Too Smart for Your Own Good
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 10
The letters came in March.
Not thin envelopes this time. The schools had moved to digital notification years ago — a portal, a login, a page that either opened into something or didn’t — but Ji Yeon had requested paper copies from all five schools when she submitted her applications, which was an option buried in the application settings that most people didn’t know existed and Ji Yeon had found because she was thorough and because she had decided that whatever came this time she wanted it in her hands in a form that was real.
Soo Yee did not know the exact date the letters were expected. Ji Yeon hadn’t said and she hadn’t asked. She had learned over the winter to give her sister the space that belonged to her sister and to trust that Ji Yeon would bring her what she needed to bring her when she was ready.
What she knew was that in March the air in the apartment changed. Not dramatically. Not in a way that would be visible to someone who didn’t know how to read the specific frequencies of this family. But her mother’s cooking became more deliberate — not more elaborate, just more considered, the way she cooked when she was managing something internally and the kitchen was where she put the energy. Her father came home at seven-fifteen the way he always did and washed his hands and sat down but sat for an extra moment before picking up his chopsticks, as if orienting himself before beginning. Small recalibrations. The household bracing quietly for whatever was coming without discussing the fact that it was bracing.
Sung Min had his second-semester exams. He called every Sunday and did not ask about the letters directly and did not need to.
The case was moving. Percy Givens had defeated Harvard’s motion to dismiss in February — a clean ruling, the judge’s language pointed in ways that Givens said were favorable indicators for the class certification argument. The class certification hearing was scheduled for May. Three thousand and twelve affected applicants had been identified across five institutions. Their attorneys were coordinating. The case had acquired the size and momentum of something that no longer required Soo Yee’s direct attention to keep moving, which was what she had built it to do.
She went to school. She took notes. She ate lunch. She worked on the next stage of the dataset analysis that Givens had asked for, which she did in the evenings at her desk with the same methodical patience she brought to everything. Mr. Castillo checked in twice a week with a look that had evolved over the months from concern to something closer to quiet pride, though he would not have said so directly and she would not have required him to.
The national coverage had settled into a lower register after the January statement — still present, still accumulating, but no longer the daily event it had been. The story was in the courts now, which was where it belonged. Courts moved at their own pace and generated their own coverage and did not require an eleven-year-old to keep feeding them.
She was ready for what came next. She was not sure what that was yet and she had decided that was acceptable. She had spent five months building one thing with complete focus and she had built it well and it was moving on its own momentum. The next thing would present itself when it presented itself and she would approach it the same way she had approached this one — by reading everything available and finding the variable that everyone else had decided not to look at.
March moved through its middle weeks. The city began its slow negotiation with spring — not fully committed, still cold in the mornings, but something different in the afternoon light, something that suggested the argument was shifting even if the outcome wasn’t certain yet.
The letter came on a Thursday.
Soo Yee knew because she heard the mail slot and then heard nothing — none of the usual sounds of Ji Yeon moving through the apartment after getting the mail, no footsteps returning to the kitchen, no door. Just the sound of the mail arriving and then silence where the next sound should have been.
She closed her laptop and waited.
Five minutes. Ten.
Then Ji Yeon’s door opened.
Soo Yee’s door was already open. She had opened it without deciding to, the way you did things that were decided by something below the level of conscious choice. She was sitting at her desk with her hands in her lap and her notebook closed in front of her.
Ji Yeon came into the doorway. She was holding an envelope. Not folded. Not made smaller. Just held, in both hands, the way you held something you weren’t sure yet what to do with.
Soo Yee looked at her face.
Ji Yeon’s face was doing several things at once in the way faces did when the thing that was happening was too large to be expressed in any single direction. Her eyes were bright and her jaw was set and she had the look of someone who had been braced for impact and the impact had come from an entirely unexpected angle.