Wronged
Wronged.
Ever since I was little, people had said I had a twisted personality.
At first I denied it, but as I got older, I had to admit, at least to myself, that they were right.
I had a hot temper.
Because of that, words sometimes came out of me in a way that was far too blunt.
I knew curves were better than straight lines if you wanted to keep people together, but I could never quite put that into practice.
It’s just my nature.
But there was nothing in this world that absolutely could not be changed.
That bluntness of mine was corrected like a miracle after I enlisted in the army.
What was I supposed to do when the seniors told me to keep my head down?
After finishing my socialization there and getting discharged, I had one question left to answer.
What am I going to live on?
I wasn’t good at studying, so I hadn’t gone to college.
And if you asked whether I had any proper certifications, the answer was no.
Looking back, my teens and early twenties had been spent just drifting along, letting life carry me wherever it wanted.
And now the price for that had come due.
"This is bad."
That wasn’t an exaggeration.
It was really bad.
When you live by drifting, sooner or later your life starts drifting straight off a cliff.
Then a phone call came from an older guy in the neighborhood I’d known since high school.
[Give road manager work a shot, Chan.]
Ma Seok-du, who was now a team leader at one of the country’s giant entertainment companies, Baekhak.
He was the most successful person I knew personally.
And that Seok-du hyung was offering me a job as a road manager.
An entertainment celebrity manager, in other words.
[The work itself isn’t that hard. Drive hard, keep your assigned celebrity happy, and protect their private life.]
There was no reason to turn it down.
A life that had gone from drifting to outright falling apart.
Seok-du hyung’s offer to get me into a decent company was, quite literally, a rope lowered from heaven.
I grabbed it.
"I’ll work really hard, hyung."
I still remember it clearly.
The way I looked when I went to Baekhak for the first time, full of expectations.
I was going to be a road manager at Baekhak, the monster of the entertainment world.
As a young man with blood still boiling in his veins, how could I not let my imagination run wild?
But reality, as always, was cold.
The working conditions might have improved, but a road manager was still just a road manager.
When the people above told you to bend, you bent.
If the celebrity you handled told you to roll, you rolled.
If the drama producer or director told you to do tricks, you did them.
The entertainment industry I saw with my own eyes was colder than I had imagined, a jungle, and brutally merciless to the weak.
To survive in that world, I had no choice but to round off my blunt personality.
The guy who’d once been called a brawler for his sharp temper had turned into something like half spicy, half fried chicken.
It felt awkward, and I didn’t like it much, but what could I do?
"If you want to eat, you have to endure."
Even as a road manager, I had four major insurances and a salary that came in on schedule.
For someone like me, who had spent his life drifting while others were struggling, it was a luxury job.
Somehow, after three years on the job, I had earned recognition at the company and become someone people could count on.
That was when I met a damn witch.
"Nice to meet you, Kwon Chan."
Lee Ha-eun.
The rising star of Chungmuro, who had reached the top-tier actress level at just twenty-three.
No, she was simply a top-star actress.
But to me, she was just a damn bitch.
And not just any bitch, either. A completely unhinged one.
"Can’t even do this much, and you call yourself a road manager?"
"So that’s how life is, Kwon Chan."
"You said getting into Baekhak was thanks to Team Leader Ma, right?"
"Why are you like this? Why do you live your life like that?"
She knew exactly how to get under my skin.
Not just under my skin, either. She scraped at my pride, at my soul.
Even the personality I had painstakingly rounded off from a straight edge into a curve was useless in front of Lee Ha-eun.
That crazy woman seemed determined to test my patience every single day, nagging me and tearing into me again and again.
"No wonder your life looks like that, Kwon Chan."
I wrote my resignation letter in my head hundreds of times, then tore it up just as many times.
If it hadn’t been for the real-world problems tying my legs down... I would have quit the company a long time ago.
Yes.
If it hadn’t been for the practical problems gripping my ankles.
If I quit now, could I even move to another agency?
What about next month’s rent, utilities, taxes, and all the rest of it?
As always, money was the problem in the end.
I couldn’t bring myself to quit Baekhak Entertainment for a salary of just 2.5 million won.
So it was only natural that I stopped by a lottery shop and bought a ticket.
I didn’t even dream of winning.
The odds of winning the lottery were one in five million, and there was no way I’d be the one to beat them.
This is... right. I’m buying hope.
A hellish company life.
A crazy woman I’d ended up working with one day.
A miserable life with my pride and dignity both crushed flat.
To break away from that reality even a little, I was buying hope in the form of a lottery ticket.
But that hope became reality.
"1.4 billion?"
I’d won the lottery.
In other words, I’d beaten one-in-five-million odds.
"This is real?"
I couldn’t believe it, but it was reality.
There it was, on the new Nonghyup account I’d opened that day: 1.4 billion won.
At that moment, I made up my mind.
"Fuck it, I’m quitting."
I took the resignation letter I’d written and rewritten hundreds of times and headed to the company.
And that night.
I went to bed with top star Lee Ha-eun.
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