Idle Talk Aside (3)
“Ah.”
The instant Toseong woke, warm sunlight was already soaking into his face, and he threw a hand up to block it.
“I’m gonna lose it…”
The hangover’s headache arrived with company. From the far side of forgetting, every shameful memory he wanted buried came down on him like a tsunami.
He’d forgotten his own age and whined at a kid years younger than him. Drunk whining, at that.
“I was out of my mind, damn it…”
The boy was still wet behind the ears. If a kid like that had looked up to Seongil, then making a request like that wasn’t really so strange.
He should have handled it more like an adult. Instead he’d gotten drunk and met it far too emotionally.
“I’ll apologize.”
And then he’d forget it.
Cheering from a distance, maybe he could manage. But with Seongil rising up in him, he didn’t think he could cheer for the boy with a clean heart.
Toseong sat up in the plush bed. The room was unfamiliar. He couldn’t remember anything after he’d blacked out, but anyone could tell this was the master bed of a family home.
“So they lent me this, too.”
Now he owed them a place to sleep. He let the climbing embarrassment out on a sigh and stepped from the room.
“Sleep well?”
Baekya, fresh from a wash and fluffy head to toe, greeted him from the living room with a sheet mask on her face.
“Well, well. Somebody’s living easy.”
She flashed him a peace sign.
Toseong trudged over and dropped straight down beside the sofa where she sat. His eyes wandered the living room. It was just the two of them.
“Where’d Tae-il go?”
“Exercise.”
“Diligent.”
“A girl took him out. The silver-haired one.”
Silver hair. Sakuya, wasn’t it? A girl who looked, to anyone’s eye, like she’d put in real training had walked Tae-il out the door, and Toseong smiled a bitter little smile.
“This is exactly what it looks like, isn’t it?”
“High probability.”
Baekya nodded hard. The mask hid her face, though embarrassment might well have had her red underneath. Even now the picture was sharp—the silver-haired girl smacking her lips like a carnivore, those violet eyes cutting and bright.
“Mingi got yanked around and still managed to get a solid hold on things. This one, though… he’s building, nice and steady, toward getting eaten alive.”
“Mm. It might not be quite like that…?”
“No? Looks different through a woman’s eyes?”
“Heh.”
Baekya laughed and slid past the question.
“Forget it.”
An answer didn’t look likely, so Toseong got up and made his slow way toward the kitchen. Whether it was the hangover or not, his head ached, and he was badly thirsty.
“Hm?”
A sticky note was on the fridge.
— Tae-il
With a wry smile, Toseong took the drink from the fridge and downed it.
“Guh…”
“Oh, right! They said they’d cook when they get back from exercising!”
“Taking a meal off them, too, is a little…”
“Give it up.”
Rolling her sleeves, Baekya announced she’d be helping as well and suddenly showed off a forearm bulge—muscle earned by actual living.
Toseong sighed and asked.
“Do you remember how many glasses we had last night?”
“Hm? After you passed out, Tae-il kept going by himself and emptied seven bottles straight.”
“For real…?”
He’d said with his own mouth that he could hold his liquor. He really hadn’t been ordinarily strong. Feeling he’d picked a pointless fight with his pride, Toseong shook his head.
“Wait, so he drank like that and still went out to exercise first thing in the morning…?”
“Yeah. He seemed fine.”
Toseong had nothing to say to that.
He envied youth. With thirty arriving the day after tomorrow, he felt it down to the bone.
Tae-il came back from his morning exercise.
“I’m home!”
The moment he peeled off the jersey plastered to him with sweat and flung it aside, Ayane shoved him in the back.
“A-Ayane?”
“Shin-chan, shower first! You stink! Ayane’ll get breakfast ready!”
“Hearing I stink out of nowhere actually wounds me…”
“Hurry!”
Ayane rushed him into the bathroom, and Sakuya slipped in beside her.
“I’ll help with the prep, too.”
“Ehh. I can start trusting Sakuya’s skills now, right…?”
“I won’t cut my fingers anymore!”
