Karaoke
I went out again tonight.
There was no grand plan to exercise. Nothing like that. It was a quiet hour, with hardly anyone around, and that alone put me at ease. I didn't need a destination. Walking until I felt like turning back was enough.
A shame, though—I never saw the gray cat from my first walk.
I stepped outside without much thought and took a route much like last time.
Step. Step.
A little farther on, a coin karaoke place came into view. I stopped in front of the entrance.
"……."
Last time I'd hesitated a moment and walked right past. I leaned in and peered through the glass. No one inside.
I couldn't even remember the last time I'd been to karaoke. Middle school, probably—back before I became a girl.
"Whatever."
I went in.
"The one in the very back... there."
I stepped into the room and shut the door, and the singing drifting down the hall fell away. I paid and dropped onto the sofa. Only then did it hit me that I hadn't sung once since becoming a girl. I barely talked in the first place. There was almost never a reason to hear my own voice drawn out for any length of time—I never turned my mic on in DiscoChat, and at home a few muttered words to myself were the extent of it.
So what was I supposed to sing.
Oh. Maybe that one.
I typed a familiar title into the search bar.
I punched in the queue number and hit start. A moment later, a familiar intro spilled out of the speakers.
"It's all in the mood— I—"
I got through the first line, then my mouth shut on its own.
"...What?"
I hadn't stopped because I was off-key. The voice coming back through the mic was just unfamiliar. Maybe because it was the first time I'd ever sung in a girl's voice. And there was another reason. Before, even a slightly high note meant forcing my throat. Now it climbed more easily than I'd expected.
"...No way. Reborn, and Now I'm a Singing Genius?"
I queued the song again. This time I didn't stop halfway. I sang it all the way through.
When it ended, a score appeared at the bottom of the screen.
"What even is this."
So I wasn't a singing genius after all. Still, I'd sung it well. If anyone else had been listening they might have asked what I thought I was doing, bragging about a machine score—but there was no one here but me. If I said I was good, then I was good.
"...Ahem."
Next song.
This time I tried something I never would have sung before: a song with a female vocal. The high parts rose more naturally than I'd expected. It wasn't as if my skill had suddenly become extraordinary. Even so, the voice itself was nice to listen to.
"This one's fine too."
I queued whatever came to mind, from songs I used to play all the time to anime themes. At first I'd wondered how I was supposed to fill a whole hour by myself. When I came back to myself, the time left in the corner of the screen was almost gone.
"Already?"
I thought about it for a second, then paid for more time.
Coming to karaoke alone wasn't as bad as I'd thought. No one was listening, so if I sang badly there was no one to care. More than anything, it was secretly fun finding out how each song sounded in this voice.
"Should queue this one too."
Just then, the phone I'd left on the table buzzed. It was ☆.
My fingers paused.
"……."
Rude.
I meant to mute my notifications before another reply could come in, but this time a DM arrived from someone else.
This time I really did mute my notifications, and I picked the mic back up.
I sang a few more songs, then leaned back on the sofa and rested. When I opened DiscoChat, a fair number of people were gathered in the gallery server's voice channel.
"Rel again."
I didn't play Rel, but it was famous enough that I had a rough idea what kind of game it was. A friend had told me to try it once, and I'd even installed it. A few bot matches later it wasn't fun, so I'd abandoned it and never looked back.
In the server chat, though, the Rel talk was in full swing.
I got the gist. I also had absolutely nothing to say to any of it.
Well... we didn't have to play every game together. And right now, this was a lot more fun than Rel.
I closed DiscoChat and queued the next song.
"Just thirty more minutes."
Even after I left the karaoke place, I didn't head straight home.
"Agh, it's cold."
I walked slowly through alleys that had grown more familiar since my first night out. Even if I took a wrong turn now and then, opening the map on my phone was enough. I took a few photos along the way—a bench under a streetlight, the sign of a shop that had already closed.
In front of a convenience store, a cat I'd never seen before was curled up tight. Not the one from last time.
Click.
I got the photo before it could run, and sent it to ☆.
I checked the photo again. I hadn't been thinking about composition at all.
I walked a little farther, and another message came in.
Starstagram. The social app where people posted photos and short videos. I didn't have an account. In middle school and high school I'd been too busy studying to see the point, and while I was repeating the entrance exam, even less so.
I turned the screen off, and my face floated faintly across the black glass.
Pretty—no. Not just pretty. Absurdly pretty.
If I posted a selfie on Starstagram, I'd probably get a fair amount of attention. But linking the nickname I used now, Sayu, to my face was an entirely different problem.
"Is it...?"
