Starting School Life from Zero
Starlight Elementary sat flush against Starlight Middle and Starlight High. Enroll here, and you could more or less expect never to leave the grounds at all—middle school and high school were coming for you on the very same campus.
"Oh my gosh, she's adorable~"
"Those sparkling eyes! She looks just like a doll~"
I had set out holding Bora's hand, only to be waylaid halfway by a pack of high schoolers and thoroughly humiliated. Bora made no particular effort to save me. And so, trapped among the older girls, I had my cheeks kneaded without mercy. Why was it always my innocent cheeks they had to keep pawing at?
They were a little round, sure, but hardly so round that anyone ought to feel compelled to touch them. And yet, strangely, the moment people laid eyes on me, their hands went out on their own.
"Mmph—mmph—mmph!"
I wriggled free of the high schoolers fussing over my face and plastered myself to the back of Bora's legs, glaring up at them. Really—kneading someone else's cheeks as if they were pounding rice cakes!
I fixed them with a look fierce enough to bring a wild lion to mind. It did not appear to be working. The cluster of girls did not seem to feel the slightest threat in my eyes.
"Bora, let's go somewhere else."
"Okay!"
The only stratagem left to me was number thirty-six: run for it. Retreat, too, is a strategy.
"You can make it on your own from here, right?"
We had reached the main building. A short climb up the stairs and Class 3-1 would be right there. I caught Bora's hand, tipped my head back, and looked up at her.
"Can't I go with you, Bora?"
"It's just... I've got something I need to take care of for a minute. It won't take long! I'll come straight up as soon as I'm done!"
"Hnnn..."
If Bora was busy, what was I supposed to do about it? I nodded and stepped through the entrance. I kept glancing back over my shoulder, but there was only Bora, waving.
I climbed the stairs and came to a stop in front of my classroom. One deep breath, and I opened the door as it was. The room was relatively quiet. It was the first day, and everyone seemed content to fiddle with their phones.
Hmm...
It was my first day too, so I decided I would settle on a concept. Acting like an ordinary elementary schooler would do a number on my cool, and I couldn't have that. Today's concept was cool-chic. The goal was to stay confident at all times and hold to a cold, aloof attitude.
I walked up to the desk with my name on it and set down the bag with Rumi printed across it. I could feel the kid beside me sparkling at the sight of it. A girl, by the look of her, and clearly a fan. Well, of course. Rumi was popular.
The moment I sat, the girl next to me leaned in and asked, very softly.
"Um... do you like Rumi a lot?"
I couldn't help the grin that pulled at the corner of my mouth. Sorry as I was to say it about Bora and Haru, neither of them had ever actually watched Rumi's anime. They only knew the character.
Most adults were like that. They could remember the name of whatever character their kid loved, and then the moment you asked for details they turned out to know absolutely nothing.
"Obviously! You like her too?"
If I had found a comrade, there was no longer any need to maintain the cool-chic concept. Between fellow devotees of Rumi, nothing ought to stay hidden.
"Y-yeah! I love her so much!"
Fortunately, the girl in the seat beside mine was a Rumi fan. To show her, I eased the zipper of my bag open and reached inside, drawing the treasures out one by one.
The moment illustrated Rumi goods started emerging from my bag, the little girl beside me went wide-eyed.
"Whoa! You carry this many?"
"Rumi is my idol!"
From the pencil case on down, Rumi was printed across every kind of writing tool I owned. That much was only natural.
"I'm Yumi..."
We kept talking, and before long we had even traded names.
The name made me think of a cat, but I was not the sort of delinquent who teased people over what they were called, so I smiled as I answered.
"I'm Hana!"
We clicked more easily than I had expected. Rumi, and everything else besides—the conversation did sit a little lower than the ones I had with Bora and Haru, but this was perfectly fine.
Surely my mental age hadn't actually gotten younger? Lately, the things Haru and Bora said had started to feel harder and harder to follow. A generation gap, maybe that was the way to put it... This body was ten years old. Goo-goo hormones were running through me, an infantilization there was no escaping.
