I Can't Go
On the morning of the interview, I was passing the lecture hall when I saw Yuna standing beside the door.
Every time a passing student made her step aside, she would shuffle half a step out of the way, then drift back to her original spot.
She was clutching a printout against her chest. Three pages, stapled in the top-left corner — exactly as I'd seen it before.
"I'm sorry."
She held the papers half out toward me, then stopped.
"Can you look at this? I have my interview today."
"……"
"Just tell me what's wrong with it."
My hand started to rise. The calculation came first: thirty minutes and I could fix all of it.
I took it anyway.
I skimmed quickly through the first and second pages. Midway down the third, my hand stopped.
"Here."
I turned the paper around, pushed it toward Yuna, and pressed my finger on the third question.
"…Where?"
Yuna leaned in to look. As her eyes swept over the spot I'd marked, her pupils moved up and down twice.
"The section where you wrote why you want to join the student council."
"What about it?"
"This is the only part that's someone else's words. Everything else is in your voice — but this one box reads like something you copied down from something you heard somewhere."
Yuna took the printout back and held it up with both hands. The paper trembled faintly at the edges — whether because of the paper or because of her hands, I couldn't tell.
"…How do I fix it?"
"That part I can't do."
"Why?"
"Because you're the only one who knows why you want to join the student council."
"…I don't know, though."
She didn't try to finish the thought. She rolled the edge of the paper up in her fist, then let it go.
"Then that's your answer."
The corner of the paper crumpled slightly in her grip. Yuna lowered the printout and pressed it back against her chest.
"Jung Woojin."
"Yeah."
"I'm really on edge right now."
"I know."
"You know, so what?"
"Go in like that anyway."
The third question trips her up because its reason belongs to someone else.
Back in the winter of our senior year of high school, someone had told her she'd need one line for the résumé when she got a job.
Yuna believed that.
The other four questions, all combined, took half an hour. That single one took three days. Filling in why someone else wanted something, on their behalf — that's why. And after inventing it, I'd had to make Yuna genuinely believe it herself.
Yuna rewrote it in her own words, said the same things at the interview, and passed.
This time, I only told her as far as which part was the problem.
Inside the lecture hall, the professor began calling attendance.
"…Thanks."
She hugged the printout to her chest again. She said it without having gotten a single idea about how to fix it.
"I'm going in."
She went in ahead of me. Her steps were so quick I couldn't see her face.
Lunchtime came. Dogyeong had posted two things in the group chat.
He'd posted the same thing yesterday, and the day before. Dogyeong still doesn't understand that not answering is the answer.
Last week, the three of us were supposed to eat together and it became two; those two finished quickly enough.
There were three private messages.
That last one wasn't sent hoping for a reply. It was the kind of message that ends with the sending itself, and I accepted all of those.
I read it, then laid the phone face-down on the desk.
At a window seat on the third floor of the library, I finished reading the tenth paper of the day and checked the time. The section I'd pointed out that morning would still be untouched. Half a day doesn't fix a thing like that.
By the time Yuna's interview slot had come and gone, I was walking into the lecture building's main entrance when Dogyeong came running from the direction of the parking lot.
His first words came out half a beat late.
"Where are you going?"
"Third floor."
"Yuna's interview is right now?"
"I know."
"Hey, where are you going? It's Yuna's interview. Ah — but I texted you. You didn't see it? You saw it, I know you did."
Dogyeong's interview had ended that morning. I hadn't replied, and Dogyeong reads no reply as on my way.
"Why do I have to wait? I never said I'd wait."
"……"
"The one taking the interview is Yuna, and the one who likes Yuna is you."
Dogyeong grabbed my arm. His face hardened a beat later than his hand did.
"…Huh? No, why. What's with you? Hey. What is it?"
"I'm late."
I pulled my arm free and went inside, up the stairs. On the second floor, I heard him following.
"Hey. Hey, wait. Ten minutes is all. It won't even take ten minutes."
"……"
"Then come after it's over. That works, right? What time does it end?"
The third time wasn't words. One step above me, he grabbed my arm again.
"Huh?"
Until now, this was where it had always ended. I'd let it go this far, and Dogyeong knew that too.
He let go, and I kept climbing.
During Yuna's interview slot, I was on my way up to the third floor.
At the end of the third-floor corridor, in front of the seminar room, I went back over the papers one more time.
Eleven underlined sentences, four question marks scribbled in the margins. I'd found answers to three of the questions; one I hadn't.
With a scrape, the sound of a chair dragging came from inside.
Six people sat along a long table.
When the door opened, six heads lifted at once — then, once they confirmed I was a freshman, dropped again. Only the woman seated at the far end by the window stopped, closing her laptop.
The empty seat was at the end nearest the door.
"You're Jung Woojin. Your seat is there."
The voice was low and unhurried. The name written at the very top of the roster was probably hers.
"I'm Jung Woojin."
"I'm Oh Sera. Third year."
"You read the paper before coming?"
"I did."
Someone across the table laughed quietly. One of the senior boys, a fourth-year, crossed his arms and pushed his chair back.
"Then shall we start with a summary?"
I spread the printout on the desk and spoke, tapping my fingertip along the underlined passages.