Wounded by Ayane’s suspicious look, Sakuya protested the injustice.
“I don’t believe you at all…”
“I practiced! Watching iTube!”
“Knife work was something you could practice by watching iTube…?”
“It was on there?”
“…”
Ayane felt, all over again, the greatness of iTube. For now, she took Sakuya to the kitchen. Just like that.
Passing through the living room, Ayane met the eyes of Toseong, half-risen and awkward on the sofa.
“Oh, you’re up? So, um… Mr. Saturn?”
“Uh, uhh… Saturn?”
When Toseong looked puzzled, Sakuya filled in from the side.
“She says Tsuchisei sounds weird, so it’s Saturn.”
“She said your name’s hard to pronounce.”
“I-I see…”
“It’s like Sailor Moon, so it’s funny, right? Wanna try it too?”
“Ghk.”
He would rather die than cross-dress. Toseong clamped his molars shut.
“Aww. It’d suit you, though…”
Baekya stuck her lip out and grumbled. Toseong ignored her and followed Ayane into the kitchen.
“You two are cooking?”
“Yes!”
“Well, I’m only helping a little with the prep.”
Ayane pulled ingredients from the fridge with easy, practiced hands and passed them to Sakuya. Sakuya set them out, neat and unmixed, across the cutting board and the bowls.
“Ayane doesn’t really know hangover food either, so I was thinking just kimchi stew. Is that all right?”
“Uh? Yeah, yeah. Sounds good. But kimchi stew…?”
“Shin-chan loves it, so I mastered it completely!”
“That’s something…”
“There’s a little extra meat in it, though!”
Toseong tried to help with something, but the kitchen was already full with just Ayane and Sakuya. More precisely, there was physical room. Their rhythm locked together so tightly, though, that he couldn’t see a gap to step awkwardly into.
Baekya, mask peeled off, sidled over and jabbed his side with an elbow.
“Kinda losing your nerve, huh?”
He didn’t answer.
“Hehe. Go wait nicely in the living room. Oh, I’ll help too!”
“Thank you.”
Watching the girls laugh and chatter their way through the cooking, Toseong retreated without a fight.
Back on the living-room sofa, he was sitting there blankly when Tae-il appeared, washed clean.
“Did you sleep well?”
“Y-yeah.”
Awkward.
Toseong thought of a senior long since graduated, no longer around.
They say if you drink together, whatever awkwardness there was just disappears…
Every word of it was a lie.
Two men feeling the awkwardness of a shared living room, Toseong rubbed the back of his neck.
“Hey, um…”
“Y-yes! Go ahead.”
Toseong ducked his head at once.
“I’m sorry about yesterday. My drunk rambling went a little too far.”
“No! I was wrong too!”
“No. I’m the adult. I should’ve held back more. I feel like I made a real scene just because I was drunk.”
“I-if we’re going by that, then I also…”
A past life. A secret he couldn’t speak. Cornered for an answer, Tae-il simply closed his mouth.
“Haha. And, uh, about that bet from yesterday…”
“If it’s that…”
“First, I want to say I’m sorry.”
Toseong rubbed his neck again.
“I’m sorry. I don’t think I can grant that request.”
“It’s all right…”
Tae-il clicked his thumbs against each other. It was roughly what he’d expected.
“I think I got too greedy, too. I’m sorry.”
“Mm. Yeah. Thanks for understanding.”
A thick, sticky awkwardness hung between them.
“Ah, unnie! If you put the meat in already…!”
“I can’t?”
“Aren’t I the more useful one today?”
“Don’t show off, just help!”
“Ahaha!”
With the noise from the kitchen for background, the two of them kept a silence awkward beyond belief.
Only after a long while did Toseong speak first.
“The song.”
“It was really good to listen to.”
“Well, more than half of why it sounds good is the vocalist, though.”
“No need to beat yourself up. You wrote something mainstream that still lets that girl stand out.”
“Y-you can tell?”
Excited, Tae-il slammed the table. Toseong startled.
“Huh? Well, yeah. Anyone listening to her sing would obviously think that.”
