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Sooyoung can’t stop thinking about Jinsol’s new type. The one she’d given during their interview the day before.
“Someone dependable, huh?” Sooyoung leans against the wall, handing Jinsoul a cup of water as she wanders over to the cooler. The song they’re practicing loops loudly over the speakers. She could stop it, but it would require crossing the room.
Jinsoul pretends to ignore her, gulping down the water gratefully, and soon there’s no water in the cup she uses to block her face. Sooyoung suppresses her smile. It’s so Jinsol. Her and her inability to act.
“I didn’t know they invented drinkable air.”
She watches Jinsol blush, stammering out an excuse. Sooyoung likes when Jinsoul gets like this. That she can get Jinsol like this. Regularly. Easily. Exactly the same way Jinsol can get Sooyoung. Sooyoung doesn’t even think Jinsol notices. “Why did you change it this time?” Sooyoung keeps her posture loose, lazy as she pours herself another water at the cooler, the cold traveling through the paper cup to her hand. Like it’s just a passive curiosity. Just something to tease Jinsol about later, maybe.
Jinsol shrugs, but there is a quiet tenseness in her shoulders. “I wanted to say something from the heart.” her long, slip fingers fiddle with the rolled rim of the cup.
“And all the times before? Were they not also from the heart?” Sooyoung finishes her own water. She crumples the cup on her hand, the wet paper collapsing easily into itself.
“That’s kind of inane, isn’t it?” Jinsol shifts her weight, irritated. “I can want more than one thing.” Sooyoung knows well enough to drop it. Still.
Sooyoung chews that over.
Sooyoung remembers meeting Jinsol for the first time. A week into training, with plans to debut already. It felt too good to be true. All she’d ever wanted, all coming together so quickly. She’d quit her job at a department store a few days after signing an artist contract with Blockberry. She would be recording her song next week. It was all so fast.
She’d run into Odd Eye Circle by accident. She wanted to use the practice room to work on a choreo and there they were, running through a song that she’d heard on a music show a few months ago. They look like stars. Like celebrities with big eyes and slim figures, it’s not that Sooyoung didn’t also have those things, but Seoul girls were different.
There was a signup sheet on the inside of the door to reserve the room, so Sooyoung cracked the door open quietly, so as not to disturb their practice. The door squeaks loudly instead, and the shorter blonde, Jungeun, looks over, eyes landing on Sooyoung, who’s crouched slightly like that will make her any quieter.
Sooyoung straightens up and nods, gesturing awkwardly to the signup sheet, and Jungeun nods, before furrowing her brows and leaving the other two to greet her properly.
“I’m Kim Lip.”
“Ha Sooyoung. I just signed onto the group..?” Sooyoung doesn’t really mean to say it like it’s a question.
Jungeun—Kim Lip—appraises her, then gives her a half-smile. “You dance?”
“Yeah.”
“You good?”
Sooyoung licks her lips. The other two have stopped dancing, watching the two of them instead. “Yeah, I am.”
Jungeun grins. “Good.”
Sooyoung can’t help but feel like she passed some kind of test. She’d heard Jungeun had been here since the beginning of the company. One of the trainees from the old agency. So maybe she had.
“That’s Choerry, she’s our baby.” Choerry waves back, smiling widely. “And that’s Jinsoul.”
Jinsol nods, eyes intense like she’s studying Sooyoung. Sooyoung studies her back.
She’s pretty in that Seoul type of way. Sooyoung likes the look of Seoul girls. The ones who smoke outside or bars after midnight, who eye her as she passes by them quickly on her way home from dance practice; the ones who did her makeup for her test shoot; the ones, like Jinsol, who she trained with. She won’t pretend it’s not more than aesthetic appreciation. Sooyoung has always been realistic about that part of herself. It was something to observe, and then to let go of.
Jinsol’s got a sharp jaw and slim nose and big eyes, features intense and dramatic. She has that mysterious, cold look about her. And then she speaks.
“Hi, you’re the new girl?”
And the illusion is shattered. Jinsol’s slow, awkward drawl contrasts her chic vibe so much that, for a moment, Sooyoung thinks she’s trying to imitate Sooyoung’s Busan accent.
It’s so unexpected that it takes Sooyoung a moment to respond, nodding and saying something to confirm it.
Jinsol gives her a small, closed-mouth smile.
Five years later, Jinsol catches Sooyoung applying lipgloss in the mirror of their shared hotel room in Osaka.
Sooyoung had been invited to some club by Jungeun, who’d been invited by one of the guys in another group who’d performed at the same concert, who had, apparently promised that the music was really, really good.
“What are you—” Jinsol’s eyebrows are furrowed in that way that brings out the cute little scar between her brows. Sooyoung resists the urge to poke it. Jinsol has her hoodie slung over her shoulder, leaving her in a cropped tank top that must have been too cold for the walk over. She can see the goosebumps on her upper arms.
“Come with. Let’s go clubbing.” Sooyoung says it lightly, like she’s hoping the levity will convince Jinsol not to freak out. She can already hear the edge in Jinsol’s voice. Jungeun has gotten more rebellious over the course of her time as an idol. Jinsol had somehow gotten…less so.
So it’s no surprise to her when Jinsol makes a half-hearted swipe at the tube of lipgloss, hissing, “are you crazy? Put that down.”
Sooyoung holds it out of reach. “Can’t make me.”
Jinsol immediately follows, stepping into Sooyoung’s personal space. “We’re going home tomorrow. This is not the time to drum up scandals.”
