Known as the nation which values academic grades above food, walk into any Korean school classroom and one would likely find teachers ordering their students to study harder for the upcoming examinations, or students in hysterics after finding that their ranking had dropped two places.  Students committing suicide over the stress of having to do well in their studies is a common occurrence.  However, in Yong Shin High School, the only students who actually bothered to put in effort to study were those in what was called the Social Care group, allowed to walk the same corridors as honest-to-goodness heirs and heiresses because their parents worked for their schoolmate’s parents.  The rest of the student populace?  For them, the point of attending school at all was something like putting up a show to reassure the public that the future generation owning their country would be capable enough to ensure prosperity and stability.  In simple terms, putting up a front.  They didn’t have to worry about graduating from university for a degree which guaranteed a slightly higher chance of obtaining a good job; their future was laid out neatly for them.

Unlike the other Social Care kids, Cho Han had nothing against standing on the lowest rung of the school’s hierarchy.  As he always joked to his younger twin sister Jin, being looked down upon on a daily basis was better than the ambiguous treatment students from New Money families had to endure.  At least he could be certain about where exactly he stood in the food chain.  Plus, he had the luck of being two years younger than the youngest child of the Yong Shin empire, which meant that neither of the heirs could be bothered with his existence, just the way he liked it.

By the time he entered high school though, his father had already resigned from his post as personal secretary to the wife of Lee Yong, the president and owner of the corporation, and had encountered unexpected success with his restaurant after three years of struggling.  In those three years, Han dropped out of his second year in Yong Shin Middle School to enroll in a regular public school and suffered at home during mealtimes because he and Jin were relegated the ‘important’ job of testing his parents’ food experimentation results.  What began as a humble push-cart stall grew into a small rundown eatery, expanding further into a restaurant, and branched out into franchises that spread rapidly over Korea. 

As Han’s first year in high school came to an end with many good-natured complaints about the crazy levels of studying stress, the Cho household’s atmosphere was tense for well over a week: his mother had broached the subject of him transferring into Yong Shin High, and of course Han had no intentions of going down without a fight, despite claiming back then that being in the Social Care group was fine by him.  Jin, resigned to her fate of having to mingle with the rich brats again, could do nothing except sigh, shake her head at her brother’s sulking figure, and return to her book.  She agreed with Han’s completely valid arguments that entering a new school in the middle was troublesome, and that she would dearly miss the friends she had made, but she also understood that to her parents, securing entrance into the school of the Rich was a crucial political move they had to make in order to seal their admittance into high society.  If they wanted to attract partnership offers or investments – and they did – this would bring them a step closer.

When Jin carefully laid out the logic behind the transfer to Han, he gave her a confused But aren’t we doing well enough already? followed by a scowl because she was ‘taking our parents side again’.  For the millionth time, she questioned whether the attending doctor had mixed up who was born first; that Han was older than her, albeit by a mere twenty minutes, seemed a fluke – she was the unrivalled mature one of the two, something that was getting increasingly obvious.  The younger twin was not worried though.  Han may have a child-like mentality, yet the intuition of children was surprisingly accurate, and she went to sleep knowing he would come around eventually, if not because he actually agreed, then it would be because he never could stay angry for long.

At the traditional New Year party hosted by youths for youths, Lee Jongsuk heard from Park Hyungsik that a pair of twins who had previously attended YS Middle School as Social Care students were supposedly returned, strangely, after several years.  Hyungsik jokingly asked the second-in-line whether his father had sent their family overseas and brought them back again, to which Jongsuk laughed noncommittally.  He didn’t give the conversation any further thought even though the mention of ‘twins’ faintly rang a bell; quite a number of YS employees’ children frequently came and left the schools, and he had no interest in keeping tabs.  Shrugging off the nagging feeling, he maneuvered through the dense crowds in search of a certain Ahn Sayoung.