Minseo reads the day the way fishermen read the sea: by rhythm, by pull, by the tiny changes that mean trouble if you miss them. First period is safe water: homeroom yawns, attendance, the soft scrape of chairs. Second period is where teachers still believe in “attitude,” where a late pen-click can become a lecture about character. By lunch, the hallway current turns sharp; clusters form and reform with the efficiency of a spreadsheet, and she slips through the edges like she’s solving for time, not friends.
The bell is never just a bell. It’s a warning that the next room has different rules. In the Korean classroom, the teacher’s mood dictates whether questions are “diligent” or “disruptive.” In math, the same boy who forgot his worksheet three times gets a quiet printout from the front office: no scolding, no name written on the board. Minseo files the detail away the way she files everything: under don’t-look-too-long, under later, under not my business.
Announcements crackle over the intercom. Rankings posted, mock exam registration, self-study attendance reminders with that bright, fake-cheerful “fighting!” that makes her jaw tighten. She keeps her face blank. She knows the trick: breathe shallow, nod when everyone nods, let the words wash past without catching on anything inside.
She moves with purpose because stopping invites questions. When someone laughs too loud behind her, she doesn’t turn; it’s rarely about her until it is. When a teacher calls for “a few scholarship students” to stay after class, she doesn’t look relieved or resentful, just gathers her notebook with practiced care, as if being selected is neutral. Her planner is open on her desk like an alibi. Color-coded blocks, romanized notes, a life reduced to manageable units: 야자, hagwon, review, sleep (maybe).
By the time the last bell rings, her shoulders have been held up by muscle memory. She doesn’t exhale until she’s already walking, already calculating the next tide.
At home, the air is always mid-argument. A cabinet closes too hard, a spoon hits a bowl like an accusation, her mother’s voice goes flat in that way that means don’t push. Minseo learns to read it all without looking up, to keep her hands busy (washing, packing rice into lunch boxes, re-copying notes) so nobody can say she’s “just sitting there.” Endurance becomes a posture: shoulders down, eyes steady, answers short. If she moves carefully enough, she can keep the household from tipping into something worse. If she gets her brother’s homework checked, if she distracts her grandmother with a drama recap, if she becomes useful, maybe the noise stays contained.
At school the noise is quieter but sharper. Fluorescent lights bleach everyone into the same tired color; the comparisons happen without words: who gets called on, whose mistakes get softened, whose name teachers say with warmth. She tells herself it’s still one system, just different uniforms. Home trains her to hold her breath. Haneulseong teaches her not to let it show. Survive it, don’t feel it, and whatever breaks will break later.
Minseo’s days are built like a spreadsheet you could survive inside. Highlighters lined up by shade, to-do boxes squared off so nothing can leak. She times her practice sets with her phone hidden under the desk edge, thumb hovering over start like it’s a pulse. Fifteen minutes: vocab. Twenty: math drills. Ten: corrections, red pen only. Coffee isn’t comfort; it’s dosage. Two sticks of Maxim before first period, half a can of hot Six-pack during lunch if her head starts to throb. When her thoughts jitter, she adds structure instead of rest: one more review cycle, one more neat rewrite. At home and at school, promises are negotiable. Effort is the only thing that stays where she puts it.
When classmates hiss about favoritism, about “extra hints” and quiet extensions, Minseo lets the words skim past her like bus exhaust. She doesn’t nod, doesn’t argue. Complaining feels like spending energy you can’t earn back. She keeps her eyes on her own worksheet, the neat columns of her planner, and walks faster between periods, as if speed can keep unfairness from attaching to her name.
In her head, the rules lay themselves out like graph paper: hard lines, no mercy, but at least predictable. Don’t cheat, don’t talk back, don’t give anyone a reason to look at you twice. Work until your wrists ache, until the noise turns into white hum. If you still slip, then it’s on you, clean and simple: a personal failure, not a rigged game.
A wrong feeling hits first: before she can name it, before she can file it into the safe categories of “jealousy” or “stress.” It’s visual, almost geometric: the answer key on the teacher’s podium lying at an angle too deliberate, corners aligned with the edge like someone practiced setting it down. The paper isn’t curled from use. The staple is fresh. Clean.
Minseo’s eyes snag on it the way they snag on a crack in a phone screen.
At the back, a boy who never stays after class, who usually bolts as soon as the bell rings, backpack already half-zipped, hovers near the podium with that half-bow students do when they want to be polite and invisible at the same time. The teacher’s voice drops. Not quite a whisper, but a soft, compressed register meant for one person. The teacher taps the top of his workbook with a pen, precise, like placing a chess piece.
“Just between us,” she hears: maybe. Or maybe her brain supplies the phrase because it’s been trained to hunt for it.
Minseo looks back down at her own notes. The lines are straight. The handwriting is neat enough to convince anyone she’s fine. Her head throbs behind her eyes, the caffeine doing its harsh, useful work. She tells herself the key is clean because it’s new. He stayed after because he finally decided to try. Teachers have favorites because everyone does, and it’s not a crime to be liked.
But the wrong feeling doesn’t leave. It slides under her ribs and sits there, warm and stubborn.
In the next period, she notices the same boy again: how he walks out with a loose smile, like he’s been handed something lighter than homework. In math, a different student gets a “quick hint” at the board that sounds like a whole solution if you already know how to listen. In the hallway, a teacher pauses beside Hajun and speaks with the careful warmth adults use for students they’re invested in, their tone polished like an award plaque.
Minseo presses her thumbnail into the edge of her eraser until it dents. Coincidence, she tells herself, because tired minds make patterns out of noise.
Still, her gaze keeps drifting back to angles, to taps, to lowered voices: as if the air itself has started to carry secrets.
She starts watching without deciding to. It happens the way you start listening for your name in a crowded hallway, automatic, a reflex built from too many close calls. Her eyes track patterns: the students who “accidentally” take the long route past the teachers’ desk, the ones who hover with their pens uncapped like they’ve been waiting for permission to breathe. A workbook lands on the edge of the desk and a finger, teacher’s, not student’s, pins one corner, slides it open to an exact page. Not “review chapters,” but this. A tap-tap, crisp as a metronome.
A form goes missing and the response isn’t a scolding, just a low murmur: “Arasseo. I’ll fix it later.” The student’s shoulders loosen, relief disguised as gratitude.
Minseo’s gaze snaps down to her own notebook every time, as if catching the exchange is the same as making it happen. She forces herself to copy definitions she already knows, to look busy, harmless. Noticing feels sharp-edged. Like accusation. Like stepping into a spotlight she can’t afford.
Still, her attention returns (quiet, stubborn) counting who gets called by name, and who gets waved through without it.
The numbers refuse to behave. A score that should have climbed in bruised increments, two points here, one point there, leaps cleanly over the messy middle, landing in the high nineties like it was always meant to be there. The ranking board updates and somehow the shift looks smooth, too smooth, like someone pressed “sort” and watched the right names rise.
Minseo flips to the back of her notebook and draws a narrow timeline: date, period, subject, teacher. She marks the day the “hint” happened, the day the answer sheet lay too crisp on the podium, the day a student left class lighter.
Then she pauses, crosses it out, rewrites the same line as a harmless study doodle, boxes, arrows, “review ch. 3”: until it looks like anxiety and not evidence.
Outside the staff room, Minseo catches the edges of things that aren’t meant to have edges: a low, hurried phone call, a surname spoken once: then swallowed like a mistake. Someone laughs too softly. The copier hums, stops. A door clicks shut just before she turns the corner, sealing in warmth and authority. She keeps walking at the same pace, chin level, face empty, as if her ears didn’t tilt toward it.
At night, Minseo rewrites the day the way she rewrites math solutions. Period 3, Ms. Han, a “quick hint.” Lunch, a form “found” without anyone looking. After-school, a name called too gently. She copies it into a neat list, then stares until it feels like a story she’s inventing. In the end, she draws a hard line through the page, practicing erasure as if it’s discipline.
The morning starts before her alarm can finish buzzing. Before the tinny vibration can fully translate into get up, Minseo’s hand is already there, smothering it against the mattress like she’s stopping evidence. The room is dim, winter-gray even though the sun should be coming. Her eyes sting from last night’s screen glare; the back of her skull holds a small, persistent ache, like someone pressing a thumb there.
She sits up in one motion, because hesitation is how thoughts sneak in.
Hair first: twisted back, elastic biting into damp strands. No loose pieces to touch her cheeks and distract her. Uniform next: white shirt snapped smooth, tie straight, skirt hem checked without looking in the mirror too long. She pinches a stray thread on the cuff, pulls until it breaks. The tiny act feels like control.
In the kitchen, the air is cold and carefully neutral. The rice cooker is off. A cup sits in the sink at the exact angle it always sits, as if the house is trying to prove it still has routines. No one speaks. Or maybe everyone is just waiting for someone else to make a noise they can react to. Minseo doesn’t offer one.
She pours water into her tumbler, not bothering with tea. The cap clicks shut, small, final. She keeps her shoulders narrow as she passes the living room doorway, eyes forward, like walking past a sleeping animal. Her grandmother’s room is quiet behind its papered door. From her parents’ room, there’s nothing. That nothing feels active, like a held breath.
Shoes, coat, backpack. Bus card in her hand before she even reaches the entryway, plastic rectangle warmed by her palm, a shield she can pretend is just a commute. She slips out while the apartment is still deciding whether to wake up, and the hallway light flickers once, bathing her in the building’s stale warmth.
Outside, Seoul is already moving. Minseo falls into the stream of uniforms and office coats, steps measured, face composed. Like if she walks correctly, the day can’t spill.
At school, her body runs ahead of her mind. She’s through the front gate, up the stairwell, past the trophy case where university banners glare like a dare. In the corridor, she refills her tumbler at the dispenser: hot water, one stick of instant coffee she brought from home, stirred until it turns the color of weak mud. The first sip is bitter and thin, but it puts a wall between her and the hollow throb behind her eyes.
She walks like the hallway is a bulletin board only she can read: who’s laughing too hard, who’s not laughing at all, who’s already looking at the ranking sheet even though it’s not posted yet. A sophomore bows too deep to a teacher. Someone’s voice drops when Hajun passes, polite as a blade. Minseo doesn’t turn her head, just stores the shape of it.
In homeroom, she slides into her seat with the same careful posture she uses at home. Shoulders tucked in, hands busy, face arranged into “fine.” Her planner opens flat. Pen clicks once. She copies the day’s schedule as if writing it makes it true, and keeps her gaze on the page long enough for her breathing to match the room.
Classes fold into each other under the same fluorescent hum: mock-exam packets, timers, the scrape of mechanical pencils like teeth. Minseo’s hand cramps and she doesn’t shake it out; she just switches grip, keeps going. Write, circle, move: then rewrite in the margins, translating mistakes into something that looks intentional. When Ms. Han drifts down the rows, her shadow pauses longer at certain desks. A soft murmur (“a quick hint”) and a boy who never shares notes nods like he’s been reminded of something he already knew. Someone else’s timer mysteriously “lags.” A request for an extension lands like a joke and is answered with a smile: “It’s okay. Fix it later.” Minseo keeps her expression flat, eyes on her own paper, and files the pattern away where it can’t be called anger.
Afternoon turns into small, practiced acts of damage control. She gathers extra handouts for the absent like she’s patching holes in a sinking ship, fields questions that land on her desk because she looks “organized,” and answers without saying she’s tired. In the hallway she nods at teachers, annyeonghaseyo, polite, steady, as if consistency can be currency, something you earn instead of inherit.
By the time Minseo reaches home, the foyer feels staged: shoes too neatly aligned, silence stretched tight over whatever just happened. She doesn’t call out. She slips past her grandmother’s room, past the closed door where voices have learned to stay low, and builds her own border: desk lamp on, planner open, earbuds in with no music. She rewrites until her handwriting looks like control.
At school Minseo moves like she’s already apologized for existing. She keeps her shoulders slightly rounded, bag hugged close, steps measured to the pace of the hallway so no one has to sidestep her. The front pocket of her backpack is stocked like a tiny emergency kit. When a classmate pats their pockets and swears under their breath, Minseo’s hand is already there, offering without looking up, as if generosity counts more when it doesn’t demand to be witnessed.
“Need?” she asks, low.
“Ah. Yeah. Thanks,” they say, relief loosening their face. The pen leaves her fingers. A debt is created and paid at the same time.
She does it with everything. When the teacher’s stack of worksheets tilts, Minseo is out of her seat, palms flat, aligning edges until the paper looks obedient. When someone’s absent, she collects handouts and writes their name in the corner in neat block letters, proof, later, that it existed and wasn’t her fault if it didn’t reach them. She volunteers to run attendance sheets to the office, to wipe the board when no one else moves, to compile group project slides because “you’re good at organizing.” She becomes a hinge the day swings on, and nobody has to ask what it costs her.
Teachers like it. Peers lean on it. Her name gets said in the same breath as competent, responsible, dependable. Words that sound like praise but function like assignments. Even the small talk that comes with it is transactional: “Minseo, do you have the formula sheet?” “Minseo, what did he say about the essay topic?” “Minseo, can you check my answer for number 12?”
She answers with her notes already open, page flipped to the right section like a practiced magic trick. The faster she solves someone else’s problem, the less time there is for anyone to wonder what hers might be.
When someone tries to get close, Minseo feels it before she understands it. The pause half a second too long after her name, the tilt of a voice into softness. It lands on her skin like heat. Sympathy is a beam you can’t step out of without looking guilty, and being seen like that feels dangerous in a school where weakness gets converted into rumor, then into ranking, then into pity.
“Are you… okay lately?” a girl asks beside the lockers, fingers worrying the strap of her tote.
Minseo’s throat locks. Her brain does the fast math: what answer keeps the conversation from spreading, what answer won’t invite a second question. She keeps her expression neutral, the competent mask she wears like uniform.
“I’m fine,” she says, then reaches for something safer. “Did you do the 국어 reading? The teacher said the thesis has to be one sentence.”
The girl blinks, dragged from concern to homework logistics. “Oh. Yeah, I: kind of?”
Minseo nods, already pulling out her notebook, offering margins and bullet points like a bribe. She lets the topic change do the work of escape. Her hands look steady. Inside, she stays frozen until the warmth is gone.
The wealthy kids used her like a clean, silent staircase: step on, get higher, don’t look down. “Minseo, can I see your notes for a sec?” said with a smile that meant just for a sec and ended with a practiced “gomawo” once the photo was taken. They never asked how she got the answer, only how fast she could hand it over. But with the scholarship group, it was different pressure. Less glossy, sharper. They watched her like proof that you could survive here if you were disciplined enough, quiet enough, never messy. If Minseo didn’t crack, then nobody else had permission to. Between both sides, she became a passageway, not a person, belonging to neither current and still expected to keep everyone moving.
She makes the choice early, almost clinically: be the girl who always has a spare charger, the girl who reminds people of deadlines, the girl who answers with a screenshot instead of a confession. Usefulness is a shield. No one gossips about a tool, no one pities a schedule. “Steady,” they call her, and the compliment quietly becomes permission to leave her carrying everything alone.
“Fine” is the quickest door out, so Minseo keeps using it. To homeroom teachers who pause too long on her face, to classmates fishing for softness, to her own reflection in the bathroom mirror under harsh fluorescent light. Anything else would be a request. A crack. It would mean she wants more than survival, and she has no safe place to store that wanting without someone charging interest.
Minseo’s planner is a living thing. It swells through the week: sticky notes blooming along the margins, boxes subdividing into smaller boxes until even her handwriting has to shrink to fit. She likes the click of her pen, the clean line through a finished task, the tiny dopamine that comes with writing done in neat block letters. In theory, it’s proof of control.
In practice, the feeling evaporates before the ink dries.
A crossed-out item doesn’t leave empty space; it makes room. Korean vocab quiz. Done becomes rewrite mistakes, becomes teacher said this might appear on midterm, becomes review with past paper. Laundry. Done becomes fold and hide it before Halmeoni comments, becomes find the other sock before Mom notices and asks where Dad is. The list is an escalator that never stops. Stepping off would mean falling.
She tells herself it’s discipline, that this is what serious students do. Stack effort on top of effort until the future is forced to appear. But the satisfaction is thin, like instant coffee: bitter heat that fades fast and leaves her more aware of the tiredness underneath.
At school, her usefulness has its own checklist. Reply to Kakao messages with screenshots of solutions. Upload the shared study doc before anyone asks twice. Remember who needs a seat saved during yaja, who’s allergic to peanuts during club snacks, who will pretend not to hear if the teacher calls on someone unprepared. Even kindness becomes logistics. It’s safer that way: if she can reduce herself to functions, nobody can demand her feelings as payment.
Sometimes she catches her reflection in the classroom window, late afternoon glare turning her into a darker overlay on the rows of desks. Tied-back hair. Practical cardigan. Eyes too awake for how little she sleeps. She looks like someone who has learned to move quietly through other people’s expectations without leaving fingerprints.
The worst part is how quickly her brain converts relief into threat. If there’s a free period, she immediately searches for what she’s forgetting. If a teacher praises her, she braces for the next assignment, the next ranking post, the next reason her place here could be taken back. Being ahead doesn’t feel like winning; it feels like being temporarily unpunished.
In the pockets of silence she can’t schedule (bus stops under weak streetlights, the sink at midnight, the three seconds before a page turns) Minseo’s mind does something inconvenient. It asks for proof.
Not grades. Not rankings taped to the bulletin board like warnings. Proof that the hours mean something other than keeping panic at bay. That effort can build, not just patch.
On the bus, her reflection floats over other students’ faces in the dark window. Everyone’s hunched in the same posture, earbuds in, eyelids heavy. She tests a vocab word in her head, then another, like tapping a wall to find hollow spots. When she gets one wrong, heat rises under her collar even though no one heard. Maintenance, her brain supplies, as if she’s a machine that will fail if she stops tightening bolts.
At home, she rinses her instant coffee mug until the smell is gone, scrubbing harder than necessary. The water runs, loud in the cramped kitchen. She imagines a future where studying isn’t an apology for being behind. Where it’s curiosity, or choice.
She flips through her notes, neon highlights fading into each other. Margin comments, arrows, revised solutions: evidence of labor. She wants it to be evidence of becoming.
She starts noticing the pattern the way you notice a drip in the ceiling. Small at first, easy to ignore until you can’t stop hearing it. Mr. Han’s voice goes soft as steamed rice for certain surnames, the ones that belong to apartment complexes with security gates. A late homework packet becomes “a misunderstanding,” a gentle laugh, a promise to “check later,” and later never costs them anything. Someone forgets their ID on mock exam day and an admin appears like magic with a spare; Minseo watches scholarship kids line up anyway, palms damp, praying their names don’t end up on the “discipline” list. In the hallway, she catches a whispered, “I’ll handle it,” sliding between teacher and student like a private passcode. It’s never said to her. It’s never meant for her.
The anger never becomes a scene. It sinks inward, turns into structure. Alarms set five minutes earlier, pages tabbed sharper, her pen pressed hard enough to leave dents. If the system is tilted, she’ll tilt herself back with effort, not favors. No “please, sunsaengnim,” no quiet shortcuts, no stepping on someone weaker just to breathe. She’ll win clean, or not at all.
Under the practiced calm, something in Minseo refuses to flatten. Not optimism, she doesn’t have time for that, but a stubborn, inconvenient belief that there must be a way to earn a future without trading herself for it. Honest, not hollow. She doesn’t know what that proof looks like yet. A fair decision. A rule applied evenly. One adult who means it. If she ever touches it, she’ll clamp down and not let go.
Monday morning, the loudspeaker schedules “Mock Week” like it’s a ceremony. Principal’s clipped greeting, the list of dates and “strict procedures,” the reminder that phones will be collected and “any irregularities” reported. The voice echoes down the stairwell and into Minseo’s ribs. Desks have been spaced wider, just enough to make every scrape of a chair sound like an accusation. Pencil cases sit on the top right corner of each desk, zippers facing forward, lined up like offerings. The air carries that specific smell of warm plastic from freshly laminated seating charts, mixed with instant coffee from someone’s thermos.
Minseo arrives early, not because she’s eager, but because being early means fewer variables. She checks the door sign (2-3, not 2-2) and adjusts without letting it show. Her planner is already open on the right page; she’s written “MOCK WEEK” in careful block letters, then broken it down into time slots the way other people break down meals. If she can see the edges, she can breathe.
Inside the room, the proctor’s clipboard snaps as he flips pages. A stack of OMR sheets rests on the front desk, corners aligned too perfectly. Minseo’s gaze flicks there once, then away: don’t stare, don’t look like you’re worried. She chooses a seat that keeps her in the middle row, not close enough for the teacher to hover, not far enough to be “forgotten” when papers are handed out. The chair legs squeal when she sits; she presses her palm flat on the desk to steady the vibration.
Across the aisle, a boy in a spotless uniform drops his mechanical pencil, then laughs softly when a friend picks it up for him. Someone in the back whispers, “Mapo Prime? Jinjja?” like it’s a password. Minseo hears it, catalogues it, refuses to turn her head.
She writes her name on the practice cover sheet as soon as she’s allowed, each stroke deliberate. Under the fluorescent lights, everyone looks washed out, like they’ve been photocopied too many times. Minseo blinks, once, twice, timing it between the proctor’s footsteps, and tells her body the same thing she always does: we’ll endure. We’ll make it clean.
Between periods, Minseo moves like a second proctor, quiet, efficient, eyes doing math. She tracks the week the way she tracks everything: bell times, room changes, which sunsaengnim looks too harried to double-check the seal on an exam packet. Her planner stays closed in her hand, but the grid is already in her head. Third floor, 2-3, then down to 1-5 because someone’s “urgent meeting” stole a classroom. Every change is supposed to be announced; not every change is.
The hallway hums with half-swallowed bravado. Boys lean into lockers and trade answers in coded fragments hagwon names passed around like credentials. A girl laughs too loudly, then goes silent the moment a teacher’s heels click closer.
Minseo doesn’t join. She watches instead: who suddenly has confidence like it was delivered overnight, who stops meeting anyone’s eyes, who keeps their mouth shut like they’ve been warned. Near the stairwell, Hajun glides through the crowd without touching it, polite nods collecting around him. Minseo notes that too, and keeps walking, counting the variables she can control.
By Wednesday, the school’s routines start to show hairline cracks. In 2-3, the homeroom sunsaengnim’s patience is gone; when a boy raises his hand to ask for a reprint, his OMR sheet came out streaked, the barcode smudged, the teacher flares like he’s been accused. “Just fill it in neatly. Don’t waste time,” he snaps, and the room goes very still.
Outside, the admin office window stays half-shut, the gap just wide enough to slide papers through like contraband. The hallway copier becomes a bottleneck: toner-sweet air, jammed trays, teachers standing too close, voices lowered. Minseo keeps her eyes on her own stack of worksheets, but the same word keeps surfacing, different mouths, same urgency (“replacement,” “replacement”) and it lands in her stomach like a pebble that won’t dissolve.
After the third exam, a harried sunsaengnim sends Minseo with attendance forms, “staff office, quick”, like it’s nothing. She walks fast anyway, because errands are safer than waiting. The corridor past the printing nook smells of toner and hot paper. Exam packets sit in uneven towers, staples flashing. Someone’s hands shuffle, re-staple, flatten, too hurried, too careful, like fixing a mistake without letting it become a scene.
A sunsaengnim’s hand, ink-smudged at the thumb, slips a thin bundle onto the stack with the kind of practiced care that pretends it’s nothing. “Igeo… use this one for anyone who needs it,” he says, voice light, eyes already moving away. Minseo keeps her face blank. She watches the header sit a fraction too high, the pages not quite flush, a fresh paper cut bright against the worn staples. An answer key in the wrong shape.
Minseo steps into the printer room like it’s a quiet pocket of the building, fluorescents buzzing, trays half-open, discarded staple strips glinting on the floor, and lets her breathing match the steady mechanical hum. Outside, the corridor is a conveyor belt of footsteps and whispered gosa jokes, someone’s heel squeaking with each rushed pivot. In here, the air is warm with toner and dust, the kind that dries the back of her throat.
She keeps her hands in her pockets. Habit. Evidence doesn’t cling to you if you don’t touch it.
On the counter, a cardboard box labeled “2-3 Mock / Extra” sags at the seams. A few packets have slid out, corners fanned like someone thumbed them in a hurry. Minseo doesn’t read the cover yet. She reads the edges: one stack is too clean, cut like it came straight from a new ream; another has the faint wave of paper that’s been pulled through twice. She clocks staple angles: some sit flat, pressed deep; others bite shallow, leaving tiny crescents you only see if you tilt the paper against the light.
The printer blinks a low-ink warning in red. A smudge of black on the feed tray looks like a fingerprint, but toner doesn’t hold skin the way it holds impatience. Minseo leans just enough to see the top packet’s header: Haneulseong High, the same font and spacing as what her class got this morning. Same date. Same “Mock Exam Week” stamp. Her stomach doesn’t drop; it tightens, like she’s bracing for a cold hallway breeze.
She flips her gaze to the first question: just the first line, the structure, the kind of prompt. It isn’t what she remembers. It’s close enough to pass in a blur, but wrong in the way a familiar song feels wrong when one note is shifted.
She doesn’t move the packet. Instead she memorizes: Page 1 has long passages. Page 2 starts with graphs. The staple is set a millimeter higher than usual, as if someone aligned it to a different guide.
When she turns her head, she catches the back page of the top set through the gap where it’s not fully flush. A pale ink stamp ghosts there: half-smeared, like it kissed metal and slid: “Rooftop Access Log.”
Minseo swallows. Her headache pulses once, sharp, then recedes. She backs out the way she came in, already replaying the pages in her mind, already hearing the soft rip of paper against paper that shouldn’t exist.
She scans the stacks the way she scans a test: not for answers, but for tells. The staples first: some sunk deep enough to bruise the paper, legs folded tight like they were pressed with a steady hand; others shallow, slightly splayed, the kind you get when someone’s rushing and the machine’s jaw doesn’t fully bite. Toner next. One pile has that velvety, even black that comes from a fresh cartridge; another is peppered, letters just a shade lighter at the edges, as if the printer hesitated mid-run.
The page edges bother her most. A few bundles align too perfectly, squared like they were tapped carefully against the table. Others sit a fraction off, corners not quite kissing, a thin stair-step of white that suggests they were collated manually. She tilts her head and watches the light catch a faint ripple on certain sheets, the subtle waviness of paper pulled through twice. It’s a small thing, almost nothing. At Haneulseong, almost nothing is how problems begin.
On top of one pile, a “replacement” bundle sits too cleanly, squared off like it was tapped into obedience. Minseo lets her fingers close around it without lifting, just enough to feel the drag of paper against paper. Same header as her class’s packet, same date, same bolded subject line in that officious school font, yet the thickness is wrong. A few sheets too many, or fewer, she can’t tell, only that her palm registers the difference the way it registers a door that’s been freshly oiled.
The staple bites higher, impatient. The pages don’t flex the way handled copies do; they resist, crisp, like they haven’t been breathed on by a room of students. In her head, the exam she took this morning and the exam in her hand refuse to become the same object.
She doesn’t read for meaning; meaning can wait. She reads for discrepancy. Her eyes hop (multiple-choice distribution, the rhythm of passage-to-graph-to-short answer) then snag on the sequence: a swap that would slip past anyone running on caffeine. The left margin sits a hair off, as if the PDF breathed differently. Different master file. Different hands. Different intention.
Minseo eases the bundle back into its precise square, fingertips sliding out as if the paper could remember heat. She doesn’t take it; taking would leave a gap someone else could measure. But her eyes have already taken everything and when she reaches for her notebook, her pen moves on its own. The “wrong” questions settle into her margins like muscle memory, like she’s the one who’s been replaced.
She flips the packet once, quick and practiced, the way she flips through a new workbook at Kyobo. Checking thickness, staple placement, whether the pages are miscut. Not reading. Not yet. Just counting with her thumb, letting the edges whisper past.
The back of the last sheet catches the fluorescent light wrong. Not blank-white like it should be, but bruised with a pale shadow.
Minseo’s thumb pauses mid-fan. Her skin goes cold at the smallest resistance, like the paper itself is warning her not to look too long.
There, near the bottom corner where a student’s name would never go, ink that isn’t printer ink. It’s stamped ink, uneven, the kind the office uses when they don’t trust signatures. The letters are broken, as if whoever pressed it was too fast or the pad was drying out. Some strokes are crisp; others fade into nothing. The impression is slightly raised, catching on the ridges of her fingerprint.
She tilts it, and the stamp resolves into language.
Not a teacher’s approval, not a “COPY” mark, not even the faint gray smudge of a misfeed. An institutional phrase, ugly in its plainness, like it’s meant to be invisible because it’s ordinary to the people who handle doors and keys.
Her gaze flicks to the printer-room door, then to the narrow window in it: wired glass, as if the school expects students to become problems. Outside, footsteps pass, a quick laugh, someone dragging a chair. Everything continues at the normal speed of mock-exam week.
Inside her chest, something accelerates.
She thinks of the rooftop without meaning to: the locked stairwell door with the NO ENTRY sign that everyone pretends they’ve never tested, the way the air up there tastes different, metallic and open. She’s never gone, not since last year’s incident turned the lock into a story adults tell with careful mouths, but she’s seen enough to know locked doesn’t mean untouched.
Minseo forces her thumb to keep moving. Page, page, page. Count. Confirm. Her eyes refuse to leave the broken letters even as she tells herself it’s nothing, just a reused sheet, a stray stamp, a mistake.
But official paper doesn’t pick up marks by accident. It picks them up by contact.
“Rooftop Access Log.” The English sits inside the Korean of her day like a splinter, too official to be slang, too specific to be a random stamp. Her brain supplies the rest (dates in neat columns, a key number, a signature line no student ever sees) because she’s stood in the administration hallway often enough to recognize the school’s obsession with traces. Logs. Lists. Proof that a person existed in a place at a time.
But this isn’t on a clipboard. It’s on the back of an exam sheet.
The ink is half-smeared, the way it gets when someone presses paper against metal and jerks it away, panicked or rushed. She can almost feel the motion in the blur: contact, pressure, escape. Like the packet had been pinned, briefly, to a door plate near a lock: something that shouldn’t have touched it at all.
Minseo’s throat tightens. Rooftop access is supposed to be controlled, tracked, impossible without an adult. Yet here is the mark of that system bleeding onto something meant for her desk, her score, her future.
It lands in her head not as information, but as an order: someone opened what was sealed.
Minseo doesn’t let her face move. She pinches the packet at two corners so her fingerprints won’t smear anything, a small, ridiculous courtesy to a crime she hasn’t named. The staple bites her thumbnail; she welcomes the sting because it keeps her from flinching. Her mind clicks through the school like a map of sealed mouths: the rooftop stairwell door with its too-clean lock, the counselors’ file cabinets that smell like paper rot, the AV closet that always has a film of warm dust on the handle, the office copy room where toner lives in your throat for hours. Locked spaces leave residue. Rust. Disinfectant. Cold air that doesn’t belong. If this sheet carries a door’s stamp, it means the door was opened. Or the paper was pressed against it on purpose. Either way, someone wanted a trace.
Recognition hits first, sharp and unreasonable: this isn’t just misprinted paper, it’s paper that crossed a line. Official stock doesn’t wander into locked air on its own. Someone, an adult, or someone treated like one, has been carrying documents through forbidden corridors and bringing them back clean-faced, except for this residue. Anxiety makes her a cataloger; her mind files the stamp under pattern, not coincidence.
The stamp is light enough to pretend it’s toner shadow, smeared enough to pass as a careless brush of paper: yet it catches under her ribs like a warning. She takes it in the way she takes in test directions: the slight left-lean of ROOFTOP, the uneven pressure in ACCESS, the missing tail on the g in Log. Then she flips it back, blank-face careful, as if her eyes never touched it.
The printer room door gives a small, decisive click, then seals again with that soft suction of a gasket catching: careful hands controlling the sound. Minseo keeps her posture neutral, weight even on both feet like she belongs here. She doesn’t swivel. She lets her gaze stay on the copier’s blinking panel and measures the room by reflection in the dark plastic casing.
Footsteps: one pair light, quick, heel-first: someone who’s trying to seem casual. The other slower, heavier through the sole, controlled like a person trained to arrive without apology. Two bodies, not a teacher. Not the office ajumma who would have announced herself with keys and sighs.
The air shifts with cologne and winter wool, a clean expensive smell that doesn’t match toner and paper dust. They speak once, barely a thread of sound.
“Yeogi…” the lighter one murmurs, here, then stops, as if the word itself is too loud.
They come in like they’ve been given permission somewhere. Not permission on paper. The other kind: the kind that lives in the way you don’t hesitate before crossing a boundary. Upperclassmen, Minseo clocks: second-years, maybe third. Uniforms too crisp for 야자 exhaustion, ties set with practiced symmetry. Their ID lanyards don’t swing; they’re tucked away like accessories that might get caught on something.
Minseo’s thumb presses against the edge of her notebook until the cardboard cover bites. Don’t look. Don’t guard. Guarding is a flare.
The lighter one drifts to the counter, fingers brushing the scattered scrap sheets as if checking for warmth. The heavier one pauses half a beat too long behind her, close enough that Minseo can feel the calculation: where her hands are, what she’s holding, what she’s not holding. She makes her breathing boring: in, out, like she’s waiting for copies that never finish.
On the printer display, the queue list is empty. The “recent jobs” icon sits there like a closed mouth. The heavier student steps toward it anyway, shoulders loose, gaze unbothered. He doesn’t touch the screen yet. He watches the tray first, and then Minseo’s knuckles, as if expecting paper to appear by confession.
They don’t greet her, not even the shallow nod students trade in tight spaces. Their attention slides over her eyes and stops at her wrists, the notebook, the thin shadow where paper could be. It’s a practiced scan. The one with the lighter steps lets a polite expression bloom, the kind you put on for a homeroom teacher when you’re asking for a signature, then he turns it on Minseo like she’s part of the wall: present, irrelevant, to be stepped around.
The other moves with a contained impatience that doesn’t look like rushing. He angles himself toward the printer as if he’s done this before. His fingers hover near the touchscreen, close enough to feel heat off it, but he doesn’t tap. He waits. For her to flinch. For her to reach for something. For the tray to betray her.
Minseo keeps her hands boring. She loosens her grip on the notebook a fraction, letting the cover sit flat, letting her knuckles un-whiten. In the corner of her vision, the lighter one’s gaze drops (just once) to the staple edge, as if counting pages. Then he looks away too quickly, like noticing would be an admission.
Minseo shifts half a step sideways, the way you do when you’re making room for someone with cleaner shoes and louder certainty. She lets her shoulders soften, lets her gaze drift past them to the bulletin of toner instructions like she’s just another kid killing time between copies. The gesture is an offering: the machine, the space, the right-of-way.
Inside, she counts anyway. The heavier one takes the lane closest to the output tray. Close enough to intercept paper as it lands. The lighter one turns his body just slightly, not blocking the doorway outright but narrowing it, a polite fence. Neither of them fumbles for a phone; their hands stay empty, ready, like rules are something you carry in your pocket only when it’s convenient. Minseo keeps her own fingers still, notebook pressed flat, heart working overtime in a quiet face.
The heavier one finally wakes the touchscreen with two precise taps, scrolling straight past the help icons to Job History. He lingers there, too long for idle interest, eyes slicing from the empty list to the clean stack of A4, then to the faint ridge where a stapled packet would sit, then back. Auditing. Beside him, the other boy slouches into the counter like bored furniture, yet his angle stays perfect, a mirror trained on Minseo’s hands.
Politeness shrink-wraps their urgency, glossy and tight. “Did you print something?” the lighter one says in a voice meant for hall monitors: no lift at the end, no room to misunderstand. Minseo gives a small, neutral shake, eyes on the toner notice like she’s reading it. She keeps her palms open, fingers slack. In her head: header, staple bite, grid spacing, one question number skipping: memory as contraband.
Minseo backs out of the printer room like it’s a trap with teeth: not fast, not obvious, just a careful reverse step that keeps her shadow from crossing the threshold too much. Fluorescent light stutters on the glossy linoleum. The air is warm with toner and somebody’s sweet canned coffee, a smell that always makes her think of deadlines and mouths held shut.