Sooyoung drops her hand to her side, letting Jinsol take the gloss from her. She was done with it anyway. But Jinsol stays in her space, breath ghosting across her face. She can count Jinsol’s eyelashes from here, and see the faint lines on Jinsoul’s lips right around her cupid’s bow. Sooyoung steps away. “Will you relax? This is our last night in Japan. We might as well enjoy it.” She adjusts her dress, something fancy Chaewon had convinced her to get while shopping earlier that day.
Sooyoung got her first job at age thirteen. Restocking shelves in a corner store in Yangsan a few blocks from her family’s apartment. The old man who owned the store probably underpaid her. She didn’t care. She bought a beyblade board with the money from that job, and then a Wonder Girls CD. And then summer break ended and her mom made her put the rest in a savings account.
She worked through high school. It was for spending money at first. Her mother worked hard to provide for her and her older sister. So Sooyoung would buy meals after dance academy practice with friends, new CDs and sneakers and fancy new pens. Then she saw the way her sister would sneak money into her mother’s purse after she’d gone to bed, and she started doing the same. Just a little. She couldn’t ever tell whether it eased the weight on her mother’s shoulders.
And then her sister caught her one night and told her to knock it off, that she had it covered. And what was Sooyoung supposed to do at fifteen? So Sooyoung saved it instead. She wore the same pair of sneakers for the rest of high school.
“We’re in Osaka, Jinsol. This is my first time here. We might not be able to come back in years, and I can’t just—justify taking a weekend trip to Japan whenever I want.” She tries her best to tamp down her feelings. She sees the way Jinsol doesn’t understand. But Jinsol’s family had been to Japan before. Jinsol had gone with friends, too, before she’d started college.
It wasn’t…couth to point out the differences between them, so Sooyoung stops, swallowing the rest of what she wants to say. Instead, she settles on, “being an idol—this can’t be everything there is. I won’t let it. I won’t.” She can feel her heart pound beneath her ribcage. It shouldn’t matter that Jinsol doesn’t get it. It really shouldn’t. They’re different people.
Then Jinsol’s hands are reaching towards her and Sooyoung doesn’t mean to flinch. It’s just that—well. She smooths her expression into nothing at all.
“You’d be putting everything on the line. Is that what you want, truly?”
Sooyoung watches the way Jinsol’s throat bobs as she swallows.
“You know how easy it is to get destroyed in this industry. All it takes is one person or one picture. All the trips you had to make, the hours of training, the diets. You’d sacrifice it all for—what, a night out at some club you can’t even talk to the bartender in?”
Sooyoung wonders if Jinsoul knows how expressive she is. The way her eyebrows give away her every thought, how she had different ways of clenching her jaw based on what she was feeling. This isn’t anger. It’s fear.
The first time Haseul has goaded Sooyoung into sneaking out to the club with her, Sooyoung’s heart pounded so hard she was afraid it might explode, the way she couldn’t reply to Haseul in the cab because she was afraid her dinner would come back up.
“It gets easier.”
“Huh?”
“Breaking the rules. It gets easier the more you do it.”
That’s easy for Haseul to say.
Sooyoung knows the tenuous nature of idolhood. Sunbaes that became same age friends that became acquaintances who asked, politely, not to talk about the industry anymore.
If Sooyoung’s idol journey ended here, what would she do? She’d been good at shoveling fries into pouches at Lotteria when she’d first come to Seoul. She could do that again. Then she imagines coming face to face with a former fan, watching them realize who was wearing the apron and visor uniform.
At the end of the day, the calculus was different for Haseul, whose family would put her right back into school, who would probably become some pretty, popular opera singer, or a teacher at a hip vocal academy for rich kids.
And then Haseul is reaching for her hand and leaning in, grinning like they’re sharing a secret. They are sharing a secret. “I’m so glad I had someone to go with. You’re going to love my friends.”
The idol guy wasn’t lying. The music is good, and the dance floor is filled to capacity, maybe even a little over. The crowd moves as one, and Haseul looks delighted, leading the way to a nice little corner of the dancefloor, and choreographing their gradual move towards the center of things.
After a few hours, Sooyoung uses the crowd on the dancefloor to slip away from Jungeun and Haseul. She rolls the remaining tension from her shoulders as Jungeun gets hidden behind a particularly large man and she’s able to duck and disappear from sight, free to experience the club as she wants.
It doesn’t take her long. She’s used to this part now, letting her eyes linger on pretty women for just longer than she should, then a quick glance back when she feels them looking at her. She catches the eye of a pretty girl with a sharp jaw. Her hair is almost as light as Jinsol’s. It’s just a passing thought, one that’s shooed quickly away as the woman draws Sooyoung against her body, swaying them both to the beat.
They dance like that for a few songs, and Sooyoung feels herself sink into the anonymity of the crowd. She dodges a kiss, playing it off like she’d seen someone, but she allows the woman to kiss her neck, closing her eyes and listening as the DJ fades one song into another.
And then, “C’mon,” Haseul’s voice fades in as a hand tugs her away from the girl. “We need to get back and wash up before our flight.”
Sooyoung blinks her eyes open and lets herself get pulled out of the dancing crowd and towards the exit, not even bothering to say goodbye to the woman, who’s already lost in the mass of people. She can feel Jungeun’s eyes on her. Can tell exactly the question she wants to ask. She almost wants to dare her to, but Jungeun keeps quiet. Best let sleeping dogs lie.
Instead, she slips into the back of the taxi as Haseul gives the driver directions from the middle seat. And as they peel away, she watches as the neon lights of the clubs fade together to a pretty rainbow.
“This is love, she thinks. Music thrums from outside and then vanishes just as quickly. The digital billboards and neon shop signs blur together into a coalescence of blue, blue, blue. I am in love with this. This is all I can ever love.”