Math Dropout
"Hahh..."
The moment I shut the computer off, a weary sigh slipped out of me on its own.
I was exhausted.
Physically, all I had done was click a mouse and twitch my fingers a little. Mentally, though, it had taken a real toll. I was starting to understand why people found emotional labor so draining. Still, I was just glad I had made it through in one piece.
Succeed at the Blind Date — CLEAR!
🎁 Reward issued
⏱ Transformation Duration: +2 days
That's it? Only two days?
It was not as if I had done the quest for the reward, but I could not help feeling disappointed.
Jjangjjangwang's stream was still going. He had wrapped the main broadcast content and slipped into a little cooldown, chatting with viewers and trading impressions of the day. Ordinarily I would have hung on every word, but I was too worn out to keep watching.
In the end I lost the argument with the little voice in my head, shut the computer down, and threw myself onto the bed.
"This is beyond my control..."
As a consolation prize, I picked up my phone and opened Jjangjjangwang's community cafe. Checking it this way still counted, right? What really mattered was how the viewers were reacting.
Armed with that excuse, I scrolled through the posts, and luckily the response was not bad. It was not bad at all. It was ravenous.
Nobody was talking about the game that had originally been scheduled. The entire cafe had detonated into one subject and one subject only: the blind date content. The chatter funneled down to two names in particular—the Mwinghand couple, and me.
A little embarrassing, honestly.
There were a lot of takes, but they all landed in the same place: today's content had been insane, and everyone was counting down to the YouTube upload. I felt the same way.
Anyway, the tiredness won. I surrendered to my slowly closing eyelids. The stretches of darkness between blinks grew longer, and my thoughts started to drift—
Ding-dong—
"Oppa!"
My little sister barged in, and just like that, rest was off the table.
...Why, of all days, am I this close to resenting Sea-chan?
I dragged my heavy feet to the front door and opened it, not even bothering to hide the fatigue in my voice as I looked at Sea standing there.
"...What are you doing here?"
"What do you mean, what? Today's our tutoring day."
"Ah..."
"Don't tell me you forgot."
"Tehe~"
Right. Of course.
Sea-chan had not done anything wrong. If anyone deserved the side-eye, it was me—the idiot who had blanked completely and, for a second, blamed her little sister for it.
"What's wrong? You look awful."
True to her social-butterfly instincts, Sea read my face in a heartbeat and asked with real concern. I did not want her worrying, so I forced a smile.
"Mm. Nandemo nai."
That said, I had seen her yesterday. So why did this feel like a reunion after years apart? Probably because yesterday had been all father-related chaos. By the time Sea showed up, the hard conversation was already over, and she had only hung around for a short chat before heading home.
"Come in."
I let her inside and steered her toward the living room. My room had a single chair and a desk too narrow for two people to study at. Spreading a table out here would be better.
Honestly, I was in no condition to study today. A little lie-down on the bed had at least put me in better shape than I had been right after the blind date, though.
"It's the long-awaited first lesson. Oh! And this is the textbook. I thought long and hard and picked the easiest one I could find."
Sea was beaming for some reason. Maybe she was just excited about studying together. Our little sister was, by unanimous consensus, a bookworm.
...That was meant as a compliment, but it came out a little weird.
Of course, Sea was not only good at studying. She also kept up a full social life with her friends. The complete package.
"Did you pick a Japanese textbook yet, Oppa?"
"Mmm... not yet?"
"Pick one already. You've only got two days left."
"Hai."
Sea had offered to tutor me in math if I taught her Japanese. A two-way street—each of us teaching, each of us learning. Realistically, a math tutor would have commanded a much higher rate than a second-language one, but still.
"Then let's start! Okay—fight-o!"
"Wooow..."
"What was that? Pump the energy up!"
"W-woooo...!"
"Hmph."
She did not look impressed, but luckily she let it go without comment.
"First I need to know exactly what level you're at, Oppa."
As she said it, Sea pulled a sheet of paper from her bag.
"Uweh."
It was a test.
Why did tutoring come with an exam?
"I have to see which parts you're weak in and which parts you're strong in. Think of it like a diagnostic. Just take it easy. No pressure."