Her eyes keep working even as her face stays blank. Header first: the school crest slightly too crisp, as if reprinted from a newer file. Staple angle: top-left, but pinched lower than usual, bite marks like tiny bruises in the paper. Grid spacing on the multiple-choice: tighter by a millimeter, enough to change how your pencil sits, enough that someone would mis-bubble if they were rushing. And the question numbers. One jump ahead, a skip that feels like a finger snapping in your face.
She doesn’t look at the boys again. Looking is an invitation. She lets her gaze drift to the wall clock above the printer like she has somewhere ordinary to be.
Behind her, the machine makes a soft mechanical sigh, the kind that sounds like paper is about to slide out. She keeps her hands where any camera would want them: visible, empty. Palms slightly out, fingers relaxed. Innocent.
But her brain won’t behave. A faint stamp on the backside, half-ghosted through the sheet as if the ink got pressed against something metal: ROOFTOP ACCESS LOG. The letters are smeared at the edges, like someone tried to wipe them with a sleeve. The words land in her stomach with a weight that has nothing to do with exams.
She crosses the hallway without running, shoulders loose, steps even. Competence as camouflage. Only when she turns the corner does she let herself breathe in, shallowly, through her nose, counting, steadying, while the packet’s layout keeps printing itself behind her eyes, one line at a time, as if memorizing it has already made her complicit.
The layout clings to her like a second shadow, each turn of the corridor cueing another line break, another mis-spaced bubble row. Minseo keeps her face arranged into “nothing,” but her mind is loud, header, crest, numbering jump, the tight grid that would make your pencil feel wrong. She tells herself she can file it away like any other anomaly. Like gossip. Like a teacher’s mood. Catalog, don’t carry.
At her desk she flips to the back of her notebook, the section she labels in small block letters: likely variants. It’s a system. Systems don’t accuse you.
Her hand hesitates above the page, pen tip hovering as if there’s a magnetic pull in the paper fibers. Then she writes, clean, pared down, an outline first. 1–5 in the same order she saw, the skipped number like a missing tooth. She doesn’t copy words. She copies shape: where the long passage sat, how the diagram leaned left, the way one question’s choices ran one line too far.
The ink should make it external, containable. Instead it sharpens. In her margins, the wrong test becomes legible enough to solve.
That night, 야자 ends and she walks home with the packet’s geometry still humming under her skin. At her desk, she runs her routine like a prayer: timer, water, two aspirin she doesn’t take, then the notebook opened to “likely variants.” The outline she swore was just a record pulls her in anyway. She builds solutions around shapes instead of sentences: where the long reading block should sit, where the diagram tilts, where the missing number leaves a gap you can fall through. Each answer she arrives at is crisp, checkable, obedient. For a few minutes her chest loosens, because numbers don’t raise their voices. She tells herself she’s inoculating against surprises. But her brain pays her in relief, and relief makes anything feel true. By 2 a.m., the “replacement” version has a familiar weight, like it belongs to her.
When the teacher starts sliding the official mock down each row, Minseo’s pen doesn’t wait for permission. It skates into the margin. Tiny timing marks, a quick formula, the kind of anchors she’s trained into her wrists. But the anchors are wrong. The prompts she scribbles come out in the “replacement” order, line breaks and all, like her body is clutching at familiarity before her mind can notice it’s poison.
The first look at the real packet hits like iced water. The numbers step differently; a passage she pre-solved isn’t there at all. Her notebook lies open on her desk (too neat, too ready) its margins holding a flawless skeleton of a test no one else received. For one blank beat she can’t reach “fix it,” only “this is how it will read.” The classroom noise keeps moving, but the air feels crowded with attention that hasn’t found her yet.
Two futures unspool at once, neat as parallel lines in her head.
In the first, she lifts her hand. The motion alone would feel like an admission. The teacher would pause, eyes narrowing the way they do when a student disrupts the sacred order of a mock. Minseo can already hear her own voice, too steady, too prepared: “Seonsaengnim, I think the packet is different.” Different. Such a polite word for accusation. It would land wrong. The room would pivot, chairs squeaking, classmates’ gazes snagging on her open notebook like hooks. Someone (Hajun, maybe, or a boy who wants to be on Hajun’s side) would smile without warmth. Of course she says that. Of course she has “noticed” something. Scholarship kids are always collecting proof, always calculating.
In the second future she keeps her head down and writes like nothing is burning. She crosses out the wrong anchors, rebuilds on the fly, pretends her earlier scribbles are just practice, just nerves. But paper is a kind of witness, and witnesses don’t care about intention. The margins of her notebook sit too cleanly organized, the wrong question numbers marching in confident sequence. It looks like a plan. It looks like she came in armed.
Either way, adults will do what adults do when the bell is loud and their time is thin: lean back, fold their hands, and choose the story that costs them the least. A student under pressure made a choice. A student tried to get ahead. A student like Minseo, capable, quiet, hungry, could have been tempted.
Her throat tightens around a small, stubborn sound she refuses to make. She presses her pen harder, as if pressure can pin reality to the desk. Somewhere behind her, a page turns; the soft flutter feels like judgment arriving early.
Scholarship. The word is printed in the handbook like a promise, but the clauses underneath it read like a trap: renewal contingent on conduct, on “integrity,” on anything an adult can circle with a red pen when they’re tired. She can see the progression in her head the way she sees math. Clean arrows, no mercy. Suspicion becomes review. Review becomes a meeting. A meeting becomes a file. A file becomes an explanation written in someone else’s polite language, filed under her name.
It isn’t only the number at the top of the test that trembles. It’s the tuition waiver that keeps her grandmother’s sighs from turning into numbers, too. It’s the small monthly stipend that buys bus fare and printer paper and the right kind of calculator. It’s the unspoken contract that lets her mother tell relatives, chin lifted, “Our Minseo got in on merit,” like that sentence alone can hold the house together.
One wrong-looking page and she can already feel the floor tilt: toward “how could you,” toward “we expected better,” toward a door that closes softly so nobody has to admit they pushed.
Minseo runs the answers through her mind like a script she can’t stop refining. If someone points at her notebook, those tidy columns, those confident numbers, she’ll say the printer room was chaotic, that packets got mixed, that she grabbed the wrong stack without looking. “Jeongmal, it was just. “I assumed it was the same.” Better. Neutral. Adult-friendly.
But each line, even rehearsed in silence, comes out sounding like an excuse that needs attachments: timestamps, witnesses, a teacher who remembers her face at the copier. The kind of explanation that invites a calm, murderous follow-up, Why didn’t you check? Why didn’t you report it immediately?. Until the story stops being about paper and becomes about intent. She swallows, jaw tight, as if she can physically hold her innocence in place.
Her gaze snaps back to the packet: clean staple lines, crisp header, and that almost-invisible ink blur on the reverse, like it kissed metal and pulled away. Rooftop. The word doesn’t belong anywhere near a mock exam. The detail should be leverage, evidence, something solid. Instead it sharpens into a warning: proof demands possession, and possession is how a mistake becomes intent.
Minseo does what she’s trained herself to do: presses her expression flat, shoulders square, hands folded like she’s waiting for a teacher to call her name. On the outside it reads as composure. Inside, the panic doesn’t leave; it recalibrates. It turns into a scanning habit, a constant inventory of who’s watching, what’s on the desk, where the paper came from, and what story it might force her to tell.
The rest of the day she moves like she’s holding a tray, careful, level, expression blank, but her attention keeps snagging on paper. Every handout is suddenly a living thing, capable of changing when she isn’t looking.
Between classes, she stops at the bulletin board where teachers tape up “important” notices in uneven rows. She reads them anyway, not for information but for inconsistencies: different staples, different white, edges cut slightly crooked. When the first bell rings, the hallway surges, and she tucks herself into the current with her backpack hugged close, making sure no loose sheet can slide out and be “helped” along by someone else’s hand.
In the classroom, she checks page numbers twice, then again, thumb flicking the corner like she’s counting money. She rereads headers as if the font might confess. The date line, the class code, the teacher’s initials. She mouths them silently, letting them scrape against her teeth. The photocopier’s whine from the office down the hall becomes a warning sound; the smell of toner makes her throat tighten, a chemical tang that seems to climb up the back of her nose and sit there.
She starts marking tiny, private anchors in her notes: a dot beside a title, a short diagonal slash under the last character of a word, not enough to notice unless you already knew to look. It’s stupid, she knows. It’s also the only control she has that doesn’t require permission.
At lunch, trays clatter, someone laughs too loudly, someone else complains about “fair questions,” and Minseo’s chopsticks hover over rice that tastes like nothing. Her eyes keep drifting to the stacks of worksheets on other desks, to the way someone folds a corner into a sharp triangle, to the quick exchange of pages like it’s nothing.
By the time evening self-study starts, her head aches in a tight band. She takes her notebook out and immediately turns it over, scanning the back cover for smudges, stamps, any shadow of contact she can’t account for: like the paper might be the one leaving fingerprints on her.
In second period math, the teacher taps the board and says, “Igeo mock siheom-e 나와요,” like it’s a promise. Minseo’s pen freezes mid-stroke: just long enough for her to feel how visible hesitation is. She forces it to move again, smooth, obedient.
But she isn’t just taking notes anymore. She copies the problem exactly as it appears: the comma after the 조건, the odd extra space before a fraction, the way the triangle in the diagram tilts left as if the photocopy warped it. She counts the tick marks on the angle, traces the thickness of the line with a lighter touch and then a darker one, trying to match the teacher’s chalk pressure. When the teacher underlines a phrase twice, Minseo underlines it twice in the same place, even though it makes her page look manic.
It’s ridiculous. It’s also the closest thing to a timestamp she can make without stealing anything.
Around her, pages flip, erasers squeak, someone whispers “daebak” at a tricky step. Minseo keeps her eyes down. The notebook feels less like 공부 and more like evidence: proof that what entered her hands existed in this shape, at this moment, before it could be replaced.
She tries to reset the only way she knows: 더 해. More 문제집, tighter 시간표, an extra alarm at 5:[^20] that she hits without remembering her own name. She builds a grid in the margin until it looks like a small prison she can manage. Caffeine takes the edge off her dizziness and sharpens the edges of everything else.
But the first time Yuna slides her worksheet over to compare, Minseo’s stomach drops at a single number that isn’t where it should be. Not wrong, exactly: just different. A posted 해설 on the bulletin board uses a diagram angle she never saw. Even her own neat steps start to feel like they’re chasing a moving answer key.
“I’ll outwork it” has always been a spell. Now it won’t catch.
The contamination doesn’t stay on paper; it seeps into objects. A locked classroom door stops being policy and becomes a mouth that won’t answer, metal lip sealed tight. When a teacher talks about 정직, the words tilt, as if they’re aimed at her for some uncommitted crime. She starts mapping footsteps after lunch, who cuts past the office, who pauses by the printer room, then flinches at herself, at suspicion turning into a skill.
That night, under the desk lamp’s thin cone of light, Minseo opens her notebook and sees them (those questions) settled inside her own handwriting, each line straight, each number placed like she’d meant it. Her throat tightens. Was it carelessness? A half-asleep slip? Or had she been guided, nudged, steered without noticing? The panic doesn’t flare; it compresses, ice-cold. From now on, 학교 isn’t fairness. It’s a machine, and she has to learn its gears before they grind her down.
Minseo angles her shoulders and threads along the wall, keeping her gaze on the floor tiles the way she does when she needs to be invisible; the broadcast club hallway is too loud, too bright, too full of names that turn into stories.
Posters for auditions and “NEW SEMESTER RECRUITMENT” peel at the corners, tape darkened from too many hands. Someone’s speaker leaks tinny bass from a dance cover practice room, and the air smells like hot toner from the office printer plus the sweet sting of canned coffee. Students in uniform clusters keep pivoting toward the broadcast club door, laughing like it costs nothing. Minseo counts steps instead. Tile, tile, scuff mark. Don’t look up. Don’t get drafted into someone else’s narrative.
Her phone is off in her bag, school rule, scholarship rule, rule-rule-rule, so she can’t even pretend to check it. She tightens her ponytail without raising her elbows, a small habit of making herself smaller. Above the noise, she catches fragments: “selection,” “recommendation,” “Seoul Nat, no, not that one, ” and her stomach gives that familiar drop, the one that comes when adults decide things behind frosted glass.
She should be in the library. She should be anywhere that has a desk and a predictable silence.
A teacher’s shoes click past, and Minseo presses closer to the wall to let him through, careful not to brush anyone. The last thing she needs is a rumor that she “thinks she’s too good” or that she’s “acting weird” when her home is already one wrong phone call away from collapsing into public. Competence is a shield, but only if she doesn’t draw attention to it.
She reaches the bend where the hallway narrows by the trophy case, already picturing the escape route, stairs down, turn left, disappear into the stream of first-years, when a shadow slides across her path.
A body steps cleanly into her line.
Lina is the one who’s stepped in. No shove, no grab, just a precise sidestep that turns Minseo’s straight line into a decision. She blocks like a door that isn’t locked but still makes you feel stupid for trying the handle. Her uniform is as neat as Minseo’s, but she wears it like she’s late for something important; a lanyard swings once, then goes still. Close enough that Minseo catches the faint medicinal sweetness of peppermint gum, close enough that if Minseo keeps walking she’ll collide and everyone will look up and pick a story.
Minseo’s feet slow on instinct. Her shoulder bag bumps her hip, heavy with notebooks and the kind of planning that only works if no one interrupts it. Lina doesn’t lean in or raise her voice. She just holds the space: chin level, eyes sharp, not hostile, just…intent.
Around them, the hallway current keeps moving, bodies sliding past in pairs and trios, laughter skipping off the trophy case glass. Lina’s timing is clean, practiced, like she’s intercepted people before: students who pretend announcements are background noise, students who think they can out-walk responsibility.
“Minseo.”
No “hey,” no sing-song greeting, no polite padding. Just her name, clean and level, as if Lina has filed it under something urgent. The sound lands with the sharpness of a roll-call, and Minseo’s focus jerks up before she can stop it, reflexive the way her hand always rises when a teacher says her name like it’s a test question.
For a beat, the hallway blurs: mouths moving, laughter breaking, the trophy case catching fluorescent glare. Minseo’s ears narrow to that one syllable and the space between them.
Lina doesn’t smile. She doesn’t apologize for stopping her. Her eyes hold steady, saying, I’m not here to chat.
Minseo swallows, throat tight, and forces her face into neutral like she can make herself unchosen by looking like work.
Minseo’s first response is physical, not verbal: a half-step back that pretends to be courtesy. Her fingers cinch around the edge of her notebook until the paper bows. She scans past Lina’s shoulder (two second-years laughing, a gap near the trophy case, the stairs’ mouth swallowing uniforms) mapping exits the way she maps test time. Her pulse ticks in her wrists: move, now, before this becomes obligation.
Lina’s voice stays low, not a whisper but a scalpel. Quiet enough to avoid attention, sharp enough Minseo can’t pretend she didn’t hear. Minseo answers with nothing: no nod, no question, just her eyes going flat as she tightens her grip on her notebook. Silence is her habit of self-defense. If she gives Lina even one hook, a favor will form, and favors become stories.
Lina moved with the kind of forward momentum that made other students part around her without realizing they’d yielded. She cut across the corridor and planted herself in front of Minseo: close enough that Minseo had to stop or bump shoulders, far enough that it wasn’t technically a confrontation. Like she’d timed it: the bell had just rung, the hallway current was thick, teachers were still behind closed doors.
In Lina’s hand was a folded printout, edges softened from being clenched too long. Not a cute handout, not something from a club: plain A4, black-and-white, the school logo faint at the top like a stamp of legitimacy. Lina didn’t offer it. She held it like evidence.
Minseo’s eyes went to it anyway, faster than she could decide not to. Headline: University-Prep Excellence Track. The words were in the school’s official font, the same one used for disciplinary notices and scholarship reminders. Beneath it, smaller, almost apologetic: recommendation-based selection.
Her stomach tightened on reflex. Recommendation meant a person. A person meant a mood, a favor, a debt.
Lina angled the page so the fluorescent light didn’t wash it out, a practiced tilt like she’d done this in front of someone else: maybe more than one someone. Her finger hovered, then pressed the line as if to keep it from slipping away.
Minseo felt her own posture go rigid, shoulders drawing up under her backpack straps. She kept her face blank, but her mind was already calculating: who would see them, whose phone would be out despite the rules, whether a teacher would glance up and decide this looked like “stirring.” She could hear her mother’s voice in the back of her skull, don’t stand out, don’t give them a reason, and her father’s, sharper, insisting that competence was the only thing no one could take.
“Recommendation,” Minseo said finally, testing the word like it might bite.
Lina’s mouth didn’t soften. “Read it,” she said, quiet, impatient. “All of it.”
“There are only a few seats,” Lina said, and the corridor noise seemed to thin around her words. She tapped the fine print with a blunt fingernail, tap, tap, like she could knock an answer loose from the bureaucratic wording. “And the criteria reads like fog on purpose. They’ll call it holistic, they’ll put phrases like leadership potential and community fit in there, and everyone will nod like it’s fair.”
Her eyes didn’t leave Minseo’s face; Lina watched for flinches the way teachers watched for cheating. “But it’s going to be managed,” she continued, voice still low, still careful. “By who your homeroom teacher already decided is ‘safe.’ By whose mom shows up to committee meetings with fruit boxes. By who can get a ‘suggestion’ in front of the right vice principal without anyone calling it influence.”
Lina’s finger slid down the page to the recommendation section and pressed hard enough to crease it. “Grades are the excuse they use after. The real selection happens before anyone even applies.”
Minseo could smell the toner on the paper, sharp and new, like a warning printed fresh.
Minseo’s jaw sets hard enough to ache. She skims the printout in one clean sweep eyes moving like she’s timing herself on a mock exam. Leadership potential. Community fit. Words that could mean anything, which meant they could mean you, not you, depending on who was speaking.
She folds the page back along Lina’s original crease, neat, almost compulsive, and returns it like it’s hot. No lingering grip, no accidental brush of fingers that could be read as agreement. Her shoulders square under her backpack straps, spine straight, the posture of a student who’s already practicing how to say no without sounding defensive.
“Not my thing,” she says, voice flat. But her gaze darts once, left, right, cataloging who might have seen them pause. Contact wasn’t the danger. Being pulled into a story was.
Lina’s gaze hardens, urgency threaded through the calm. “I’m not telling you to apply,” she says, almost biting each word. “I’m telling you to watch. Screenshot the notices before they ‘update’ them. Write down who gets called in, who suddenly has ‘prior commitments.’ Compare the wording. Scholarship kids get filtered out quietly, and they’ll still call it merit.”
Minseo cuts in before Lina can hook her with another we or us. “You have the wrong person,” she says, each syllable ironed smooth. “I’m not organizing anything. I’m not reporting anything.” Her fingers tighten around her backpack strap until the webbing bites. “I’m just a student who studies. I’ll get in on grades.” Saying it out loud feels like a vow: and a shield.
Lina’s warning doesn’t feel like information; it feels like paperwork. Like a thin white envelope slid under their apartment door, the kind her mother pretends not to see until the night gets quiet enough to make it impossible.
Minseo’s mind starts doing what it always does when someone offers her “help”: it builds the timeline backward. She doesn’t picture Lina’s plan. She pictures the after. A homeroom teacher’s eyes snagging on her for half a second too long when she speaks. The way the vice-principal’s mouth would tighten: not angry, just aware. A “casual” request to stop by the counseling office that isn’t casual at all. The counselor’s desk with its tidy stack of pamphlets, the scent of hand sanitizer, the slow, practiced voice: We just want to make sure you’re okay.
Okay means monitored.
She can almost see the email thread: polite subject line, neutral font, her name typed out like it’s already decided. “Scholarship status review” isn’t a threat; it’s an administrative possibility. Those are worse, because nobody has to admit they’re punishing you. They can call it “standard procedure,” and the people at home who need her to stay funded will only hear the part that matters, review, and panic will seep into every meal, every whispered phone call behind a half-closed door.
Her grandmother’s face flashes up, not dramatic, just tired. The grocery ledger on the fridge. Her mother counting out cash like it’s a ritual. Minseo’s own sleep-deprived reflection in the bathroom mirror, eyes too alert for the hour. One wrong label at school and the instability at home stops being private; it becomes a file someone can request.
Around them, the hallway keeps moving. Shoes squeaking, a distant laugh, the crackle of the broadcast club’s leftover announcements on a speaker somewhere. Ordinary life, loud enough to pretend nothing is happening.
Minseo swallows and holds her expression steady. If Lina’s words are a notice, Minseo’s refusal has to be a signature that doesn’t smudge. She can’t afford to be a story. She can only afford to be a score.
In Minseo’s head, the verbs never stay neutral. Asking slides into questioning, and questioning turns into accusing with the speed of a teacher’s pen circling a mistake. Then it’s not about the program anymore. It’s about her. About her “attitude.” About “fit.” About whether she’s the kind of student who creates “discomfort.”
She can practically script the meeting, down to the plastic chairs and the way adults soften their mouths before they say something unforgivable. We’re just checking in. We value transparency. Responsibility is important for scholarship recipients. Words that sound like care until they stack up, brick by brick, and her name gets pinned in the middle like a photo on a bulletin board. Evidence.
Minseo imagines herself answering carefully, too carefully, and that carefulness being interpreted as guilt. She can hear the polite escalation: from concern to “pattern,” from “pattern” to “risk.” A small frown from the vice-principal; a note typed, not handwritten, because typed notes travel.
And once it’s typed, it’s real in a way her life at home never gets to be.
The worst part is how cleanly adults can stitch a life together once they decide there’s a seam. She’s worked so hard to keep things in separate folders (school in one, home in another, emotions zipped into the smallest pocket) but a teacher only needs one phrase. Home environment. It sounds harmless, like lighting or noise level, not like her father’s voice sharpening over dinner. One “just to verify” request for documents, a family registry copy, a guardian signature, and the private chaos becomes official ink. The divorce stops being a rattling in the kitchen and turns into a checkbox, an explanation that can be offered without anyone admitting they’re judging her. Unstable. A word that sticks to scholarship files like toner, impossible to fully erase once it prints.
Her grandmother’s face rises up without permission: careful silence like a folded blanket, hands flattening bills as if respect can keep them from multiplying. Pride maintained through omission: it’s fine, it’s fine, said until it becomes policy. Minseo feels their money’s thinness, not in numbers but in heat, like paper held too close to a flame. One stray breath, one new label, and it curls.
Bravery doesn’t feel noble here; it feels like an invoice with no due date, only penalties. It sits under her sternum, heavy and precise, like a textbook she can’t set down without someone noticing the empty desk. If she leans into it, something else tips. So she does what she’s practiced: lowers her gaze, smooths her expression, makes her life look easy to file.
That night Minseo clears a rectangle of space on her desk the way she used to clear her plate as a kid. Everything pushed to the edges, nothing allowed to drip into the center. The old planner lies open, its pages already freckled with eraser dust and tiny apologies in the margins. She doesn’t flip back to see what she promised herself last week. She tears the schedule out cleanly, folds it once, and slots it into the trash like evidence.
A fresh page. A sharper pencil.
She writes the headings first, in English because it looks more official: WAKE, COMMUTE, REVIEW, SETS, DINNER, YAZA. Then she starts pinning time to them, ten-minute increments like thumbtacks. 05:[^40]. Alarm. 05:[^45]: stretch (because the counselor once said it would help). 05:[^55]: vocab deck. 06:[^20]: bus; reading passages standing up, phone tucked low so no teacher can confiscate it at the stop. 07:[^10], arrive, buy coffee only if she feels dizzy; she underlines only twice.
Her hand moves faster when she’s not thinking. Between blocks she draws arrows, contingency plans: if homeroom is noisy, library. If headache, switch to math drills. If Dad texts, ignore until 22:[^30]. She doesn’t write divorce. She doesn’t write court. She doesn’t write the sound of her mother washing dishes too hard, like she’s trying to scrub the day off the plates.
The page fills until there’s barely white left, a city map made of rules. It’s satisfying in a shallow way: each line a promise that tomorrow will be navigable if she obeys it. When she reaches the late hours she hesitates, pencil hovering over the narrow strip that should be sleep. 00:[^10]. Lights out. 00:[^20]: actually out. She adds 00:[^30] like a compromise with reality.
She checks her watch, then the clock on her laptop, then her phone, aligning them as if time itself has been lying to her and can be corrected by agreement. The house is quiet in the brittle way it gets after an argument, everyone pretending their breathing isn’t part of the problem.
When she’s done, she traces the schedule once with her fingertip. Her pulse slows, not because she’s calm, but because she’s contained. For a moment, the future is just boxes she can fill.
In the margins of her textbooks, Minseo builds a second curriculum nobody grades. She copies definitions the way some people count breaths: term, colon, meaning until the graphite thins and her handwriting turns smaller, more disciplined, as if neatness can replace sleep. Formulas march down the page beside the printed ones, each symbol retraced like a door she keeps locking to make sure it’s really shut.
Her ring finger develops a pencil groove, tender and exact. When she presses too hard, the skin lifts into a sore line that stings when she washes her hands; she welcomes it anyway, a pain with rules. Caffeine heat sits behind her eyes. The room hums with the old refrigerator and the distant murmur of adults keeping their voices “normal.” She doesn’t look up when a door clicks. She doesn’t pause to listen for names.
Repetition is dull comfort: the page fills, the lead smudges, her eraser leaves pale scars. Effort becomes measurable something that can’t be argued about at the dinner table.
On practice questions she keeps her work pristine. She draws the margin line with a ruler. She numbers each step like a lab report. No “maybe,” no tiny questions that would betray a second of doubt. When a shortcut occurs to her, she ignores it and writes the longer method anyway, proof, not speed. Even her eraser marks are controlled: one clean swipe, no shredded paper, no gray smears that look like panic.
If she makes a mistake, she doesn’t circle it. She copies the entire solution onto a new sheet, as if the wrong version never existed. Her answers line up in obedient columns, black ink over pencil, a final layer of authority. It’s not for the grader. It’s for her: an attempt to make certainty real by making it look real.
She signs her name on the yaja attendance sheet with a hand that wants to tremble and doesn’t, then drops into her assigned seat like it’s a checkpoint. The lights bleach everyone into quiet outlines; the air tastes faintly of toner and instant coffee. Her eyes grit with dryness, lids heavy, but she keeps them open: because being visible, upright, working, feels safer than arriving home early to voices.
Yuna falls into step beside her, voice low. “So. What did Lina say?” Minseo keeps her gaze ahead, counting tiles, counting breaths. “Nothing,” she says, and then, because Yuna’s silence waits like a hand on her sleeve: “Just… noise. Rankings are what they count. Rankings are what they listen to.” She makes it sound like math, not fear, and lets the recited rule steady them both.
In the corridor, conversations don’t stop. Just kink, the way a ribbon twists when you pull it; she feels the shift more than she hears it, syllables swallowed as she draws near. Someone laughs a beat too late, like they remembered they’re supposed to. A backpack strap gets adjusted, a phone disappears into a pocket even though phones are already a risk. The soundscape doesn’t quiet; it reorganizes around her, leaving her as the awkward empty center.
Minseo keeps walking. Practical shoes, even pace. If she looks up, it turns into a confrontation. If she looks down, it looks like guilt. So she fixes her gaze at shoulder-height and catalogues details the way she does formulas: three girls by the broadcast club poster, one boy leaning against the window with his tie loosened, the homeroom teacher’s office door cracked open like an ear.
A name flickers, hers?, then gets replaced by something safer, a pronoun, a laugh, a “ya, seriously.” She doesn’t catch the full sentence, only the shape of it, the way her own anxiety supplies missing words with cruel efficiency. Something about “selection,” maybe. Something about “fair,” said like a joke.
Yuna, half a step behind, says nothing, but Minseo feels her attention like a steady hand hovering near her elbow, ready to grab if Minseo tilts. Minseo refuses to tilt. She passes the trophy case where last year’s rankings photo stares out. Smiling faces, identical blazers, the illusion of equal lighting. The fluorescent glare makes the glass reflect her back: hair tied tight, eyes too sharp for how little she’s slept.
A classroom door swings open and clips her shoulder. “Sorry,” a boy says, already looking past her. His apology is perfect in the way people apologize when they’re not apologizing to you, but to the air.
Minseo’s throat tightens, then loosens. She adjusts the strap of her bag and keeps moving, because the only thing she can control is motion, forward, measured, no sudden turns, like if she walks correctly enough, the corridor won’t be able to rewrite her into whatever story it’s telling.
A worksheet slides onto Minseo’s desk with the soft, flat sound of something meant to look harmless. The top margin is crisp, the font too official. Her first thought isn’t study. It’s setup.
She doesn’t touch it right away. She watches how it arrived: not passed down a row, not tossed by a friend, placed, as if someone made a point of accuracy. The paper sits perfectly squared with the desk edge, daring her to disturb it and leave proof in the crooked angle.
Around her, pencils move. Pages turn. The room does what it always does, but she feels the difference in her own body: the small lift of her shoulders, the heat behind her eyes from too little sleep, the way her pulse starts counting possibilities instead of problems.
She flips the worksheet over. Blank. No hidden message, no scribble. That should be relief.
Instead it’s worse: because the second purpose wouldn’t be written. It would be timing. Witnesses. A rule she doesn’t know she’s breaking until someone decides she is.
The rooftop stairwell door is shut the way a mouth shuts when it’s decided not to answer you. A fresh strip of yellow tape crosses the frame, the school crest stamped on it like authority made visible; beneath it, the metal latch gleams, newly oiled, catching fluorescent light as if proud of itself. Minseo doesn’t go up there (she knows the rule, knows the incident, knows how quickly “just once” becomes a report) but her eyes snag on it anyway.
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, the sign says, in Korean and blocky English. She reads it the way she reads ranking lists: as a boundary drawn by someone who won’t be the one paying for crossing it. Every locked door on campus starts to feel like a decision made in advance. Who gets choices, who gets consequences.
She flips open her notebook like it’s a railing, fingers finding the familiar spine. But the page doesn’t calm her. The neat columns look like logs; the highlighted margins like flags. Dates. Seat numbers. Who said what, when. Her own handwriting (too consistent, too legible) feels suddenly arguable, something a teacher could hold up and ask, jotteul? Where did you get this?
By the time the bell cuts through the room, “normal” has turned into something staged. Everyone acting like they don’t notice the same things she does. A laugh lands half a beat late. A classmate’s eyes flick to her hands, then away. Even the teacher’s pause feels measured. Minseo gathers her pens slowly, careful not to look hurried, bracing for the day her carefulness gets called suspicious.
The broadcast club announcements ended the way they always did. Too loud, too bright, and somehow already old news the second the microphone clicked off. Students peeled away in slick currents, adjusting blazers, comparing Instagram posts, trading “eotteokhae” like it was a joke instead of a prayer.
Minseo stayed at the edge, where she could pretend she was only waiting for the crowd to thin.
Lina slid into that edge like she belonged there. Not smiling. Not apologizing. Her lanyard swung once and then stilled as if even her movements were rationed.
“Minseo-ya,” Lina said, voice low enough to be mistaken for gossip. “Did you see the notice?”
Minseo’s eyes flicked to the bulletin board without moving her head. A new sheet of paper, school logo, a neat title in bold: an “elite university-prep program” with a name that sounded imported and expensive. Under it: dates, requirements, a QR code. The kind of thing that made teachers’ expressions soften around certain last names.
“I saw,” Minseo said. She kept her tone flat, like she was answering attendance.
Lina leaned in just slightly, the way people did when they were about to offer a secret or a warning. “Spots are limited. The rubric is vague on purpose. You know that, right?”
Minseo heard the pencil-point of it: vague meant flexible. Flexible meant someone else’s hands.
“There’s an interview,” Lina continued. “Recommendation weighting. ‘Holistic’ evaluation. It’s going to be handled.”
Handled. The word landed like a thumb pressing on a bruise. Minseo’s stomach tightened automatically, thinking of signatures, phone calls, who got called “mature” and who got called “problematic.”
“Handled by who?” she asked, then hated herself for asking.
Lina’s eyes darted past Minseo’s shoulder toward a knot of polished students laughing too neatly, their parents’ names probably already stored in someone’s office contacts. “By people with favorites. By people who think scholarship kids are good for the brochure.”
Minseo’s fingers closed around the strap of her bag until the fabric bit. She could feel her face trying to betray her, interest, anger, wanting, and forced it still.
“I’m not doing this,” she said, careful. “I’ll apply. I’ll do well. That’s it.”
Lina’s mouth tightened. “Grades won’t matter if they don’t want them to.”
Minseo didn’t look up at her. She stared at the QR code like it was a trap disguised as an opportunity, and kept her voice neutral because neutrality was camouflage. “I can’t afford… managed,” she said, and let the rest stay unspoken: I can’t afford to be the story.
Minseo kept her expression as blank as the hallway tiles. It was an old reflex: don’t feed the moment anything it could grow into. Lina’s word, managed, kept echoing anyway, too close to the language adults used right before someone “took responsibility” and a name disappeared from a list.
No coalition. No group chat. No “we should talk to the vice principal.” Those were for students with parents who could make phone calls without trembling, for kids who could afford to be righteous in public. Minseo’s life ran on conditions: attendance, conduct, quiet excellence. One complaint stamped the wrong way and scholarship support could turn from lifeline to leash.
She imagined the counselor’s office, the polite tilt of a teacher’s head. Are you saying the school is unfair? The question would sound reasonable, even kind, while it boxed her in. If she said yes, she became difficult. If she said no, she admitted she’d imagined it.
So she chose the only safe posture she knew. Competence without heat. “I’ll just do what I can,” she said, like that was a plan and not a retreat.
The scholarship kids clock it anyway. Minseo doesn’t have to look to know: she can feel the shift in air, that quick tightening that happens when someone’s name becomes relevant. Two rows down the corridor, someone laughs too loudly at nothing. Another student pretends to scroll their phone even though phones are supposed to be off, thumb hovering like an alibi. A boy with a scholarship pin keeps his gaze on the floor, but his shoulders angle toward them, listening with his whole body.
And then there are the ones who look straight at Minseo like they’re doing math: risk, payoff, collateral damage.
A question moves through them without words, passed in glances and swallowed breaths: will she play quiet and survive, or speak and make it everyone’s problem?
Across the hall, the chaebol-adjacent politeness shifts into something counted. “Annyeong” comes with a head tilt that measures her blazer sleeve, her scholarship pin, the distance between her and Lina. A girl praises Minseo’s “discipline” like it’s a specimen; a boy asks, too lightly, what she thinks the interview questions might be. Their smiles don’t warm. They calibrate. They decide.
Hajun didn’t confront her. He calibrated. She’d feel him before she saw him: an extra half-second of silence when her zipper rasped open, his gaze tagging the borrowed stapler, the library sign-out sheet, the way she wrote her name too neatly. His politeness stayed perfect, which made it worse; it turned her routines into evidence. Soon “integrity” wasn’t a virtue the school preached: it was a spotlight searching for a face.
Homeroom always had a soft-buzz tension, like the room was holding its breath until the first bell made everything official. Minseo kept her notebook open on her knee because the desk’s surface was sticky from someone’s energy drink spill, and because writing looked like compliance. Practical. Safe.
Hajun sat two rows ahead, spine straight as if his blazer had been ironed onto him. When the teacher finished the usual announcements (mock exam schedules, 야자 attendance reminders, the warning about phones) Hajun’s hand rose with the smooth certainty of someone who had already calculated the outcome.
“Seonsaengnim,” he said, voice even, polite enough to be admirable. “Could you confirm the 기준 for what counts as unauthorized problem packets? Just so there’s no misunderstanding.”
It wasn’t a challenge. It was a gift wrapped in deference. The kind of question that made the teacher’s posture adjust into Public Fairness Mode, the kind Minseo recognized from watching adults at home switch tones when relatives visited.
The teacher blinked, then nodded too quickly. “Right. Good question. So. Materials from outside sources are fine if they’re publicly available or purchased. But internal packets, like departmental practice sheets, or compiled exam questions intended for teacher distribution, those are not for students unless officially provided.”
The class shifted, chairs squeaking. Someone at the back whispered, “Is this about last week?” Another pencil stopped mid-scratch. Minseo’s own pen paused, the ink pooling a second too long at the end of a line. She forced her fingers to keep moving, to look like she was taking notes on policy, not on herself.
Hajun kept his face neutral, eyes on the teacher, as if he was simply responsible. He added, gentle as a reminder: “And if someone… gets access unintentionally? Like, from a friend’s older sibling, or a group chat?”
