The Shackles Come Undone
The shackles had come undone.
"Oh Yu-jin — that would be YJ Entertainment CEO Oh Dong-seok's daughter, correct?"
The principal asked, flipping through the application files.
"Yes, that's right."
"She's been acting since she was little, and she's applying to the Practical Dance Department? Not the Performing Arts Department?"
"Hmm, I really couldn't say…."
"As for Byun Ha-jin, he quit acting after kindergarten. Hold on… Ah, the TTN kid."
Ten years had passed, but the commercial had been famous enough that the principal still remembered it.
"Beyond that, he played the child role in one of Director Kim Si-woon's films, and his acting back then left a deep impression on me."
"A Kim Si-woon film, you say…."
Confession of a Pianist. It came out in 2003 — if you haven't seen it, you should. You'll understand then why I have such high hopes for Ha-jin."
"If he's that talented, why did he stay away from acting for ten years?"
"That's what I'd like to know. I fully intend to ask him at the practical audition."
"Ha-jin, you're really not thinking of going pro?"
I was packing my bag after training when the gym director came over and asked.
Ten years of looking at the same face meant the gym director felt less like a coach and more like an uncle to me.
"Think it over. A face like that with a body like this stepping into the ring? People would lose their minds. The idol of the MMA world… what do you think? Tempting, right?"
"I told you before. I'm going back to what I gave up."
"Acting, you mean? You did that back in kindergarten, didn't you? Why pick it up again after ten years of not touching it?"
"I didn't quit — I couldn't do it. There were circumstances beyond my control. But I think I can do it again now."
"Just like that?"
"Yes. That's just how it worked out."
I'd taken up MMA to overcome the aftereffects of my emotional acting, yet somehow, absurdly, the benefit had come back in middle school instead.
Once you hit middle school, kids start clustering into groups, and a hierarchy takes shape.
And more often than not, the currency of that hierarchy was fists.
"You little punk. You think a pretty face gets you everything? Step outside!"
When a new semester began, the kids who threw their weight around suddenly got busy.
They had to sort out the pecking order and challenge for class boss or grade boss.
To boys like that, I was a thorn in their side.
"I swear, I can never tell what that guy is thinking."
Unlike elementary school, where we all roughhoused together, middle schoolers scattered and formed their own cliques.
I couldn't fit into any of them and became a loner.
It wasn't that I wanted to be — the other kids simply couldn't bring themselves to come near me.
I was already over 170 centimeters tall, and after seven years of martial arts training, even a casual glance showed a body that was solid as a rock.
On top of that, I had a historically handsome face — an idol to the girls, and to the boys, a creature from an entirely different taxonomic order.
With all that attention converging on me, the punks posturing in the background got overshadowed and vanished from view entirely.
I'd stolen every scrap of the attention that was supposed to be theirs.
"Have you seen Ha-jin? There's literally light coming off him. How is a middle schooler's face even like that?"
The teachers were no different.
A few boys swaggered up to challenge me, but the result was always the same.
"Heard that punk Do-hoon from Class 4 got dropped in two punches yesterday."
"I heard he threw up after. Total chaos."
"Look at Ha-jin's forearms. How many years has he been doing martial arts?"
Rumor only swells as it passes from mouth to mouth.
Two punches might have been an exaggeration, but very few could last long against my fist.
I followed the gym director's advice to the letter, and within a month, not a single kid dared lay a hand on me.
"Teacher, I'm here."
"Good. I have to head to the broadcasting station later, so practice on your own today."
"Yes, sir."
Like the gym, I'd been coming here for over ten years, and it felt like a second home.
It had started as a tiny space with only a few practice rooms, but in a decade it had grown into a fairly large acting academy spanning three floors.
Later it would move into its own building — compared to that, this place would seem small too, I suppose.
It was still early, so I was the only one in the practice room.
Hold on. The script I was planning to look at today….
Ever since my blank period began, no script could pull me in the way it once had.
It felt almost as if my Future Sight were saying, the conditions have been met, so let's lift your handicap — the handicap of my emotional-acting aftereffects.
From that point on, I could pick up any script I wanted and practice to my heart's content.
My teacher had been pleased too, saying my external-expression acting seemed to be finally taking proper shape.
But a while ago, I'd started getting pulled into scripts again.
And in a way completely different from before.
I unfolded a script my teacher had received recently.
There was a role in it that suited me well.
Fallen dead drunk on the floor of the front porch in broad daylight — a father, once great, now ruined by liquor.
