Chapter 48

Chapter 48

Chapter 48 Elementary School Debut Ceremony (1)

Five days passed quickly.

They say time passes slowly when you're waiting for something, but when that waiting is filled with worry and apprehension, it's an entirely different story.

Was this how every parent with a daughter felt?

Would she adjust well? Would she be bullied because of her appearance? Would someone discover that she wasn't human? And so on.

No matter how hard I tried to convince myself it was nothing serious, there were many days when I couldn't concentrate on work because I was worried Lia might get hurt.

But since I'd decided to raise her like an ordinary child, I couldn't keep her confined to this little coffeehouse forever.

Even if I wasn't her real parent.

"You can manage on your own, right?"

"Yes!"

"And you know to wait in front of the school gate when you're finished?"

"Yes!"

"Good. Let's go inside."

After parking the car in the temporary parking lot set up on the playground, we followed the bustling crowd attending the entrance ceremony toward the auditorium.

"Mister, did you go to elementary school too?"

"Yeah, but it was so long ago that I don't remember much. Still, it was fun."

"But you said you don't remember it very well."

"If I still remember having fun, doesn't that mean I must've really enjoyed myself?"

"That's right! Sometimes I don't remember my dreams very well, but there have been times when I had lots of fun in them!"

Apparently reassured at last, Lia swung the hand she was holding energetically and quickened her pace.

It seemed Lia had been just as worried as I was.

(Ahem, we will now begin the 64th entrance ceremony of Geumhyo Elementary School. Parents and guardians, please take your seats on either side of the auditorium. Students, please sit in the center seats according to your assigned class and number.)

At the announcement over the speakers, the parents released the children they'd been holding close and sent them out into the world for the first time.

"All right, go on. You remember your class and number, right?"

"Yes! Class One, Number Sixteen!"

"Good. I'll be sitting up there, so go and take your seat."

I stood watching for a long time as Lia walked into the auditorium alone.

This might have been the first time she'd stood on her own since coming to the coffeehouse.

At the coffeehouse, she was always beside me, and on days when I went to work, the Elder, Sani, and the shamans spent time with her under the pretext of guarding the Divine Tree.

I captured that historic moment on my phone.

"Yeeun! Look over here! Over here!"

"Siha!"

The other parents weren't much different from me.

Their children were merely walking into the auditorium, yet they kept calling their names, hoping they would turn around at least once.

And when Lia, whom no one had called, turned around and waved cheerfully, the noise of parents loudly calling their children's names briefly subsided.

Everyone might think their own child was the prettiest, but Lia's smile was in a completely different league from those of ordinary children.

The video I'd just taken was such a masterpiece that I could already imagine the enthusiastic response it would receive if I uploaded it to the group chat.

"Who's that child? She looks mixed-race."

"Oh, how pretty! Her parents must absolutely adore her."

Was it too much to hope for after all?

I'd managed to conceal her blond hair by dyeing it in a hurry, but there was nothing I could do about her eyes.

And I couldn't have her wear colored contact lenses every time.

I'd comforted myself by thinking that the difference wasn't very noticeable at a glance, but I hadn't expected her to attract this much attention from the entrance ceremony onward.

___________

In the auditorium, in the seat directly in front of Lia.

A little girl wearing an excessively frilly pink outfit was surveying her surroundings with her chin raised high.

'Mom was right. There really isn't anyone prettier than me. They're all shorter too. Class president is going to be mine!'

"Oh my, that girl is so pretty."

"Isn't she a model or a child actress?"

The whispers of adults gathered in small groups reached the girl's ears clearly through the surrounding noise.

There was no chance she'd misheard. She could feel the gazes of most of the adults in the auditorium directed toward her.

In fact, she was quite accustomed to compliments about her appearance.

The hair salon she regularly visited, her ballet academy, her violin academy.

There wasn't a single place she went where people failed to tell her she was pretty.

One of her father's subordinates at his company had even offered to introduce her to an entertainment agency, saying it was important to debut early in show business.

If her mother hadn't insisted that she was intelligent and should focus on her studies for the time being, she might really have become a child actress.

That was what she'd thought.

Until she heard an adorable voice from behind her.

"Wow! There are so many people! Don't you think?"

When she casually turned around, a terrible catastrophe awaited her in the seat behind her.

Smooth, straight hair, fair skin, and a beaming smile that made others smile along without realizing it.

The girl felt as though she were facing a natural disaster so enormous that she'd lost even the will to flee.

Because she'd belatedly realized that the attention she'd been so conscious of hadn't been directed at her at all.

"Hello!"

"H-Hello."

"Oh, right! They said you should introduce yourself first when you greet someone! I'm Kim Lia. What's your name?"

"Park Serin."

"Nice to meet you! We're in the same class, so let's be friends!"

"Uh, okay."

Serin instinctively realized that she needed to stay away from Lia.

Wasn't this exactly the sort of situation where people would compare them?

Having grasped the situation, Serin quietly rose from her chair and sat in an empty seat farther toward the front.

'Good. If I sit this far away, other kids will sit between us, so it'll be fine.'

But a disaster once encountered was not so easily escaped.

"Wow! I can see the front much better from here!"

A chilling voice came from the seat behind her.

'Don't tell me she followed me?'

Having met her first human-shaped(?) friend other than Sani, Lia had no intention of letting Serin go so easily.

(This concludes our entrance ceremony. Students, please follow your homeroom teachers to your assigned classrooms.)