Fine. Easy. No pressure, just like she said. What mattered was not my score right now. What mattered was how much I would grow through the tutoring.
With that mindset, I took the test paper and looked over the problems.
"Uh... uuurrgh."
"Ah. Oppa turned into a zombie."
I genuinely could not make sense of any of it. After failing to produce a single answer on my own, I finally cracked and asked her.
"This is math, right?"
"Yeah. Why?"
"Then doushite is there this much English?"
I could not even tell what any of it meant. The moment Sea realized I was not joking—that I was sincerely, completely lost—she furrowed her brow in a this-is-bad kind of way.
"Oppa."
"Hai."
"When you studied math, which parts were hard?"
"Eh. Well..."
She waited. Nothing came out. Sea pressed on.
"You are studying, though, right?"
"O-o-of course I am! Watashi is...!"
"Hand over your workbook."
"......"
"Now."
She was not going to drop it. I had no way out. I pulled the math workbook from the farthest, dustiest corner of the bookshelf.
"Achoo!"
A pale puff of dust—proof of how long the thing had been left untouched—drifted onto the bridge of my nose, and I sneezed on reflex. Sea, who had just witnessed that miracle in real time, let out a devastated sigh.
"Oh my god..."
"...Heh. Heheh."
"Give it."
I handed the workbook over with both hands at the crook of her fingers. Our model student flipped through the whole thing in three seconds flat, then looked at me and smiled. The smile was so bright I almost smiled back without thinking.
"You think this is funny?"
"......"
"How do you even keep a book this pristine? Nobody would ever guess it was used. Maybe you should donate the secret to a museum."
"G-gomen nasai..."
Terrifying. Our Sea-chan was way too terrifying!
It was exactly like the horror game I had started today and immediately given up on. Especially the way she delivered those vicious lines with a sunny, sparkling smile—the mismatch was so wrong it circled all the way around to uncanny.
"Okay. Let's think this through one piece at a time. Calculus... you can't do that, obviously?"
"Is that something high schoolers learn?"
"...Moving on. What about functions? Exponential, logarithmic, trigonometric."
"...A sting operation?"
"......"
The longer this went on, the longer Sea's silences stretched, and those silences were starting to scare me on a primal level.
I wanted to protest that not knowing something was not a crime. My teacher, however, seemed firmly of the opinion that not knowing this much absolutely was.
Sea asked her next question the way a person reaches for a last straw.
"...You know what a quadratic equation is, at least?"
"O-of course! You finish the first one, and then the second one is... the equation part...?"
"Oppa. When exactly did you give up on math?"
"When I hit the wall and realized there was no hope left."
She looked deeply moved by that answer. I half expected tears.
Sea stared blankly at the test she had brought, then muttered under her breath.
"I think I picked the wrong textbook... They said it was the easiest level, but even the easiest one is still a high school course."
"...Um. Watashi needs to study the high school course, though. I'm taking the college entrance exam, so I don't really need the university material."
What I got back was a look of pure ice and a voice to match.
"Apologize to every college student in the country. You're going to have to start over from middle school."
"Eh... so watashi's becoming a fifteen-year-old middle school girl-chan?"
Our sweet Sea cheerfully ignored that and stuffed the textbook she had brought right back into her bag.
"Sea-chan. Are we not having class today? You said it was the long-awaited first lesson..."
"That's right. It is the first lesson. Okay. Today I'll teach you something really important."
Ohh. At last—my escape from being a math dropout!
"What's one plus one?"
"...Two?"
"Bzzzt. The answer is 'cutie.'"
She pressed an index finger to each cheek and puffed them out.
She was making fun of me! She was making fun of me for being at this level!
And yet she looked so cute I could not even complain. Chou kawaii desu ne.
"Okay, now you say it."
"...You want me to copy that?"
"If you don't, I'm never tutoring you again."
I wanted to believe she was joking. Her eyes said otherwise. Even while she poked her cheeks with her fingers, that sulky little glare was, against my will, kind of adorable.
"Come on. What's one plus one?"
"......"
"Hurry up!"
"...C-cutie!"
Click.
"Huh?"