Seventeen, a High School Girl in Waiting
I had decided that retirement would be the start of a proper life as a rich man with nothing to do. That was when an attack I never saw coming hit me.
Good morning, pa-pa-pa-pa-pa!
The alarm every modern person loves to hate had gone off at a decent morning hour and shredded my sleep. Since when did I set one for this time? I reached for the spot where I always left my phone before bed, meaning to kill it, and my hand cut nothing but air.
Hadn't there been a desk right there? I'd been living out of the practice house, then grabbed a place in a hurry after I retired, so the layout still wouldn't stick. Either way, I forced my half-dreaming eyes open. The sooner that infuriating noise died, the better.
What met them was a room packed with furniture that looked expensive at a glance: a queen bed so plush it had to cost a fortune, a giant teddy bear parked at the edge of it, pink wallpaper that brightened the whole room, and a vanity.
Why was the wallpaper pink? And what was a vanity doing here? Never mind that. Where was I?
The place I'd bought was never this lavish. I'd found a house just big enough to live in alone. I had no memory of purchasing anything this extravagant, and the layout didn't look like a studio at all. It looked like a bedroom in a house.
Then a knock froze me solid.
Knock. Knock.
If I got caught like this, was that a crime? Trespassing? Unlawful entry? One of those? How was I supposed to explain myself to whoever was knocking — I went to sleep and woke up here? Not a chance. That would be a straight call to the police.
I was still racking my brain for a plan when a voice came through the door.
"Eunha! Are you up?"
Eunha. It was my name, but a common enough one in Korea. I was still deciding whether to answer when the door suddenly opened.
"Wait, hold on—"
I couldn't get the rest out.
"If you were already up, you should have answered."
The middle-aged woman who had just opened the door and walked in was someone I knew.
"Auntie...?"
What the fuck. Why does my voice sound like that?
While I reeled at the sound of it, the housekeeper held out a towel.
"I know you want to sleep in on break, but you still have to keep the habit of sleeping early and waking early. Hurry and wash up, then come eat breakfast."
Break? What was she talking about?
"No, Auntie...? I mean, right now, what is all this—"
She left the room without hearing me out. She probably hadn't pretended not to hear. She simply hadn't heard me at all, which was fair, since I'd spoken so quietly. The voice that had come out of my throat a moment ago had shrunk me.
"What is even going on..."
I couldn't hide how thrown I was by the young, bright voice spilling out of me as I hurried to find a piece of furniture. There it was. The vanity. I had no idea what a thing like that was doing in a man's room, but I went straight to it, and the moment I met the face in the mirror I knew the thing I hadn't wanted to believe had happened after all.
"What the hell is this?!"
Have you ever heard someone say their mind went blank? Hit people with something sudden, or dump too much on them at once, and they say their head goes white. Mine was closer to the second.
I had definitely fallen asleep in the little studio I'd signed for, and now I'd woken up in some upscale room. The housekeeper I hadn't seen since high school had come to wake me. And more than any of that, this...
"What even is this...?"
This body. What was it? I never thought the kind of sex change you only see in comics would happen to me.
I wondered if it was a dream, slapped my own cheek, tried every trick I could think of, and still didn't wake. Only after the housekeeper burst back in and scolded me for still not washing did I pick up the towel and a change of clothes and step into the bathroom. Only then did I notice the room had a bath of its own. The bathroom alone looked about half the size of the studio I'd bought. She'd even brought clothes to change into, and under...wear.
Do I... actually have to wash?
The me in the mirror was wearing white pajamas trimmed with frills. A bob to the shoulders, eyes that looked pretty fierce — I could have passed for a high school girl in the middle of adolescence. Was it even right to take these clothes off and wash? That was the thought I was stuck on. I was a man, whatever else had changed. With a body like this, washing felt like some kind of crime, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do.
I was still wavering over whether to undress when the housekeeper came in, carrying a bottle that looked like bath supplies.
"I thought you'd run out of body wash, so I brought some... You haven't even taken your clothes off?"
