Never a Question

You would never lose to Winter.

Not on paper. Not in reality. Not on the sheet taped to the department bulletin board.

The board's the same as always. Cork gone gray at the edges. Layers of old flyers underneath the new ones, curling up at the corners like they're trying to escape. Somebody's stapled a club recruitment poster upside down again. Nobody's fixed it in two years.

Fifty names crowd the list today, ranked top to bottom by qualifying score. Only the top twelve make the case competition team. Every semester, your name lands one line above hers. Never by much. Always enough. Like clockwork. Like gravity.

Except this time it doesn't.

This time the sheet has two names bracketed together at the top. Side by side. Like the department ran out of room for separate lines.

CO-LEAD: Y/N
CO-LEAD: Kim Minjeong

You've never once heard anyone call her that. Not in two years. Not once.

To literally everyone on campus, she's Winter. The name she introduced herself with freshman year. She made it stick through sheer force of personality. The department, apparently, prefers paperwork.

You read the sheet three times. The ink doesn't change. It never does. You've tried that trick before, staring hard enough at a bad grade like it might blink first.

“Congratulations,” says a voice behind you.

Flat. Enough to skip the congratulating part entirely.

“You've ruined my morning.”

You don't have to turn around. You already know the exact angle of her eyebrow. You've catalogued it. Filed it somewhere next to the sound she makes when someone cites a source wrong.

“You're welcome,” you say. “I assume you fought this.”

“I fought against it. I lost.” She crosses her arms. “Apparently the department thinks balance is a virtue.” She says the word like it personally wronged her.

“Balance is good for you. Look at trees. Yoga people.”

“I would never do yoga.”

“I would never survive being co-lead with someone who's never done yoga.”

She doesn't laugh. She never laughs at you on purpose. You've tested that theory. Extensively. At cost to your own dignity. Two years running.

What she does instead is fold her arms tighter. She looks at you the way she looks at a case study with a typo in the first line. Personally offended that it exists at all.

“This isn't a joke,” she says. “I've run this team's actual operations for two years. Recruiting. Scheduling. Every submission we've ever sent in.” She lets that sit a second. “You've topped the qualifying score for two years straight without once showing up to a planning meeting. And somehow, we're co-leads.”

“Meetings are optional. The scoreboard isn't.”

“That's the most insufferable thing you've ever said to me.”

“You say that a lot.”

“It's true a lot.”

You open your mouth to argue the point. You don't get the chance.

This isn't new territory. You've been here before, in smaller versions. Sophomore year, a group project with no snacks and a fire alarm that went off at exactly the wrong moment. Winter standing in the parking lot afterward, arms crossed, informing you with total sincerity that you were, quote, “a liability to responsible people everywhere.” You told her the smoke wasn't your fault. It was, a little. She's never let you forget it.

A laugh cuts through the hallway noise. Not yours. Definitely Karina's.

She's leaning against the board already. Phone up. Filming. Because of course she is.

“Oh, this is the best thing that's happened to me all week,” she says. “Giselle. Giselle, come here. It actually fucking happened.”

“They didn't just put us on the same team,” Winter says. She doesn't look away from you. “They made us co-leads. Together. As one unit.” She says unit like a diagnosis.

Giselle arrives at a jog. One look at the sheet is all it takes.

“Holy shittt.” She grabs Ningning's sleeve, drags her over. “This is actually historic. Someone should be documenting this properly.”

“I am documenting it,” Karina says. “I've been documenting it.”

“This isn't a wedding,” Winter says. “No one needs footage.”

“It's giving wedding.”

“It's giving disaster.” Winter doesn't blink. “Which is the same thing, historically. If you look at the numbers.”

You almost laugh at that one. Almost.

She catches the almost. For exactly half a second, she looks like she regrets being funny in front of you. Like it slipped out before she could stop it.

“There's more,” Ningning says. Unhelpfully. She taps a second sheet, pinned just below the first. “Event committee assignments are up too.”

You lean in. Read it. Read it again. Apparently today is a day for reading things twice and being betrayed both times.

GALA PLANNING COMMITTEE: Y/N, Minjeong, Karina, Yeji, Yuna, Jiho, Sunwoo

“Absolutely fucking not,” Winter says.

“Language, princess.”

“Don't call me that.”

“You just swore in front of a bulletin board. I'm allowed to comment.”

“I'm allowed to swear. I'm not allowed to be called that.”

“Absolutely already happened,” Karina says. Still filming, right up until she reaches her own name. Then she stops scrolling. “Wait. I'm on this?”

“You signed up for something two weeks ago,” Ningning says. “Right after Winter found out she might get stuck co-leading with him and spent a week trying to get it overturned. You said, and I quote, front row seats. I assumed you meant it metaphorically.”