Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (2)
"Hello! I'm Seo Yu-rin!"
"...Haah."
"Tae-oh! You can't sigh! You have to greet them!"
"...Hello. I'm Baek Tae-oh."
I was the one who'd suggested coming here, sure, but one look at that man's face and my head was already starting to ache, and I was only seven years old.
A haggard-looking man who was presumably the casting director, and beside him, a man in glasses.
That was Director Shi Yeon-seo.
Twenty years ago, so he'd be in his early thirties now. Definitely no gray hair yet — he looked young.
"Please act out eating an apple, Miss Seo Yu-rin."
Director Shi Yeon-seo said.
"Umm..."
It looked like the simplest possible request, yet for some reason Yu-rin frowned, as if she were wrestling with a real problem. And for some reason, a creeping sense of dread began to crawl up my spine.
Sure enough, after a moment of agonizing, Yu-rin asked, utterly baffled:
"Why?"
Oh no.
I smacked my forehead. Before Director Shi could open his mouth, I hurriedly grabbed Yu-rin by the shoulders and turned her toward me so she'd face me instead. The sudden spin caught her off guard.
"You can't just cut it front and back, you dummy."
"Waaang?!"
"Here, let me explain."
Yu-rin loved emotional acting, but eating an apple gave her nothing to feel. So she asked why — what she really wanted was a situation she could pour emotion into. Which meant my job was simply to create the situation she was looking for.
What kind of situation do I give her?
Several possibilities floated through my head, but somehow not a single one felt right. I couldn't have explained exactly why, but none of them seemed like something Yu-rin would be satisfied with.
Except one.
And that one had a problem of its own.
...It's honestly, ridiculously embarrassing.
I stole a glance at Director Shi's condition.
"..."
He was watching us expressionlessly. Fine for now — but knowing the Director Shi of my past life, there was no telling when he'd start frothing at the mouth and telling us to get out.
In the end, there was no avoiding it, was there.
I squeezed my eyes shut and charged myself with courage. I raised my hand and mimed holding an orb. Then, looking at the innocent, utterly clueless Yu-rin who still had no idea what I was doing, I held the hand out to her.
"Ah—"
Just that one word.
And in the same instant, starlight exploded from Yu-rin's eyes. Her head shot forward and lunged at my hand.
"Amp!"
Her tiny mouth clamped down hard on the back of my hand. Impossible as it was, I could almost hear the crisp crunch of an apple being bitten into in midair.
"Mmm—!!"
Yu-rin shuddered all over. Had the apple been underripe? No — judging by her expression, she was trembling purely out of happiness for this moment. Her reaction was so intense that the person doing the offering was the one blushing.
"Mmm."
My fingertip traced delicately around her lips. I wiped away the juice that had run from her fierce bite, and a darling little tongue poked out to lick her lips, chasing down the last stray drops.
"Thanks for the meal."
...She was thinking about the apple when she acted that, right?
I found myself groping at my own chest. No matter how I looked at it, that girl hadn't been acting with an apple. She'd been acting with my heart.
A heavy silence settled over the tiny office with the sign that read Audition Room.
— Tap. Tap. Tap.
Only the sound of Director Shi tapping his notebook with a pen in a steady rhythm filled the room.
A moment later, the first to break the silence was, surprisingly, Director Shi himself.
"Thank you for your time."
As if she'd been waiting for it, Yu-rin threw herself into my arms.
"Tae-oh! Praise me, quick!!"
"Yes, yes. You worked so hard."
"Waaang! That's half-hearted!"
"You're right. You waaang-ed so very hard."
"Waaeeeng!"
Yu-rin puffed out her cheeks. I knew she was annoyed, but I wished she'd cut me some slack too. It's hard to keep your composure when you've taken a direct hit from acting that charged at point-blank range like that.
Over the shoulder of Yu-rin clinging to me, I looked quietly at Director Shi, seated where he'd been all along. His eyes met mine, and he spoke.
"We'll notify you of the results later."
"Thank you for your time."
"Thank you for your time!!"
Hand in hand, the two of us made our way out of the audition room.
"Yu-rin! How did it go?!"
"Waaang."
Her mother, who'd been waiting outside, scooped Yu-rin up in a panic. She'd wanted to wait out here because Yu-rin had refused to let her come in with us.
"They didn't say anything scary, did they? Should Mommy go in there and give them a piece of my mind?"
"I waaang-ed..."
"Waaang...? What's that supposed to mean..."
The mother looked at me. Could it be she couldn't decode Yu-rin's waaang?
