The Faculty Meeting
The moment I returned to school, I ran into the teacher named Ma Haejin.
She had figured out in a single glance that I belonged to the A Team, and she possessed the kind of cool personality that decided introductions were completely unnecessary.
But this was hardly the time to go stirring up curiosity in some counseling teacher. I immediately turned to Eunchae.
“Eunchae? You more or less know how things are going down, right? I heard all the candidates got hauled in over the pledges…”
“Waaah! Eunchae went too!”
“You—you went as well?”
Honestly, this kid still had zero sense of when to insert herself and when to stay out. But that actually worked in my favor. This way I could learn what had been said in the counseling session without having to meet up with Eunju’s group at all.
“What the hell happened in there?”
“Mmm… so in there, right…”
Eunchae squeezed her memory for all it was worth and started explaining everything that had gone down during lunch.
The interview had been held in the little counseling room attached to the teachers’ office. Present as observers were Teacher Eunju and the three homeroom teachers of the candidates.
Academic Affairs Director Kim Cheolho had run the session, with Vice Principal Kim Munyeong sitting in as an observer.
On Eunju’s side the attendees were the candidates themselves—Eunju and Yuna—plus their closest aides, Wonhui and Mokhwa. On Jihye’s side it was just the vice-presidential candidate Thuy and my beloved daughter Harin.
Ah, and of course Eunchae had claimed a seat for herself as well.
“First, why don’t we hear both sides’ basic take on how this situation even came about?”
Director Kim Cheolho decided to start by collecting each side’s preliminary statements. Given that the candidates actually knew one another reasonably well, neither side seemed eager to speak first.
“I honestly have no idea how something like this could have happened.”
In the end Eunju was the one who broke the silence. Jihye immediately matched her.
“Same here. It’s not as if we have zero history with each other, but we’ve never once shared campaign pledges.”
Well, of course the ones most flabbergasted would be these kids. After the whole running-mate mess they hadn’t exchanged a single word for quite a while.
And yet there I was—the inconvenient intersection belonging to both camps. The real problem was that they were treating that single “me” as two completely separate people.
“Something’s weird! ‘Casual Clothes Day once a month’—that was originally our pledge!”
Wonhui, of course, was never going to sit quietly. With a face full of pure sulk she zeroed in on the most suspicious point and fired. Vice Principal Kim Munyeong tilted her head.
“What do you mean by that?”
“It’s true! That used to be our main plank, but we completely rewrote the platform halfway through. So how come that exact pledge is sitting over on Unnie’s side?”
“Wonhui? We’ve been preparing this pledge for a long time. Why are you suddenly saying that?”
Jihye shot back in defense of her own camp’s flagship promise. Eunju hurriedly tried to smooth things over.
“We just… dropped it midway because it didn’t look realistic. Our ideas just happened to line up, that’s all.”
“Even if ideas line up, can they line up this perfectly?”
Harin jumped in. She seemed determined to act as full-time spokesperson in place of Thuy, whose Korean was still a little awkward.
Then Yuna—who was good at everything except being student council president—opened her mouth and said something completely unnecessary.
“Hehe… actually we didn’t even come up with this one ourselves. All of it was Timo—”
“Uh, Unnie? I don’t think we need to bring up someone who isn’t even here right now.”
Having received a very firm warning from me earlier, Eunju clamped a hand over Yuna’s mouth. Tsk… Eunju was still trying to keep her promise to me to the bitter end—so where the hell had I been and what had I been doing?
“Instead of that, why don’t we give each side time to explain exactly how they put their pledges together?”
Jihye’s homeroom teacher offered a reasonable suggestion. The problem was that if you dug down to the roots of those pledges, every single path led straight back to me.
“Let’s do that. Jihye, how did you mainly put your platform together?”
“Well…”
At Kim Cheolho’s question Jihye glanced sideways at Harin for a second. Harin gave a reluctant little nod, signaling that it was all right to reveal the secret.
“We decided on the main pledges among ourselves. But the detailed ones… we got help from Harin’s father over there.”
“Her father? So you got help from adults?”
