The Truth

Cheongram Gallery was as loud as ever, but the mood of what was going up had shifted.

At first it had been nothing but standard scores — who had bombed, who had done well. Not anymore. All day the board filled with a different kind of post: where to send the applications, how far a score like this could actually carry you, and whether to sit the exam one more time or stop here.

I scrolled the gallery while picking at the leftover rolled omelette from yesterday's delivery.

Not long ago I would have dropped a comment on posts like that without a second thought. Isn't it just a matter of getting one more question right? Hit a score that gets you in safely and there's nothing to agonize over.

The finger about to type that stopped over the box.

Limit's advice came back to me — ease off, read the room.

"They weren't wrong."

All I'd done was mention that my math score was a little disappointing, and now I more or less understood why people had gotten angry. Not that I planned to give up flexing entirely. If I just stayed a little inside the line, that ought to be enough.

Probably.

I backed out without commenting.

The exam was over, but the college wasn't decided. The same score could land in completely different places depending on where you sent it. One extra applicant and you fell; one fewer and you caught the last train in. The more I thought about it, the more this whole application game seemed ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠even closer to pure luck than the test itself.

When I finished eating I left the bowl in the sink and went back to my room. An admissions-prediction site was up on the monitor — university names and chances of getting in, projected cutoffs and last year's competition rates. Look at the numbers alone and it could have been a game leaderboard. The trouble was that once you lost on this board, there wasn't another round.

Unless I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠threw in yet another year. Maybe.

"Hmm……."

I moved the mouse and clicked back through the schools I'd been keeping as candidates. Safeties and reaches. My scores had come out well, so there were plenty of options — which only made me greedier. If I could reach this far, why not one step higher? And if that was possible, a little higher still? Once I started sliding the line up, there was no end to it.

A soft chime. Discord.

A moment later Limit sent a photo — the short list they'd put together. Three university names, each with a brief note beside it.

I pulled Limit's score report back up in my head. The first school would be nice if it worked, but it was an open reach, and risky. The second was reasonable. The last one didn't look worth using a slot on.

The conversation stalled. I went back to the admissions site, and Limit seemed to be comparing their own list. Then a single message came up.

I read it again.

This time the reply didn't come right away.

Obvious enough. If they got in, there was no reason not to go, and if they didn't, they'd think about it then. Still, it caught me off guard. Since the CSAT ended, Limit had done nothing but game, and even when applications came up they'd never seemed particularly serious. I hadn't realized they were already entertaining another year.

That was true. Nothing was decided. I didn't particularly want to talk about what came after a failure.

For a while, nothing came back.

"I say one serious thing and this is what I get……."

I closed the chat and went back into Cheongram Gallery. A new post had just gone up.

The comments were strangely well-behaved. Hardly any swearing, and none of the usual jokes people dropped just to get a laugh. I looked at the post for a while, then typed one of my own.

Hang in there.

I set the short line down and rested my finger on Enter. If I suddenly wrote something like that, would it look even weirder? I hesitated, then posted it anyway.

I looked at my own comment for a second, then closed the window. A message landed in the chat the three of us shared.

Star sent a laughing emoji.

The next day, by the time I'd eaten lunch and sat down at the computer, Limit and Star were already in Discord.

Ah. Right. Yesterday Star had asked me to go through the applications together.

A moment later Star uploaded a photo: a screenshot of a notepad, university names and departments neatly lined up.

Every one of them was a pharmacy school out in the provinces.

Right after that, another image came up — a score report with the personal details blacked out. I ignored the two of them bickering and looked up Star's candidates one by one, punching the scores into GigaStudy and Jinhaksusa and setting the current sample against last year's results.

The scores themselves weren't bad. Pharmacy school might be a stretch, but it wasn't an impossible number. What mattered was that every university weighted things differently. Some leaned hard on Korean; others split wide open on math or the science electives. Star's raw score in Calculus was the same as mine, but she'd lost more ground in Korean and the electives. One more math question right, and she could have picked a pharmacy school in comfort.

Thinking about it now was pointless. I pushed the thought out of my head.

The second school weighted the electives far too heavily. For Star, who'd lost a lot of points there, it wasn't much of an advantage.

We went on like that for a long while, cutting the list down. Then Star dropped a link to another university's admissions office.

I clicked it, and the admissions guidelines opened.

I went straight to the weighting ratios and last year's results.

"……This one looks all right."

On the sample that had come in so far, there was a real chance, and set beside last year it didn't look bad either.

I scrolled a little farther down the guidelines, then looked at the school name again.

"……Huh?"

The hand on the mouse stopped. I scrolled back to the top and checked the name again. It was definitely a women's university. The eligibility line would say the same thing. I went straight back to the chat.

A brief silence.

"……?"

The reply came at once.

"What?"

The word came out before I could stop it.

The day I'd first joined the server came back. That high, clear voice — the moment I heard it, I'd thought she was a girl. But back then she had definitely said it was a voice changer……

For a second I had nothing to say. Who even played a prank like that?

Apparently someone did. She was right in front of me.

That was when Limit typed.

My hand stopped again.

As expected. Incapable of a proper explanation.

Thinking about it now, the way she talked had been a little too natural. That alone couldn't have settled her gender, but I could at least have been suspicious. Still — she herself had said voice changer. Was there any reason to assume it was a lie?

I stared at the chat for a while. I wasn't exactly upset. It was just absurd — one fact I'd taken for granted for days flipping over all at once.

And now that I thought about it, the truly absurd part was something else. Star had let other people go on assuming she was a guy. And I, a girl, was letting everyone go on assuming I was a guy. We could both plead that the other person had simply misunderstood on their own…… but in the sense that neither of us had bothered to correct it, we weren't so different.

"……?"

How had the conversation jumped there?

My fingers paused over the keyboard. Of course Star didn't know I was a girl. Now that she'd said she was one, she seemed to think a boy in my position had less reason left to hide his voice. Weird logic.

Ah. I had said that.

I thought about it, then joined. Star's laugh came through at once.

A laugh slipped out of me before I could stop it. The mic was off, of course, so neither of them heard it.

It wasn't such a big deal, once I sat with it. Not Star being a girl. Not Limit having known all along. I'd just found out a beat late.

I pulled the Hallim Women's University College of Pharmacy page back up.

Just in case, I checked the projected cutoff again.

Well, of course. There was free food on the line.

I went back to my own prediction screen.

Two things, then, that I'd found out today. Star was a girl. And if she got into pharmacy school, she was buying dinner.

The second one mattered a little more.