Buuuuuung. Screeech.
The bus stopped in front of me.
This bus that stops in front of the village at 6:40 in the early morning is the one that takes me all the way to school.
The ride takes about 1 hour.
If you use a car, the 20-minute distance turns into 1 full hour.
I wore clean gray pants and the blue male uniform jacket.
The name tag was attached too.
On the white name tag, the name Jang Tae-san was clearly engraved.
It was my first time going to school in well over ten years.
My feelings were strange.
Whenever life in society was hard, I sometimes missed my high-school days.
All those emotional stories I shared with friends back when we were just beginning to face life properly.
Thinking about it now, they were nothing but childish games.
But back then, it truly was good.
“Hoo… I’ve really become a high-schooler again.”
My mind was in my thirties, but my body and reality were that of a high-school student.
The uniform fit me better than I expected.
The problem was that my mind had a bit of trouble accepting it.
Unlike before, the new uniform on my body was crisp and neat.
Even the blue Nike sneakers were new.
The twins’ uniforms had also been newly purchased. The uniforms of the boys who had suddenly shot up in height had become too small.
Mine had too.
Since we were graduating soon anyway, they bought two new blouses to match.
It was the same for me.
The uniform I had bought in the first year was now too small and didn’t fit anymore.
Before returning, my body had been thin, so I had worn it without trouble, but now that my muscles had developed, it felt like the clothes might tear apart at any moment.
Chiiik.
The bus door opened.
I tapped my transportation card, freshly charged to the brim.
Ah… Once again, tears threatened to cover my eyes.
There were times when the card balance almost ran out, and I had to hold my breath in fear.
The allowance was fixed, but because my parents weren’t salaried workers, it was distributed irregularly.
Between transportation costs, snacks, and the small fee for reading books, it was always lacking.
But not anymore.
I had become a golden goose.
The twins commuted by riding in my father’s car.
Since it wasn’t far enough to be called long-distance, there was no burden on time.
My father was extremely satisfied with the new car.
On the day he came home after cleanly paying off his debt using the bankbook I had given him, my father poured me a drink.
He didn’t say thank you.
Instead, he treated me as an adult, as one person who had shared the weight of the household.
That day was one example.
That day, I taught my father how to make soju-beer mix.
Soju-beer mix had not yet become explosively popular.
From this point in time, soju-beer mix would slowly begin to spread.
At that time, the explosive mixed drink of whiskey and beer was mainstream.
I stopped my father, who was about to pour me soju.
Then I opened the cold beer from the fridge, poured soju into the beer glass, and made him soju-beer mix with the perfect golden ratio.
During dinner, my entire family was astonished.
I was someone who didn’t even drink alcohol, but I made soju-beer mix with such skill that I could have been a part-timer at a nightlife bar, and they were shocked.
It was a technique I learned from a senior when I did a waiter part-time job during school.
With this secret, I used to get praised by the seniors.
My father, who drank the soju-beer mix I made like that, was impressed.
He said beer had never tasted this good and downed several glasses in one shot.
And my father…
Soon collapsed flat on the wooden floor.
He was a naïve farmer who had only been used to makgeolli and soju, never having known the danger of soju-beer mix.
“It’s been a while. My seat.”
The bus heading toward the city still had plenty of empty seats.
The morning bus stop was close to my neighborhood.
And I always sat in the same roomy seat.
I always sat in the fourth seat behind the driver.
The bus seats were arranged one row on each side.
The space that had felt enormous now looked small.
As my consciousness grew, the space felt smaller.
It’s just like before.
Most of the people on the morning bus were students.
Sometimes older people also rode it, but it was used like a commuting bus for students.
I put earphones in my ears.
On the MP3 I downloaded onto my cellphone, Im Moon-se’s song began to flow out.
It was a song that didn’t match my age.
One day before dying, the sentimental voice I had quietly heard pulled me into it.
– Leaning against the bus window, standing~♪
The bus departed.
My feelings were very strange.
Outside the window, low mountains and rice fields, and houses came into view.
The emotion tasted from a seat I had not sat in since leaving Seoul was a quiet excitement.
‘Today is the day Seodang Online rises in the afternoon.’
I was going to school, but investing had not stopped.
Now my net capital exceeded 1 billion won.
The magic of small amounts was an express train leading to cash heaven.
For someone who knows the future and information, the flailing of the forces did not work.
Seodang Online, which I would buy today, was the same.
Even the faint ripples until yesterday had formed promotional harmony in the charts.
The 5-day through 120-day moving averages on both weekly and monthly charts all created a bottom, and even that had slept underwater for two years.
The ants had all grown exhausted.
The ants who draw big pictures and the ants who only think about the food in front of them could not be the same.
Most ants do not invest in stocks that show no change.
Ants enjoyed betting their lives on skyrocketing stocks and riding waves.
A truly many-satisfied people.
Ants loved a single-round gamble.
Forces thoroughly use that nature of ants.
I was also one of those ants.
In the past, I was a believer who ate off the scraps of the operation forces.
I was a chart believer.
Within the countless signals dyed in red and blue that captured the greed of people, I also jumped in.
After I became a stockbroker, I saw every chart: all trade volumes and Kosdaq charts, overseas large-caps, futures, currency charts.
On many days I examined hundreds per day.
I also pounded away to identify the faint signals trapped inside the charts.
I achieved some results, but that had limits.
Before the forces, charts were meaningless.
Inside the stock caged in that category, they were gods.
Sometimes ants betrayed with trembling hands and caused problems, but ants could never win against them.
Only gnawing leftovers.
While I went to school and took classes, automatic trades were executed.
