Life After the Exams, With a Slight Twist
With the midterms behind them, April drew to a close.
Perhaps it was the long holiday weekend made by Children's Day and Buddha's Birthday—the teachers were buried in grading and coordinating remedial class schedules, while the students scrambled to check their scores, practice for the sports festival, and run through preliminary matches. The new month found the school humming with activity on every front.
The sports festival, with its deadlines to meet, was the most chaotic of all. Since nobody could come to school during the holiday, preliminary matches had to be squeezed into lunch breaks and even dragged out into the after-school hours.
According to Seoha, there was already grumbling about club time getting encroached on...
Come to think of it, didn't Seoha glance at me when she was talking to Chaerin about the sports festival?
Could the lucky letter she'd given her have brought some misfortune down on an underclassman?
Just as she was sinking deep into that train of thought—
"Waaah!"
At the cheer that rang out, Yeoncheong lifted her head, confirmed it was a point for the other team, and promptly stuck out her lips in a pout.
What she was watching was the volleyball preliminary for the sports festival. She knew her class had not a single volleyball club member, marking them as the undisputed weakest team—and so the roster had been half-written off anyway, filled mostly with kids who'd rather dodge the sports festival entirely.
Yeah, this is hopeless.
It stung enough that they might be knocked out in the preliminaries of one of the precious few third-year events. And from her position as a spectator who'd come to cheer on Hasol and Nayun, watching a match that stayed lopsided from start to finish was its own special kind of exhausting.
Worse still—
"Waaah!"
At the second eruption of cheers, Yeoncheong raised her head half hoping against hope. Sure enough, it was another clean point for the opposition—but Seoha, who'd driven home the spike, turned not toward her own cheering classmates but toward this side, the corners of her mouth curling up.
No wonder the hand that smacked my butt stung so much.
Yeoncheong rubbed at the spot for no particular reason, muttering to herself. Infuriating.
Because that was exactly the problem. Their preliminary opponents were Class 2—the class with Seoha and Suyeon—and Class 2 just happened to be the strongest title contender in the whole festival.
There were grade-wide mixed events like the two-person-three-legged race, sure, but that was only one event out of many. For someone with Yeoncheong's win-first-ask-questions-later attitude toward sports festivals, the situation was nothing short of infuriating.
If they really did take the championship, could she actually withstand the storm of bragging that would come flying her way?
She was nursing such worries as the festival drew nearer when the whistle blew to end the match, and Yeoncheong rose to her feet. The game had ended in a crushing victory for Class 2, powered by their actual volleyball club member and Seoha, who was every bit her equal.
Thanks to which, her own Class 3-1 had taken one more step toward elimination in the volleyball preliminaries.
After the match, amid the jumble of milling students—
"GRAAAH! Annoyingly good, isn't she!"
Using Nayun's rave review as her compass, Yeoncheong marched straight ahead and spotted her friends in no time. Catching sight of that bouncing yellow ponytail, she quieted her footsteps and slipped in beside them, kneading the shoulders of a hardworking Hasol.
"Seoha, isn't this going too far? That was seriously merciless."
"Might've been different if you'd begged me to go easy on you and actually played yourself."
"Don't give me that. You'd have aimed your spikes straight at me."
remembering Seoha slamming volleyballs around with vicious intensity at the beach, the future was as plain as day. Leaving behind a friend who complained that Yeoncheong saw her as some kind of demon, Yeoncheong patted Nayun's shoulder consolingly—no use getting worked up over a result already decided.
Meanwhile, whether it was thanks to her trademark people skills, Suyeon—who'd stepped away to exchange a few words with her own classmates—caught the scene and puffed out her cheeks.
"Only massaging your own classmate? Me and Seoha ran our legs off out there too, you know."
"Wait, you were playing? All I could see was Seoha and the volleyball club girls."
At that, Suyeon launched into an account of her own heroics, rubbing her elbow for emphasis.
"Heyyy! I blocked like a ton of your spikes, Nayun! And I scored a point too!"
