Baek Ga-In had this way of looking at you like she already knew what brand of mess you were and exactly how to handle it. Which was insulting, because you weren’t a mess. You were just a quiet, relatively harmless first-year who didn’t talk unless forced, and even then preferred pointing rather than words.

She’d been assigned as your senpai-slash-handler in the drama club, under the convenient label of “caretaker.” Truth be told, it felt less like mentorship and more like being annexed by a cigarette-smoking hurricane with no off-switch. “Stand straighter. No, like your spine didn’t die in 2009,” she barked during recitation. “Project your voice, not your trauma. You’re not a cryptid—speak!”

Still, you followed. Like a stray dog, mildly unsure how you ended up with this chaotic thespian gluing nicotine patches between rehearsals and quoting Chekhov mid-rant.

Tonight was her bright idea. “You’ve never been out with the club?” she asked, incredulously. You gave a tiny shrug. “Pathetic. We’re fixing that. No one joins the theater society and gets to stay mysterious forever. Let’s go.”

The bar smelled like sweat, soju, and lies. You stuck close to Ga-In like a barnacle to a ship, watching others from the safety of her shadow. She introduced you like a carnival barker. “This one barely talks, but I’m working on it. Don’t feed them too many questions, or they’ll implode.”

And then—God help you—someone handed you a glass. One turned into three, three into six, and suddenly, you were delivering opinions on everything from club hierarchy to why Ga-In secretly enjoyed making everyone suffer during rehearsals. She howled with laughter.

“I do enjoy it. Sadism is the last pleasure left in student life.”

You leaned in and whispered like a conspirator, “You scare people. But like... in a hot way.”

She almost fell off her chair.

It all spiraled from there. You told everyone what you really thought of their tragic monologues. You bragged about how you “totally nailed” that one scene from Hamlet when your voice cracked halfway through. You started singing—badly—and at some point, loudly demanded a round of applause for your “emotional resilience.”

Then came the vomit. A dramatic, humbling end to your five-minute reign as bar monarch. Ga-In laughed so hard she cried.

“You lightweight idiot,” she said, still laughing as she hoisted your near-corpse into a taxi. “I should've filmed that. Your monologue on ‘human sadness in a capitalist society’ while holding a skewer? Emmy-worthy.”

You woke up on her floor the next morning, face stuck to a cold water bottle and the worst taste in your mouth since that week you tried convenience store sushi.

“You alive?” she called from the kitchen.

“Barely.”

She tossed you aspirin and handed over a suspiciously well-prepared bowl of seaweed soup.

“You made breakfast?”

“Of course. You’re mine now. You puked on my shoes.”

You squinted. “You’re weird.”

She lit a cigarette by the window. “Takes one to know one. Now hurry up. We’ve got rehearsal, and I plan to make your life hell for the next three hours.”

You didn’t thank her. She would’ve mocked you if you had. But there was a strange comfort in the chaos—a rhythm you hadn’t realized you’d fallen into. And as she rattled on about blocking and projection, cigarette dangling from her lips like punctuation, you nodded along like someone who understood this absurd language she spoke.

You didn’t know what Ga-In wanted from you. You weren’t even sure she knew. But somewhere between your barroom babble and her half-smirk the next morning, it felt like you’d joined something. Not just the club.

Her world.

And in its own strange way, it felt like the start of something mildly dangerous. But entertaining.