※ Episode 2: She's Fine, Actually?
This is what happened after Cheon Cheri tried to take her own life right in front of my eyes.
It had been a genuinely perilous moment, but by the narrowest of margins, CPR brought Cheon Cheri back from the brink.
The moment she came to, Cheon Cheri asked me to keep the day's entire commotion a secret between the two of us, then headed home. It had happened immediately after a suicide attempt, so I honestly worried her body might be wrecked — but if she insisted she was fine, then fine it was, presumably. Besides, even if she did die later on, it would be somewhere I wasn't, and my status would quietly drop from "person present at the scene" to a mere "last witness from school."
"Oppa? Isn't it a little sad to be this low-energy with something good coming up?"
When I kept my mouth firmly shut even after getting home, my little sister Bada worried over me.
"Cheon Cheri…"
Would Bada ever believe that the idol Cheon Cheri had tried to kill herself in our school classroom?
"Cheon Cheri? Oppa, I thought you said you didn't even like her? A man saying two different things with one mouth, honestly."
Bada knew perfectly well that I disliked idols in general — and my own classmate Cheon Cheri in particular — so she needled me about why my story kept changing.
"Cheon Cheri will get married someday too, right?"
Enough moping like some delicate sweetheart — time to man up and play it cool. Among everything Cheon Cheri had said that day, one word had lodged itself in my mind — marriage… — so I'd asked on the hunch that she might be shouldering that weighty responsibility.
"Obviously she will? Unless she's come out and said she'll never marry… From what I've heard, most of them end up marrying businessmen or fellow celebrities."
"She'd only be marrying because she truly wants to, right? Cheon Cheri too…"
"Wouldn't she be even freer than her idol days — back when she had to sing in makeup and outfits her agency picked out for her?"
Was Bada right about that? An idol's marriage might, if anything, buy her a better life than her active years ever did — so there was no point worrying over celebrities. That was Bada's ruling, anyway.
But Cheon Cheri was…
"I'm getting married… I don't want to get married… If I get married, I might die…"
How was I supposed to interpret Cheon Cheri's I-don't-want-to-get-married? Her marriage had been decided while she was still young — could the suicide attempt have been a kind of performance, her way of defying the adults running her family's affairs?
She clearly had her reasons, but with things having turned out this way, prying felt unseemly, and all I could do was hold my tongue.
"Something's off about you… Don't tell me, Oppa…"
Bada had apparently noticed that I'd done nothing but talk about Cheon Cheri for a while now, and she pressed her index finger to her temple like some scholar deep in thought.
"You want the person you marry to resemble Cheon Cheri, don't you?"
And where had that theory come from? Bada was probing, ever so casually, whether what I really wanted was to marry Cheon Cheri herself — or, failing that, someone who looked just like her.
"…Even if it's not Cheon Cheri herself, every man dreams of marrying a beautiful woman. You know that much."
The only reason I wasn't interested in Cheon Cheri was that she was an idol — her looks, I would freely concede. If she'd been a childhood friend of mine, just an ordinary student, I might even have made a fool of myself trying to win her heart.
"Hahaha… Right… You really are honest, Oppa…"
I couldn't exactly call myself handsome either, but I did want the person I married to be reasonably easy on the eyes. If she had even idol-grade looks like Cheon Cheri's, I was confident I could reshape myself into someone worthy of her attention.
Hearing myself say it, I sounded like a total simp. Which was rich, considering my personality had nothing in common with a simp's.
Dinner, a bath, and then I went to bed early. Sleep kept spitting me back out every hour so I could check the entertainment news. Mercifully, right up until seven in the morning, not a single report of Cheon Cheri's death went up.
Part of me was praying she would stay alive — and the suicide attempt alone was driving me, of all people, half out of my mind.
"Have you all had a chance to listen to the new song I released a while back?"
"Of course I have."
"Yay! I'm so glad! I'm signing autographs for our class only, so if you bring an album or some merch sometime, I'll…"
There was that immortal maxim: never worry about celebrities. Unlike me, who'd spent the night tossing and turning over dark thoughts, Cheon Cheri had strolled into school in perfect health and thrown herself into promoting her new song and an upcoming live performance. During breaks she could barely squeeze in a trip to the bathroom before she was back to signing autographs and working the crowd. It was almost superhuman.
So it really had been a misunderstanding all along…
Privately, I let myself breathe again. Cheon Cheri was alive, for one thing, and unless this was some conspiracy-theory body double, the odds of my being implicated in abetting a suicide had dropped considerably.
