Please Fall for the Male Lead (Not Me)

"Convert them," Yeju said.

[ No. ]

"You've got twenty-one thousand points sitting in a panel in my eye. Give me sixty-six sen."

[ Host, I want you to hear this in the spirit it's offered. I am not a bank. I am not a currency, I am not convertible, I am not tender at the tea stall, and if I could be I would have told you on the third day, because watching you not spend me has been the single most tedious experience of my professional life. ] The panel sat there, plain and grey, at half past six in the morning in a corridor. [ You cannot buy a boy a boat with me. You can buy fire. That's the shelf. It's always been the shelf. ]

Bori was eating breakfast with the slate propped against the teapot, and she said no before Yeju had finished the sentence.

"It's eighty-one sen and it's on deposit."

"It's sitting in a box under your bed."

"It's on deposit." She turned the slate over and wrote something on the back of it. "Thirty-four people gave me that to hold because I'm the only person in this school who counts things without wanting them. The day I lend one sen of it to anyone, for anything, for the best reason in the world, I stop being that, and then there's no book, and then the money moves somewhere I can't see it." She ate. "Ask me for bread. The answer's yes. I'll give you the whole loaf and I won't ask why, and that's a serious offer, so don't make me repeat it."

She'd give me the loaf. She has one loaf, she'd hand over all of it, and she won't give me a sen that isn't hers. Both of those come out of the same place in her. I could work on that for six years and never find the seam.

"Then I need a stake," Yeju said.

Bori put her spoon down.

"You're going to bet."

"I'm going to bet."

"On the headpat book."

"On the headpat book."

Bori looked at her for a while. Then she picked the spoon back up, which was Kang Bori for a standing ovation, or possibly for a funeral.

"Twelve or more in a day pays twenty to one," she said. "It's twenty to one because the record's eleven and the record was Tuesday and Tuesday was a girl passing her second circle, which happens once. Four sen gets you eighty." She ate. "It's a bad bet. It's the worst bet on the board, that's why the odds are like that, and the odds are mine and they're correct."

"Four sen."

"You haven't got four sen. You've got a bow you didn't buy and a notebook."

Um Dae-sik lent her the four sen in the corridor outside Doksu's room without asking a single question. He dug it out of a coat pocket in coppers, counted it twice into her palm because he counted everything twice, and he was grinning about something else entirely, some fight on Saturday, and he said "pay me back whenever, I'm rich, I'm a rich man now," and went off to be shouted at about an essay.

He's got twelve sen from beating a ducal cousin with a broken rib and he's just given me a third of it for a thing I won't explain.

I'm going to fix this. I have until the fourth bell, one Do Yuna, a market that pays twenty to one. He is never going to know it happened.

The plan was simple, which should have been the warning.

Do Yuna touched Yeju's head an average of 3.4 times a day, which Yeju knew because thirty-four people had been paying to know it for thirty-five days. The distribution was not random. It clustered. Yuna patted when she was proud, when she was flustered, when she was sad, when she had said something she thought was funny. The record of eleven had come on the day she passed her second circle, which meant the ceiling was emotional, not physical. Yeju did not need to make her do anything. She needed to be available, twelve times, on a day when Do Yuna had things to be proud and flustered about, which was every day, because Do Yuna was a weather system.

At the second bell Yeju stood next to her at the annex stairs for four minutes.

Yuna talked about a boy in the fire track who had set his own sleeve on fire. She talked about it with both hands. She did not touch Yeju's head.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

At the third bell Yeju arranged to be sitting on the low wall when Yuna came out of the practical, which was a place Yuna had patted her twice before, at a height Yuna liked, because Yuna liked a height she could reach without stretching.

Yuna sat down next to her, said the practical was fine, and picked at the wall.

What is happening.

At the fourth bell Yeju said, out loud, in a corridor, to a person, "I'm proud of you," which was true, which she had never once said, and which cost her something she would be paying off for a week.

Yuna went bright red and said "shut up" and did not touch her head.

By the fifth bell the count was zero. It had never been zero. In thirty-five days of a market that thirty-four people had put eighty-one sen into, the number had not once been zero, and Yeju was standing in the wash-line corridor with four borrowed sen on twelve-or-more and a girl who had gone strange.

"You're standing wrong," Bori said, from the doorway.

"I'm standing."

