Seventeen
The boy stood on the breakwater, the rough waves crashing behind him.
I had written the story with a country boy named Haesu, who lived by the sea, as the protagonist. In every way, he was the complete opposite of Cha Jun-jae. The boy nursing a one-sided crush was pure, uninhibited, and fierce like the waves he loved. His emotions were so transparent that anyone watching him for a few days could easily see how painfully in love he was.
Cha Jun-jae, on the other hand, was like Dalos Island. The sea around Dalos Island looked deceptively shallow, only reaching up to your thighs, but the moment you underestimated it, the water deepened. The crashing waves struck not from above the surface but from below. Even people who had known him for years would find it hard to understand his true feelings. Unless you dove in, you would never know where Cha Jun-jae’s heart was flowing.
“Haesu kicks aside the clutter scattered across the room. Embarrassed, Haesu glances sideways.”
Cha Jun-jae read the screenplay in a voice as soft as a flowing river. A scene from a movie that hadn’t even been shot yet played out in my mind. I overlaid Cha Jun-jae’s face onto the deeply tanned features of Haesu. In him, I saw the image of a boy learning what first love felt like.
“I’ll clean up the dirty, messy stuff right away.”
It was the entrance scene for Su-hee, who burst into Haesu’s life like an angry wave. Su-hee, who had come from Seoul, wanted to board at the protagonist’s cheap-rent house. We were currently on the sandy beach, under a hammock. Cha Jun-jae, playing Haesu, had been introducing the single-room space when he suddenly fell silent.
“Why.”
The next line. The next direction. Cha Jun-jae, who had been reading as smoothly as water, had abruptly gone quiet. My foot, which had been tapping while I visualized the scene in my head, stopped at the same time.
“Why did you stop?”
“Why is Haesu acting like this?”
“What do you mean?”
It was a story set in the late 1970s to early 1980s. Cha Jun-jae had been reading the part where Haesu, whose stubborn parents had offered up their boarding room, was showing it to Su-hee. Instead of sounding annoyed, he looked genuinely curious, his eyes widening.
“Doesn’t Haesu feel any shame?”
“He’s seventeen. He’s at that age—hot-blooded, honest, no filter in his words.”
“But that seventeen-year-old Haesu is in love with a girl named Su-hee, right?”
“That’s true.”
“Then wouldn’t he want to hide things? That he’s the son of crude parents, that the villagers embarrass him, even his own feelings of having nothing?”
“…But that’s not his personality.”
“Were you like that at seventeen? Honest, no filter in your words?”
“……”
“I couldn’t be. I was fake. There was always a filter in everything I said.”
Cha Jun-jae was picking apart the world I had created, the characters I had designed. Even though I had explained that this was simply how the character was, he kept dragging in a different reality.
I gave up trying to convince him. I weakly snatched the screenplay from his hands. I had asked for his help, but this wasn’t the kind of meticulous nitpicking I had in mind.
“Do you pull this kind of stunt with other directors when you’re filming?”
“No.”
Cha Jun-jae answered surprisingly plainly. The gaze fixed on me had lifted its gloomy veil. I had only learned it today—Cha Jun-jae’s eyes looked different when he looked at me compared to when he looked at anything else.
“You’re not just any other director, Song Eun-dam.”
“…Then what kind of director am I?”
“My favorite director.”
Then he showed me the smile that people never tired of praising. Having ended the conversation, he turned his gaze out toward the sea. The image of the boy Haesu pouring out his love faded away. He had returned to the Cha Jun-jae I knew.
I had thought the protagonist Haesu’s charm lay in his reckless straightforwardness, his mix of shyness and honesty. He was the exact opposite of Su-hee, the woman shrouded in mystery.
Had I, at seventeen, been honest and without pretense simply because I was young? No. Back then, I was actually a much better actor than I am now. I had desperately hidden the fact that I wanted to become an actor from Cha Jun-jae. In the end, the story had spread through my best friend Ji-yeong, but still. The seventeen-year-old me was definitely more like Su-hee than Haesu. I had slyly tucked my true feelings into my back pocket and always kept a special face reserved just for Cha Jun-jae.
