I stood on the stage, tenth of eyes on me, my old guitar feeling small and cheap. "The soul of Ukraine," the professor had said.
What did that even mean? They'd just heard Yoo Chae-rin. They'd heard perfection—a voice trained to deliver pure, heartbreaking, flawless emotion. They wanted to hear me play some sad, folksy-sounding song?
They wanted a cultural exhibit.
I looked down at my calloused fingers. I thought of the trainings. I thought of Dany, of our courtyard, of the loud, messy, passionate rock music we loved. Screw it. I wasn't going to compete with Chae-rin.
I was going to do the opposite.
I just closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and attacked the strings.
It wasn't a gentle, finger-picked melody. I hit the guitar with a hard, percussive strum, my hand striking the wood to create a backbeat. It was Motor'rolla's "8-й колір" (8th Color). It was a song everyone back home knew. It was a rock song.
I started to sing.
My voice wasn't pure and clear like Chae-rin's. It was raw. It was a little rough around the edges. It was a rock vocal. I was singing in Ukrainian, a language none of them had ever heard—a language of hard consonants and soft vowels that was a million miles away from their own.
I kept my eyes shut. I wasn't in the recital hall. I was back in Cherkasy, in my room, my old amp turned up just loud enough to annoy the neighbors. I was playing for myself. The song built. My strumming got faster, more aggressive. I hit the chorus, my voice rising, pushing from my chest, full of all the homesickness and frustration and adrenaline of the day.
I was loud. I was unrefined. I was nothing like them. I finished with one last, ringing, defiant chord that echoed in the acoustically-perfect room.
The silence that followed was completely different from the one that followed Chae-rin's song. Hers was a silence of awe. This was a silence of shock.
I opened my eyes, my heart hammering, my fingers tingling. The entire class was just... staring. Kang Min-ah had her pink phone clutched in her hand, her mouth open in a wide, delighted "O." Ha-neul's eyes were wide, her perfect posture gone, as if she'd never seen a guitar used as a weapon before.
Then, from the back of the room, a single, loud whoop. It was some girl. She was on her feet, clapping. "YOOOOO! That's what I'm talking about!" she roared.
That broke the spell. The room erupted. It wasn't the polite, unified applause Chae-rin got. It was a messy, chaotic, and loud wave of clapping and murmuring. The sports team guys were cheering. The music-wing rebels in the back were actually nodding, impressed.
I saw Chae-rin. She wasn't clapping. She was just staring at me, and she looked... furious. She looked personally offended, as if I'd just spray-painted graffiti on a classic painting.
The professor at the front was looking at me, too. Her head was tilted, her expression unreadable—a mix of surprise and calculation. She was re-evaluating me.
And right at that moment, when the applause was at its peak, the heavy door at the back of the recital hall swung open with a bang.
The applause died. Instantly. Every head in the room, including mine, snapped to the door.
In the doorway stood Park Jun-seo and Lee Myung-Dae.
Jun-seo, the "Golden Boy" of Kirin, had a fresh, angry-red mark on his perfect bottom lip, a small bead of blood welling up. His tie was undone, and his uniform was rumpled.
Myung-Dae looked worse. He had a plaster—the kind you get from a nurse's office—stuck crookedly across the bridge of his nose. His cat-like eyes were narrowed, and he was too relaxed. He didn't have a beanie on.
Actually I'm still shocked how good everyone looks here! I FEEL FREAKING INSECURE!!!
They had been in a real fight. The room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. This was a bigger scandal than my kimchi stew by a factor of a thousand. Jun-seo saw the room, saw the professor. He instantly tried to regain his composure, wiping his lip with the back of his hand and bowing. "Professor," he said, his voice strained. "We apologize for being late. We were... detained."
Myung-Dae just scoffed, slouching against the doorframe. He didn't apologize. His eyes scanned the room, passed over the professor, and landed on me. They were full of ice.
The professor looked from Jun-seo's lip to Myung-Dae's nose. She looked at the clock on the wall. She looked at the shell-shocked class. She let out a long, slow sigh. "That's all for today," she announced, her voice flat. "Class dismissed."
The room exploded into frantic, high-speed whispers as students scrambled to pack their bags. I stood on the stage, frozen, my guitar in my hand.
My first day of school was over.