Chapter 2 (1/2)

The cool breeze blew. The weather was still cold, but the sunlight was warm, so it didn’t feel bad overall. During such good days, the best thing to do was to have a leisurely nap on a seat near the windows, but…

“Myohan! Let’s play soccer!”

“Can’t you see I’m mopping?”

Myohan angrily rubbed the wet mop on the floor. He did it because he was mad, but it splattered dirty water all over and he soon had to stop. Myohan’s friend Byeon Sinsul, who was wearing a T-shirt and holding a soccer ball, tapped on Myohan’s head with it playfully.

“You shouldn’t have come late, you know.”

“Oh, go away, you bastard.”

Myohan angrily pushed the ball away and placed the mop right in front of Sinsul’s shoes. He thought it would make him at least flinch, but Sinsul loved soccer and his shoes were already dirty. He just smiled.

“Okay, I’m a bastard, so start coming early to school!”

“I wasn’t late because I wanted to.”

“Of course, you never oversleep because you want to.”

“Hey!”

Sinsul took a step back only when Myohan threateningly raised his mop. He put his ball on his head and shrugged with a smile. He looked so playful and good that it made Myohan’s anger fade. He just sadly put his face on the mop’s stick. Then he sighed deeply.

“I was late because some idiot was picking on me, and now I have to be punished for that…”

“Some idiot?”

Cats slept ten to sixteen hours every day. Although Myohan insisted he wasn’t a cat, he was a cat, and he slept a lot. He was often late to school because he tended to oversleep.

“You had a fight?”

Therefore, whenever Myohan said he had come late for a good reason, his homeroom teacher immediately dismissed it as bullshit and sentenced him to cleaning the hallway for a week. Well, it was wrong to come to school by lunchtime, but he hadn’t wanted to!

“No, not that. I was chased.”

“Tut tut, you should have been nice, or you should have run well.”

“I did run well, and it took that long.”

The chase he thought to have lasted for two hours turned out to be a four-hour one. It was already afternoon when Myohan arrived at school, and since the teacher had been sick of him being frequently late since the beginning of the semester, he showed no mercy.

Sinsul clucked his tongue at Myohan, then he took all the other boys to the schoolyard. Myohan kept looking at them as they went down, not because he wanted to play soccer but because he envied their freedom.

Sandy wind came in through open windows. Cleaning the hallway wasn’t hard. He didn’t have to clean the entire hallway; he just had to clean a few meters right in front of his homeroom. The problem was that the taps were at the end of the schoolyard, and he was on the sixth floor. To clean the hallway, he had to take the dry mop to the end of the schoolyard, soak it with water, go back to the sixth floor, clean, go down to the schoolyard again to wash the mop, and go back to his homeroom on the sixth floor to put it back. He was sure he was about to lose some weight.

“Oh Myohan, you came late again?”

“You’re just hopeless!”

“You all want to die? Come here!”

His classmates chuckled and passed by, patting his hair. The class president even gave him a can of soda. He looked down at citronade he would never buy with his own money, and then recalled the class president’s name was Yuja, which literally meant citron. Well, he certainly did live up to his name.

“Teacher, I’m done.”

After mopping the floor absent-mindedly, it was all clean and shiny. Now it was time to go to the taps to wash the mop.

“Oh, really.”

He really didn’t want to do it. He wondered if he couldn’t do it in the toilet and looked, but there were already some students who had carried out exactly the same idea being punished there. Now he had no choice but to utilize his useless cat abilities. He slowly walked to the end of the hallway. Then he looked around. Luckily, there wasn’t anyone nearby, and when he looked down, the ground was empty as well.

Now he didn’t have to hesitate. He opened a window wide and threw the mop to a tree. He could just jump, but the mop could be broken. The mop fell, bumping into branches, and safely landed. Myohan checked it and stood on the window sill.

It was most certainly faster than walking down. It was just a little, no, pretty dangerous, and he was going to be in big trouble if anyone caught him. Myohan looked down. It was dizzily high, but he wasn’t afraid. He narrowed his eyes to see there the mop was. Then he jumped, just like he had had when he jumped up to a wall to run away from the man earlier the day. He jumped lightly like a cat and easily landed on the ground. He patted his pants and shirt to check if there was any damage. He stood straight and tried jumping. He couldn’t feel any pain. His legs were fine. Feeling pretty good, he picked up the mop and looked up to the window he had just jumped from.

Then his eyes narrowed. Someone was looking down at him here. He tried to see who it was, but the shadow disappeared. It couldn’t be good, but Myohan just shook his head and moved. Maybe his eyes had been wrong. He just couldn’t wait to wash that mop and go home.

The man didn’t show up after school finished and he arrived home. He thought while he took a bath. Now to think about it, he had so many questions he hadn’t been able to ask. Like how he had found Myohan, how he had found out he was a cat, how did he know about the twelve zodiac animals, and why he was asking him instead of anyone else.

“What kind of idiot is he…” Myohan muttered as he dried his hair with a towel, of course not expecting an answer at all.

“First off, I’m not an idiot.”

Chills crept up on his back. He wanted to scream, but he was way too shocked that he couldn’t utter a word. Every streak of hair on his body rose in tension. He froze, right there, with his hands on his cheeks. The man appeared in front of him.

“I didn’t know you’d be so surprised.”

Shit. Myohan cursed silently. He could hear his own heart beating like crazy. He just blinked, completely frozen, and the man just shrugged to see him like that.

“So easily scared, just like a cat.”