11. Chapter Eleven
The last year of school is absolute mania.
Around the first week of September I realize I’ve got less than six months to make or break the rest of my life.
The entrance exams loom over everything, this countdown clock ticking in the back of my skull.
So I throw myself into it the only way I know how: all the way, headfirst, no brakes.
My routine becomes a kind of religion. I’m up before dawn, hunched over my desk with a lamp and a cup of instant coffee I taught myself to make because my mom’s already gone to work by the time I drag myself out of bed.
School, then study hall across town, then home, then more studying until my hand cramps around my pen and the words on the page turn into soup.
I collect college application forms from every source I can find, begging teachers for extras, writing to admissions offices, hoarding them in a growing stack on my desk that starts to resemble a small paper fortress.
My textbooks are falling apart from overuse, spines cracked, pages dog-eared and annotated until there’s more of my handwriting on them than the original print.
Ryowoon gets dragged into it whether he wants to or not.
I corner him at Mrs. Nam’s after his shifts and shove practice tests across the counter at him, forcing him to sit and quiz me on history dates, vocabulary, math formulas.
He bitches about it constantly, groaning and throwing his head back and telling me I’m going to give myself a brain hemorrhage, but he stays.
He reads the questions in his low voice, slouched in the chair behind the register with his long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle, flipping through the practice booklets.
Most of the time he doesn’t study for himself.
I glance over and his notebook is open to a page of hand-drawn engine bisections, not a single academic note in sight.
He’s wasting himself on me, I think sometimes.
But I don’t say it, because when I glance up from my own work at two in the morning with my vision swimming and my stomach shrieking with hunger, and I see him still sitting there across from me in Mrs. Nam’s back courtyard, cigarette between his fingers, waiting to walk me home, I can’t bring myself to tell him to go.
The girls don’t stop trying. Notes keep appearing in my textbooks, little folded squares with hearts drawn on the outside, tucked between pages of calculus and Korean literature.
A girl from the class next door stops me in the hallway one afternoon, pretty, flushed cheeks, clearly nervous, asks me if I want to come up to the roof after sixth period.
Six months ago I probably would have said yes.
Now I just look at her and feel nothing but the gnawing awareness that sixth period ends forty minutes before my after-school study block starts and I need those forty minutes to review the wrong answers on last week’s mock exam.
“Sorry,” I say, and I mean it, a little. “I can’t.”
She looks crushed. I feel bad for about ten seconds and then I’m back at my desk.
I come home so late and so hollowed out that I walk through the door, kick off my shoes, and drop face-first onto my sleeping mat still wearing my uniform.
I wake up to my alarm with the buttons of my shirt imprinted on my cheek and the taste of exhaustion coating the inside of my mouth like film.
My mom leaves rice and side dishes covered on the counter for me but half the time I forget to eat them, find them still sitting there the next morning, untouched.
She scolds me, tells me I’m going to make myself sick, and I nod and promise to take better care of myself and then promptly do not.
Ryowoon starts showing up at my door in the mornings with convenience store kimbap and banana milk, shoving them at me and telling me to eat before I pass out and embarrass him at school.
I take them without argument, scarfing down food on the walk to class while Ryowoon smokes beside me, his stride slow so I can keep up despite the fact that his legs could eat up twice the ground mine do.
Some mornings he doesn’t say much. Just walks beside me, smoke curling up from between his fingers, his eyes scanning the road ahead.
The week of the college entrance exams I stop eating almost entirely.
But this time not on purpose, it’s because my stomach stays clenched into a fist that won’t unravel, the anxiety pressing on my ribs until I can’t tell if I’m hungry or nauseous.
I sit at my desk the night before the first exam and stare at my notes and realize I can’t absorb a single word.
The characters swim and rearrange and my pen shakes in my grip.
I put my head down on the desk and breathe and count backwards from a hundred.
I make it to sixty-seven before my alarm goes off and I realize I fell asleep.
The exams themselves pass in a blur of white pages, ticking clocks, and the sound of pencils scratching.
Three days of it. I walk out of the final session into pale November sunlight and feel like something vital has been extracted from my body.
