…Honestly, I Wasn't Really Thinking
"Have you, by any chance, ever killed someone by accident?"
One line, from the very heart of the team behind the YouTube channel Snack Movie.
"Why."
Sua answered on reflex. It was a defense mechanism of sorts. She didn't expect anything pleasant to follow, and the reply shot out of her, uneasy, before she could catch it.
"No, it's just..."
But every anxious prediction she had braced for turned out to be wrong. The Snack Movie side offered a reaction she had not seen coming at all.
"...You startled us a little."
Startled? Well, they had reason to be. She had stared into empty air and gagged as if someone were choking her, swung a knife that wasn't there, tended to customers while gazing at nothing, and finished by crouching on the floor and trembling all over. Of course they were startled. Awed, even. Sua's face burned so fiercely she thought it might split.
"Ah, hey!"
The man seated beside them burst out laughing. How much working out did a person have to do before he himself started to feel like one enormous slab of rock? Was he some kind of fitness trainer?
"Miss Sua, we're only asking this comfortably. I'd appreciate it if you didn't answer with such an edge."
An edge? Me? I'm the one over here shaking, terrified of stepping on any of your toes.
"Don't misunderstand. I answered comfortably too."
"I know that. There's not the slightest sign of nerves on you. We've never had a participant like this — you're really something unusual. Anyway, if you could just soften that edge a little, I'd be grateful."
No. That wasn't what I meant by comfortably. I meant I was approaching this politely. Why.
"All right."
At that, the muscular man broke into a smile that looked almost offensively healthy.
"Nothing's scared me since I started working out, but that face of yours is unusual, Miss Sua. There's a presence to it that makes a person hesitate."
"...Yes."
Was that a compliment?
That was when it happened.
"Your name is Lee Sua, correct?"
A woman had cut in — the one who had kept her silence the entire time. And yet, astonishingly, Sua recognized her.
Wait. Kim Chae-rin!
Her brow twitched before she could stop it. She knew exactly who this was.
Kim Chae-rin, Goddess of Hanri University
That was how the woman had been circulating on social media lately. A goddess of social media. The goddess of Hanri University. Sua had caught a glimpse of her once and thought she was stunning, so there was no mistaking her. Faced with someone who seemed to stand alone as a work of art, drawn in an entirely different style from everyone else, Sua could only marvel.
Skin white as a sheet of blank paper, a face that looked smaller than a fist, hair falling all the way to her waist and gathered neatly with a headband. She could fairly have been called the very definition of pure, innocent beauty, and she was one more reason for Sua's shame to swell.
...What did I just do in front of a girl like that.
She had wanted to get along with pretty girls, and instead she had shown them something bizarre from the very start. If a woman this lovely ever cut into her with sharp words, Sua thought, her heart might simply break.
Kim Chae-rin lifted a sheet of paper as she spoke.
"Your self-introduction is completely empty. What on earth do you do? You haven't been acting — so where have you been all this time, and what have you been doing?"
Sua swallowed, her throat dry. The section was blank because she had applied with nothing more in mind than checking whether acting was even her aptitude. There had been no reason to write anything. And the truth was, even if she had tried, there was nothing to write.
Credentials I can proudly hand to someone? I don't have any!
She scrambled for a moment, then reached a conclusion fast. No lying. If nothing else, she could at least be honest.
"Soccer, basketball, golf, swimming... I've sort of done a little of everything. Aside from acting, I feel like I've tried almost all of it."
She said it with desperate sincerity. She looked like a criminal confessing her crimes, but it couldn't be helped. She was still ashamed of the acting she had put on display.
And yet.
"Hm...?"
A thick, clinging bewilderment settled over the faces of all five judges — eyes blown several times wider, brows twitching. There was no doubt about it. Every one of them was dumbfounded, and deeply.
"So you're saying... for the sake of acting... you learned all of that...?"
Sua's brow drew tight before she knew it. What kind of nonsense was that? Had they lost their minds? If she had to name the most absurd thing she had heard all year, this was it. She barely swallowed the words that had nearly escaped. Let them misunderstand her like that, and she was going to suffocate and die.