"It counts the amount of narrative space devoted to relationships across roughly a hundred memoirs. The finding is that conflicted relationships get written about at length, while harmonious ones get written about briefly. The conclusion is that authors over-remember conflict."
"That's the conclusion."
"Yes."
A ballpoint pen spun once between her fingers, then stopped.
"Then what would you say is the weakest point of this paper?"
The sound of pages turning on the desktop went still. The senior who'd been crossing his arms uncrossed them.
"It might not be over-remembering at all."
"……"
"Harmonious relationships might be written briefly because there genuinely was nothing to write. When one side accommodates the other completely, no incidents occur."
The pen stopped.
"And the one doing the accommodating doesn't write it down. Because it doesn't register to them as accommodating. They just write that they got along well."
The senior boy set his elbows on the desk and leaned forward.
"Then how do you find that out? How do you count what wasn't written?"
"You look at the other side's account alongside it. You check what the other person was doing during the period when one side wrote that they got along well. Any relationship where the two records diverge is a case this paper missed."
"……"
"If one side kept feeling that things went smoothly for no particular reason, then during that period, the other person was making enormous accommodations."
The senior boy opened his mouth halfway, then lowered his gaze to his notes. There was the click of a pen cap snapping shut.
For a long while, no one said anything — though that long while was probably about five seconds in reality.
"…Where did you see that?"
"It's not in the paper."
"Then where."
"Experience."
I looked at my wristwatch, but it wasn't a gesture for checking the time.
Sera didn't smile. Instead she pushed the laptop she'd closed off to the side and opened a paper notebook. She wrote a line or two, then raised her head.
"Come again next week."
Strength gathered in the hand gripping my pen. It took a few seconds to let it go.
I'd been told I was good at plenty of things. Good at counseling, good at looking over people's writing, good at setting a mood. All of it was work done for someone else's sake.
No one had ever said it about something that was mine.
The study session ended after two hours.
I was shouldering my bag on the way out when Sera followed me into the corridor. She didn't match my pace, walking half a step behind.
"Jung Woojin."
I stopped and turned.
"Yes."
"That last thing you said."
"……"
"Was it about yourself?"
The window at the end of the corridor was open. One of the senior boys stepped out toward it with a cigarette in his hand, and as the door swung shut behind him, a draft of air pushed in.
"I've seen someone like that."
"…Seen."
"Yes."
Sera shifted her printouts under her arm.
"Let's say that's what it was."
Tucking the notebook into the crook of her elbow, she turned toward the stairs.
"Next week's reading is sixteen pages. Two papers, and one of them is methodology, so it's dull."
"I'll read it."
"Read it and come say that same thing again. The methodology is where it'll catch you."
I watched her back as she went down the stairs for a moment. She never once looked behind her.
In my previous life, I first heard this woman's name that fall. It was when Dogyeong asked me. Doesn't that senior seem into you?
I was stepping out of the building's main entrance when my phone rang in my pocket.
When I pulled it out, a missed call was already logged. It had rung once and been cut off, so I hadn't heard it.
Cha Yuna.
The one ringing now was Dogyeong.
"Yuna got rejected."
"……"
"Where are you?"
"Campus."
"She's a total wreck right now. She cried in the lobby."
Over the receiver, footsteps and crowd noise bled together. The sound was coming from somewhere with a high ceiling. The student council hall lobby.
"Hey, get over here now. I don't know what I'm supposed to say to her. Come do something about it, okay?"
"I can't go."
"Huh? What'd you say? Can't hear you."
He heard me fine.
"I said I can't go."
"…Why can't you? What's going on with you. Hey, then what about Yuna?"
"……"
"Hey."
"Yeah."
"Could it be that you—"
The sentence died there. Twice, the sound of people passing behind me came through the phone, and through all of it Dogyeong asked nothing.
"…Never mind."
He hung up.
I know what word was about to follow. Because I'd brought it up first that morning. The one who likes Yuna is you — that had been me asking a question Dogyeong never asked.
The person who brings up what goes unasked is the one it's hanging over. Dogyeong knows that too.
The student council hall was on the opposite side from the main gate; getting there meant circling around the athletic field.
Twelve minutes on foot. Once, I'd run those twelve minutes and made it in seven.
I know what I'd say if I went. That she did well, that there'd be another chance, that the interviewer was the strange one. If I said it, Yuna would smile. And after smiling, she'd turn her body toward Dogyeong.
I walked toward the main gate. On the way, I took my phone out of my pocket twice and put it right back in.
Dogyeong would have passed. That kind never fails at things like that.
Only Yuna fell.
The thing that had shifted between us was a single question — the third one — and in the time it would have taken to write that question, I read ten pages of a paper.
I don't know which side was right.
I stopped at a red light at the crosswalk in front of the main gate. While two cars went by, I settled on one thing.
What I'd chosen not to do was doing things in someone else's place. Declining the request wasn't the same as refusing to see the person. Blend the two together and it just becomes turning your back on them — and the one who turns their back has no place to return to later.
That morning was exactly that. I told her which part was the problem, but not what to write.
The version of me who wrote it for her already saw how that turned out. I'm not going back down that road.
The light changed, and the crowd moved ahead of me.