“You get it! Iris says every time she sings it there’s this much high stuff, but it’s so easy to sing it’s almost strange…!”
“Y-yeah. She was really shooting those high notes out…”
“Actually that’s because I studied the habits Iris has when she sings, in my own way, and on purpose I—”
“O-oh, is that right?”
The moment the subject turned to a song he’d composed and praise for the vocalist, Tae-il became a river of eloquence. Flustered as he was, Toseong kept meeting him halfway.
This part’s exactly like Seongil, too…
Listen to a bassist’s sorrows, or listen to him talk about a song he’d written, and the same scene had always unfolded. Sitting through a long-winded explanation that went nowhere was something painfully familiar.
Maybe…
The members of Tae-il’s band had been far behind in what they could do. Because of that, maybe there’d been no one inside the band to really hear him out, and he’d been secretly starved for a chance to boast.
A band, huh…
Letting Tae-il’s faintly shy, self-congratulating ramble wash past him, Toseong turned it over.
He still didn’t want to start a band again.
But.
If, by some chance, there was a reason—then maybe. It didn’t have to be Shin Seongil. Just that dreamlike picture: the members of Hon coming back together to drag that particular problem child out into the open.
He imagined it, if only for a moment. Happy memories, given time, tended to be polished up a few more layers into something beautiful. This was one of those times. Catching Seongil’s shadow in Tae-il, Toseong sank into a memory he couldn’t have said was how many years old.
Only—
“So actually, there’s a part of the next song I was especially careful with, too. I’m paying special attention to the lyrics on purpose, so it’s easier for Iris to put her feelings into it…!”
The local broadcast was a little loud.
The tail end of the tour.
In BARD’s temporary lodging—where practice and everything else had collapsed under the limit of their stamina, leaving nothing but quiet—a heavy thud of footsteps rang out.
“Hah. Hah…!”
Izumi, taking the stairs at a run, caught her climbing breath and flung open the loosely shut door.
“Yahiro!”
At the shout, Yahiro, lying on the bed like a corpse, squirmed like an insect.
“Knock… would you. Brat…”
“You’re awake!”
“I woke up because of you, you menace…”
Yahiro, who’d been sleeping face-down, groaned his way upright and perched on the edge of the bed.
“What. Did Basara already get into some accident?”
“No!”
Beaming, Izumi held an iPad out to him.
“An iPad? Some brilliant inspiration hit you?”
“Nuh-uh!”
Izumi shook her head hard from side to side.
“No?”
“Just look!”
“Hahh. Making a fuss isn’t my style…”
Yahiro checked the iPad she’d handed over.
“A video…?”
It was a TokTik clip of a busking set, in a place that was obviously the Yoyogi entrance at a glance. And one girl caught in it was particularly familiar.
“Isn’t this that kid? Ari-something.”
“Arisugawa Iris.”
“Right. Taichi’s band, their vocalist. Don’t tell me…?”
“Yeah!”
A band carrying three newcomers had, in barely more than two months, brought their first busking to a successful close. A milestone.
“Haha.”
Whether the goddess of fortune had willed it or not, their busking video had gone up on TokTik’s recommendations. The views were climbing fast.
The title was Legendary Busking I Saw in Passing. The tags were all over the place—hashtags for people who simply enjoyed songs, and ones that ran all the way into harassment. What mattered wasn’t that. It was the video itself.
“Ohh?”
Yahiro’s eyes snapped wide.
The vocalist was covering with raw ability, but the band holding her up from behind was seriously awkward. To a professional’s eye, hopelessly short. Knowing how long they’d had to prepare, though, Yahiro felt something like pride well up on its own.
“Nice. The song itself is ordinary, though.”
“I think they aimed for that.”
“A song the public would like. Youth and love.”
It was autumn, and Cultural Festival season besides. In a melody and lyric that were exciting and yet thick with the smell of fall, Tae-il’s shrewd way of thinking showed plain as day.
“Haha! As expected, the kid’s the real thing. Worth looking forward to?”
