The thing about being ugly is that people don't actually hate you.
They just act like you don't exist.
Park Jae-beom figured that out sometime around middle school, probably around the third or fourth time a teacher looked straight through him during attendance like his name wasn't even on the list. It wasn't malice. It was something worse than that. It was just... nothing. He was background noise. Furniture with a school uniform on.
He was seventeen now and nothing had changed.
...
6:14 AM.
The alarm went off and Jae-beom was already awake. He'd been awake for an hour, staring at the water stain on the ceiling of their one-room apartment in Bucheon. It was shaped a little like a dog. He'd been staring at it since he was twelve.
The apartment was small enough that he could hear his mother breathing from across the room. She slept on the floor mat by the window, curled up in the same flower-print blanket she'd had for years, her back to him. She always slept on the floor. Said the sleeping mat was more comfortable.
He knew she gave him the bed because she thought he didn't notice.
He noticed everything.
He got up quietly, careful not to let the floorboards creak near her side of the room. The uniform was already hanging on the back of the chair, washed last night, slightly damp still because their building's ventilation was terrible. He pulled it on. The shirt buttons strained a little at the stomach, same as always. He didn't look in the mirror. Hadn't done that in a while.
On the small table by the stove, there was a note.
Jae-beom-ah, rice is in the pot. Eat before you go. Don't skip. — Mom
He stood there for a second reading it.
She'd worked a double shift yesterday. Cleaning offices in Yeongdeungpo from 6 PM to 3 AM. Her flip-flops were by the door, the blue ones with the cracked heel she kept saying she'd replace. She hadn't replaced them in eight months. Probably because new flip-flops cost money that was better used on electricity bills or school supplies or rice.
He ate. He didn't taste it.
***
Bucheon Technical High School wasn't the worst school in the city. Jae-beom was pretty sure of that because he'd looked it up once, in a spiral of self-pity that he was not proud of. There were schools with worse facilities, worse teachers, worse everything.
But Bucheon Technical had something special. A specific kind of cruelty that came from putting kids who'd already given up on themselves in the same building together and calling it education.
He walked through the front gate at 7:52 AM.
He made it four steps before he heard it.
"Aye, Fatty's here."
He didn't stop walking. Stopping was the worst thing you could do. Stopping meant you acknowledged it, and acknowledging it meant it could go somewhere. He just kept his head down and moved, the way he always moved. Small steps, hunched shoulders, hands buried in his pockets, making himself as compact as possible for someone who weighed ninety-five kilograms.
"Yah, Park Jae-beom. I'm talking to you."
The voice belonged to Shin Woo-jin. Third year. Track and field kid, lean and tall with the particular confidence of someone who had never in his life been told he wasn't good enough just by walking into a room. Jae-beom knew his name the same way you know the name of a weather pattern that keeps ruining your week.
He stopped. Not because he wanted to. Because three of Woo-jin's friends had shifted positions without him realizing, and now the path to the building entrance had a body in it.
"Your glasses are crooked again," Woo-jin said, tilting his head. Not angry. Almost amused. "You look like you got sat on."
Laughter. The specific kind, not loud, not mean enough to get a teacher involved, just enough to let Jae-beom know how this looked from the outside.
He pushed his glasses up. They were crooked because the frame was cracked on the left side and he'd been holding them together with a strip of tape for three weeks.
"Sorry," he said.
He didn't know why he said sorry. He hated that he said sorry.
"Hey, I actually want to ask you something." Woo-jin stepped closer. He smelled like decent body wash, the kind that came in the bigger bottles that weren't on sale. "My girlfriend says you keep staring at her in homeroom. That true?"
"I don't."
"She says you do."
"I really don't." Jae-beom kept his voice flat and his eyes down. The ground was safer. "I sit two rows behind her. I'm looking at the board."
"Are you calling her a liar?"
There it was. The pivot. The moment where any answer was the wrong answer because the question was never actually about his girlfriend or the homeroom or the glasses. It was about the simple fact that Shin Woo-jin could do this to Park Jae-beom and there was nothing Park Jae-beom could do back.
"I'm not calling anyone anything," Jae-beom said quietly. "I need to get to class."
Woo-jin looked at him for a long moment. Then he stepped aside. Just like that, like he was bored with it already, like Jae-beom wasn't worth the energy of a prolonged scene.
That was the part that always stayed with Jae-beom, even after everything. Not the confrontations that went further than this one. Not the times things turned physical in the stairwells or behind the gym. Just this. The casual dismissal. The way Shin Woo-jin looked at him and saw nothing worth his full attention.
He walked to class. He sat down. He put his bag under his chair.
