The Moment Talent Sprouts (1)
Something about the pronunciation just now had sounded off.
Hadn't they been calling me Lucky Charm?
And that one employee wasn't the only person addressing me strangely.
"Fortune-Kicker's clocking in now?"
"Oh—that's him? That's Team 3's Fortune-Kicker?"
People I'd never exchanged a single word with nodded at me like old acquaintances as they passed. Others clustered at a distance, whispering the moment they caught sight of me.
What is this?
Something was going on that I didn't know about. Had yesterday already turned into gossip? I was scanning the hallway for the least uncomfortable person to ask when someone tapped me on the back.
"Fortune-Kicker's here?"
Kim Hyunjo.
"Good morning, Chief. But what are you calling me? What's a Fortune-Kicker?"
"Word got around yesterday that you dumped Sung Do-won. Nothing stays a secret in this business. Anyway, that's why your nickname went from Team 3's Lucky Charm to Team 3's Fortune-Kicker. The guy who kicked his fortune out the door."
"Ah……."
"I hear the division head came up with it himself."
My professional image. Is this really all right?
I was trying to take the question seriously when Kim Hyunjo hurried me along.
"Come on, let's head down. The shoot crew'll be here any minute. Geonyoung went to pick them up."
"The shoot crew?"
"We're filming insert shots of the kids practicing. Remember?"
Neptune did have a shoot on the schedule today. Recording for the Next K-Star missions started tomorrow, and they'd said they needed practice footage to cut in later during the edit.
"Wasn't it locked for five?"
"Another team was supposed to go first, but their regional shoot ran later than anyone expected and the schedule got tangled. So they asked if we could film first and they'd head over after. Figures. We're always the easiest ones to push around."
On the way down to the basement practice room, Kim Hyunjo muttered, his face creased with worry.
"Jieun's supposed to run those kids hard. I just hope she doesn't pull her punches because the cameras are there."
Jieun was the vocal trainer who'd agreed to help with today's shoot. I'd seen her at the last meeting—a cute face, and incredibly short. She'd spent a few years as a faceless singer before switching over to training.
"One shot like that does more than a hundred interviews about how many hours a day they practice, how hard they've worked. Viewers see it and think, those kids really are grinding, girl groups aren't easy either—and they take it the right way."
I nodded and opened the practice room door. With the mission coming up, the members were dancing and singing with no backing track at all. The trainer stood with her arms crossed, watching.
I slipped in quietly and watched them practice, and a sigh of admiration escaped me on its own.
Lee Taehee, especially, was astonishing even to someone like me with no real ear for music. It was hard to believe a voice that size could come out of a frame that didn't even clear a hundred and ten pounds.
She powered through the dynamic choreography and sang at the same time without a hint of strain, her voice shooting out clean and unwavering. The high notes in particular came so easily that anyone who didn't know better would have assumed they were simple.
I was watching with a pleased smile when—
"Lee Songha!"
I jumped.
At the trainer's shout the members froze where they stood. Lee Songha, the one whose name had been called, wiped her sweat and bowed her head.
"I'm sorry."
"If this is how you handle a title track you've been practicing for over half a year, what are you going to do with the other missions? Are you trying to embarrass me? We're going on air with our faces out for the whole country to see. You want me getting torn apart for debuting a kid who wasn't even ready?"
"I'm sorry."
"If you're going to be like this, just tell them to run your parts in AR!"
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
The criticism came down so sharp that even I, only watching, flinched. This clearly wasn't the first time. Lee Songha bowed with real force and repeated her apologies. I worried she might cry, but there wasn't a trace of tears. If anything, it was the other members stealing pitying glances.
But still…… she didn't seem bad enough to deserve a scolding like that.
Since becoming Neptune's manager, I'd been monitoring the tracks and music-show broadcasts of every girl group people said was doing well these days, and honestly, looked at objectively, Lee Songha was average. Put on rose-colored glasses and she sat a touch above average.
Not the kind of level where you said she was genuinely great—but she wasn't bad, either.
The problem was the company she kept. Lee Taehee, on the same team, sang so overwhelmingly well; LJ's rap was nowhere near the kind of skill that got buried anywhere; and even Lim Seoyoung, who specialized in dance, was a decent singer. Set beside them, Songha only sounded relatively weak. Drop her onto another team and she wouldn't be treated like a hole in the lineup.
And then there was how much she practiced.
If skill grew in neat proportion to the hours you put in, how nice that would be—but it didn't, and that was all there was to regret. If even I, a third party, felt this way, how stifling must it be for her?
"Oh, you're here?"
The trainer noticed us late and came over, looking a little awkward.
"Chief, are we starting the shoot now?"
"The crew should be in soon."
"When we're filming, what should I—how am I supposed to do this?"
"Just do it the way you've been doing it. Like right now."
Kim Hyunjo nodded, satisfied.
A few minutes later the traitor came in with the Next K-Star shoot crew. The young PD and one writer I'd seen at the last company dinner, plus a cameraman with his camera and staff hauling a long boom mic and the lights. The moment the group poured in, the practice room was packed.
"Thanks for having us. We'll shoot for exactly thirty minutes and get out of your hair."
The PD said it through a wide yawn.