The teacher’s mouth tightened. “Intent matters, but possession matters too. If it resembles internal material, it can become an integrity issue.”
Integrity. The word landed with a weight Minseo felt in her molars, like biting down on aluminum.
She didn’t look up. She could feel the room’s attention reorienting in small angles, the way people lean toward a story before it’s spoken. She told herself it wasn’t about her. She told herself her notes were clean. She told herself, automatically, that staying quiet was the safest thing.
Then Hajun lowered his hand and, with the smallest turn of his head, as if checking something irrelevant, let his gaze slide once toward her notebook. Not blame. Not a glare. Just a precise, measured glance that made direction contagious.
The teacher’s voice warmed into that practiced, institutional patience. Fairness as performance, fairness as warning. “For example,” she said, and the word opened a door. “If it’s a worksheet stamped with our department header, if it includes the same numbering style we use for in-house mock exams, if it’s a compiled packet meant for 교무실 circulation. Those are internal. Even screenshots. Even if someone says they ‘found it.’” She paused, then added, as if remembering she had to sound reasonable, “Public workbooks are fine. EBS is fine. Hagwon handouts are fine. But anything that looks like our material: don’t keep it. Bring it to me.”
The room adjusted around Minseo in tiny frictions: chair legs scraping, the click of a mechanical pencil, a breath that turned into a stifled laugh and then died. Someone murmured, “So strict,” like strictness was abstract until it had a name.
Hajun didn’t react. His face stayed smooth. Only his eyes moved: one clean flick toward Minseo’s notebook, not a point, not a stare. Just a calibration. The nearest desks caught it anyway, heads turning in a small wave, following his precision like it was instruction.
Minseo kept writing anyway. Her handwriting stayed neat, each stroke measured, like she could trap her pulse inside the grid lines if she didn’t let the pen lift too long. Under the desk, her knee bounced once, then she pinned it still with the heel of her shoe.
She scanned the room the way she scanned a multiple-choice set, fast, silent, looking for the trick. Two girls near the window exchanged a look that said thank god it’s not me, then dropped their eyes like that made them innocent. A boy in the back sat too straight, suddenly interested in his ruler. Someone’s whisper threaded her name into the air without fully committing to it.
Hajun’s calm was the loudest thing in the room. Minseo filed that away, too.
Before lunch ended, she returned to her seat and found a folded slip waiting where her pencil case should have been, placed with the care of someone who didn’t want to be seen. The paper was thick, stamped with the school’s blue header like a bruise. One line: Report to Administration. No name. No time. Just an instruction that felt already filed.
In the girls’ bathroom, the fluorescent light made her skin look borrowed. Minseo gripped the sink until her knuckles blanched, counted her inhales like a metronome, hana, dul, set, then stared herself down in the mirror. Inventory, not panic. Which notebook, which day, whose handout, which hagwon logo, which chat timestamp. If she walked in saying “I don’t know,” the file would translate it: unclear. Unclear became guilty.
Minseo pushed through the bathroom door like she was leaving a different temperature. The hallway air hit her face, drier, sharper, full of the same disinfectant and instant coffee that lived in every corner of Haneulseong. She kept her notes pressed flat against her ribs, not because anyone could steal them mid-stride, but because the pressure gave her hands a job besides shaking.
Two first-years in gym jackets paused at the water fountain and looked at her too long. Minseo adjusted her grip, turned her shoulders a degree to slip past, and kept walking as if she hadn’t noticed. Her ponytail tugged at her scalp with each step. She could feel her pulse in that small ache.
The office corridor was a narrower kind of silence. The bulletin board here wasn’t club flyers; it was laminated policy sheets and scholarship notices in stiff fonts. Rules you could be buried under.
She rounded the corner and almost ran into Yuna.
Yuna’s body moved like it had been told to take up less space. Her backpack straps were straightened to perfect symmetry, her uniform collar smoothed, her expression composed in a way that didn’t match the swollen redness around her eyes. The skin beneath them looked raw, like she’d splashed cold water again and again hoping it would erase something.
“Unnie. “Minseo.”
Minseo caught the edge of Yuna’s sleeve with two fingers, gentle but firm, anchoring her before she could step back and pretend this was a normal pass in the hallway. Up close, Minseo could smell soap on Yuna’s hands. Too recent, too much.
“Did you cry?” The question came out clinical, like checking a symptom list.
Yuna’s mouth twitched into a smile that didn’t reach anywhere useful. “Just… my eyes. The sink water’s cold.”
That was a lie by omission, and Yuna wasn’t sloppy. Minseo’s stomach tightened. She followed Yuna’s gaze without being obvious: the office door, closed; down the hall, a teacher lingering near the stairwell, posture casual in the way surveillance tried to be.
Yuna leaned in a fraction, voice thin as paper. “They talked to me.”
Yuna’s voice dropped to a near-whisper, the kind meant to disappear into the hum of the fluorescent lights. Her eyes flicked once toward the office door, then down the corridor where a teacher stood with a clipboard held loose at his side, pretending to read the bulletin board. The pretense made Minseo’s skin prickle; adults at Haneulseong watched like they were collecting evidence from breathing.
“They already said it,” Yuna murmured, and swallowed like the words were too dry. “That… if you get involved with integrity issues, it follows you.”
Minseo kept her face still. Her mind, however, started sorting the phrase the way it sorted test questions: integrity issues. Not cheating. Not accusation. A category broad enough to catch anyone standing nearby.
Yuna’s fingers tightened around her backpack strap until the fabric creased. “Recommendations. Club positions. Even small things: like who they ask to manage materials, who they trust with the broadcast room key.” Her laugh was a thin exhale, almost polite. “They said I should… be careful who I’m seen with.”
As if proximity was a choice, and not a trap.
Minseo opened her mouth and reached for the kind of sentence that solved things, It’s okay, I’ll handle it. I’ll talk to them. I have timestamps. Competence as bandage. But the hallway itself felt like a lesson plan: keep your distance, keep your scholarship, keep your name unlinked. She saw it in the way Yuna’s shoulders angled away, not from Minseo, but from the imaginary camera of other people’s eyes.
“I’ll, ” Minseo started, then stopped, because any plan that required Yuna to stand beside her was already a sacrifice.
The accusation wasn’t a knife; it was disinfectant. Spread it around, make everyone afraid to touch. Minseo’s fingers tightened on Yuna’s sleeve, then loosened, careful not to look like she was holding her back. “Don’t say anything alone,” she managed, voice low. “Not unless I’m there.”
Yuna didn’t make it sound tragic. She stated it like a schedule she’d already adjusted to: if the adults needed the story to have a second name, someone close enough to make it believable, they would reach for the nearest hand. And Yuna had been nearest. Shared printouts slid across desks, the same seat in 야자, the same turns down this corridor. Evidence by adjacency.
The drop in Minseo’s stomach is immediate and physical, like a trapdoor opening under her ribs. She sees the mechanism with terrible clarity: don’t prove she cheated. Just make standing near her feel risky. Turn her into a kind of contagion. Let teachers “advise,” let friends flinch, let silence spread. Isolation will do half the punishment, long before any verdict is typed and filed.
The waiting area chairs were molded plastic, the kind that gripped the backs of her thighs through her skirt. A fluorescent panel buzzed overhead with a thin, impatient sound. Minseo sat with her knees together and her hands folded on top of her phone-less empty lap, like posture could be a defense.
In. Hold. Out. Four counts, then again. She kept her gaze on a smudged poster about “Academic Integrity” taped to the wall (bold letters, cheerful clip-art scales) until the words stopped being English and became shapes. Panic didn’t leave; it reorganized. It slid out of her chest and into a line, narrow and usable.
Don’t think: am I in trouble. Think: what happened, in what order, who saw what.
Monday: after 야자, the classroom lights snapping off in sections as the last students filed out; she’d packed her bag by habit, checked her planner, watched the hallway clock tick past ten. Tuesday: the library, because home was loud and the air in the study cafe cost money; she’d needed the printer because her old worksheet was covered in eraser scars. Wednesday: homeroom, the announcements, the pile of handouts passed down each row, sleeves brushing paper like it didn’t matter. Thursday: study group, three desks pushed together, someone’s iced Americano sweating a ring onto the tabletop, the smell of instant coffee and highlighters.
Her mind began building a map the way she built study schedules. Who could confirm she was in the library at 7:[^13], because the scanner beeped when she used her card? Which teacher saw her leave the math room late, because she’d asked one question at the door? What exactly was on that practice packet, and what exactly did her answers resemble?
If they needed a narrative, she couldn’t give them emotion. Emotion wobbled. Adults heard wobble and called it guilt.
Sequence didn’t wobble.
Through the glass of the office door, she could see silhouettes shifting, a hand lifting a file. Somewhere inside, a printer whirred: paper becoming record. Minseo’s mouth tasted like dried caffeine. She pressed her thumb against the pad of her index finger, grounding herself in a small, sharp point.
Okay, she told herself, not as comfort but as instruction. Timeline first. Then proof. Then motive, whose, not mine.
The details come back with a precision that feels like betrayal. In the library the printer had chewed at her first page, ink dragged into a gray bruise across the header. The machine stuttered, half-fed, half-stuck, until the librarian clicked her tongue, yanked open the tray, and left it gaping while she went to answer a phone call. That open mouth of plastic. A brief, stupid invitation.
Minseo can see her own hands hovering, not touching, because touching meant fingerprints and blame in her head. She remembers the heat of the printer’s side panel against her knuckles, the faint burnt-dust smell, the way the queue screen flashed her student number and then went blank. Someone behind her cleared their throat once. Then the handout stack in homeroom: the one packet with a torn corner like a bitten nail. A cover stamp in bluish-purple ink, not the school’s usual tired red. A faint coffee ring kissing the top margin, as if someone had set down a paper cup and decided it was nothing. Her thoughts start tagging each artifact, smear, tray open, purple stamp, ring, clean labels, as if she’s taking notes on the air.
She rewinds faces and bodies around those objects the way she rewinds lecture recordings at 1.5x: not to relive, to locate. In the library, someone had hovered just behind her, pretending to dig through a backpack, eyes angled toward the gaping tray. In homeroom, a sleeve had skimmed the top sheet like a casual mistake. Someone had said, “I can pass them out,” bright voice, unasked. Another had watched her pick up her packet with a stillness that felt like counting.
The social map slides over the physical one. Who benefits if her name is linked to “integrity review.” Who needs one scholarship competitor softened. Who can afford to look innocent because they’re never questioned.
Her stomach tightens at how cleanly it all aligns, like a problem set designed to only have one answer.
Minseo arranges the week into columns: verifiable, corroborable, and the kind of thing adults call an “excuse.” Library log-in times, card swipe, printer queue, are hard data. Homeroom packet routines are habit: who carries the stack, which teacher uses the bluish-purple stamp, who’s always early, sleeves already grazing paper. She trims accusations into questions: “Could you confirm the stamp color?” “Who handled distribution?” Polite, compliant. Forcing specificity.
By the time the office door clicks open, the fear in her chest hasn’t disappeared: it’s been rerouted into procedure. Minseo straightens, palms damp but steady, and runs the week again in her head like a numbered list. Printer jam. Queue screen. Bluish-purple stamp. Torn corner. She keeps her sentences short enough to be repeatable, evidence-shaped. If they want “integrity,” she’ll give them specifics, not panic.
The office air has that sterile mix of printer toner and cheap lemon cleaner, like someone scrubbed away evidence of people. Fluorescent lights flatten everything: her face in the glass of a framed “School Violence Prevention” poster, the pale woodgrain of the table, the vice-principal’s tie knotted too perfectly. On the desk, a thin stack of papers sits squared to the edge, corners aligned, a paper clip already biting into the top page. It looks less like paperwork and more like an arrangement.
“Minseo-ya, come in,” the vice-principal says, tone warm in the way adults practice. He doesn’t motion to a chair so much as indicate where her body should go. The pen in his hand is already uncapped; the cap rests beside his thumb, ready to be snapped on when he’s finished writing whatever version of her life he needs.
A subject teacher is there too, one of the ones who always says, I’m only being fair, and she offers Minseo a small smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. The teacher’s folder is open, pages nested inside like a prepared argument.
“This is just a confirmation,” the vice-principal adds, as if “confirmation” is kinder than “investigation.” His gaze flicks to her hands (are they shaking, are they empty) and then back to her face, collecting tells the way Minseo collects details.
Minseo sits. Her knees fit under the table with less space than she expects. The chair legs squeak against the floor; it’s a loud, embarrassing sound in a room built for quiet compliance.
On the top sheet, her name has already been printed in a box. Below it, lines wait for her to fill the rest in.
“We’ve had a student raise a concern,” the vice-principal says, and pauses just long enough for her to understand the power of an unnamed “student.” Then, smoothly: “About overlap with an unauthorized practice packet.”
Unauthorized. The word lands without volume, but with weight.
Minseo keeps her voice level. “May I see what’s being compared?”
The vice-principal’s smile stays. The pen hovers. “In a moment,” he says, gentle as a lid closing. “First, we’ll confirm a few details.”
The subject teacher flips her folder open with a practiced snap, as if the sound itself is a boundary. Her fingertip pins a page. “So: these practice problems. When did you first begin working on them?” Neutral phrasing, but her eyes don’t move; they stay fixed on Minseo’s mouth, waiting for a slip.
Minseo answers with a date. The vice-principal’s pen makes a soft, satisfied scratch.
“And who suggested this set to you?” the teacher continues. “A friend? A hagwon teacher? An online community?” Each option offered like a lifeline, each one a different kind of guilt. Minseo feels the question narrowing the room: if she says no one, she sounds evasive; if she names someone, she becomes a conduit they can tug on.
“I study from what’s distributed in class,” she says carefully.
The teacher’s smile twitches. “Mm. Then where did you access this specific packet? Not the official handouts. The one with overlapping items.”
Unauthorized sits between them without being spoken again, a stamp waiting to be pressed. Minseo keeps her posture still, as if stillness can count as innocence.
Minseo recites the week as if she’s presenting findings: Monday after 7th period, classroom 2-3, the shared printer on the second floor that coughed and froze mid-queue; Tuesday’s redistribution after lunch; the bluish-purple stamp the teacher always uses when she’s trying to look “official.” She names the people who were in line behind her without making it sound like she’s blaming them. She mentions the corner of the handout that tore when she yanked it free. How she folded it down, irritated, and kept it that way in her binder because it bugged her every time she opened it. Her voice stays even, but inside she’s counting: breath in, breath out, don’t let it shake. Calm, she realizes, is something she manufactures.
The teacher repeated Minseo’s words back to her with tiny, surgical edits. “A friend forwarded a list” became, “So you obtained materials from outside the approved distribution.” “I didn’t know” became, “You didn’t verify.” Each paraphrase slid the blame a centimeter closer. Beside her, the vice-principal nodded, pen moving steadily, as if he were translating Minseo into something more recordable. And less defensible.
Hajun’s name enters like a scent. The vice-principal says, “A student flagged a possible overlap,” and the teacher adds, “Someone known for academic integrity.” No surname, yet the room tilts toward him anyway, as if his reputation is already seated, hands folded. Minseo hears herself answering and realizes they’re not collecting facts; they’re collecting doubt.
The vice-principal doesn’t raise his voice; he doesn’t have to. The office is too quiet for volume. Quiet enough that Minseo can hear the copier down the hall warming up, the soft click of a pen being capped and uncapped, the radiator making a tired metal ping. He sets two stapled sheets on the desk with the careful finality of someone placing a seal on a document.
Left: her practice responses. Her handwriting, slightly slanted from the late-night angle of her desk lamp, the places where her pen pressed harder when she was trying to force a concept into her head. Right: a page labeled in plain font, RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION, in Korean that looks like it came from the teacher’s drive, not a student group chat. Both are highlighted in the same fluorescent yellow, the kind that stains your fingernails if you smear it.
He rotates the papers so they face her, not him.
The alignment is too neat. Someone has taken time to make the similarities look inevitable: question numbers matched, wording boxed, her answer fragments underlined where they line up like a confession. Minseo’s eyes snag on a sentence she remembers writing at 2:[^13] a.m., when her head was throbbing and she told herself competence was the only thing she could control. Now it sits in yellow ink, framed as motive.
She forces her gaze to move, like a student reading a passage out loud. Her mouth goes dry anyway. If she licks her lips, it will look like guilt. If she doesn’t, her voice will crack.
“So,” the vice-principal says, polite, almost bored, “can you explain how you had access to this packet?”
He doesn’t say cheating. He doesn’t say stealing. The words aren’t needed; the page does the work for him. The official formatting makes her own work feel suddenly чуж워 (foreign) even to her. A month of studying collapses into a narrative with one clear protagonist: wrongdoing.
Minseo keeps her hands on her knees so they won’t hover over the papers like she’s trying to hide something. Inside, her stomach drops with a clean, sick weight. This is how they do it, she realizes, quietly, neatly, in yellow.
Her homeroom teacher, Ms. Han, who usually pretended not to see anything that might require extra work: leaned forward with a practiced softness. “We just want to prevent misunderstandings,” she said, as if this were a spilled milk situation, a whisper in the hallway that could be wiped up with a tissue. The sentence was almost kind. That was what made it worse.
Then the vocabulary changed, one careful noun at a time, and Minseo felt her throat tighten around her breath. Integrity review. Not an accusation, not a punishment. Something administrative, neutral, inevitable. The vice-principal’s pen kept moving, scratching dates and phrasing into a form she couldn’t see.
“And because you’re on scholarship,” Ms. Han added, eyes dropping to the highlighted pages like they were a fragile object, “there are protocols. Scholarship implications. We have to document this properly.”
Record-keeping. The word sounded like a drawer sliding shut. Minseo pictured her name living in a file that outlasted her explanations, outlasted even her grades. Ink seeping into paper, irreversible even when it was wrong. She nodded once, too small to be agreement, too visible to be nothing.
The questions come in a sequence designed to sound casual. “Where did you get your materials?” the vice-principal asks, eyes on his notes, not her. “Did you print anything at school? Who did you study with? Any shared files. Han adds, as if they’re troubleshooting a broken printer.
Minseo hears the timing more than the words. If she answers too quickly, it becomes a script. If she takes even a breath too long, it becomes a pause they can underline. She keeps her expression flat, voice measured, and lets her brain split in two: one part responding, the other counting what’s missing.
No one asks how “restricted” was enforced. No one asks who else could have touched that packet, whose USB, whose teacher account. No one says proof. They only say process.
A form slides across the desk, rotated with the same careful courtesy as the highlighted pages. The vice-principal places the pen down like a ruler (precisely on the signature line) then withdraws his hand. “This is the simplest way,” Ms. Han murmurs, voice soft as lint. Admit “unintentional overlap,” accept a minor demerit, keep it internal. Mercy, packaged as efficiency. A trade: her surrender for their quiet.
Something in her recalibrates. No flare of anger, just arithmetic. In this room, silence isn’t dignity; it’s consent. Minseo keeps her voice even. “May I have a copy of the comparison?” she asks, then adds, like she’s reading a checklist, “the distribution record for that packet, the exact clause you’re citing, and the appeal timeline.” The temperature seems to drop. Smiles hold. She realizes cooperation here means controllable.
Minseo steps out of the office and the door clicks shut with a soft finality, like a lid settling. In her hand is a stamped notice (red ink, school seal) thin paper that should weigh nothing. It drags at her wrist anyway. She slides it into the clear pocket of her file folder because her hands have learned that if something can be taken, it will be, and because if she holds it openly, it looks like guilt.
The hallway is the same fluorescent corridor it was ten minutes ago: the sting of instant coffee from someone’s tumbler, the squeak of indoor slippers, a burst of laughter from second-years clustered by the vending machine. Nothing pauses for her. That’s the cruelest part: how normal the world insists on being while your skin has turned into a listening device.
A group of boys leans over a phone hidden behind a workbook; they snort, shoulders bumping. Minseo’s eyes snag on the movement and her brain supplies the subtitle before she can stop it: They’re laughing at you. She forces herself to keep walking. She counts each step from tile seam to tile seam, like metronome practice, like a way to keep her face from showing what her chest is doing.
Someone says her surname: not loudly, not even clearly. “Han…?” “Min…?” It could be any name. Still, her neck tightens. A teacher passes with a stack of papers and doesn’t look up until the last second, gaze flicking over Minseo the way you check a bag tag at baggage claim: confirming, labeling. The teacher’s expression doesn’t change, but the half-beat delay lands like a hand on the back of her collar.
At the end of the corridor, the windows show a slice of winter sky over the courtyard. Minseo hears, faintly, the school bell’s aftertaste of vibration. Her folder edge cuts into her palm. She adjusts her grip so the pain is controlled, chosen. Then she keeps moving, shoulders squared, as if she is simply late for class and not walking around with a new kind of record breathing against her ribs.
By the teachers’ room, the study-group board hangs at shoulder height, laminated charts and color-coded names crowded into tight columns. Minseo slows without meaning to. Her slot, third row, second from the right, the one she’d checked every morning like a pulse, is blank.
Not crossed out. Not moved. Erased.
A damp smear clouds the whiteboard where “Han Minseo” used to be, the marker’s ghost still clinging in pale gray, and around it the old lines remain: a perfectly drawn rectangle now holding nothing. The absence is so tidy it feels intentional in a way scribbles never are. Someone took the time to make her disappearance look clean.
She imagines the tissue in a hand: quick wrist, practiced, no hesitation. A small administrative mercy: no public X, no messy accusation, just subtraction. Like a seating chart correction. Like she was never assigned a chair to begin with.
Her fingers tighten on the edge of her folder until the plastic creaks. She doesn’t reach for a marker. She doesn’t look around to see who’s watching. Instead she memorizes the empty box: its size, its position, the faint drag marks at the corner where the ink resisted. Evidence, even when it pretends to be air.
She keeps her pace even, shoulders set like she’s just another student moving between periods, but her eyes snag on the micro-behavior she usually files away and forgets. A subject teacher lets her gaze rest on Minseo a fraction too long. Not pity. Not curiosity. Inventory, the way you count chairs before an exam. The teacher’s mouth stays neutral, but the look does a quick scan: folder, uniform, face, as if matching her to a name on a list that’s already been annotated.
The hallway rearranges itself in Minseo’s mind into a soft checkpoint. Everyone performs normal (footsteps, murmured jokes, the squeal of a chair leg) but she can feel the conclusions being filed somewhere she can’t access, stamped without her signature.
Her grip tightens until the spiral edge teethes her fingerpad. She stops by the window where the glare makes her eyes water and opens to a clean page. Without lifting her face, she starts a list. If it stays in her head, they can call it “emotional.” Paper is harder to dismiss.
The decision hits her mouth like a bitter tablet she can’t spit out. No more disappearing on purpose. No more betting that straight A’s will be read as innocence. If they want procedure, she’ll bring procedure: ask for the print logs, the packet distribution list, the CCTV request form, the timestamps on the “authorized” upload. She’ll say what everyone keeps implying. Because they’ve already made her the suspect, and silence is just edits made without her.
Park Seongmin catches Minseo at the mouth of the stairwell like he’s been waiting for her route, his shadow cutting across the “No Entry” sticker on the metal door. The building hums with after-school self-study but he moves through it like he owns the air.
He doesn’t grab her wrist. He doesn’t have to. His shoulder angles in, a blunt, practiced block that turns her back toward the corridor with non-gentle efficiency that still isn’t cruel. The message lands in her ribs: not now, not here, not where people can watch you unravel and use it.
Minseo’s throat tightens anyway. She keeps her face neutral, competence as a reflex, while her eyes do their own scan. Two first-years at the water fountain. A teacher’s heels receding. A group by the bulletin board pretending not to look. She can feel the rumor machine idling.
“Ya,” Seongmin murmurs, voice low and clipped, like he’s cutting a wire. “Stairwell is where stories get made.”
“I was just, ” Minseo starts, because explanations are safer than silence.
He doesn’t let her finish. He tilts his chin, eyes tracking the hall, then points down the row of classroom doors. Not a request. A route. His coat smells faintly of cold air and instant coffee.
Minseo follows because arguing would be louder than obeying, and loud is a kind of losing here. Her headache pulses behind one eye, screen glare, caffeine, no sleep, timed perfectly to the moment she wants to disappear.
As they walk, her mind replays the smear of ink on the posted list, the way the stamp looked… rubbed, like someone’s thumb had worried it until the letters blurred. The corner of the exam packet she’d glimpsed, torn, as if someone had tested how far paper could be altered without anyone calling it tampering.
Seongmin stops at an empty homeroom. He doesn’t look at her when he pushes the door open. He looks past her, past the hallway, as if he’s counting who might have followed. His anger isn’t loud, but it has direction, and for a second it steadies her.
“Inside,” he says, like an emergency exit sign that talks.
Inside, he closes the door with control, not drama, and the click of the latch sounds final in a way Minseo can’t afford to interpret. He crosses the room in three long strides and points, not at the front, not at the teacher’s desk, but to the back corner where half-drawn blinds turn the late-afternoon light into narrow, defensible strips. The classroom smells like whiteboard cleaner and stale heat.
“Sit. Back there.” His voice is low enough that it doesn’t leak through the door.
Minseo sets her bag down like she’s filing it, like her hands aren’t buzzing.
Seongmin doesn’t soften. He doesn’t circle around “are you okay” like adults who want to feel kind without changing anything. He plants his palm on the nearest desk and looks at her the way he looks at an unfair rule: directly, with the intent to dismantle it.
“What was erased?” he asks.
When her mouth opens and nothing comes out fast enough, his jaw tightens once. Then he starts sorting the chaos into slots, like he’s already writing the appeal in his head.
“Name. Whose. Time slot. Exact. Which board posting. Stamp or signature: who’s on it. And witnesses. Who saw it before it changed.”
Minseo answers the way she answers test questions when her hands want to tremble, short, clean clauses. “Second-floor main board. Scholarship notice. My name was there. Rank line. Time stamp said 16:[^10].” She swallows. “At 16:[^45] it wasn’t. Ink smear on the stamp. The paper corner was torn.”
In the silence that follows, the facts feel too light to hold anyone accountable.
Seongmin leans in, not angry at her, angry at the air. “Again. Slower. Like you’re writing a complaint they can’t ‘misunderstand.’”
She repeats it, forcing her mind to pin down minutes. When she first saw it. When she checked again after math. When Yuna whispered, “Did you drop?” in that careful voice. Seongmin cuts in, precise. “Not ‘they deleted it.’ Say: ‘The record changed between 16:[^10] and 16:[^45].’”
He set his phone on the teacher’s desk, screen up, and thumbed the timer on like this was 야자, except the bell would never ring. “Seventy-two hours,” he said, tapping the digits until the cadence lodged in her chest. “CCTV loops. 출결 logs. Server history. Even paper gets ‘reposted.’” His eyes were hard. “And people? People forget into convenience.” Time, he made clear, was already taking a side.
Seongmin leaned in just enough that Minseo’s spine understood this wasn’t a suggestion. He slid a torn scrap of A4 across the desk: blank on one side, already divided into boxes on the other: times, locations, names. “Write,” he said, like it was a verb that could build a wall. “We don’t wait for them to ‘look into it.’” His voice stayed flat, but something under it shook. “We move first.”
Seongmin taps the scrap with his pen (tap, tap, tap) like he’s about to start a unit test review, not talk a student off a ledge. The sound is small, but it corrals Minseo’s attention the way a whistle corrals a field. His jaw works once, like he’s chewing down whatever he wants to say first.
“Rooftop lock,” he says, and flicks his wrist toward the window as if the door is visible through concrete and floors. “That was the headline. Easy story. Safety. Concern. ‘We had to.’” His mouth twists on the last syllable, mocking the official tone without needing to imitate it. “But last year? The real panic wasn’t a kid on a roof. It was a mouth. It was who might talk, and who they might talk to.”
Minseo keeps writing, but her letters tighten, corners sharpening. She can feel the school’s fluorescent calm pressing down on her shoulders. The expectation that nothing messy ever truly happened here, not in a way that could be cited.
Seongmin leans back, then forward again, restless. “Teachers can be managed. Students can be disciplined. But parents’ committees?” He clicks his pen, not quite a smile. “Those ajummas with KakaoTalk group chats and time. Alumni donors with ‘concerns.’ The kind of adults who treat school reputation like property value.”
Property. Minseo’s stomach dips, thinking of her grandmother talking about apartments and shame in the same breath. She pictures a signboard: Haneulseong High, now with a crack through the letters.
Seongmin’s voice drops, controlled on the surface, angry underneath. “So they locked the roof and called it prevention. But what they really did was seal off a place where evidence could exist without being supervised. A place where someone could hand someone else something, paper, photos, a name, and there wouldn’t be a neat camera angle to overwrite.”
Minseo’s pen pauses. Ink pools at the end of a stroke, a tiny bruise on the page. She hates how much it makes sense. She hates that he’s saying it like it’s common knowledge, like the school has done this before and will do it again unless someone forces the story into the right hands first.
Seongmin doesn’t lecture; he diagrams. He takes Minseo’s scrap and, in quick blocks, builds a route map that feels like watching traffic from above: only the cars are names and the intersections are stamps. His pen moves with practiced irritation: 행정실, 교무실, the print room, the scholarship committee that “meets” but somehow always reaches the same conclusions. Arrows loop back on themselves like they’re designed to. He labels one box “생활기록부” and taps it twice, hard enough to dent the paper. “This,” he says, not looking at her, “is where they make you permanent.”
Minseo’s throat tightens as he keeps going. Discipline notes don’t just appear; they’re routed. “Printing error” retakes don’t happen because someone is kind; they happen because the right adult is willing to sign off before anyone asks why. Even mock exam packets have a chain of custody, Seongmin mutters, like they’re evidence in court. Watching it laid out, Minseo realizes the school isn’t chaotic: it’s efficient. And efficiency, here, means mistakes get erased fast and privileges move smoothly, like water finding the easiest channel.
“Evidence,” he says, and the word lands like a stamp, heavy, irreversible. Not what students say in the hallway, not the warm, vague thing teachers call “character.” Only what can be filed without anyone’s feelings attached. He starts counting on his fingers, brisk, like he’s listing supplies before a storm: 출결 records that don’t lie if you screenshot them early; print-room logs. How many packets, what time they came off the machine, whose ID badge opened the door; proctor sheets with signatures that can’t be unsaid. Then the things adults hate because they force a paper trail: 민원 forms, official request slips, anything that requires a receipt number. “And CCTV,” he adds, eyes narrowing. “Retention request before it loops. Miss that window and you’re arguing with air.”
Seongmin tells her to watch the soft voices. Power, he says, doesn’t always shout; sometimes it bows. The kids who say 죄송합니다 like it’s punctuation, who smile at teachers and ask, politely, for the “correct procedure”: they’re the ones who’ve memorized the handbook like a script and know where the loopholes breathe. He still doesn’t give a name. He doesn’t need to. The outline is too crisp: perfect 생활기록부, perfect manners, rules sharpened into something that cuts.
Minseo’s pen skates across the margin, neat lines disguising how her chest keeps catching. She forces her inhales to stay quiet, like a good student, and understands why her skin has felt too small all week. This isn’t a single kid getting clever; it’s an old route, rehearsed by the building itself. Last year’s silence left grooves. The ink drag, the overly tidy explanations. She hasn’t been paranoid. She’s walked back onto a field that remembers.
Miran waits until the library thins out, chairs scraping, fluorescent lights humming, the last wave of students funneling toward 야자 like a tide turning, then slides into the seat beside Minseo instead of across. One seat away, not touching, like distance is a rule they learned the hard way. Their backpack stays on their lap, straps looped around a wrist. An exit plan.
They don’t say Minseo’s name. Not even a greeting. Just a shallow inhale that sticks in their throat, and then a sketchbook appears on the table between them, placed with care as if it might crack. Miran keeps both hands on the cover, fingers flat, bracing, the way Minseo has seen kids brace for scolding.
Minseo’s pencil freezes above her notebook. Her notes, Seongmin’s list of what counts, what can be filed, stare back at her in clean lines. Evidence. CCTV retention. Logs. Receipts. The words feel suddenly too loud in her head, as if thinking them could summon someone.
Miran’s eyes flick toward the windows, the stacks, the librarian’s desk where the monitor glows. Then back to Minseo’s face, searching for something: permission, maybe. Or danger. Their voice comes out low and careful, Korean rounded by a cadence that doesn’t belong to this school’s sharp Seoul tempo. “If you don’t want to see it… tell me now.”
Minseo swallows. She hates the heat behind her eyes: hate that her body reacts like there’s a siren when there isn’t. She makes her face do what it always does: neutral, capable. “Show me.”
Miran doesn’t move right away. They just press down on the sketchbook as if holding it in place stops something else from slipping. A small tremor runs through their knuckles. “It’s not… fortune-telling,” they add, too fast. “It’s just: my brain. It keeps replaying.”
Minseo nods once, controlled. Her gaze stays on Miran’s hands because looking at Miran’s expression feels like trespassing. Around them, the library settles into its late-afternoon hush, the kind that makes secrets sound like paper.
Miran’s gaze flicks once toward the librarian’s desk, where the monitor’s glow makes a pale square on the wood. Then back. Then down again, as if they’re timing their courage to the room’s breathing. They nudge the sketchbook forward a few centimeters, stop, then another few, the way you offer a stray cat food without wanting your hand bitten. The cardboard cover makes almost no sound against the table, but Minseo hears it anyway, the tiny scrape amplified by her own pulse.
Minseo doesn’t lean in. She makes herself stay still, spine straight, palms flat on her notebook like she’s anchoring paper before it flies.
Miran lifts the cover with two fingers. The page underneath is already tired. A rooftop door fills the page in blunt pencil lines: the lock plate drawn with obsessive care, scuffed and crosshatched, the metal’s worn edge shaded darker where hands would grip. Even the hinge screws are counted. Miran’s thumb hovers above the drawing, not touching, as if contact might change what it shows.
Minseo’s gaze catches on what doesn’t belong in an ordinary sketch: the stamp. Not just red, but uneven. Blotted at the edges, as if the ink had pooled and then been dragged while still wet. A thumbprint smear, the kind you only notice if you’re trained to look for mistakes. Beside it, Miran has drawn an exam packet corner torn too neatly to be accidental, then folded back like someone checked the rip and decided it was good enough.
Something hot climbs up Minseo’s neck, an embarrassed heat that feels like being accused without words. The drag-mark matches the one she’d clocked on real paper. One second of noticing, filed away because saying it out loud would make her sound petty, paranoid, obsessed. Her pencil stays suspended, useless, while her stomach drops into the certainty of pattern.
Miran’s voice stays down near the tabletop, as if sound itself could be reported. It fractures, then stitches back together. “It’s not (like) anything sent,” they say, shaking their head hard once. “No sign. No warning.” Just a dream, looping. Same rooftop door. Same red stamp, smeared like a thumb dragged it. Same torn packet corner. And always that weightless panic: arriving one breath too late, as if their brain memorized the route before their life did.
Minseo keeps her expression blank, like the library air is part of the test. Inside, her mind clicks into bullet points: rooftop door, lock plate wear, stamp type and ink viscosity, the exact tear angle on the packet. Who holds the master key. Which teacher touches packets first. Where fingerprints would smear. Gratitude and anger tangle, but one thought settles her. Repetition means method. Method means paperwork, CCTV, retention dates. Traces.
Seongmin doesn’t ask if she’s okay. His gaze flicks once over her face, headache, sleeplessness, the tight jaw she thinks she hides, and then he looks past it, like feelings are fog and facts are footing.
“What did you see,” he says, flat. “Exactly. Don’t summarize.”
Minseo opens her mouth and the first thing that comes out is wrong on purpose. Too general, too safe. “The packet looked…off.”
Seongmin’s chair legs scrape. He leans in, not unkind, just relentless. “Time.”
“After second period,” she corrects, and her brain supplies the bell chime like a timestamp. “On Tuesday. In the third-floor corridor, outside the staff room. I was going to the print station for the club notices.”
“Place. People.”
“Teacher Jang was coming out,” she says, and hears how that sounds, like she’s accusing. She forces herself into the shape of a report. “Also two second-years: track jackets. I don’t know their names. They turned their faces away when I passed.”
“What were you holding?”
“My notebook. Phone was in my bag. I wasn’t recording.” She hates that she has to say it.
Seongmin’s pen taps once, a metronome. “Objects you saw.”