At any rate, someone who looked very much like a teacher was earnestly explaining what school life from here on would involve.
"Hm?"
It seemed to be time to hand out the textbooks. Upperclassmen who looked like middle schoolers came into our room carrying stacks of them, and the way they smiled at us—as if we were simply adorable—stung my pride.
Still wet behind the ears, the lot of them...! Of course, so was I.
Textbooks with bright, colorful covers—Korean, English, math, and the rest—began to pile up in one corner. With only about twenty of us, the stack never got very high.
In my day, I remembered them piled well past the top of my head... Fewer people, it seemed, came with this advantage too. When there weren't many of you, handing things out was simply more convenient.
We went up in turn and took the books one by one. Maybe because this was third grade, the number of textbooks didn't even look like half of what we'd had in middle school and high school.
I slipped the math book out for a look at what we were supposed to learn. I only meant to skim the table of contents. I was curious how hard it would be. It had been nearly twenty years since I last attended elementary school, and I wanted to know how things had changed, and what.
1. What is the value of 356 + 402?
2. How many centimeters are in 1 meter?
One look at the problems and I could only laugh. Three-digit addition, unit conversions—nothing but questions you could solve at a glance, doing the math in your head. Just as I thought. At my level, a third-grade problem was easy enough to make me yawn.
I finally understood why the regressors in novels always thrived once they went back. Now that I was the person in question, this was nothing more than swimming where your feet still touched the bottom. My knowledge was perfectly ordinary, and yet inside a third-grade classroom my very existence was a calamity.
I could handle high school math, no less—talent enough to walk into a gifted class. Of course, study beside actual prodigies for a single year and I would fall behind for certain. My brain was ordinary.
Launching Starlight Coffee, Starlight Food opened by firing the first shot. They committed a full ten billion won to advertising. Green tea's market was small and its drinkers few, so word of it had spread quickly even without ads.
Coffee was another matter. Substitutes were everywhere, and they would be competing with franchise cafés as well, which made getting the word out to the public the first and most urgent task.
With the green tea, of course, part of it had simply been that there was no money. If the cash had been there the way it was now, they would have spent on advertising without restraint and launched it that way.
Green tea, cherry tomatoes, and now coffee—the more products they put on the shelves, the more a quiet pride welled up in Kim Sehee's chest. She might have been living as a parasite on Hana, but even that was something. At this very hour, countless entrepreneurs were still straining with everything they had, desperate to sell what they had made.
Annual revenue had cleared a trillion won long ago. Push a little harder, and they might even take a run at the major conglomerates.
She had taken a small company that wouldn't sell no matter how you tried—a pure liability—and raised it, with her own two hands, all the way into a major corporation. At any rate, that ten-billion-won advertising budget received its stamp from Starlight Food's leadership: APPROVED, slammed down with a bang. Newspapers and broadcasters accepted Starlight Food's campaign with broad, delighted smiles.
Starlight Guild was famous enough that the money was clean and legal, with no trouble likely to come trailing after it. No outlet in the press was about to let a gold vein of an advertising budget slip past.
"Starlight Food just drew their blade. But the coffee they released before was really awful, wasn't it? That's how I remember it."
"Wasn't that the one you took a single sip of and threw out? I think you said it tasted like ditch water..."
"Oh, right! I did say that."
"We're only here because we're being paid to run the ads, but they must be pretty confident in this new coffee drink. Confident enough to put up this kind of money."
"Yeah. Everything coming out of Starlight Food these days tastes so good that I am kind of looking forward to it."
Even so, the two employees at the outlet weren't expecting much. Weren't coffee drinks all more or less the same? And it wasn't only the coffee sold in supermarkets they would have to beat. They had to compete with the cafés inside the buildings, too.
Demand was enormous, but the supply was absurdly enormous as well. Step outside and walk the street, and coffee shops stood shoulder to shoulder. Once upon a time it had been cell phone stores. Now it was coffee.
There was only one reason to wade into a red ocean like this. Starlight Food had to be genuinely confident in their coffee.