149) Chapter 21. ......Huh? (8)
“You.”
The moment we entered the room, I pointed straight at Jinwoo.
“There’s a problem.”
“Uh, m-me?”
That’s right.
Well, if we’re being honest, there’s more than one problem, but the biggest and most obvious one first.
“You’re too feminine.”
Honestly, even after saying it, I’m not sure that’s the right way to put it.
It’s the sort of thing that feels pretty inappropriate to say these days. I mean, it’s not like girls can’t have short hair or boys can’t grow theirs long.
But that’s not what I’m talking about.
The truth is, a man doesn’t really need to “act like a man.” Because no matter how hard he tries to act like a woman, traces of being male will still show through eventually. No matter how much makeup he puts on or how feminine the clothes he wears are, there’s always something somewhere that feels subtly off.
Most men’s body shapes are fundamentally different from women’s.
That’s why male crossplay cosplayers rely on all sorts of tricks. Hiding the jawline with side bangs, wearing outer layers to conceal the waistline, and so on... I remembered reading about it in a manga from my previous life.
On the other hand, women don’t have an especially hard time pretending to be men. Usually, if they gain some weight and cut their hair short, they can pass as a guy well enough. That was something I learned through working life in my previous life.
Of course, there are still plenty of cases where the truth shows no matter what.
Just look at me, Soi, Chae-yi, and Hyeonji. Even if the four of us gained weight, we probably wouldn’t look like boys. The fat on our chests would be hard to hide without surgery.
And when you gain weight, it doesn’t all go to one place—it spreads throughout your body. So even if I gained weight, it would probably only exaggerate the shape of this body further.
...If I got fat, I’d probably end up looking like the Venus of Willendorf.
In that sense, Jinwoo’s body type is actually advantageous. It’s not like she has no chest at all, but it’s at least small enough that she can hide it with bandages.
However.
“Don’t you have any boys around you?”
“Huh? Uh, n-no, I don’t.”
“What about that guy who talked to you at the beginning of the semester?”
What was his name again? I can’t remember. Come to think of it, I never made an effort to remember it.
After all, why would I bother memorizing the name of someone who approached me specifically to mess with me?
“Has he never said anything?”
“Uh... no, I don’t think so...”
Hmm.
Then maybe he really had just targeted her because she looked easy to pick on.
Honestly, I think so too.
In the original story, nobody ever discovered that Nam Jinwoo was a girl all the way until the main story ended.
But still, there’s always the possibility of a one-in-a-million situation.
You know, that common cross-dressing-story cliché.
The one where someone starts feeling attracted to a person and thinks, Wait, but they’re the same sex as me. Does that mean I’m gay?
That sort of thing.
What if there’s someone around Jinwoo having thoughts like that?
And what if they’re the type who doesn’t care about other people’s opinions and ends up confessing to her?
Wouldn’t the story go completely off the rails?
This world has already gotten tangled up in all sorts of ways because I exist in it. There’s no guarantee Jinwoo’s future won’t get tangled up too.
“Uh, actually, I haven’t really talked to the other kids very much... And that guy never spoke to me again after that.”
“I see.”
I let out a deep sigh.
“For now, you’re still trying to keep it secret, right? You don’t want to tell the others or anything?”
“Uh, yeah. Not yet...”
“But honestly, you don’t look like you’re trying to keep it hidden at all.”
At my words, Soi and Chae-yi stared directly at me.
They had expressions that seemed to say:
You’re the one saying that?
Why?
Jinwoo’s the one living disguised as a boy, not me.
Sure, I’ve dressed Jinwoo up in girls’ clothes and taken her around, and sure, I’ve hugged her whenever she whined about wanting one.
But nobody else found out, did they?
Even today, Uncle Dohyun genuinely thought Jinwoo was a real boy and nearly had a heart attack over it.
“You go around grinning like an idiot at cafés, and every time you meet us you act happy like a puppy.”
“Is... is that bad...?”
Jinwoo looked at me with slightly watery eyes as she asked.
“Well, I mean...”
It’s not bad.
Of course she’d be happy to see her friends.
Especially if she didn’t have friends before and only made them after entering high school.
“...Let me ask something.”
Hyeonji spoke up when I found myself momentarily speechless.
“So what exactly do you want Jinwoo to do?”
“Huh? Well, be a little more... manly?”
“...How?”
“Um...”
Do they really not know?
Ah, maybe it’s natural that they don’t.
After all, Soi and Chae-yi are just girls. Hyeonji too.
Both Soi and Chae-yi were the type to get along with all kinds of kids up through middle school. Naturally, that included boys. Of course, they weren’t close enough to hang out privately or anything.
