Help || Hwang Hyunjin

NINETEEN

Boy, I hated the arrival of this day.

My phone was constantly ringing and I was terrified. No part of me wanted to pick it up. I hated the fact that I actually knew the one who made my phone ring.

A good ten minutes later, it stopped ringing.

Earlier that day I had answered the call and learnt that it was none other than the same psycho I had encountered five days back.

Now the ringing was replaced by the constant dinging of the phone.

I looked at it and was terrified at the number of notifications I had got in the past minute.

The same guy had been spamming and I wanted to do nothing more than tell a soul, even if it was my sister about what was happening but this guy seemed to be capable of hearing from a mile away. Not literally, but I feared he was stalking me in such a way that he knew every single move I made.

I hated this game. I hated myself for being alone at that time, in that place even if I knew that Hyunjin wasn't here in Seoul. I hated myself for breathing at that point of time.

It felt like almost everything was going back to how it was before I met Hyunjin.

All I wanted to do was see Hyunjin's face. I just had to see him. I needed Hyunjin in my life. That had become a fact.

---

I had told my mom that I would work everyday so that my summer wouldn't pass with me just whiling away my time. I said that I wanted to keep it nice and productive, in a way that I would be up on my toes all the time.

All of it was just an excuse to earn quickly. I had to apply to as many jobs as I could. 

When Hyunjin's mom gave me the envelope before visiting Hyunjin, I had managed to sneak in a million won that I had earned from the part-time job that I had. That was more than three-quarters of what I had earned. That was all he needed to get into SOPA. I wanted to help him more than anything.

In my pocket, I was hardly left with 10,000 won. It wasn't impossible to earn 4.9 million won after making an extremely theoretical plan in my head. I had to apply to at least three other jobs that would each pay me 18,000 won if I worked for an hour per day apart from the one job I already had. That would mean by four hours of labor per day which was not too bad. The only demerit was that I had to get a job with mostly physical labor considering the fact that I was still sixteen and had to apply for the jobs by the next day at least.

The first thing I did was take my bike to the instrumental store. It was still 7:00 in the morning. The manager and I did some negotiation and ended up with a deal where I would work everyday and my hourly salary would be 14,000 won. That was a great start.

The next place that came to my mind was the cafe Hyunjin worked at. I had been there quite a few times after we started to seriously hang out.

When I went there, I was happy. I was simply happy. It was probably because of the owner knowing me as Hyunjin's friend that she was sweet enough to almost immediately hire me and we ended up with a deal where I would work for two everyday and for that, my daily salary would be 20,500 won. This was going pretty well.

The next place I rode to was the cafe that I used to visit often when I hadn't started hating food...

I went in and learnt that the owner had changed. All the excitement that had filled me with the suavity of the first two deals slowly went down when I met the owner. He was mean, very mean.

The way he spoke and absolutely everything about him that I could judge by seeing him for the first time, made me boldly judge in my mind, that this fellow was undoubtedly rude.