Minseo swallows. The library air feels too clean, like it’s waiting to judge her. “A stack of exam packets on the rolling cart. The top one had the red stamp, blotted, dragged. Like a thumb went through it while it was wet.”
“Not ‘like,’” Seongmin cuts in. “What did it do.”
“It smeared. The stamp edges were uneven. There was a drag-mark toward the bottom right.” Her hands come alive despite herself, tracing the direction on the tabletop. “And the corner, top left, torn. Too straight. Folded back.”
Seongmin nods once, sharp. “Sequence.”
Minseo closes her eyes and forces herself to replay it without panic’s shortcuts: she passed, she glanced, she slowed, she pretended to retie her shoelace to look again. She remembers the sound of paper shifting, the cart’s squeaky wheel, the way Teacher Jang’s sleeve brushed the top sheet and didn’t pause.
When she opens her eyes, her breathing has stopped tripping over itself. It’s turned into numbered lines she can point to. Timeline. Contact points. Witnesses. The kind of clarity that doesn’t ask anyone to believe her. Only to check.
Seongmin slides a blank A4 toward her like it’s a worksheet, not a lifeline. “Write it,” he says. “The way you’d write it if you wanted them to like you.”
Minseo’s pen hesitates, then moves: Dear Teacher, I’m sorry to bother you… I was wondering if maybe… Her stomach tightens as the sentences curl inward, soft and apologetic, already giving the reader permission to ignore her.
Seongmin doesn’t comment until she dots the last i. Then he flips the page over with two fingers, brisk. “Now write it so they can’t pretend they didn’t understand.”
He dictates the shape of it without raising his voice: date at the top. Subject line. Address the Administrative Office, not “someone kind.” Request, don’t ask. Specify scope, location, and time window. Name the record: CCTV footage, printer access log, portal edit history. Add the retention concern. Politely. Add a response deadline: calmly.
Minseo rewrites. Her handwriting steadies as her tone hardens into procedure.
“Good,” Seongmin says. “No feelings. Just a trail.”
Seongmin lays the institution out in failure points, not ideals. His finger moves across the desk as if the school’s floor plan is printed there: cameras that don’t “record,” they overwrite. Seven days, sometimes three if the server is full; a single missed request and the hallway becomes a blank. Printers, though, are petty and honest. Every swipe, every login, every time a file is sent, timestamps, user IDs, the machine number, stored because no one bothered to turn it off. The portal, too: even when students see only the final notice, the backend keeps a trail of edits, who clicked “save,” and when. Rumors, he says, are smoke. Documents are weight. “Tie everything to something that can be subpoenaed,” he mutters, like it’s a prayer.
Minseo’s hand goes to her phone on autopilot, thumb already finding Yuna’s chat, but Seongmin catches the motion with two blunt fingers in the air: stop. He angles his chin toward the library computer. “Email. Not 말로.” He makes her type a subject line that can’t be misfiled, sentences that sound neutral but corner the reader into replying. “If it isn’t written, it didn’t happen,” he says, and points until she includes the CCTV retention window.
He draws a line down the page and turns her tidy notes into something sharper. Beside what happened, he writes, who benefits. And makes her answer even when her throat tightens. Beside who had access, he adds, who would know to erase a trace. Minseo’s pen digs harder. It isn’t reassurance; it’s arithmetic. Fear, translated into suspects and timestamps.
At home the air was warmer but no less tight. The living room TV murmured behind her grandmother’s door, a drama soundtrack swelling and collapsing like it was breathing for the whole apartment. Minseo slipped her shoes off without letting them thud, stacked her bag against the wall with the care of someone hiding evidence, and went straight to the small desk wedged between the bookshelf and the window.
Seongmin’s notes lay open like a map she couldn’t afford to misread. Two columns (access and benefit) and her own handwriting around it, sharp and controlled. She copied it into her laptop first, then started stripping it down. Checklist. Timeline. Folder tree.
/CCTV_request/
/Printer_logs/
/Portal_edits/
/Witnesses_access/
/Witnesses_benefit/
Screenshots got renamed with dates and locations:
2025-12-XX_hallway3F_stampmark.jpg. She made a spreadsheet
that looked clinical enough to pass for homework. Time. Place. Source.
What can be verified. What is inference. She set conditional formatting
so anything without a document turned gray. Gray meant: don’t lean on
it.
For a little while, the world narrowed to boxes she could tick. The panic quieted, not gone but corralled: like a dog that would still bite if she loosened her grip.
Twenty minutes later, it broke through anyway. The desk lamp’s light pooled too bright on the screen, and the caffeine that had kept her upright all day turned acidic in her stomach. A headache unfurled behind her right eye, hot and pulsing, and when she blinked the lines of her spreadsheet swam.
She opened a draft email and stared at the first sentence until it stopped meaning anything.
I am writing to request… Too formal.
I need… Too needy.
Could you please… Too easy to ignore.
Her fingers hovered, then typed, then deleted. Accusatory, she thought. Insubordinate. Like the wrong honorific.
From the hallway came her mother’s voice, tight, low, answering a call she didn’t want to be on. Minseo kept rewriting anyway, chasing a sentence that could not be twisted, that would pin the truth down without sounding like she was asking permission to deserve it.
At school the next morning, the office air is colder than the hallway. Printer heat and disinfectant, a kind of cleanliness that feels like warning. Minseo waits at the counter with the form pressed flat under her palm. The clerk’s pen cup is chained down. Even the stapler looks supervised.
She catches herself assembling the apology the way she always does with adults, syllables lining up in her mouth before she’s opened it: 죄송한데요… I’m sorry, but, As if asking for a record is an inconvenience, as if the inconvenience is hers to absorb.
“Your name here,” the clerk says, not unkind, already looking past Minseo’s shoulder.
Minseo’s fingers close around the pen. They tremble, tiny and traitorous, and it makes her throat burn with embarrassment. It isn’t the form that scares her. It’s what the signature implies: that she’s accusing the institution of forgetting, that she’s forcing it to show its work.
She writes each stroke carefully, anchoring the letters like weights. When she slides the paper forward, her instinct is to add, If this is too much trouble… Instead she only says, “Please stamp the receipt.”
On her laptop, three drafts sit in tabs like three different versions of herself. The first is so formal it feels borrowed. Honorifics stacked, sentences padded until they can’t be accused of urgency. The second is clipped and procedural, almost cold: bullet points, attachments, numbered lines that look like schoolwork. The third is the worst. So cautious it nearly deletes the ask, hedging until nothing remains but politeness.
She highlights a phrase, deletes it, retypes it plainer. Seongmin’s voice threads through the pulse in her temple: don’t narrate your feelings, narrate the clock. Retention window. Dates. Camera locations. Who receives it. Who signs. Her stomach rolls anyway, like truth is something the body tries to spit out. She keeps the language clean, even when her hands want to apologize.
The front office accepts the paper with practiced politeness, fingertips barely touching the edge like it might stain. A teacher glances up, and the smile that follows is too controlled. Thin enough to cut. Minseo’s chest clamps; breath snags on a full count, heat rushing to her ears as if she’s been caught stealing. She doesn’t argue. “Could I get that confirmed in writing?” she asks, voice level. She watches the stamp come down, notes the nameplate, the time, the pen that signed, and walks out before her eyes can shine.
In the hallway, Minseo presses her shoulder to the cool tile, eyes on the floor until the spin in her vision steadies. Then she flips her notebook open like it’s a shield: follow-up date circled, retention deadline underlined, escalation path in arrows, names to CC written in blocky neatness. Competence stops being a frantic disguise and becomes a choice, submit, document, repeat, because if she shrinks back into “reasonable” silence, stonewalling wins untouched.
Minseo makes herself stop calling it a sign. Symbols are soft. Symbols can be argued with. Routes can’t.
She rebuilds the school in her head the way she rebuilds a study schedule: inputs, bottlenecks, time. From Class 2-3 to the rooftop stairwell is two turns and one blind corner where the fluorescent light flickers: the kind of place you can tuck your body against the wall and become an absence. The official rooftop door is locked, everyone knows that, but “locked” at Haneulseong has always meant locked for students, not for the people who carry jangbu and keys and look like they belong.
Who can reach it without a key? Not her, not Yuna. But a teacher with a stack of worksheets can climb any stairs without being stopped. A 방송부 (broadcast club) kid with cables and a hurried face can slip through doors adults assume they have permission to open. A janitor can pass anyone with a cart. An office aide can say “I was told to” and most people will hear the sentence they want to hear.
She thinks about sound. Which doors hiss shut soft, which ones click like a warning. The stairwell door by the science wing sticks: she’s heard it slam during 야자 (evening self-study), echoing all the way down the corridor. The door near the art room closes with a gentle suction, almost polite. If someone needed to move a packet, to pause with it, to do something small and decisive, they’d pick the quiet door. They’d pick the moment when the hallway swells: passing period, lunch rush, the five minutes after mock exam papers are collected and everyone’s complaining at once.
Control, she reminds herself, is never just mood. Control is hardware and habit: keys, schedules, who is allowed to stand still without being asked why. And control, if it’s real, always leaks documentation. Sign-out sheets, maintenance logs, CCTV angles that pretend to watch but leave a slice of shadow untouched.
Minseo’s pen moves. Not poetry. A map. A list of access points. A timeline with gaps circled like bruises. She doesn’t let herself wonder what it “means.” She asks instead: where would the system hide it, and who would the system excuse?
The ink detail won’t let go. Smeared doesn’t happen when everything is dry and ceremonial, when the stamp comes down in its expected cadence and lifts clean. Smear means moisture. Or it means hurry: someone pressing too hard, not waiting for the pad to reset, stamping like they’re trying to outrun a thought.
Minseo tries to treat it like any other variable. If the mark was still tacky enough to blur, then the paper was handled close to the moment it was stamped, not days later after it sat in a file. That tightens time. It tightens the room.
Authorized access doesn’t mean innocence. It just narrows the pool to people who can touch official things and make it look normal: teachers who never get challenged at doors, office staff whose hands are invisible because they’re “helping,” kids with responsibilities that read like permission on a clipboard. The smear is a fingerprint without a finger. It says: someone was here, and they didn’t have to ask.
She takes the torn corner out of the realm of “weird” and puts it where it can be tested. Paper doesn’t rip like that from a simple handoff: not if the packet was just passed down a row and stacked. A clean tear means someone pinched it, held it back, opened it when it wasn’t supposed to be opened. It means a second handling, maybe a third: check the contents, compare a page count, slide in a replacement, press the staple down like the original. “Lost” is a flood word: anything can happen, nobody’s at fault. “Substituted” points like an arrow. And arrows require a map: where the packets wait before proctoring, who signs them out, who’s trusted not to be watched. Neat violations feed on routines everyone stops seeing.
Seongmin’s voice reappears in her head, not as comfort but as procedure. First: file the CCTV retention request today, before the automatic overwrite: no “I’ll check” promises. Second: ask for the 시험지 배부 (distribution) and sign-out logs, the kind with timestamps and initials. Third: make them answer in writing. Hallway apologies evaporate; documents don’t. If Haneulseong runs on plausible deniability, then she’ll make deniability cost time, signatures, and nerves.
“Destiny” stops sounding mystical and starts sounding like logistics. She isn’t chosen; she’s positioned. By a schedule, by a locked door, by the kind of silence people mistake for compliance. Someone is gambling she’ll swallow it and move on. Minseo decides, deliberately, to be expensive instead: to turn every gap into a timestamp, every shrug into an email, every “we’ll look into it” into a paper trail that refuses to fade.
Minseo watches Yuna stop asking, Who said what? and start asking, Who touched what? It’s subtle, Yuna still smiles at the right moments, still looks like she’s just another kid surviving between bells, but her notebook changes. The margins fill with arrows and time stamps instead of names circled in anger.
At lunch, she sits where she can see the corridor to the teachers’ office. Not the center tables where people perform their friendships, but the edge, near the vending machine hum and the staircase that funnels runners and late slips. When someone passes with an errand form, Yuna’s eyes flick once: down to the paper color, the stamp, the way it’s held like it matters. She doesn’t stare. She counts.
During cleaning time, when homeroom turns into choreography, brooms scraping, chairs lifted, everyone pretending the floor isn’t already clean, Yuna drifts closer to the back cabinet where class materials live. She notes which class rep has the keychain with the tiny bear charm, which club officer says, “I’ll take it,” before a teacher can assign it, who has “office keys for club stuff” that jingle too confidently.
Minseo pretends to review vocabulary, but her gaze keeps snagging on the same details Yuna does: the hallway corner by the broadcast club board that always clogs right before handoffs; the way certain students time their water break to pass the staff room door; the kid who volunteers to carry stacks “because it’s heavy,” palms already clean of chalk.
Yuna’s notes aren’t accusations. They’re logistics. Routes. Bottlenecks. Habits dressed up as coincidence.
When she finally slides her notebook toward Minseo, it’s open to a crude map of the second floor with little marks: circles where people cluster, Xs where adults can’t see. Underneath, one line, written small and steady: Rumors move like people. So do packets.
Yuna reconstructs distribution days the way Minseo builds a study plan: from zero, from what can’t be argued with. She pulls up the bell schedule and writes it down by hand anyway, then adds the human delays. First-period yawns, a teacher’s “just one announcement,” the two-minute lecture about uniform skirts that always steals time. In the margins she lists who came in after the second bell, who asked to use the restroom, who “forgot” their ID and had to go to the office. Not as guilt. As movement.
She cross-checks with what she can actually remember: the sound of the intercom crackling, the door sliding open, the rustle of paper that always makes the room sharpen. She notes when a teacher turns to write on the board, when a joke lands and everyone looks up, when the class rep stacks the packets on the front table instead of handing them straight out.
Every pause becomes a boxed timestamp. Ten seconds. Fifteen. A whole minute while someone’s name is called for guidance. Yuna marks each moment the packets could breathe without eyes on them. And who was close enough to touch them without being seen.
Seat charts become a kind of math problem Yuna doesn’t announce she’s solving. She redraws them in her small, squared notebook, desk by desk, then overlays layers: where the class rep stands when the stack lands, who can reach the front without scraping a chair, who sits close enough to “help” and far enough not to be watched. Minseo sees the logic in it even as her stomach twists at being mapped like evidence.
Yuna circles not the loud kids, but the ones with perfect timing: the student who always “borrows” a highlighter the second the teacher turns; the one who drops a pencil and stays down too long; the one who asks, too politely, to swap a packet because theirs is “printed weird.” The wrong moments repeat. Patterns do, too.
Yuna starts treating teachers like constants and their quirks like variables. Mr. Han always does roll call first. Heads down, eyes off the stack. Ms. Choi, without fail, calls on Hajun right as the packets land, as if the room needs a performance. Another teacher lets papers travel hand-to-hand down the rows. Each habit shrinks the safe seconds into something measurable: when the packet could slip, and who could make it vanish without noise.
When the same names reappear across different days and different subjects, Yuna’s pencil hesitates, then presses harder. She stops writing “coincidence” like it’s a shield and switches to timestamps, 11:[^03], 2:[^17], clean, flat, almost kind. She photographs each page under the desk, thumbs quick, then uploads to a hidden drive and slips the notebook into a second sleeve. Evidence, built to survive adults.
Minseo kept her eyes on her planner like it was a boundary line she could draw with ink. Boxes of time. Arrows. Checkmarks that pretended the day could be contained. She wrote “야자. Revise bio notes” in small, neat letters and didn’t look up when chairs scraped or laughter spiked, because looking up meant catching someone catching her.
A shadow fell across the page anyway.
Yuna slid into the seat beside her with the same unremarkable timing she used for everything. Quiet enough not to announce allegiance, deliberate enough to be felt. Her pencil case landed with a soft thud, then a rustle of a convenience store bag.
“Did you eat?” Yuna asked, like she was asking about weather, like she didn’t already know Minseo’s answer from the way Minseo’s hands shook slightly around her pen.
“I’m fine,” Minseo said automatically. The words came out too quick, too practiced.
Yuna didn’t argue. She just nudged the bag closer until it touched the corner of Minseo’s planner. Triangle kimbap. A warm cup, boricha, maybe, the kind that didn’t taste like desperation the way instant coffee did.
Minseo stared at it for a beat, irritated at the gentleness because gentleness meant someone had noticed. Not just the packet thing. The rest of her, too. The way she’d been turning hunger into a manageable problem. Ignore it, solve later, move on.
“You’re going to get a headache,” Yuna added, voice low, eyes still on her own notebook as if she was speaking to the paper. “Again.”
Minseo’s throat tightened. “I already have one.”
“Okay,” Yuna said, like that was data, not confession. She flipped a page, the motion crisp. “Then eat anyway. You can be anxious and fed at the same time.”
A laugh tried to happen in Minseo’s chest and died halfway. She unwrapped the kimbap slowly, as if noise could invite questions. Across the room, someone glanced over, then away. Yuna shifted her shoulder just enough to block the line of sight without making it obvious, her posture casual, her presence suddenly structural: an anchor disguised as coincidence.
Yuna didn’t announce anything. She just began behaving as if the two desks, Minseo’s and her own, formed a perimeter with rules.
Her bag went on the aisle side first, a soft barricade that forced passing elbows to angle away. When the loud table behind them revved up, Yuna shifted her chair a few centimeters, shoulder turned, blocking the clean line of sight to Minseo’s hands and planner. It was subtle, the way people adjust for comfort, except it made Minseo harder to single out.
A couple of girls drifted over with the bright, hungry energy of “Did you hear, ” and Yuna met them with a small, bored smile. “About the new math hagwon? My cousin says their mock tests are brutal,” she said, like gossip had a more useful place to land. She offered a pen, asked for a worksheet file, pulled them into logistics until their curiosity cooled into routine.
When someone’s voice snagged on the word packet, Yuna answered first, light and flat. “Test anxiety makes everyone weird,” she said, already turning the page, already moving on.
Minseo kept writing. Her pulse still ran too fast, but the air around her stopped feeling like it was waiting to bite.
During 야자, the room settled into its practiced hush: pages turning, highlighters squeaking, the soft coughs people used to prove they were still awake. Minseo’s eyes stayed on her biology outline, but the lines swam anyway, caffeine and fluorescent glare knitting a headache behind her temples.
A paper cup appeared at the edge of her desk like it had been there all along. Convenience-store sleeve, lid beaded with warmth. Jihyeonseol set it down within reach without pausing, her wrist flicking back to her own notebook as if she’d only adjusted her pencil case.
No “Are you okay?” No careful face, waiting for a confession. Just proximity. Close enough that Minseo could borrow steadiness without owing a performance.
Minseo’s fingers closed around the cup. Warm. Real. She took a sip and kept writing, the panic forced to share space with something ordinary.
In the library, Lina moved like she’d done this in offices and contest prep rooms. Claiming a corner table with quiet authority. Her tote hit the chair first, then Yuna’s binder, then Minseo’s planner, each object assigned a place. A charger appeared, split, offered without ceremony. “No emotions,” Lina murmured, already listing points. “Facts. Timeline. Who. When. We write it like a report.”
Minseo tried to outrun it by becoming smaller. Writing faster, answering before anyone could ask, keeping her face blank enough to pass for “fine.” Competence as camouflage. But the shape around her didn’t loosen. Yuna trimmed the minutes into something defensible. Jihyeonseol kept the air steady, voice low, no pity. Lina held the table like territory. Not comfort. Structure.
Yuna didn’t ask for everyone’s attention. She just opened her notebook and let the pages do it for her.
The paper lay flat, squared to the table’s edge, like something submitted rather than shared. A grid of names and arrows, hand-drawn seat charts from three different days. Circled desks, little notes in the margins: window cracked, teacher paused here, Hajun came in late. Underneath, bell times copied down to the minute, not the lazy “around then” that adults loved to poke holes in. 08:[^10] homeroom. 09:[^00] first period. 09:[^47], packets on podium. 09:[^52]. 09:[^54]. Minseo watched Yuna’s thumb press the corner, anchoring the page as if it might slide away. Her handwriting was neat in a way that didn’t look decorative. Efficient. The kind of neatness that came from trying to make yourself undeniable.
“I’m not saying anyone did it,” Yuna said, voice low enough that it blended into the library’s hum. Not defensive. Careful. “I’m saying this is when the room changed.”
Her pencil tapped once beside a time stamp. The moment the exam packets moved hands to hands, the moment the teacher turned to write something on the board, the moment everybody’s bodies did that small synchronized lean that meant we’re not looking. Minseo could feel it in her own spine just reading it.
At Haneulseong, “careless” wasn’t a mistake. It was a category. It stuck to you like the red stamp on a transcript, like a nickname that followed you into teacher meetings. Careless meant you deserved what happened. Careless meant you were the kind of student adults could scold without guilt.
Yuna flipped to the next page: a list of names with tiny dots beside them, not accusations. Routes. Who sat near the door, who always volunteered to collect papers, who lingered by the podium after the bell. She’d written it all down because memory could be argued with.
Ink couldn’t.
Jihyeonseol didn’t touch the charts. She slid Minseo’s planner aside like she was clearing a stage. “Say it,” she said, and when Minseo hesitated, she added, softer, “Out loud. Adults don’t read minds. They read tone.”
Minseo’s throat tightened on the first attempt, sentences leaking extra words, I think, maybe, I’m not sure but. Each qualifier felt like a reflex, a way to preempt blame. Jihyeonseol stopped her with two fingers lifted, not harsh, just precise.
“No apologies,” she said. “No ‘I might be wrong.’ You’re not on trial for having feelings. You’re reporting what happened.”
She demonstrated, voice steady, the cadence of someone who’d learned survival in meetings: “At 09:[^47] the packets were on the podium. At 09:[^52] they were handed out. Mine was not the same as the others.” Short. Clean. No room for someone to wedge in shame.
Minseo tried again. Her palms dampened against her pen. “At 09:[^52],” she said, forcing the numbers to carry the weight instead of her face. “The packet I received was different.”
Jihyeonseol nodded once, eyes sharp. “Good. Again. Same words.”
Lina didn’t raise her voice; she didn’t have to. She angled her chair into the dead space between shelves where the security camera couldn’t see their mouths clearly, only their bodies, and motioned three scholarship kids over with a quick, clipped 손짓. “One rule,” she said, eyes moving like she was counting exits. “Only what you personally saw. No ‘I heard.’ No names unless you’re ready to sign them.”
She tore a page from her notebook and drew columns. “Color of the cover. Staple position. Page count. Anything,” she said. “Keep it boring. Boring survives meetings.”
Pens came out. Paper whispered. Minseo watched shoulders loosen as the task became mechanical. Lina nodded once, satisfied, like she’d found a way to make them un-isolatable: not a rumor, a pattern with handwriting.
Their reasons scraped against each other like misfit gears (Yuna’s careful need for truth, Jihyeonseol’s insistence on scholarship-safe language, Lina’s anger looking for a target) but the direction stayed aligned. Specifics. Times. Physical details. Anything that could be verified without begging for trust. Minseo felt, uncomfortably, how they were building a narrative sturdy enough to stand even if the adults decided her character was the weakest evidence.
Minseo kept trying to reduce it to a clerical error. Swap the packet, reprint, forget it. But with Yuna’s timestamps, Lina’s columns, and Jihyeonseol drilling her sentences into something adults couldn’t mishear, the problem began to orbit her name. It wasn’t comfort they were offering. It was scaffolding. And at Haneulseong, scaffolding was the only thing that held when the building decided to drop someone.
By lunch the story had already slipped its leash.
Minseo heard it as she crossed the corridor by the science lab: two first-years pressed against the window, whispering with the bright, bored energy of people trading snacks. “Did you hear? Minseo-ya said Hajun cheated. Like, straight-up,” one said, the syllables snapping. The other made a face like it was delicious. “Scholarship kids always act like that. They can’t lose with dignity.”
Minseo’s steps didn’t change. Practical shoes, steady pace. Her spine stayed straight the way she’d taught it to in front of adults. But inside, her stomach sank as if an elevator cable had cut.
She had never said a name. She had never used the word “cheating.” She’d said (carefully, stupidly politely) something’s off with the packets, the distribution, the timing. She’d practiced it with Jihyeonseol until it sounded like a broken printer, not a crime. Yet the rumor had been folded into a sharper shape, its corners creased into accusation.
It wasn’t just traveling; it was being carried.
At the water fountain, someone she’d shared notes with last semester didn’t meet her eyes. Their hand hovered, then pulled their phone closer to their chest like Minseo might contaminate the screen. A boy from Class 2 muttered “drama” under his breath as she passed, too quiet to be reported, loud enough to be heard. In the cafeteria line, a cluster of girls angled their shoulders so she had to take the narrow path, the one that made her brush against backpacks and apologize for existing.
Yuna appeared beside her without announcement, as if she’d been there the whole time. “It’s… weirdly fast,” she said, voice low, gaze fixed on the rice scoops like they were evidence. Her tone didn’t accuse, but Minseo felt the implied structure: routes, conduits, intention.
Minseo’s phone was in her bag, useless until after class. Around her, screens flickered under desks anyway. Thumbs moving, messages multiplying. Someone wanted this version. Someone wanted Minseo to sound hysterical, jealous, reckless.
She swallowed, tasting metal. “I didn’t say that,” she said, not to Yuna exactly. To the air. To the fluorescent-lit urgency that turned process into scandal.
Yuna’s nod was small and steady. “Then we don’t argue with the rumor,” she said. “We outlast it with receipts.”
The backlash found Lina first because Lina was the one who spoke like she expected to be heard. It started as the smallest kinds of punishment: comments said with a laugh that wasn’t a laugh. In the stairwell a boy from a wealthy homeroom nudged his friend and said, “Scholarship line is noisy these days,” like it was a trend, like it would pass if ignored.
At lunch a third-year leaned against the vending machine and, without looking up from his phone, offered advice that sounded generous. “If you keep collecting people, it’ll look like a vendetta. Adults hate groups. They’ll ask who you’re targeting.” His tone made coalition sound like conspiracy.
Even the warning from a teacher came wrapped in politeness: a light touch on Lina’s elbow after class, a smile that didn’t reach the eyes. “Lina-ya, you’re very capable. But reputation… once it gets a scratch, it’s hard to polish back. Especially for students who depend on support.” The word support landed like a leash.
Lina’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t raise her voice. She just nodded, like she accepted the concern: then walked away already counting who had been close enough to overhear.
Lina didn’t back down; she rerouted the whole conversation. In the main group chat she typed like she was filing a report, not defending a friend: no names, no accusations, just process. Jeolcha first. She pinned a message, “If it’s nothing, the records will prove it”, and dropped a link to a shared log.
Columns appeared within minutes: date, period, packet color, who passed them out, proctor name, where the extra stack sat. Lina added a seat map template and told everyone to mark their own square, jipjeonghae, be exact. When someone tried to steer it back to Minseo, “So who are you saying did it?”, Lina replied, politely lethal: “I’m saying we track distribution. Adults listen to data.”
Yuna’s eyes kept sliding, not to faces but to mouths: the same sharp phrasing, the same “she said Hajun cheated,” always reappearing after it passed through one corner of the room. A boy from Class 2 drifted too close to Minseo’s desk and hissed, “Why are you making this a big deal?” Before Minseo could breathe, Yuna leaned in, palms up. “Ah. Sorry. That was me. I… heard wrong,” she said, soft, almost sheepish on purpose.
In the next homeroom, Yuna makes herself the punchline before anyone else can. She lifts her hands, grins too wide, and says, “Aigo, I think I overheard wrong. I got excited and made it sound bigger.” A few laughs loosen the air. Minseo keeps her gaze on her notebook, letting the heat pass over someone else: while the shared log quietly fills with timestamps.
Jihyeonseol caught Minseo at the edge of the lunch line like it was planned, fingers hooking lightly around Minseo’s sleeve before Minseo could pretend she hadn’t noticed. “Come,” she said (no explanation, just momentum) and Minseo followed because resisting would look like a scene.
They slipped into an empty classroom that still smelled faintly of chalk dust and microwaved kimbap. The blinds were half-drawn, turning the desks into stripes of light and shadow. Jihyeonseol shut the door with her heel, checked the hallway once, then pointed at the teacher’s podium like it was a witness stand.
“Again,” she said.
Minseo’s throat tightened on the first syllable. “I’m Minseo. On, on Tuesday, third period, the packets, ”
“Name. Date. Period. Then observation.” Jihyeonseol’s voice was gentle but unmovable, like a metronome. “No feelings yet.”
Minseo inhaled through her nose, counted without meaning to. “Kim Minseo. Tuesday, third period. Mock exam distribution.” She forced herself to keep her hands still on the edge of a desk. “I saw an extra stack of packets on the windowsill behind the proctor’s desk. The stack was not distributed to the room.”
A pause. Jihyeonseol nodded once, approving, then tilted her head. “And?”
“And I think, ” Minseo started, habit dragging the words out like a safety rope.
“Delete it,” Jihyeonseol cut in immediately. “Adults hear ‘I think’ and they file you under yusik. Drama. Say what you saw.”
Minseo’s cheeks burned. “I saw Hajun… maybe. “You don’t need his name unless you have direct contact. You have process. You have placement. You have inconsistency.”
Minseo’s jaw ached from holding her mouth in the right shape. She tried again, cleaner. “I saw the proctor pause at the extra stack. I saw one packet removed after distribution began.”
This time, the silence felt like space instead of punishment. Jihyeonseol exhaled, softer. “Good. One more time. Same words. Same order. Don’t shrink when you’re right.”
Jihyeonseol slid Minseo’s notebook closer and, without asking, claimed a corner of the page like it was a treaty table. Her pen moved fast: clean block letters, no hearts, no doodles. Three bullets first.
“Evidence,” she said, tapping each line as she wrote. “Where. When. What changed.”
Minseo watched the words appear: Extra stack on windowsill behind proctor’s desk. Proctor paused at stack after distribution began. One packet removed; stack count decreased.
Under it, Jihyeonseol drew a line like a breath. “Impact sentence. One.” She wrote, then let Minseo read it out loud: “This affects scholarship fairness and student trust in the exam process.”
Minseo’s stomach pinched at the word scholarship: like she’d rung a bell that couldn’t be unrung.
“And request.” Jihyeonseol wrote the last line with a decisiveness Minseo didn’t feel: “I want the distribution process reviewed and the packet chain documented.”
Then her phone came out. Stopwatch app. Bright, merciless digits.
“Ready,” Jihyeonseol said. “Forty seconds. No filler. No sorry. Go.”
Minseo starts again. The sentences come out in the right order, practiced into a clean spine, but her body betrays her: shoulders inching forward, neck tucking, like she’s offering her throat to whoever sits behind the desk. Her voice stays even anyway, which feels like lying.
“Stop.” Jihyeonseol’s tone doesn’t scold; it resets the room.
Minseo freezes mid-breath.
“Not the words,” Jihyeonseol says, stepping closer without crowding. “Your shape.” She taps two fingers lightly against the edge of a desk, then gestures to the floor. “Feet. Both.”
Minseo plants them, soles flat, as if she can anchor herself through cheap sneakers and linoleum.
“Chin level. Hands. Unclench.” Jihyeonseol watches until Minseo’s fingers loosen, until the tremor quiets into something usable. “Again. Same sentences.”
Between periods the corridor swelled (shoes squeaking, lockers slamming, someone laughing too loud) and Minseo’s body did what it always did: angled, narrowed, made room. Her shoulder brushed a backpack; she flinched and folded tighter. Jihyeonseol’s hand found her elbow, a quick, exact correction, turning Minseo back to square. “Don’t shrink when you’re right,” she murmured, barely audible under the bell.
Minseo kept walking, but the hallway felt narrowed, as if the air itself expected her to apologize for existing. Don’t shrink when you’re right looped with the rhythm of her steps, turning her ears hot, her throat tight: too sharp to file under stress, too intimate to call fear. At her desk she flipped to a clean page and rewrote her first sentence, deleting every maybe, every I think. She stared at the bluntness, letting it stand.
Yuna began where facts lived: where a teacher’s signature ended and a student’s memory began. In the back of her planner, between a taped hagwon flyer and a vocabulary list, she drew the classroom the way her mind held it: windows to the left, the dead fan that clicked above row three, the teacher’s podium like a small stage. She didn’t bother with perfect scale. She only needed positions that stayed still.
Period by period, she rebuilt the day the packets went missing and the days around it, because patterns didn’t announce themselves unless you lined them up. She wrote the bell times first, 08:[^10], 09:[^00], 09:[^50], then filled in who arrived late, who asked to go out, who hovered at the front like they had a right to. Names came in pencil at first, tentative, then darker when she confirmed them by asking the same question to two different people and hearing the same answer.
She didn’t call it an “investigation,” not even in her head. That word sounded like a room full of adults, like punishment. She called it making it make sense. Like matching socks. Like finding a missing USB in a chaotic desk drawer.
Each entry got a date, a time, and one small human note she allowed herself. No paragraphs about feelings, no stories that could be argued with. The margins stayed mostly clean. When she did write something extra, it was a detail that couldn’t be un-said: blue packet, thicker paper, teacher said “keep sealed”, stack moved from left hand to right.
At lunch she watched hands more than faces. Who carried stacks without being asked. Who could approach the podium without being shooed away. Who joked while looking for an opening.
By the end of the second day, her notes had stopped resembling schoolwork and started resembling a map with routes: paths paper took, paths rumors took, paths people took when they thought no one was logging them. She slid a photocopied seating sketch across to Minseo without ceremony, as if it were just another set of study materials. Her voice stayed light.
“Tell me if I got row four wrong,” she said, and kept her eyes on the page, so Minseo wouldn’t have to see how steady her hands were trying to be.
Lina didn’t let the rumor breathe in the open where it could mutate. She turned it into intake.
She chose the library stairwell because it was too narrow for an audience and too public for anyone to get bold. Between classes, she posted herself on the landing like she belonged there (phone tucked away, hands busy with a folder) catching people one at a time as they passed. Her voice stayed low, practical.
“Not what you heard. What you saw,” she said, and waited through the awkward laugh that always came first.
If someone led with names and outrage, she cut the heat cleanly. “Facts only. Which teacher. Which period. Exact words.” She wrote nothing down in front of them, just listened, head tilted as if she were memorizing a schedule.
Students who wanted drama tried to orbit (half-smiles, widened eyes, a “You won’t believe) ” Lina stepped aside like they were air. No follow-up, no permission.
But when someone said, “It was a blue packet, thicker than usual,” or “He said ‘keep it sealed’. Those exact words,” Lina’s posture shifted, almost imperceptible. She asked one more question, where the stack sat, who touched it, which hand, and then gave them a time to come back.
By Thursday, her “check-ins” had edges. Not gossip. A filter. A narrowing. A small coalition built from specificity.
Jihyeonseol ran Minseo through it like debate club drills openings, clean, timed, merciless. In an empty broadcast room that smelled faintly of hairspray and warm electronics, she lifted one finger. “Claim.” Two. “Timeline.” Three. “Artifact.” Four. “Stop.”
Minseo’s first attempt came out with extra words clinging to it. Jihyeonseol cut in, not unkind. “That’s background. Adults hear it as excuse.” She slid a printed screenshot across the table, the kind with a time stamp that didn’t care about feelings. “Let the paper talk.”
Minseo tried again, forcing her voice into the same register she used to read answers in class. Her stomach still dropped, but she didn’t follow it. She learned, minute by minute, where honesty ended and self-exposure began.
Minseo made the chaos legible. She opened a new notebook like it was a contract, tabs, an index that grew by the hour, each page numbered in the corner with a hard press of her pen. Screenshots got printed, dated, and paired with who sent them and where they came from. Anything hazy she boxed in red: unconfirmed. No leaps, no “probably.” Only: this happened, then this led to this. Enough to survive a teacher’s skeptical stare.
By Friday, it isn’t a plan anymore. It’s muscle memory. After yaja, they drift to the same back corner by the lockers where the fluorescent hum is loud enough to cover whispers. Phones come out only long enough for airdrops and timestamped photos; then they’re gone. Yuna confirms seats and periods, Lina assigns follow-ups, Jihyeonseol trims sentences. Minseo files everything twice. Nothing lives only in a mind.
Minseo waited outside Park Seongmin’s cramped office until the bell’s echo thinned into hallway noise. The door was half-open, the kind of invitation that still asked you to decide. She stepped in, bowed out of habit, and kept her eyes on the stack of unclaimed worksheets by his elbow: anything but the way his gaze found the tightness in her shoulders like he’d been expecting it.