I folded the screenplay and set it on my stomach, then asked as if letting out a sigh.
“Cha Jun-jae. Jun-jae.”
“Yeah.”
“What could you possibly have had to lie about? You said there was always a filter in your words?”
Cha Jun-jae, who had been looking down, suddenly dropped a burst of laughter onto the ground. I had thought it was a subject he hated. But he looked at me with a rare, lively expression. The bright light spreading from his dark eyes was almost overwhelming.
“Turn off the sparkly eye effect. What’s with you? It’s just one question.”
“It’s amazing that you’re curious about me.”
I had grown used to Cha Jun-jae’s blunt, almost biting way of speaking. The feelings he had toward me were quite complicated, and though I didn’t know why, they seemed to be positive. I avoided his burdensome gaze and said,
“In my opinion, your life is perfect.”
He accepted my confident words with a faint smile.
“In what way?”
“Your parents are kind. Your family background is perfect, you’re an only child, you’re handsome, you’re tall. That alone is more than enough to live comfortably in Korea, and on top of that, you succeeded as an actor. What could you possibly lack? If I were Cha Jun-jae, I’d probably be holed up in Korea right now looking at real estate listings.”
I delivered a whole speech, even throwing in some materialistic thoughts. Cha Jun-jae didn’t look the least bit offended; instead, he seemed amused.
“So that’s how you see things.”
“Why? Are you disappointed?”
I was secretly hoping for his answer. I had consciously treated him like a comfortable friend. It was better to do it on purpose. Otherwise, I wouldn’t know how to treat Cha Jun-jae at all. He savored the word “disappointed” and slowly lowered his head. In his downcast eyes lingered a bitter emotion.
“Disappointed?”
“……”
“It’s just that kind of feeling. To me, Song Eun-dam was like an empty puzzle. Coming here and hearing the things you say feels like finding the missing puzzle pieces one by one. Fitting them together.”
He was thinking something similar to me, though different. Just as I had felt like I was swimming into the seemingly calm sea that was Cha Jun-jae to learn about the strength and waves of his life.
“Now that you’ve put them together, what do you think? Not that great, right?”
“It’s just…”
“Just what?”
He smiled without a trace of resentment at my provocative tone. He spoke in a calm voice, just like the seventeen-year-old Haesu.
“I’ve become clearer on why you hate me.”
“……”
“Song Eun-dam really is someone worth hating, Cha Jun-jae.”
I couldn’t deny that I had once wanted to join the number one Cha Jun-jae anti-fan cafe. But hearing it straight from the person himself was surprisingly stinging. More than anything, I sensed a self-deprecating tone in his words. It didn’t sound like a joke—it sounded like he genuinely disliked himself. That was the strong sense of unease I had felt ever since I dove into the sea that was Cha Jun-jae. I had thought no one could possibly hate Cha Jun-jae more than I did. But once I went inside, I found one more person.
“It’s probably not as bad as you think, Cha Jun-jae.”
Cha Jun-jae. For him to understand my disgust, my hatred—it would be impossible unless he were a bodhisattva. And I felt uncomfortable with a Cha Jun-jae who hated himself.
Cha Jun-jae had been laughing it off with a self-mocking smile when he suddenly fixed his gaze on me.
“What does that mean?”
I had jumped into Cha Jun-jae’s sea and was digging up the true feelings he didn’t want to reveal. Today, I discovered a version of myself that wanted to refute every single thing he said.
“I didn’t hate you because you were the kind of person worth hating.”
Ever since the day I decided to be honest, our once-prickly relationship had been slowly changing, step by step.
“I hated you because you shone too brightly.”
The moment I acknowledged a feeling I thought I could never reveal to the world.
“Keep helping me with the Haesu role. Thanks to you, a lot of good ideas are coming to me.”
It had freed up a considerable part of me.