Wonhui immediately complained that that alone was basically cheating. But that wasn’t true, Wonhui.
Your side’s pledges were all written by an “adult” too.
“Th-that’s right. But we figured that level of help was still okay.”
Harin’s face flushed with embarrassment. With that admission, the side that had used the adult card suddenly looked a little weaker.
“Haa… well, I suppose that can happen. Then how did Yuna’s side put their pledges together?”
“We… got help from another senior who isn’t here today. Honestly, every single pledge we put out was written by that senior.”
Eunju also came clean that the source of their platform had been “me.” From this point on the tension was unavoidable. Would Eunju manage to hide my identity all the way to the end?
“A senior? Who?”
“That’s…”
Yuna’s homeroom teacher, apparently as dense as the student she taught, immediately demanded my identity. When Eunju couldn’t answer properly, Mokhwa jabbed her repeatedly in the side.
“What are you doing, Eunju? Just say it.”
Even Wonhui couldn’t stand the frustration any longer, and Eunju found herself completely cornered. By now it wasn’t only the teachers who found the situation suspicious—Harin’s side was starting to look at her strangely too.
“There’s just… a senior.”
“Ahh… Eunju? Shouldn’t you reveal which senior? That seems like the only way to clear up the misunderstandings between both sides.”
Teacher Eunju looked completely baffled by her student’s behavior. But Eunju remained firm.
“I can’t reveal it until that senior decides to come forward themselves. The fact remains that there’s one more person on our campaign team, and that person wrote the entire platform.”
“…”
Eunju never sold out my name, not even at the end. I was so grateful I could have cried, but it was also true that she had put a crack in her own credibility.
And so both sides had traded one solid hit each. Jihye’s camp had accepted help from a parent; Yuna’s camp couldn’t name their source.
For the moment it looked like a draw.
Eunchae’s story ended there. The denser the details became, the thicker the concentration of pure “we’re fucked” grew.
“Haa… Eunchae? What’s the mood among the kids like?”
“Woooong! Wonhui is super mad at Oppa? She kept grilling Eunju about why she wouldn’t talk about Oppa. But Oppa, why didn’t you actually come?”
“Me? I had, uh… circumstances. Anyway. What about everyone else’s reaction?”
A plagiarism scandal had exploded right in the middle of a student council election that already had the entire student body aggroed. What mattered more than the contents of that interview was how the rest of the students were taking it.
“Woooong? Look at this.”
Eunchae immediately unlocked her phone and opened an app. It was a cute little community app whose mascots were an adorable puppy and a baby pig.
“Huh? Wait, is this Dogs & Picks?”
“Woon! That’s right! They’re already talking about the election in here.”
Just as Eunchae said, an election-related thread had already been created and comments were pouring in real time. And because everything was anonymous, the content was brutally blunt.
The student body had already split cleanly in half and was fighting a trench war. The fact that every single bit of this chaos had been caused by someone who wasn’t even a student at this school made my head spin.
“Haa… Eunchae? During the interview earlier, did they say anything about calling people back again?”
“Woooong? They said they wouldn’t call the students again—just the teachers would hold a meeting among themselves.”
“Really?”
Well, something this big wasn’t going to end after hearing student statements alone. The teachers would probably gather after classes finished.
Looks like I’d be getting home late today.
Classes ended. Instead of going home I stayed hidden on campus, turning over every possible way to fix this mess.
I eventually arrived at something resembling an answer. I shoved the phone that had been vibrating nonstop into my pocket and quietly headed for the back courtyard.
Ugh…
And sure enough… Teacher Eunju had just come out of the meeting and was sighing as if the sky itself were collapsing. After checking all four directions to make sure no one else was around, I stepped up beside her.
“Teacher?”
“Ah—! You still haven’t gone home?”
“With something like this blowing up at school, how am I supposed to just leave? I figured you’d be out here worrying all by yourself again, so I came.”
“Th-that’s why? You were worried about me?”
Innocent Teacher Eunju seemed to actually believe those words. But that wasn’t the important part right now.
“I heard the teachers held an emergency meeting because of what happened today?”
