I Don't Like This World, I Only Like You

5.1

Chapter 5 : My Dearest Kim Jisoo

001

Jisoo is my best friend, my High School classmate. She was born on 3rd January ; those who knew about the origin of her name always said that her parents were too easygoing about her name.

According to various rumours, when Jisoo was young, she suffered from a huge bout of illness, and hovered near the brink of death. As a result, her parents didn’t impose any expectations on her in relation to her studies – they were satisfied as long as long as she could run and jump about like a healthy kid. Jisoo lived up to her parents’ expectations, never ever falling out of the bottom three places in all the big exams and small tests she sat for.

Her father wasn’t anxious, and always assured her that everything would be alright. He promised her that when the time came, he would pay ‘school fees’ that enabled her to enter X High School. During our era, all the children would have heard of the following saying: ‘Entering into X High School is equivalent to having one foot into the huge universities.’ Despite that saying, we subsequently found out that our admission into the universities had not much relation with this ‘foot’ we had by virtue of being in X High School.

Jisoo thus let loose and daringly played for the three entire years in Junior High. However, during the year when we were due to take our graduating exams, there was a sudden amendment in the policies made by the Ministry of Education – ‘school fees’ were no longer allowed, and admission into schools would be purely based on the grades that we scored. Her entire family was stupefied – her dad was unable to discover any solution despite asking all his friends and networking acquaintances. It was only when our Principal changed the name of the funds from ‘school fees’ to ‘construction fees’ that Jisoo managed to enter into X High School.

002

I was extremely stressed when I first entered school. When I was in Junior High, I could still manage to squeeze into the Top 10 – however, when I came to High School, I realized that there would always be people better than me. A simple glance around the school compound yielded geniuses everywhere. I couldn’t even bear to compare my trashy results with theirs.

Thus, I was extremely good to Jisoi. I helped her buy her breakfast, accompanied her when she did her cleanup duty, and when we ate together I always gave her my meat so that she would be able to feel the love between classmates. Till today, whenever she reminisces about these incidents, tears would always fill her eyes. I simply don’t have the heart to tell her that all my actions were motivated by my fear of her transferring out of school – with her around, I would never be at the bottom of the class.