Became an American Retro Novelist - Chapter 152



Only Noblemtl

152.

‘What the heck, that kid?’

Kate clearly heard Jonathan Hamill from the play walk by saying ‘that’.

As we were standing shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, we felt that the atmosphere between us was somehow off, and soon that became the case.

Kate, wondering what on earth was going on, cautiously approached ‘that kid’.

“Hey, Jonathan?”

“······Ah, Kate.”

“What happened between you and Shin? You don’t look so happy.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. That guy. He got mad because I suddenly put my arm around his shoulder.”

“Ah~.”

Kate immediately knew it was a lie.

No matter how much the other person disliked him, God was not the type of person to easily reveal his likes and dislikes in front of others.

In addition, when I glanced at it earlier, Jonathan’s expression hardened abruptly after it was revealed that Shin was the famous ‘new writer’. It was clear that he had said something about it and then got hit in the face.

Eventually, she began to wonder if she had done something wrong.

Kate, who had grown up and started to take care of her appearance in her own way, naturally knew how to present herself in front of people. However, as she was still a teenager, she had many immature aspects that were not mature enough.

That’s why I ended up thinking like this.

‘Did I get in some kind of trouble by revealing that I’m a writer for no reason?!’

For some reason, I kept feeling anxious.

Of course, Shin Han was an uncomfortable opponent for Kate. However, just because he was uncomfortable, it didn’t mean he was someone she hated. And not only that, Shin Han as a writer was the one who was currently writing the work that was supporting Kate mentally.

As a result, my mind kept going back and forth. Somewhere between, ‘Don’t worry about it’ and ‘What if I make a mistake and the ‘About T’ series gets disrupted?’

Kate Moore, who had been worrying about this all day, decided to just ask the question honestly and end it, so she waited for the next Basic Sociology 1 class.

And then the class came a week later.

After three hours of lectures, Kate apologized to her friends and went to see God.

“Poetry, God.”

“······What’s wrong? You’re looking for me in a crowded place.”

“I have something to ask you. Is that okay?”

“Just for a moment. What’s going on?”

“It’s a bit······ here.”

“Then, the coffee you couldn’t drink last time?”

“good.”

“Where are you living?”

“Why is it like that?”

“I want to eat cake too.”

“······! hey!”

Kate’s face turned red for a moment and she quickly turned around in surprise.

Fortunately, no one seemed to hear.

Shin chuckled as he watched Kate’s expression change quickly.

“Aren’t you being too concerned about what others think?”

“······You, you don’t know my heart.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The god nodded as if he understood and turned around.

Kate stared at his back, which seemed somewhat relaxed, with an uncomfortable expression before following him.

The two headed to a cafe right near the school building without taking a car.

God ordered coffee and cake as he had said and paid for it with his own money.

“The, the calculation is······?”

“Hey, do you really think I’ll get something from you?”

“Euuuuuu-!”

I hate him. He’s a really annoying guy.

Kate, who ordered coffee and sat down, opened her eyes and spoke to Shin, who was sitting across from her and handed her a fork that came with the cake.

“it’s okay.”

“Oh, so you’re saying you won’t eat what the enemy gives you?”

“I have to manage it.”

“You take care of everything.”

As he said that, God took a big bite of the cake and put it in his mouth.

Kate’s mouth opened without her knowing it, but then she quickly fixed her expression when she saw Shin looking at her with a sinister(?) face.

But it was already too late.

“Hey, I told you to take a bite.”

“I told you, it’s done!”

“Then are you going to throw it away?”

“huh?”

“If you don’t eat it, I’ll just throw the cake away uneaten. It’s a waste. Food.”

“Why, why are you passing the guilt on to me······!”

“It would be nice if we could eat together.”

God handed Kate a fork, and she took a bite, crying as she ate the mustard.

The feeling of sweet whipped cream melting in your mouth.

As she was eating continuously without coming to her senses, the god who was looking at her slowly opened his mouth.

“So, why did you call me?”

The timing was right as he also had something to say to Kate.

God is related to novels, Kate is related to novelists, a little differently.

They had something to say to each other.

“No, that.”

“huh?”

“I was wondering if I did something bad to you at the social gathering last week.”

“What did you do?”

“I, I put you in an awkward position by telling you I was a working writer.”