“I need to file a review,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than her hands. “Which form. And… what wording keeps it from becoming ‘just a misunderstanding.’”
Seongmin didn’t ask what happened first. He dragged a battered binder from under a pile of flyers, the plastic sleeves cloudy with use. “They love that word,” he muttered, flipping pages. “Misunderstanding means nobody’s accountable.”
He slid a printed sheet toward her and tapped three lines with a pen that had teeth marks on the cap. “Use the school’s language. Don’t argue feelings. Request procedure.”
Minseo leaned in. The title was something like Request for Formal Verification. Formal enough to feel like entering an adult room without permission. Her throat tightened anyway.
“Write: ‘I am requesting a formal integrity review pursuant to policy,’” Seongmin said, as if dictating an essay outline. “Then: ‘Please preserve all related materials.’ That forces them not to ‘lose’ anything.” His eyes flicked up. “Dates. Exact times. Where you were. Who can corroborate.”
“I don’t have. “You do,” he cut in, not unkind. “Originals, not copies. If you have copies, say why. Screenshots with full timestamps. And witnesses who aren’t your best friend only.” He paused, then softened the edge of his voice. “Even your best friend counts. Just don’t make it easy to dismiss.”
He wrote a list on a sticky note and slapped it into her palm: timeline / receipts / chat export / handwritten headers / request comparison of access logs. Armor, but made of paper.
When she stood to leave, Seongmin added, almost casually, “Don’t call it unfair. Call it inconsistent. Make them reconcile the inconsistency.”
Outside, the corridor lights buzzed. Minseo folded the sticky note twice, then again, until it fit inside her wallet like something you could carry without anyone seeing it. Her relief didn’t arrive yet. Only a sharpened focus, the kind that made her feel briefly untouchable.
That night, Minseo clears her desk the way she’s seen adults clear a table before bad news: everything pushed aside, only what matters left in the light. She doesn’t “study.” She rebuilds.
First, she lays out her notebooks in chronological stacks, flips to each dated header, and photographs the pages in order with the time display visible in the corner of the screen. She retakes any shot that blurs a single Hangul syllable. The air tastes like cold instant coffee and printer dust.
On her laptop, she opens a new folder and names it like a report: Integrity Review, Appendix. Inside, subfolders: Handwritten Notes / Timeline / Messages / Receipts. She numbers each image file, A-01, A-02. So no one can pretend the sequence is ambiguous.
She highlights margin notes where her reasoning corrected itself, circling the moment a wrong method turns into the right one. Not proof of perfection. Proof of process.
Then she makes an index page, bullet-pointed in the school’s language: item, date, time, relevance. Her wrist aches, but the ache feels clean. If the system wants paperwork, she will become paperwork.
She treats the study-cafe trail like evidence from a crime show, the kind she used to half-watch while folding laundry for her grandmother. From her wallet: the crumpled paper receipt, edges softened by sweat. From her bank app: the card payment line item, store name abbreviated, exact won amount. From her texts: the café’s automated message, gyeolje complete, timestamped to the minute. She screenshots each one with the status bar visible, then emails them to herself so they live somewhere her phone can’t “accidentally” forget.
Then she opens her notebook and finds the places her pen dug in hardest: the definition she rewrote twice, the diagram she corrected in the margin. She circles those entries and writes the matching time beside them, building a cross-marked map that says, quietly: I was here before you decided I wasn’t.
Yuna found her after yaja, in the hallway where the lights dimmed to save electricity and the floor still held the day’s heat. She sat close but not touching, opened KakaoTalk, and exported their entire thread. Then she took screenshots, status bar and all, and saved them twice.
Friday morning, she doesn’t linger outside a classroom door. She goes straight to the administration office, takes a numbered ticket, and waits under the hum of fluorescent lights. When her turn comes, she slides the packet across the counter and says, evenly, “Jeongshik geomto, 부탁드립니다.” No apology, no explanation to be judged.
Minseo walks into the review room with her binder held flat against her ribs, the metal ring pressing a line into her uniform shirt. The air smells like instant coffee gone cold and copier heat. A plastic clock ticks too loudly for such a small room.
There are three adults at the table. An administrator with a laptop already open, the subject teacher who’d said the word cheating without saying it, and another staff member whose name tag catches the fluorescent glare. None of them stand. Minseo gives a small bow anyway, the kind that costs nothing and invites nothing back, and says, “Annyeonghaseyo.”
She sits as if the chair belongs to her, not because she’s confident but because asking would feel like surrendering the only control she has. Her posture is neat. Back straight, shoulders quiet. Her face stays blank enough that her eyes don’t have to apologize for being tired.
The administrator gestures vaguely toward the binder. “You brought… materials.”
“Yes.” Minseo sets the binder down with both hands, aligning it to the edge of the table until it’s square. She can feel her pulse in her fingertips. She doesn’t let them fidget. Her pencil case stays closed; she isn’t here to write anything down that can be twisted later.
The teacher’s gaze flicks to her hair tie, the plainness of her, as if searching for the kind of student who would do something desperate. Minseo lets the gaze land and slide off. At home, people look at her like that when they’re deciding which version of the divorce story she belongs to.
She hears Seongmin’s blunt voice in her head. Let them hang themselves on procedure.* She inhales through her nose, counts the breath like an equation.
When the administrator says, “We’ll need to understand your timeline,” Minseo nods once. Not agreement. A signal that she’s ready.
Her thumb rests on the tabbed index, already marked. The binder is not a plea. It’s a boundary.
The administrator doesn’t say cheating this time. He says things like, “In general,” and “Hypothetically,” and keeps his cursor hovering over a file name on his screen as if the answer might be in the font.
“So,” he continues, voice careful, “how do you think the packet might have been accessed before distribution?”
Minseo doesn’t take the bait of feeling accused. She flips to the index with her thumb like she’s turning pages in a textbook, not defending her life. “My notes were written before the exam packet existed in my hands,” she says, one sentence, no extra air.
She slides the first attachment forward, already open to the right page, the edge aligned with the table’s seam. The paper shows her handwriting dated two weeks back, the same unit title underlined twice. Next to it, a study cafe 영수증 with a timestamp, the ink slightly faded at the fold.
The teacher’s eyes narrow, then flick, against their will, to the date.
Minseo keeps her hands flat. “If you look at page three,” she adds, and watches the administrator’s finger follow where she points, the timeline beginning to lock.
Minseo keeps her voice level and small, like she’s reading attendance. “March 3rd, 19:[^12]. Mapo Study Café.” She doesn’t look up for permission; she looks down for proof. Each question lands, and she answers with three coordinates (date, time, location) then pins it to paper before anyone can interpret her tone. Page 2: the first outline in blue pen. Page 4: the 영수증, the timestamp dark as a bruise. Page 6: Yuna’s KakaoTalk logs, screenshots with the day stamped in the corner, the same problem number mentioned in passing between jokes about convenience store coffee.
No speeches. No “I would never.” Just click, click, click. The timeline sealing shut around their insinuations until there’s nowhere for it to breathe.
The teacher clears his throat, circling the same accusation without naming it. Minseo doesn’t argue. She turns back past the recent unit, to older pages where her handwriting is messier, margins crowded with “x” and red arrows. Week by week: a wrong substitution, a half-finished proof, a teacher’s comment copied down, then her own correction the next 야자. It’s learning, not copying.
Minseo turns to a page she almost tore out. “Here,” she says, tapping the boxed mistake. An early shortcut that collapses under a sign error, then her later correction in smaller pen. “If I had the packet, why would I write this first?” The problem set has no trace of that dead-end. She doesn’t add anything else. Her silence makes the gap visible: no leak can explain learning.
The vice principal clears his throat the way adults do when they want the room to forget they’re choosing sides. He doesn’t look at Minseo when he speaks; he looks at the form, at the pre-printed boxes, as if the paper is the only thing in here that can’t be argued with.
“In accordance with the academic integrity guidelines,” he begins, voice careful, clipped, “the mark will be, ” A pause, the smallest recalibration. “, paused, pending correction.”
The phrasing is sterile on purpose. Not cleared. Not apologized for. Just suspended in midair like a heavy book held above someone’s head.
Minseo’s eyes track his pen. It’s a cheap ballpoint, the kind the office keeps on strings, but in his hand it becomes a gavel. The tip hovers over the earlier note then hesitates like he’s weighing whether he can afford to admit the mistake in ink.
Her fingers curl against the edge of her binder until the plastic bites. She keeps her face neutral, because relief is something people love to punish, because showing she needs this outcome would make it feel negotiable.
The pen comes down. One decisive, irritated slash through the accusation. Not a neat correction, not a formal amendment: just a strike-through, like erasing a stain without acknowledging who made it. The sound is small, a scratch that seems too quiet for how loud her pulse is. He writes a brief addendum beside it, letters compressed: “Paused pending correction,” and initials, as if a signature can disinfect what happened.
Someone shifts a chair leg. The air changes: less hostile, not yet kind. Minseo catches the vice principal’s jaw tighten as he caps the pen, a mechanical click. He slides the paper a few centimeters away from himself, toward the center of the table, like distancing his hands from the decision.
Minseo doesn’t reach for it. Not yet. She watches the line he drew, and thinks: proof works. Documentation works. If you can make the timeline undeniable, even adults have to move.
Across the table, Mr. Kim, who’d said “we have to consider the possibility” with that careful teacher voice, doesn’t fight back. He goes very still, like a photo loading and then freezing. One eyelid flutters a beat late, a misfire that makes Minseo’s skin prickle. His shoulders square, locking into posture, and his gaze lands not on her face but on the plastic seam of her binder, as if eye contact would make this real.
When the vice principal asks a procedural question, what time the packet was supposedly accessible, who had the key, Mr. Kim answers too fast. Too clean. The words come out flat, clipped into neat syllables, like he’s reciting a script he’s already revised in his head. “I only raised a concern. For due diligence.” He doesn’t say he implied anything. He doesn’t say her name.
A younger staff member tries to clarify ”: and Mr. Kim cuts in, voice suddenly firm. “No. I didn’t see anything directly.”
Minseo watches his hands. They’re folded, then not, then folded again, knuckles whitening briefly: an attempt to leave the room without leaving prints.
Minseo keeps her expression arranged into something acceptable until the vice principal stands and everyone follows, chairs scraping in tired unison. She answers when spoken to, a small “ne” here, a quiet nod there, while they promise to “review procedures” and “tighten access,” as if the issue is a loose lock and not a girl nearly labeled a thief. She watches their mouths more than their eyes, cataloging phrasing the way she catalogs formulas: pause, pending, guidelines. No one says sorry. No one says wrong.
Her fingers don’t unclench until she’s out, binder hugged to her ribs like a shield. The door shuts with a soft click and her lungs finally remember how to move. Heat floods up her neck into her ears, relief buzzing under her skin. Threaded with a clean, precise anger: that belief had required receipts, chat logs, timestamps. That her truth had needed footnotes.
In the hallway the fluorescent lights feel harsher, like they’ve been turned up to watch her. Lina doesn’t say congratulations; she just grips Minseo’s shoulder once, firm, brief, then releases, already looking down the corridor like the next round is waiting. Yuna exhales in a long spill and bends slightly at the waist, fingers on her knees. Minseo sees it: Yuna had been bracing for impact too.
Jihyeonseol doesn’t drift away with the others; she stays a half-step closer, close enough that Minseo can smell clean shampoo under cafeteria air. Her gaze doesn’t flick to the office door, doesn’t ask for details. “You did it,” she says, voice low: no yaa, no joke to soften it. Just fact, offered like permission for Minseo to stand there unashamed.
Relief doesn’t settle in Minseo’s chest: it cinches, like someone tightening the strap on a backpack until it sits flush and bearable. A clean, usable thought slots into place: I can make them back off if I can prove everything.
She watches the line of adults reassemble themselves. Paper slides into folders. A stamp pad is capped. A pen clicks shut with unnecessary force. Their movements say procedure, not person. No one meets her gaze long enough to risk seeing what they almost did to her name.
It occurs to her, with a sharpness that feels almost like clarity, that innocence isn’t a state here. It’s a format.
The vice principal’s voice softens on words like “misunderstanding” and “policy,” as if volume could rewrite intention. The homeroom teacher (stiff-backed, cheeks blotched) keeps looking at Minseo’s binder instead of Minseo’s face. When the teacher says, “We’ll be more careful going forward,” it lands like an instruction, not an apology. Be more careful, as if the danger was her being accused, not their willingness to accuse.
Minseo’s fingers find the edge of her receipt in the clear sleeve and press until the paper dents. Time. Location. Proof. She thinks of her notes, the way she’d written them half-asleep under study café fluorescents, not for anyone’s approval: just to survive the next test. Now they’ve become evidence. She feels a small flare of triumph, and underneath it, something colder: that the truth had been treated like a claim to be verified, not a fact to be recognized.
In the corner of her vision, Hajun stands perfectly still near the doorway, expression composed to the point of absence. His eyes track the adults, then flick to Minseo’s binder with the same quick calculation he uses on exam questions. He doesn’t look surprised. He looks like someone updating a file.
Minseo swallows the anger back into something neat. If they require packaging, she can package. If they require documents, she can produce.
Her heart keeps beating too fast, but her mind is already making categories. What counts. What persuades. What shuts mouths. What survives scrutiny.
She leaves the room with a new kind of certainty. One that doesn’t feel like peace, but like a plan.
That night, Minseo doesn’t open her planner. She opens a blank document and names it like something a committee would take seriously: Incident Response, Study Integrity. The cursor blinks, impatient. Her room is quiet in the way that means someone is asleep behind thin walls and any sound could become a question.
She writes headings instead of feelings.
What worked: time-stamped receipt (study café),
KakaoTalk chat logs (Yuna), scan of handwritten notes, consistent pen
pressure, page numbers.
What almost failed: relying on memory, assuming adults
would “see” effort, leaving anything in a single bag.
She copies the office’s phrasing from memory, “policy,” “access,” “reasonable suspicion”, and answers it with bullets the way she answers a short-response question. Screenshot. Export. Backup. Print.
The list grows. Each line is a small, satisfying click, like sliding a bolt into place. She adds a new section: Preemptive proof. Under it, she types fast, as if speed itself is protection: take photos of board dates; save drafts; keep receipts for everything; never walk into a room without a folder.
When her laptop fan kicks up, her headache returns, but she doesn’t stop. Control, she tells herself, is something you can assemble.
By morning, her backpack looks less like a student’s and more like a portable file cabinet. Pencils and highlighters get demoted to the side pocket; the center is claimed by a rigid clear folder labeled in neat English so she can find it in two seconds with her eyes closed. She starts a second notebook, not for math or Korean lit, but for process: dates, rooms, who handed out what, which teacher said which rule. She changes her cloud password twice, makes it something she can remember without writing down, and doesn’t tell Yuna even when the secrecy stings. In class, her phone lifts for a half-beat, click, the board’s date captured, before she even realizes she’s done it.
In the planner’s margins, Minseo draws a new header in block letters (Preemptive proof) and the bullets that follow aren’t about vocab or calculus. Seat number. Classroom clock photo. Screenshot every KakaoTalk thread before it “disappears.” Keep a paper trail for exemptions, errands, nurse visits, office calls. The checklist gives her a tight, bright satisfaction she refuses to call relief. Like competence, like safety, like a future that can be audited.
When her chest tightens, she doesn’t name it fear. Fear is messy, subjective. She calls it a gap: missing timestamps, unsaved threads, a receipt she forgot to ask for. Confidence turns into a quieter blade: systems don’t “come for” people, she tells herself; they only flag the careless. If she stays ahead, scan, backup, log, annotate, nothing can stick to her skin.
Seongmin catches her before she can slip back into the stream of students, right where the corridor narrows beside the administration office. The fluorescent light makes everyone look a little sick. His oversized coat hangs open, scuffed sneakers planted like he’s blocking a door on purpose.
“You think you won,” he says, not smiling.
Minseo’s hand tightens around the edge of her clear folder. The plastic bites into her palm in a way that feels grounding. “I did win,” she corrects, because the word matters. The integrity mark is paused. The vice principal’s mouth had gone thin. The teacher who’d looked at her like she was a question with one answer had stared at the floor.
Seongmin’s gaze flicks to the office door, then back to her face. His eyes don’t have congratulations in them. Only inventory. Like he’s counting what she’s carrying and what she’s leaving exposed. “One win makes you loud,” he says. “Not your mouth. Your outline. People start seeing your routes.”
Minseo blinks. Loud? She’s done everything possible to be quiet. She’s been careful, respectful, factual. She had receipts. She had dates. She had screenshots. The system responded the way systems are supposed to: evidence in, outcome out.
He speaks again, blunt enough to sting. “You just taught them you’ll fight. That you know how. So next time they won’t make a mistake you can print out.”
The word next time lands wrong, like he’s cursing her. Her throat wants to close, but she keeps it open with sheer practice. “Are you saying I should’ve… let it go?”
“I’m saying,” Seongmin says, voice lower now, “don’t mistake a pause for safety. Don’t mistake embarrassment for remorse.” He rubs a hand over his face, a tired gesture that looks older than he is. “Keep your head down for a week. Let the heat move.”
Minseo hears: be smaller. Wait. Hope. Adult superstition, the kind people use when they don’t know how to fix things. She nods anyway because nodding is faster than arguing, and because his concern makes something in her chest ache in an inconvenient place.
“Okay,” she says, already reorganizing the advice into something actionable. Not head down: head forward. Keep logging. Keep proof. Next time, she’ll be faster. Next time, she’ll close the gaps before anyone can even point at them.
As she walks away, Seongmin doesn’t follow. But she feels his eyes on her back like a hand hovering there, unsure whether to steady her or shove her out of danger.
Hajun catches her by the bulletin board where mock exam rankings curl at the corners, the paper edges worrying under the hallway’s recycled heat. He’s immaculate as always as if he has a private room to breathe in between bells.
“Minseo,” he says, voice pitched for politeness, not intimacy. “I heard it got cleared up. I’m glad the misunderstanding was resolved.”
His smile doesn’t reach his eyes. It’s the kind teachers like because it costs them nothing.
“Thanks,” she answers, already shifting her folder higher against her ribs. She can feel the stale glue of the posted notices, the faint chemical tang of toner. Her headache flickers.
He tilts his head, the movement small, practiced. “You said you studied off-campus that day, right? Which study cafe was it? Were you alone?” A beat. “And the receipt: did you request it at the counter or was it automatic?”
The questions come out clean, clipped, almost helpful. Minseo gives him clean answers back, name of the cafe, Yuna’s presence, time-stamp, pleased she can sound steady, competent.
She doesn’t notice how his gaze ticks to her hands each time she says a time. Like he’s counting. Like he’s building his own notes.
Over the next few days, Minseo begins to recognize patterns the way she recognizes question types: repeat, adjust, confirm. The same second-year boy is always “tying his shoelace” by the stairwell when she switches floors. Two girls who never use the lockers choose hers to linger near, their voices dropping the moment her footsteps line up with theirs. At the water purifier, a boy’s eyes slide: not to her face, but to the clear folder tucked under her arm, to the bulge of her bag like it might confess something.
She tells herself it’s normal. News travels; people stare. If anything, it’s proof the review mattered.
Still, she starts taking the long hallway once, then twice, just to test if the edges follow.
Yuna slips into the seat beside her during break, shoulder brushing Minseo’s blazer sleeve like a signal. “Ya,” she murmurs, eyes on the classroom door, “the 출결 logs are… glitching. People are here and still marked absent. Times are shifting. Teachers keep saying ‘system check.’” Minseo taps her planner, barely listening. Compared to a formal review and a paused integrity mark, an admin hiccup reads as harmless static.
Each small wrongness becomes something she can file. She turns unease into procedure: screenshot the 출결 page before it “updates,” export the Kakao chat, photograph the study-cafe clock, keep receipts in a zipper pouch, duplicate everything to Drive and a USB. Vigilance feels like competence. Competence feels like armor. So alarms stop being alarms: just cues to document faster, cleaner, enough to win again.
Minseo walked back into homeroom like nothing had happened: like the last week hadn’t been a fluorescent interrogation of her character. Shoulders squared, chin level, planner already open on her desk before her chair finished scraping the floor. The spiral binding sat at a precise angle, her timetable and to-do list aligned as if the page itself could enforce order.
Around her, the room made the usual sounds: zippered pencil cases, the thud of backpacks, someone tearing open a stick of instant coffee contraband. But there was a new thinness in the way voices rose and fell. A few heads turned too fast, then looked away. A boy in the back whispered her name like it was a category.
“You’re the one who, ” someone started, half-curious, half-hoping for a mess.
Minseo didn’t look up from the planner. “I just did what the policy says,” she said, in the same tone she used when correcting a textbook typo. Flat. Factual. Not an invitation.
Her pen tapped once, twice, a small metronome against the desk. Victory had a rhythm, apparently. She told herself it was just excess energy, leftover adrenaline, but the sound steadied her more than it should have. Adults had been forced to follow her evidence. The school had moved because she pushed the right button hard enough. For a moment, the world felt correctly calibrated: cause, effect, receipt.
Between periods, a teacher passed in the hallway and hesitated. Eyes flicking to her face, then to the clear folder under her arm. Minseo met the glance without flinching. She could feel the heat under her collarbone, part relief, part anger, part something dangerously close to satisfaction. She wasn’t invisible when she didn’t want to be.
At lunch, Yuna slid a carton of milk toward her without comment, like placing a bookmark in the day. Minseo’s mouth wanted to say thank you, wanted to soften. Instead she nodded and flipped to a fresh page. The planner paper smelled faintly of ink and disinfectant. She wrote the next week’s goals in clean boxes, handwriting tight and controlled. Untouchable, she thought, if she stayed sharp enough. If she kept the rules close enough to her skin.
That night she doesn’t study first. She builds infrastructure.
On her desk, the clear folder becomes a whole archive: color tabs, a cheap label maker borrowed from her uncle’s office, dates stamped in blunt Hangul. She makes subfolders by 과목, then inside them, screenshots arranged like evidence exhibits, 출결 page before and after “system check,” Kakao messages exported and renamed with the minute they were sent, photos of classroom clocks cropped so the second hand is visible. Receipts get stapled to mock-exam printouts; she writes the location and seat number in the margin, as if the paper might forget where it existed.
Even conversations become documents. After a teacher calls her to the hallway, Minseo returns to her seat and types the exchange into Notes: who spoke first, exact phrasing, tone, what was implied but not said. Bullet points. No adjectives. She saves it to Drive, then to a USB she keeps in the zipper pouch with her ID.
It feels… clean. Like scrubbing grime off something that was never supposed to be questioned. Chaos translated into a format adults have to respect. Proof you can hold in your hand.
The feeling didn’t stay in the review room; it leaked into everything. When a girl at the lockers repeated a softened version of the cheating rumor, Minseo didn’t argue. She opened her KakaoTalk export, pointed to the sent time, and said, “This was before third period. Check the minute.” The girl’s face tightened, then she laughed too loudly and changed the subject. In math, Mr. Kim tried to slide the quiz date forward like it was negotiable. Minseo raised her hand, calm. “The 공지 says Friday. Posted 08:[^12].” She even remembered the exact shade of the announcement banner. He paused, eyes flicking to the classroom board, then nodded like he’d meant it. People started giving her space. Not out of kindness, but out of caution. Documentation wasn’t just proof. It was a boundary.
At home, the shouting spikes. Voices ricocheting off the thin apartment walls until her grandmother’s clatter in the kitchen sounds like a warning. Twice she leaves 야자 early, signing out with a steady hand and a throat that won’t unclench, telling herself it’s temporary, that she’ll “make it up” later. Those nights don’t become files. No receipts, no Kakao exports. The school doesn’t get to quantify survival.
When Lina leaned in and said the new elite program wasn’t about scores so much as “looking clean,” something in Minseo clicked into place, hard and bright. Clean meant legible. Clean meant undeniable. On the walk to 야자 she opened her folder again, thumb hovering over time stamps, attendance-board photos, cafe receipts, checking, rechecking, sure that if she kept producing proof, the school would eventually run out of ways to refuse her.
The summons arrives through homeroom like a misdelivered punishment. The teacher doesn’t raise her voice; she doesn’t have to. She pauses at the roster, eyes flicking to the back row, and says Minseo’s name as if it’s a correction to be made. A student aide in a stiff cardigan steps into the classroom with an envelope that is not sealed, just folded with the school stamp showing: official enough to make everyone look up, casual enough to pretend it isn’t humiliating.
When the aide reaches her desk, her hand hesitates. The envelope hovers for half a second above Minseo’s notebook, as if the paper itself might stain. “Scholarship office,” the aide murmurs in English that feels like a borrowed uniform. No eye contact. No sorry.
Minseo nods once, too small to be defiant, too controlled to be grateful. She slides the envelope under her math workbook like she can hide it from the room’s hunger. Around her, chairs creak. Someone’s pen stops scratching. The silence is the kind that counts.
She doesn’t open it. She doesn’t need to. Her body already knows what a summons means: a hallway walk that turns into a story before you reach the stairs.
She stands when the bell rings, notebook hugged to her ribs, spine straight, hair tie pulling tight at the base of her skull. In her head, she starts building a defense in bullet points, dates, reasons, the phrases teachers accept when they don’t want to know details. 야자 attendance policy. Family emergency. Prior notice given? (No, because there was no time.) Counselor visit? (Only once.) Evidence? (Texts, maybe. Voice recordings? Too messy.)
She maps her route like a strategy: main staircase, not the back one where the seniors smoke. Keep her face neutral. Don’t rush. Don’t look like you’re guilty.
As she passes the hallway bulletin boards (mock exam rankings, college banners, a bright poster for the elite prep program) her phone buzzes once in her pocket, trapped and useless. She imagines her grandmother’s living room, voices ricocheting off thin walls, and feels her throat tighten. Competence is armor, she tells herself, and keeps walking.
Inside, everything is disinfected into obedience. The scholarship office smells like citrus cleaner and toner; the fluorescent light makes even the beige walls look judgmental. Laminated 규정 sheets are pinned in tidy grids, the kind with bolded clauses and tiny footnotes, as if fairness can be formatted. A printer hums in the corner, still radiating heat. On the desk, a manila folder sits already open to her name like someone has been rehearsing this conversation without her.
The coordinator doesn’t ask if she’s okay. She doesn’t even start with hello.
“Explain why you failed to comply with evening self-study attendance,” she says, voice practiced, not unkind, worse, impartial.
Minseo stands because there’s no chair offered. Her hands tighten around her notebook until the edge bites her palm.
A single page slides toward her, pushed with two fingers as if it’s contagious. Highlighted lines leap out: policy citations, percentages, thresholds. There’s a signature block at the bottom with an empty line that feels like a demand, not a formality.
Minseo opens her mouth and hears how thin the word family sounds in a room like this.
The report is immaculate in the way wealth is immaculate. Nothing smudged, nothing human. A table of dates, exact exit times down to the minute, and neat “security confirmation” notes that turn her leaving into a decision with clean edges. 21:[^14]. 20:[^47]. 19:[^58]. Each timestamp is a small accusation.
Minseo’s stomach drops as she recognizes the nights like bruises you can name by touch: her grandmother’s voice on the phone, not loud, never loud, just tight, whispering her name like a warning; the sound of a door hitting its frame hard enough to shake the spoon jar; the moment Minseo chose to run because running was what kept things from tipping.
Here, that instinct has been converted into evidence. Her urgency is formatted. Her fear is filed.
She explains anyway, careful and professional, the way she’s trained herself to speak to adults: “family circumstances,” “temporary instability,” “I made up the hours during lunch and weekends.” The words come out in tidy clauses, like copy-pasted apologies. The coordinator’s smile doesn’t move, but the questions sharpen: why no documentation, why no exemption form, why this “pattern.” Minseo hears her own steady tone and hates how loophole-shaped her life sounds.
When she steps back into the corridor, the air feels louder. Near the counseling hallway, she catches it in shards (“seonsaengnim-hago manhi manna…”) cut off when she turns. A boy from her class doesn’t look away fast enough; his gaze sticks to her blouse pocket like it’s a badge. The report’s clean fonts blur, then sharpen. This isn’t observation. It’s curation. Absences framed like a confession, so any explanation becomes begging.
Park Seongmin appears the way trouble appears in this school, fast, sideways, before you can brace for it.
Minseo is two steps from the administration door when his oversized coat cuts across her path. “Ya,” he says, not loud yet, but sharp enough that her shoulders lock. His gaze drops to the paper in her hand like it’s a weapon. “Give me that.”
She hesitates on instinct, rules, ownership, consequences, but his palm is already out, impatient. The report slides from her fingers. For a second she feels bare, like she’s handed over the only proof she exists in their system.
He scans it standing up, eyes moving too quickly to be fair. The fluorescent light catches on the clean grid lines. His jaw works once. Again. A muscle ticks near his temple, the tell he’s trying not to swear in front of students.
“Look at this,” he mutters, angling it away from passing eyes. “Minute-by-minute. Security confirmation. They didn’t ‘notice’ you left early. They tracked you.”
Minseo’s throat tightens. “I can explain. I already. He holds the report closer, as if reading it could rewrite it. “Listen. Don’t go in there and start talking first.”
Her pulse stutters. “If I don’t, ”
“They’re waiting for you to apologize,” he says, too quickly, like he’s been in this room before with different students and the same trap. “They want you to say you were wrong so they can write down you admitted it. You say ‘I’m sorry’ and suddenly it’s not a family situation, it’s ‘lack of compliance.’” He flicks the paper once, a sharp little slap. “And then they act like they’re being kind when they ‘let you off’ with a warning.”
Minseo watches his hands. Ink-stained thumb, short nails, the tremor he’s hiding behind motion. Her own hands hover uselessly at her sides. Around them, the hallway keeps moving: a teacher’s heels, a cluster of first-years whispering, the distant click of a printer.
“Seonsaengnim,” she says, careful, “please. If you get involved, ”
“I’m already involved,” he cuts in, and the bitterness in it surprises her. He shoves the report back into her grip, but keeps two fingers on the corner like an anchor. “You stand behind me. Don’t give them your neck.”
Park Seongmin doesn’t so much walk as cut a line through the corridor, his oversized coat flaring with each fast turn. Minseo keeps half a step behind, the report folded too tightly in her fist, edges biting her palm. His voice starts low, dangerously controlled, and then rises with each syllable like a kettle left too long.
“Minute-by-minute?” he snaps, stopping hard in front of the vice principal’s door. “Who authorized this kind of attendance verification for 야자? Since when are we running a surveillance log on kids who already don’t sleep?”
The secretary at the front desk looks up, pen hovering. Her eyes flick to Minseo, to Park, to the small knot of students slowing near the stairwell like they’ve hit invisible traffic. Somebody whispers, “mwoya,” and then pretends to adjust their backpack.
Park leans toward the desk, not touching it, but close enough that the air feels crowded. “Don’t tell me this is ‘standard.’ Show me the guideline. Show me the approval.”
Minseo’s stomach drops. Not at the words, but at how easily they can be repeated later, trimmed into a headline: difficult staff member, unstable student. She wants to tug him back by his sleeve. Instead, she stands still and listens to the fluorescent lights buzz like a warning.
The vice principal doesn’t touch the numbers on the page. He adjusts his glasses and lets silence do the work first, then speaks as if he’s offering Park a chance to save face. “Seongmin-ssi,” he says, too gentle, “your concern is noted. But why is a support staff member coaching a student through compliance procedures? Why are you repeatedly requesting ‘exceptions’ without proper channels?” His gaze slides, almost bored, to Minseo and back. “And these meetings you keep having with students. Why are they off the record?”
Park’s laugh is sharp, humorless. “Because if it’s on the record, you can bury it,” he says, voice climbing. “Because kids like her don’t have parents who can come in wearing suits and smile at you.”
Park’s hand lifts before Minseo can stop it, palm open like a confession. “She left early because her house is, ” He swallows, then pushes through. “Parents. Divorce. She’s managing things.”
The vice principal’s face arranges itself into sympathy, a slow nod. “I see. Then we’ll need formal documentation. And you,” his gaze pins Park, “should stop handling sensitive matters in corridors.”
Minseo’s ears ring. Her life, flattened into a stamp: unstable. Useful. Weaponized.
The vice principal’s smile doesn’t move as he closes the folder. “For the record,” he says softly, “this will be noted. Continued… inappropriate advocacy invites review.” He lets the word hang like a policy, not a threat. Then, to Minseo, precise and isolating: “Any appeals go through the official channel. Individually.” Park’s posture stays rigid, but Minseo feels the trap. His defense recast as misconduct, her as the liability tied to it.
Minseo’s thumb drags down the page until the bullet points turn into a sentence that feels like someone’s hand closing around her throat.
Corroboration: Student was observed leaving campus grounds prior to 야자 dismissal on the following dates… The list is not vague. No “around,” no “several times.” It is stamped with specificity: 21:[^12], 21:[^18], 21:[^25]. Not just that she left, but the window between the bell and the front gate. The phrasing is administrative-clean, the kind adults use when they want the conclusion to look inevitable. Patterned behavior. Repeated early departure without proper authorization.
She reads it twice, then a third time, because her brain keeps trying to turn it into a mistake.
A teacher couldn’t have known those minutes. Homeroom teachers barely knew students’ faces past midterms. Even the hallway CCTV logs weren’t written like this; this reads like an answer to a question. A prompt. Someone asked: When did she leave? How often? Who saw her? And someone else (someone close enough to know her rhythm) filled in the blanks without hesitation.
Minseo’s mouth tastes metallic. She counts the dates with the edge of her nail, quietly, like tallying debts. The nights her grandmother’s voice had climbed into a rasp. The nights her father didn’t come home. The nights her mother’s phone had lit up with messages she wouldn’t let anyone else read. Each time, Minseo had walked out of the classroom with her bag already packed, shoulders set, eyes down, pretending it was normal.
The report turns those exits into a “pattern.” It turns her home into a misconduct trendline.
Her gaze catches on one line again. The part that makes her skin go cold. Not the accusation, but the confidence of it. The way it’s framed as if the writer never had to wonder.
Someone didn’t just notice.
Someone confirmed.
In the corridor outside the nurse’s office, Kimin steps into her path like a practiced accident. Half a smile, shoulders angled so anyone passing sees friendliness, not interception. The fluorescents bleach them out; their lips look a little too pale. A neat medication pouch bulges from the pocket of their cardigan, the zipper pull clicking once when their fingers worry it.
“Minseo,” they say, soft enough that it doesn’t carry. Their gaze skims over her shoulder, counting witnesses. “Don’t. Don’t look like that.”
Minseo doesn’t answer. She just waits, still as a door.
Kimin exhales, quick, like it hurts. “They asked me to confirm schedule stuff. Just dates. Like, ‘you’re in the same class, right?’” A small laugh tries to happen and fails. “I didn’t accuse you of anything. I swear.”
“Who asked?” Minseo’s voice comes out flat, competent. It surprises her how much that scares her.
Kimin’s eyes flick away again, toward the staff room end of the hall. “It was… they were just checking.” Their smile tightens too fast. “I only said what anyone could’ve seen.”
Minseo doesn’t raise her voice. She just keeps asking, the way she does with math proofs: one step, then the next, until there’s nowhere left to hide the missing line.
“Checking by who?” she says. “Verifying for what.”
Kimin’s fingers pinch the zipper pull again, again. “A teacher, at first. Like, casually. ‘You’re always together, right?’ And then, ” Their throat works. “An administrator. Same 질문, different tone. Like the answer was already decided.”
“What did you say.”
Kimin’s eyes shine without spilling. “I said the days you left early. I said I saw you near the office once. I said you mentioned family stuff.” The words come out clipped, pre-apologized for. “If I act difficult,” they add, voice tightening into something sharp and scared, “they start wondering why I need exceptions at all.”
Minseo hears the 거래 being made without anyone naming the price. Kimin’s smile clicks into place. Too fast, too polite, like a reflex drilled by fear. “I didn’t say anything bad,” they repeat, and the sentence hangs between them like a charm against consequences. But Minseo knows school language: you don’t need 악의. You need verifiable. A timestamp. A witness. Just enough so suspicion prints as fact.
Minseo takes one small step back (not retreat, recalibration) because the shape of it is suddenly obvious: a person flattened into a form, a line item, a “confirmed.” Kimin’s shoulders loosen like a knot cut, gratitude disguised as normalcy. Minseo turns before her face can crack. The paper in her grip feels hot, toner and accusation. It isn’t melodrama. It’s survival, sworn in.
