The Next Step (4)
I gave CEO Baek Junyeong a rough rundown of the concept I'd sketched out.
It was going to take a considerable amount of JYB's manpower, but the moment I reminded him of the impact we'd gotten from recreating that flash mob in a single drama scene, he agreed without hesitation.
Still, there turned out to be more details to iron out than I'd expected, and the conversation ate up a fair amount of time.
Well… it was Saturday, so it didn't really matter. But walking the corridors of JYB headquarters alone on a weekend night was, without a doubt, something eerie.
Celebrities take weekends off too, obviously. Which meant the building had far fewer people moving through it than on a weekday—and at night, even fewer still. That was exactly why I, an outsider, always ended up heading home so late.
Anyway. Long preamble aside, the conclusion was simple: it was scary.
Not that I believed in ghosts. It was just the dark atmosphere getting to me. And even if one did appear right in front of me, I knew the single strongest exorcism chant in existence, so I wasn't worried.
How exactly did you manage to fix it to the horizontal coordinate system?
One line like that and any ghost within earshot would call me a lunatic and bolt.
But then…
Screech— creak—
A grating noise suddenly scraped against my ears.
Just as I thought I might finally get to use the horizontal-coordinate-system chant, a faint light leaking from that direction caught my eye.
That way was definitely toward the dance practice rooms…
The moment I placed it, I understood what the irritating sound had been. Friction against the floor. The occasional heavy thud of something striking down. If someone was practicing choreography, every question about the noise resolved itself at once.
Hold on—who would be practicing choreography this late on a weekend night?
According to CEO Baek Junyeong, practice at this hour was basically forbidden unless you were right on the verge of debut.
Curiosity pulled me all the way to the practice room door. And through the gap, what I saw was…
"Hah…"
I Dahye, breathing hard, pushing through her choreography.
…Except something about her looked off.
I wasn't exactly an expert on dance, but her movements felt rushed. Her eyes had lost their focus, and she kept dancing even though her stamina was clearly spent—so precarious it looked like she might collapse at any second.
What on earth was chasing her hard enough to put her in that state?
One thing was certain. The I Dahye I'd first seen on Choice 30—the one who had shone so brightly on that stage—was nowhere in that room.
"What are you doing here?"
"Kyaaah!"
For some reason, the sight of me in the practice room made Dahye's whole body start trembling.
What? Why did I suddenly feel like the criminal here?
This was a little earlier.
Before filming on Fly High began, the idols and Seol Soyoung gathered in one place for the first time to lock in formations and blocking.
"Wow~ Hello! I'm Kang Haneul from Green Day!"
The first person bold enough to approach Seol Soyoung, who had been standing off by herself, was Kang Haneul.
"Ah. Hello."
"We're probably going to run into each other a lot for the drama, so if it's not too forward of me, could I maybe get your number…"
"If anything comes up, please contact the production company."
Soyoung shut him down with an iron wall of cold indifference. Kang Haneul, devastated that his handsome face had scored exactly zero points, retreated to a corner and quietly shed a tear.
Baek Junyeong, who had been watching the whole thing, had a few choice words for him.
"Haneul~ Let's surrender one of your vacation days."
"What?! Why?"
While Kang Haneul protested the injustice, the other idols flushed with secondhand embarrassment, as if they'd already shown Soyoung their worst possible first impression.
A little later, under that awkward atmosphere, they began their first choreography practice with Baek Junyeong and Seol Soyoung at the center.
And every idol in that room—Baek Junyeong excluded—was stunned by Soyoung's dancing.
Are those even human arms and legs?
That was what they thought, privately. She was still so unfamiliar with the choreography that she was actively getting in the other members' way.
"CEO."
"What."
"While we've been killing ourselves practicing our acting, have you just been goofing off?"
"You wanna die? I've been marking her full-time for weeks just to get her to this level. I'm actually proud of Soyoung. She's grown this much already—heh heh heh…"
"Ah…"
Faced with Baek Junyeong's completely unfiltered look of pride, the idols couldn't bring themselves to say another word.
"But you guys are going to end up respecting Soyoung soon enough, too."
At the time, none of them understood what he meant by that last remark.
But after one day, two days, three days of matching breath with Seol Soyoung, they finally understood exactly what Baek Junyeong had been talking about.
"…Hah. Hah. Does she seriously never get tired?"
I Dahye stared at Soyoung with a look of pure exhaustion.
"Ugh— I almost actually threw up just now…"
Looking around, she could see her seniors gasping just as hard as she was.