“Yeah. She sings well, too.”
“She does.”
Yahiro recalled the little lady who had declared, neat and certain, that she sang well. It hadn’t been empty talk. Her strength wasn’t only in songs carried on feeling. An amateur driving high notes up this cleanly in full voice was, when he thought about it, genuinely impressive.
“This is something to study, isn’t it?”
At the praise, Izumi lit up as if it were her own accomplishment, mouth corners lifted, heels kicking. A cherished junior’s start looking smoother than expected seemed to delight her.
“Let’s see. Shall we have a look at the reactions?”
It hadn’t been up as a recommendation for long, and already a scatter of comments sat underneath.
Sexual harassment included, there were plenty of comments that were awkward to read, but the response ran fairly hot.
After checking what the viewers had to say, Yahiro let the busking video run again and let out a short breath of regret.
“Ah, this is a shame.”
“Hm?”
“Maybe because they started filming from the middle, everything you could use to guess who this band is got cut.”
The video had only the playing and the singing. A self-introduction, anything—there was nothing.
“Whoever filmed it might’ve edited that out, privately nervous about copyright. If it was going to turn out like this anyway, it would’ve been better if the band’s name got out too. A waste.”
“Yeah. It was a good chance to let people know Tales Tale…”
Izumi showed the same regret. She wanted to help somehow, and at the same time she wanted to wait, lofty, as a senior and as the wall that would hand them their trials. The tangle of it gnawed at her.
Thinking it over, Yahiro stroked his chin.
“Izumi. The stage where these kids officially debut is definitely…”
“Yuuma High’s Cultural Festival.”
“We’ve had that place come up before, haven’t we?”
“Have we…?”
Izumi, who had no interest in marketing or events and left all of it to Yahiro, tilted her head.
“There should be something. Hold on… ah, yeah. Here.”
“Where?”
From the bag sprawled under the bed, Yahiro pulled the event list their manager Masato had printed and held it out.
“He told us to pick at least five off this.”
“Yuuma High…”
What set Yuuma High apart was that it performed well every time, at the Interhigh and the other national tournaments. Naturally, famous singers and bands were often invited to celebrate that and lift morale. BARD had been invited often themselves.
“Can we take part in the Cultural Festival, too?”
“I’ll ask Mr. Masato!”
“Huh? Hey—hey, Izumi! Wait! Our tour isn’t even over y— and she’s gone.”
At the question Izumi’s eyes had gone wide, and then she’d sprung up and bolted back outside.
Yahiro smiled bitterly and played the video again.
“You put the work in, kid.”
Maybe the phone that recorded it wasn’t much good; the sound was crude. But he could hear it. Tae-il’s calculations, and his effort, came through vivid.
“The other songs would be even better…”
Tales Tale. Yahiro pressed the name of the band that would, in a not-so-distant future, stand proudly in front of them once more, deep into the back of his mind.
“From the top!”
“Yes!”
“One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four!”
At the trainer’s shout, the girls moved, sweat beading on them.
Squeak. Squeak. Every time a sneaker met the slick floor, a friction-sound stabbed the ear. So they wouldn’t slip. Following the tape stuck down on the floor, they drove themselves hard without letting the formation break. Eyes to the front. In the mirror that filled the wall, they checked their own shapes one by one.
“Expressions, watch your expressions! The faces you’ve got right now are absolutely not faces an idol makes!”
“Yes!”
They smiled by force. The corners of their mouths twitched and trembled, but they couldn’t let the smile go. Their joints ached. Their calves screamed at them to rest. They couldn’t.
“Good! Just like this, one last time…!”
One last time. A torture by hope, heard several times every practice.
Even so. Brushing aside the bangs in her eyes as if it were nothing, the girl put on a false smile.
This is the path I chose.
The girl, Ishikawa Haru, kept driving her body past its limit and dancing, set on becoming an idol.
“Good! Everyone, nice work. Short break!”
When the trainer clapped, the girls short on stamina flopped to the floor one after another.
