I'm Pretty, Aren't I? (Photo Attached)
The next day was Saturday.
The weekend had arrived. The funny part was that a weekend didn't mean I got to rest. Starting Monday, I was going to be living at JO Entertainment for a while, which meant I had a small move to get through.
"Nngh! Guess that means I'm going to work today."
Weekend or not, sitting around wasn't an option. When I'd signed the contract yesterday, they'd given me permission to keep the weekend part-time job. The group hadn't even been decided yet—they hadn't assembled an idol team at all—and they said it would take half a year at the earliest.
"I'll be heading out now."
"Sweetheart, watch for cars. And if some weirdo tries to talk to you, don't you dare play along. You scream. Immediately."
"Yes, I know."
Ji Hyuna caught me on my way out the door, her voice packed with worry. I already knew all of this. I wasn't a toddler. I wasn't about to wander off with a stranger.
"I'll just work my shift and come straight home. I'm leaving now."
I pulled on my shoes and stepped outside.
The restaurant was only about five hundred meters from the house. At my old walking speed, that stretch had taken more than thirty minutes, but with my stamina up where it was now, I ought to be able to do it faster.
That said—just because my stamina had jumped from 1 to 10, a clean tenfold increase, did not mean I actually had ten times the endurance.
Should I say it only went up by a decimal point or something?
If I wanted to move the way I actually wanted to move, I needed my stamina at 50 at the very least. Maybe higher.
I was still turning that over when I reached the restaurant. A glance at the watch on my wrist said twenty-five minutes.
Faster than before. Still not enough.
I needed to knock out more achievements and stack as much stamina as I could. Idol work, acting—either way, I had to be able to clear the baseline. An idol who collapsed mid-stage? An actress who folded on set? Let a story like that get out even once, and nobody anywhere would want to call me.
"Hello."
I opened the door and stepped inside.
—Creeeak.
It was still break time, so the dining room was deserted, not a single customer in sight. The only sound was the steady chop of a knife from the kitchen.
"Jiwoo, you're here? Early again today?"
From the back of the kitchen, the owner greeted me in his apron, wearing that same happy smile he always did. Every time I came in, he was the one who looked the most pleased to see me.
And then—
"Oh, welcome... Jiwoo..."
The voice from beside me nearly made me jump out of my skin.
"Huh—unnie...? Since when...?"
I hadn't seen Lee Boram when I'd looked around the dining room. Where had she even been hiding? I pressed a hand to my startled heart and managed a greeting.
"Unnie, hello. You came in early today."
"Uh... yeah. The thing I was working on lately... wrapped up... so I woke up early... came in early..."
"Did you?"
Last week, Lee Boram had been a walking wreck. She hadn't actually botched anything with the customers, but the owner and I had spent the whole shift on edge, waiting for her to do something catastrophic.
Looks like she actually slept this time. Her face looks better.
Break was almost over. Before it ended, I wiped down the dishes with a dry towel and mapped out my routes for the day.
Time slipped by, and customers began to trickle in one by one.
Except...
—Side-eye. Side-eye.
Every single person who walked in stared straight at me. If our eyes met, they flinched and jerked their gaze away.
It was hard to file them under "ordinary customers."
"Jiwoo? There's not... something going on... is there? If there is... tell me... I-I'll take care of everything..."
Lee Boram grabbed my hand and turned a vicious look on the dining room. The air around her said she might actually stab someone, and it wouldn't have been surprising. I hurried to stop her.
"Unnie! Please calm down. Nothing's even happened yet. I just happen to be that pretty."
I decided to lean all the way into shameless. It was mortifying—face-burning, soul-cringing mortifying—but I kept my expression carefully even while, on the inside, I kicked the blankets hard enough to achieve lift-off.
AAAAAAAH! What am I saying! You lunatic! You insane bastard! I am not in my right mind!! Die! Die right this second!!
My insides were a flipped-over mess. My face, meanwhile, wore an iron mask and a sweet little smile.
This was the posture of a former salesman. No matter how wretched the situation, you kept the smile on. That was Sales 101.
Which was when—
"As expected... someone like J-Jiwoo... can say that... yeah... that's right. Okay. Then I'll calm down like you said... but if anything happens, you tell me right away."
Uh. What was she saying? She wasn't supposed to agree with that. I'd tossed it out as a joke to laugh the whole thing off, and she was taking it dead seriously, which only made it worse. I wanted to vanish on the spot. I covered my face with both hands.
Get a grip, Lee Jiwoo. You need to equip the world's finest shamelessness right now. If you don't, it won't just be today—you'll never be able to look Lee Boram in the face again. I repeated it like a hypnotic suggestion until the composure came back.
"Unnie. We should get to work. That's the owner's happy screaming you hear out there."