And Serin wasn't the only person bothered by Lia.

There was another person watching with displeasure as Serin followed the teacher into the classroom, Lia sticking close beside her.

______________

"Serin's mother, do you know that child?"

"No."

"They're clearly not even in the same class socially. Why is she clinging to Serin like that?"

"Look at that bag. It's not even a brand-name bag. It's just something sold at a supermarket."

"You shouldn't let children befriend just anyone at the beginning of the school year."

"Maybe her mother put her up to it. Everyone knows Serin's mother runs a first-tier supplier for Daechun Group."

"That's right, exactly! How can they be so shameless?"

The parents who had been watching Serin's mother's reactions began adding their own remarks.

But the frown on Serin's mother's face showed no sign of disappearing as she watched her daughter vanish into the classroom with a child she'd never seen before.

She had already formed a social circle centered on families whose children had attended English-language kindergartens.

Being able to afford fees exceeding three million won a month until their children entered elementary school meant those families were already well above average, so the children had naturally become friends too.

Unfortunately, however, the children's time together had only extended as far as attending the same school.

Class assignments were handled by computer, leaving no opportunity to interfere.

And so her daughter had ended up separated from the others in her class.

She had already been upset about that, but now, to make matters worse, a child wearing cheap clothes and carrying a cheap bag had attached herself to her daughter.

"Oh! That's right! Did everyone take pictures at the entrance ceremony? I got the video button mixed up, so I ended up recording an entire thirty-minute video this time! Hohoho."

"I need to hurry up and pick out my best pictures to upload to my family's group chat. Look at me, I'm so scatterbrained!"

One perceptive parent changed the subject to ease the chilly atmosphere.

Only then did Serin's mother relax her stiff expression and take her phone out of her bag.

But when she checked the photos, her face twisted into an expression far worse than before.

Her daughter, who always looked refined and elegant wherever she went, somehow appeared strangely unsophisticated.

The cause was the child beside her.

In every photograph, the unknown girl smiling brightly had turned her daughter into Hyangdan, the plain maidservant.

She had already repeated the word "endure" in her heart more than three times.

"Everyone, ask around and find out where this child came from. I especially want to know where she lives."

It was the last chance she was giving the child.

After all, there were occasionally people like that.

People who pretended to be frugal by deliberately dressing their children in cheap clothes, only to use it later as a heartwarming story.

Most of them were public officials or politicians, so making a mistake could lead to serious trouble.

But if that wasn't the case, she intended to make one thing perfectly clear.

Just because they attended the same school didn't mean they lived in the same world.

____________

Had it been about thirty minutes since Lia entered the classroom?

The sound of cheerful giggling rang out, and children came pouring out of the building.

Then, as though they'd made a promise, they each ran into their parents' arms.

"Mister!"

"Did you have fun?"

"Yes! Serin and I became desk partners! I told the teacher I wanted to sit with Serin, and she made us partners!"

"That's great. You've already made a friend."

Fortunately, my worries that she might be ostracized because of her unusual eye color seemed to have been unfounded.

"There are so many desks and chairs at school! They stretch all the way from here to here! And you can hang your bag on the desk like this. And also..."

Lia seemed determined to tell me absolutely everything she'd seen and heard in the classroom during those thirty minutes.

And since she rarely forgot anything after seeing or hearing it once, I achieved the remarkable feat of absorbing an enormous amount of information I hadn't asked for.

Including the fact that there were nineteen students in her class but fifty shoe lockers outside the classroom.

"Didn't they give you anything else to bring home?"

"The teacher said to give you this!"

It was a school notice notebook.

Even after all these years, the format of these notebooks hadn't changed.

At the end of each school day, children copied the words their teacher had written on the blackboard into these notebooks in their clumsy handwriting.

It was partly a learning activity designed to accommodate children who had not yet fully mastered Hangul, and partly a way for them to learn to prepare their own supplies and create opportunities to communicate with their parents through those few lines.

『Monday, March 24, 2025

(Teacher's Confirmation: ), (Guardian's Confirmation: )

1. Bring the basic student information form.

2. Prepare indoor school shoes, not slippers.

3. Bring a jump rope.

4. Write an illustrated diary entry.』

Receiving a notice notebook with a clearly designated space for the guardian's signature finally made me feel that I'd become a school parent.

And Lia had many other guardians besides me.

"Let's show this to the Elder and the shamans when we get home. They'll be happy to hear that Lia wrote it."

"Really? Then let's hurry home!"

"Hmm, I think we'll have to wait a little."

"Why?"

"Because it'll take quite a while for those cars to get out."

I pointed toward the line of cars stretching toward the playground entrance.

Not only was the speed limit restricted to thirty kilometers per hour because it was a school zone, but the traffic signals for both left and right turns were short. It looked as though it would take at least twenty or thirty minutes for all the cars gathered on the playground to leave.

"Shall we look around over there while we wait? We have to buy a jump rope anyway. What do you think?"

"Yes! I'd like that!"

Since we were stuck there anyway, I considered taking a look around the school, but what really caught my attention was the stationery shop in front of it.

It wasn't quite like the stationery shops of my school days, where all sorts of goods were spread across outdoor stands like a general store, but it was enough to stir up nostalgia.

And there, I encountered something I should never have encountered.

Other parents who had come to the stationery shop with much the same idea as me.

They had plenty of time to spare,

the financial means to buy as many of the goods displayed in the stationery shop as they pleased,

and vivid memories of their own school days.