“It wasn’t particularly difficult.”

“okay?”

“It was annoying though.”

“Did you have any problems with Jonathan?”

“Jonathan?”

“Why, the play that was sitting at our table and······.”

“······Ah, that guy.”

Shin averted his gaze for a moment as if recalling a thought, then smiled and said.

“It was nothing. Don’t worry about it too much.”

“If that’s the case, then that’s fortunate······.”

“I really think it’s a bit strange. In high school, you acted like you wouldn’t bleed even if you were stabbed, but now you worry about other people all the time.”

“I wasn’t worried about you, I was just worried that it might have a negative impact on the serialization of ‘About T’!”

“That’s it. Who am I?”

God naturally began to lead the conversation. As I said, he had his own reasons for wanting to talk to Kate separately.

“We weren’t on good terms to begin with. Has something changed in your feelings?”

“What, what? Weren’t things pretty good between us?”

“······.”

Unfortunately, it was off from the start.

“I thought I was comfortable when I was with you.”

“······Me too~! Wow~!”

“······That’s a lie.”

Shin felt a pang of conscience for a moment at Kate’s seemingly powerless remark.

“No, Kate. What is your standard for being close to someone in the first place?”

“Speaking comfortably to each other.”

“Then you······ don’t have many close friends?”

“yes.”

“Why? Aren’t you tired of living like that?”

“There’s no way around it. This society is a jungle where the strong prey on the weak, and in order to survive in such a place, you have to wear a mask and learn how to deal with others.”

“Hoo, oh.”

“······Why did you write that?”

“No. No. Keep going.”

“You’re going to write it as a novel!!”

“Damn, I thought I had fooled you perfectly!”

“Who wouldn’t know if you wrote it down so blatantly in your notes?!”

I jumped up from my seat and shouted, but Kate realized that she was near the sociology department and quickly sat down.

And then, as if to reward himself for having endured it all, he started grumbling and eating the cake like crazy.

“Eat well.”

“You, you······ Are you really going to write my story as a novel?”

Pink cheeks.

God said honestly, thinking he had nothing more to hide.

“It’s still an idea, an idea.”

“What kind of novel is it?”

“A story about a girl who is like an angel and makes people happy.”

“······Hey, tell some lies that people will believe.”

“Damn, I thought I had fooled you perfectly!”

“Are you repeating the same thing again?”

“Yeah, yeah. So tell me quickly.”

“Me, why me?”

“The price of the cake.”

“You lied!”

“You should have checked the contract carefully before eating it.”

“What nonsense······!”

“Isn’t it good that you have someone you can confide in? If you keep it inside like that, you’ll get sick. It’s a truth that’s even in textbooks.”

Kate, who had been squinting her eyes as if she was dissatisfied with God’s words, nodded with a long sigh.

“That’s right. Do as you wish.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t plan on revealing that you provided motivation for the novel.”

“If even a little bit of this becomes known, we will sue you immediately.”

Kate pokes the remaining cake with a fork.

While Shin felt an inexplicable chill, she continued speaking slowly.

“I really sympathize with Alice and Tony. Their lives are similar to mine, in that I am a daughter who is expected by her family. The only difference is that I love my parents so much and they do the same to me. I am comfortable with this. I like the fact that I am living the life I want to live, without having to form deep relationships with others and just going along with them.”

“You said you were stressed earlier?”

“Sometimes? Well······ I don’t know if you knew······.”

A fork scraping up the remaining whipped cream on an empty plate.

Shin, who had noticed her hesitating, asked.

“The same thing?”

“With strawberries.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Surprisingly, these two people got along well.

When God bought a second cake and offered it to her, Kate took a big bite and explained again.

“I’m like Jonathan, I really don’t like that.”

“okay?”

“Oh. I really didn’t like him because I could clearly see his mentality of trying to do something to girls. But he wasn’t that attractive either. Let’s say his face is pretty even. But who would want to keep talking to someone who doesn’t have a shred of culture while talking?”

“But you kept sitting there.”

“Because there is social gaze.”

“You’ve been talking about social issues all this time.”

God asked her what she meant by ‘social’.

Kate’s subsequent answer was quite ambiguous, but it was something that everyone could understand.

