ⓖⓞⓛⓓⓔⓝ | woosan

24. Badass Basketball Ace

2:14 pm

The sounds of metal lockers being opened and closed greeted Wooyoung even before he entered the locker room connecting the school's hallway to the giant sports hall.

The second he entered, the stuffy air hit him like a wall, almost making him faint at the stench of cheap deodorant and sweaty teenage boys.

He was glad he always had PE in the afternoon since he was sure half of the guys in his class wouldn't even shower if they still had a whole day of school ahead of them.

Shuddering at the thought of it, he sat his backpack down onto the bench in the middle, took out his shorts and tee and quickly started undressing himself.

He didn't like being undressed in front of others, it felt too private for him.

He always felt like for him it was part of a kind of intimacy he only liked to share with a rare few.

Without realising how routined he had pulled his shirt over his head and pulling the other one right back down, he had finished changing into his sports outfit. It was nothing special, a pair of basketball shorts and a simple t-shirt, something he could change into and out of really quickly.

Sighing in relief, he threw his bag into the empty locker opposite of him with the precision only a basketball player could have. It landed inside without grazing the sides only making a hollow sound as it hit the back of the locker, which drew the attention of the few students left in the room.

His eyes turned left and right, not with the intention of scaring the students'  looks off but definitely with the effect of doing so.

Was he really that scary to other people? He had never thought about how he came across to others, he didn't really care most of the time. He knew he was good at heart, and that's all that mattered to him.

The past weeks have been a challenge for the, now much happier, boy. For the first time he could remember, he started searching for the reasons for other people's reactions within himself. Soon enough realized that his cold and closed off image was something incredibly difficult to get rid of and finally saw that he was only part of the reasoning behind other people's behaviour.

For so many years it had seemed to not make sense to him, why he was faced with all those struggles, why people didn't like him, why people had false perceptions of him.

He knew his own responsibility in certain things, he knew he had to change and he knew it was something that wouldn't happen quickly.

But it was getting somewhere, slowly but steadily. Hope had come to him again, in a very unexpected form.

"WOAHHHHH-", a sudden screech from somewhere behind him snapped Wooyoung out of his own thoughts and turned his stupidly wide grin into an expression of horror.

After a hot second of collecting himself he clutched his hand over his chest as he spun around only to find a figure lying on the floor behind an open locker door.

He looked around the room, the other two students were laughing, pointing at the one that was lying on the ground, grunting obviously in pain.

Wooyoung knew the petite guy, whom he had realised to have grown a teeny little crush on over the past weekend of texting with him, wasn't a particularly popular target of bullying.

For obvious reasons, he was the one out of all people at the school that would exactly know about who was getting bullied, and who wasn't.

He didn't like it, but he couldn't help being glad to know that since the incident before class his friends stopped going anywhere near San and his friends.