Seo Juhan walked slowly, lost in thought.
His family must be really struggling, huh? Maybe that’s why he only wears his school uniform. His family might be so poor they can’t afford to buy him a coat.
Wasting time earning pocket money when he should be devoting all his energy to college entrance exams.
It was a kind of life Seo Juhan had neither experienced himself nor witnessed around him. That’s why Seo Juhan could let his imagination run wild.
His father was an incompetent domestic abuser who only raised his fists when drunk, and his mother had married young and immature, knowing nothing but housework.
Despite enduring all kinds of hardships, their precious only son—raised like gold and jade—gets into an unexpected traffic accident. They sell off every piece of furniture they have to save their son, but unable to handle the hospital bills, the family ultimately becomes buried in debt.
While his mother works herself to the bone going from one restaurant job to another, his father also goes out for construction work when he feels like it, but the only thing that grows is the interest on their debt.
Before he knew it, Go Un had become a boy breadwinner—or strictly speaking, a young adult breadwinner—in Seo Juhan’s mind.
He was on a completely different level from those carefree empty-headed brats everywhere.
His mediocre high school grades must have been because he was working part-time jobs too. The money to buy problem workbooks, the time to solve problem workbooks—these would have been luxuries for him.
The kid standing tall and growing despite his unfortunate accident was admirable and praiseworthy. Like a lotus flower blooming alone in a mud puddle, it was even heartbreaking.
Still, a regular school would have been better—how did a kid like that end up coming to a school like this…
Though they didn’t share even a strand of hair’s worth of similarity, somehow Go Un’s circumstances overlapped with his own situation, and Seo Juhan clicked his tongue.
At the same time, for some reason, it was comforting.
* * *
The OMR card reading was complete.
Juhan’s hand, which had been tapping on the desk at regular intervals, also stopped.
Seo Juhan quickly scanned the laptop monitor with his eyes. In the grid-patterned boxes, the answers the students had marked were displayed in rows.
He found patterns in the correct answers for the multiple-choice questions. Most of them had unified everything with a single number. Some repeatedly went from numbers 1 to 5, growing larger then smaller. The ones who marked randomly could be called the stupidest bastards.
Anyway, it was fortunate if they had at least marked properly.
It was commonplace for OMR cards to be completely unreadable because students had scribbled all over them with random pens instead of computer marking pens.
In every class, there were always kids who wrote their student numbers wrong or drew weird doodles. One or two even committed unauthorized absences right up to exam day.
Well, midterms weren’t anything special to begin with. Something from a few weeks ago flashed through Juhan’s mind.
[These are last year’s exam questions—just change the numbers and send them to me.]
He had called the extension of a teacher from the research department who was in charge of creating the math exam with him and said just that. The Hangul file casually sent via messenger shortly after was a bonus.
When Seo Juhan opened the file, it contained 50 simple basic problems. They were at a level that would only be used as examples in the explanation sections of textbooks.
Giving this as a midterm exam. If this were a normal school, there would be so many perfect scorers that no one would be able to get a grade 1.
However, Seo Juhan had long since become accustomed to Yangseong School’s level, so he silently performed his assigned task without complaint. It took less than an hour to modify the problems and answers.
[What, you’re already done? Young teachers are definitely faster.]
—Haha…
Though the other person praised him, Seo Juhan wasn’t pleased at all.
[I’m going to pick 30 problems from here to use as exam questions. So during the class period before the exam, have them solve all the newly made problems once. I’ll do the same.]
—These exact problems? Shouldn’t we at least change the numbers?
[No way, if we do that, the kids will get everything wrong on the exam. Don’t change anything and have them solve it exactly as is.]
—Uh… yes, understood.
Seo Juhan answered half-heartedly and put down the receiver.
This was no different from telling them the exam questions. It was spoon-feeding them right into their mouths, begging them to please eat.
No matter how absurd this place was, Seo Juhan couldn’t help but worry.
What if there are a lot of ties?
The bone-chilling anxiety he’d experienced during the time when internal grades changed based on a single exam question difference was ingrained in him.
Such worries proved to be an unnecessary luxury today.
They gave them 50 problems claiming they were exam questions and put out 30 of them exactly the same. They could have gotten the answers right just by skimming through them the day before. No, even if they didn’t know how to solve them, just memorizing the answers would have been enough. But the Yangseong School thugs didn’t put in even that much effort.