Minseo stops on the landing between the second and third floors because her body remembers before her mind catches up. The stairwell is always the same, gray cement, green anti-slip strips, a window that never opens enough to change the air, but today the fluorescent tube’s hum sits inside her molars, vibrating like a warning she can’t swallow.
Miran’s voice comes back, not dreamy now, not mystical. Practical. A list.
Rooftop door. Locked, but someone knows when it isn’t. A hinge that doesn’t squeal if you lift it right. A moment when the security camera “glitches” because nobody checks that corner unless they’re looking for something.
Missing exam packet. Not stolen in a dramatic way. Just not there when it’s time to be there, and then everyone has to ask, Who had access. Who was last seen. Who is always “around.”
Adults nodding because there’s a record somewhere. 출입기록. Attendance sheet. A signature line that looks official enough that no one wants to be the person who questions it. Teachers who don’t say “I think,” only “According to.”
Her fingers tighten around the edge of the paper she’s carrying until it bends. She thinks of how the school loves procedures because procedures don’t have feelings. Procedures don’t hear shouting through thin apartment walls. Procedures don’t carry younger cousins on one hip while boiling ramyeon with the other hand. Procedures only ask: Did you stay for 야자. Did you sign out correctly. Did you notify the right office.
A footstep echoes from below: someone taking the stairs two at a time, laughing softly, life continuing. Minseo presses her shoulder to the cold wall and inhales the smell of dust and disinfectant.
It isn’t that Miran predicted her. It’s worse.
Someone noticed her patterns: how she leaves early without making a scene, how she goes to the office instead of complaining in the hallway, how she refuses to ask for help until it’s too late. Predictable, that’s the word that makes her stomach twist. Predictable means easy to frame. Easy to “verify.”
She makes herself move again, one step at a time, as if walking can keep her from becoming a story other people can finish for her.
Minseo flips the compliance report over and forces herself to read it the way Park Seongmin once told her to read school paperwork: not as guilt, but as mechanics. The page is clean: black toner, neat grid, dates lined up like they’re impartial. Each row has a small cruelty built in. “Early departure” becomes “absence” if the exit time isn’t written in the right pen. “Notified homeroom” becomes “no notice” if the 담당교사 was at a meeting when she came by. One unchecked box turns a night of slammed doors and her grandmother’s breath turning shallow into a simple category: unexcused.
There’s a signature at the bottom, quick and confident, the kind that assumes nobody will challenge it. She can almost see the moment it was signed: someone’s bored hand, someone else’s polite request, a stamp of authority that erases context by design.
She traces the dates with her thumb and remembers them anyway: the rice cooker beeping into silence, her cousin’s homework spread on the floor, her mother whispering “잠깐만” like it could hold a marriage together. On paper, it reads as character. In her body, it was triage.
The “private meetings” rumor sits down beside the compliance report like it’s always had a reserved seat. Minseo can see the architecture of it: not one dramatic lie, but a chorus calibrated to sound casual. “I saw her go into the office again.” “Isn’t she always with teachers?” Said in the hallway, at the water purifier, half-laughed over convenience-store 삼각김밥: each repetition sanding off uncertainty until it turns into something smooth enough to hold up as fact.
No one has to show a photo. No one has to know what was said. The point is the outline: Minseo alone with adults, Minseo slipping through rules, Minseo getting “help.” A soft witness list, made of mouths, ready to be stapled to any paperwork that needs a story.
Miran’s warning clicks into place like a latch. The rooftop lock isn’t protection; it’s a premise. If the door is “always” 잠겨, then presence becomes intent, and intent becomes proof. A missing exam packet doesn’t need a thief, just a corridor sighting, a whispered witness (“I saw her near there”) and the school’s love of logs does the rest, neat as a stamp.
Minseo sees what the dream was really showing her: the darkest part isn’t genius, it’s patience. Nobody has to invent her. They only have to watch. Count the minutes she leaves early, note which stairwell she uses when her phone buzzes, trust she won’t argue in public. If they predict her silence, they can assemble a version of her that fits the school’s appetite for suspicion.
Hajun found her where the corridor narrowed into a choke point of information: the bulletin board, layered with printouts that curled at the corners. Mock exam rankings, club tryout notices, scholarship reminders in stern font. Minseo stood too close, as if proximity could make the letters rearrange into something kinder. Her finger hovered over an empty patch where her name should have been earlier this week, a phantom itch.
His footsteps were quiet. Not sneaking. Just controlled. When she glanced over, he was already wearing that composed, slightly concerned expression teachers mistook for maturity.
“Kim Minseo.” His voice stayed low, polite, almost warm. “Are you… doing okay lately?”
The question was a net. It didn’t matter what she answered; the shape of her life would still be visible through it. Minseo kept her face neutral, shoulders squared the way she did in the office, as if she was already being observed from behind glass.
“I’m fine,” she said, because anything else was giving him material.
He nodded like he’d expected that. Like he’d filed it away. His gaze flicked. Not at her face, but at the board: the compliance notice stamped with the school logo, the line about 야자 attendance requirements bolded twice. Then he looked back to her with the careful softness of someone offering a seat on a sinking boat.
“There are cases like this,” he said, not quite a sigh, not quite a warning. His honorifics were immaculate, every syllable rounded. “Scholarship recipients who struggle to maintain compliance during… family difficulties.”
Minseo felt heat crawl up her neck. He hadn’t said parents. Hadn’t said divorce. He didn’t need to. The hallway itself seemed to lean in.
“I’m managing,” she replied, and hated that it sounded defensive.
“Of course.” Hajun smiled, small, contained. “It’s just that the committee prefers documented consistency. Attendance logs are… objective.” He said objective like it was a comfort. “If there are unavoidable circumstances, exemption forms exist. But you know how it is. Without documentation, it becomes hard for them to justify exceptions.”
Justify to whom? To parents with money, to teachers who liked easy stories.
A group of first-years passed, glancing between them. Hajun shifted half a step, as if to give Minseo space, as if he was the considerate one caught in her storm.
“I hope it works out,” he added, gentle enough to be quoted. Then, almost conversational: “They worry when someone seems… frequently in private meetings.”
He didn’t gloat. He didn’t raise his voice. He simply placed the institution between them like a clean sheet of glass and waited for her to see her own reflection distorted in it.
He never said her name again, as if that were a kindness: keeping it hypothetical, keeping it clean. “There are cases like this,” he murmured, honorifics clipped and perfect, the kind of Korean adults praised as 바른 말투. Scholarship kids who “struggle to maintain compliance during family difficulties.” He offered it like a blanket, like he was protecting her from the chill he’d invited in.
Minseo held her gaze steady and let her face do what it always did: competent, unreadable, not messy.
Hajun’s sympathy came with footnotes. “Attendance logs are objective,” he said, almost lightly, as if quoting the weather app. “If there’s an unavoidable situation, exemptions exist. A simple form.” His eyes slid. Not to her, but to the invisible paperwork he’d already imagined in a folder. “But without documentation, it becomes difficult for them to justify… flexibility.”
Justify. Flexibility. Words that sounded neutral until they landed on her throat.
He tilted his head, the gesture of someone listening carefully. “The committee prefers documented consistency,” he added, soft enough to be overheard and misunderstood as concern. Then he paused, letting her silence do the work of admitting everything.
A homeroom teacher cut through the corridor with a stack of worksheets hugged to her chest, eyes already tired from the day’s small crises. She slowed when she caught Hajun’s voice and then the pause where Minseo didn’t fill the air. Silence, to adults, was always agreement or guilt.
Hajun turned first, timing it perfectly. “Annyeonghasimnikka, seonsaengnim,” he said with a slight bow, the kind that cost him nothing and paid out interest. The teacher’s mouth softened into something like relief. “Ah, Hajun-ah,” she answered, shoulders dropping as if the hallway had become safer.
Minseo watched the exchange happen to her like furniture being moved: authority sliding toward him, suspicion settling where she stood. He hadn’t argued a single point. The room still chose him.
He added, almost like an apology, that the committee had been “concerned,” not upset. Concerned about “unexplained patterns,” about “misunderstandings” that could “harm you in the long run.” He said harm the way adults did, soft and reasonable. The implication cut cleaner than an accusation: he wasn’t attacking her character. He was fitting her into a punishable story the school already believed.
Minseo clung to facts like a railing: those three nights she’d left 야자 early, the exemption form still blank in her bag, the “private” meetings that were only stamp-and-signature errands. But facts didn’t behave like evidence when the air had already decided. In Hajun’s calm, she finally saw it: he didn’t have to prove anything. He was the default setting. Trusted first, corrected later, if ever.
The list goes up during passing period, taped too neatly to the bulletin board outside the faculty office. White A4, the school stamp pressed in purple, a font that makes every name look equally replaceable. Someone must have measured the corners with a ruler. It sits level despite the draft from the stairwell, as if even air is expected to behave here.
A small crowd forms the way it always does: half celebration, half scavenging, everyone pretending they’re only there for a second. Shoes squeak on the waxed hallway. A first-year on tiptoe says, “Omo, look at the note,” and then laughs like it’s not a real laugh, like her mouth doesn’t know what to do with relief yet. Two boys from Class 2-3 do the thing where they act bored, shoulders slouched, eyes trained hard on the paper anyway, then exchange a quick, coded glance when they find what they were looking for.
Minseo stays a step back, letting taller bodies take the heat of attention. She can smell someone’s iced Americano, sweetened too much, and the sharper, dry scent of photocopied toner from the office. A teacher’s heels click once inside, then stop, as if whoever is behind the door is listening to the volume of student breath.
Names stack in tidy lines. Next to some, there are brackets. The phrasing is clean enough to be weaponized: no accusation, no explanation, just a bureaucratic shrug in formal Korean that turns panic into procedure.
A senior girl, hair pinned perfectly, points with a nail and says, “See? I told you. It’s always like this.” She doesn’t say who “this” benefits; she doesn’t have to. Someone else murmurs, “Seonsaengnim-deul do yaksok an jikyeo,” and the sentence dies midair, swallowed by the presence of the faculty office door.
Minseo watches the crowd’s faces change (microseconds of joy, blankness, calculation) like the hallway is a screen and everyone is trying not to be caught reacting. The paper doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch, but it feels alive in the way a verdict is alive: official, impersonal, already decided.
Minseo slides in along the wall, shoulder grazing the cold metal of the trophy case, eyes moving the way they always do when she’s bracing for impact, fast, systematic, refusing to linger long enough for hope to swell. The list is just paper, but her body treats it like a living thing.
She finds Hajun almost instantly. His name sits high and clean, perfectly centered in its line, no brackets, no parenthetical notes, no little bureaucratic asterisk to explain him. Of course. Even in black ink, he looks untouchable. He isn’t in the crowd, she would have felt the shift, the tiny rearrangement of people giving him room, but the space around his name feels occupied anyway, like the font is shaped to fit him.
Minseo’s fingertip hovers a few centimeters from the page, not touching. She imagines the committee room: careful voices, polite nods, a decision made before anyone pretends to deliberate. Hajun doesn’t have to show up to win. The school carries him like an ID card.
Behind her, someone whispers, “As expected,” and a couple of students exhale, relieved to be right.
She searches for Lina next, almost on reflex, because Lina would have already spun around and announced it to the hallway if she’d cleared the cut. Sharp voice, chin up, like victory was a fact. And because “pending” isn’t the same as no. Pending is a hinge. A door that hasn’t decided whether to swing open or take your fingers with it.
Lina’s name is there. A bracketed note sits beside it, clipped and bloodless: “additional review.” The kind of phrase adults love: formal Korean wrapped around nothing, clean enough to sound fair, vague enough to make questions feel like misbehavior. Minseo can picture Lina reading it, mouth tightening, doing math at the speed of panic: who asked for the review, and what, exactly, they’re hoping to find.
Minseo’s eyes drop to where her surname should be and skid past it, as if the paper has shifted under fluorescent light. She backtracks, slower, forcing each line to resolve into letters. Then she starts again from the top, obedient as a scanner. Once, twice, a third time: finger hovering at the margin, not touching, like contact might make the ink tell the truth. Certain names recur: familiar clans, club captains, “model students.” Hers never appears.
For a few seconds she can’t decide where to put the emptiness in her body. There’s no yellow highlight, no stamped “disqualified,” no 담당자 name to corner later. Just a clean omission, sterile enough to pass as routine, which makes it feel more deliberate. Behind her, someone murmurs, “Maybe it’s not finalized.” Another voice, sharp: “If it’s not on the sheet, it’s not happening.” Minseo’s stomach drops. All her logged 야자 nights, signatures, receipts. Never protection. Only evidence, waiting for whoever gets believed first.
The hallway lights hum with a thin, mean insistence, like they’re tuned to her frequency. Minseo blinks and the world stutters: white tiles, blue trim, the glare reflecting off every polished surface. Her eyes feel rubbed raw. Instant coffee sits on her tongue in a bitter film, and her stomach keeps folding in on itself, an ugly origami she didn’t ask for.
She walks on muscle memory, because muscle memory doesn’t ask questions. Shoulders squared. Chin level. Face set to neutral. Her practiced 표정, the one teachers nod at approvingly like it’s proof of character. The moment she stops performing “I’m fine,” someone will tilt their head and say, “Are you okay?” in that soft voice that makes the air too thin. She can’t afford to answer honestly. Honesty is messy. Honesty becomes a rumor by lunch.
A cluster of second-years spills out of a classroom, laughing too loudly at something not funny. They part around her without looking, like she’s a lamppost. A boy with a backpack slung low bumps her shoulder and mumbles “mian,” already moving on. She doesn’t turn. Turning would mean admitting she felt it.
From the teachers’ office, a copier whines, then a sharp clack. Paper trays being slammed shut. The sound makes her jaw tighten. Paper. Packets. Lists. Her brain tries to inventory: the scholarship notice board, the homeroom teacher’s glance lingering too long, Hajun’s polite voice saying something that sounded like help but landed like a warning.
Her phone vibrates in her pocket, muted, because class hours, but the phantom buzz is enough. Jihyeonseol, probably. Yuna, maybe. Even tenderness feels like another task she’ll fail if she touches it wrong.
She reaches her classroom and pauses at the door just long enough to press her thumb against the edge of her notebook, grounding herself in the hard, familiar cardboard. Breathe in. Coffee, toner, winter air trapped in coats. Breathe out.
Then she steps inside like nothing is happening. Like she is nothing that can break.
Minseo takes the back desk, the one that lets her see everyone without being seen. She sets her notebook down with the careful precision of putting a lid on something boiling. The cover gives that soft, dry drag against the laminate, and for a second she believes, stupidly, desperately, that opening it will snap the day back into a shape she can handle.
The first page is clean enough to hurt. Neon highlighter bars: 국어, 수학, 영어, split into tight blocks like the hours can be domesticated. Margin arrows pointing to “revise 서술형 template,” “submit scholarship form early,” “ask homeroom about exemption.” Teacher comments copied word-for-word, even the little “good attitude” that always feels like a leash.
She flips again, faster. Mock exam graphs, score spreads, error logs with polite, obedient language: careless mistake, time management, concept gap. Her handwriting is steady: too steady, like someone else’s.
Tonight the perfection doesn’t read as 노력. It reads like evidence. An audit trail for a system that promised merit and only ever notices you when you slip.
Her pen hovers over the grid, ink poised like a threat, and then her fingers betray her: just a slight tremor that makes the tip skate, a crooked line she has to correct. She rewrites the schedule anyway. Again. A cleaner wake-up time, a stricter 야자 block, a tighter error-log review, a polite subject line for an email she hasn’t sent because even punctuation feels like it can be misread. Fix sleep. Fix the score spread. Fix the wording. Fix the tone, 안녕하세요, 감사합니다, 죄송하지만, until the honorifics taste metallic in her mouth.
But each “fix” doesn’t soothe; it multiplies. The page becomes a ledger, then a dossier. Look, see, she did everything right. Dates. Hours. Proof. And still, somehow, she’s on the wrong side of the frame.
Exhaustion curdles into suspicion, thick and sour behind her ribs. She replays the small moments like clauses: the counselor’s too-long blink before “we’ll see,” a teacher’s careful non-answer, Hajun’s politeness landing exactly where it could bruise. Certain names repeated with effortless certainty; others swallowed. When the list went up, who looked away first. Her mind claws for the precise second her spot became negotiable: when compliance stopped being safety and became leverage.
She presses her palm flat over the grid until the paper dents, knuckles whitening, as if pressure can pin her pulse in place. Breathe in, breathe out. No visible crack. Under her hand the neat lines feel less like a schedule and more like minutes from a meeting she never attended, her own life summarized in bullet points. The more she rereads, the more she can taste the invisible hand steering her: right up to the quiet, procedural cut.
Miran’s rooftop-door image won’t unclench its grip on her mind: the cold metal handle, the muffled thud as if someone’s shoulder met it hard, the thin, stubborn strip of light under the frame. In her head the corridor is always too clean, too bright: fluorescents buzzing like a warning she can’t turn off. The air holds its breath. Even the dust seems disciplined.
Minseo tells herself it’s nothing. Stress dressed up as prophecy, the kind of symbolic costume her brain pulls on when reality refuses to give her a checklist. If she can make it a “thing”, a door, a missing packet, a single hinge point, then maybe it stops being the amorphous fear of being erased. Maybe it becomes solvable.
But her body doesn’t buy her logic. The image arrives in the micro-gaps: when she shuts her locker and the latch clicks too sharp; when a classroom door swings and catches the stopper with a soft bump; when a teacher says “잠깐만” and disappears into the staff room with a stack of papers held tight to their chest. Each sound tugs that rooftop thud closer, until she’s bracing for it without moving.
She tries to audit herself the way she audits exam errors. What did Miran actually say. Locked rooftop door, missing exam packet. Dream logic. Pattern-seeking as self-harm. She repeats the phrase like it’s an exemption form: I am not superstitious, I am tired. Yet her mind keeps laying the pieces on a table anyway, arranging them into a shape that looks like intent.
In her notebook, between math corrections and essay outlines, she has started writing small, stupid questions she can’t stop asking: Who has keys? Who prints what? When did the rooftop get “officially” locked again? She hates herself for it. The way suspicion makes her feel petty, like gossip with better handwriting.
And still, when she closes her eyes, she sees the handle, and her fingers flex as if they remember turning it.
But once the thought is there, it starts dragging a chain of details behind it, clinking louder the more she tries to walk away. The week before the list went up plays like CCTV in her head. The announcement sheets on the bulletin board had that just-copied smell, toner still sharp, even though the date line was old. Someone had reprinted them anyway, as if the paper itself needed to look official again.
She remembers pausing by the office window and seeing stacks of forms shuffled with unusual speed, the kind of efficiency that never appears when students need certificates. A red 도장 stamped slightly off-center on a scholarship memo, the ink heavier on one edge like the stamp had been pressed in a hurry. The margins on a notice didn’t match the previous week’s template: one side narrower, text nudged, the school logo sitting a millimeter too high.
Tiny things. Nothing that would hold up if she said it out loud.
But paperwork in this building is usually slow on purpose, slow like a gate. That week it moved like someone already knew where it was going.
She can still see the administrator’s face through the office glass: the lips lifting before Minseo even finished speaking, that polite curve arriving a beat too fast, like muscle memory from parent meetings. The eyes didn’t change. When Minseo asked (careful voice, respectful honorifics) about the selection timeline, about where appeals were filed, the answer slid sideways.
“Geokjeong haji ma,” the administrator said, palms open as if calming a child. “It’ll be handled fairly.”
Fairly. Handled. Words that sounded like closure without containing a single date, name, or document number. Minseo nodded because that’s what you do in adult spaces, but her stomach tightened at the absence of specifics. Reassurance was cheaper than information; it cost them nothing, and it asked her to pay with silence.
Hajun had been there too (corridor traffic, lockers slamming, the usual controlled chaos) and she’d asked one extra question, just a fraction too precise. His response arrived dressed in perfect manners: “geureon geo geokjeong haji ma,” voice even, eyes courteous. But the politeness pulled tight around the edges. Not anger. Not surprise. More like a latch clicking into place, closed softly so nobody could call it a scene.
The spiral cinches into a fork she can’t stop staring at. If Miran’s rooftop-door dream is a warning, then someone touched the board, slid papers, swapped packets, smiled through it, while everyone performed innocence. If it’s nothing, then the only person moving pieces is her, rearranging reality until it fits the shape of her fear. Pattern-recognition as self-harm. Competence, quietly, becoming paranoia.
The idea doesn’t arrive as a decision; it arrives as relief. Like someone turning down the volume in her skull. If she stops pushing, stops asking questions that make adults’ smiles tighten, stops giving anyone a reason to measure her, then maybe the world will stop pressing its thumb into her ribs.
Minseo sits on the stair landing outside the second-floor library, where the fluorescent lights stutter faintly and the air smells like warmed-up toner. Students pass in pairs, shoulder to shoulder, trading quizlets and jokes that land too loudly against the quiet rule of the hallway. She doesn’t look up. Looking up is how you get pulled into things: eye contact, obligations, sympathy you have to repay.
The program notice is still in her hand. Cream paper, official letterhead, the kind of clean design that pretends transparency is built into the margins. She reads the bullet points again even though she knows them: recommendations, portfolio, “holistic evaluation.” The phrase sits on her tongue like something tasteless.
She folds it once. Then again. The paper fights back. New creases over old, a small resistance that makes her jaw clench. Each fold is smaller, neater, more final. A rectangle becomes a strip. A strip becomes a square. She presses the last corner down hard with her thumbnail until the edge bites into her skin.
A hard little block in her palm. Dense. Contained.
It feels almost satisfying, how easily something important can become something you could lose in a pocket, something you could forget at the bottom of a bag under worksheets and a half-empty bottle of water. Hide it. Let it go quiet. If Lina asks, she can say she never really had time, never really wanted it. No drama. No appeal forms. No hallway whispers about who got picked and why.
Her phone vibrates once. Too quick to be a call. She doesn’t take it out. The vibration fades, and with it a flicker of panic that tenderness might be waiting on the screen, asking her to be soft when she feels like a wire stretched too tight.
Minseo closes her fist around the folded paper until her knuckles ache, as if pain can substitute for certainty, as if holding on hard enough can make disappearing look like a choice.
In the notes app, she types Lina: just the name, no honorific, like writing it plain will make it less of a door. A breath. Then: Sorry, I don’t think I can, The cursor blinks after the dash, steady as a metronome, and it feels personal, like it’s keeping time to her failure to decide.
She backspaces. Tries again.
I really appreciate you, but my schedule… Too soft. Like she’s asking permission to be overwhelmed.
I’m not applying. Too sharp. Like she’s daring Lina to argue and proving she expects one.
Something’s going on at home and I can’t focus. The truth, closest to the bone. And suddenly humiliating, a spill she can’t mop up once it’s on someone else’s screen.
She watches each draft turn into a confession anyway: of fear, of wanting, of the embarrassing fact that she hoped the program might be a way out. Her thumb hovers over send, over delete, over nothing. The phone warms against her palm. The hallway noise recedes until all she can hear is the tiny click of her own swallowing.
She deletes the draft, watches the thread snap back to empty like it never happened, then taps Lina’s name again. Thumb moving on muscle memory, the way she rechecks a locked door twice, three times, until her chest stops arguing. The keyboard rises. The cursor blinks. Nothing else.
A blank screen shouldn’t feel like a verdict, but it does. It feels pristine. Pristine means no tone to misread, no weakness to screenshot, no opening for Lina’s urgency or pity. Clean becomes the same as safe, and safe becomes the same as alone.
She types two words (I can’t) then holds her breath, waiting for the shame to flood in. It arrives anyway, hot behind her eyes. She long-presses, selects, deletes. Again. Again.
Her brain offers her a version of herself with clean, sharp borders: she never wanted the program, never needed to be “selected” like a favor. If there’s favoritism, if someone is hiding an exam packet or leaning on connections, it won’t touch her: because she’ll outwork it in silence. The thought lands like a pill: control, chalk-dry. Relief, and something that resembles giving up.
She flips her phone facedown like it’s done something wrong and opens her planner instead, building a new route that doesn’t require Lina’s reply. Mock exams mapped in pencil. Yaza blocks stacked until midnight. A scholarship 규정 checklist copied into the margins, attendance, conduct points, appeal windows. Measurable things. Solvable things. If she compresses herself into numbers and compliance, she can’t be singled out, she tells herself.
Yuna intercepts her at the corner where the second-floor corridor narrows. Right before the stairs that always bottle-neck with boys in varsity jackets and girls clutching A4 files like shields. The hallway is colder than the classrooms, heat leaking out through the old window frames. Yuna’s breath makes a faint white smear in the fluorescent light as she steps in with that careful, apologetic timing she uses when she’s decided something matters anyway.
“Minseo.” Her voice is low, pitched to be private without sounding secretive.
Minseo stops because stopping is easier than weaving through bodies with her head already pounding. She keeps her shoulders squared, gaze forward, as if she’s waiting for instructions from a teacher. The bell is still three minutes away; every second feels accounted for.
Yuna doesn’t reach for her hand: she knows better. She just slides a stack against Minseo’s forearm, firm enough that Minseo has to take it or drop it. The paper is cold, edges clean. On top: photocopied pages with highlighted lines. Under that, a printout of the administrative board’s update schedule: 날짜, 시간, 담당자. And then a single sheet in Yuna’s compact handwriting, bullet points aligned like they’ve been measured.
No hearts. No pep talk. Just a plan.
Yuna’s fingers hover at the bottom of the stack as if she’s steadying it, or steadying Minseo. “I thought… since things are weird lately,” she says, and her eyes flick once to Minseo’s face, checking for cracks. “It’s safer if you have it all in one place.”
Minseo’s throat tightens. For a moment she smells toner and instant coffee and feels the weight of being perceived. Of being the kind of person someone makes contingency lists for.
She adjusts her grip on the papers like she’s handling evidence. “You did all this?” she asks, too quickly, already hearing how it sounds.
Minseo’s mind flips it anyway. Help as evidence she’s slipping, help as confirmation that people have started keeping score on her stability. Her pulse ticks behind her eyes. The hallway noise sharpens: sneaker squeaks, someone’s laugh breaking too loud, the distant clack of a teacher’s heels. Yuna’s neat bullets blur for a second and Minseo hates that, hates the tiny betrayal of her own vision.
She hears her voice come out wrong before she can reroute it: too even, too bright at the edges, like she’s giving a presentation on a day she didn’t sleep. “So now I need a babysitter?” she says, lips tightening on the last syllables. “I know how to read a notice board.”
A couple of students glance over, then pretend not to. Minseo feels their attention like a fingertip pressed to the back of her neck. She should stop. She should swallow it, say gomawo, make it normal. But something in her insists on distance, on proving she’s fine by refusing the proof she isn’t.
The words land with the precision of a cut, and she can’t catch them fast enough to pretend she didn’t mean them.
Yuna’s expression doesn’t crack. It empties. The warmth drains out the way the hallway heat does when a classroom door shuts, sudden, efficient. Her mouth smooths into something almost polite, eyes flicking once to the students pretending not to listen, then back to Minseo with a careful neutrality that says: I won’t make this harder for you.
She shifts the stack in Minseo’s arms with two fingers, precise as a librarian aligning a spine on a shelf. No tug, no insistence. Just a quiet correction, like returning ownership.
“Okay,” Yuna says, soft enough that it could be mistaken for agreement instead of retreat. “Then just… keep it. In case.”
And she steps half a pace back. The space is practiced (mercy, boundary, exit route) and it hits Minseo like being left behind while someone else learns to walk away first.
Minseo moves before the pressure behind her eyes can spill into her face, shoulders braced like a uniform. She counts: landing, railing, two flights. Rules are easier than feelings. In the stairwell’s disinfectant chill she tells herself it’s mercy, that she’s shielding Yuna from getting splashed by her family’s noise, her own fraying. The papers press against her ribs: toolkit, accusation, bruise.
Her phone vibrates twice, then again, Jihyeonseol. The lock screen flares with preview lines: a gentle “u okay?”, a stupid small pun that would’ve made Minseo snort on a normal day, an offer to meet after 야자 near the vending machines. Minseo doesn’t open anything. She turns the phone facedown, as if light can invoice her. Warmth, she thinks, is debt.
Dinner starts with utensils and ends with evidence. The first clink of spoon against bowl is almost normal and then her mother clears her throat the way teachers do before calling on the wrong student.
“So,” her mother says, eyes on the banchan as if the spinach can answer. “The school called again.”
Minseo’s chopsticks pause midair. Her father doesn’t look up; he folds his napkin with a careful, punishing neatness. Her grandmother chews in silence, gaze resting on Minseo’s hands like they’re a clock she’s trying to read.
“It wasn’t ‘again,’” her father says. His tone is flat, like he’s correcting a misprinted date. “They asked for documents. That’s normal.”
Her mother’s laugh is a single breath. “Normal. Right. Like it’s normal to need three copies of everything because you. The rest stays unspoken, suspended, daring anyone to name it.
Minseo keeps her face neutral, the way she does when she’s presenting in class. She counts the items on the table: kimchi, anchovies, eggs, the shared soy sauce dish. Shared. Nothing about this feels shared.
Her mother sets down her spoon. “Did you tell her about the account?”
Her father finally looks at Minseo, not her mother. “Ask him if he’s even paid the last, ” her mother starts, and then swallows it back like it burns. She tries again, softer, sharper. “Minseo-ya, you heard him, right? He said he would handle it.”
Minseo’s stomach tightens around the rice she hasn’t eaten. Questions that aren’t questions. Pauses that aren’t pauses, but traps: a beat of silence that invites her to speak and then punishes her for choosing a side.
“I don’t know,” she says, because not knowing is the only safe answer. “I didn’t see anything.”
Her grandmother’s chopsticks click once, a tiny sound of disapproval or measurement. Across the table, her father exhales through his nose, and her mother’s gaze drops to Minseo’s phone beside her bowl, as if even that is a witness that could be called.
The talk doesn’t rise into shouting; it thins into numbers, deadlines, and the sharp etiquette of blame. Her mother lists bank names like they’re witnesses. Her father answers with dates, receipts he can’t find fast enough, the careful calm of someone insisting the facts will save him.
“The school will ask again,” her mother says. “They always do when it’s. Like this.”
“It’s routine,” her father insists, eyes on Minseo as if she’s the only neutral surface left. “Minseo-ya, you were there. Tell her what they said.”
Her mother pivots without looking at him. “Then ask your father why the account is empty. Ask him why he said he’d handle it.”
Ask. Tell. Confirm. Translate. Minseo feels herself turning into a corridor: doors on both sides, both locked, both demanding she carry messages through without leaving fingerprints. She keeps her voice even, the way she keeps her grades even.
“They asked for the same documents as last time,” she says. “Income statement. Family registry. That’s all.”
Her grandmother’s silence sits heavy, not comfort, not defense. Just observation, as if she’s counting how long Minseo can hold her posture before it cracks.
A cupboard shuts too hard in the kitchen, not quite a slam, but sharp enough to make the air flinch. A ceramic bowl kisses the sink with a thin, accusing clink. The apartment seems to contract around those small impacts, walls, table, the narrow strip of linoleum, like it’s holding its breath for the next piece of evidence.
Minseo stands up before anyone can assign her the role. She gathers plates with the practiced speed of someone clearing scratch paper after a mock exam, eyes down, wrists precise. Soap, rinse, stack. No wasted motion, no lingering that could turn into a question.
Her head throbs behind her temples, caffeine and screen glare, but she keeps her shoulders level. If she moves fast enough, maybe the sounds won’t have time to become a fight.
Her grandmother doesn’t speak, not even a throat-clear. She just sits with her tea cooling and watches. Minseo feels the gaze track every motion: the rinse, the shake of water from a bowl, the precise stack on the drying rack. Not accusation, not kindness: something like bookkeeping. A wordless gaeungham that says: how many nights can you be the buffer before the glass finally gives.
Under the faucet’s hiss, her mind does the kind of arithmetic that never shows its work. Reliable plus quiet plus “no trouble” equals worth. Until one slip turns it into a minus sign. She imagines the office stamp, the scholarship line crossed out, adults exhaling like see. Not just a lost slot; proof evaporating. A body at the table who needs managing.
Minseo goes back to her room with her hair still damp, the towel slipping off one shoulder as soon as she shuts the door. The hallway light under the crack stays on, a thin blade that makes her feel watched even alone. She doesn’t bother turning on her desk lamp. The laptop is enough.
Opening it is muscle memory. Like cracking a workbook before she’s decided she has the strength. If she closes it, it’s like saying I can’t fix this. The boot screen blooms blue-white, and the glare punches straight into the ache behind her eyes. She blinks until the letters stop swimming.
The school portal loads with its clean fonts and polite colors that pretend the stakes aren’t viscera. She clicks into rankings, then notices, then the scholarship page, as if rotating the same problem will make a seam show. Refresh. The cursor becomes a small spinning circle, a waiting room.
Nothing changes. Of course nothing changes.
Still, her finger hits F5 again. Again. The action is stupidly soothing: proof of movement when her whole life feels like a chair being pulled out from under her. She scrolls past bullet points she could recite: attendance thresholds, behavior demerits, “maintaining academic excellence.” Asterisks that lead to footnotes that lead to “committee discretion.”
Committee. A word that means faces she can’t read and conversations she’ll never hear.
On the notice board, the latest announcement is about a “special program briefing” next week. No details, just a neat attachment icon. Minseo clicks; the PDF takes a second too long to open. In that second, her chest tightens like she’s bracing for impact. When it’s only an outline and a list of dates, she feels both relieved and insulted.
Her phone buzzes once on silent, screen lighting with a preview she doesn’t tap: Jihyeonseol, a short message with a question mark at the end. Minseo flips the phone face-down like it’s contraband.
Refresh. Rankings. Refresh. Guidelines. The portal’s calm refuses to mirror her. Her reflection, faint in the dark screen edges, looks competent like a photo ID. Like a version of her that could be revoked with one missing line of text.
She slides her planner out from under a stack of mock-exam printouts, the cover frayed at the corners where her thumb always worries it. Planner means control. Planner means breathing. She clicks a pen and starts where she always starts: dates, deadlines, action verbs.
Email homeroom teacher.
Ask scholarship office about,
The dash sits there like an open mouth. Her hand hesitates, then writes smaller, tighter.
Who decides?
The pen scratches harder. A bullet point becomes an interrogation. What counts as proof? Screenshots? A teacher’s word? A rumor that can’t be quoted? She draws a box around “committee discretion” like it’s something she can contain, but the ink bleeds through the cheap paper.
She tries again: Collect documents. Track attendance. Double-check, Double-check what, exactly, when the rules are made of fog and polite smiles? Her page fills with arrows that circle back into themselves, neat systems collapsing into spirals. Reliability, she realizes, isn’t a trait. It’s a contract: valid only until it costs someone with a better last name.
Her wrist aches. She keeps writing anyway, as if movement can substitute for certainty.
In the silence, Minseo runs the day back like she’s annotating a passage no one else will read. Mr. Lee’s voice softening when Hajun spoke, then sharpening on her question. The girl behind her laughing a second too late, eyes flicking to see who else would join. A “괜찮아” from Yuna that sounded like an apology. She catalogues micro-movements: who interrupts without consequence, who gets reminders instead of warnings, who walks up to rules as if they’re automatic doors sensing the right kind of body. The pattern settles in her stomach, sour and hot. It isn’t just that she wants to be told she’s doing well. She needs recognition like a receipt: proof the hours, the headaches, the swallowed words were a transaction, not self-harm dressed up as ambition.
Her cursor floats over a blank Notes doc, the title bar still reading “Untitled” like a joke. Minseo’s hand tightens on the mouse, then goes slack. Nothing will type itself into safety. The thought arrives with the calm of a verdict: one missing name on a list, one exam packet “misplaced,” one rumor packaged as concern, 그 애 요즘 불안하대, and she’d become background. Replaceable. Easy to cut loose without anyone feeling cruel.
Minseo closes the notebook with a soft, final thud and folds over it, forehead pressed to the worn cover like it can absorb the heat in her skull. She isn’t calmer: just emptied, lungs tight from holding up a face all day. The room smells faintly of toner and instant coffee. In the dark, a thought sinks, heavy and quiet: nobody protected her here. They only let her exist until someone with a cleaner family and better lines to the office wanted her seat.