I’m gutted, scraped out, a walking husk operating on fumes and anxiety and residual caffeine still floating through my bloodstream.
For the first time in months, I don’t go home to study. There’s nothing left to study for.
Jinwon finds me at the gate, throws his arm around my shoulders and says tonight we’re going out, no excuses, if I say no he’s going to physically carry me.
Haeil materializes, grinning, says he’s already secured refreshments and that I’m not allowed to be boring about it.
Sihyung and Yoohan are already waiting at the bottom of the hill, and when Ryowoon comes loping out of the building last, bag slung over one shoulder, hair messy from where he’s clearly been sleeping through his final period again, Haeil lets out a whoop and we’re off, the six of us heading down toward the harbor as the sun drops behind the hills.
We end up beneath the docks like always, the wood planks above us creaking when the wind picks up, the sound of the water lapping at the rocks.
Jinwon brought snacks, dried squid and shrimp chips, and Haeil produces a plastic bag clinking with pilfered beer cans, warm, clearly swiped from someone’s garage or a convenience store that wasn’t Mrs. Nam’s.
He passes them around and I catch Ryowoon’s eye across the circle.
He leans against one of the wooden pilings, legs bent in front of him, a cigarette in his mouth. He looks at me, looks at the can Haeil’s holding out in my direction. His expression doesn’t change. No judgment or disapproval. He just meets my eyes and gives me the smallest almost imperceptible nod.
I take the can. The first sip tastes awful, sharp and warm and tinny, and I wince, which makes everyone laugh.
The second sip is easier. By the third I can feel it loosening the knot behind my sternum, and by the time the can’s gone and Sihyung passes me another I’m sinking into the warmth of not thinking about a goddamn test for the first time since September.
Ryowoon doesn’t drink. He smokes, leaning against his piling, watching the rest of us get increasingly stupid with a fondly amused expression.
Haeil gets sloppy first, starts telling a story about the time he accidentally set a trash can on fire behind the gymnasium that gets more and more elaborate with each retelling.
Jinwon laughs until he chokes on squid. Yoohan keeps trying to skip rocks in the dark and can’t figure out why they won’t bounce off water he can’t see.
Sihyung flushes pink halfway through his second can and gets sentimental, starts telling everyone he loves them, grabbing people by the shoulders and squeezing until they shove him off.
I lean back, my shoulder blades hitting something solid and warm.
Ryowoon’s legs are right there behind me and I don’t move as I settle against them, my head tipping back until it rests against his knee.
The beer makes everything feel soft, the voices of my friends transforming into a kind of music I want to bottle and keep.
Ryowoon’s knee shifts slightly under my skull, adjusting, but he doesn’t push me off. I close my eyes.
The voices get distant, come back, get distant again. I’m warm and heavy and the lapping water sounds like a pulse. My last clear thought before I go under is that someone’s hand is on my shoulder, and then nothing.
I wake up in a tangle. My cheek pressed into the rough fabric of someone’s jacket and there’s an arm under my head and a knee jammed into my lower back.
I blink, gritty-eyed, and see Jinwon’s face inches from mine, mouth open, dead asleep.
Yoohan’s legs are somehow draped over my ankles.
Behind me, against me, the warmth I fell asleep leaning into has shifted but not left.
Ryowoon’s arm is wedged beneath my neck and his other hand rests loosely on my shoulder, his breath slow and even against the top of my head.
We’re a heap, the lot of us, limbs overlapping and tangled in a graceless pile of dozing teenage boys beneath the docks.
It’s embarrassing. It’s also the best I’ve slept in months.
When the scores are posted three weeks later I stand in the crowd outside the main building and scan the list and scan it again and my hands start shaking before I realize what I’m seeing. Top of the class. Number one.
I don’t even get a chance to react before the noise erupts around me.
Ryowoon reading over my shoulder because he’s tall enough to do that without trying, lets out a startled, bright bark of laughter.
Then Jinwon is grabbing me, Haeil is screaming profanity, Sihyung and Yoohan join in until all five of them are pounding my back so hard I stagger forward.