Seo Juhan shook his head from side to side as he pulled out the next answer sheet envelope. It was the class he was homeroom teacher for.
He placed the stack of OMR cards on the reader and pressed the button. The machine steadily ejected the OMR cards it had finished reading. The sound was rhythmical enough to be uplifting.
On the laptop screen, the numbers the students had marked appeared in a stream.
Seo Juhan rapidly scanned the answers written on the very first line with cold eyes. It was Go Un’s.
Of course it was a perfect score. But he didn’t feel even a bit of pride or admiration.
What was the point of working so hard to help him solve application problems when they were going to give such pathetic exams anyway?
“Phew.”
Seo Juhan let out a sigh while appreciating the unique pattern that followed below.
All of this was utterly disgusting.
He was afraid that the teachers’ lethargic expressions and rotten pollack eyes—as if their only job was to kill time—would become his future.
Seo Juhan had never lost his ranking in the entire school throughout high school, earned scholarships in college through diligent grade management, and was a talent who passed the teacher certification exam on his first try right after graduating from college. He was a person who never doubted that a life of always doing his best and putting in full effort was natural.
All the towers he had been so proud and confident about were crumbling.
And so Seo Juhan made a decision.
He would attempt an escape from Jeonghan City in Gyeonggi Province.
He was now sick of Jeonghan City.
The old downtown where all kinds of outsiders of unknown origin flocked—ethnic Koreans from China, Russia, illegal immigrant workers from Southeast Asia and beyond. The residents of the new downtown who exploited their labor while inwardly despising and looking down on them.
That hypocritical social landscape applied exactly the same way at Yangseong School. They were shoving cancerous existences that couldn’t even be recycled into the fence called school and passing the responsibility onto innocent teachers like himself.
Seo Juhan desperately wanted this. Now, as long as it wasn’t Jeonghan City, he even wanted to return to his hometown, that closed-off and conservative provincial city.
If he were there, he could easily enjoy authority as part of the established generation and status as a local resident.
And he would meet a proper woman whose identity could be verified from kindergarten through college. She would be so naive she’d never even held a man’s hand, let alone kissed, but like a modern woman, she would have to work and contribute to the household economy.
He couldn’t start married life with a rental. They would have to buy an apartment by combining his carefully saved money, money contributed by both families, and a loan.
The two of them would earn and save, moving to apartments with better locations and larger floor plans, multiplying their capital and living happily while enjoying the pleasure of raising rabbit-like children.
In the provinces, that was enough. He could enjoy a peaceful and comfortable life without any major ups and downs.
Seo Juhan believed these injected beliefs were his own. The values inherited from his father, his only family, were deeply rooted as if they had been entirely his own thoughts from the beginning.
His mind, having had his subjectivity castrated since childhood, was full of obsessive notions. He was so deeply brainwashed that he knew nothing about his true self.
In the silent teacher’s office with only one light on, only the sound of scratching could be heard.
Late in the evening, Seo Juhan remained alone in the teacher’s office, diligently moving his ballpoint pen, surrounded by partitions covered with densely attached post-its and notices.
He was devoted to studying. While flipping through his education theory sub-notes, he was doing retrieval practice on scrap paper to see if he still remembered things well. It was to take the teacher certification exam again and return to his hometown.
He hadn’t opened them once since the certification exam ended, but quite a lot still remained in his brain.
Seo Juhan paid attention to each individual tree rather than seeing the forest as a whole. If he could just structure everything overall, it seemed he could quickly regain last year’s sharpness.
The teacher’s office was perfect. Once the teachers who shared the same office left for the day, there was no better study room.
Clatter.
Then he heard the sound of the door opening. Seo Juhan, who had been concentrating, flinched and his shoulders trembled. His seat was right next to the door where cold wind blew in whenever the teacher’s office door opened, so he couldn’t help but be startled.
When he turned his head to the side, a small man was standing at the doorway. His face was darkly tanned as if he’d worked outside a lot, and wrinkles were etched all over it.
“You still haven’t left work.”
The man smiled pleasantly, but his wrinkles, which seemed to have doubled, looked grotesque.
“…Ah, yes. I have a bit of work to do.”
Seo Juhan, who had been startled thinking some suspicious person had invaded, answered belatedly.
“When are you leaving?”
Only then could Seo Juhan roughly guess the man’s identity.
