When the Puzzle Pieces Are Missing (1)
"Are all of those people here for the concert?"
The kids stared out the windows, mouths hanging open.
Their eyes were stretched so wide that if I smacked the backs of their heads, the eyeballs might have gone tumbling out. Mine would have been among them. I was just as stunned, my face mashed against the passenger-side window.
The final recording of Next K-Star was a concert—eight idol teams pouring out, all at once, every performance they had shown across the missions.
With the buzz running this high, I had expected a crowd. Seeing the mass packed at the hall entrance still left me speechless. There were audiences at music shows and at regional events, but nothing that compared in scale.
"H-how many people are coming today?"
"They said the tickets sold out, so it'll be over five thousand."
The traitor answered from the driver's seat.
"Five thousand...!"
Lim Seoyoung started coming apart, gnawing at her nails. She looked ready to chew her fingers clean off if I left her to it, so I swung my arm back over the seat.
"Here. We don't have a doll, so hold onto this."
"Blessings upon you!"
Lim Seoyoung seized my arm.
A person only has two hands, though. So why did it feel like they were multiplying? I turned, puzzled, and found Lee Songha latched on as well. She rarely got nervous on a drama set, but a performance still seemed to weigh on her. Her face had gone stiff.
Fair enough. It wasn't so long ago that people said she single-handedly dragged the team's average down.
"Uh, that person..."
Lee Taehee suddenly narrowed her eyes at the crowd outside the window.
"What? Someone you know?"
"I think I saw them when we did the guerrilla concert in Hongdae."
At that, Kim Hyunjo clicked his tongue.
"You still remember someone from back then?"
"They were big, so they stood out. And they were the first person who ever gave us a gift."
"Oh! Those butter cookies?!"
Lim Seoyoung plastered herself to the window. The butter cookies from that day were still preserved like a specimen in one corner of the living room. LJ had thrown them out three or four times for growing mold, and every time Lim Seoyoung brought them back. A cookie with a remarkable lifespan.
"So they came to see us? They came to see us, right?"
"Who knows. The team they cheer for might've changed since then."
LJ said it without a dream or a hope in the words. But Lim Seoyoung's eyes were already sparkling. She fretted over fans more than anyone, and the thought that one had come seemed to send her confidence and her drive surging.
It wasn't just her. The others were the same.
Little by little, the air inside the van began to heat.
Because Next K-Star was a competition, plenty of the audience had come to cheer for one specific team. And wherever fans of different teams gathered, a war of nerves was inevitable.
"Is Lee Taehee even that good at singing? I couldn't tell."
"I couldn't even tell if LJ's rap was any good."
"I bet a lot of the people voting for Neptune are just throwing their votes at Lee Songha's face. But is she even that pretty? I don't see it."
"Hey, honestly, she is that pretty. If you can't tell, memorize it."
A few fans who had come for Sugar Cat muttered among themselves.
Because of the history between Sugar Cat and Neptune's Lim Seoyoung, a mood of keeping Neptune in check had existed among Sugar Cat's fans from the very start.
Early on, it had been fine. Sugar Cat was competitive enough to fight boy groups for rank, and Neptune was scraping the bottom. But as the episodes piled up they clawed their way up and the two sides traded places, until the reversal had long since stuck.
Because of that, an unusual number of Neptune antis had cropped up among Sugar Cat's fans.
A few audience members who had come for Neptune wore unpleasant looks, but the Sugar Cat fans kept muttering.
From the row behind, a hand as broad as a pot lid tapped their shoulders.
"You folks don't know what you're talking about. Let's keep it down."
"What, we can't even talk with our own—"
The ones who turned in irritation flinched.
Shoulders squared off in a hard line, a build as solid as an athlete's. The Sugar Cat fans folded themselves small and quiet. Pick a fight with the man in the row behind, and they wouldn't be seeing a concert. They'd be touring the afterlife.
Just then a VJ roaming the seats with a 6mm camera came over and pointed it at the man in the back row.
"Mind if I get a quick interview? Who did you come to support?"
"I came to support Neptune."
At that, the Sugar Cat fans in front shrank even flatter. They were whispering, pale-faced, about whether they ought to abandon their seats and move somewhere else, when the woman with the man smiled, sly and easy.
