The Test Was Hard
"Uuuugh..."
"Jiyu, snap out of it!"
I caught Jiyu by the nape as she sank. I heaved upward with everything I had, but that heavy head of hers showed no intention of rising. I looked to Yumi, hoping she would come in as the relief pitcher.
"Waaah!"
But Yumi was sinking too. I tried every trick I had to rally the two of them, and none of it did any good. All I could do was stand there, the color gone from my face. If they stay under like this, what am I supposed to do?
The reason both of them had gone under was simple. Today had been the second-semester midterms. Jiyu hardly studied to begin with, so she had simply met the inevitable and lay there limp. Yumi, though—I couldn't understand why she was like this.
I had always thought of Yumi as a kid who was good at school. Today felt different. I edged a little closer to her.
"Yumi, why are you like this too?"
"Uuugh..."
Yumi was making animal noises. The sight of her actually frightened me. I knew Jiyu would sink during exam season. I never thought Yumi would go down with her!
"Hana... you did well on the test, didn't you..."
Yumi stared at me with wild, bloodshot eyes. Those eyes scared me so badly that I turned my head away. The state she was in now was enough to overwhelm even the presence of the grown man living inside me. I never imagined I would see Yumi this thoroughly sunk. She must have bombed the test far worse than I had thought.
"Y-Yumi, this test was hard! Even I felt like my brain was cramping while I was solving it."
The moment I offered that little piece of comfort, life began to return to Yumi's eyes. She must have been convinced she had failed, and the second I vouched that the test had been difficult, she found her strength again.
"Really?"
"Yeah. I think the average is going to drop across the board. The questions were really hard."
"If you say so, that puts me at ease!"
At last Yumi returned to her usual self. Maybe it was because I was first in the whole school—my words carried real weight. So this is the power of academic standing. If some kid muddling along in the middle of the rankings launched a campaign to reject Seoul National University, people would snort. But if the top student in the school did the same thing, they would lean in and listen. It felt exactly like that.
Jiyu, however, was unchanged. She didn't care whether the test had been hard or easy. She was going to bomb it either way. I tried a different line to get her back on her feet.
"Jiyu. I'll treat you to ice cream today! Let's go eat something sweet...!"
I put my mouth to her ear and said it like a whisper. At those words, Jiyu's eyes flashed bright. She looked at me the way a believer looks upon Jesus.
"Really, Hana?"
"Of course! I even brought my card."
I showed her the check card gleaming gold. Honestly, there was enough money on that card to buy the ice cream shop outright and still have plenty left over. Chairman Kim Sehee had told me that if the day ever came when I lost it, I was to call her at once. No limit had been set on it.
I could have swiped it for an entire apartment in a single payment—maybe even a whole building. That was how much money sat on the card.
"Let's go!"
Jiyu and Yumi seemed to have come back to themselves, their voices bright and strong. I smiled at the two of them from behind. Elementary schoolers, through and through! I trotted along after them.
Lee Inseop, head of KT&G's purchasing department, was startled by Starlight Food's unexpected proposal.
"Starlight Food handles tobacco leaf as well?"
"It just ended up that way. We believe the quality of the leaf is of the very highest grade."
"Is that so?"
Lee Inseop scanned the data Starlight Food had provided. He intended to visit the tobacco farm himself and confirm it in person, but reading the compiled documents first was hardly a bad start.
"Is this really true?"
"Yes. Everything written in the documents is fact, without a single empty claim."
Looking at what was written there, Lee Inseop had no choice but to be astonished. If the contents held, the tobacco market was about to undergo an enormous change. Ordinary cigarettes contained more than three thousand chemical substances.
But the prototype cigarettes Starlight Food had produced were missing several of those components. They had been made almost entirely from tobacco leaf. It was hard to say whether something like this could even be called a cigarette. It was easier to think of it as nicotine gum, or a patch.
A cigarette with none of the other toxins was not harmful to human health. Nicotine remained, of course, but set beside conventional cigarettes, this was practically an angel's merchandise.
"Did the test subjects truly find the taste satisfying?"
Tobacco leaf and a handful of other ingredients had never been enough to satisfy smokers. Companies did not blend in all those chemicals for nothing. That mixture was the formula that met a smoker's palate.
"We ran the trial with a sample of one hundred subjects, and there is nothing here but fact. Starlight Food would hardly lie about a matter like this."
"That may be so. It's just that the results are so bewildering..."
Lee Inseop thought that if they adopted this tobacco leaf, KT&G's competitiveness would climb another level. A cigarette that wasn't harmful to one's health. It had no choice but to succeed. And it even delivered a flavor that could satisfy every smoker.
"We'll contact you after further verification. We'll do our utmost to reach a positive result. We would like Starlight Food to make preparations on your end as well."
"Of course."
Lee Inseop had put it obliquely. He would take the matter to KT&G's upper management, and Starlight Food was to go ahead and get ready on its own. From Starlight Food's side there was no risk either, so they accepted gladly.
Starlight Food's reputation was already well known, and the leaf was expected to find its way into other cigarettes before long. With a cigarette like this, they might even soften, to some degree, the view of tobacco as a narcotic or a harmful indulgence.
KT&G's executives had no choice but to send a favorable reply to Starlight Food's proposal. There were humiliations they had endured up to now. Even after privatization, KT&G still had to watch the government's mood.
KT&G felt wronged. People spoke as if the steady disappearance of tobacco farms were their fault. No one would hear a word of the explanation that tobacco farming was difficult and grueling, and that fewer and fewer farms were growing it for that reason.
The government did not listen to KT&G's lament. It was the look of someone talking with their ears stopped shut. Domestic farms alone could not meet demand, so purchasing overseas leaf was inevitable. Without imported leaf, they simply could not match the domestic demand for cigarettes.
There were many reasons tobacco farms quit, but the greatest were the brutal labor and the illnesses brought on by the nicotine the leaves gave off.
Other crops could be raised with rice transplanters and farm machinery. Tobacco was different. The work could be done only by hand, and people even fell ill from farming it. That was why growers abandoned tobacco—and this despite KT&G buying up the entire harvest at a generous price.
If KT&G had not purchased the leaf at so generous a price, there would have been far fewer domestic tobacco farms than there were now.
Then Starlight Food came forward with an offer to supply an enormous quantity of tobacco leaf. It would not have been strange for KT&G's executives to accept it with cheers. It was a chance to cast off, in a single stroke, the long grievance of being told they did not use domestic leaf.