Still, at the end of the day I was weak-hearted too, and the fear that Cheon Cheri might yet make a terrible choice gnawed at me the entire time. Not that this meant I could relax. I had to keep watching her like a hawk in case she tried to kill herself again out of nowhere.
"Cheon Cheri…"
Just as I had at home, there I was in the club room, muttering that name all over again. I had no clue what the real purpose behind her suicide attempt was… and even with her breathing today, there was no guarantee she'd still be breathing tomorrow…
I should have just gone straight home yesterday… God, this is going to drive me insane…
"Cheon Cheri? You mean the second-year idol?"
First Bada, and now someone else had caught me muttering that girl's name under my breath.
"Right, right~! I kept telling you it'd be wonderful to recruit her into our club, but you flat-out refused — said that was the one thing you wouldn't do, remember~?"
A girl with her hair done up in a rather distinctive style was smiling sweetly at me. She set a plate of cookies and some tea down in front of me, telling me to take it easy. The cookies were genuinely delicious. Word was she'd baked them herself, and honestly, they were professional-grade.
"Cheon Cheri's songs really are lovely. She has plenty of fans even among us third-years."
To her, the name was nothing remarkable — Cheon Cheri was famous throughout the entire school — so she simply let my muttering slide.
"And here I thought you had no interest in Cheon Cheri. You surprise me, Yongsung."
This was Senior Yujeong, a third-year in the same club as me. Her family and the club's faculty advisor were even connected by marriage. I'd first gotten to know her after starting high school, but she'd proven so dependable that somewhere along the way I'd ended up confiding even the secrets I kept hidden from everyone else. Still, she had a mischievous, teasing streak and loved to lob flustering questions my way — and in moments like these, she sometimes felt less like a senior and more like Bada's older sister, as if the two of them had been cut from the same teasing cloth.
"But today is not the day to be talking about Cheon Cheri. You have someone you're supposed to be meeting, remember."
Senior Yujeong jabbed at me with firm conviction: no matter how dazzling an idol Cheon Cheri might be, a woman was still a woman — and I'd better not so much as dream about letting my eyes wander.
"It's your first meeting with your fiancée, after all."
The bride my family had chosen for me — and today, at long last, I would meet her for the very first time. We were supposed to have met much earlier, but apparently something had come up on her family's end. By all rights, a match like this was supposed to be made back in first or second grade of elementary school, so that no one would bat an eye at the engagement — which meant that between us, not an ounce of trust had ever been built. Second year of high school was late by any measure, but the adults had urged the meeting on all the same: better now than never, if only to put faces to names.
"Must be nice, Yongsung, having someone to marry."
"It's not nice at all, Senior Yujeong."
I wasn't seeing anyone, but even so, coming face to face with the person I'd marry for the first time set my heart pounding every bit as hard as stumbling onto Cheon Cheri's secret had.
"So? What's she like?"
"I haven't received so much as a photo. I've never even seen her face."
"Then we have a crisis on our hands. You like pretty girls, don't you, Yongsung? If some homely girl walks in, you're finished, aren't you?"
"Senior. Please stop thinking of me as a simp."
"It's the truth, though, isn't it? You keep insisting you don't like Cheon Cheri, but it's plain as day that you're interested."
"…Is that so…"
"Well, have you at least heard her name? Even without a photo~"
"No… I never actually heard it…"
"Well, keeping the name under wraps isn't anything out of the ordinary for these arrangements~"
True enough — I'd been given neither her photo nor her name. But according to the elders, she was a bride who'd knock my socks off, and all I had to do was look forward to it. Since I was never much of a talker, Bada had agreed to step in on the big day, playing something like a matchmaker's assistant.
And I trusted my own eye. If she turned out to be washed-out-looking, or simply not to my taste… I had a feeling I'd be shouting "This marriage is void!" on the spot.
It even felt like she and Cheon Cheri were wrestling with the same kind of worry, which made me sympathize… and I had someone to marry, after all…
Wouldn't it be lovely if she, like me, married someone the family had vetted and lived happily ever after? The only problem was the face — I still had no idea what my bride looked like.
Don't worry, I told myself… After all, a girl with the name value of the nation's most popular idol was never going to be married off to some widower.
What was the point of agonizing over a girl who might be dead soon anyway… Cheon Cheri would look after her own life.
For now, I needed to look seriously toward the future with a fiancée whose face I had never once seen — not with an idol who had tried to kill herself. And deep down, I hoped that if my fiancée turned out to have a decent face and a passable personality, the meeting would go off without a hitch and carry us all the way to the wedding.
"I watched her try to kill herself with my own eyes! Of course I don't want to marry a girl who tries to kill herself!"
It had to be that way…