The Mother in the Photograph
With one preparation after another, a full week slipped by before I knew it. Broadcast day for episode 9 of the idol survival show.
Friday afternoon—the day I’d promised to meet Song A-seong. My place didn’t have a TV, and A-seong lived with his parents, so finding somewhere to gather wasn’t easy. In the end we met at Han Min-hyeok’s officetel again.
“Should we start with Min-hyeok hyung’s team today?”
Group 4, Team 2. Han Min-hyeok’s team had lost the obstacle race after one of their members fell, and with it they’d lost the right to choose their concept. What they’d been stuck with was the angel side.
They’d picked fourth, so there hadn’t been many songs left—but they’d still managed to lock onto a concept and make it work.
“I think their song was Ojakgyo.”
“Yeah. East-Asian-style Cupid~.”
Pew. From where he was lounging on the sofa, Han Min-hyeok mimed shooting an arrow with a playful grin.
Honestly, even from where I sat on the devil team, I figured Group 4’s win would go to Min-hyeok’s angels. The devil team in Group 4 had taken Vesta’s Love Me Again and performed last the previous week—and true to expectation, they’d been mercilessly torn apart by Vesta fans in the communities.
Min-hyeok’s team had looked good live; the costumes and concept had suited them. They ought to win without much trouble.
“Ah, pulling off another concept this hard.”
Min-hyeok preened again over how well he’d digested whatever concept he’d been given. A-seong made a face like he couldn’t stand the self-congratulation.
“Mm, well… Anyway, Han-hee hyung, did you film your vlog?”
“Yeah, the day before yesterday. You?”
“I… filmed with Hyeok hyung.”
“Fed him something delicious, of course.”
I’d noticed it ever since he’d cooked dinner for us last time—Han Min-hyeok seemed genuinely interested in cooking. Having a sous-vide machine at home already put him outside the ordinary.
Once that footage dropped, he’d be popular. Anyone who could plate food that looked that good was already worth looking forward to.
“What about you, Han-hee hyung? Did you film alone?”
“No. Mm… you’ll see when it comes out.”
In my case, I’d never shot a vlog before, so what I got was something that left me half wondering if I’d even done it right. It looked fine. It also didn’t.
I’ll know once it airs.
I’d worked hard, but I couldn’t guarantee the result. All I could do was hope the editors were kind.
“Come to think of it, if they’re editing the vlogs on top of everything else, the editors must be insanely busy. They already seem busy enough as it is… It still shocks me every time.”
“Right? Last week they finished the stage edits in three days.”
Of course the broader footage—practice after the mid-evaluations and so on—would have been cut in advance, so the real timeline was longer than that. Still, going from stage shoot to competition broadcast in three days was a terrifying pace.
“Do you think the Plus edits are the same team?”
“If they were, we’d have heard rumors that someone died by now.”
Once a stage ended, eliminations were locked by viewer votes, which meant you couldn’t pre-shoot the next stretch of content. The editing team had almost certainly been running flat-out the whole time. The structure of the show made it unavoidable.
Come to think of it, I’d heard the gap between filming and airing might get even shorter from here on. The finals were supposed to be live.
…They must be getting paid well.
A stray thought crossed my mind: maybe the reason this program got praised for less vicious editing and overdone production than other audition shows was simply that there wasn’t enough time to engineer any. Probably overthinking it.
“But Min-hyeok hyung, you’re fine not watching with your teammates?”
“Mm~ Not really? If I suggested getting together, I think it’d just stress them out. We were closer to a business relationship, I guess.”
I nodded. They’d shared a room and pulled a stage off together, but according to Min-hyeok it had felt more like rivalry than a team. That was possible enough.
A-seong hadn’t gathered with his team for last week’s broadcast either, which made our little after-party get-together the odd one out. Then again, every team had its own atmosphere.
We kept chatting like that, ate the dinner Min-hyeok had put together, and watched episode 9 together. Afterward A-seong and I sent the hardworking cook off to rest in his room and started on the dishes.
I was scrubbing away at the soft clink of china when A-seong, drying the clean dishes beside me, spoke first.
“Third round and the finals—only two left. I hope I end up on the same team as you at least once, hyung.”
I rinsed the suds off a plate, passed it over, and nodded. Of course. A-seong was one of the members I already had my eye on.
“A-seong. Do you remember what you were about to say to me when we first started the dorms? You asked if I’d ever met you before.”
That day in the auditorium, when he’d started to say something and Kwon Do-ha had appeared and cut him off. The memory seemed to surface; A-seong opened his mouth.
“Ah, that… Hyung, do you remember anything from when you were little? My mom and your mother were friends, so I met you a few times when I was a kid.”
So that was why he’d been so unusually warm from the first meeting—we really had met. But mother…
When had we met, that he still remembered it?
“…How old were you?”
“Around ten, so… seven years ago.”
Seven years ago. That would have made me twelve. …The timeline didn’t fit.
“You met with your mother? Until when?”
“The four of us met together, but we didn’t see each other that long, honestly. After your mother passed away, contact just stopped… About half a year?”
He’d met with both mothers. I managed my expression. Thanks to the trait that boosted my acting, I could keep my face calm on the surface.
“You might not remember. From what I can recall of you as a kid, aside from your mother, you didn’t seem interested in anyone.”
A-seong said he’d dug up an old photo just in case and transferred it in advance, then opened his phone album. In what looked like a garden, a woman sat smiling brightly on a chair, and a child clung to her waist with his face buried against her. She was stroking the back of the child’s head with a tender expression while he hid his face from the camera, as if he didn’t want to be photographed.
“…Could you send me this?”
“Of course.”
