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The boy still had his walls up, his thorns raised from behind them. Watching him throughout the meeting—arms crossed, his disgruntled, defiant expression fixed on some point in the empty air—it was impossible to tell if he was even listening to people’s stories.
Even so, Bobo’s stance was to wait patiently, saying there was hope in the very fact that the boy kept attending on his own, even though the meeting wasn’t mandatory.
“How was it today? It gets a little better the more you realize you’re not the only one struggling, right? Just think how many ‘abnormals’ there are in the world.”
After the meeting, as people were leaving, Bobo clapped the boy on the shoulder and grinned. The boy was standing in front of the snack table set up along the wall, picking at the cookies. It was a playful retort, borrowing the boy’s own term for male omegas and female alphas: ‘abnormal.’
“How about you help clean up first and eat the cookies later, huh?”
Bobo came up from behind and wrapped an arm around the boy’s neck, pulling him close. Though he lost his balance and grumbled as he was dragged along, the boy didn’t seem to truly mind the playful antics Bobo initiated.
Bobo didn’t treat the boy delicately. He had judged that approaching him with a so-called ‘adult’ demeanor—trying to teach him decorously or acting as if they understood everything—would have no effect on this boy.
Bobo and his boyfriend had first met the boy three weeks ago in the Parc de la Villette. In a corner of the peaceful park—where young children ran around the playground, families on picnics laughed and chatted while eating sandwiches, and couples in swimsuits kissed while sunbathing—behind the information center, in a shaded spot untouched by foot traffic, the boy was sitting on the ground, curled up and drenched in a cold sweat.
Finding it strange that the boy seemed to be deliberately hiding instead of asking for help, Bobo and his boyfriend had approached him to ask if he needed anything.
The boy’s heat cycle was starting. He hadn’t taken any suppressants. The two immediately took him to a small nearby clinic to get a prescription and made sure he took the medication.
The 14-year-old boy, named Nicolas, couldn’t accept the fact that he had presented as an omega. He hadn’t told his school or his family and, insisting he didn’t need suppressants, had been in the dangerous situation of trying to endure his heat cycle on his own.
The two had invited the boy to ‘Late Presentation.’ The boy had parted ways with them, declaring he would never live as an omega, but today marked his third time showing his face at the meeting.
“Nick, it’s about time you told your parents.”
Bobo casually brought it up as he folded a used chair in half and stacked it neatly in the back of the exhibition hall. But the boy’s face flushed red as he jumped.
“Never, absolutely not! If my father finds out, he’ll kick me out!”
“You say you hate your father so much, but you’re scared of getting kicked out of that house?”
“……”
From his very first meeting, the boy had spoken with a frightened face, saying that if his father found out he’d become an omega, he wouldn’t even look at him, and that he might send him away to a mental hospital out of shame and disgust. He was pessimistic, as if his life were completely over, convinced he would be ostracized and bullied at school and wouldn’t be able to get a proper job.
In the end, his denial of being an omega was less Nick’s own judgment and more a result of the prejudice society and those around him held against omegas.
“Anyway. Seriously. You can’t just go and tell my father without telling me. Got it?”
“Why would I do something for you that you should do yourself? For whose benefit? Don’t even think about it.”
Bobo pushed away the boy, who was clinging to his arm with an almost desperate expression, by flicking his forehead gently, and flashed a grin.
Anxiously glancing at the two, wondering if the boy’s anxiety and rebelliousness would explode and cause him to run out, never to return, Yeehyeon finished putting away the last chair and slung the eco-bag he had placed on the snack table over his shoulder.
“Um… I’m going to get going.”
“Oh? I’ll go with you!”
The boy grabbed several cookies studded with large chocolate chips and followed Yeehyeon out. Separated by the canal, the boy’s house and ‘The Hands’ were about a twenty-minute walk apart. They had discovered this on the first day the boy came to the meeting, and this was the third time they were walking home together.