“That’s right. Aigoo… why did something like this have to happen? And of all people, two kids from my own class running for vice president…”
“Tell me more. What exactly came up in the meeting?”
“That? Well, earlier we… ah, no! You’re a student and I’m a teacher! As a teacher I absolutely cannot just casually tell a student what was discussed in a faculty meeting—”
“Teacher, is teacher ethics really the priority right now? You don’t use Dogs & Picks so you probably don’t know, but the students have already split into two camps and are writing every conspiracy theory imaginable. If someone doesn’t stop this, this school will never recover. And those two students in your class will become lifelong enemies and resent Teacher Eunju forever for failing to mediate even once. Are you really okay with that?”
“Hup! Th-that can’t happen…”
Had I poked the conscience of the kindest teacher a little too hard? Her already pale face had gone corpse-white.
“Haa… Teacher, the truth is this is all my fault.”
“What… what do you mean?”
No ordinary method was going to persuade Teacher Eunju. She might be a little naive and dense, but she knew how to keep her mouth shut, so this much information should be safe to hand over.
“Well… the truth is, I’m the one who wrote the pledges. But while I was doing that I asked my fifteenth-cousin uncle for a few opinions.”
“Th-then you and Harin’s father wrote the pledges together? So that’s what the kids meant earlier?”
“Exactly. But there must have been a little communication error between me and my fifteenth-cousin uncle, because we each ended up handing the same material to different candidates. That’s how this whole mess started. So Teacher? If I’m going to fix this, I absolutely have to know what was said in that meeting.”
“A-all right. What actually happened earlier was…”
I finally succeeded in persuading her. Teacher Eunju no longer hesitated and began recounting everything that had taken place in the conference room.
The faculty meeting had been chaired by Vice Principal Kim Munyeong. Principal Lee Jaeseong sat at the head of the table while one of the foundation directors, Park Jiwon, had taken a seat off to the side and volunteered to act as auditor.
“So the students are claiming it was pure coincidence? Yet Jihye’s side clearly named their source, while Yuna’s side is still hiding it—why is that?”
Principal Lee Jaeseong asked about the part that didn’t make sense to him. Of course Vice Principal Kim Munyeong had no answer either.
“They refused to say right to the end.”
“Honestly, if Yuna’s side keeps acting like that it looks bad, doesn’t it? We teachers want to believe both sides, but from the students’ perspective it will look like they have something to hide.”
Lee Jaeseong predicted that the failure to reveal my identity would ultimately work against Eunju’s camp. Anyone looking at the situation would have to agree.
“But can pledges really end up this similar without someone copying?”
That was Foundation Director Park Jiwon. The two main pledges pointed in slightly different directions, but every single detailed plank matched word for word—so of course plagiarism was the natural suspicion.
“What do all of you think?”
Lee Jaeseong decided to solicit opinions from the entire faculty. But perhaps because the matter was so sensitive, not a single person dared open their mouth first.
After all, as the principal had said, teachers—whether they liked it or not—were obligated to appear to trust their students on the surface.
Park Jiwon, not being a teacher but a foundation director, could raise doubts freely. The moment a teacher admitted that plagiarism had occurred, however, they would effectively be branding one side as thieves.
So no one wanted to volunteer for the role of villain.
“They didn’t copy the pledges.”
“…?”
And right then, one brave soul shattered the silence and claimed the floor first. Everyone turned their heads in unison, wondering who it could be…
It was Ma Haejin.
I had already known she was no ordinary teacher, but I never expected her to step forward first here. And she did it half-reclined in her chair with both hands shoved into her pockets—an attitude of pure insolence.
Gulp…
The sound of teachers swallowing hard echoed from every corner of the room. Apparently I hadn’t been the only one who had sensed how extraordinary she was.
Even Principal Lee Jaeseong and Vice Principal Kim Munyeong simply waited in silence; neither of them could even manage to ask what she meant. Ma Haejin slowly straightened from her slouch, looked around at everyone, and spoke.
“To be precise, it wasn’t the pledges that were copied—it was the system.”
“…”
Would someone care to explain what the hell that means?