Senior. Grant Me One Wish.
Baek Ah-rin.
My junior from school.
From the day I helped her onward, she changed.
The kid who'd been charging around with a sports cut had, at some point, started growing her hair out. She didn't grow it especially long — just to about her shoulders — but it was already a vast improvement over before. On top of that, she started dressing like a woman.
Those long legs, a gift of her proportions. The most feminine part of her figure. To put them on display, she began wearing nothing but miniskirts.
Honestly, I was bewildered. A girl who'd gone around looking like a boy had suddenly turned feminine. And not by a little. Of all the women in medical school, she had become the most feminine of them all.
Medical school is quietly conservative. No — it's extremely conservative. The looks people gave Ah-rin started turning strange, in an entirely different direction.
The professors wrote her off as a delinquent. Among the students, she was a girl who'd spread her legs to graduate because she didn't have the talent. Her reputation was in free fall.
Honestly, it wasn't something I needed to stick my nose into. But maybe I felt I had to take responsibility all the way, since I'd been the one to save her. In the end, I interfered.
"Hey, if you go around like that, the professors aren't going to look on you kindly."
"Senior, staring at a junior's legs like that is sexual harassment."
"That's not what I mean. Why'd a kid like you change so drastically?"
"Change how?"
"Make your skirt a little longer."
"Why's that? Wasn't that what you liked, Senior?"
For a moment, I felt my face burn.
"Hey! That's not it at all! The way you're dressing, people are talking!"
"Talking about what?"
I couldn't say it. Not the rumor that she was sleeping with professors to buy her grades.
"Th-that's...! You can't just change like this all of a sudden! Dress like everyone else! You didn't, and now there's a weird rumor going around. You want more of that?"
Ah-rin looked at me with an indifferent expression. Then that expression shifted into one of understanding.
"Well, I suppose it can't be helped, then."
I didn't want a good junior like her receiving that kind of evaluation. And that junior understood as much. But a reputation once ruined does not recover a second time.
At this place — Hankuk University, the finest medical school in the country — she was merely average. She failed to get into Hankuk University Hospital, a place you could barely scrape into even with an impeccable reputation.
I knew. She wasn't a genius, but she worked hard. She was the kind of person who could show you that effort itself could look magnificent. I believed someone like that ought to become a doctor, and that made it sting all the more.
Watching me, Ah-rin smiled.
"What's Senior supposed to do, looking more disappointed than I am? I'm fine. I'll just go somewhere else and work."
"Even so, someone like you..."
"I made it this far because Senior looked after me."
She bowed to me at a full ninety degrees.
"Thank you so much for bringing me this far!"
"Hey, hey...! What are you doing!"
Flustered, I pulled her back up.
"Next time... when I can help Senior, I'll give it everything I've got."
"It's fine... you don't have to think of it that way... just live your own life."
"Yes, Senior!"
"And get yourself a boyfriend while you're at it."
Ah-rin's faintly hollow little smile from that moment is something I still can't forget.
"What's wrong?"
"No... it's nothing."
That was as far as my connection with her went in college. After that, I went through all kinds of storms of my own. I didn't have the luxury of looking after anyone else. And so... the memory of her faded from my mind.
"Senior?"
I ran into her again in a place I never would have expected.
I had opened a private clinic for my daughter's sake. Luckily, word of mouth in the area was good, and patients came flooding in. It was more than I could handle alone. I needed a pay doctor. So I put out a job posting.
A few people came, but none of them were quite right. And then, while I was still turning it over... Ah-rin walked into the clinic.
"Is this... where Dr. Cha Eun-hyeok works?"
A feminine voice. A bob that fell to her shoulders. Makeup applied with considerable care. And a miniskirt over black stockings. The only disappointment was that she didn't appear to have much in the way of a chest.
At first, I had no idea who she was.
"Yes, that's right."
"I heard you were looking for a pay doctor... I thought a phone call would be rude, so I came to see you in person."
She studied me carefully. But I didn't recognize her at first. Her beauty had come into even fuller bloom. Her makeup was more sophisticated, and her fashion sense had improved beyond any comparison with her college days. That was why I didn't realize. I didn't realize that the woman who'd come to work as a pay doctor at my clinic was Baek Ah-rin.
"Heh. Senior... you don't recognize me just because I dressed up a little?"
