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“Mo-tak, take it easy on Ha-na.” She hears Chu Mae-ok, the kind elderly woman who picked her up from the hospital, say to the man, Ga Mo-tak. She and Ga Mo-tak don’t get along.
“Yeah,” Jang Cheol-jung, a middle aged man who arrived a few hours ago with a bag and a wrinkled suit, chimes in with a little chuckle. “Give her time. She’s gonna be a strong one, I can feel it.”
“Give her time?” Ga Mo-tak quotes, and Ha-na flinches slightly at his chipped tone. “Cheol-jung, she still hasn’t discovered what her power is. It’s been, what? Two months now? Maybe you can convince Wi-gen to get U-sik to choose someone else. She’s too young.”
Having super-hearing sucks. She’s way out of earshot and she still hears them. It’s inconvenient to hear so much, all at once, all the time. How do they deal with it?
Old age makes you miss little things like hearing, Ha-na, Ahn Yeo-na, Ha-na’s best friend since the beginning of highschool, whispers teasingly in her mind. Ha-na’s nose crinkles slightly, tucking her knees underneath her chin.
Has it been two months already?
Logically, she knew it’d been more than that. Half a year, maybe past that, even. She knows the vague details of her rebirth; what caused it, what happened, what is expected of her in the thereafter. A young spirit by the name U-sik chose her to be something called a Counter. It’s like being a demon-hunter. That’s what she is now. Do Ha-na, demon-hunter. If Yeo-na could see me now. She thought amusedly as U-sik led her renewed soul back into her mortal body.
She remembered waking up alone in bed, a woman with windswept curly hair barging into the crowded hospital room.
“Do Ha-na?” She said with a gentle smile on her face, something akin to pity stretching in her eyes. “Oh my, you’re so young.” Maybe she thinks Ha-na wouldn’t hear her, but she did, and it made her flush, body instinctively retreating back into the bed. “Ah, nevermind that. I’m Chu Mae-ok. Jang-mul already handled your paperwork, so we can go home now, if you’d like. I’ll cook food for you there—anything you want.”
Ms Chu was just so—so good. She made Ha-na feel at home, at ease, in both her own newly-living skin and in her new place of residence. She was like her mother in all but blood.
(That was when things went straight downhill. When Ha-na started to liken Ms Chu to her mother and, oh, God, what did my mother do?
Poison. It was poison. She’s sure of it. Crawling down her throat, taking refuge in the pit of her stomach. Choking. Is that blood? Was it hers? Or was it—No. No. Can’t be Ha-young’s, her sister is too young, too young. Age too low to start seeing blood past her lips from anything but baby teeth. She’s too young— Ha-na is too young. Save her, save h—)
“Don’t say that.” Ms Chu chastises. “She’ll grow into it. Let her grow into it. Cheol-jung said it himself, didn’t he? She’s a strong one.”
Silence follows after that. It’s heavy, obnoxiously so. She’s suffered enough of those heavyweight silences that spread across her very eyes as she came home late from school only to find her mother weeping on the kitchen table, bills and notices trembling under her fingers while Ha-na tried to maneuver her way into her and Ha-young’s shared room.
She decides to leave.
Her mandatory Counter tracksuit clings to her body as rain falls. Ha-na cursed. She didn’t even bring an umbrella. Sure, the tracksuit had a hood, but it may as well be nothing since the cloth absorbed the water anyway.
Like instinct, Ha-na starts running. She makes good use of that Counter-issued super speed and sprints past office-workers starting their day at their borning, monotone jobs. In another life, Ha-na probably would’ve ended up like one of them. In another life, maybe she wouldn’t’ve.
She doesn’t see a need to fill in those what-if gaps anymore, though. She’s not in another life. She’s in this one.
She’s not Do Ha-na, office worker. She’s certainly not Do Ha-na, Olympic soccer player. Right now, all she is and ever will be in the foreseeable future is Do Ha-na, Counter.
Without realizing it, Ha-na slows down. Counter or not, running still gets exhausting after a while. It didn’t help that she was already pretty tired after training hand-to-hand with Ga Mo-tak since the crack of dawn. The asshole kept playing dirty because do you think evil spirits play fair, Ha-na? No! Let’s go again!
Not even her old coach was that cruel. And that was saying something. Even though she quit soccer back when she was sixteen, she still got chills whenever she saw coach Min walking down the hallways during school hours.
“Look at my handsome boy! Honey, quick, take a picture!”
“My little girl is growing up! Oh, I’m going to cry.”
“Hey! The ceremony hasn’t even started yet—you’re getting makeup all over my toga!”
Suddenly, Ha-na’s ears burst with activity. It’s too early for this much noise, what is going on—?
Congratulations to the Class of 2018!
Oh.
Ha-na stares at the tarpaulin, dumbfounded.
This… This is her school. She recognizes some of these faces. These are her batchmates. Meaning this is—
“Woah, is that Kwon In-su? Oh my God, why did you cut it so short? Are you preparing for military service or something?”
