I Couldn't Tell You Who It Was

“Listen, we’re not here to play house,” Seogeung growled, then stood up from his seat. “But how perfect. I was feeling really shitty just now.”

Seogeung had his chair in his hands. He dragged the chair across to the end of the hall and glared at the camera. When it dawned on the others what the infuriated Seogeung was going to do, someone yelled, “Wait!”

But it was too late.

“They can’t watch us if I do this!” Seogeung lifted the chair and hurled it at the camera. The lens cracked with a loud noise. Although the camera didn’t drop from the ceiling, the shards of the damaged bits fell along with the broken pieces of the chair. The red light in the camera turned off.

“Seogeung!” Seoyoon exclaimed, and only then did Seogeung turn around triumphantly.

Then, he smirked at me. “Fitting of someone who likes men, you talk like a c*nt too. Hey, do you even have a d*ck? I heard some of you surgically remove them. Aren’t you flat down there if you take your pants off? Or maybe you haven’t reconstructed the bust yet.”

I contemplated for a moment on whether I should correct him by telling him that being gay was different from being transgender. But I had a feeling that even if I explained as best I could, I would only be ridiculed in return, so I scrapped that thought. Unconfident, I didn’t feel like putting the effort into conversing with someone who wouldn’t listen to me either way. I decided to ignore it.

Because I didn’t reply, Seogeung must have thought that he won the argument. After walking toward me, he started circling me very unpleasantly. “This b*stard is suspicious no matter how I think about it. Isn’t it weird that some f*cker that nobody has ever even heard of was invited to this shoot? Do you have connections or something? Did you sleep with one of the dead filming crew? Then, Goyeon caught you, so you tried to silence her.”

I didn’t kill Goyeon.

Goyeon was still probably crawling on top of the pile of bodies. People tended to become attached to either the last thing they saw before they died or whoever killed them. I was not sure if the staff killed Goyeon, but seeing that she was preoccupied with them, they couldn’t be unrelated.

However, I couldn’t push that onto the others as evidence, especially not to the person before my eyes.

I glanced briefly around my surroundings, but nobody looked willing to help me. After a couple of conflicts, the group understood who Seogeung was as a person. Moreover, in the present situation, the suspicion around me hadn’t been cleared. One wrong step and they could fall under the same scrutiny.

I really didn’t want Hyehyun’s help.

“Then, following that logic, you—Seogeung—could have killed the staff, isn’t that right?” Just then, someone came to my defense. The question thrown to Seogeung was quite apt.

“What? What are you saying?” Seogeung looked appalled and glared at the one who questioned him—Woorim.

Woorim was sitting next to Hawoo, flipping through the guide booklet from yesterday and the black key. There was a scratch pad with a list of the events that happened to us so far written down, but I couldn’t tell which of the two wrote it. Both were holding pens in their hands.

Seogeung looked in Woorim’s direction and Hawoo must not have wanted to be roped in because he scooted his chair slightly to the side. The booklet they were looking at must have belonged to Woorim because he kept circling things meaninglessly in the book. Woorim continued, “Isn’t that so? You were the last person who met the producer, the one who’s sprawled out on the elevator floor.”

Woorim was right.

“Plus, everyone else fell asleep early after taking the sleeping pills, yet you stayed up relatively late compared to the rest of us.”

The others agreed quietly, so Seogeung hurriedly clarified, “The only reason I didn’t eat much dinner was that it didn’t taste good, okay? I only drank beer because it happened to be in the kitchen when I felt a bit hungry!”

I frowned when he said that he didn’t eat because it didn’t taste good. I thought the meal tasted pretty good for instant food.

The thing I was surprised about wasn’t that Seogeung had unexpectedly refined taste buds. I assumed that if it were Seogeung, he would have eaten that jjamppong deliciously, and the reason he could stay up that late was that he knew about the existence of the sleeping pills in advance—I was shocked that my assumption was shattered into pieces.

Woorim stopped doodling and tapped the paper with his pen. The way that his long fingers grasped the pen looked precarious as if he could flick it away at any moment. “Until what time?”