empty desk, but……
Woo Do-yeon never came back alive.
And now.
“Hey, Woo Do-yeon. Tell me your secret, would you? The secret to seducing old men. I want to seduce the geography teacher so he'll give me the exam questions too.”
“Look at her pretending not to hear.”
“Didn't they say she was in the nurse's office all morning? She's sick, but she still came down to eat?”
“Being sick is totally fake, she was probably on a date with the geography teacher. That's why she's so hungry now.”
“Gross!”
“What are you even imagining, you pervert?”
“Pfft!”
“Hey, Woo Do-yeon! Can't you hear me? Are you deaf?”
“Hey, hey!”
In the past, I had ignored Woo Do-yeon.
A poor family that couldn't even comfortably afford workbooks, grades constantly on the verge of slipping among kids armed with private tutoring and hagwons, an unrequited crush on Seo Jae-gyeom…… My own head was about to burst from my own problems.
And honestly, I was scared.
I didn't want to become a target myself just for standing up for Woo Do-yeon, who wasn't even my friend.
Watching her suffer made me uncomfortable, but the moment I turned away, it was quickly forgotten.
When the people around me made jokes about Woo Do-yeon, I might have swept along with the mood and laughed at least once.
However.
‘Having lived up to twenty-nine once, I know.’
The things that felt like the entire world back then?
Looking back, they're absolutely nothing.
Two years from now, once you go to college, you can live perfectly fine without keeping in touch with a single high school friend.
What kind of kid was I in high school? Unless I bring it up, nobody knows.
This truly is nothing.
Yet over this insignificant nothing, a person died.
“Hey, Woo Do-yeon, can't you hear me? Hey!”
“Holy crap, look at her ignoring us even after getting hit with a walnut pastry.”
“Hey, throw some kimchi at her, kimchi.”
“Ugh, then I have to grab it with my hands.”
“Just pick it up with your chopsticks and flick it!”
“You're a genius.”
Having returned to the past, I am unimaginably happy right now.
Yet this isn't something I earned through any great achievement of my own.
The regressor could just as easily have been Woo Do-yeon or Jung Eun-sung. The fact that I won the lottery was a hundred percent coincidence.
I was merely luckier than Woo Do-yeon.
If I get to enjoy a second chance just because of sheer luck while Woo Do-yeon doesn't, this world is just too foul.
So I will do what Woo Do-yeon undoubtedly would have done for herself if she had been the regressor instead of me.
Q. Didn't you say you were just going to study?
A. I was planning to…… I really intended to.
Still, I'm an adult now. How could I sleep soundly with my legs stretched out at night while turning a blind eye to that spectacle? My conscience wouldn't let me.
You can't study without enough sleep.
Besides, to study properly, you need a decent academic atmosphere anyway.
Singling someone out to ostracize and torment them—how is anyone supposed to study in an environment like this?
‘Right, since I got this good fortune, let's share a bit of it. It's not like it wears out.’
“Ji-soo-ya.”
I turned to look at Ji-soo, who was holding her lunch tray beside me with an uneasy expression.
“I'm sorry, but I can't eat with you today. There's an empty seat next to Seo Jae-gyeom over there, so just eat with him for today.”
Better not to have any stray sparks fly at her while being around me.
“I'm really sorry, I'll buy you chocolate milk after math class later, okay?”
Without waiting for an answer, I walked straight toward Woo Do-yeon's table.
Clack.
The sound of my lunch tray hitting the table resonated loudly across the quiet cafeteria.
The crowd at the adjacent table, who had just been giggling while picking up kimchi with chopsticks, shut their mouths and stared at me.
Acting as if nothing was amiss, I pulled out a chair and sat down across from Woo Do-yeon.
Woo Do-yeon, who had been steadfastly continuing her meal, lifted her head and looked at me.
“Kang Da-hye, what the hell are you doing?”
Song Yeo-reum, sitting at the neighboring table with a walnut pastry gripped in her hand ready to throw at Woo Do-yeon, called out to me.
For the record, Song Yeo-reum was one of the few people I still remembered among my high school classmates, most of whom I had completely forgotten.
She went to the same middle school as me, and she had been a notorious delinquent even back then.
Shaking kids down with petty lines like ‘Lend me a thousand won,’ ‘Give me ten thousand won,’ ‘How much do you have on you right now? Oh, no cash? Can't you just withdraw it from an ATM?’—she must have extorted well over a million won in total.
In our second year of middle school, we were in the same class. When I told her I didn't have any money, she said, ‘Really?’ and gave my uniform skirt pocket a sharp pat on her way past.
Just to check if there were bills in my pocket.
She had once locked a friend of mine who went on to a foreign language high school in a cleaning supplies locker to beat her, and she had once demanded that I help her cheat on an English exam.
‘Back in the day, I was terrified of you.’
I looked at her hair—styled by unplugging the bathroom hand dryer to plug in a curling iron—and her uniform, where the skirt was the only piece she was even wearing properly.
“Hey, Kang Da-hye. I asked what you're doing right now.”
“…Sharing my good fortune.”
“What?”
“Ah, for you, it might be bad luck, though.”
“What kind of bullshit… Aaaagh!”
The red bean butter walnut pastry I threw landed squarely inside Song Yeo-reum's soup bowl. Broth splashed all over the hoodie she was wearing, making Song Yeo-reum shriek at the top of her lungs.
I gave a broad grin to Do-yeon, whose eyes had grown wide as saucers.
Since this good fortune makes me so incomparably happy, I hope others can become just as happy as me.