In basketball she had failed to catch a pass, taken the ball straight to the face, and bled from the nose. In soccer she had nearly turned an ankle. Martial arts had ended the instant someone struck her in the stomach and she found she couldn't breathe, at which point she quit. Explaining all of it would be far too embarrassing.
"Just... simply a hobby?"
"A hobby...? Then what about the acting?"
Kim Chae-rin gazed at Sua without looking away. With her eyes rounded like that, she seemed to be watching a scene from a film.
"Well. Something like that."
It was the best answer Sua could manage. Say it had been a performance she had given her all, and have them immediately call it worthless — what then? She would be even more pathetic. That would not do. She intended to play it safe.
Honestly, is there anything better than playing it safe?
"A hobby.... This level of skill, as a hobby.... Ha...?"
As if her throat had caught fire, Kim Chae-rin took a sip of water from her tumbler.
"Hold on. Never mind the rest. There's something I absolutely have to ask."
That was when another man cut in.
...Is this someone who does nothing but work all day?
A baseball cap jammed low, a scruffy beard, clothes gone shapeless. Sorry as she was to think it of someone she had only just met, the look brought a homeless man to mind.
"I'll ask only one thing. Miss Sua. Just one."
The rest? What rest? It had better not be a hard question.
Sua's head tilted, ever so slightly.
"What in the world were you thinking?"
"What?"
"Even looking at a script that's only a single line, you must have pictured the place, the lines, the character — all of it. I want to hear every bit of that. Each piece, in detail."
"...All of it?"
This was awkward. Extremely so. What was she even supposed to say in a situation like this? A hint, even a small one, would have been nice.
Sua turned her head, just a little.
Time to Act
Status: Deactivated
...Seems like that's the one you ought to be asking.
All she had done was reproduce what she herself had experienced. She could hardly tell them the truth straight through, and no excuse plausible enough to cover it came to mind at once. She needed a moment. How was she supposed to put this?
But the rumpled man gave her no opening at all. His eyes glittered. He was plainly brimming with curiosity about her.
"Hahaha.... Did I go and ask something too difficult?"
"Ah, it's not that."
"It's a question I've asked the other participants too. I'm not grilling only you, Miss Sua, so I'd rather you didn't take it the wrong way."
"I'm not taking it the wrong way. I was only thinking for a moment."
"Now that I think about it, this is strange. Why am I the one explaining all of this at such length to you, Miss Sua? It's really peculiar."
After that, Sua held her silence for a long while. More time did not help. Nothing she could actually say would come.
How long had it been? The judges sat hardly breathing, waiting for nothing but her answer.
In the end, it was the most honest sentence she had. That was all Sua said. However she turned it over, nothing among the answers she was actually capable of giving seemed better than this.
After Sua left, the interview room went frantic.
"No.... Did I hear that right?"
Kim Chae-rin's voice was dazed. She even pulled off the headband that had sat so neatly over her tidy hair, a gesture closer to shock than anything else.
"That was a hobby? Honestly, we all know that's a lie. I've acted myself. I know. A hobby doesn't come out at this level."
PD Son Ji-woong, listening beside her, nodded as well. His eyes had gone enormous. He didn't look much different from Kim Chae-rin.
"Her presence is just that fierce. I figured a frightened performance was basically impossible for her. And then she goes and pulls it off, right in front of us."
"By her own account, she did it without thinking much. So what does that leave except inborn talent? This is insane."
"...Why on earth would someone like that come to a shabby place like this?"
The man Sua had mistaken for a trainer — Choi Heewon, PD of the Snack Movie channel — looked over her self-introduction once more. Wherever his eyes went, there was nothing but blank space. The introduction was empty. The career history was empty. It was almost too much to believe.
"Feels like she could walk into the actual entertainment industry. She hardly needs a broadcast like this..."
"Right? And her face is beautiful, too. Watch the way she talks, and it seems as if she's lived every kind of life there is."
The judges spilled their astonishment out without holding a thing back.
A good while later, only after their startled hearts had settled somewhat, Kim Chae-rin put her headband back on and spoke.
"So she's an unconditional pass, yes?"
"Of course she is! Just imagine making videos for the channel with someone like that and uploading them. It'd be a massive hit. Guaranteed!"
And that was how Sua was accepted into Snack Movie.
She had left every competitor behind her — magnificently, and with her head held high.