And the crew really did wrap in exactly thirty minutes and leave. From what I could tell, they'd gotten a cut or two of the members practicing, and the rest would be them getting picked apart—especially Lee Songha being ground into dust.
I could only hope that when people online saw that footage, they'd think, That's too much. She wasn't bad enough to get torn into like that.
"Sunwoo."
I was cleaning up when Kim Hyunjo came over.
"Leave the others with Geonyoung. You take Songha and wait in Conference Room B. I'll find Young-hoon hyung and come up. We still haven't finished yesterday's conversation."
"Ah, yes!"
I'd been waiting for exactly when that talk would come up.
I picked my way through the members, who were sprawled out in exhaustion and still murmuring that the shoot seemed to have gone well, and found Lee Songha. She was in the farthest corner, collapsed facedown like a load of wet laundry.
She hasn't passed out, has she?
"Songha."
"Yes."
The moment I called, she shot upright.
"The chief and the team leader want to talk. You all right with that?"
"Yes, I'm fine."
Lee Songha picked up her bag and followed. Behind us the others saw her off, one line each.
"Songha, talk it out and come back."
"Go on."
"Tell the team leader everything you heard, you frustrating girl!"
We stepped into the elevator and I pressed the button for the fourth floor.
The space was narrow and sealed, so the sound of labored breathing echoed off the walls. Lee Songha's shoulders were heaving as if she'd sprinted here at a full run. Sweat covered her forehead, her chin, even the slender line of her neck. It was pitiful to look at.
And still she never once said she was tired. I couldn't decide whether to call that admirable, or stubborn. Or maybe just fierce.
The truth was, what hurt worse than her body was probably her heart.
"The vocal teacher was scary."
"Sorry?"
"She might have gone harder on purpose because the shoot crew was here today."
I'd said it hoping it might help, even a little, but Lee Songha tilted her head.
"Teacher was really gentle today, because we were filming."
"……That was gentle?"
"When we're actually practicing, she's about ten times scarier. And even then, this kind of thing doesn't bother me."
A thought cut through me.
This was a kid who said she was fine even after a scolding that harsh—and after ones ten times worse. And yet when she'd taken acting lessons, the stress had worn her down. Worn her down enough that she got depressed eating three people's worth of late-night food every night, and in the end quit.
That bastard. What did he do to her? How hard did he push?
An acting teacher I'd never even met was turning into a monster inside me.
I settled Lee Songha in Conference Room B and went to fetch the muffins I'd bought on my way in. Between practice, the shoot, and getting yelled at, her blood sugar had to be crashing. The least I could do was feed her a snack.
"Songha, these are muffins. Want to ea—"
"I'll eat them."
"All right. I bought them so everyone could have a snack, but you go ahead and take one first."
Lee Songha had already seized the muffin box and was about to open it when she stopped short.
"Only one? Are they different kinds?"
She looked at me and asked it with complete seriousness, as if I had just planted her at some tremendous crossroads.
But I was the uncle of quadruplets.
"No. They're all the same. Nothing to choose."
"Wow. Thank you for the food."
As if someone might snatch it the instant she hesitated, Lee Songha grabbed a muffin. A fist-sized muffin crowned with walnuts vanished in the blink of an eye. Not a figure of speech. Actually in the blink of an eye.
What—did she drink that muffin?
Lee Songha even gathered up every crumb that had fallen on the table, then smacked her lips with regret. Maybe her real talent lay in competitive eating. With a face like that, if she filmed a mukbang on a livestream, she might make a fortune.
"I bought one for myself too, but I don't really like them, so have another."
"Really?"
"Really."
"Thank you."
She likes them. She really likes them. They must be good.
She was someone whose expression barely moved, but when she ate she looked genuinely happy, and I liked seeing it. Four thousand won apiece—an absurd price I would never have paid with my own money if it were only for me—but watching her, it didn't feel wasted at all.
Even after Lee Songha had demolished both muffins, Kim Hyunjo and the Team 3 leader still hadn't appeared. I kept glancing at the conference room door when she started rustling through her bag. She drew out a stack of A4 paper.
The synopsis for Cat Guardian Spirit.
"I read… everything you gave me."
"Yeah? What did you think?"
The synopsis really wasn't much, but I asked just in case.
"The unnies said it was just okay."
As expected.
"I thought it was fun."
"……Really?"
"Especially the novel at the very back. That was fun."
Lee Songha flipped neatly through the synopsis to show me.
At the very end, the early plot of Cat Guardian Spirit was attached in the form of a novel. Plenty of synopses wrote their stories out that way, but maybe because writer Hong Joo-mi had come up as a romance novelist, this one was serious—like an actual novel. That was the part I'd enjoyed most, too.
"Which character did you like best?"
Lee Songha paged back toward the front, then raised her hand.
"This person."
I nearly let out a gasp.
Jung Haewon, the simultaneous interpreter.
Lee Songha had pointed at exactly that role.
Since the synopsis had come into my hands, I'd read it dozens of times. I'd tried casting Lee Songha as every woman in it, imagining which one would suit her best.
And I'd decided that if she did this drama, I wanted her as Jung Haewon. Not because I'd heard it from the future, but because the character itself felt genuinely compelling.
And because I thought the role would suit her.