I walked the streets a while longer after that, then went home.
I'd gone out because I had nothing to do, and somehow I'd even ended up at karaoke by myself. Bit by bit, I seemed to be looking for ways to spend time alone.
When I checked DiscoChat, the people who'd been playing Rel were still gathered in the voice channel. Limit and ☆ were there too, of course. I hesitated, then joined.
"Oh, Sayu, you're here. Did you get home?"
In the voice channel, the Rel talk went on. Who had died how many times. Who had walked into some ridiculous spot in the last teamfight. I could more or less follow the words. I still didn't understand what was funny about any of it.
I left the chat open and sat there for a while.
"You don't play Rel, right, Sayu?"
...Me?
I'd been staring into space. The voice calling my name snapped me back all at once. I hammered out a message at once.
The two of them, who'd been deep in Rel talk until a moment ago, closed the game like it was nothing.
Are they switching because of me...?
I didn't ask.
I launched Ebex, and an invite came from Limit. ☆ joined as well, and the three slots filled.
The match went smoothly. We wiped the squad we ran into early and moved into the next ring. I was digging through a nearby bin for ammo when ☆ spoke up.
"Oh, right. They're coming this week."
"I told you on Tuesday. Juyeon."
A conversation only the two of them understood. I was picking up loot, and curiosity got the better of me, so I typed.
"Oh, there's someone we both know."
"The one I mentioned before."
The name rang a faint bell. ☆ paused.
"Uh... did I talk about them while you were around, Sayu?"
"Guess not? Sorry for going on about someone you don't know."
How was talking about someone they knew supposed to be wrong.
I tried to focus on the game again, but my thoughts drifted somewhere else.
Someone they knew. Something from before. Lately I seemed to hear a lot of stories I wasn't part of. The two of them had known each other far longer than they'd known me, so of course it was natural. I was the one who'd shown up in the middle, and only recently. Still, it had only been a few weeks, but I'd thought we'd gotten pretty close...
"……."
"...Ah."
I looked at the map. Their characters were already standing way up ahead. Only mine had stopped, far behind.
I put my hands back on the keyboard and played.
...It was nothing. I'd just spaced out in the middle of a game.
We played a few more matches after that, but maybe because I'd been out walking, I got tired earlier than usual.
"Already?"
"Good night, Sayu."
I left the voice channel and lay down on the bed, and a private message came in from ☆.
So she saw that.
The chat ended there.
☆ had noticed even that—how I'd gone quiet for a moment. Earlier, the second I said I didn't play Rel, they'd switched the game to Ebex for me. She always reached out first. She kept looking after me.
I knew all of that. So what more was I hoping for?
What had I actually wanted.
I turned it over for a moment, and no answer came. Maybe I'd just been a little bored lately. They had plenty of stories that didn't include me, and they'd spent a while talking about a game I didn't play. That was all.
Then something I'd heard earlier came back to me.
"Right. We talked about Starstagram."
Since it was on my mind, I installed the app. The download finished, I tapped the icon, and a sign-up screen appeared.
"What do I use for a name."
Sayu was an automatic no. I had no intention of connecting the name I used on Cheongram Gallery and DiscoChat to Starstagram.
I thought about it, then typed in a plain enough English nickname.
July 22. My birthday.
I filled in a few more details after that and skipped every suggested friend. A moment later, a brand-new account with nothing on it existed.
"Nothing here."
At first I thought about posting the cat photo I'd taken earlier. I got as far as the photo picker, then backed out. If I was going to do it, I wanted something else for the first post.
What should I upload...
I glanced around my room, and one idea sent me into the bathroom.
In the bathroom mirror stood a white-haired girl in a gray hoodie, phone in hand. I opened the camera and looked at the screen. I smoothed my hair a little with my hand, then lifted the phone in front of my face.
Click.
I checked the photo.
A mirror shot, the lower half of my face hidden behind the phone, only my eyes and hair showing.
"Came out nice."
Well. Of course it did.
I was only wearing a gray hoodie, and still the white hair falling past my waist and those silver eyes stood out. I looked at the photo a little longer.
"Yeah. Pretty."
This was good enough to post. I hit create, selected the photo, and skipped any filter. At the caption box I hesitated a moment, then put in nothing but tags.
#selfie #whitehair
I pressed upload, and for the first time a single photo existed on my account.
"...So now what."
I closed Starstagram and browsed Cheongram Gallery and DiscoChat. About ten minutes later, I opened Starstagram again.
"What?"
There was a comment, too.
I stared at the screen for a while. The corner of my mouth lifted on its own.
"...Heh."