𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘄𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗞𝗶𝗺?✓

episode 9

On the way home, the car was completely silent. taehyung was driving, and jisoo was looking out the window from the passenger seat; each was lost in their own thoughts.

“What are you thinking so long about?”

“Nothing much.”

When Jisoo first met Taehyung, the 24-year-old had already possessed everything he could want.

It wasn't just because his parents were wealthy, however. His confidence and unreserved behavior seemed to be the result of his own efforts, added to what he’d inherited. It felt like he was asking those around him, “This is the result of all my efforts. What have you got to say about that?” She envied him that confidence.

Ever since she was thrown out into the cold streets, the results of her national exam in hand, jisoo had formed an odd habit. It was to force herself to smile.

It took only a week, no, a single day, for her to realize something: nothing she’d learned in her textbooks would be of any use to her out here.

The people she met in her various short stints were nasty specimens.

The young owner of the convenience store where she'd once worked would promptly disappear whenever a foreigner entered the store. He could not even say “hello” in English. The moment he handed her the first month's pay, he'd taken 10,000 won from her by force and bought various snacks, saying, “It’s customary to treat others to some nice food when you get your pay.” The tteokboki and sundae she ate that day could not have tasted more bitter.

When she worked at a cafe, she worked with a female student a year older than her. She could not even add properly and was perpetually searching for her calculator. At first, Jisoo had thought it was a joke.

She was as nasty toward Jisoo as she possibly could be, even so. Every task she didn't want, such as cleaning dirty ashtrays and blocked toilets, became Jisoo’s lot. Whenever jisoo displayed displeasure, she'd shake her cigarette at her and tell her, “Keep your eyes on the ground, bitch.”

They were not the only ones. Everyone surrounding Jisoo was strange. So many people were ignorant of the simplest things. There were people who did not know middle school English, the basics of factorization, or when Silla unified the three kingdoms.

None of those people had been anywhere near the top 1%, had top-tier school grades, or continuously held the number one position in school.

I'm much smarter and diligent than these people. Why must I live this way? I studied hard while these people loitered; why did this happen?

Such thoughts continued to bother her. It felt like she was getting dumber by the day. She had been so sure that she was the best student out there, enclosed in that little academic world that was everything she knew. She was now working for the kind of people she'd once despised.

She couldn't stand it.

jisoo had chosen to smile so that she could repress that sense of injustice. She simply smiled when she felt cheated and angry, in sad and gloomy situations, on days when she grew irritated for no clear reason.

If she didn't, she'd probably be angry every day, teary-eyed and irritated. She couldn't afford to lose her jobs that way. She had to somehow make by and support her sisters until they could graduate medical school and make money themselves.

Her smile had never wavered, but on the inside, she had been slowly becoming warped.

Taehyung was the person who'd jutted in and effectively reset this backward progress.

She had wondered how such a man could exist.

There was nothing he didn't know. When he had her study in preparation for her work overseas, the schedule was tight, bone-grinding. She’d never studied so hard, not even for the national exam.