"You're standing where she can reach you. You've done it eleven times today." She had the slate. She had, Yeju understood with a lurch, been marking the zero all afternoon in front of thirty-four people. "You're a foot to her left at every stop. You were on the wall at the right height at the third bell and you got there first, which you have never done, because you don't get anywhere first. She's been reading you all day and she doesn't know she's reading you and it's making her nervous. That's why she's not doing it. You can't ask for it. It stops being it."

The whole thing came apart in Yeju's chest at once, and what came up through the gap was not the sixty-six sen.

Six hours. I made Do Yuna nervous for six hours because I wanted eighty sen. Tonight she'll lie in bed and work out that I was odd with her, and she'll decide it was something she did.

[ Deliberate action logged. Objective: manufacture twelve instances of affection from Heroine One in a single day, for money, to purchase a second-year out of a labour slot on a Rift roster. ]

[ Outcome: failed. ]

[ Payout: 1 point. Receipt attached. ]

[ Host. I have been keeping this ledger for a long time and I want you to understand that this is the first entry I have ever been embarrassed to file. ]

Yeju sat down on the flags in the wash-line corridor with her back against the wall and stopped.

She stopped doing all of it. The market, the arithmetic, the sixty-six sen, the boy with the boat, the slot she had opened with her own mouth in a shed. She sat on cold stone between a laundry cart and a drainpipe, four sen of somebody else's money in her fist, her forehead on her knees. She was still there eleven minutes later when Do Yuna came round the corner and found her.

Yuna did not ask anything. She sat down on the flags, which were filthy, in her only uniform. Then she put her hand on Yeju's head.

Then she did it again. Again. She kept doing it, that firm two-handed disaster she had been doing since the seventh day, saying nothing at all. Yeju sat with her face on her knees and let her. Somewhere in the middle of it she started counting and could not stop.

Eleven.

Bori's slate came down the corridor at the ninth bell. The count went up on the board in the night-kitchen, and thirty-four people looked at it. It said 11. That equalled the record. It paid nothing at all, because the bet was twelve.

[ Eleven. ]

I know.

[ I want it on the record that I said nothing. ]

"You bet on me."

Dae-sik was standing at the end of the corridor with his coat over his arm.

"Bori told the whole night-kitchen there was four sen on twelve-or-more and that the four sen came out of my pocket, because Bori tells the truth about money, it's her whole thing." He came down the corridor, put his back against the wall, slid down it, sat next to her. He winced on the way, tried to hide it, could not. "Twelve or more, twenty to one. Eighty sen." He did the sum out loud, because he always did. "Minus the four I gave you, that's seventy-six clear, and you needed sixty-six."

Yeju did not say anything.

"You were going to buy the boat," Dae-sik said.

Say something. Say a normal human sentence. He's sixteen and he's got a broken rib and he lent you a third of his purse in a corridor without asking.

"I opened that slot," Yeju said. "In the shed. I lied to nine people on purpose to prove something, and a boy went down holding a rope. The collarbone made the hole. The hole is you. You're going into a fourth-cycle permit-zone because of a thing I did with my mouth on a Tuesday."

Dae-sik was quiet for a second. Then he laughed. It turned into a cough. The cough was bad, and he held his ribs and rode it out with his eyes shut.

"You think I didn't know that?" he said. "Everyone knows that. Somyeong told me before I signed. She came and found me at the ladder. She said, the slot's open because Han Yeju lied to us and Jung's got a collarbone. I said, right, is it eleven sen a day. She said yes. I went and signed it." He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. "I'm not a child, Yeju. I've been counting sen since I was nine. I know where that slot came from. I'd have run to it if there'd been a queue. There was a queue, and I did run."

"For the boat."

"For the boat." He said it easily. Then he stopped, and Yeju felt him decide something. When he spoke again his voice had gone somewhere she had not heard it go.

"That's the reason I say," Dae-sik said. "It's a good reason. It's true, it's a boat, my mother's got half of one, and nobody asks a second question when you say money." He was looking at the drainpipe. "I've been in this school two years. Hundred and eleven fights. I'm seventeenth on a ladder nobody's supposed to know about, I owe thirty-one half-loaves, and I've never once been on a list where somebody needed a body." He shrugged, and the shrug hurt him. "You lot need a body to carry and haul. Six days. Somebody wrote it on a paper and put it on a wall, lucky me got there first."

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