They were calculated thoroughly and dispersed.
Even small amounts moved by tens of millions.
So that the forces could not be surprised, I became an investor dispersed across various stocks.
My buying and selling were concluded like a precisely set program.
I also bought two computers.
They were the latest models at the time, but the performance was…
If a graphics card exceeded 1 gigabyte, the price easily went over one million won.
The RAM hit the max at 4 gigabytes.
The CPU was Pentium.
Even so, it ran well.
Games and programs in 2006 were still light versions.
Kkiiiiik. Buuuuung.
The bus kept repeating stops and starts.
Students got on the noisy bus.
And then…
“Hmph. Vacation is over. Hng!”
“Why is your face so tanned? Did you go help harvest chili peppers on a farm?”
“No. With my family I went to Gwangalli Beach~.”
“Oh? Really? I’m jealous……”
I heard the voices of the girl students.
My heart warmed.
The seats in front were mostly taken by girl students.
In a city of about three hundred thousand people, there were ten high schools.
The bus I was riding mostly looped through the outskirts and villages.
Hearing the chattering voices of the girl students made my memories vividly resurface.
The lively girl who was talking about leaving the beach right now was called Mi-jin.
We saw each other’s faces almost every day, but we didn’t talk.
Next to her, the friend whose forehead-length bangs swayed in envy was named Na-young.
They were students of Jangju Girls’ High School, the counterpart school to Jangju High School, which I attended.
“If it’s heavy, give me your bag.”
It was me, Jang Tae-san, being gentlemanly.
The girl students in school uniforms swayed with the jolting of the bus.
The faint shampoo scent they gave off felt nice.
Just looking at girls without makeup was pleasant to the eyes.
It satisfied the thirst I had regained for this flavor.
There!
I couldn’t just watch the heavy bag hanging on her shoulder.
There was no shyness like in the past.
“Yes?”
The girls widened their eyes at my kindness.
It was a flower garden all around.
It looked silly to be sitting among the girl students, but I didn’t go to the back seats.
In the back seats, there were many male students who commuted from town.
A dark aura flowed from that direction.
There was a hierarchy even inside the bus.
It wasn’t regional discrimination but discrimination created by the school.
Like a mixture of various colored ethnic groups, the uniforms of different schools were scattered everywhere.
A faint boundary line was drawn.
The far back seats that boys liked were taken by the troublemaker kids.
The big, bulky kids whose school name had recently changed to Jangju Information & Chemical Industrial High School sat in the very back long seats.
In the very back of the bus, they swore loudly or spat, or made shameless obscene jokes without hesitation.
It wasn’t that they discriminated by school, but the atmosphere of the buses could be fully sensed.
In between them, each school’s kids were mixed and seated.
The kids from the poor village where I lived rarely got into the prestigious Jangju High School.
Inside the bus, Jangju High School students had to keep their heads low to avoid trouble.
To keep up with school classes, commuting was hard.
Only poor me took the longest commuting course.
My friends lived in town as lodgers or in the school dormitory.
For various reasons, I had never entered the world of the back of the bus.
My middle school was different, and the neighborhood where I grew up was different.
“It’s heavy……”
“It’s fine.”
Mi-jin said that with a half-moon smile.
The shy Na-young gently handed over her bag.
Their bags were placed on my knees.
It was better to sit.
Since most of the passengers were girl students, standing could easily be misunderstood as brushing past them.
Just like that, about five bags piled onto my knees.
“Who’s that? I think I’ve seen him somewhere?”
“His face looks familiar……”
“Are you sure you’ve seen him a lot somewhere?”
The girl students from various schools around me wondered who I was.
The curious gazes of the girls swept over me.
Good grief, just how much must I have changed for them not to recognize me?
For a year and a half, I had ridden this bus.
And I had always camped around this seat.
And yet the girl students didn’t recognize me.
Joy and bitterness crossed inside me at the same time.
The me of the past, who had no sense of presence, was completely erased.
And at the same time, the me transformed sharply as if by plastic surgery stood here.
“Was there a handsome guy like that on this bus? Doesn’t he look like someone we’ve seen a lot somewhere?”
“Maybe his name tag is covered by the bags so we can’t see it?”
They whispered, but my sharpened ears heard everything.
“Should I ask him?”
“Mi, are you crazy……”
They were girls with innocence still remaining.
Very different from the bold and aggressive girls of 2020 who would ask for a phone number first.
They weren’t pretty in the face, but just seeing these fresh late-teen girl students was healing.
Every time the bus moved, the sweet shampoo scent and the faint lotion smell lightly stirred my heart.
They were around the same age as me, but my mental state was in my mid-thirties.
That gap floated naturally.
A soft smile hung on my lips.
“Oh? He smiled.”
“I think he heard us. Should we talk to him?”
Just the morning imagination alone made the girls enjoyable.
It was an imagination allowed only to youths who had just begun to bloom.
Before I knew it, Mi-jin and Na-young were surrounded by the other girls.
Their quiet laughter rang like poetry.
My gaze fixed outside the window.
At that moment, the bus stopped.
It was that place.
And then one girl quietly got onto the bus.
She took the seat beside the open spot in front of me.
My gaze drifted toward her just like in those days.
My heart pounded, and without realizing it, it raced.
And then, in my earphones, the Im Moon-se song continued…
– Sitting by the window where the morning sun rises~♪
Watching the faraway drifting clouds~♬
Old memories I’ve been searching for settle into my heart~♬
I always want to stay by her side~♪♬
I can’t leave……
My eyes burned as I looked at her.
The girl I had wanted to meet again……
The girl I had only kept in my heart all my life……
My first love…… my crush.