Seongmin caught her on the second step past the faculty office door, in the thin strip of corridor where the fluorescent light flickered and the security camera’s black dome aimed a little too far left to matter. It was a place students used without naming it: where you could stop breathing like you were being graded.
Minseo’s hand was still on her backpack strap. Her shoulders were squared in the way she’d trained them to be when adults looked: spine straight, face neutral, eyes attentive. Competence as camouflage. She could feel it from the inside, the stiffness that meant she’d been holding herself up for too long.
He didn’t ask, “Are you okay?” That question was a trap anyway. Yes meant keep going, no meant explain everything in under ten seconds.
Seongmin’s gaze moved once, quick and unkind, from the dark half-moons under her eyes to the coffee breath she couldn’t quite hide. “You’re doing it again,” he said, like he’d seen the pattern on other students’ bodies. “The ‘I’m fine’ posture. Like if you stand straight enough, your life will follow.”
Minseo swallowed. The corridor smelled faintly of printer toner and disinfectant. Behind the faculty office door, she could hear paper shuffling, a chair scraping: someone inside deciding things she would have to live with.
“You’re a good student,” Seongmin continued, and the way he said it made it sound like a diagnosis. “The kind they like because you don’t make noise. But this routine, sleep three hours, drink caffeine like it’s medicine, pretend your head doesn’t hurt, ends two ways.” His voice stayed low, controlled, almost bored, as if he were reading out options on a form. “Ambulance. Or withdrawal. Pick one.”
Minseo’s fingernails dug into the strap. Her stomach tightened, not from fear exactly but from the logic of it. How easily he said it, like he’d watched it happen.
“I can’t. Seongmin cut in, softer but sharper. “Then stop trying to disappear through being ‘good.’ Advocate like it’s a skill. Because right now you’re volunteering to be crushed.”
Seongmin’s tone stayed quiet, almost flat, like he was explaining how to submit a time-off request. “Advocacy isn’t a vibe,” he said. “It’s a process. You do it the same way every time so they can’t pretend you didn’t.”
Minseo watched his mouth more than his eyes, absorbing the steps like a cram-school formula. Her pulse kept thudding, but the words gave it a shape.
“Write it down,” he continued. “Not ‘I feel like.’ Not ‘maybe.’ A request. A date. A clear ask. And you cite the rule: school handbook, scholarship guideline, whatever they claim to live by.” His hand flicked once, as if stamping a document. “You set a deadline. If they dodge, you follow up in writing. If they call you in, you bring someone. Witness. Always.”
Minseo pictured the faculty office: the chairs angled to make students look smaller, the polite smiles that meant no. She nodded once, too quickly.
“Copies,” Seongmin said. “Screenshots. Photos. Keep a log. Because later it becomes ‘We never agreed to that.’ And you don’t argue. You show the record.”
Minseo’s mouth opened on instinct. “I’m sorry, I, ” The apology rose like it always did, automatic as bowing.
“Stop,” Seongmin said, not loud, just final. His eyes didn’t soften. “Stop volunteering to be small.”
She froze mid-breath, heat creeping up her neck, because he’d named it. Not her grades, not her effort, but the way her body tried to shrink before anyone could push.
“They count on you going silent in three places,” he went on, ticking them off like checkpoints. “At the counter when they make you wait until you give up. In meetings when they say ‘we’ll look into it’ and you nod. And right here when someone tilts their head and says, ‘It’s complicated,’ like that ends the conversation.”
Minseo’s fingers loosened on her strap. She didn’t apologize again.
Seongmin pointed, not gently, down the hall like it was a map. “Program selection? Academic Affairs. Second window, not Counseling. You ask for the selection rubric in writing. Not ‘Can I see,’. “Assume they’ll forget you on purpose.”
Minseo didn’t offer explanations. She slid her notebook out like a shield, the cover soft from overuse, and opened to a blank page. Her pen clicked once, twice, too loud in the corridor, before she pinned it to the paper to stop the shake in her fingers. “Which form,” she asked, voice level on purpose, “and what date do I write at the top?”
She flipped to a clean page and wrote the title in block letters (PROCESS) pressing hard enough that the pen tip hissed. Beneath it she drew two straight columns with the edge of her ruler, the lines precise, almost satisfying. Left: what they say. Right: what they do.
It felt childish, like a worksheet. It also felt like the only way to keep her brain from spiraling into apologies and maybes.
Under what they say, she wrote, We’ll look into it. Under what they do, she left a blank space, a small dare to reality. Then she added, It’s complicated. Next to it: Delay until you stop asking. She didn’t know if it was true yet. She knew it was plausible, which was worse.
The corridor hummed with after-school drag. Shoes squeaking, someone laughing too loudly near the stairs, the distant clack of a printer spitting out something urgent. Minseo kept her shoulders still. Inside her chest, her heart beat like it was late.
She added a third line, careful with her handwriting so she wouldn’t have to decode herself later.
Scholarship students must maintain “conduct.” → “Conduct” becomes a leash when they need one.
Her pen paused. Conduct. In Korean it sounded cleaner, like something you could fold and put away: haengsil. She tasted the word and didn’t like it.
She wrote a fourth line and the letters came out smaller.
You’re overreacting. → Make you doubt your own memory.
She’d learned, quietly, that memory could be eroded by tone. A teacher’s sigh. A class rep’s polite smile. A “misunderstanding,” delivered like a gift.
She forced herself to add a final row, even though her hand wanted to stop.
There is no rubric. → There is one, but it isn’t for you.
The page looked blunt, almost ugly in its honesty. She shut her notebook halfway, then opened it again, refusing the instinct to hide it.
Last semester, in the week after the second mock, the rankings had gone up on the bulletin board outside Academic Affairs. Students pretended not to look and then looked anyway, necks angled like they were just passing through. Minseo had stood at the edge of the crowd with her notebook hugged to her ribs, eyes scanning down the columns the way she scanned answer keys: fast, brutal.
She remembered one name because it didn’t belong there, not with that score. Someone from the back row who slept through 영어 and still somehow floated. The name sat in the middle of the list for exactly one day. She’d seen it with her own eyes, under fluorescent glare, a fact as solid as paper.
The next afternoon, the page was different. Same tape marks. Same school stamp at the bottom. One line “updated,” neat as correction fluid. The old name gone like it had never existed, replaced by a new one that made everyone nod, relieved by the familiar order. No announcement. No apology. Just reality edited.
The thought doesn’t crash into her; it settles, like something heavy placed carefully on a desk. If her seat in this school, this scholarship, this “chance”, can be revised with a quiet “updated,” then the word safety has always been a borrowed term. Conditional. Renewable. Dependent on her voice staying small and agreeable, on laughing at the right jokes, on never making a teacher’s day harder with questions that require paperwork.
She sees the corridor again as a system: the smiles that mean “drop it,” the sighs that mean “be grateful,” the way adults protect their own convenience with phrases that sound kind. Minseo swallows, throat tight, and feels the old reflex to apologize for existing flicker, then, in the same breath, refuses to feed it.
The old instinct rises: fold yourself smaller, say ne, accept whatever “fair” is handed down like a favor. Her fingers hover as if to close the notebook for good. Instead she presses her thumbnail into the page until the fiber gives, a pale crescent bruise. Let them call it gratitude, haengsil, maturity. She won’t build her life on permission that can be revoked.
Instead, she drafts something sturdier than endurance. Not just studying harder: evidence. A timeline in the margin: when the list changed, who was standing near the bulletin board, which teacher’s stamp was at the bottom. She writes down dates, room numbers, exact phrasing adults use when they want you quiet. Copies, screenshots, signatures if she can get them. Witnesses. Paper that remembers.
Minseo’s pen hovers, ink threatening to bead. In the margin, “program slot” sits circled like a target, but the circle suddenly looks childish. Like she’s been aiming at a single leaf while the whole tree is diseased.
If she gets her name put back where it “belongs,” what changes? She can already hear the adult voices smoothing it over: a misunderstanding, a clerical error, nothing personal. She’d be expected to bow her head, say gamsahamnida, and return to being the kind of scholarship kid who doesn’t make noise. And next time, they wouldn’t be sloppy enough to leave fingerprints. They’d learn. The trap would be cleaner, the story tighter, her options narrower.
Her temples pulse with caffeine and sleep debt. She forces herself to breathe through it, slow, like she’s counting between train stations. The anxiety wants to collapse into something simple. But the corridor outside the library glass is full of moving pieces: seniors drifting past with printed schedules, a teacher in a cardigan glancing at the bulletin board without stopping, two first-years snapping their phone cases shut the second a shadow crosses them. Systems have habits. Systems repeat.
Minseo flips back two pages. The handwriting there is neat, almost smug, like it believed effort was an argument. Now she sees the missing part: effort only matters when the rules aren’t a weapon.
She touches the bruise on her thumbnail from earlier, a tiny ache that feels honest. “Getting it back” is a request. A favor. Something granted by the same mechanism that took it.
Her gaze shifts to the dates she’s written, then to the empty space beneath them. She could fill that space with more than her own anger. She could fill it with details no one could laugh away. Not a complaint: an account.
Outside, someone laughs too loudly, then stops, as if remembering where they are. Minseo lowers her pen, steadies her hand, and draws a line under the circle. Beneath it, she writes, smaller but firmer: prove the mechanism. Then she turns the page and begins.
She makes herself look at it the way she looks at exam mistakes: not as an insult, as data. One bullet becomes two, then four. Roster swaps that happen in the ten minutes between lunch and fifth period. Names erased in faint gray, rewritten darker, like the hand wasn’t even trying to hide. “Missing” exam packets that vanish only from certain desks, then turn up in the staff room tray with a breezy ah, found it. Announcements delivered in passing (half-whispered in the stairwell, “by the way, submit today”) so only the right ears catch them, and the official board stays clean.
Her pen scratches faster. Rules that turn elastic around wealthy kids and tighten around scholarship kids: uniform checks, attendance logs, phone confiscations, “attitude” notes that become permanent when you don’t have a parent who can laugh with the vice principal. Extensions granted as understanding for one student, labeled irresponsibility for another.
She draws a column: who was present, who repeated it, who stayed silent. Beneath that: who gains. The pattern isn’t random. It’s curated. Like a rumor, like a schedule, like a trap that’s polite enough to call itself policy.
The anger in her chest doesn’t rise like a speech; it settles like a lab result. Cold, steady, usable. She’s not trying to be righteous. She’s trying to be accurate. If this place runs like a machine, then it has moving parts you can name without sounding emotional: the exact minute the bulletin board went unattended, the teacher who always “forgets” to lock the staff room, the laminated key tag she saw swinging from a lanyard, the handwriting pressure that changes when a list is rewritten in a hurry. She thinks in categories, access, motive, opportunity, because categories don’t tremble. Sign-in sheets. CCTV blind spots. Who had the exam packets first. Who “found” them later. And the simplest part, the one she hates most: who benefits when it goes wrong.
She runs the numbers the way she runs practice tests: worst case first. A complaint becomes “attitude.” A question becomes “insubordination.” One note in a file, one meeting with a tight-smiled counselor, and suddenly her scholarship isn’t a fact. It’s a privilege that can be revoked. She imagines the word munje haksaeng, problem student, sticking to her like gum. She doesn’t look away.
Minseo lets the word risk sit on her tongue until it stops tasting like drama. Courage is what teachers praise after you’re already broken; this is simpler, uglier. Refusal. She won’t keep earning oxygen by being useful, polite, invisible. She won’t let “accidents” assign futures like lottery numbers. If she gets labeled difficult, fine. At least it’ll be true.
Minseo sits on the edge of her bed with her planner open like it’s going to grade her back. The house noise bleeds through the wall. She ignores it. She makes the problem smaller on purpose.
Define the question. What exactly happened to the exam packet, and who got to touch the story after.
List variables. Access points. Time windows. People who benefit. People who panic.
Then: assign roles, because if she keeps this all in her own head, it turns into fear instead of a plan.
Miran first. Not because she believes in prophecy, she doesn’t have the luxury, but because Miran has been carrying details the way Minseo carries guilt: carefully, as if dropping it would make it worse.
Her phone screen is a bright ache in her eyes. She types, deletes, retypes.
Miran. Can you do something for me.
Not about “visions” like… mystical. I need data.
If anything happens again, write it down w/ date + time. Exactly what you saw/heard, and what was happening IRL that day (class, announcement, who was around). Even if it feels stupid.
She stares at the word stupid and changes it to ordinary.
Even if it feels ordinary.
Her thumb hovers, then adds one more line, blunt like an instruction on a mock exam.
Don’t interpret. Just record.
Send.
The message bubble sits there, delivered, and Minseo feels an immediate recoil. Like she’s handed someone a weight and called it help. She breathes through it anyway. This is what Seongmin meant, she thinks. Advocacy isn’t a personality, it’s a sequence of actions. Ask. Clarify. Document. Repeat.
She flips to a blank page and writes “Miran (log” in the margin, then underneath: “Yuna) public trail.” Her pen scratches too hard, a thin tear in the paper. She forces her hand to loosen. She can’t afford to look desperate. She has to look prepared.
With Miran, Minseo makes it procedural: like they’re running an experiment instead of chasing a ghost. She drafts a template in her notes app and sends a screenshot: Date/Time. Location. What happened. No metaphors. No “felt like.” The moment something hits, dream, déjà vu, overheard phrase, Miran has to write it down immediately, before school noise rewrites it into something prettier.
“Use the same wording each time,” Minseo adds, then regrets how bossy it sounds and doesn’t delete it. Consistency is the point. If adults look at this later, it can’t read like a diary. It has to read like a record.
She asks for a confidence tag because memory is slippery and guilt makes people overstate. Then the mundane anchors: class period, hallway corner, whose shoes were in the frame, what poster had just gone up, what teacher’s voice was on the PA. Anything ordinary that can be cross-checked.
Not proof. Not yet. But something that can survive someone else trying to break it.
She turns to Yuna next because Yuna understands constraints the way Minseo does: as survival, not cowardice. Minseo keeps her voice even when she texts, like she’s assigning roles in a group project, not asking for a favor that could backfire.
Can you help me track something?
Only public stuff. Stuff people say anyway.
No confronting. Promise me.
Yuna’s reply is a single “Okay” that lands heavy, reliable.
Minseo sends bullet points: screenshot posts that are already circulating, note who first says a phrase and who repeats it, write the time and place, 2-3 ban lunch table, broadcast club room, class group chat. If it’s overheard, don’t lean in; don’t become the story. Map the route, not the motive. And if anyone asks? It’s “just organizing notes.” The safest lie is the most boring one.
Minseo builds redundancy into everything like it’s part of the syllabus. Screenshots go into a shared drive labeled something dead, like “math_practice_2”; the same notes get pasted into a plain text file and a photo archive. Dates, filenames, duplicates. Nothing lives only on one phone, one notebook, one bag that can be “lost.” And to Yuna she repeats, once, clearly: safety first. Thoroughness is optional.
They settle into a rhythm that feels like 야자. Miran’s logs arrive after midnight with timestamps and mundane anchors; Yuna’s updates come as tight bullets between bell rings. Minseo copies everything into one clean timeline, no adjectives, no anger, just arrows and overlaps. After a week, the “coincidences” start looking engineered. Only then does she list teachers who won’t turn facts into gossip.
Between second period and homeroom, the library was a narrow lung of quiet. Students cut through with borrowed books hugged to their chests, shoes squeaking on the waxed floor. Minseo chose the tightest corridor of stacks. Where the fluorescent light stuttered and the shelves made a small, accidental privacy. No windows. No audience. A place that didn’t invite scenes.
Jihyeonseol was already there, leaning like she belonged to the silence, hair tucked behind one ear, a slim notebook open but not being read. Her eyes lifted the moment Minseo’s footsteps changed tempo, as if she’d been counting them.
Minseo stopped at the endcap for 사회문화, pretending to scan spines. Her mouth tasted like instant coffee and unchewed words.
“You’re avoiding the hallway,” Jihyeonseol said softly, not a question.
Minseo kept her gaze on the call numbers. “I’m just. Busy.”
A pause, gentle but unignorable. “Minseo.”
The way her name landed, clean, unweaponized, made Minseo’s shoulders tighten on instinct. She turned just enough to face her, careful with her expression the way she was careful in front of teachers, careful like composure was a rule.
“I’m fine,” she said.
It came out automatic, a stamp. She heard it and hated how easy it was.
Minseo inhaled once, shallow. “No. I’m not fine.” She steadied her voice, lowered it further, as if the shelves themselves could report her. “I’m functioning.”
Jihyeonseol’s face didn’t shift into pity. She only moved her notebook closed, an unspoken I’m here, I’m not going anywhere. “Functioning like… sleeping two hours and calling it discipline?”
Minseo’s throat tightened. She made her eyes sharp to compensate, scanning for footsteps, for anyone turning into their aisle. Nothing. Only the low hum of the building and the papery sigh of someone flipping pages two rows over.
“I can’t… afford to look unstable,” Minseo said, and the word afford felt too literal in her mouth. “If I slip, even once, it doesn’t stay private. It becomes a story.”
Jihyeonseol’s fingers rested on the edge of the shelf, not touching Minseo, just close enough that Minseo could measure the distance. “So you’re carrying it alone because you think that’s safer.”
Minseo’s laugh was small and flat. “It is safer.”
“And is it working?” Jihyeonseol asked.
Minseo opened her mouth, then closed it. The silence that followed wasn’t empty; it was full of all the things she’d been converting into checklists and timelines, all the fear she’d filed under later. She looked down so Jihyeonseol wouldn’t see how close she was to cracking. “I don’t know,” she admitted, the smallest truth she could manage without breaking.
Minseo swallowed, then forced the explanation out the way she forced herself through practice sets, fast, clean, no room for emotion.
“It’s not… about pride,” she said. “Here, ‘ordinary’ isn’t neutral. Ordinary is invisible. Ordinary is the person teachers forget to recommend. Ordinary is the scholarship kid they watch harder because they assume you’re barely holding on. Ordinary is the one they look at first when something goes missing. Like you were grateful enough to steal it.”
The words sounded like a policy memo in her own mouth. She hated that she could make fear sound logical.
She kept her eyes on the book spines to avoid seeing her own reflection in Jihyeonseol’s face. Her right hand had found the strap of her backpack and wouldn’t let go. She tightened, loosened, tightened again, as if the pressure could keep her from spilling.
“If I’m exceptional,” she added, quieter, “then I’m… useful. Untouchable. At least a little.”
A breath caught, sharp enough to sting.
“And if I’m not,” she said, and the sentence fractured, “then I’m just another problem people can file away.”
Jihyeonseol didn’t reach for advice. No “힘내,” no neat plan, no university-name talisman to wave over the fear. She only tilted her head, eyes steady in the aisle’s thin light, and asked like she was asking about weather, not a wound.
“When did you start believing you’re only safe if you’re exceptional?”
Minseo’s first instinct was to answer with dates. Middle school rankings. The first scholarship form. The first time her mother’s voice went brittle at the dinner table. But nothing lined up into one clean origin. It was more like a slow seep: small humiliations, small praises, all of it teaching her the same rule.
Her mouth opened. Air came out. No words.
In the quiet, the library’s hum filled the gap. Jihyeonseol waited without moving, and Minseo realized the silence had already said it: longer than she could remember.
“If I mess up once,” Minseo said, voice thin, “it won’t be ‘she’s tired.’ It’ll be ‘see: she was always like that.’ Like I was a mistake they finally noticed.” The sentence tasted like dust.
Jihyeonseol stepped closer into the narrow aisle, shoulder almost parallel to Minseo’s, blocking the line of sight from the main walkway: no spectacle, just shelter. “Keep going,” she murmured, like privacy was something she could offer with her body.
Before they parted at the library doors, Jihyeonseol spoke low, almost clinical. “Fear isn’t you quitting. It’s data. It tells you where they can hurt you, and what you care about.”
Minseo nodded like she understood. Because she did, and because she couldn’t afford not to. Outside, cold air scraped her throat clean. Her breathing steadied. Her jaw tightened. Not okay. Just chosen.
Minseo opened her planner to a blank page she’d been saving for “later,” like later was a real season she could schedule. She wrote the date in the corner, then, under it, a title she didn’t let herself soften: COST.
Extra supervision. She pictured the homeroom teacher’s eyes tracking her even when the teacher pretended to be looking at the seating chart, the way a scholarship student’s mistakes were always educational examples. She wrote: more office calls. more “check-ins.” No hallway shortcuts.
Scholarship review. She wrote it twice, the second time in smaller letters, as if shrinking it would shrink the possibility. She could almost feel the weight of an email subject line, 장학금 심사 관련, and the sudden quiet it would create around her desk.
Retaliation. Hajun’s calm smile, his polite “선생님, 잠깐만요,” turned into a lever. She didn’t know what he’d pull, but she knew he had hands on the machine.
“Difficult.” She wrote the word in English because Korean felt too sharp, too official: 문제 있는 애. She’d seen girls like that get filed away into warnings.
Her pen paused. The library’s fluorescent buzz made her skull ache. She added a fifth line without numbering it, like it didn’t deserve to sit with the others.
Outcome decided in shadows.
That one didn’t come with a manageable image. It was more like a smell, printer toner and stale coffee, like the hallway outside the staff room, where conversations lowered when students passed. It was the feeling of a door closing before you reached it, and being told later, brightly, that you’d simply been late.
Minseo stared until the letters blurred, then circled the sentence hard enough to dent the paper. The circle wasn’t decoration. It was a boundary.
She couldn’t control how closely they watched her. She couldn’t control whose parents played golf with whose vice principal. But she could name what she was refusing: a future chosen by whispered meetings she wasn’t allowed to enter.
She capped her pen, pressed her thumb into the indentation, and let the pain anchor her. Not fearless. Not naïve. Just no longer willing to lose without seeing the rules.
She practiced in increments, like learning a new grip on a pen. In class, when Ms. Han mentioned “exceptions” for the university-prep program, Minseo waited until the bell, then walked up with her notebook open. “Seonsaengnim,” she said, polite enough to be unremarkable, “could you tell me which guideline that’s based on? If there’s a document, I want to match my plan to it.”
Ms. Han blinked, surprised by the phrasing more than the question, then gestured toward the staff room printer. “It’s in the notice.”
“Could you send it to the class group chat, with today’s date?” Minseo kept her voice even, like she was asking for homework pages. Her fingers held the edge of the notebook so tightly the paper bowed.
Later, at the bulletin board, she photographed the announcement beside the school clock, making sure the minute hand was visible. She started a folder on her laptop: screenshots, PDFs, captured revisions. Yuna’s messages slid in quietly (“they changed the phrasing again”) and Minseo answered with a single line: “Save the earlier one.”
The words she stopped saying were the hardest: 괜찮아요, I trust you. Instead, she learned to ask, “Can we have that in writing?”
Hajun stopped her by the trophy case, angled like it was coincidence and not interception. His voice stayed soft, almost kind. “Minseo-ya. Just… be careful. There are procedures. If you push too hard, it can look like you’re questioning the school.”
The advice landed where a threat would, clean and measured.
Minseo didn’t laugh it off. She didn’t bow into apology. She shifted her backpack higher, steadying the strap against her collarbone. “Which procedure?” she asked, tone flat as attendance. “Is there a rule number? Or a notice? I want to read the exact wording.”
His eyes flicked, left, toward the staff room door, then back to her. The smallest delay, like a file not opening. Minseo kept her gaze on his mouth, on the way his politeness held too tightly at the corners. She waited for the first crack, and didn’t fill the silence for him.
In the corridor between third period and lunch, Minseo felt the temperature change without anyone touching the thermostat. Heads turned a fraction too late. Smiles arrived pre-measured. A boy who always borrowed erasers held his hand back like he’d been burned. Yuna’s eyes asked, wordlessly, Are you okay? Minseo kept walking. Let them be impressed. Let them be annoyed. She wasn’t here to make it easy.
By lunch, Minseo built a plan that treated attention like weather: inevitable, manageable if you dressed for it. Paper trail first. Rumor went in a separate column, tagged as hearsay. And she would move early, 질문부터. Before anyone could rename her careful questions as misconduct.
Last period drags, fluorescent light buzzing like a trapped insect above the whiteboard. The teacher’s voice flattens into a rhythm. Page numbers, “important for the mock,” the kind of warnings that sound like care but land like a threat. Minseo keeps her pen moving anyway, not because she needs the notes, but because stopping would leave space for her thoughts to get loud.
Two rows ahead, someone coughs into their sleeve and checks the clock. A boy near the window bends to tie his shoelace and slips a glance at his phone under the desk, thumb flicking fast, kakaotalk, probably, or a photo. Minseo’s eyes catch it and slide away without judgment. Evidence has a way of turning into leverage in this building, even when no one says the word.
Her own phone is off, buried deep in her bag like a temptation she can’t afford. Her headache sits behind her eyes, a thin wire pulled tight. She rolls her shoulders once, quietly, the way she does at home when her parents’ voices rise and she pretends she can’t hear.
When the teacher turns to erase the board, Minseo begins packing. Not hurried. Precise. Textbook squared to the desk edge. Loose worksheets aligned, clipped, and tucked into a folder labeled in neat block letters. Pencil case zipped with the pull tab facing outward. Nothing left that could be “misplaced,” nothing that could be picked up and later returned with a smile like a trap.
She checks her desk surface with the flat of her palm, feeling for a stray sticky note, a ripped corner, a forgotten name. Her eyes sweep the floor around her chair, one centimeter, two, until she’s satisfied there’s nothing with her handwriting on it.
The bell hasn’t rung yet, but her body is already in the corridor. Controlled speed: not running, not lingering. The kind of movement adults read as responsible and classmates read as suspicious. She keeps her face neutral, like she’s simply early for 야자 prep, like her stomach isn’t twisting around the idea of tonight.
At the door, a teacher says, “Minseo-ya, already?” in a tone that could mean anything.
Minseo dips her head. “I have something to submit,” she answers, careful with the words. Not a lie. Just not the whole shape of the truth.
In the corridor, Lina doesn’t lower her voice the way students usually do when they want something to stay theirs. She stops where the hallway widens, between the faculty office door and the trophy case, and lifts a thick, brown envelope like it’s ordinary, like it isn’t bait.
“Program evaluation packet,” she says, crisp. “Sealed. Deadline is tonight. Submissions handled by policy. Direct to the office, logged. No ‘I left it on your desk’ nonsense.”
The word policy lands like a ruler on knuckles. A passing homeroom teacher slows, eyes flicking to the envelope, to Lina’s face, to the cluster of students suddenly pretending they weren’t listening. Someone gives a too-bright laugh. Someone else, one of the boys who always knows what’s trending before it trends, tilts his head as if measuring how much this is worth in group chat.
Minseo stays half a step behind, hands closed around her folder strap, watching the ripple. Which faces soften into approval because a teacher is nearby. Which go blank because they’re doing math. A girl near the lockers murmurs “jinjja?” like disbelief, but her gaze cuts past Lina toward the staff stairwell.
Calculation has a smell here (printer toner and instant coffee) and Minseo breathes it in like proof.
Yuna folds herself into the hallway noise like she belongs to it. She’s at Minae’s desk for half a second, “Can I borrow your 지우개?”, then by the window, then near the lockers, smiling politely at a joke she didn’t start. To anyone else, she’s just orbiting; to Minseo, it’s reconnaissance.
Her eyes don’t fix on people’s faces. They skim wrists, pockets, shoe tips. The second Lina says sealed, logged, policy, Yuna notes the boy who stands too quickly, restroom, he mouths, already halfway gone. She clocks the girl who rotates her whole torso toward the staff stairwell like a compass needle finding north. Under a desk, a thumb flicks once, hidden by a textbook’s shadow: a single tap that breaks the phone ban and sends a ripple outward. Yuna doesn’t react. She just remembers.
Seongmin’s “routine” meeting hits at the exact hour the office runs on half-attention and habit. He walks in with a thin folder, not dramatic. Just inevitable: printed forms, clipped screenshots of timestamps, policy lines highlighted in cheap yellow. His voice stays even as he asks, then waits, until a name is written, a signature fixed, and “later” becomes a record they can’t erase.
Dusk squeezes the campus into fluorescent pockets of quiet. Lina walks the envelope straight to the office counter, making the clerk say “sealed” out loud, making a teacher glance up and witness, making the logbook open. Minseo stays one step aside, rehearsing request phrasing, CCTV, key access, timestamps, like a prayer. Then she drifts to where scholarship kids always get funneled: beneath the rankings, where “almost” becomes evidence.
After 야자, the building didn’t empty so much as thin out, like steam. The third-floor corridor kept its fluorescent hum, its smell of toner and instant 믹스커피 clinging to sleeves. Minseo took the spot she’d picked on purpose: beneath the rankings board where the hallway pinched narrow between trophy case and classroom doors. Everyone had to slow there. Everyone had to look up, even if only to pretend they weren’t.
The posted scores sat behind glass, neat columns of names and numbers that made a kind of mirror. As students filed past, their faces doubled: the real and the reflected, both tired, both trying to look neutral. Minseo watched the reflections more than the bodies. In glass, people forgot to perform.
A pair of boys in matching black padding jackets came through first, shoulders angled to block each other’s view. A scholarship girl followed, clutching a clear file like it was a shield, eyes fixed straight ahead. Someone laughed too loudly at nothing, then stopped as they passed the board, mouth closing like a zipper.
Minseo didn’t move. Her backpack straps cut into her collarbones; the ache was grounding. She counted time in sounds: shuffling slip-ons, the squeak of a janitor’s cart wheel somewhere far, the distant click of a staff room door settling shut.
Then: footsteps that didn’t scuff. Even, measured, a heel-to-toe certainty that made the corridor feel narrower than it was. She didn’t need to see him yet. Hajun always walked like the air was arranged for him.
His reflection reached the glass before his body did. Immaculate uniform, tie perfectly set, expression composed to the edge of blank. He didn’t glance up at the rankings. He never had to.
Minseo exhaled through her nose, slow, like she was turning a page in her head. When he drew close enough that she could see the faint shadow under his eyes, the kind that came from insomnia, not studying, she shifted one step away from the wall.
Not to challenge him. To become unavoidable.
Minseo stepped into his lane. Not close enough to brush his sleeve, not far enough to be ignored. The corridor’s hum filled the gap for a beat. Her voice stayed low, pitched for his ears only, so no one could turn it into a scene and no teacher could pretend to have “overheard” a confession.
“I’m not going to ask you where the packet went,” she said. The words tasted like the easy route, the satisfying headline, and she let them pass. “Because you don’t have to steal to win.”
Hajun’s eyes didn’t change, but something in his focus tightened, like a camera narrowing its frame.
“You just make it complicated,” Minseo continued, steady, like she was reading from a policy sheet. “You create a process that’s always… messy. Enough missing stamps, enough replacement chains, enough ‘procedures’ that someone has to be called in to explain.”
She nodded once toward the rankings behind glass without looking. “And it’s never the same people who get called in, right? It’s always scholarship kids. Always the ones who can’t afford one mistake. One ‘suspicious’ record. One meeting away from losing funding.”
Her hands stayed on her backpack straps, knuckles pale. “That’s the architecture. Not a crime. A trap.”
Hajun’s mouth curved into something almost gentle. “Minseo-ya,” he said, voice smooth as a homeroom teacher’s note in the margin. “You’ve been under a lot of pressure. It’s exam season. If you’re seeing connections everywhere, maybe you should talk to the counselor.” The concern was formatted perfectly. Minseo didn’t bite the bait by listing timestamps or names. She listened for what the sentence was trying to file her under.
“You always sound worried about ‘fairness’ right before someone gets called to the office,” she said quietly. “Not when a rich kid misses 야자. Not when someone’s tutor hands them last year’s answers. Only when the outcome can be routed into a warning, a 기록, a ‘let’s just check.’”
A cluster of students rounded the corner, voices muffled by scarves, and the corridor tightened. Hajun didn’t move out of his calm. Only his gaze did, a quick, involuntary check toward the staff-only door down the hall, like measuring whether it was shut, whether someone stood behind it, whether the route was still clean. Minseo let the silence stretch one beat too long. “People look for exits,” she said evenly, “when they’re thinking about access. Not innocence.”
Hajun recovered in a blink, neutrality snapping back into place like a buttoned collar. “Be careful,” he said, soft and procedural. “There are consequences for making accusations.” Minseo kept her voice low, almost bored. “Procedures are exactly what I’m documenting.” She shifted to the side, permission, not retreat, and let him pass. As he walked off, she counted his steps, the cadence, the half-second hitch where his eyes had cracked.
Minseo waited until the library’s last bell emptied the tables into the hallway. The quiet after 야자 sign-out had a particular sound: printer hum, the soft click of pen caps, someone’s cough swallowed into a sleeve. She took over a corner desk like it was an exam seat: bag on the left, binder open, phone face-down because rules were rules, even when the rules were the problem.
She wrote the request on clean A4, not on the school’s flimsy “student inquiry” slip. Header, recipient, subject line. She copied policy language the way Seongmin had shown her: exact article numbers, the phrase that made records “mandatory to retain,” the clause that required a written response within a set number of days. Not “If possible.” Not “Could you please.” Dates. Start time. End time. “Between 19:[^40] and 20:[^20],” because wide windows gave adults space to shrug.
She listed camera IDs from the faded map taped near the security monitor she’d glimpsed during an errand last semester: corridor outside the staff-only door, stairwell landing, rooftop access point. She requested access logs for staff key usage, specifying “all entries, including administrative overrides,” because she’d learned how people hid behind the word exception.
Her handwriting stayed neat even as her pulse climbed. The sentences were cold on purpose. You can’t argue with cold sentences; you can only comply or refuse.
At the print station, the paper slid out warm, smelling faintly of toner. She made two copies, stacked them precisely, and walked to the office with her shoulders set as if weight could be redistributed by posture. The secretary glanced up, already tired.
“What is this?”
“A formal records request,” Minseo said, voice level. She didn’t explain why. Explanation was a rope for someone to pull.
The stamp came down with a dull thud. One copy stayed on the desk; the other returned to Minseo with the red date like a bruise. She kept her face blank, careful not to blink too fast, and tucked it into a clear file sleeve. Only then did she notice her hands. Shaking under the paper where no one could see.
Lina handled the sealed evaluation packet the way people handled evidence on crime shows. Except this was Mapo-gu fluorescent light and a school that pretended nothing bad could happen inside its walls. The envelope was thick, the kind the office used for official documents, and she kept her thumb pressed along the flap like she could feel any tampering through paper.
“Witnesses,” she said, brisk. Not a request. An instruction.
Two classmates hovered, nervous at first, then pulled in by the seriousness like gravity. Lina produced a black pen and had them sign across the seam where the glue met. Their names cut through the beige paper in clean strokes. She didn’t let them joke it away.
Next: proof of time. She held the envelope against the bulletin board where the day’s schedule was posted (date, period, club rooms) then snapped photos from three angles, the clock in frame when she could manage it. The phone stayed in her hand only as long as necessary, rules acknowledged, not obeyed.
When she walked it to the designated drop box, she didn’t tuck it under a binder. She carried it at chest height, slow enough for eyes to land. If anyone wanted to call it “careless,” they’d have to do it out loud.
Yuna didn’t waste energy on the loudest version of the story. Loud was just heat. She listened for the first thin crackle. The “she’s overreacting” tossed like a joke at the water fountain, the careful “Don’t you think she’s… accusing staff?” whispered with a hand half-covering a mouth. She tracked how it traveled: who said it first, who repeated it with new emphasis, who pretended they were only “concerned.”
In her notebook margin, she drew arrows between names, periods, and locations. Same phrasing, different mouths. Like someone had drafted a script and distributed it in fragments.
Then the pivot word appeared, “scholarship misconduct”, from three unrelated circles within an hour. That wasn’t organic. That was a warning dressed up as morality, and it always arrived right before consequences.
The office answered her request with airy words. Minseo came back the next morning with fluorescent highlights, a one-page timeline, and the clause circled so hard the paper thinned. She set it down without bowing. “Please confirm, in writing, whether the requested footage and access records will be preserved and provided.” Silence, then the brittle click of a pen.
Seongmin’s voice carried down the corridor. Minseo kept her gaze on Hajun. His face stayed smooth, but his replies were careful, always redirecting: not did it happen, but what counts as proof, who’s allowed to ask. That was the fracture. She spoke quietly, steady enough to be recorded. “You don’t have to steal,” she said. “You just make the rules brush against people until they look guilty.”
