I could never say that everything I did was only for my sister.

  The truth was, my life had always been shaped by her.

  She was an avid reader, and at her urging I devoured cssic novels one after another, until—without realizing it—I became a reader too. When she decided to attend a drama school in Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a pywright, I followed her path. Two years ter, I took the entrance exam myself, for no reason other than that she was there.

  The school was an all-girls institution, for reasons no one could quite expin. It had been founded sixty years earlier by the legendary stage actor Roberto Berger, who served as its first principal. For someone like me, with no acting experience whatsoever, attempting to pass its highly competitive entrance exam was reckless. My family and my middle school homeroom teacher begged me to apply to a public high school instead. My cssmates mocked my decision behind my back.

  But I refused to give up.

  Driven solely by the desire to study at the same school as my sister, I spent a year haunting theaters, teaching myself how to act, and practicing vocal techniques I had learned from YouTube—over and over again.

  The audition assignment was a monologue titled Beyond the Wall. Each applicant was required to write and perform their own piece.

  On the day of the exam, I performed almost entirely on impulse, pouring my love for my sister—and my resentment toward her—into the monologue. By then, nothing remained of the script I had stayed up all night writing.

  If it hurts this much, maybe I should just disappear.

  But… if there’s even a 0.001 percent chance of being loved,

  then I want to cling to life.

  …How foolish, right?

  One of the examiners was the headmaster himself—a former stage actor of great renown, a man who had won numerous prestigious international awards. After my brief two- or three-minute performance, he smiled at me gently.

  “Your piece conveyed your retionship with your sister very clearly,” he said. “She isn’t physically here, of course. But what matters isn’t whether the problem truly exists—it’s whether you can create it in this space. And whether you can express your emotions in a way others can understand. Watching you, I felt as though I could see the ghost of your sister.”

  “She’s… not dead,” I replied, completely serious.

  There were three examiners in total. They stared at me in stunned silence, then burst out ughing.

  “It’s a metaphor,” one of the female examiners expined.

  Even then, I didn’t fully understand. My face burned with embarrassment at being ughed at.

  As I was about to leave the room, the headmaster called out to me.

  “You’re still very raw, and there’s a great deal about you that needs polishing. But your emotional expressiveness—that’s a powerful weapon.”

  By some miracle, I passed the exam.