"Seriously, you came all this way just to act dignified? I'm a Neptune fan! I won the ticket war and came in doing a victory dance! That's how you do an interview if you want to get on air and at least stamp your face in front of Neptune!"
"You're loud."
The man glared, but she paid him no mind and spoke to the VJ.
"We were at the guerrilla concert last time, too. At first this guy snorted that an idol show would be exactly what you'd expect."
"Oh, really?"
"So I said, how do you know—you might get hooked on a girl group and be lining up at a fansign a month from now. And he told me to cut the crap. Look at him now. Hooked on Neptune."
One wall had chroma-key fabric hung like a curtain, and beneath it four chairs sat in a neat row.
The Neptune kids took their seats with practiced ease, ready for the pre-interview.
"This is the last interview."
PD Go Joon-tae said it, shaking a densely packed sheet of questions.
Maybe because it was the last one. Even that man looked a little less venomous today. The eyes that had been full of obsession over climbing ratings, the tongue he had oiled to wring out something provocative no matter what—both were quiet.
"Before the first recording, five of the seven teams picked Neptune for last place. And now, on the day of the final recording, you've climbed to third overall. With all the ups and downs, this must feel different, doesn't it?"
Right. The first time Lim Seoyoung heard that, she had gone rigid.
But as PD Go Joon-tae said, Neptune's rank now was third.
First was Punchline, and second was another boy group, so among girl groups Neptune was effectively first. Plenty of people even assessed that if you set fandom firepower aside, Neptune's rank would climb higher still.
"Honestly, sometimes I wake up in the morning and get startled. I think I'm dreaming."
Lim Seoyoung answered, pressing a hand to her chest.
"Not long ago we were standing on the edge of a cliff every single day, afraid the team would disband. And in barely four months the world changed. I get shocked thinking it must be a dream, and every time I realize it isn't, I'm just so happy."
Joy soaked her expression and her voice alike.
The questions went on for a long while. Only after they had spent easily twice as long as the other teams did the pre-interview end. A glance at the time said the show was nearly upon them. I was about to head out when PD Go Joon-tae caught me.
"Hold on. Sunwoo-ssi, just two questions or so, please."
"Me?"
"When you think about it, you're the one who tied our fates together. If you hadn't grabbed me four months ago, would today even exist?"
PD Go Joon-tae said it with a bitter look.
"Let's just do the interview. I'm still getting an earful from upstairs because the Seo Ji-joon booking fell through."
Now that was welcome news.
Kim Hyunjo shoved me in the back and told me to go do it, so I ended up giving a solo interview that hadn't been on the schedule. I doubted my interview would help the ratings by so much as a speck of dust, but PD Go Joon-tae seemed satisfied anyway.
When it was all over, I shook his hand awkwardly and thought, Let's not meet again.
Twenty minutes to standby.
A heavy tension moved through the waiting room. It felt as if there wasn't enough oxygen.
Outside, Sugar Cat's performance was in full swing. The roar of thousands of spectators carried all the way in.
Neptune's first stage was next. The kids shook off the dregs of their nerves each in their own way. Lim Seoyoung was hugging an enormous bag and working through diaphragmatic breaths; Lee Taehee and LJ had earphones in, concentrating.
And Lee Songha sat quietly beside me.
Amid the hush of even their breathing, Lee Songha's phone buzzed.
A glance showed the name saved on the screen: Home. She picked up the phone and ended the call without hesitation, then powered it off entirely and dropped it into her bag.
"You can take it. There's time for a quick call."
At that, Lee Songha shook her head hard.
"I don't have to."
"Talking to your parents might settle you a little."
"I'm fine."
She seemed to sink into thought, then soon murmured, as if to herself:
"And I'm steadiest when I'm with you, Oppa."
Ten minutes to standby.
We left the waiting room and moved toward the stage.
Maybe because it was the last day, or because everyone was equally nervous with thousands of spectators waiting out front, members of the other groups offered a word of encouragement as they passed.
We reached the back of the stage right after Sugar Cat's performance ended. While the special MCs and the judges kept up light talk over the footage, Sugar Cat came down behind the stage, noisily congratulating themselves.