Water still dripping from my hands after the dishes, I stared blankly at the photo. The surface was still; underneath, everything was churning.
The mother I knew had left home when I was three. So who was this person gazing so lovingly down at the child in her arms?
“Thanks for telling me… And I’m sorry I don’t remember.”
“No! It’s fine. I’m just glad I got to see you again.”
A-seong waved it off, then hesitated a moment before going on.
“If you have time later, would you be willing to meet my mom sometime? Ah—if it’s uncomfortable, that’s okay, but…”
He added that after the news had cut off, his mother had worried about me a lot. I nodded.
“No, I’ll go see her sometime.”
If she’d been my mother’s friend, I needed to meet her. She would know things I didn’t.
I thought I’d handled it calmly, but the truth was I wasn’t sure. After that I rushed through the rest of the cleanup, said goodbye to the two of them, and left.
I don’t know how I made it home. The whole way back my heart rate kept climbing and cold sweat soaked my back, and the moment I arrived I shut myself in the bathroom. The face in the mirror was a wreck.
June 12th. Day one of the third training camp. The weather had turned abruptly hot; I awkwardly brushed at the arms left bare by the switch from long-sleeved sweatshirts to short sleeves.
Hair dyed black again, I finished getting ready and settled into the now-familiar studio to wait. While I sat there, I checked the daily mission.
Achieve Today's Interest (100/100)
On Success: Roulette Draw ×1
On Failure: Acquire 'Cold and Body Aches'
Even though it was still the small hours of early morning, the daily mission was already complete. Once my stats had climbed past a certain point, the contents of the daily missions had started to change, and an “Interest” category had been added.
Interest. It seemed to count things like people searching my name out of curiosity. With the program doing well, the daily mission had somehow turned into a roulette machine that automatically handed out free spins.
Still, it occasionally throws out a weird penalty, so I should keep checking it every time.
A penalty for failing to secure broadcast footage—stat cuts and the like—could always show up again, so I couldn’t relax completely. For the moment, though, the conditions were meeting themselves without any special effort on my part, which was one less thing to worry about. It had been quietly nagging at me.
Use now?
YES / NO
YES.
I claimed today’s reward and watched the wheel spin and spin, then thought STOP. The slowing disc caught on the needle with a soft click.
I looked at the needle resting on an entry that had caught my eye before. Crisis Detection Traffic Light?
An uneasy feeling settled in. Looking back over everything so far, the roulette had always seemed to hand out whatever reward the moment required.
Which meant that if a Crisis Detection Traffic Light had come up, it was because I was going to need to detect a crisis…
I worked hard at warming up a body that wasn’t in the best condition. No harm in preparing just in case. I kept the tension from slipping, ready to respond to anything sudden—and filming began.
“The second team mission of the idol survival show—the battle of good and evil—has come to a complete close.”
At MC Cheon Tae-rim’s gesture, the studio’s giant screen filled with the angel and devil teams of Groups 1 through 7, lined up in a row.
“First up, Group 7, who presented stages of Fill Me Up and Bang. Between the angels and the devils—the winning team is!”
Starting from the bottom? Cheon Tae-rim drew it out, then raised his hand high. Under Group 7, the angel side dimmed and the devil side flared bright.
“Yes—victory for the devil team! That makes it 1 to 0!”
More or less what I’d expected. Group 7’s angel team hadn’t had anyone who could really handle the high notes of Fill Me Up. The devil team, on the other hand, had taken the old-school, obvious rebel vibe of Bang and rearranged it into something that still felt trendy. Kim Seong-min’s smiling face—he’d been the center for Bang—flashed on the screen.
“Next, Group 6! The winning team of Group 6 is…!”
Group 6 went to the angel team Cha Ji-heon had been on; Group 5 to the devil team An Do-hyeon had been on; Group 4, as expected, to Han Min-hyeok’s angels.
“That brings the score to 2 to 2! Extremely tight!”
Wins were splitting more evenly than I’d thought—then Group 3’s result came up.
“The winning team of Group 3 is—the devil team!”
Han Sang-jin and Lee Won-yeong appeared side by side on the screen. Han Sang-jin looked at least mid-180s; Lee Won-yeong early-to-mid 170s. Framed together, the height difference was impossible to miss.
Come to think of it, everyone’s pretty tall.
Even Woo Cheong-hee, who you’d expect to be the shortest, was 178. Song A-seong and Han Min-hyeok had been tall to begin with.
“Group 2 goes to the angel team! Ah—that makes it 3 to 3! A dead heat!”
From 1–1 to 2–2 to 3–3, the gap never widened past a single point. A screen of Song A-seong and Kim Yo-han high-fiving closed out that result, and only Group 1 was left.
“The match that decides every result—last up, Group 1! The devil team’s Antithese, or the angel team’s Twenty-Five! And the result is!”
After milking the suspense as far as it would go, Cheon Tae-rim suddenly shouted.
“The devil team! Congratulations!”
Confetti burst as my face filled the board. I hadn’t won alone, and having the close land on me was a pretty heavy bit of direction—but luckily I managed to produce a face that looked genuinely happy.
I high-fived the people around me, looked into the cameras pointed our way, and smiled again. We’d won; I couldn’t very well pull a long face.
“All right—now that we have the results of the second team battle, we’ll move straight into the ranking announcement.”
And the ranking ceremony that began before we could even savor the win was brutal.
“A total of forty-two contestants will pass! Anyone who falls outside that number will no longer be able to stand on this stage.”
“….”
Out of seventy, a full twenty-eight would be cut. The temperature in the room dropped. Looking at Nam Hye-seong’s pale, frozen face, I swallowed a sigh.
I couldn’t be sure of anything.