Nick never brought up talk of alphas or omegas on the subway, but when they were walking on the street, he was much more proactive and candid with his thoughts than when he was at ‘Ddu.’’
“Why do things like male omegas even exist? I just want to drop dead.”
After getting off at Laumière station and walking with the canal on their left, Nick spoke, kicking at a stone rolling on the ground with his hands in his pockets. It was an extreme statement, unsuited for a leisurely, sun-drenched Sunday afternoon, but Yeehyeon knew that Nick’s words about wanting to die didn’t carry any serious weight.
“There are also male betas who envy male omegas because they want a child with their alpha partner.”
“That person must be gay!”
“Hmm… but his partner was a female alpha?”
“A man… wants to become an omega, to get pregnant with his girlfriend’s child?”
The boy stopped walking and turned to look at Yeehyeon, his face a mask of shock, as if he had just heard about some bizarre and disgusting crime.
“The two of them wanted a child born from the two of them, and he was thinking that if it were possible, he wouldn’t mind becoming an omega himself. Between two people in love, is it really that important who carries the child?”
More than half a year had passed since Yeehyeon, after much hesitation, had started attending the ‘Late Presentation’ meetings. During that time, he had met people in various environments and situations and had heard their deepest stories, their worries, their wounds, and their triumphs—or the frustrations of not being able to overcome them. It was half a year in which he learned that there was no such thing as an absolutely correct or good secondary gender, and that depending on the situation and environment, the desired gender and the way one accepted their own gender were all different.
Yeehyeon told him about a few male omegas who might be able to break Nick’s prejudice, but the reaction he got was not much different than before.
“Whatever about those people, I never wanted this! Then they should have just made those guys omegas! I… I really hate… becoming this kind of monster.”
Shouting with a face that looked like it was about to cry, Nick bit his lower lip hard, turned his back on Yeehyeon, and started walking again.
At the boy’s words, Yeehyeon felt a momentary daze, as if he’d been lightly struck on the head.
He remembered how he had described himself—stuck in a half-state, neither beta nor omega—in exactly that way… as a monster.
“Yeehyeon-ah.” The man who had called him that for the first time had looked like someone standing under a collapsing sky. By calling himself a monster in front of him, who hadn’t dared to approach him carelessly, he had plunged a knife deep not only into his own heart but into the man’s as well. He could see that now.
This time, it was Yeehyeon who stopped walking. Nick, who was a few steps ahead, belatedly noticed Yeehyeon had stopped and looked back. Facing the strong sunlight, Nick squinted his eyes.
“Males insert and females receive. Both a male and a female are needed for pregnancy, but it’s the female who actually becomes pregnant…. Calling that ‘normal’ is a beta’s standard.”
“Most of the world is beta, though.”
“Just because most are betas doesn’t mean everyone is. Just because most are a certain way, is it fair to treat that as ‘normal’ and the remaining minority as ‘abnormal’?”
“……”
Thinking he was talking about things that were too difficult for a fourteen-year-old boy, Yeehyeon relaxed his shoulders and let out a light sigh. He then took off the sunglasses he was wearing and tucked them into the pocket on the left breast of his t-shirt.
“What I mean is… there’s no need to hold up just one thing as normal and make everything else abnormal.”
Nick looked up at Yeehyeon defiantly, his expression still showing he didn’t quite understand.
“What are you? Are you really a beta?”
His tone was suspicious. The boy had grown up in a world where betas defined themselves as ‘normal’ as a matter of course. Just like… in his grandfather’s village.
Meeting Nick’s honest eyes, which were a mix of confusion, anxiety, anger, and fear, Yeehyeon slowly opened his mouth.
“I’m… nothing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I could be a beta, or in the future… I could become an omega.”
Yeehyeon took a deep breath. Even if Nick didn’t know, he himself, as he said these words, knew the meaning and weight hidden behind them.
