Exam Study
The instant my fist sank into Lee Bohyun's jaw, silence settled over the set.
Huh? That was the last line... so why hasn't anyone called it?
OK or NG — something was supposed to come out of PD Oh Seok-ho's mouth. Nothing did.
I flicked my eyes toward the edge of the set.
"...."
Everyone was staring at us with their mouths slightly open.
A few dozen seconds crawled by like that.
Then, a soft rustle.
The first people to move among the frozen crowd were the actors.
That was acting, I'm sure of it... but standing this close, the conflict between those two was so vivid it felt real.
Ah... so this is the level you have to reach before people fall in love with you and start calling you a true actor.
Incredible. The rest of us have been drilling these lines and digging for the emotion for months just to get this far... and those two locked down the script and the feeling in a matter of days. Days? They look like people who've been living inside these roles for years.
Thoughts raced through the actors' heads, and hearts that had been sleeping for a long time began to pound. It became a moment that made them turn around and ask, all over again, whether the acting they had been doing was even the right kind of acting.
And it wasn't only the actors thinking that.
I knew it from the first scene we shot, but today's work is even better. It doesn't look like they forced themselves into the roles. It looks like the roles were tailored to fit the two of them.
Honestly... she only just debuted, and it hasn't been long since she wrapped her last project. I figured Kang Sora would bleed through. What I just watched was Kang Mirae herself.
The crew and every department head on set were drowning in praise they couldn't even get out of their mouths.
Especially this:
Oh Hye-jung can go that hard? She always had a bit of that delinquent edge, but right now she's playing a villain who doesn't give an inch even to the lead.
Even the people who already knew Oh Hye-jung's work said nothing out loud. Each of them simply took the two performances in, in their own way.
Meanwhile, Oh Hye-jung stayed down on the floor, her fist clenched tight.
I lost...
The words overwhelming defeat wrote themselves across her mind without any help.
She knew the performance she had just given was one of the best of her five-year career. No — better than that.
But.
That wasn't me alone.
She rolled her eyes and stole a glance at Jiwoo, who was still standing there. No okay had come, and Jiwoo's pupils were flickering with genuine panic.
Panic like that didn't look planned.
Which meant she had, without even meaning to, breathed real life into the character of Lee Bohyun.
I slipped up more than once.
Every time a mistake surfaced, Jiwoo's acting erased it and folded the moment back into something that looked completely natural.
That was a technique even veteran actors struggled with. And a rookie who had only one credit to her name had just pulled it off.
Fine... I have to admit it. She beat me as an actor. But... next time, I am not losing.
"Okay—cut!"
The okay finally landed, and Oh Hye-jung pushed herself up off the floor.
"Um... are you all right? I think I hit you way too hard..."
"...."
The woman who had been radiating hatred and rage at the heroine a second ago was gone. In her place stood a single fidgety hamster.
A hamster that, admittedly...
"If I... if I caught your jaw wrong, we should get you to a hospital right—!"
"No, I'm fine."
...had an absolutely enormous chest, and Oh Hye-jung's gaze drifted there before she could stop it.
Shit... I'm so fucking jealous.
At that point, she just had to ask.
"What do you even eat to grow like that?"
"Grow? Senior, you're taller than I am."
"That is not what I meant and you know it... Hah. Forget it. Go on, I'm fine."
"Yes! And if your jaw starts bothering you at all, this is my number. Please call me."
Jiwoo dipped her head in a polite bow and slipped off the set.
There was consideration in every movement, and respect in every word.
"So that's why Go Eun-hye acknowledged her."
There was no getting around it. Lee Jiwoo was a good person.
"Wait. Jiwoo."
"Yes?"
Oh Hye-jung called her back just as she was checking the script and getting ready for the next setup.
"See, I knew something was hur—"
"That's not it."
Cutting her off, Oh Hye-jung pulled out her phone.
"Let's take one picture together."
Five hours after I posted the school-uniform shot of me and Oh Hye-jung, the comments were already flooding in.
"Still, it's a relief. She looks sharp on the outside, but she's warm underneath."
"I was a little intimidated the first time I met her too, but she's nothing like that, which is a blessing. I think we'll get through the rest of the shoot just fine."
On the way back to the dorm after wrapping the day's filming, Kang Ho-yeon and I were in full bloom on the subject of Oh Hye-jung.
We started with first impressions and worked our way through the way she threw herself into a scene, and even the cute little corners that didn't match her face at all.
"And the photo came out well. People are already heading over to Actress Oh Hye-jung's SNS and following her."
They were. Before we posted, Oh Hye-jung's account had been hovering around ten thousand. It had already broken thirty.
