Make a Wish
Before I knew it, the year was almost over. In just two days, this year would be gone and a new one would begin.
It felt like only yesterday that I'd thrown a surprise Christmas event for my viewers, and already it was the end of the year. Time seemed to be flying by far too fast.
"Ah."
Come to think of it, it really was only yesterday. Christmas had been less than a week ago.
Even if I'd been mistaken about how long it had been, the sense that time was racing past remained the same.
The thought that the year was ending left me feeling oddly sentimental. I gazed out the window at the snow piled outside and found myself replaying everything that had happened.
Like a roll of camera film unspooling with a soft whir, the events I'd experienced since my body changed flickered past one by one.
Most of them had to do with streaming. Deciding to start broadcasting after becoming Camilla, going live for the first time, entering a tournament, turning on the cam… And every person I'd met had been connected to streaming somehow — people I'd gotten to know through the broadcast.
What would I have been doing with my life if I hadn't started streaming?
The thought came to me unbidden, the same idle fantasy I sometimes entertained before falling asleep.
In those imaginings I became a fashion model capitalizing on this striking face, or a diligent office worker grinding through a nine-to-five, or even a total freeloader doing absolutely nothing at all.
I found myself picturing countless versions of myself branching into entirely different fields, like parallel worlds.
And if those daydreams had one thing in common, it was that every version of me looked exactly like Camilla.
It hadn't even been a full year, and yet I could no longer picture what I'd looked like before becoming her.
That old self existed only as a memory now — and even that memory was growing hazy. Or maybe I was unconsciously refusing to call up my previous life at all.
It wasn't impossible. I'd had countless nightmares where I turned back into my old self mid-stream, or woke up to find the transformation undone.
This body had changed for no reason. A blessing received without a price could, put another way, be reclaimed at any moment. And so I sometimes trembled with the quiet dread that I might one day go back to the way things were.
If that happened, everything I'd built — every relationship I'd formed with people — would collapse in an instant, like a sandcastle before a wave.
It would be a hollow, empty thing. Life was fleeting enough as it was, and all I could do was hope it never came to that.
What even is a life, anyway?
I was thinking more than usual today. One stray thought after another kept chaining together, each tugging the next along behind it — when a message came through.
There weren't many people who messaged me. My editors, my fellow streamer Ririyang, or my overeager disciple Jjangmilla.
Counting them out like that, it was actually quite a few. Three whole categories of candidates, even.
Anyway, the one messaging me now was Ririyang. She insisted on calling herself my unnie on the grounds that she was older, but banmal still seemed to sit awkwardly on her tongue — she kept bouncing back and forth between formal and casual speech.
She was one of the people who messaged me regularly, and in a certain sense she was the only one of her kind.
My two editors mostly stuck to business — edit reviews, emails, work-related stuff. Jjangmilla's messages were almost always progress reports, complete with match records attached to show off her practice results.
The only person who sent me personal messages — Nice weather today, isn't it? or This place has amazing cake, we should go together sometime — was Ririyang.
She'd kept in touch steadily ever since we'd been on the same team at the tournament.
I figured she was just the sociable type and left it at that. The way she clung to the whole unnie thing made me think she had a bit of an old-fashioned streak despite being young.
The message she'd sent was simple.
The New Year's Eve bell — she meant that thing, right? Where everyone gathered at the start of the new year and rang that enormous bell.
She wanted to go to the actual site?
"Hmm…"
I gripped my phone and deliberated. I'd already read the message, so I had to reply somehow. How was I supposed to turn her down without making the person who'd asked feel bad?
The reason for refusing wasn't anything special. I just didn't feel like it.
This was an age of extreme internet development. You could hear the bell and watch the sunrise through a LAN cable without ever leaving the house. There was no need to stand around shivering in the cold, waiting for some bell to ring.
Of course, there was an atmosphere you could only feel by being there in person — that much I couldn't deny.