I shrugged.
"It went well."
"You promise?"
"Yes."
People say it's hard to read any emotion on Director Shi Yeon-seo's face, but I was a bit of an exception. After all, I'd been scouted as a grad student in my past life and rolled around under that man well into my working years, so I had a decent grasp of his habits and quirks.
— Tap. Tap. Tap.
The sound of Director Shi drumming on the desk was still ringing in my ears.
A sound I'd only heard a handful of times even in my past life.
"You don't need to worry."
It was the sound he made only when he was in a genuinely good mood.
What on earth did I just witness?
Had all those wrecked all-nighters lately made the casting director see things?
He rubbed his eyes. And yet, burned into his retinas as if branded there, the performance that little girl — Seo Yu-rin — had shown him remained.
"W-wow. Which academy trained her, I wonder?"
She'd done something strange at first, but the moment he laid the groundwork for her, she'd thrashed about like a fish in water. He had seen countless child actors climbing his way up to this room, and hers was among the top handful of performances he'd witnessed.
At his question, Director Shi shook his head.
"Casting Director. Does that child look to you like someone who has professionally studied acting?"
"She was better than most of them, so I'd assume so? Her parents could be in the business, I suppose."
"...I see. Then let me ask a different question."
It was the first time since the auditions began that Shi Yeon-seo had spoken this much. Usually he would scrawl the word failed — just three syllables — in his terrible handwriting, and that would be that.
"Can a teacher create a genius?"
"I'm sorry?"
The rhythm of Shi's pen against the notebook quickened. The nib stabbed at the page again and again until the notebook was scarred like something wounded.
"The obsession of a person who grinds away decades to solve a single equation that may have no answer at all."
"The discipline of a person who carves years off themselves to shave a comma's breath of time."
"The curiosity of a person who excavates an entire civilization to understand one sentence in a dead language no one speaks."
"The patience of a person who spends a lifetime staring at the same night sky to interpret the movement of a star no one will ever reach."
"The passion of a person who, after losing every sound in the world, still translates the melody inside their head into a score —"
"Can a teacher teach that madness?"
The casting director met Shi Yeon-seo's eyes and swallowed hard. The madness Shi was describing right now — it was swirling inside those eyes. For the first time, the corners of Director Shi's mouth curved into an arc.
"Children like that are heaven's descent. They simply fall from the sky."
Genius — heaven's endowment.
Why do people rave over them? Why do they look up at them in awe?
Because genius is never made. It descends from heaven, and from nowhere else. Because they carry a madness that ordinary mortals could live a hundred lifetimes and never possess.
A genius director, born in Korea, had just laid eyes on an unknown little girl and put the sky in his mouth.
"A born actor. There is no other way to explain it."
A performance of barely four seconds.
And in those four seconds, Yu-rin had been as happy as if she'd tucked the whole world into her pocket. She was, unmistakably, a child born to be an actress.
At this unprecedented praise, the casting director's whole body trembled.
"Then I should send the girl the acceptance text right away—"
"Not the girl, Casting Director."
"...I'm sorry?"
The beaming smile of the man reaching for his phone collapsed. After everything you just said, you're telling me no?
Fine. Today would be Director Shi Yeon-seo's last day on this earth.
With a mind frayed by a week of sleepless nights, the casting director clenched his phone upside down. Entirely indifferent to this, Shi spoke.
"I said the children. I would very much like to see that boy on set as well."
"...Didn't we only need one child actor?"
Director Shi Yeon-seo gazed at the door the children had left through.
One of them is a genius. The other is...
He didn't know.
Having survived a decade in an industry where countless self-proclaimed geniuses debut, hit a wall, and vanish, Shi Yeon-seo was more than seasoned at telling genius from mediocrity — but the boy named Tae-oh was a little strange. Genius or not, even Shi couldn't say for certain.
And that move earlier —
He had caught what was in Yu-rin's heart and steered her, precisely, toward drawing out her absolute best. Was it a one-time fluke, or was it, for him, simply an unquestionable inevitability?
He didn't know, he didn't know. He truly did not know.
If Yu-rin was a girl whose genius announced itself openly, then the boy named Tae-oh was, to Shi Yeon-seo, an unknown.
"Call them in for now. I trust you'll handle it."
"...Hrk."
And the unknown was always the direction Shi Yeon-seo's camera turned.
Director Shi Yeon-seo's first drama — something that had never existed in the past life. As the genius met two small children, it began, quietly, to stir into being.