When she thrust her head in close, whining that Yeoncheong had watched the whole thing and was pretending not to know, the only real answer was to throw both hands up in surrender.
In the end, Suyeon—massage secured—wore a smile of complete satisfaction, and at a meaningful glance from Seoha, Yeoncheong reassured her that she was next on the list. Which was how she somehow wound up massaging everyone in turn.
"Hey, Yeoncheong. Just crush her shoulder. Make it so she can't play the next match."
"Ooh, that's not a bad idea."
At Nayun's tempting proposal, Yeoncheong glanced over—and Suyeon issued a solemn vow that if she actually did it, there would be consequences. But with the advantage of already having Suyeon's shoulder in her grip, there was no reason to be scared.
"Well then. Thought you'd get away with driving us into the pit of preliminary elimination, did you?"
"If you're out of matches you can just hang out with us instead!"
True, if volleyball really did get eliminated in the prelims, there'd be plenty of free time—and it would probably happen exactly like that—but hearing it spelled out so soon wasn't exactly a cheerful prospect.
"Oof~ guess all that running pays off. You're so knotted up right here~"
"Gwaah! Save me!"
Yeoncheong conveyed her feelings through the earnest medium of a deep-tissue massage instead. The special service seemed to be a hit, if Suyeon's full-body wriggling was anything to go by—though perhaps the muscles really were that badly knotted, because even after Yeoncheong switched to a genuinely proper massage halfway through,
"Ah! Aah! Ow! Stop! Stop!"
"It's the knots. Just bear with it a little."
Suyeon squirmed and protested her agony all the same. After a good long struggle, she finally wriggled free of Yeoncheong's grip, lips trembling.
"Yeoncheong, you haven't eaten lunch yet, right? Come on, let's go get food."
Worried about being grabbed yet again, Yeoncheong snatched up both her hands and bolted for the cafeteria.
"Hey! Do only you two have stomachs? Wait for me!"
"I still haven't gotten my massage though..."
"Seoha, food first!"
And since empty stomachs were hardly unique to those two, Nayun, Seoha, and Hasol all hot on their heels.
The cafeteria itself was calm enough, but the lunch crowd was louder and livelier than usual, and afternoon classes—the hurdle of midterms finally cleared—drifted by in the drowsy haze befitting the season of spring lethargy.
"Haaahm..."
Yeoncheong lay half-slumped over her desk, gazing up out the window at the clouds floating lazily across the sky with pure envy—when Teacher Jisu walked into the classroom and the scolding came pouring down.
"Midterms ended days ago and you're still like this? Up. Homeroom, everyone."
The teacher swept her gaze around the room to check for empty seats, then gave the papers in her hand a little flutter—and one by one, the students stirred upright. Around this time of year, there was only one kind of paper Teacher Jisu would be carrying in.
"The remedial class schedules and the name lists are out. Check them after class."
Rapping the attendance book against the lectern to quiet the murmuring students, Teacher Jisu continued.
"Third-years only need to clear the cutoff—but for those of you headed to remedials, let's put in a little more effort for the finals. Understood?"
And her eyes were resting, unmistakably, on Yeoncheong...
So it's remedials this time too, after all.
Her head dipped all on its own.
After school. At the sigh of a friend pawing back through the exam papers she'd shoved into her desk drawer, Seoha asked,
"You did study hard, though. All you needed was to clear the cutoff. Were your scores really that low?"
Yeoncheong nodded as she reworked the problems she'd missed. She'd focused her efforts exclusively on the subjects that counted for her regular-admissions exams—which meant the science subjects with comparatively little study time were the ones that had come back to bite her.
"Every single guess I made was wrong..."
And with the answers she'd left to the heavens all betraying her, remedial classes were simply her unavoidable fate.
Noticing that her pen had stopped, Seoha's lips curved.
"The answer's 3."
"Hmm... oh. Thanks."
Following the pen as it started its slow crawl again, Yeoncheong kept the conversation going.
