Spending your three months worth of vacation working on all available jobs you could grasp was easier said than done. Xinran knew that: she did the almost implausible and scraped enough money to produce an amount just enough to cover one semester. Once her family discovered, they all went in. They did a month long garage sale in front of their humble house at the lower west side of Seoul, her seamstress mother took in more (and heavier) orders of custom made gown, her office working father did so much over time so he garnered as many income as he could, and her 10th Grade distant younger brother — even if they did not quite get along smoothly ever since — secretly saved some bills and handed it to their parents to help Xinran only if they didn't tell her it came from him.

The way her family backed her up only fuelled Xinran's scorching determination to make ends meet; cost what it may. There was no day in her vacation (or as she titled it, her most grueling battle to the death yet) that a second turned useless or idle: she kept working as a freelancing content writer and decent looking model for different fashion and youth magazines; scavenged for more amazing thrifted finds and stocked up even more for their fashion boutique located at the ground floor of their house; at dawns she assisted one of the town's favorite baker, and at nighttimes she washed dishes and clean after a high-end restaurant at the other side of the river; and crawled her way and snatched a glittering position in the publishing company she had been steadily employed at for four years already (first two years was as an intern, then as a fully-paid employee ever since). Jampacking all of those in a short span of ninety days just to produce Xinran's final college tuition was comparable to forcing so many juicy sardines inside a small can size of a teenager's fist. With all of these jobs, the girl obviously can quit school already!

Xinran was full of perseverance but also full of doubt to achieve her goal. was not easy. Panic attacks interpolated her like a plethora of freshly turned zombies around a whimpering human. There were so many times she wanted to quit, begged for an accident, and eventually spaced out so badly while crossing a street that she got hypnotized by a pair of headlights speeding towards her. The bags her eyebags owned were high-end couture. The stress acne and spontaneous binge eating were as unstoppable as Xinran. While her classmates and good friends are having great times on their out of country language trips or going back home to just rest for three months, Xinran turned more undistinguishable as days passed by. She was a whole new level of mess.

Mingyu gasped so indecently, everyone who heard him might have thought he saw something gruesome. He was waiting for his best friend so they can enter their last year in college together, but instead, a ghastly woman appeared in front of him. "What the happened to you?"

"Half of sixty-five thousand dollars happened."

"You what?" Mingyu's tone went higher and higher. He could not believe what he was looking at: a girl one foot shorter than her, almost unrecognizable and frail with her ever translucent skin and deepening dark circles. He angrily disapproves of her overall state. "You look like if Guillermo del Toro and Junji Ito brainstormed and conceived a ing love child."

"That's the most disgusting yet horribly accurate depiction of myself right now,"  sighs Xinran, "I guess someone's been studying some from their film class." Kim Mingyu majored in Film Production while minoring in Fine arts. One would think Mingyu would do amazing as an actor but truthfully, he . It was hard for him to stay in character, he'd forget his lines, he could not bear to fake any of his emotions hence the whole acting gig was thrown out of the window since high school.

"You sure you want to attend classes today? Today's only gonna be briefing and stuff."

", my family and I just ing clawed one semester worth of tuition so I can finish my goddamn studies in this outrageously expensive school so you best believe I will attend all classes! Sick or not! Dead or not— heck— even Faculty Conference Day, I will attend. I'm going to squeeze this campus until I get our money and labor's worth—!"

Mingyu shook Xinran's right shoulder until she stopped like what Mingyu wanted her to do for the last few seconds. The boy jerked his chin upward and Xinran looked in the specific direction. 

It was the continuation of the staredown of the century from last semester. 

Jeon Wonwoo began his graduating year as a transferee (yet again) at Van Eidel University, wearing a plum turtleneck underneath that shiny black leather jacket paired with another dark jeans and a good old pair of black Converse shoes. You'd know he smelled fine as hell even from a mile away. Xinran eyed him head to toe then back up to his head again, knuckles unknowingly clenched already at her sides. For Wonwoo, she appeared to be a tiny ominous figure encased in a dense black smoke, or at least that was how his imagination painted her. All in all, she looked mauled and powerless.