She'd always been confident that when it came to grit and hard work, she wouldn't lose to anyone…
Watching Soyoung still taking coaching from Baek Junyeong, Dahye wondered.
What was the reason?
What let her keep moving even through the rest periods she'd been given?
If it were just good stamina, Dahye could have understood that a hundred times over. But whatever kept Soyoung going wasn't stamina.
It was desperation.
Dahye could feel it in the way Soyoung approached every step of the dance. And as if that desperation were being answered, Soyoung's dancing improved little by little—slowly, steadily, like a child learning to walk.
Watching it quietly made something uneasy twist in Dahye's chest.
And then there was this.
"Whoa. Her tone is insane."
"Is Soyoung secretly a singer?"
The first time they heard her sing—during the recording of the group track—it was pure shock.
Talent mattered everywhere, but in music it mattered especially. At the same time, talent was the device that delivered a cruel reality check to ordinary people.
Even so, Dahye had believed the world was fair. She'd believed that someone who worked hard enough could surpass a genius.
…She really had been living on pure, naive imagination, hadn't she.
Dahye understood it now. When it came to singing, for every one thing she learned, Soyoung grasped ten—and the moment Dahye barely caught up to ten, Soyoung would already have pulled ahead to a hundred.
No talent for dance? With that kind of persistence and effort as a talent of its own, dance or anything else, she would eventually pull it off.
Honestly, watching her made Dahye reflect a little on herself, too.
Embarrassingly enough, she had never thrown herself into anything with that level of desperation.
From the moment that thought took hold, Dahye started pushing herself as if something were chasing her.
Dance, singing, everything—her practice hours ballooned, and she even snuck in the weekend sessions that were supposed to be off-limits.
"What are you doing here?"
"Kyaaah!"
And that was how Eunwoo eventually caught her by chance.
There was no such thing as an eternal secret in this world. In a way, it had been inevitable.
I looked at the trembling Dahye and asked,
"Are you cold? That's weird—you're sweating that much."
"I-I'm so sorry! I'll clean up right away and head home!"
I was genuinely worried about her, and she just bowed at the waist and started apologizing out of nowhere.
Hmm. She was probably freaking out because she'd broken the rule against using the practice rooms on weekends… but why apologize to me, an outsider?
"Well, you're the future CEO of JYB, aren't you? Of course I thought you'd scold me…"
"Ah."
Right. Thanks to someone running their mouth, Dahye thought I was the heir to JYB.
In this situation, though, that actually worked in my favor. Since things had already gone this far, I decided to lean all the way into the JYB-successor act in front of her until the truth came out.
"If a single 'I'm sorry' were enough to erase a crime, why would we need police? Why would laws even exist?"
"…Excuse me?"
"You know what you just did is a prohibited offense at JYB, right? Follow the manual and it's more than enough grounds for dismissal."
"Th-that absolutely can't happen!"
Dahye shook her head, refusing to accept reality.
I stepped right up to her face and smiled my friendliest smile.
"Whether it can or can't isn't for you to decide, Dahye. That's for me—the heir to JYB—to decide. Have you fully grasped your position now?"
Dahye swallowed hard. Judging by her eyes alone, she looked like a herbivore staring down a predator.
Carefully, she asked,
"What do you want from me?"
"Well. If you want me to keep my mouth shut, you'd have to show some serious sincerity… but just this once, I'll let you off a little lightly."
"Lightly?"
A flicker of hope lit in her eyes. I said something that might answer it.
"Yes. How about we take a moment—JYB's heir and a trainee—to be honest with each other?"
But for some reason…
The second those words left my mouth, a look of pure contempt locked onto me.
Hey. Hey.
You're not thinking something completely different, are you?
"That's the worst. Just fire me instead!"
Yeah… she'd definitely gotten the wrong idea.
I'd literally just meant she should answer my questions honestly, like a counseling session.
"C-counseling?"
The moment I scrambled to clarify, her pale cheeks flushed scarlet.
Just what kind of delusion had she been spinning to react like that?
Curiosity got the better of me, so I asked.
"But why did you call me the worst just now?"
"Kyaaah! Forget what I said earlier! Absolutely! Never remember it!"
"That's not really up to me…"
That was when Dahye's expression went ice-cold. She walked over to the corner of the practice room and came back with something in her hands.
"I said forget it. If you really can't, I'll help you."
I stared at the cleaning mop she was gripping like a baseball bat and completely lost the ability to speak.
Uh…
I had no idea how she planned to erase my memories with that thing, but maybe she could put it down first so we could talk…?