But if you asked me whether that atmosphere was worth braving subzero temperatures for, the answer that came out was a solid eh.
I was still carefully picking my words when Ririyang, apparently anxious about the lack of a reply after I'd read her messages, quickly added another.
I froze.
The fingers typing out a polite refusal stopped mid-motion.
A wish. A wish, huh…
Make a wish and it comes true.
It was obviously superstition, but getting taken in by it just once didn't seem so bad. Maybe I could treat it as a novel experience I'd never tried in my life so far. And with my head this full of stray thoughts, maybe getting outside was exactly what I needed.
It was a somewhat impulsive, emotional decision — the kind I wouldn't normally make.
Drawn in by the word wish, I accepted the invitation.
"I-it actually worked?"
Meanwhile, Ririyang's eyes went wide as she received Kayak's positive reply. She'd floated the idea on a nothing-to-lose basis — she never expected the invitation to actually be accepted.
Especially not from Kayak, who until now had met every single proposal with nothing but lukewarm indifference.
In Ririyang — Da-hee's — twenty-three years of life, she had never met anyone so hard to get close to.
Even finding common ground was a struggle from the start. Kayak was only two years younger than her, practically the same age, and yet Da-hee could never quite figure out what was going on inside that head.
The things girls that age usually cared about — cozy cafés, delicious desserts, cute clothes, dramas and movies streaming on OTT platforms —
Kayak showed a bizarre complete lack of interest in any of it. Every invitation to go shopping or hit up a good restaurant got shot down. For Da-hee, who desperately wanted to befriend her, it was obstacle number one.
She could grab Kayak's attention by asking about Camilla or talking about Camilla, sure — but that approach would hit a ceiling eventually. You couldn't keep a conversation blooming on Camilla talk alone all day long.
And besides, she was curious about Kayak's true inner self, Camilla or no Camilla.
After that she'd kept messaging whenever she had a free moment, trying to figure out what Kayak was into — but that hadn't been easy either. Kayak always replied promptly, yet somehow never quite let her real feelings show. It felt harder than dating.
Lately she'd even started sensing a faint air of annoyance from Kayak's end. Catching that vibe had left Da-hee shocked and a little hurt — but it also, somehow, lit a stubborn fire under her.
How on earth do I get close to her? In all of Da-hee's life, she'd never encountered a person who pushed her away quite like this.
She'd never clung to someone this hard either, but what was she supposed to do? Someone she admired this much, someone she wanted to befriend this badly, simply hadn't existed until recently. When you're thirsty, you dig the well yourself — that was just how things worked.
Kayak was a legendary Pokémon. That was the analogy. Somewhere along the way, that was what she'd become inside Da-hee's mind.
Catching a rare species like that required a matching level of effort. Da-hee wiped every scrap of conventional wisdom from her internal hard drive. She decided to drop her preconceptions and try every method under the sun.
Inviting Kayak to go hear the New Year's Eve bell together had been part of that campaign. At this point it was quantity over quality — she'd been casting every kind of bait she could think of — and by pure luck, she got a bite right away.
She was going to refuse at first, though…
The unread count next to the message had disappeared. That meant she'd read it.
And if a reply didn't come right away after that, it meant Kayak was carefully choosing her words of rejection.
That was the refusal pattern Da-hee had pieced together from experience, which was why she'd frantically tacked on that extra line like someone grabbing at straws.
"Did she want to make a wish?"
Had the promise of a granted wish been what reeled her in? After turning down every other invitation with some polite deflection, she'd said yes almost immediately — it was almost comical.
Maybe, despite how she looked, she was the type who liked fortune-telling and reading horoscopes. The way she'd reacted so instantly to talk of wishes made it not entirely unlikely. Da-hee made a mental note of today's successful approach.
Maybe I should try that angle next time…
But that was a problem for later. Right now Da-hee was in an excellent mood simply from having locked in plans with Kayak.
Humming to herself, she opened her wardrobe — to pick out what she'd wear tomorrow.