I Only Like You

Chapter 7: My Dearest Lee Hyun-Joo

~ 1 ~

Lee Hyun-Joo is my best friend, my High School classmate. She was born on the month of May. For her father, she was considered as the jewel of his life, which led to the emergence of her name.

According to various rumours, when Hyun-Joo 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. Hyun-Joo 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 XXX High School. During our era, all the children would have heard of the following saying: 'Entering into XXX 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 XXX High School.

Hyun-Joo 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 Hyun-Joo managed to enter into XXX High School.

~ 2 ~

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 Hyun-Joo. I helped her buy her breakfast, accompanied her always, 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.

Once, when we were taking our Mathematics exam, I had absolutely no confidence. Hyun-Joo was seated right behind me, and when she handed in her paper, I was extremely shocked – she had answered the difficult questions with an entire page of scribbles! My vision turned black momentarily and I thought in my heart that I was dead – I'm going to be the top from the bottom this time round!

After class, Kim Taehyung helped the teacher to mark the Mathematics Paper. When he returned he comforted me, "Don't worry, you scored slightly better than her."

I told him not to comfort me – I saw that her answer sheet was full of her scribbles.

Taehyung was at a loss for words, "She didn't even answer a single question – she simply copied each question five times."

~ 3 ~

Hyun-Joo and I each have a strange hobby – I liked to collect pretty wrapping papers whilst she liked to collect beautiful notebooks. Every term when school reopened, she would prepare 5 or 6 new notebooks and carefully write on each notebook "Language Notes", "Mathematics Notes", "English Notes" and so on. However, after diligently taking notes for five pages, she would inevitably give up and use the remaining pages to play Tic Tac Toe.