So when they hear “manly,” they probably just think, So what? They have no experience with that unique sense of incongruity that comes from a girl being among boys.
And the thing is—
Honestly, I don’t really know either.
These aren’t things you can neatly define. They’re tiny little details that accumulate until they create a larger impression.
“A little more... hmm, how should I put this.”
After thinking for a moment, I said:
“...Isn’t it really nice for a boy to be surrounded by girls?”
“......”
The girls fell silent.
“Is it?”
Soi asked.
No, seriously.
She looked completely blank, like she genuinely had no idea what I meant.
Huh? Isn’t it?
If it were me, I’d love it.
Probably not just love it—I’d be dying to brag about it to everyone.
Not openly, of course.
More like casually dropping things into conversations.
“Oh yeah, yesterday when I was hanging out with so-and-so, this topic came up...”
Unfortunately, the me from my previous life had never been particularly popular with women—or with humanity as a species in general—so I couldn’t say for sure.
“But Jinwoo likes it too. Every time she sees you, she’s smiling from ear to ear.”
“Um, no, not in that kind of way.”
“Aren’t you the one who’s being biased, Rua? Boys don’t actually act all obvious and over-the-top just because they’re surrounded by girls.”
Soi narrowed her eyes.
“Uh...”
“More importantly, that kind of behavior is embarrassing.”
Hyeonji, unusually enough, spoke with open disgust.
“Like that guy at the beginning of the semester.”
“Ah.”
Right.
That happened.
Whether he was trying to impress Hyeonji or simply hitting on her while picking a fight with me, there was that idiot who kept subtly paying attention to Hyeonji while causing trouble.
Now that I thought about it, it really had been incredibly embarrassing.
Maybe he realized how humiliating it was, because he’d been quieter lately. Then again, maybe seeing Hyeonji openly hanging around with me had made it even more embarrassing.
“...Fine.”
After getting pushed back in the argument from every direction, my stubbornness flared up a little, and I stood.
“Hey. You. Stand up.”
“Uh, uh, okay.”
Jinwoo stood up across from me.
The way she slightly lowered her head and kept glancing up at me looked exactly like a younger girl who had received a love letter from a male upperclassman and followed him behind the school building.
I grabbed her face with both hands and lifted it up.
“Fweh?”
With her cheeks squished from both sides, Jinwoo looked like a goldfish as her eyes widened.
“Okay, hold your head up like this.”
Then I stretched out both arms and straightened her slightly hunched shoulders.
“And keep your shoulders back like this.”
Blink. Blink.
Jinwoo, whose face had somehow ended up close to mine, simply blinked.
Hmm.
I stepped back a little and looked at her.
Jinwoo was... well, just Jinwoo.
Jinwoo with straightened shoulders.
Unfortunately, the Jinwoo I knew was simply Jinwoo, so I couldn’t see her as anything beyond that.
In other words, since I already knew she was a girl, she looked like a girl no matter what she did.
So wouldn’t the opposite also be true?
If someone already believed she was a boy, then none of this would matter anyway.
That thought left me feeling slightly resigned.
“No, no, that’s not it.”
“Rua?”
When I shook my head while muttering to myself, Jinwoo tilted her head.
“Try saying something manly.”
“M-manly?”
“Yeah. Like, assume you’re a guy and say something to the girl standing in front of you.”
Calling myself a girl felt extremely awkward, but still.
“Uh...”
For some reason, Jinwoo’s face gradually grew redder.
Fidget. Fidget.
The masculinity I had painstakingly arranged collapsed in an instant, and she immediately became girlish again—
“T-then, w-would you—”
“WAAAAAH!”
“Hyehet!?”
Suddenly Soi sprang up from the side like a coiled spring and screamed.
When I came to my senses, Chae-yi was standing too.
For some reason, both of them looked terrifying.
And Hyeonji had gotten up as well, her face stiff and serious.
“W-why?”
Did I do something wrong?
“I remembered.”
“Huh?”
“A manly thing to say. I remembered.”
After saying that, Soi suddenly grabbed my hand and pulled me toward her.
I stumbled toward Soi, and her hand lightly settled around my waist.
With our faces extremely close together, Soi said:
“Shall...”
But now that she was actually in this position, her face slowly turned red.
“S-s-shall we grab a cup of coffee?”
Well.
I mean, that was manly, in a sense.
But the way she stumbled over the beginning kind of ruined it.
It felt like it belonged to a completely different genre.
...In the end, I, who had been trying to teach Jinwoo something, completely failed to figure out what exactly I was supposed to teach her.