The son, home from school, stares down at him in disdain, then opens the front door.
The father, discovering his son has come home, rasps through a phlegm-choked throat:
"Don't just come in — go buy me two bottles of soju."
"You need to stop drinking. It won't bring Mom back."
"I tell you to buy, you buy. What's with all the talk? Wait. Are you disrespecting me now, just like your mother did?"
His face crimson, he hurls the soju bottle in his hand at his son.
The bottle grazes the boy's forehead and shatters against the front door.
A bead of blood wells up from the fresh gash.
The son glares at his father with an emotion too tangled to name.
Watching his mother-abandoned father rot into a wreck stirred pity.
It rankled that the man carried on like this after failing even to hold his family together.
He hated himself for being able to do nothing in the middle of it all.
And thinking of what the future might hold, he felt afraid.
The son had to perform all of these emotions with nothing but his eyes and expression — no lines at all.
A situation practically designed to swallow you whole in emotional acting.
If it had been back then, the aftereffects would have been brutal.
Now, though, I stepped into the script and watched my own performance, giving directions from the outside.
Just like in kindergarten, I wasn't the one acting — a separate, second me, detached from my body, was doing it.
Like a doppelganger, in other words.
To put it in gaming terms: before, I was the character, sprinting across the field myself. Now I was standing outside the field, controlling the character with a gamepad.
The me inside the script and the me performing the emotions had split apart.
The moment I finished the scene, the world of the script vanished as if it had never been.
Controlling my breathing, I gathered up the raw emotions that had shot out in every direction and reined them back in.
They still tangled and frayed on their own, but no longer to the point where I couldn't keep my body upright, the way it had been in kindergarten.
So this means… time to start the engine?
It had to be Future Sight's signal that my blank period was over.
Aftereffects at this level were more than bearable.
It wasn't just the infuriating Kang Ji-hoon, either — Hong Jung-woo sunbae was sweeping across both television and the silver screen.
Those two had sprinted at full throttle for ten years while I hadn't even left the starting line.
But now the shackles of my aftereffects had come undone, too.
For every step they ran, all I had to do was strap on wings and fly.
Wings called Future Sight.
Checking my phone, I found a flood of messages.
About time she showed up.
The practice room door flung open hard enough to break off its hinges.
"BYUN HA-JIN!!"
There she was.
"Is it really that hard to text me when you're coming here?!"
Yu-jin was in full fury mode.
Even the way she glared at me with narrowed, blazing eyes while huffing and puffing was beautiful.
Twelve years ago she'd been cute; she'd passed through pretty, and now she was in glorious, full-throttle beautiful.
A feminine grace flowing along elegant curves, reaching its peak in those vivid, sculpted features.
By her own account, if ten people passed her on the street, twelve of them would turn around for a second look.
"What, you think I'd be anywhere but here at this hour? You could've just come straight up."
"Then why did you leave my texts on read?! Why is it always me who has to check up on you!"
"I was in the middle of practicing. You know I can't hear anything when I'm reading a script."
"Unbelievable. Uselessly good at focusing, that's you. It's not like you even need the practice."
She snorted, then opened the mini-fridge and pulled out a drink.
"Have you seen this?"
She held up her phone and showed me the screen.
Performing Arts Department
1. Free Acting (self-prepared): within 1 min 30 sec (50 pts)
2. Special Talent: within 1 min (50 pts — dance, vocals, instrument, etc.)
Practical Dance Department
Major Dance: within 1 min 30 sec (100 pts)
— Street dance styles (old school, new school)
— Choreography (K-pop and all original routines)
— Classical dance (contemporary, Korean traditional, ballet) etc.
All dance styles accepted.
"It's the practical exam notice. I saw it when it went up."
"You've only been prepping your free acting. What are you going to do about the special talent?"
Last year and the year before, they'd only evaluated free acting, so I'd assumed this year would be the same.
A special talent, out of nowhere? What was this, a talent show?
"Well, there's still time. I'll look for something I can pull off. Worst case, there's always the piano."
Yu-jin knew better than anyone what kind of magic I could work with a piano.
Skill aside, my knack for bewitching an audience was second to none.
"The acceptance rate for the Performing Arts Department is nine to one. Half measures won't cut it."
Come to think of it, I couldn't name a single applicant to this school who couldn't play an instrument.
And there was no guarantee that bewitching the judges would earn high marks.
The special talent I'd brushed off as trivial had just become my biggest headache.