Chapter 4

I found the inexplicable hostility from Dorothy strange.

I had never interacted with them before.

I hadn’t provoked them.

Upon joining the new class, I immersed myself in my studies as always, but life was not peaceful.

My desk and chair were mysteriously drenched regularly.

Pages were occasionally missing from my textbooks.

Homework I submitted often disappeared.

I reported these issues to the teacher. Pulling the surveillance tape led the teacher to several suspects. A few of my classmates who pranked me were scolded by the teacher.

Yet, I had never had any conflicts with these people. I couldn’t understand what I had done to offend them.

Perhaps the teacher’s intervention annoyed them even more, as they followed me to the coffee shop where I worked part-time after school.

They would deliberately loosen their grip when I handed them their drinks, causing the cups to spill.

They exploited the shop’s policies to incessantly find faults, forcing me to remake their drinks repeatedly until the manager scolded me, and only then would they leave satisfied.

When I couldn’t hold back and asked them why, one of the girls simply said airily, “Just for fun.”

That was their reason for treating me this way.

At the shop, I often stopped my good friend Adam from standing up for me.

He was deaf from birth.

It had been hard for him to find a job.

I didn’t want my issues to affect him, so that day, I planned to secretly tell the manager about my decision to resign without Adam knowing.

Just as I was about to speak up, the bullies came again.

This time, Dorothy was with them.

They ordered coffee at the counter, and unlike previous times, no drama unfolded. They even thanked me as they took their drinks.

Dorothy too, so beautiful and elegant, thanked me politely.

They found a table in the shop and sat down, chatting and laughing in a friendly atmosphere. It seemed as though the ongoing mockery and entanglement were just my imagination.

But the bullying was real.

It was just that Dorothy’s presence made them behave differently.