The CSAT Is Over
……It was over.
The testing time for my second elective had just ended. The proctor declared the exam finished and was already gathering up the answer sheets. Even so, I didn't feel nearly as much as I'd expected. Until this morning the day had seemed like the most important of my life—and it really was important, to be fair. But the moment I got my phone back and stepped out past the school gates, my head went strangely quiet.
It's just over.
That was the only thought that came.
What am I even going to do when I get home…….
There wasn't anything in particular I'd been dying to do once the exam ended. No trip, no grand plan. I hadn't been able to mess around for months, so rotting in my room for a while sounded like more than enough happiness.
Outside the testing site, I texted my parents that I thought I'd done well. Dad sent back a short note telling me I'd worked hard. Mom asked if I wanted to get dinner together.
……I'm tired. I'll just tell them I'm going home today.
I caught a taxi and headed back. Home was a newly built apartment a little outside Gangnam. My parents had bought it near Cheongram Academy so my year as an examinee would be easier, and most of the time I had the place to myself.
"Haaah. Home……."
The second I opened the front door, I kicked my shoes off any which way, went to the kitchen, and pulled a drink from the fridge. I drank it down in long gulps. There was still a little time before the elective answer keys went up. They usually dropped them sometime after eight…….
I almost opened a community app, then stopped myself. If I went into the Cheongram Academy Gallery right now, it would obviously already be a war zone of people checking answers, and I didn't want to look at someone else's key and find out what I'd missed before I was ready.
"Nothing to do……. Guess I'll just lie down and mess with my phone."
Sprawled on the sofa, I fiddled with my phone and nothing else. I hadn't felt bad walking out of the testing site. Korean hadn't fallen apart, and math had been fine aside from the three problems I'd agonized over until the very end. The electives didn't feel like I'd made any mistakes, either. The real question was how accurate that feeling actually was…….
The elective answer key went up. I went straight to the desk and sat down. I'd deliberately waited until now, leaving Korean and math ungraded too.
"So how many did I actually miss."
I started with Korean. Right. The next one was right too. I'd gone quite a way down the sheet before a number finally came up that didn't match my tally.
"Ah."
A short sound slipped out of me. Still, this was far better than I'd expected—I'd graded all the way through number twenty-seven before missing a single one. I checked every question that remained and added up the score.
……98.
I moved straight on to math. The moment I saw the answer to the problem I'd wrestled with the longest in the testing room, my hand stopped.
64.
It was the same answer I'd written.
"……Oh?"
Thinking I might have misread it, I checked again. The same. The next one was right too, and so was the one after that. The further the grading went, the faster my heart beat. Math was a 92. I finished English, then checked both electives in order. After I matched the last answer, I stared down at the tally sheet for a long moment.
"Whoa."
Three. Across every subject, I'd gotten three questions wrong.
……I really had done well. It was close to the best case I'd imagined before the exam. Math had never been something I dominated, so that part made sense, but Korean had come out quite a bit better than my usual level.
"With scores like these, applications should be easier than last year."
Once the grading was done, I could feel the stress draining clean out of me. For months a single mock-exam question had been enough to swing my mood, and I'd stayed up until dawn refreshing communities over one grade cutoff. All of it suddenly felt as if it had been a dream.
And right then, there was something I wanted to do before anything else.
Flex.
The thing that had kept me going through my retake year. I picked up the phone I'd propped in front of me, turned it on, and tapped the app at the very bottom of the home screen. A familiar logo came up.
Gallside.
I went straight into the Cheongram Academy Gallery, which I kept bookmarked. As expected, the place was exploding. Posts about bombing Korean. Posts about blindly guessing a math short-answer and hitting it. A famous fixed nickname's declaration that he was going for a third attempt, already up. The exam had only been over for a few hours, and new posts were still landing by the second.
For the first time in a while, I logged in under my fixed nickname.
Sayu.
The permanent nick I'd used since the start of my retake year. On the gallery, you could call me famous, if you were being generous. I always wrote in polite speech and carried a cute profile pic, so even though I'd never meant to, people constantly said I was running a protect-me act. I never bothered to correct them. It was fun. Especially on a day like today.
I hit New Post.
"Heh……."