He had never imagined he would voice it like this—the subject he had spent the last ten months since leaving Seoul building up and tearing down within himself, approaching and turning away from again and again.
“You saw at the meeting. How many people present in their mid-to-late twenties? No one knows what I’ll become in the future. And… whatever I become, or don’t become, I’m still me, and I’m not a monster.”
“……”
“I attend ‘Late Presentation’ because I don’t want to see anyone else as a monster, either.”
Though dissatisfaction and questions still remained, Nick’s expression had softened from before. Yeehyeon started walking again and gave Nick’s back an encouraging pat. Nick looked at Yeehyeon and slowly nodded.
Nick’s prejudice, absorbed into his skin from the influence of society and his family, would not change overnight, or with a single decisive word. But if there was one thing he had felt over the past six months, it was that change was not an entirely impossible story.
“Hyung… aren’t you going on vacation?”
Nick asked this after chattering on for a while about his family trip to his grandmother’s house in the Loire region of central France, which they took every year to match his father’s vacation.
While grumbling that he couldn’t go to other countries in Europe like his other friends, he seemed to be looking forward to the once-a-year trip. For now, he seemed to have completely forgotten the fact that he had become an omega and that, unlike before, he had to take suppressants to enjoy his trip.
“A friend from Korea is coming to visit instead.”
“A friend?”
“Yeah. So I’m going to the airport to meet him tomorrow.”
“Must be a really… close friend. For him to come all this way.”
Yeehyeon nodded at Nick, who asked this somewhat cautiously, as if testing the waters. Nick’s eyes sparkled with curiosity, having completely forgotten that just ten minutes ago he had been pessimistic about life and wanted to die.
Perhaps, as Bobo said, all Nick needed was time and attention, and he would eventually adapt and come to accept himself in a healthy way. In any case, Bobo had been through this kind of situation far more than he had, so he had no choice but to trust his words and move the boy by remaining unshaken in their own truths from their respective positions.
By the time he parted with Nick and arrived at ‘The Hands,’ his back was soaked with sweat. Even though the temperature was lower than in Korea, the sun was strong due to the clear, cloudless weather. He quickened his pace, thinking of quickly getting to his room, taking a shower, and drinking a can of cold beer, when a long-haired man coming out of ‘The Hands’ building raised a hand toward Yeehyeon.
“Yeehyeon.”
“Ben.”
“Look at you, all sweaty.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty hot today,” Yeehyeon said, wiping the sweat from under his chin with the back of his hand.
“The apartment is a furnace. I’m just going to go out to a café.”
“It’s just as hot there.”
“At least there I can look at beautiful men and women,” Ben muttered, as if stating an obvious truth everyone agreed on. Ben simply enjoyed appreciating beautiful people as subjects, and he didn’t hide this aesthetic preference, this hobby of his.
“Wanna come with?”
Yeehyeon smiled and shook his head at Ben’s question. On days he had the ‘Late Presentation’ meeting, he had work planned from the afternoon into the evening.
Contrary to Ben’s claim that it was a furnace, when he entered the lobby, the cool, settled air was a relief. Even if the lower floor was cool, it was obvious the studios upstairs would be thoroughly heated.
Glancing inside the open door, it seemed there were quite a few visitors since it was a Sunday. He was about to go up to his room quietly when a familiar voice called out to him from behind.
“Yeehyeon-ssi, a package came for you.”
Yuni, with a playful expression, was waving, holding a small parcel tucked under her left arm. It seemed she had been in the office and had spotted him returning home. Yeehyeon smiled and stepped off the stairs.
“It came on Friday, but I guess Pierre forgot to leave a message telling you before he left on vacation.”
The box she handed him was less than two handspans tall. It wasn’t very heavy either.
“I think it’s from the US. Did you have someone you know in the States?”
Yeehyeon looked down at the box and checked the sender. The neatness and warmth were evident even in the handwriting.
Marcus Dunham. It was Marcus.
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