Chapter Text
Most days, Moon Byulyi wasn't concerned with the naturally beautiful things in life. She found them dull and they didn't ask for a closer look, a different perspective. Byulyi yearned for the ugly: the battered moth, the dirty landfill, the leaking pipe; these things must be made beautiful. That was art. Taking a photo of a sunset is merely capturing a lovely image, not creating it.
She walks the cracked sidewalk towards school, camera rhythmically bumping against her stomach, lens cap between her fingers. Just gazing. It was just after dawn and the sun weakly peeks over the treetops, barely woken from its heavy slumber.
The sun sleeps more than I do, Byulyi muses quietly to herself. The thought is half-bitter, half-amused.
Free time was not in the vocabulary of Byulyi. As editor and photographer of all the school's media, she arrives at school nearly an hour before the first student and leaves two hours after the last. And with the honors courses' workload... well, there wasn't much time for sleeping.
It helped though. To stay busy. Her mind and its endless thoughts were demanding and destructive, so life's daily distractions were necessary to survive. And Jung Wheein, her best friend and daily dose of happiness in a midget-sized package. Though a writer on the newspaper, Wheein's main focus was playing the flute in marching band. Made sense, she looked adorable in the uniform.
The quaint, two-story red-brick structure that is R.B.W. High appears in Byulyi's field of vision as she turns the corner. A school of just 350 students, she knew the names of everyone and vice versa. Really helped to know the nice guy or girl on the athletics teams who wouldn't mind a candid shot taken of them for the paper. Some don't appreciate the way the flash really exemplifies the sweat on their bodies. She doesn't know what they expect to happen.
Byulyi stops walking suddenly. Converses only a hair from the lower step of the school. A piece of crumpled-up paper cartwheels down the stairs like a poltergeist pushed it. A bright red D is visible even in its harsh state as it settles around the middle of the staircase.
With one hand she slips off her glasses as the other lifts the camera, focusing. With her extended vision, she can see it was some type of Calculus test - Differential. She snaps the photo, lowers the camera, and pushes her glasses onto her face; a procedure so common it'd become half habitual.
"Shame." Byulyi mutters to whoever that test once belonged to.
"A damn shame."
Byulyi starts at the husky, unidentifiable voice coming from a place on top of the stairs that she can't see clearly. Nervously, she hikes her backpack up on her shoulders and stands on her tiptoes, trying to see who could possibly be here so early in the morning.
"Who's up there? Is it a ghost?" Byulyi tries to joke, but her voice cracks at the end.
"Nah."
They don't say anything else. It was definitely a woman though. That fact gave Byulyi enough courage to walk up a few steps and face whoever sits between her and the inside of the school. Her shoulders slump as she recognizes the girl slumped into the corner next to the double doors.
"Ahn Hyejin, the principal said you didn't have to be here until 7:30."
The younger student sighs, running her hands through her dark hair. "What the hell? I've been here for thirty minutes waiting for your ass."
Well maybe if you had listened.
Principal Hughes always sent the troublesome, but not too troublesome, students to work on the school yearbook or newspaper as punishment thinking that Byulyi and the other nerds would be some kind of good influence on them. She considered it more of a punishment on them than on the troublemakers who had no expertise on the subject and created unusable content.
Byulyi quickly glances over Hyejin. She'd been told she was a sophomore and yet a few tattoos were already scrawled along her arm and neck.
"How old are you?" Byulyi questions as she reaches into her bag for the front door key.
"Why?"
Byulyi swallows down her annoyance, pushing her spectacles up her nose again. "Just trying to make conversation. You'll be on the media team for a month, so we should get to know one -"
"I asked 'why?'. You don't have to give me an entire exposition about my purpose here."
Smoking weed in the bathroom during fourth block. That's why she's here.
"I'm sixteen," Hyejin continues.
Byulyi cracks a crooked grin as she slips the key into the lock, "Hi sixteen, I'm seventeen."
As Byulyi finally unlocks the school doors, she hears Hyejin mutter underneath her breath in complete seriousness, "Fucking kill me now," and chuckles quietly. This might actually be fun.