The Interview
For over an hour, no one in the car said a word. Not my father driving, not my mother in the passenger seat, and not me in the back.
It wasn't usually this heavy between us. Of course, it was never exactly cheerful, either.
I had graduated high school without becoming a college student, joining the peculiar class of people known as "repeat takers." I hadn't done anything terribly wrong, yet I felt like a criminal standing before my parents — stuck on the riverbank between minor and adult that all my friends had already crossed, unable to make it over, condemned instead to an endless extension of high school.
I had never met my grandparents, on either side. My father, an only child, lost both his parents in a car accident when he was in elementary school and grew up an orphan in his grandmother's care. Now that even that grandmother (my great-grandmother) had passed, my father had no blood relatives left at all.
As for my mother's past, I knew almost nothing about it. Neither of my parents ever talked about it. Then, in my second year of high school, a man claiming to be my maternal grandfather appeared out of nowhere, demanding money and assaulting my father — and in the chaos of that incident, I learned a little about how my mother had grown up.
My mother had a younger brother I'd never met — my uncle. My grandfather was a selfish, violent man who routinely raised his hand against his family; my grandmother bore the brunt of it, though my mother and uncle weren't spared either. Then one day, my grandmother finally left the house, taking my uncle with her. My mother was in middle school at the time. My grandmother had abandoned her. Perhaps it was because a woman alone couldn't raise both a son and a daughter. Perhaps a new man had come into her life, one who couldn't take on both children. Whatever the reason, my mother was left to live alone with her violent father.
Unable even to attend high school, living like a slave to her own father, my mother met my father — a taxi driver — the year she turned twenty-two. Somehow they fell in love, and she fled to Seoul, married him, and gave birth to my older sister. I came along the following year. My father was everything my grandfather wasn't — gentle and warm — and that was probably why my mother fell for him. To an outsider, though, my father was small, homely, timid, and ineffectual. My mother, forty-four this year, on the other hand, was a striking beauty. Her wretched family circumstances and severely introverted personality had kept her out of the spotlight, but looks alone, she was the equal of any actress. And it wasn't just her face. Without any particular exercise or upkeep, her natural proportions were simply good, and as she moved into her forties, flesh settling pleasingly at her chest and hips gave her a body that was lush and sensual — a delicious contradiction to her dignified, intelligent face.
With my father's income so meager, my mother had learned hairdressing and ran a small salon. A woman with an actress's beauty dealing with customers day after day was bound to face her share of temptation, but my parents genuinely loved each other. I knew that no matter how rich a man came waving a fortune at my mother, she would never waver. But even love between husband and wife struggles to stay healthy without hope for the future. And for my parents, that hope was me.
I had an older sister, just one year ahead of me, but she had no gift for studying and loved to have fun. She wasn't the kind to break their hearts or go off the rails in any serious way, but her grades were always at the very bottom. What she did have was the phenomenal body she'd inherited from our mother. Her face couldn't compare to Mom's, but her figure was every bit her equal — no, maybe better. Those bursting C-cup breasts, that cinched waist, the naturally swelling line of her hips and backside might even have outdone my mother's slimmer younger self. In the end, my sister gave up on college and was living on her own, working as a fitting model for a clothing company.
I, on the other hand, had a knack for studying from an early age. All through elementary school and well into middle school, I held onto first place in my grade without a single academy or private tutor. My grades were always my parents' pride. Every time people said how lucky they were to have such a studious son, they'd demur — but the satisfaction never left their faces. And after I entered high school and declared I would become a doctor, the way they looked at me changed; it was as if they were already gazing at their son the doctor, somewhere in the future.
But starting in my second year, my grades began to collapse. I couldn't explain why. My parents blamed the incident with my maternal grandfather, and it was true that the whole affair — and everything I'd learned about my mother's upbringing — had been a shock. But not enough to touch my studies. No matter how much I studied, my ability simply wouldn't improve. My teachers' answers were always the same: You have the talent, your skills are definitely growing. The scores aren't showing it yet, but keep at it and the moment will come when they do. I believed them — but that moment never arrived, not even on the day of the college entrance exam itself.
I scored far below even my usual mock-exam results. Medical school was out of the question; getting into any university in Seoul would be a struggle. It was a score neither I nor my parents could accept, and so it was decided I would spend a year as a repeat taker. But in the end, the problem was money. My parents never said a word about it to me, and I never brought it up with them, but all of us knew that a year of cram-school life would be an enormous burden on our household.
Then one evening at dinner, my parents brought up a residential academy. It was called the MF Academy — an odd name — and they said it recruited students a little differently from your typical repeat-taker cram school. It interviewed both parents and students, selected only those it judged capable of improving based on the interview alone, and guaranteed that their grades would rise within a year. I worried my parents were being scammed. But given my position, I wasn't exactly in any state to be picky about schools.
A week later, my parents and I went for the interview. The main campus was in the countryside of Gyeonggi Province, we were told, and the Seoul office handled only recruitment and interviews — but it was far bigger than I'd expected, occupying an entire five-story building.
There were no other students there for interviews. It felt less like an interview and more like a consultation. After a courteous escort to a clean, upscale waiting room, I'd been sipping tea for about ten minutes when two staff members arrived and led my parents and me off in separate directions. I was taken to a room with a single table and two chairs facing each other — and in one of those chairs sat an astonishingly beautiful woman who looked to be in her thirties. The interior was luxurious, but the overall layout and structure gave off the feel of a police interrogation room in a movie.
"Hello there."
When I sat down across from her, the woman greeted me with a smile. I stammered out my own "Hello," though for some reason I found it hard to meet her eyes. She radiated a bright, bewitching charm. Her brown-dyed waves fell to below her chest, but she'd tied them back neatly, giving her a polished look; her face was sharp and aloof on the whole, yet when she smiled, her eyes curved into little crescents that made her seem warm and even cute. She wore a modest deep-blue blouse, but her chest was nearly as large as my sister's, and the outline of her bra showed clearly through the fabric.
But what really set my face on fire was below the table. The tabletop was completely transparent, colorless glass, so I could see everything underneath — and the woman was wearing a black skirt so short and so open in front that her bare, stockinged-less legs were on full display, showing off their snow-white skin. If the hem rode up even slightly, her panties would come into view, and I hardly knew where to put my eyes. Worse, she seemed to have already caught me staring down there, which made even looking at her face embarrassing.
"You're Wonjoong, aren't you? I'm Yoon Ah-hyun, an instructor here at MF Academy. If you pass and enroll, you'll be living and studying together at our residential main campus starting next month. I hope your interview goes well today — good luck getting in."
Her enunciation was crisp, but there was something in Ah-hyun's smiling voice — a trace of aegyo, a seductive allure that could snare any man. Cooped up in that sealed room with just the two of us, I could almost catch her body's scent beneath her faint perfume. The snow-white thighs kept stealing my gaze, which made it worse. Feeling the blood drain toward my lap, all I could manage was a hollow "Yes."
Ah-hyun, watching me with an amused smile, pulled a thick wad of papers from her bag and set it down in front of me.