I sat on the edge of the bed and laughed to myself. The comments sprouted like weeds. I hadn't written my exact score in each subject. There was no need to spell out where I'd gotten what. Just saying I'd missed three across every subject was enough to make everyone angry on their own.
I looked through a few other posts and came back to find that someone had already stuck my nickname in a title and put up a thread just to curse me out.
My mood got even better. Doing well on the CSAT was nice, but having somewhere to brag about it right away was nice too.
After that I wandered through other people's posts and left comments. If someone said they'd bombed it, I told them it didn't look as bad as they thought. If someone said they'd done well, I congratulated them. Of course, anyone who'd come from my post took whatever I said as another flex. That was the actually fun part.
After a few months under the name Sayu, the version of me on the gallery had drifted a little from the one in real life. In real life I didn't go out of my way to get under people's skin, and I didn't show off my scores this blatantly. The gallery was different. I needled people while neatly using polite speech, and I flexed whenever I got the chance. And on the gallery, that was fine.
"They'll forget all of it by tomorrow anyway. Idiots."
I hit refresh a few more times. Comment notifications kept stacking up, and the group chat with my friends already had dozens of messages waiting. My parents had reached out again, too. I was checking the alerts one by one when my eyelids suddenly grew heavy. The tension that had been running since morning must have let go all at once…….
"Maybe I'll sleep……."
I lay down without even changing clothes, tossed my phone aside, and stared blankly at the ceiling.
……The CSAT is finally over.
And I did well.
Starting tomorrow, I really don't have to do anything. No academy. I can game until dawn and wake up in the afternoon. I can stay in my room all day and nobody will say a word.
"Perfect…… haaah……."
With that, I fell asleep almost at once.
My face itched.
"Nn……."
Still half asleep, I flailed a hand. Something soft caught on the back of it with a faint rustle. I thought it was the blanket and pushed it away, but it spilled right back down over my face. Annoyed, I grabbed it without opening my eyes. Thin. Smooth.
I opened my eyes, and what I saw was long and pure white.
Hair.
"……?"
I ran it through my fingers a few times. It was long. Too long. This was not the hair I knew……?
"What is this……."
The moment I opened my mouth, my whole body locked up.
……My voice was wrong. Thin, young, unbroken.
"Ah, ah, mic check……?"
This voice—I couldn't even tell if it was mine—was clear and high. Soft enough that I couldn't decide whether to call it cute or pretty. A girl's voice.
……This is so sudden I'm wide awake.
I sat up on the bed, and white hair poured over my shoulders all at once. Long hair, falling past my waist. I lifted it in both hands, but it didn't peel off like a wig. If anything, when I gave it a gentle tug, the scalp it grew from stung. Unless someone had glued a wig to my head, this pure-white hair was really mine.
"Seriously, what……."
The voice wasn't the only strange thing. When I climbed off the bed and set my feet on the floor, even my center of gravity was different, and my eye level seemed a little lower than yesterday. The T-shirt I'd fallen asleep in hung just a bit too loose. I slowly looked down at myself. My arms had thinned, and my hands had gotten smaller.
"……."
And under the shirt there was a curve that absolutely had not been there yesterday. It wasn't big. If anything it was on the small side, but that hardly mattered. What mattered was that it was there.
"It's squishy."
……This is not the important thing right now.
A mirror. I needed to see a mirror first. I opened the bathroom door, stepped inside, and turned on the light.
Click.
"……."
In the mirror stood a girl I had never seen before.
Straight white hair falling past her waist. A small face, and skin so strangely clear she hadn't done a thing to it.
"……She's pretty."
Not just a little pretty, either. If I'd passed a face like that on the street, I was sure I would have turned around at least once. When I stepped closer to the mirror, the girl in it stepped closer too. I tilted my head to the right, and she moved right with me. Left was the same. I pinched my cheek.
"Ah."
It hurt. The girl in the mirror was wincing in exactly the same way.
Let me go back over yesterday.
I took the CSAT. Came home and graded it. Flexed on the Cheongram Academy Gallery. And fell asleep.
……That's all of it?
I hadn't been drinking, and I hadn't taken anything strange. I hadn't done a single thing that would turn a person into a girl while they slept. I looked at the mirror again. I kept my mouth shut for a long time before one line finally made it out.
The clear voice rang through the bathroom. Slowly, the corner of the girl's mouth in the mirror lifted.