Baek Ah-rin, now in her thirties, had matured. And because she had matured, she had become even more of a woman. A woman's beauty usually peaks in her twenties. But Baek Ah-rin was different. She was in the prime of her thirties, and yet she had grown as beautiful as a woman at the peak of her twenties.
"Y... you? Why?"
"Why else? Senior said you were looking for a pay doctor, so I came running."
She had grown beautiful, but as we talked, her way of speaking gradually slid back to the way it used to be. I was glad. And then...
"You still talk like that, huh."
Years of pent-up nagging came spilling out.
We went downstairs to a coffee shop. Fortunately, it was lunchtime. She had been working in the emergency room of the most renowned university hospital among the regional medical schools.
"The air up here in the capital region really is nicer, Senior."
"S-so you quit a university hospital to come here?"
"No prospects, that's why. I'd just be getting worked to the bone in the ER anyway... I was thinking of quitting when I happened to see the posting Senior put up."
Ah-rin stretched both arms wide, as if a weight had been lifted off her.
"Thank you, Senior. For letting me escape that awful place."
Even so, she was being reckless. Regional school or not, it was a well-regarded institution. A university hospital like that was more than worth staying for. And she'd thrown all of that away to become a pay doctor at some private clinic.
"Hey. Don't you have any dreams? You're just going to live like this?"
She took a long, greedy pull of her sweet Frappuccino, filling her mouth. Then she looked at me.
"Mm... mmph..."
Her mouth worked around the words. But I couldn't make out a thing she was saying. There was something peculiar about Ah-rin's face.
"You know me, Senior. I don't have any big ambitions."
"Even so..."
"I already know what Senior's going to say."
Slurp. She took another long pull of the Frappuccino. Her appearance had turned feminine, but in her mannerisms, traces of that rough college tomboy still showed through, little by little.
"I... thought this through a lot before coming. I already had my resignation processed at the university hospital I was working at."
"Why... would you go that far..."
"I spent years getting worked to death, and it didn't even feel like living."
The grueling road to becoming a resident. And then an emergency room that was no less brutal even after you'd made it. She was exhausted. The thing that lets a person endure all that is family — or a partner.
"You've got a boyfriend, don't you."
"Haha? Hahaha! W-what are you talking about!"
"W-what? Why are you getting so flustered?"
"I don't have one! Who'd like a personality like mine? That's a grave insult to a lifelong single, I'll have you know!"
That was absurd. Even a woman with a personality like garbage would have men clinging to her if she were this beautiful. But she insisted, absolutely, that there was no one.
"Don't you believe me, Senior!"
"Fine... if you're going to go that far, I'll believe you."
A brief silence settled over us. She was trying, a little awkwardly, to pick the conversation back up.
"A-ah, right — how's your wife? She was incredibly beautiful when I saw her back then..."
"Ah... I got divorced."
"H-huh...! I-I'm so sorry!!"
Ah-rin bent her head at nearly a ninety-degree angle. But why? I could have sworn the corners of her mouth had lifted, just slightly. When she raised her face again, though, she looked enormously apologetic. I must have imagined it.
"But... wasn't she the goddess of Hankuk University... why on earth..."
"It was an affair."
In that instant, her eyes went cold.
"Senior! I never took you for that kind of man — this is too much!! How could you do that to such a beautiful wife...!!"
"My wife was the one who had the affair."
"Ah......"
"I opened the private clinic to raise my daughter, too... I never had any time at the university hospital."
"Ah... I see... I was startled when I thought Senior had been the one having an affair. That's not the kind of person you are... what a relief!"
"What do you mean, a relief. A divorce is still a divorce."
Ah-rin looked at me. An awkward silence. Someone had to break it.
"All right. Work here."
"R-really? Thank you! Thank you!"
"But I'll be stepping out a lot to take care of my daughter. You can cover for me, right?"
As an emergency medicine specialist, she had more than enough skill for me to leave the place in her hands.
"Just leave it to me. If it's Senior's request, I'll do anything. However..."
"However...?"
"Later on, grant me just one wish."
"What kind of wish?"
"That's a secret."
"Nothing difficult, I hope?"
"Of course not. I wouldn't do anything to trouble Senior."
"Okay. Let's go write up an employment contract."
"You don't even have to write one. You could just work me like a slave."
"That's not something you say."
Why was that? The conversation we'd had at our reunion still lingered in my memory. And it should have. Because...
Dr. Baek Ah-rin, dressed in her white coat, burst into my office as if she were storming the place.