The look she gave me said it plain enough: how long has it been since you went in to wash, and you're still standing there?
I had nothing to say to that. Even so, just looking at a girl's naked body felt wrong. I kept my silence without meeting her eyes, and she sighed.
"Aigoo, fine. I'll wash you."
"R-right... wait, what? No, you don't have to—"
"If I wait for you to wash by yourself, we'll be here all day. Come here."
And so I was led by her hands and scrubbed clean, every inch of me. Sorry, whoever this body belongs to. I did keep my eyes squeezed shut.
A bath that felt like hours finally ended. I dried off with a towel and stepped out.
"You're seventeen. You're grown now. You ought to be washing by yourself."
"What? Seventeen?"
"I'm... I'm twenty-one."
"You're not a middle schooler anymore. In a few months you'll have your entrance ceremony and start high school. When are you going to grow up?"
So the owner of this body was seventeen. Good thing I'd kept my eyes closed. A minor. I'd nearly ended up in cuffs — not that looking would actually have gotten me arrested.
She dried my hair with practiced hands on the dryer, and something old and familiar settled over me. Right. In middle school, she had always dried my hair. She would scold me for doing a sloppy job and leaving it damp, asking what I'd do if I caught a cold, then drag me to the vanity.
"That's enough. Finish the rest yourself and come eat."
She left the room again without answering a single one of my questions.
"All right, then..."
I had to get some kind of read on this. I looked around the room again. Unlike earlier, when I'd been half asleep, my head was clear, and a few odd things stood out. Around the desk, true to seventeen, the surface was buried in workbooks and notebooks. And there wasn't even a computer? Where a desktop would normally sit, there was only a single MacBook. That thing definitely wasn't for games. Oh. Right. This was a girl's room.
"Is this... a wallet?"
I opened a cute little wallet printed with a puppy and found a few 10,000-won bills, a couple of 50,000-won notes, a transit card, a debit card, and a student ID. A student ID. If anything could tell me more, it was this.
"Let's see... Seorim Girls' Middle School."
In the photo, unlike the face in the mirror now, the hair was long, and the face looked a little younger.
"The name is... huh?"
Choi Eunha
Silver · River
070812-4******
A name could match. Eunha was common to begin with, and Choi was a common surname, so I could write the whole thing off as dumb luck. The birthday, too. Fine. That could somehow be the same as mine. But how could the characters match exactly?
My pro nickname, Galaxy, had come from my name. Eun, written with the character for silver, and ha, the character for river — Eunha, the Milky Way. No matter how many coincidences you stacked on top of each other, the owner of this body I'd suddenly been dropped into had the same name, the same characters, the same birthday?
No way...
I bolted out of the room. I'd thought my own room was plenty big, but the space outside was far bigger, and I caught myself thinking what kind of house even had a hallway — then remembered the house my family used to live in had been on about this scale. The things feeding that uneasy theory just kept piling up. It crested the moment I reached the living room.
Of the frames set out there, the largest was the spot where families usually put their portrait. In the photo stood my dad, my mom, my older brother — and a girl.
"This can't be real..."
"Is your hair dry? Come eat before it gets cold."
"Hoo. Stay calm..."
One thing pro life had taught me was that when something threw you, you were better off keeping your head. So I did. I locked the door so the housekeeper couldn't walk in on me and took out the phone: a cute charm, a case that would suit a girl that age. I turned it on and opened the browser. The lock was face recognition, and the moment it saw my face, it opened. I typed my name straight into the search bar.
I had searched my own name, and the pro gamer Choi Eunha was nowhere in it. A few poets, a few writers, a few professors. That was all. It felt strange to say about myself, but I had been fairly well known. Project A was the game sweeping the world right now, and I had been one of the best Project A pros in Korea.
Just in case, I tried the handle too — Galaxy, and KZ Galaxy. The results didn't change.
The name I had killed myself to build — KZ Galaxy, Choi Eunha — was gone.