Hold on.
Twenty thousand extra followers might not sound like a landslide. But Oh Hye-jung had been active for five years — the same five years since her debut. For five years she had never broken ten thousand. Today, that wailing wall finally came down.
Once the drama actually aired, the number would only climb higher.
That was when—
"Although..."
Kang Ho-yeon glanced at me and let the rest trail off.
"What is it? Did something else go wrong?"
"I don't know if I'd call it wrong... or not."
"It's fine. I already know I can't go to school because of the shoot."
"That's part of it, yeah."
There's something more important than that? No matter how hard I thought, I could not invent a problem bigger than a student not going to school.
"Jiwoo. You've got exams next month, don't you?"
"...Ah?"
Exams? Exaaaaams?
I had wiped them completely from my mind. If I had taken midterms and then finals, I might have remembered tests existed. Cheongsol High School only held one exam per term, so I had forgotten the whole concept.
"W-what do I do?!"
I already knew the material, more or less — Kim Woojin and Choi Wooseok had messaged me the likely units and the parts most likely to show up. The problem was the classes themselves. I hadn't attended them. Whether I could actually solve anything was another question entirely.
"First of all, calm down."
Kang Ho-yeon caught my frantic shoulders and sat me back in my seat.
I evened out my breathing and let the spike drain off. The word exam had set me off completely.
"I heard from your father. He said if you were going into an agency, they had to make sure you still sat your school exams."
"Dad did?"
"Yeah. I was a little surprised when the call first came in, but you could hear the worry for you sitting right under that gruff voice. So I told him we'd support you as much as we possibly could, which means..."
I swallowed dryly and waited for the rest.
No matter how long I waited, Kang Ho-yeon didn't finish. She just looked at me.
I had a pretty good idea where this was going, so I asked it flat.
"You want me to study, don't you."
"Correct."
"Uwaaaaah..."
"Don't look so tragic. The CEO is even bringing in a tutor just for you."
"A tutor..."
Kang Ho-yeon pointed a thumb at herself.
"That would be me!"
"....Haaah."
"Hold on! What is that reaction?! I'll have you know I graduated from Korea University — the best school in the country!"
Korea University? The same legendary name people in my last life ranked among the very top? How?
It wasn't that I was dismissing Kang Ho-yeon.
It was just that, for a Korea University graduate, the job she had chosen was...
"Then why are you out here playing parent?"
"Because I love idols, and I wanted to build one with my own hands."
Someone once said otaku make money.
That was the moment I learned Kang Ho-yeon was an otaku by any measure, public or private.
What I did not yet know was that her ultimate bias was Kuro.
The next day.
I arrived on set and walked into a completely different kind of look than yesterday.
"Ah, Jiwoo!"
"Hye-jung sunbae! Good morning!"
"You're early today."
"Yes! Just like you told me, I got here two hours early! I was about to go greet the other actors and the crew!"
Oh Hye-jung broke into a cold sweat.
"Ah— no... please just forget what I said yesterday..."
"What are you talking about! Advice from a sunbae I look up to like the sky itself! I could never forget it! From now on I am going to be the kind of actress who arrives first and leaves last!"
"Ah, no..."
Oh Hye-jung snapped her gaze around and checked the room.
Only after she confirmed that the crew members who had been watching us a second ago had looked away did she speak again.
"J-Jiwoo...? I mean, I'm older, so... can we just talk comfortably?"
"Yes! Of course!"
"Then, Jiwoo... the things I said yesterday... right, those are like the unwritten rules of the industry. You deliberately make someone look bad, you hit them with the whip, and then you hand them a carrot and say let's do our best together..."
"But I never got a carrot."
"That's... well."
Inwardly, Oh Hye-jung cursed yesterday's self for taking the picture and calling it a day.
She hadn't said a word as Jiwoo left, so she had assumed everything had blown over nicely.
"J-Jiwoo. I'll apologize, okay? So please don't do that in front of people."
"Ah... then not in front of people! Should I just grind my forehead into the floor in the back?"
I started lowering my head toward a floor that was rolling with loose gravel.
"S-stop! I'm sorry. I was wrong, I was wrooooong!!"
Oh Hye-jung clutched her head, already regretting yesterday.
But.
"No! Sunbae didn't do anything wrong! Every! Single! Bit of it was my fault!!!"
I snapped both eyes wide open.
"From now on, I will serve you as my great senior!"
I folded at the waist in a perfect ninety-degree bow.
"Haaah... Jiwoo hits the books for the first time in ages and she's half... no, she's gone completely insane."
"Ha... hahahaha!!"