“When you’re around people, there’s that natural sense that you get. Things like what’s socially acceptable and what’s not. People are busy biting at me if I show even the slightest weakness, and even if I don’t, they ignore things that don’t interest them. But if you act too arrogantly, you’ll get ostracized by the group.”

“For something like that, you seem to have done pretty well in high school.”

“That’s right. But it wasn’t like that from the beginning. If a first-year student who just entered the broadcasting club acts like he knows everything, he’ll definitely be hated. I just did my best in everything I could and waited for the right time.”

“Is there a reason you have to live like that?”

“Well, I’ve never really thought about it deeply. ······If I had to give a reason, it would be ‘because I wonder what meaning there is in life other than that.’”

“Can you explain in more detail?”

Kate somehow avoided eye contact with God’s question.

In front of those extremely serious eyes, it felt somehow burdensome and strange to tell my inner thoughts, something I had never been able to tell anyone before.

But at some point, she started to express her emotions, even getting angry, in a normal way only in front of God.

So when she said the following, Kate felt more relieved than she expected.

It was because I could reveal my true feelings that I couldn’t even express in front of my family. The reason given by God, ‘for the novel’, also helped.

Kate Moore was a girl who, from childhood, did not hesitate to use any means necessary to achieve her immediate goals. When she achieved her goals, she felt good, and so issues such as her emotions became ‘trivial’. Rather, Kate was adept at using such a sense of alienation from childhood.

As I achieve my goals, I become a better version of myself, earn more money, become happier, and live up to the expectations of those who love me.

It was a simple goal, and so far Kate has lived her life solely for that.

“Well, I feel a bit tired these days.”

“There was a lot of whining in my car.”

“······I guess I thought that something would change dramatically once I entered college. It’s just a hamster wheel of life anyway.”

Kate looks to the side as if lost in thought while eating her second piece of cake.

Looking at that clear profile, the god thought.

‘If you don’t change yourself, how can those around you change?’

But even if I told him that, he wouldn’t understand, and it was something that couldn’t be helped unless he realized it himself through experiencing it.

Still, I felt a sense of relief when I learned again that Kate, who I had thought of as a monster in her past life, was actually a human being.

The god, who had been thinking for a moment, asked cautiously.

“Do you do any club activities?”

“I’m doing it. Community service club.”

“Can I take a tour there?”

For the novel, that is.

***

After finishing my meeting with Kate, I returned to my room and collected my thoughts.

Suddenly, that thought occurred to me.

‘I used to be like that too.’

Especially when it’s been a while since you’ve returned.

At that time, making money was my only goal in life and I had no time to look around.

As a result, thanks to the help of the people around me, I gradually had the time to look back on other areas of my life.

That’s why I didn’t want to completely deny her thoughts.

A life of achieving goals and struggling was very important. Wasn’t it me who had failed to do so in my past life, whether as a child or as a writer after I got older and succeeded, that had collapsed and fallen apart?

In the end, when people work hard at something, they tend to have more motivation to live.

The problem here is that we do ‘just that’.

‘If it weren’t for the help of my friends, I would have just worked hard and collapsed again.’

And looking at Kate in that state, a distant future from now suddenly came to mind.

One of the best things about going back in time, I felt, was that there was no ‘Internet’.

Here, I was able to have time to look back on small things. Although I did not completely lack the pressure to do something due to the prior knowledge in my head, I still lived my daily life leisurely.

But the people in the future I lived in were different.

‘The problem was things like Instagram.’

Wow, when the word ‘Instagram’ suddenly came to mind, I felt like an alien.

I’m back in this day and age and living without any connection to that damn SNS thing.

Kate said she was acting for a ‘goal’, but I thought a little differently.

There had to be something pushing her somewhere. It could be something that still affects her today, or it could be a behavioral pattern that stems from past trauma.

In any case, living a life of being ‘always chased by something’ is very similar to people in the past, the future, and me. Due to the rise of SNS, people in the future have always suffered from a sense of comparison and inferiority, and have suffered from unnecessary pain.

‘It’s quite dystopian considering the current era.’

A story about people in an era dominated by something social that people of today simply cannot understand, called SNS.

That’s how I got the idea and started to flesh out the work.

And at the same time, I thought I should spend a little more time with Kate, who was in a similar situation.

End

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