Ha-na freezes in her tracks. That voice.
With a turn that felt too fast to be normal by human standards, Ha-na ducks down in a nearby bush and peeks overhead, clearly seeing the bottle-blonde hair of her best friend.
“Pot meet kettle. You forgot to dye your roots, by the way.”
“It’s getting covered up by the cap, anyway! At least I won’t look bald in my graduation photos!”
They squabble back and forth, but there’s a fondness to it. In-su places a careful palm on the small of Yeo-na’s back. It clicks. They’re together! Ahn Yeo-na and Kwon In-su! How did that happen?! Didn’t In-su have a thing for Seo Chae-won?! Didn’t Yeo-na have a thing for Seo Chae-won?!
Suddenly, Ha-na feels like the age she was supposed to be. Freshly eighteen and trying to figure out who’s-dating-who and who-liked-who.
It’s a dull ache in the back of her mind. Even back when she was still alive like they were, she didn’t really engage in as much gossip. She was too busy trying to look for jobs that would hire minors.
As she watches her former friend group disappear inside the school, Ha-na makes an impulsive, probably stupid split-second decision.
Pulling her hood back down low enough to cover her eyes, Ha-na trudged forward carefully.
She makes it past the gate with ease, her enhanced senses making sure she doesn't bump into anyone too familiar. She had cut her hair short after finding it difficult to maintain in its curly state, plus adding the bangs that were steadily growing fast over her eyes, so she probably won’t be immediately recognized, but one could never be too prepared.
Ha-na settles in a secluded corner of the auditorium, trying to make herself seem small since the tracksuit was already ridiculously vivid.
She should’ve brought a mask. A black shirt over red pants wouldn’t have been jarring. She could’ve made it work.
“What am I doing?” Ha-na whispers to herself. She’s in her old school watching a graduation she isn’t “alive” to see. What is she hoping to gain from this? Closure? Acceptance? Or, god forbid, mourning?
She doesn’t know. Doesn’t care, more like. Because she watches the ceremony anyway.
She watches and tries to search for secondhand joy to make herself feel better. Her research group wins best research. Last she heard of their project, it was crashing and burning because everything contradicted itself. That means they turned it around, somehow.
Something in her heart stirs when their group leader, Han Ae-cha, asks to borrow the mic and says: “Please, let us all give a round of applause to Do Ha-na, our former group leader who, unfortunately, couldn’t join us today.” The audience gives her what she wants, but her batchmates take it a step further and erupt in deafening noise.
It hurts her ears.
Her eyes, too, a little. They’re throbbing, she feels, and dripping—oh.
Oh.
She gulps down a hiccup that forces its way past her lips.
The ceremony proceeds as normal.
Ha-na guesses it’s near the end of it when the principal calls out Chae-won’s name for the valedictorian speech, but is shocked when, instead of Chae-won, up comes Ahn Yeo-na. Even though he’s obviously surprised as well, the principal gives room for Yeo-na.
“Good morning, Class of 2018!” She hollers. The graduates holler back. Some even make a few throat-aching sounds. “My God, you’re all so annoying. Damn, I’m gonna miss you all so much.”
The crowd sobers a while after that. “This is gonna be so cheesy and stupid and I’m probably going to cry a little bit, but it’s so worth it, you guys.” Yeo-na smiles for a bit, something like a shimmering sheen coating her eyes. “We’re here, you know? It’s so scary to finally be here, but we deserve this. Everyone’s going to move on to do amazing things, meet amazing people, become amazing people, and it’s going to be great.”
“I know so many of you are probably thinking, why the hell is Ahn Yeo-na giving this speech? Isn’t Seo Chae-won valedictorian? Well, I can answer that!” She laughs. “Because, before I hand the mic over to our wonderful, talented, ever-beautiful Seo Chae-won, I want to do one last, one final selfish thing.”
She takes the mic out of its holder and approaches the principal and their homeroom teacher. From this angle, Ha-na could see her hands shake. Yeo-na gives a slip of paper to the principal and dashes off backstage, leaving the principal and teacher to huddle over the paper.
Ha-na swears she hears them take a sharp breath.
“That girl, seriously.” Her homeroom teacher turns her back on the audience, hand coming up to wipe her face.
“Okay! You can read it now!” Yeo-na yells from backstage.
The crowd waits with bated breaths as the principal recites, “Do Ha-na.”
Immediately, Ha-na stood up straight. Her heart pounded against her ears, almost overpowering the noise all around her.
Yeo-na comes out from behind the curtains, holding an honest-to-god life-size standee of Ha-na, decked out in a photoshopped toga and a real-life cap that threatens to fall, and probably would’ve, had it not been for Yeo-na’s support.
“Former Jungjin Highschool girl’s soccer team captain. Best Research Group. Excellence in Social Science.” He lists off, getting teary with every medal that her homeroom teacher places on her cardboard neck. Ha-na’s crying, too. She didn’t even notice Yeo-na pull out the medals, it must’ve cost a fortune.