It really was. Beyond the break room, a customer rush was coming in like a flood, and the owner's delighted yelps were already calling for us.
Break wasn't officially over. We could have sat a little longer. But looking good at moments like this was how you got the owner to like you more.
"Okay. If that's what you're saying. I... struggle in front of people, but I'll try."
"Great! Then let's go work!"
I gave Lee Boram a gentle push between the shoulders and stepped out of the break room.
The instant we did, every gaze in the dining room swung toward me in unison. Yeah. These people definitely had business with me.
At first I'd written it off as my imagination. They were just... looking because of my, well, my pretty face. Seeing them now, that wasn't all it was.
"Um... excuse me? Did you need to order?"
I approached the customer who'd arrived first and spoke up. For all I knew they genuinely wanted to order and were just too introverted to flag anyone down.
Things did not proceed according to that theory.
"Ah... this is who I am. You're Jiwoo, the one who auditioned for the drama yesterday... aren't you?"
"...And how exactly did you know I'd be here."
I took the business card in a daze. I'd only been working this job for about a month—fewer than ten shifts, total. And they'd already figured out I was here?
The audition had been yesterday.
The speed of it was unreal. I raised my guard and kept my voice even.
"I'm sorry, but I'm not interested in other agencies. And coming all the way to my part-time job without even tasting the food properly... I'm sorry, but I think that's a nuisance. There are other customers here as well."
"Ah, you don't need to worry about that. Everyone who came in at this hour is probably someone like me."
The agency official's words made my head go blank for a second.
I'd felt something was off from the start. None of them had so much as glanced at the food. They'd just been staring at me—and more than a few had pulled out notebooks or tablets and started writing.
"Even so, we do get actual customers. If you have business with me, I'd appreciate it if you said it directly."
I never once dropped the service smile.
"Then I'll be blunt. Will you give us the role of Kang Sora?"
".....Excuse me?"
"Right now, from the drama staff to every agency involved, the only thing anyone is talking about is you. A newcomer nobody's even seen—well, you can hardly call her a newcomer—walks in and snatches a lead-level part. The mood out there is pretty ugly."
A l-lead-level... role? Nobody had said that to me. I'd asked Kang Wonseong what kind of part it was. He'd told me it was extra-level. Nothing important.
I'm sure he said the shoot would be a week at most.
I blinked. Getting blindsided once or twice in a single day was apparently not enough. At this rate I wasn't going to have a back of the head left. I arranged my face into something that said I'd known all along and continued, calm as I could manage.
"So if I give up Kang Sora, you're planning to put one of your own actors in the part?"
"That's right. Our actors are already veterans with over ten years behind them. For someone like you, Jiwoo, who hasn't even properly learned to act once... I think the role is too heavy. If you step aside, we'll make sure you're compensated handsomely."
Looking around, it wasn't just this man. The other agency people wore the same expression: they all wanted me nowhere near Kang Sora. I still hadn't been told a thing.
"I understand what you're asking. I'll speak with Director Kang Wonseong first, and we can talk after that. This is a restaurant, so I'd like you to focus on the food."
"...Yes. If that's how you want to handle it. Understood for now."
He looked like he didn't quite follow, but he nodded and finally started eating.
Only then did the stares peel off me. I let out a small breath and slipped quickly into the kitchen.
"I'm sorry, boss. Those customers... I think they came because of me."
"Nah, it's fine. We've already had plenty of people coming in just to look at you."
"....What? What do you mean?"
The owner pulled a phone from his apron, tapped it a few times, and held it out.
"Take a look at that. I only found out recently myself. Photo went up three weeks ago."
The screen was open to a social media post.
I scrolled fast, taking in the rest. The post was exactly what it sounded like: a family dinner, a pretty part-timer, a confession that died on the vine because a face like that couldn't possibly belong to someone single. An ironic little tragedy, complete with a photo that had been lightly mosaicked.
"When did someone even take this..."
Mosaic or not, the face underneath it was impossible to hide. No matter how you looked at it, the girl in the picture was me.
"Check the comments under it too."
I did as the owner said.
Every last comment was about me. The restaurant's address was sitting there in ugly, exhaustive detail—and so was the fact that I only came in on weekends, written out with zero shame.
"No wonder. I kept thinking the weekend crowd had gotten weirdly big since last week. They must've been coming to see you."
"Ha... haha... is that so?"
An awkward laugh was all I had. This had been happening without me knowing a thing? I'd wondered how the agency people had found me so fast. Of course there was a reason. There was always a reason.
"You're okay, right?"
The owner's voice was all gentleness and worry as he gave my shoulder a light pat. I put on my best I'm-fine face.
"Yes. I'm okay. I figured it would turn out like this someday. I'll get back to work, then."
I was going to have to tell the agency about this.