“Don’t loosen up. In a bit we’re all watching the video of you dancing.”
“Thank you for your work!”
The trainer nodded and left the practice room.
Break time. A fellow trainee came up to Haru, who was sprawled on the floor utterly drained, putting water back in.
“Haru! Haru! Haruru! Did you see this?”
“Hm? Which?”
“A video that suddenly went up as a TokTik recommend yesterday… this!”
Haru squeezed her eyes shut and pushed herself up. It was a pain, but the other girl was the exhausting type who never backed off until she got what she wanted.
“What even is it… huh?”
It was the kind of busking video you saw all the time on TokTik. Only the vocalist’s face was familiar. There was no way she could forget.
“You ruined everything! Was practice that hard?!”
“Did you want to make a laughingstock out of me that badly?”
“That’s why you people are trash! Trash that doesn’t help society one bit! Live like that your whole lives! Being a nuisance to everyone else! Doing whatever you feel like…!”
A grief-stricken cry rang through her head. Her lips went bone-dry. She’d only just put water back in, and still her throat closed on her as if it were splitting.
“Isn’t that the girl from the middle-school photo Haru showed us way back?”
“Y-yeah…. She looks a lot like her.”
Unlike the girl holding the video out as if it were a marvel, Haru’s expression turned uncomfortable all at once.
“Looks like her? It’s not even on that level, is it? Look at these boobs! They’re huge! I’ve never in my life seen a girl with boobs this big, gravure idols aside!”
“Ha, haha…”
At her fellow trainee thrusting the warm screen into her face, Haru shrank and managed an awkward smile. It wasn’t a particularly good memory. All at once the unpleasant feel of a guitar string against her fingertips came back to life.
Her fellow trainee, apparently not tired of it even after that, went on and on for a long while about the girl in the video. Haru answered like a machine and waited, endlessly, for the trainer to come back. It was the most uncomfortable break of her life.
A short while later, the break ended and the trainer returned—with some unfamiliar man in tow.
“This way.”
“Whoa. The heat in this practice room is no joke. I heard from the president that you keep to a K-pop idol style. You practice just as hard to match?”
“Of course. Ishikawa, come over here, quickly.”
“Y-yes…!”
Still reeling at the tiger of a trainer fawning and wagging her tail like a fox, Haru hurriedly fixed her face and ran over.
“This girl is the only one here with band experience. Our very best ace.”
“She has band experience?”
“Yes.”
The trainer added that the introduction paperwork had certainly said so.
“Interesting.”
A man who looked, to anyone’s eye, like a foreigner—the reigning champion of faces that promised nothing but trouble—looked Haru up and down without hiding it, and smiled in the open.
Handsome for no good reason. It’s oppressive.
Even in middle school, getting tangled up with that sort had never once gone well. Haru hunched her shoulders on reflex.
“Excuse me, little miss.”
“I’m not little.”
“Okay. Then, a charming young lady. How’s that?”
“Are you a pervert?”
“Puhaha!”
“Ishikawa! What kind of mouth is that!”
The man laughed until he folded and waved the trainer off.
“I-I’m sorry. She isn’t usually like this…”
“No, it’s fine.”
He soothed the trainer.
“If anything, I like that she’s bold. People who get up on a stage all need nerve. Every one of them.”
“Then does that mean…?”
The trainer looked at him with a little hope tucked in.
“I can’t be certain myself, either. Only, if this girl applies, I’ll make sure to look after her.”
“Oh my! Ishikawa! You have to say thank you, too!”
“Wh-what is this, even…?”
“Honestly! Slowpoke. So, who this gentleman is—!”
“It’s all right.”
The man raised a hand and stopped her.
“I ought to introduce myself. I’m the one asking to cast her, after all.”
“Hoho. I was too impatient.”
The trainer stepped back. The man came one step forward and drew a business card from his breast pocket.
“A pleasure to meet you. I’m Arthur.”
“Arthur…?”
“Not a stage name. My real one. A rookie producer.”
He produced the smile as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It was the most charming smile a man named Arthur could put on by artifice.