“Yeo-na…” Ha-na presses her palm against her mouth roughly, trying to muffle the sounds.
She is so stupid. Ha-na would’ve been fine! She didn’t have to come in. She could’ve turned around and given Mo-tak the cold shoulder for the entire day! She knew coming here was going to hurt, she knew.
Seo Chae-won is teary when she gives her speech. It’s a blur, honestly. Ha-na couldn’t make out a word.
What breaks her, truly, utterly, devastatingly breaks her is when she spots Yeo-na in her seat, still carrying that awful standee, and moves both of their tassels from the right to the left.
Ha-na breaks, then. She can’t take it. Wouldn’t take it.
She—She promised U-sik she would leave all of this behind the second she signed her Counter Contract.
Too distracting. Don’t interfere. Too many questions. Don’t interfere. Too little accessible answers. Don’t. Interfere.
“Hey, stop!” Ha-na doesn’t. Don’t look. Don’t interfere. Go back to Eonni’s Noodles. Pretend, pretend. “You! Are you a student here? You look familiar, why aren’t you in there?”
It’s coach Min.
“Ha-na?” She says in that hoarse voice she always seemed to have.
Oh, fuck. This is bad. She’s going to get comatosed again. U-sik, don’t leave me, please. I can’t go back. I can’t—
“Ha-na, is that you?”
Coach Min grabs her hand, skin to skin, and suddenly, the world bursts in multicolor.
Ha-na is seeing things from the body of coach Min. She’s checking things off in her clipboard as the girls start their warmups.
Suddenly, Yeo-na bursts into the room, sweaty and grief-stricken expressions fluttering through her eyes.
“Do-hwi—” She chokes. Coach Min is by her side immediately. “Park Do-hwi visited the hospital. She isn’t there anymore. He said someone discharged her. Who discharged her, coach? Coach, Ha-na isn’t—She’s—Where is Ha-na? Where’s my best friend? Where is she? She’s always been in the same spot, always, for months. Why isn’t—Coach, who took my Ha-na?”
Ahn Yeo-na begs and begs, legs giving out halfway through her dazed speech. One of the girls catches her before she falls while someone else yells that they’re going to get the nurse.
“Ha-na, come back to us. Come back to me. I don’t know where you are, where are you? I promised to—I promised to get her another blanket. She gets cold easily, coach, what if she’s cold?”
Ha-na flinches away from coach Min. There’s an odd trickle down her nose, and before she could register anything, Ha-na places her palm against coach Min’s forehead and mumbles, low and trembling, “You did not see me come in here.”
Like a puppet with her strings cut, coach Min slumps against her, vaguely unconscious. Thanking the super strength U-sik gave her, she gently placed coach Min on a nearby chair and made it look like she had only fallen asleep.
After that, she makes a run for it.
“U-sik, what just happened?” Ha-na gasps through their shared connection.
“Ha-na! You did it! You discovered your power!” U-sik replies giddily. “Oh, I have to tell Miss Gi-ran, maybe then she could convince Mr Mo-tak to back off!”
“U-sik, no. U-sik, wait—” But, too late, she was already cut off. “Fuck!”
Slowing down, Ha-na kicks a garbage can to the ground, breathing heavily as she does so.
Immediately feeling guilty, she picks it up and cleans the area.
What was that? She knew it wasn’t like the normal Counter bullshit—memory wiping was hazy and vague. That was—That was tangible. Like she could touch it and suddenly, she’s part of the experience.
Ha-na was new to the memory wipe thing. She didn’t know how to, yet. Did everyone see her memories when they touched her? Did everyone know? Is that why there’s pity? All this time, she thought it was because of her age. Did everyone see?
The blood? The bodies? The begging? The anger? The resentment and pain and curses and almost-violences?
Did they know how beyond repair she was?
She doesn’t know how she got home. Her legs took over on autopilot.
Ha-na reasons it out. She’s good at that.
They weren’t evil. They weren’t malicious. They weren’t what every other adult had been in her life. Ms Chu, at the very least, advocated for her. She saw life in Ha-na, when all the other two did was look at the husk she’d become.
Against all odds, for all intents and purposes, she was— is safe with them.
“Ha-na!” For the first time since she’s taken refuge in this place, Ga Mo-tak runs through the door to greet her first. “Gi-ran told me the news! Psychometry, I’m getting chills.”
He’s so… happy. He wasn’t that happy with her when she left earlier. Mo-tak walks over, arms raised high as if he wants to hug her.
Touch can make people see. Don’t let them see. Be the husk they already know you are. Something resentful scratches at her brain. Mo-tak is closing in. Ha-na takes his arm and flips the man over her shoulder.
For all of the world to see, a bitter and envious teenager takes down a full-grown man. It’s midday. People see. This part of town, specifically—people gossip.
From that moment on, it became common knowledge that Do Ha-na did not let anyone, most especially Counters, touch her.