.  Having their faces closely attached to each other, Lee Mina and Yoon Jung were sharing an earphone to listen to a song. At first glance, they seemed to be concentrating on the music so much; however, they actually wouldn’t be doing it. What mattered to them would be who they were listening to the music with.

  So was I. It was more important to me whom I had spent my middle school years with instead of the fact that I had graduated middle school.

  Watching the two for a moment, I soon switched my gaze to the window right beside me. It was already eight in the evening. Under the darkening sky, the cram school across our building was emitting bright lights. My slightly exhausted face was reflected in the window like a mirror.

  I looked at the sight for a while then dropped my gaze to the question on the workbook that I was trying to solve just now.

  ‘I really have no idea why things have turned out this way,’ I murmured to myself. Leaving a hollow echo, those words scattered away inside me.

  When it became nine forty, the self-studying classroom began to turn unusually noisy. My brows met in the middle while I moved my pencil busily on the workbook. The room was hot and humid because of the fan heater; it was even stuffy and airless inside due to the sealed windows. To make matters worse, the noisy atmosphere prevailed in the space, which distracted me so much. Thus, I couldn’t focus on my studies at all.

  ‘Well, but I can’t help it,’ I said to myself while looking at the calendar on the wall.

  Today was Wednesday, January 29th. The reason why the kids became so hyper, even though it wasn’t Friday, was that the four day-weekend for Lunar New Year’s Day was starting from tomorrow on January 30th.

  The last day of this long weekend was Saturday, which seemed to be a loss since it was overlapping on the actual weekend. However, the holiday was extended through Sunday, so for high schoolers, there was no better chance of a long break than this one.

  In the end, I also gave up studying, and as soon as I put my workbook in my backpack, I heard a loud noise from the hallway. The kids in the neighboring classroom would have definitely run outside out of patience.