Mingyu and Xinran watched Wonwoo finally enter the main gate. "Did he just—" scowled Xinran, "did that motherer smirk at me?"

Mingyu's head followed Wonwoo, "I think he did."

Great thing Xinran did not lag on any subjects last semester, otherwise the situation would have been way worse. She wasn't the brightest bulb back in high school so that was another thing that drove her will to finish tertiary with as many flying pearlescent colors as she could. Literature was her sole passion and it spoke to her ever since she was in elementary. That was why the Rosengård Scholarship meant everything to her. Just when Xinran and the scholarship started becoming synonymous in the university, someone took it away from her. To actually lose the scholarship tortured her for weeks on end. Emotionally, physically, mentally, psychologically, and most of all financially.

"You made it through the wilderness~" Mingyu sang as the two walked together to the large auditorium inside the university's rose mansion, for the theatre community's official run-through for the semester's drama production was that day. "Somehow you made it through~ Didn't know how lost you were until you found Gyu~" The boy was feeling the song to the core with matching hand gestures and facial expressions.

Xinran ignored Mingyu Monroe at her side and remained skeptical while clutching her manuscript against her chest. Among the perks of winning the Rosengård Scholarship was your submitted work being noticed and put into life by the university's brilliant theatre house. The community loved Xinran's first three stories, and everything reached the point of magical when the team made her stories into reality. Last time, they asked for a fourth and final serving from Xinran. She hoped the fourth one would be well received if not loved better than its precedents.

Although closely related, Mingyu was not a part of the theatre but would be helping with the camera work this semester. He very gentlemanly opened the door for his best friend and together they entered down the stairs and to where the pool of humans was.

"The is he doing here?" Xinran hissed as she finished the last steps of the stairs.

Jeon Wonwoo, holding a similar looking bunch of stacked paper, stood next to the curator of the theatre who was also the art director of the community. Cue silence. Everybody gazed at the two's direction and it gave Xinran a bad case of bubbling nausea. 

"Uh," Xinran thickly gulped but was interrupted by the curator before she could continue talking.

"Xinran, darling! How have you been!" The gay middle-aged man approached Xinran with such vigor but that vigor faded away after he got a closer inspection of the girl's physical appearance. "You look dead tired," worried he, "what have you been doing the whole summer, you silly? You look like you need plenty of rest."

"No, it's fine! I'm fine! I want to work, can't miss today's run-through."

"Oh," the bald curator blinked twice, "about that... Sweetie, the higher commitee decided they want us to use the story of last year's Rosengård winner... and..."

And the more Mister Sukchun explained (and cleared things out), the more Mingyu saw his best friend crumbling on the inside. He hated whenever he saw her feeling blue, let alone this shade of blue. He just wanted to scoop her away from stress and throw her to the most comfortable bed and tuck her under the fluffiest blanket surrounded by a thousand pillows. Ever since high school when Mingyu could only look at her from afar, he gets pissed when Xinran was that tired.

"I'm sorry, baby... I thought they contacted you before handㅡ I know this must be so freaking hard for you," Mister Sukchun soothed Xinran's shrunken shoulder. The girl knew the sympathy was genuine. She knew Mister Sukchun liked her a lot, in fact, he was one of the first few who believed in Xinran's writing skills. Xinran was so consumed by exhaustion she forgot about the other consequences of losing the Rosengård Scholarship. To be potentially be in the shadows of someone and be incessantly compared to someone and get left behind because there's a fresher one. Her head dropped and her sight of the carpeted floor turned blurry as fat tears pooled and threatened to fall. Finding a way to fund her academics made her forget about things aplenty. And to be reminded about that in front of the whole theatre community? It was a bullet through the roof of .

"Come on," Mingyu braced himself and carefully guided Xinran up the staircase, "it's gonna be okay."

Xinran held her chin up, pursed her lips in and glanced at her left.

Choi Seungcheol, seated at the audience and holding a script, was gazing at her with clear concern.