Blissful Youth | Yang Jungwon

001 "copycat"

"Are you kidding me?
Or.. maybe, are you really this stupid?"
Lim Hyunseo glared at me with a look so deep and fierce, I felt like getting stabbed with two laser pointers.
I looked back at her, not moving a single muscle in my face.
I wasn't shaken by her yells.
She forcefully pulled her headphones out of my little recorder and slammed it on the rooftop's hard floor.
"I told you not to add any riffs or special ad-libs! The teacher will know it is yours, you stupid bitch!" She yelled out once again, grabbing me by the collar of our blue and white colored school uniform and still, I wasn't afraid of her. Not even the tiniest bit.
I just calmly untangled myself from her grip and sighed annoyed.
It wasn't my fault that my piece of work carried my signatures.

Hyunseo threw her perfectly healthy and shiny, straight black hair over her slim shoulder and crossed her arms in front of her chest.
She was absolutely flawless except for her personality.
Everyone admired her until they saw her real face. Unfortunately, that was only reserved for me.

I wanted to stop getting in these type of situations with her but then I remembered the time I refused to give her my samples.
I remembered the look on my parent's faces when they were ordered to come to our school and told I was involved in a bullying scandal.
"What will happen to your daughters career once it gets revealed?"
She had said with such an innocent look on her face. It was annoying.
She was indeed pretty but she had no talent in her fingers nor her ears.
She couldn't feel the music and she wouldn't ever do so.

I stared into her eyes with a sort of numbness in mine.
The numbness that had taken control over me years ago.
"How about you start composing your own stuff?
Then you would be able to stop begging for the leftover samples from a girl you look down on so much." I whispered right into her face as we were standing in front of one another, neither of us willing to back up.
I could see her gritting her teeth from up close, probably contemplating whether she should hit me or not, but instead she just got another step closer.
"This is your last warning, Song Nari.
I want a new composition tomorrow and it better be unrecognizable or else I'll push you off this rooftop myself." she whispered with an ominous glare before taking her pink leather bag and storming away angrily.

She was mistaken.
I wasn't afraid of dying. In fact, it was living that scared me more.
When I closed my eyes and tried to envision my future, all I saw was myself living in a world that wasn't one where I could possibly be happy.
Working in a job that brought nothing but disappointment to myself just because it was one my parents had picked for me before I was even born.
Could I do that? Would I be able to live like that?
Those were the questions I constantly asked myself, to which I never found any answers.
And it scared me.
I had never stopped fulfilling my parents' wishes or pretending to be perfect for them.

I looked down to my recorder who was still laying on the ground, probably broken.
"Ah! How am I supposed to record now?!" I groaned in desperation, picking it up the next second only to see that it already refused to turn on.
I took a deep breath and allowed myself to close my eyes for a moment.
I felt a soft brise hitting my face, brushing through the trees and making the dead and weak leaves fall to the ground in a kind of rhythmic way.
I had always loved watching my surroundings carefully, as there was music in every single moment and every single thing.
I believed that music was the only way to connect with each other and the whole universe we lived in as well, as music was the language that everybody seemed to be able to understand and communicate with.
After all, music was sounds, so oppositely where there was sound, there was music.
"How can someone limit music to one genre only?" I mumbled to myself in a silly manner of pitying myself for the nth time that day.

Speaking of which: it was a late summer day, almost hitting autumn.
It was already starting to get a little colder but I wouldn't ever stop going outside to see the beautiful wonders of nature.
How the leaves turned from green to brown and the only bright color that was left was the red ivy that was climbing up the white stone walls of our school building.

Most of the students at Hakcheon Highschool were currently busy preparing for project works either in pairs or alone.
I often found myself thinking about how easy and joyful this time of year must've been for the pop music students who only had to worry about this season's audition rounds.
Most of them were handsome enough to be picked anyway.
For us classical music students it was different.
The world of music wasn't as open for us as it was for them.
Looks weren't the only thing that mattered, but actual talent.
And as my class had been told to compose a promising piece of music, many people fell behind.
Lim Hyunseo was one of them.

Even though she was the most popular and - according to the other students, the prettiest student, she had no passion for the piano nor did she have to ability to become a real pianist.
She had been threatening me to do her project works since I had transferred to this school 6 months ago and even though I usually wasn't easy to bring down, she has quickly taken measures into her own hands.

And besides, handing her my left overs in exchange for my very own little peace where nobody got on my nerves wasn't too bad.
But now, thanks to her crashing my recorded, I seemed to have nothing left neither for her or for me.

"I had all of my mixtapes on this!" I groaned in despair as I checked the little box once again just to get no response.
The looks I had always gotten because of this thing had been miraculous so far.
Everyone else just saved all of their projects on their laptops and tablets but I had a quiet decent reason not to do so:
My parents regularly went through my files to check on my "potential".

Aggravated, I slammed it on the blank floor once again, claiming it as "dead" when out of nowhere, it suddenly started to play my most recent draft, a techno-inspired rhythm with heavy basses, perfect for raves.
A smile immediately grew on my face when I realized it wasn't broken after all but died as soon as I saw a pair of white sneakers appear in front of the small recorder laying on the floor.