The printout arrived folded into thirds, as if the paper itself needed to be made smaller to be acceptable. Minseo took it with both hands anyway and carried it to the nearest empty classroom where the heaters worked only in theory.
She smoothed it on a desk scarred with compass scratches and old gum shadows. The header was official, heavy with school seal and a timestamp that made her stomach tighten on contact. Rooftop Access Control Log. Black text, gray columns. A list of nothing, for pages, until the line that mattered.
One entry in the “impossible” window.
Not a student card. No student ID field even populated. Just: Master/Staff Key. The door: Rooftop Stairwell. Status: Unlocked. Then, minutes later, Locked. Clean as a breathing cycle.
Minseo read it three times, each pass slower, trying to find the mess that would let her dismiss it as a glitch. There was no forced-open alarm. No error code. No “tamper detected.” The system didn’t scream. It nodded. It recorded the interaction like routine maintenance, like someone checking a water tank or replacing a flickering light panel, like the door had always been meant to open for that hand.
Her own hands felt too warm. She realized she’d been gripping her pen hard enough to leave a crescent in her thumb.
If it had been a student, there would be something messy. This was a straight line. Efficient. The kind of entry that belonged to an adult with permission or the confidence of it.
Minseo’s mind did what it always did under threat: built a timeline. Who had keys? Who could borrow them without signing? Who could walk up a stairwell at night without a hall monitor asking questions? She heard Hajun’s careful voice from yesterday and understood, with a chill that wasn’t from the broken heater, that the log wasn’t an answer.
It was a boundary. A message. Someone had gone through the door like it was theirs.
Yuna didn’t bring Minseo names. She brought patterns, delivered in the low voice she used when she didn’t want her own fear to turn loud.
At lunch she’d sat at the edge of other people’s tables, chopsticks moving, ears open. In 야자, she’d walked the hall with a stack of papers like she belonged there, watching who the hall monitors waved through without looking up. Later, in the stairwell where the heaters actually worked, she unfolded a grid paper sheet dense with tiny handwriting.
“On that night,” Yuna said, tapping a column, “these teachers were ‘on duty.’ But only two of them leave their floor for ‘errands’ without signing out. And this one” “always sends a student. Never goes themselves.”
Minseo’s eyes tracked the notes: who carried keys on a lanyard, who kept them clipped to a belt, who asked the office for “just a minute” and came back with toner-smudged hands. It wasn’t about authority. It was about being expected. Footsteps that didn’t trigger suspicion. Doors that opened because nobody thought to ask why.
The CCTV file came as a muted link in an admin email, subject line bland enough to be cruel. In the classroom’s fluorescent buzz, Minseo watched the grainy stairwell feed and felt the first, stupid drop: no face, no hoodie-dramatics, no moment you could freeze and circle in red. Just a figure cutting through the frame like an afterthought.
So she rewound. Again. Not searching for a name, but for method.
The shoulder dipped at the exact corner where the camera couldn’t see. A half-second pause. Then the hand rose to the keypad area and moved too fast to be cautious, fingers sure in the way of someone who doesn’t need to look. No fumbling, no checking behind them. It wasn’t stealth. It was routine. Like unlocking a door at home.
The clerk smiled like a lesson. With gloved fingertips she slid out a thick envelope. “In case of loss,” she said, voice syrup-smooth, “we follow the internal chain. A substitute packet is issued, logged, filed. So everything stays… consistent.” Minseo nodded, hearing the real meaning: an official kindness that let a swap happen without anyone ever needing to steal.
Minseo turns a blank sheet into a timeline: access log, stairwell timestamp, the moment the office “issued” a replacement. She draws arrows, then boxes, then writes the same three numbers again until they stop being separate and become a narrow passage you could walk through. It’s a system, not a theft: procedure as camouflage. The kind of clean, bureaucratic move Hajun would read like handwriting.
Hajun appeared where the corridor narrowed, between the trophy case and the bulletin board dense with 대학 입시 flyers, like he’d measured her walking speed and chosen the exact angle that didn’t look like blocking. The late self-study hush turned every footstep into accusation. Minseo’s phone, confiscated all day and returned only at dismissal, sat heavy in her pocket like a secret she couldn’t text.
“Minseo.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. His uniform was immaculate in the sickly fluorescent light, tie knot centered as if symmetry could control outcomes. When she tried to step past, he shifted half a pace, polite enough to pretend it was coincidence.
“I’m on my way to the office,” she said, keeping her tone flat, like she was answering roll call.
His gaze flicked: past her shoulder, down the corridor. Checking for witnesses without turning his head. Controlled. Practiced. “Not there,” he murmured. “Let’s talk somewhere quieter.”
The phrasing landed like a hand on the back of her neck. Somewhere quieter meant away from cameras, away from teachers who could overhear, away from paper trails. Protection, packaged as courtesy. A favor that would stain her hands if she accepted.
Minseo let her eyes move, deliberately, to the ceiling corner where a small dome camera watched the hall. She forced herself not to look back at him too quickly, as if quickness was guilt. “Whatever you have to say, you can say here.”
A muscle jumped near his jaw. For a second, the calm looked thin, stretched over something raw. “You think I’m trying to threaten you.”
“I think you’re trying to make this disappear,” she said, and hated how steady her voice sounded. Competent on the outside, panic skittering underneath. The office door at the far end suddenly felt farther than it was. “Disappearing things is your specialty.”
His eyes sharpened, not with anger exactly, but with injury at being named. “You don’t understand what happens to people who get attached to this. Scholarship students. They don’t forgive ‘noise.’ They remember.”
She heard the offer inside the warning: step aside, and he would keep her clean. Step aside, and she would owe him. Minseo tightened her grip on the folder of timelines until the paper edges bit her palm. “Then they can remember,” she said. “But they’ll remember the right thing.”
Hajun’s voice dropped another degree, as if softness could make the words harmless. “You’re smart,” he said, careful praise. “So be smart. Withdraw the request. Don’t escalate. The school will ‘investigate’ and close it. Quietly.”
He didn’t say cover-up. He didn’t have to. Minseo watched the way he kept his hands loose at his sides, like he wasn’t bargaining with her future.
“I can keep your name out of it,” he continued, eyes steady, almost gentle. “No committee. No ‘discipline review.’ No teacher suddenly calling on you in class to see if you’re ‘still stable.’” The quotation marks were audible, a mimicry of adults who smiled while sharpening knives. “You won’t be that scholarship student who made trouble. People don’t forget that. Not here.”
It landed with the weight of lived knowledge: how reputations calcify at Haneulseong, how one rumor becomes a file nobody admits exists. His mouth tightened, a flicker of something like exhaustion. “Let them handle it internally,” he said again, and the mercy showed its true shape: a door half-opened, only if she agreed to step through alone.
Minseo heard the trap with the same clarity she used to spot a wrong sign in a math proof: private would become “understanding,” understanding would become compromise, and compromise would harden into shared liability. She took one step back, not away from him. Into the thin current of students drifting toward the stairwell after 야자, where voices and footsteps made a kind of witness.
She lifted her folder slightly, letting the timeline peek out like it belonged in the open. “I need the access logs. CCTV timestamps for the stairwell and the office corridor. And the replacement issuance trail,” she said, not loud, just audible enough to be repeatable.
Her thumb found her phone in her pocket, screen hidden by her sleeve. Lina: keep sealed packet announcement on record. Yuna: watch who moves first; write everything down.
Hajun’s composure frayed, a fine crack running through the politeness. “You don’t get it,” he said, voice still low, but sharper. “Rules don’t care who touched the packet. They only count proximity. Who stood close enough to benefit when it went missing.”
Minseo didn’t flinch. “That’s exactly the design,” she said. “And I’m not signing onto a version of this that only exists behind a closed door.”
Seongmin cut into the corridor like a slammed file drawer, coat flaring, scuffed sneakers squeaking once. He didn’t ask permission. He said the nearest administrator’s name like it was a summons, then pinned it to facts: “Tomorrow, 10 a.m. Access logs. CCTV export. Replacement packet chain. Printed. Signed.” A passing teacher slowed, students stopped pretending to walk. Seongmin’s voice stayed loud enough to become record.
The corridor thickens the way steam does when a kettle starts to scream: silent at first, then suddenly everywhere. A few second-years slow with their backpacks still half on, caught between the stairwell and the exit. Someone from broadcast club lingers too long near the bulletin board, pretending to read university banners while their eyes flick sideways. A homeroom teacher pauses with a stack of worksheets hugged to her ribs, gaze flicking from Seongmin’s square shoulders to Minseo’s folder and back, as if deciding what kind of adult she’s going to be tonight.
Minseo stands under the harshest fluorescent panel, the one that makes everyone look sick. The light turns the edges of her timeline printouts almost blue. She presses the folder to her chest. Not to hide it, but to keep her hands from shaking. Her headache is a dull pulse behind her eyes, caffeine and no sleep and adrenaline arguing over who gets to steer.
Somewhere down the hall, a classroom door clicks shut. The sound is too neat, like punctuation.
Hajun appears at the far end as if he’s been waiting for the moment when enough witnesses gathered to make it dangerous. His uniform is perfect; even his tie knot looks deliberate. He walks with a controlled pace that doesn’t hurry, doesn’t apologize, like the building has already agreed to clear space for him. Students shift without meaning to. A path opens. Minseo tracks it: not with resentment, with the same cold noticing she uses on multiple-choice patterns.
He doesn’t look at Seongmin first. He looks at Minseo’s folder.
Up close, the calm on Hajun’s face is too precise. His eyes don’t dart, but they do calculate. Her posture, Seongmin’s volume, the teacher hesitating, the cluster of students becoming a record without anyone saying “record.” For a second, Minseo catches something else under it, a brittle pressure, like he’s holding himself together by force of habit.
She thinks of what he said (proximity, guilt that transfers like ink) and feels something in her chest settle into place.
If he wants the corridor to be a weapon, she can let it be a witness.
Hajun stopped at conversational distance, polite enough to pass as concern. “Minseo-ya,” he said, voice even. “You’re making this bigger than it has to be. Scholarship students don’t get to look… difficult without consequences.” His gaze flicked to her folder like it offended him. “And you clearly don’t understand how replacement packets work. They’re routine. They exist so people don’t panic.”
Minseo let the hallway absorb it. Let the watching second-years and the hovering teacher hear the shape of his warning without her dignifying it with heat. She felt her pulse in her teeth, forced her grip to loosen on the folder’s edge.
“One thing,” she said, and kept her tone the way she kept her notes. Clean. “What time was the access logged?”
A pause, a fraction too long. Hajun’s expression didn’t change, but his shoulders tightened like he’d been corrected.
“And the key ID?” she added, before he could reframe.
She didn’t look at Seongmin; she didn’t need to. She could feel the adults listening harder when the questions stayed small.
“Who signed the replacement request,” Minseo said, “and who physically carried it?”
Hajun’s mouth curved like sympathy. “Lina made a scene. Yuna’s hovering like a sasaeng. And you what are you implying about the staff?”
Minseo didn’t rise to any of the labels. She watched how he tried to drag three girls into three separate kinds of misconduct, how easily “reckless” and “creepy” and “ungrateful” could become a disciplinary note. That was the point: not a loud cheat, but a system that made everyone look wrong.
“You’re not defending fairness,” she said, voice level. “You’re defending a mechanism.”
He blinked, almost imperceptible.
“Rules set up so innocence expires,” Minseo continued. “So guilt is transferable. Like a worksheet passed down a row: whoever’s holding it when the teacher turns around is the easiest target.”
The air in the corridor changes. Not louder, but sharper. Faces that were hungry for a fight start counting instead. Minseo opens her folder and slides out the timeline printout: request submitted, policy posted, CCTV frame numbers, the ten-minute window a staff key ID pinged the rooftop door. Her voice stays flat, deliberate, almost unpleasantly calm. No pleading, no heat: just facts placed down like weights, daring the room to tip.
Hajun’s calm faltered, not into drama but into micro-errors: a blink that came late, a breath caught high, his jaw locking as if he could grind the timeline back into noise. Minseo saw it and felt nothing like victory. Only a steadiness, a cold decision settling in her ribs. He couldn’t win where ambiguity had been denied. Where signatures, timestamps, and spoken truth wouldn’t bend.
The meeting doesn’t end with shouting; it ends with paper.
Minseo watches the conference table like it’s an exam desk. Grainy wood, a ring from someone’s coffee, the neat stack of documents Park Seongmin brought in a clear file sleeve. The vice principal’s office smells faintly of toner and citrus cleaner, the kind used to wipe away evidence of stress. Everyone sits too straight, even the adults, like posture might pass for control.
Park slides the first page forward with two fingers. Key-card access logs. Rows of numbers, names, and times stamped in a font that doesn’t care who’s top of the grade or whose parents donate. Minseo’s eyes snag on the hours: late evening, early morning. Times that match 야자’s dead quiet, when corridors are just fluorescent hum and distant mop buckets. She feels her heartbeat climb anyway, a stupid, physical thing, as if the log can see her reading it.
The homeroom teacher reaches for it, then hesitates: caught between wanting to shut this down and needing to look “fair.” The counselor clears her throat, a small sound that doesn’t soften the air.
Next comes the dated sign-out sheet for exam materials. The handwriting varies. Some loopy, some aggressive, some meticulous enough to look performative. Park’s thumb holds down the corner where someone tried to erase and rewrote. Minseo recognizes Hajun’s pen pressure without seeing his name yet; she’s sat behind him long enough to know how he underlines.
Finally, Park places the timeline on top. A clean column of events: when packets were printed, when they were sealed, when a “replacement” was requested, who approved it, who had access, who was present. The story stops being a rumor you can shrug off and becomes a chain: links that can be pointed at.
Minseo keeps her hands in her lap so no one notices they’re trembling. She tells herself to breathe like she does in the library. In. Out. Evidence doesn’t care if she looks messy. Evidence just sits there, quiet and heavy, making the room rearrange itself around it.
Hajun speaks the way he always does: level tone, polite honorifics, phrases that sound like they were pre-approved. Minseo watches him angle his shoulders toward the vice principal, then toward Park Seongmin, calibrating respect like it’s a dial he can turn until adults relax. “With all due respect,” he says, and the words land soft, practiced. He offers explanations that are not lies so much as corridors: I was asked to help. I only followed procedure. There must be a misunderstanding in the records.
But the records don’t misunderstand. The timestamps sit in their rows, indifferent. When Hajun smiles, just a thin lift at the corner, like he’s offering everyone a way out, Minseo feels the smile snag against the numbers. Park doesn’t interrupt, just lets Hajun keep walking until the floor ends.
Hajun’s fingers tap once on the table, then still. A tell. His eyes flick down, fast, to the page like he can will it to change. “Those times,” he begins, and the measured cadence wavers, not into panic. Into irritation, the kind that leaks when control fails.
It’s like watching him try to press a crease out of paper that’s already been copied.
Mr. Han (the same teacher who usually hid behind “be careful” and “you know how these things work”) opens his mouth and, for once, the words have edges. He doesn’t look at Minseo when he talks; he looks at the paper, as if the paper is safer than a student’s face. “The replacement packet was requested at 21:[^17],” he says, voice flat. “Approved by me. Picked up by Student Rep Han Hajun. The seal was broken in the materials room, not the classroom. The key was checked out under my ID.” Each sentence pins something down. The vice principal’s pen stops moving. Even the counselor’s breathing seems quieter. Minseo feels the room compress. Less air for excuses, more weight on names.
Hajun’s advantage changes shape in real time. It stops being the air everyone breathes (an unspoken of course) and becomes a pattern you can point to with a fingertip, time-stamped and signed. Minseo feels the room’s gravity shift toward the paper. No dramatic scolding, no public spectacle. Just adults registering him as data, and that kind of seeing doesn’t undo itself.
The final wording comes out as an “adjustment,” not an apology: procedures clarified, exceptions reviewed, distribution protocols updated effective immediately. It reads like the school is correcting a typo. Yet the air changes. Hajun’s name sits there without its usual halo, pinned to a timeline. His posture stays immaculate, but something in his jaw tightens: politeness suddenly lighter than evidence.
The notice comes folded into a plain envelope that smells faintly of toner, the kind the office keeps stacked in a tray by the window. Minseo recognizes the school seal before she reads a word of it, and her fingers go cold anyway.
Candidate status reinstated.
The sentence is clean and bloodless. No subject, no apology, no acknowledgement that a person had to spend days being treated like a mistake. Just a passive correction, like the school is restoring a file from backup.
For one breath, her shoulders drop. The floor steadies under her shoes. Rubber soles on linoleum, the familiar friction of being held up by something that doesn’t care who she is. Relief is physical first: a loosening in her chest, a quiet unclenching behind her ribs.
Then the air shifts.
Across the table, the vice principal’s eyes don’t move away when Minseo lifts her head. The counselor’s hands are folded too neatly, as if she’s trying to keep the moment from spilling. Mr. Han clears his throat and looks at the clock, not at Minseo, and the sound lands like a warning: time is still something that can be used against you.
Minseo hears herself say, “Thank you,” in the correct register (student-to-adult, grateful-but-not-pleading) because she has practiced being acceptable in rooms like this. Her voice comes out steadier than her stomach. She sits up straighter, not out of pride but out of instinct, the way you stand taller when you know someone is evaluating your posture.
“Just… keep your attendance clean,” someone adds, softly, like advice. It isn’t advice. It’s a leash offered with a smile.
As she takes the paper, she feels the weight of it: one sheet, thin, too official for how much it will touch her life. The room stays quiet in a way that isn’t peaceful. It’s the quiet of adults suddenly interested in how a student stands, how she walks out, how she holds her face like it can be graded.
In second period, the air in the classroom feels the same (chalk dust, heater-radiator dryness) but the attention is different. It lands on Minseo in clean, measurable units. Ms. Kwon lingers by her desk long enough for Minseo to notice the soft click of heels stopping, starting, stopping again. A shadow crosses her notebook. Nothing is said, but Minseo’s handwriting tightens anyway, letters shrinking like they’re trying to hide.
“Minseo-ya,” the teacher calls, not because a question has her name on it, but because her name now fits the room’s new habit: test, confirm, record. The problem is directed “to anyone,” and still the chalk pauses mid-air until Minseo answers. She does, correctly, quickly, because competence is safer than protest.
During break, Mr. Han bends over the submission box and flips through papers with exaggerated care. “Five minutes late,” he says, not loud, not quiet: exactly audible. His pen makes a small mark on a sheet that already has too many boxes. Later, a club form comes back with a circled blank where a stamp should be, as if a missing smudge of ink could explain her whole character.
She starts anticipating mistakes she hasn’t made yet, shoulders braced for the sound of her own name.
The scrutiny spreads sideways through the corridor like spilled ink. It isn’t the old, easy accusation of cheating; it’s worse. Complicated. Sensitive case. Not worth getting involved. Girls who used to borrow her highlighters now smile too wide and keep their hands to themselves. A boy she’s never spoken to angles his body away as she passes, as if the school office might be watching from the ceiling tiles.
Minseo catches fragments, “attendance,” “scholarship,” “appeal”, stitched into laughter that isn’t quite laughter. Even the neutral ones become careful. They don’t glare; they edit themselves around her, leaving a small empty radius, the way people step around a wet floor sign. She walks through it anyway, jaw set, pretending the distance is her choice.
Hajun’s circle doesn’t confront her: they don’t have to. Lunch seats fill before she arrives. Study group “updates” happen in hallway murmurs that stop when she’s close. In the class group chat, typing bubbles vanish the moment her name appears, and when someone does reply it’s all honorifics and perfect punctuation, a cold jeongjungham that makes her feel catalogued: like a case file, not a classmate.
At home, the reinstatement curdles into proof. Her mother says, See? If you’d handled it properly, it wouldn’t have happened, and her father says, This is what your side causes. Always noise. The living room becomes a courtroom: halmeoni’s TV turned down, auntie’s chopsticks paused mid-air, everyone listening too neatly. Minseo washes dishes too hard, knuckles stinging, understanding it didn’t end the fight. It just relocated it.
The next morning, the bulletin board outside the staff office has a new notice pinned at eye level, neatly squared as if someone measured the margins. Plain font. No exclamation points. An official red stamp that looks almost bruised against the white paper.
University-Prep Program Selection Review Meeting. Date. Time. Location: Conference Room 2.
It reads like a routine calendar adjustment, like they’re moving a PTA meeting because of rain, when Minseo can feel the floor shift under it.
Students slow as they pass, pretending they’re just checking the after-school schedule. A second-year in a puffer jacket leans in too close, then jerks back when Minseo’s shadow crosses the glass. Someone whispers, “geomto,” review, the word dragged thin with curiosity. Another voice answers, “geunyang… chamyeo?” Just… are they letting her back in?
Minseo stands one step away, not close enough to look desperate, not far enough to look uninvolved. Her reflection floats in the bulletin board’s plastic cover: tied-back hair, uniform collar too crisp from last night’s rewashing, eyes slightly bloodshot from a three-hour sleep. She reads the notice again anyway, like repetition can turn ink into certainty.
Behind her, the staff-office door opens and shuts on a puff of warm air and printer toner. A teacher’s low voice says, “We’ll keep it quiet.” Another replies, even lower, “Quietly remove the replacement packets. Starting today.” The phrase lands in Minseo’s stomach, heavy and unreal. Quietly. Like the problem was never the packets, never the system. Just the noise they made when someone noticed.
She takes out her notebook without thinking, pen clicking once, and writes the date and time in the margin of her study plan. Her hand is steady. That’s the worst part: her body knows how to function when her mind is splitting.
When she finally steps away, her shoulder brushes a boy’s sleeve. He flinches as if contact might stain him, and Minseo keeps walking, face neutral, carrying the paper’s stamp in her peripheral vision like a warning light.
By second period, a messenger student appears at Minseo’s classroom door and says her name with a too-bright politeness, like it’s an honor to be interrupted. The walk to the staff wing feels longer than it is; every step past the trophy case and the counseling posters is a step into someone else’s version of her.
Conference Room 2 smells like instant 믹스커피 and laminated paper. A vice principal she’s only seen at assemblies sits with a folder open, pen cap aligned to the table edge. “Just to confirm,” he says, voice mild, “the sequence.” Not your sequence. Not your story. The sequence, as if her days are a spreadsheet.
She recites dates, who handed what to whom, the moment she realized the packet wasn’t hers. She has already practiced it in her head until it fits in one breath. They ask the same questions sideways (“Did anyone suggest you switch?” “Was there pressure?”) and when she answers, they nod like they’re weighing tone more than facts.
At lunch, she’s called again. Same room, different adult, same statement slid toward her. Sign here. Initial there. Her signature looks unfamiliar by the second time, as if it belongs to a student they’re building out of paperwork.
In the corridor outside the staff wing, teachers’ voices soften into administrative fog. “For transparency,” one says to no one in particular, as if the walls are the audience. “To ensure fairness,” another adds, smiling with just the top half of her face. The words are clean; the air around them isn’t.
Minseo walks past the copy room and feels their attention pivot with her like a security camera. Eyes flick down to her hands, empty, no contraband, then up to her mouth, searching for the correct reaction: guilty, grateful, defiant. Something they can file.
A homeroom teacher pauses mid-step, clipboard hugged to her chest. “You understand this is… procedural,” she says, careful with the syllables, like they might cut.
Minseo nods once, neutral. Her throat stays tight anyway, refusing to translate procedure into mercy.
In the admin office, Park Seongmin stands half in the doorway, coat still on, as a staff member slides open a metal drawer and pulls out a familiar form. No announcement. Just a pen uncapped, the tip hovering, then a quick, practiced slash through the line that reads “replacement materials.” The ink doesn’t blot. It’s done like deleting a routine, not confessing it ever mattered.
By evening, the rumor has already been ironed into something safer: not “they were wrong,” just “they’re re-checking because things got messy.” In the cafeteria line, Minseo catches her own name lowered a notch, like gossip adjusting volume to fit policy. The school doesn’t apologize; it recalibrates, smiles, memos, a new form stamped transparent, and insists the floor was always level, even as her feet learn the slope.
The next morning arrives with a thin, metallic cold that makes the hallway lights feel harsher. Minseo is halfway through changing her shoes when a shadow pauses by her locker, careful, like it’s asking permission to exist.
Miran doesn’t offer small talk. Their backpack hangs off one shoulder; their fingers are ink-stained in a way that looks accidental and also practiced. They glance once over Minseo’s shoulder, checking who’s watching, then slide a folded sheet between Minseo’s math workbook and the locker wall.
“Unnie, ” Miran starts, then corrects themselves by swallowing the word. “Minseo. I… wrote it down before it faded.”
Minseo doesn’t open it immediately. She’s learned that anything handed to you at school can become evidence in someone else’s story. “What is it?” she asks anyway, keeping her voice level.
“A page from my journal,” Miran says, barely above a whisper. Their eyes don’t quite meet hers; they fix on Minseo’s tied-back hair, the knot at her nape, like it’s a safe point. “It’s not… symbolic. It’s literal.”
Minseo unfolds the paper. Graph lines, torn ragged at the edge. A quick sketch: a rooftop door, hinge side shaded, the latch drawn too carefully: two screws, one slightly misaligned. An arrow points to the lock plate. Next to it, in cramped pencil: 07:38 and then again, harder, like pressed through the page: 07:[^38]: before first bell.
There’s a smudge where an eraser tried and failed.
Miran’s mouth tightens. “In the dream, it didn’t feel like a warning,” they say. “It felt like… someone rehearsing. Like they did it more than once, to see what would work.”
Minseo’s skin prickles beneath her uniform, the way it does when she realizes a teacher is smiling too politely. She runs her thumb over the penciled time until the graphite dulls.
“Did you see a person?” she asks.
Miran shakes their head. “Not a face. Just hands. And a clipboard. Like: like hiding a hand on purpose.”
Minseo refolds the page with care, smaller and smaller, as if making it easier to carry without being seen. “Okay,” she says, because okay is what you say when your stomach drops and you refuse to let it show. “Then we check.”
Minseo goes to the stairwell like it’s a lab. Passing time is loud enough to hide her footsteps; she lets the tide of uniforms move past, then slips in behind two boys arguing about a mock exam curve. The air changes. She takes the steps two at a time, then forces herself to slow, to look like she belongs there.
At the rooftop landing, the door is exactly what the school wants it to be: metal, official, closed. But the details don’t match the story. Near the lock plate, fresh gray scuffs bloom against the paint. Newer than the rust freckles, angled like something hard kept scraping and adjusting. She leans in, pretending to fix her hair tie, and sees one screw head slightly chewed, as if a cheap screwdriver slipped.
She shifts a half-step left. The hallway CCTV dome stares down, but the corner where the door meets the frame falls into a thin, perfect blind spot. A clipboard held at chest level would cover a hand. A body turned “checking” could block everything else.
The “locked” door stops reading as safety. It reads as an alibi someone rehearsed until it looked normal.
In the records room, the air is dry with old toner and paper that has learned to yellow politely. Minseo keeps her requests boring on purpose. “Sign-out sheets for the 시험지,” she says, then, “proctor logs,” then the chain-of-custody form, like she’s doing a simple audit for a teacher. The staff member barely looks up. Students come in panicked all the time, usually about attendance.
She copies dates into her notebook, neat columns, steady hand. And then the pattern starts to itch. The same rounded 7:[^40] instead of 7:[^38]. The same confident loop on the ㅅ in a name written in romanized initials, showing up on two different forms that should’ve been handled by different people. The missing packet stops being an accident and becomes a habit. An assembly line with one signature moving through it like a stamp.
The logic clicks into place with a cold neatness: first, manufacture a shortage; then, arrive with a “replacement packet” as if you’re being helpful; finally, let the inevitable scramble read as tired adults making small mistakes. The scores don’t move by accident. They’re nudged, quietly, into the shape someone wants. Minseo’s fear thins out, replaced by a denser thing: the certainty that catastrophe can be assembled, politely, stamp by stamp.
The weight doesn’t disappear; it organizes. After 야자, Minseo meets Miran in the library corner where the fluorescent light flickers like a warning. They don’t trade theories. They build proof: a minute-by-minute timeline, matching handwriting quirks to dates, noting who “replaced” what and when. No pleading, no “trust me.” When Minseo submits it, the method stands naked, stoppable, documentable.
The next morning, Minseo hears her own name before she sees the office.
It’s in the administration hallway, where voices usually blur into “attendance” and “forms” and “parent call.” Today it lands cleanly (“Minseo-ya”) spoken without the preface of a roster check, without the usual fumbling through class numbers. Someone knows her on sight. Someone has practiced saying it.
She keeps walking anyway, shoulders squared like she isn’t aware of the temperature changing behind her. The corridor smells like floor wax and instant 믹스커피; the fluorescent lights flatten everything, even fear, into something manageable. She tells herself to breathe through her nose. She tells herself her pace is normal.
A vice principal stands half-turned outside the guidance office, one hand still mid-gesture as he speaks to a teacher. His sentence snaps shut when Minseo passes. Not a dramatic stop: just a precise pause, like a video buffering. His eyes slide to her ID lanyard, to her face, then away. The teacher’s gaze follows, then pretends it didn’t.
“…in any case,” the vice principal continues, voice lowered into a careful register, a tone adults use when they’re talking about a student but don’t want the student to be able to quote them later.
Minseo feels heat crawl up the back of her neck. It isn’t embarrassment. It’s the sensation of becoming an object in someone else’s system. A file. A line item. A “case” people reference in passing and then set down.
She reaches the office door and hesitates only long enough to smooth her uniform skirt, to check the tightness of her ponytail. Practical, controlled: presentation as defense. Through the thin glass, she catches her own reflection layered over the room: her face floating on top of filing cabinets and staplers and stacks of paperwork that look heavier than they should.
Behind her, another adult voice says, “Is that her?”
Minseo doesn’t turn around. Turning would make it real in a way she can’t afford. She grips the strap of her bag until her fingers ache, then steps forward, letting the door click shut like a seal.
In homeroom, the little allowances that used to cushion her, an unasked-for “okay, submit tomorrow,” a teacher pretending not to see her eyelids flicker from 야자, are gone. The air feels newly procedural. When the Korean teacher hands out a worksheet, she pauses at Minseo’s desk like she’s checking a label, then repeats the instructions, slower, as if Minseo has a history of “misunderstanding.”
“Minseo, read number three,” the teacher says, not unkindly. Just pointed.
Minseo stands, voice steady, eyes scanning the lines the way she scans people: for traps, for omissions. She answers correctly. The teacher nods once, then asks a follow-up that isn’t harder: just public. A reminder: we’re watching.
During math, the assistant homeroom teacher walks the aisles and stops behind Minseo twice for “routine desk checks.” Pens aligned. Notes clipped. Nothing illegal, nothing wrong. Still, the presence lingers like a hand hovering over the back of her neck.
She keeps her expression blank, keeps writing. In the margin, she rewrites the same heading, date, period, page number, until the pencil bites through, paper softening under her palm.
At lunch, the scholarship kids drift toward her table the way iron filings find a magnet: then pause, checking for cameras, for teachers, for the price of being seen near her. Their trays hover. Someone’s spoon stops midair. Minseo feels the attention like a draft under a door.
A first-year clears her throat. “Unnie… if a teacher ‘forgets’ to collect something… what do you do?” The word misplaces doesn’t get said; it hangs in the steam from 된장찌개.
Another student slides in a notebook, open to a blank page, eyes fixed on Minseo’s hands. “Your timeline. The… signatures.”
Minseo doesn’t perform bravery. She flips her own binder open and points: dates in black, initials in blue, photo backups labeled by period. “Write it like you expect someone to deny it,” she says, quiet. “And save it twice.” The table exhales, reorganizing around her method.
Wealthy peers start tallying her the way they tally rankings: not with shouting, with subtraction. A chair scrapes back a few centimeters when she approaches. Someone says “ah, we’re saving seats,” eyes flicking to her lanyard like it’s a warning tag. Group chats turn to read receipts and nothing. A club sunbae’s smile goes glossy, “roster’s full”, though yesterday he’d asked her availability. Hajun’s circle arranges itself into polite angles, blocking corridors with careful courtesy, and Minseo understands: this isn’t dislike. It’s containment.
The more her name circulates in teachers’ mouths, the less space she has to be “okay” at home. One harmless call, “just confirming”, arrives before dinner and detonates. Her father asks for details like evidence; her mother calls it humiliation, proof the school is “targeting” them. They turn Minseo into a talking point in their fight. She answers in clipped facts, voice level, because she can’t vanish anymore.
Fluorescent light flattened the hallway into one exhausted color, the kind that made everyone look like they’d been awake too long. Minseo stood at her locker and made herself small without shrinking. Shoulders squared, chin level, hands busy. She smoothed the edges of her handouts until they aligned, one clean stack. Corners squared. The paper rasped under her thumbs, a thin, steady sound she could count on.
The lock clicked open, metallic and too loud. Inside: binders, a pencil case, the laminated scholarship ID that suddenly felt like a target pinned to fabric. She slid the stack in, then took it out again, adjusted it by a millimeter. Competence as ritual. At home, the rituals were different: washing a bowl twice so nobody could accuse her of being careless, answering in facts so nobody could twist her tone. Here, paper was honest. Paper held shape.
Her phone, confiscated last week for “checking the time”, wasn’t with her, but phantom vibrations still pulsed at her pocket as if her body had memorized being monitored. She forced her breathing into the slow tempo she used during mock exam listening sections: inhale for four counts, exhale for six. Don’t let your face give you away.
Footsteps passed behind her, a cluster of boys laughing too brightly. The laughter thinned when it reached her, then picked up again, as if it had tripped and recovered. Someone said her name softly, not to call her. Just to test how it tasted in the air. She didn’t turn.
A poster for an elite program hung crooked near the classroom door, fresh tape shining. The edges curled like they’d already been peeled off once. Minseo’s gaze skated past it, refusing the reflex to calculate what it would mean, what it would cost, who would resent her for wanting it.
She closed the locker with a controlled push. The sound landed cleanly, final. When she turned, her eyes skimmed the hallway without catching on anyone’s face for too long. A pair of teachers at the far end paused mid-conversation; one of them watched her with the careful interest reserved for students who had become a situation.
When she pivots from the locker, she lets her gaze travel the way she’s learned to in crowded hallways. Faces are hazards now. Even eye contact can be filed away as intent. She reads shoulders instead: who turns away a fraction, who stiffens like they’re bracing for impact, who pretends not to see her at all.
Down the corridor, two teachers halt mid-sentence as if someone has pressed pause. Their bodies keep the shape of casual conversation (clipboards tucked, coffee in hand) but the silence between them tightens. One of them tracks Minseo’s movement with an expression that isn’t hostile, exactly. It’s procedural. The look you give a spill you can’t ignore, a cracked tile someone might trip on, a student whose name has started appearing in meetings.
Minseo’s stomach drops anyway, a familiar, sour weight. She makes her steps even, shoes landing heel-to-toe like she’s walking a taped line. Don’t hurry. Don’t perform innocence. She keeps her chin level, as if being watched is just another school policy she can’t opt out of.
Her feet angle toward the ranking board out of muscle memory, the old reflex to confirm her place, to bargain with numbers. Half a step in, she catches herself and lifts her eyes to the green exit sign beyond the glass case, as if it’s a fixed point that can hold her upright. The board flashes in her peripheral. Columns of names, neat fonts, ink that decides who gets to breathe.
Behind her, the hallway rearranges. A whisper threads, snips off clean when she draws even; someone’s chair legs shriek against tile, too loud for a “nothing.” The hush that follows isn’t silence so much as a decision being made without her. She keeps her gaze level, shoulders squared, walking past the temptation to look up, letting them place the blame wherever it’s safest now that the rules have shifted.
Hajun’s cluster occupies the corridor like a sealed entrance, immaculate blazers turned into a barrier. The nods that used to come on autopilot don’t. One boy’s smile stalls halfway, then reboots for someone behind her; a girl’s gaze skates past Minseo’s shoulder as if looking at her would invite quarantine. Minseo’s throat tightens, hot, stupid panic, but her stride stays measured. The new distance settles on her skin like a uniform she never applied for.
She doesn’t try to make it smaller. No apologetic bow, no smile to reassure them she’s harmless. Her fingers cinch around the stack until the paper edges bite. She walks like it’s a decision, not a dare, letting the dislike land where it lands. A second chance, she understands now, isn’t free. It comes with witnesses, paper trails, and the nerve to let everyone see what it costs.