The moment they spotted us, their faces changed.
Until now they had smiled brightly while digging in—Neptune had turned into a Lee Songha one-woman team; how awkward, for a girl group, when only the member who acted got any attention. Now they couldn't even manage their expressions. Openly, they looked as if they had bitten into something foul.
It had to be because Star Manager had put a spotlight on all of Neptune, and on Lim Seoyoung especially. By now their insides were probably turned inside out. These were the kids who had poured a ridiculous amount of energy into looking down on her and keeping her in check for no good reason.
Sugar Cat's leader, Han Saet-byul, stopped beside Lim Seoyoung.
"Neptune's new song comes out in the spring, right? Teacher Simon Lee's?"
"It's a double title track. Taehee unni's own song, too."
Lim Seoyoung answered with a smile.
Brushing past, Han Saet-byul spoke again.
"We're making a comeback then, too. See you on the music shows."
"Hello, we're Neptune!"
The kids went up onstage and greeted the audience.
It was the slogan they always carried in their mouths to make their name known, but among the crowd gathered today there didn't seem to be a single person who didn't know it. A cheer loud enough to deafen burst from the seats.
It really did feel different.
Then the backing track of the mission song they had practiced through the night began to flow out.
Performing in front of a crowd this size was a first, and I had been quietly worried, but it was nothing but needless fussing. Not a trace of nerves showed on the kids once they were onstage. Fish in water, and nothing else.
I watched the stage without taking my eyes off it for a second.
At some point, without my noticing, a smile spread across my mouth.
To mark the final recording, we held a simple wrap party, just us.
It was so late that we only split a piece of cake each and called it done, and by the time we reached the studio apartment it was already the small hours.
I pulled into the parking lot by the light of the streetlamps.
Someone must have put out a can of tuna. In a corner of the lot, a black stray had its head shoved against the ground. When I parked close, it shot its tail straight up and went on guard.
I killed the engine and stretched long. I was thinking I would skip the shower and everything else, get inside, and flop straight into sleep, when it happened.
Out of nowhere, Noise appeared before my eyes.
If it hadn't been for the Noise, I would have thought, Why are my hands moving on their own? I was sitting in the driver's seat of a stopped car, the same as a moment ago.
The familiar interior of the minivan. The familiar wheel. The familiar air freshener.
And this place was night, too.
The Noise was bad enough already, and there were no streetlights. Outside the windows it was pitch-dark. I could faintly make out a building, but nothing I could actually recognize. The one thing that was certain was that it wasn't a place I knew.
"...So do the interview right now and explain yourself."
I was on the phone with someone. And something about it was off.
An interview? An explanation?
It sounded exactly as if I were threatening someone. Similar to when I had pressured Professor Shim Kyung-taek. No—more precisely, like the moment I had played back the file I recorded then. My own voice, the one I had heard that day, had sounded just like this.
Through the phone at my ear came roughened breathing.
Who?
"I'm not asking. If one interview doesn't fix it, do it twice, three times, and set this situation right. Unless you want to roll in the mud with me."
The words kept coming, but they were nowhere near a hint. If anything, they confused me more.
What interview? And what did it mean, set the situation right?
Rolling in the mud together—what was that supposed to mean?
My head spun in knots. On the other end of the phone the breathing only grew rougher, and still there was no answer. If I could have turned my head of my own will, I would have checked the phone that instant and seen the number...
A shrill cat's yowl stabbed my ear.
I flinched and turned my head. A black stray, fur standing on end.
Only then did I realize. I was back in the parking lot in front of my studio.
I swallowed hard and replayed the future I had seen. Outside, the stray kept circling, spitting threat-sounds, but the questions whipping through my head wouldn't let me move.
When, exactly, was that going to happen?
A thought struck, and I looked at the air freshener stuck in front of the passenger seat.
A little more than half of it was left. When I had seen it in the future, the difference hadn't been large. Maybe I would use that one up and fill it again with the same kind. If not, the future might be closer than I thought.
Who had I been on the phone with, in that future?
Why had I been threatening them?
...What in the world was about to happen?