"At least we're third-years. They said if you pass the test right after the holiday ends, they pull you straight out of remedials. That's the one I'm aiming for."
"Yeoncheong, that one's 2."
This time it was Suyeon's advice from the other side that set the stalled pen moving again. Seoha on her right, Suyeon on her left—the three of them lined up in a row at one wide desk. What even was this? She'd pointed it out and been ignored, so Yeoncheong had simply given up.
Meanwhile, with the May holiday right around the corner, Seoha—who'd heard about the remedial schedule—let her disappointment show as she stared at the desk calendar.
"So I guess studying's the plan this holiday. We probably can't go out somewhere together, huh? Or... should I come over to your place and help you study for the makeup test?"
She'd dressed it up as a study session, but given that both of them had already confessed their feelings, it amounted to nothing less than asking Yeoncheong out on a date.
Suyeon, too, had apparently been biding her time for exactly that opening—she jumped in hastily at Seoha's opening move.
"M-me too! The holiday's four days, so... even if I take one day with you and one with Seoha, that still leaves two."
"Hmm... that's a bit of a problem. I already have plans set with Hasol and Nayun..."
But Yeoncheong was busier than either of them realized this holiday. That her friends had booked their spots before she'd even asked them—no, that it was already confirmed—clearly didn't sit well with the two of them, and their jealousy came creeping up once more.
"Excuse me... what?"
Perhaps it was the memories written into her body. Startled by the frosty pressure closing in from both sides, Yeoncheong scrambled to explain.
"Parents' Day! It's because of the Parents' Day gift! They asked me to help pick one out and teach them some cooking, okay!"
"Oh. That's all."
So it wasn't the worst-case scenario of a new rival entering the picture. Suyeon and Seoha nodded along, though their expressions remained faintly dissatisfied all the same.
And Yeoncheong understood—she might be hopeless at romance, not even knowing the first character of the word, but even she could see it. Since the two had honestly laid their feelings bare, she hadn't shown them a single proper gesture of affection. She'd asked for a little time and then couldn't choose a single one of them, and somewhere in all that, half a semester had slipped past since the midterms.
Were their positions reversed, she couldn't help feeling shortchanged either.
Which was why she felt she owed something back to Suyeon and Seoha—two girls who never stopped showing they cared, yet never forgot to be considerate for fear of burdening her.
She checked off the last wrong answer and set her pen down, nudging her chair back a little to take in both friends at a single glance. She wanted, badly, to tell them she wanted to see them—but if she let this cut into her studying and her remedials stretched on, she'd only lose more in the long run.
At the sight of her, unable to even speak properly and just stealing glances at them, a laugh slipped out of her.
"What's so funny all of a sudden?"
"N-nothing."
Waving her hands to chase the laughter away, Yeoncheong cleared her throat and wet her lips.
"Then... let's meet up. I probably can't see you two separately, so it'd have to be at the same time... if that's okay with you..."
"Of course it is!"
"Don't mind at all!"
When the friends she'd worried might refuse were the ones telling her to come, what reason was there to say no? Without any question of who went first, the offer was accepted on all sides.
Is it really possible to like someone this much? The reaction far exceeded anything she'd imagined, and Yeoncheong flinched.
"D-do you like me that much?"
"Yes! It's been ages since you were the one to ask us to hang out!"
"Has it...?"
Even rifling through her memories, she could hardly recall it happening—which only drove home, once again, how passive she still was on this front.
"When? Where should we meet? What should we do?"
As an excited Suyeon spilled words in a rush, Yeoncheong calmed her down and addressed the two of them.
"You two plan it. However you want."
"Really? Seoha, what should we do?"
The hesitating, glance-stealing girls of moments ago were nowhere to be found. Between the two friends, faces blooming with smiles as they hashed out plans, Yeoncheong quietly rose and moved her seat to the opposite side of the desk.
So that she wouldn't have to explain later how she'd goofed off with them and then failed the remedial test.
She needed to study, and she needed to make absolutely sure of it.