No one moved their stuff to make room for him. No one said good morning. The girl in front of him, Woo-jin's girlfriend, turned to whisper something to the person next to her and they both laughed, and Jae-beom opened his textbook to a random page and stared at it without reading a single word.
He was used to it.
That was the worst part. He was so completely used to it that some days he couldn't even tell if it hurt anymore, or if he'd just gone numb somewhere along the way without noticing.
His mother called him during lunch.
He ate alone on the back stairwell, not the cafeteria, never the cafeteria, with a kimbap he'd bought from the convenience store on the way in. His phone buzzed in his pocket and he picked up before the second ring.
"Did you eat breakfast?"
"Yes, Mom."
"The rice from the pot?"
"Yes."
"All of it?"
"Most of it."
A pause. He could hear something in the background, probably the cleaning cart, the squeaky wheel on it that she'd been meaning to get fixed for months. She was already at the next job.
"Jae-beom-ah. Your exam results come back today, right? The practice ones."
"Yeah."
"How do you think you did?"
He looked at his kimbap. "Fine."
Another pause. She was good at pauses. She could fit an entire conversation into the space between his words without saying anything, just by the way she went quiet.
"You know I don't care about the scores," she said finally. "I just want you to be okay."
He pressed his back against the cold stairwell wall. Up above him, through the ceiling, he could hear the muffled noise of the cafeteria. Trays and laughter and the particular echo of a room full of people who all belonged somewhere.
"I'm okay, Mom."
"You sound tired."
"I'm fine."
"Jae-beom—"
"I'll be home by seven. I'll make dinner."
She went quiet again. Then softly: "You don't have to do that."
"I want to." He picked up the kimbap. "Go back to work. I'll see you tonight."
He hung up. He sat there for another minute, alone in the stairwell, listening to the muffled sounds of everyone else's ordinary day.
Then he finished his lunch and went back to class.
The thing nobody tells you about being the invisible kid is that you see everything.
Because nobody's performing for you. Nobody's putting on a face. When you're the kid that people look through, you become part of the background, and backgrounds see things that the main characters don't.
Jae-beom saw who cried in the bathroom and then came out smiling. He saw which teachers had given up on actually teaching and which ones still cared enough to get frustrated. He saw the way Shin Woo-jin's confidence cracked slightly whenever the physical education coach raised his voice at him, something small, something nobody else caught, just a flinch around the eyes before the mask went back up.
He saw a lot. He understood a lot. He just didn't have anywhere to put any of it.
So he carried it around with him, all this weight, not just the physical kind, and he went home on the bus and watched Bucheon scroll by through the smeared window. All the narrow streets and the convenience stores and the apartment buildings stacked on top of each other, and he thought about his mother's flip-flops with the cracked heel and the electricity bill on the counter and the practice exam he was pretty sure he'd done well on, not that it mattered, not that anything was going to change because of a score on a paper.
He got off two stops early. Walked the rest of the way.
He didn't know why he did that. Maybe just to have a little more time before he had to go back inside and pretend everything was fine for his mother's sake.
The alley shortcut between the main road and their building saved about four minutes. He'd been using it since he was fourteen.
He was halfway through it when he realized someone was already there.
He recognized one of them, a guy from the year above him, someone who'd dropped out of Bucheon Technical six months ago and apparently never left the neighborhood. He didn't know the others. They were older, maybe nineteen, twenty. They had that particular look of people who had nothing to prove because they'd already decided they didn't care about proving anything.
"Aye," the dropout said. "You're the fat kid from school, right?"
Jae-beom stopped. Looked at the exit. Calculated the distance.
Not fast enough.
"Empty your pockets," one of the others said. Not even aggressive about it. Just tired and routine, like this was a thing they were doing before something better came along.
"I don't have anything."
"Everyone says that."
"I have three thousand won and a cracked phone."
"Then give us the three thousand won."
He knew how this was supposed to go. He knew the smart thing was to hand it over and walk away. It was three thousand won. It was nothing. It wasn't worth it.
"No," he said.
He didn't plan to say it. It came out before he could stop it, and even as it left his mouth he felt something cold drop through his stomach because he knew immediately that he'd just made this so much worse.
The guy in front of him tilted his head. Almost curious.
Then it stopped being a conversation.
He didn't remember all of it afterward. He remembered the first impact and the ground coming up fast and trying to get up and not being able to and the cold of the alley concrete against his cheek and his glasses somewhere nearby, one lens cracked clean through.
He remembered thinking about his mother.
That was the last coherent thought he had before everything went dark and quiet and still. That she was going to come home tonight and he wasn't going to be there to make dinner, and she was going to worry, and she couldn't afford to worry, she had enough to carry already.
I'm sorry, he thought, and meant it for no one in particular and everyone at once.
The darkness took him.