Symbol of Luck (2)
Every eye in the room poured onto the screen.
A familiar album cover had appeared in the new-releases column of the streaming site. One click, and the five tracks they had worn thin through the whole preparation period unspooled in a row. The two double title tracks were flagged as the titles.
On the review board of the site that held the largest share of the domestic market, posts from people who had been waiting on the release were stacking up in real time. Reading cheers like “You can tell the quality from the intro alone” and “Neptune, blow up!” I felt my pulse pick up. Maybe it was the fact that the ranks could be watched live, but it felt different from variety shows or dramas.
What rank would they enter at?
“Chief. When does the five-minute forecast chart go up?”
At that, Kim Hyunjo let out a hollow laugh.
“Hey, kid. The five-minute forecast only shows first through third.”
“We might be in there.”
“Hey, hey. Cat Guardian Spirit hit so hard your standards didn’t just get high, they glued themselves to the crown of your head. Topping the charts isn’t as easy as saying it.”
He laughed it off, but I was serious. Bringing up a Roof-Hit earlier hadn’t been a joke either.
I knew it wasn’t easy. It meant downloads and streams shooting so high the numbers literally punched through the top of the graph. If it were easy, singers putting out music wouldn’t be strangling themselves over it. Even so, the maybe had already climbed as far as my throat.
An album with success already written into it. Recognition high enough that the rookie label could come off. Promotion with real weight behind it. With all of that, a flashy entry was worth aiming for, wasn’t it?
Or maybe that was only my thinking. The reaction in the room was lukewarm.
“Oppa, you already ladled yourself seven servings of kimchi soup — celebrating before a single rank was in. Maybe that’s why my heart’s actually calm.”
Lim Seoyoung poked me in the side and laughed. The others were the same. They strung out modest hopes: it would be nice to break the top fifty, nice if the songs could just show up on the first page of the chart.
In this room, the only person whose expectations sat this high was me. No — me and two traitors.
A moment later, Kim Hyunjo spoke.
“Here. Five-minute forecast.”
I snapped my eyes to the screen.
My brow drew in before I knew it. Nothing. From first through third on the forecast chart, Neptune’s name was nowhere. For all their talk of kimchi soup, I had thought there was a chance.
Then what rank were we? I was still guessing at the next numbers in my head when the real-time chart finally changed.
“Trusting we’re inside the top fifty,” Kim Hyunjo said. “Starting at fifty and going up.”
“Oppa, hurry, hurry, I’m going to have a heart attack!”
“And if you start at fifty and it isn’t there?”
“Yah! You’re still saying cursed crap at a time like this? What if your words take root? You — touch Sunwoo oppa, right now, cancel it out!”
Under that fiery barrage, LJ finally brushed my arm, barely a touch.
Kim Hyunjo blurted it out.
“There. Forty-second.”
What?
The kids burst into cheers, and I nearly let out some bizarre noise of my own. If he hadn’t gone straight on to the next sentence, I might have called the streaming site to ask whether the tally was broken.
“The hell is this. It’s one of our B-sides.”
“……Not the title? A B-side? A B-side entered at forty-two? D-don’t tell me the count’s wrong?”
Startled by her own words, Lim Seoyoung grabbed my arm in a rush.
The scroll that had stalled began to move again. Kim Hyunjo must have been tense too; the mouse clicked, over and over. A moment later the scroll stopped twice more. Thirty-fifth. Thirty-third. Two other B-sides sitting in those spots.
By then the air in the practice room had gone past hot and into something that prickled the skin. Toss a lighter and the whole place might have gone up in a chain reaction. Nobody managed a word. They only stared at the screen, eyes huge.
The scroll kept climbing. In the top twenty, Neptune’s album cover was nowhere to be seen. When the first digit of the ranks flipped to a one, I heard someone swallow, ahead of me and behind. And then, at last, the scroll stopped completely.
“……Here it is. Is this a dream, or am I awake?”
“A-awake, right? Right? Right, unni?”
“I think so. Oppa, check the other sites too.”
“Aaah, Sunwoo oppa really is — he really is a symbol of luck! The hair talisman worked. There’s no other way this happens!”
“The company’s not mass-buying streams or anything, right?” LJ said. “People have been talking a lot about that lately.”
The room turned inside out. Every cheek was flushed raw with excitement, and the voices climbed until they rang off the practice-room walls.
Lim Seoyoung stamped her feet, eyes brimming, as if every emotion she owned had surged up at once. LJ was doggedly confirming with Kim Hyunjo whether anyone had rigged the charts. Lee Taehee pulled a bottle of champagne out of her bag. Glasses and something to eat were already in Lee Songha’s hands.
The traitors looked a little wistful themselves, but even so they were soaking up the festival mood with the rest of them. I was the only one who couldn’t join that line.
I checked the screen one more time. It hadn’t changed.
11 Pisces Simon Lee
14 Satellite Lee Taehee
That was where the two title tracks had entered.
I met the morning with my eyes still open, watching it pale into a dim brightness.
My head was too snarled for sleep, so I spent the night staring at my phone. In and out of the music app, and every time the hour turned I checked how the real-time ranks had moved. As the hours passed, the ranks did rise, thankfully — just not by as much as I’d hoped.
10 Pisces
11 Satellite
Objectively speaking, it was a successful entry.
Kim Hyunjo and the Neptune kids had popped the champagne and drunk in their happiness until late into the dawn, and the Team 3 leader, the PR team, and staff from the other teams had all rushed to text that a rank like this was a solid showing — relief and congratulations, one after another. So yes, it was a successful entry. If I hadn’t known the original future, I might have rejoiced at a win, chugged champagne, and passed out cold. But the future I had seen, the story I had heard, kept tangling my head without a pause.
It felt like I’d lost something I’d been a single step from closing my hand around.
Had my expectations simply been too high from the start? Had they originally entered the top ten and climbed from there? But for a hit that was supposed to take first on the music shows, wasn’t this start too weak? Was there some trigger that would send it rocketing, some late reverse-climb still waiting?
Or was it because we had stepped off the plan and switched to a double title? Had the public’s attention split, so a rank that should have climbed higher was hesitating?
I chewed my lower lip, then looked through the album reviews again.
The response to the album’s quality was overwhelmingly positive. The star rating sat at a high 4.8, and across the communities and social media the praise was the vast majority. Push the promotion on broadcasts from here, let the word of mouth spread, and the ranks would climb further. I turned it over while I rubbed my dry lips.
Right. Watch a little longer.
The moment I actually plunged into the flood of schedules, there was no room left to sink into a leisurely worry. I had packed the days as tight as they would go, to get the new songs and the kids in front of people, but living it was another matter. This was a devil’s schedule if ever there was one.
Network music shows and cable ones, congratulatory stages on culture programs, and the smaller event stages besides — they were up several times a day. There were fan signings, too, to push album sales.
The days stacked up: awake at the crack of dawn, into makeup, running until they dropped into sleep at dawn again. The kids clicked their tongues and said it was the busiest they had been since debut, but the brutal schedule seemed to suit them. They grew brighter by the day.
And in step with the work, the chart ranks crept up, little by little.
When the talk show they had done with Simon Lee went out over the air, I quietly expected quite a lot. It was a so-called cattle-call talk show, celebrity guests yammering in a pack, but it was still an hour-long network variety, the same breed as Star Manager.
Next to Star Manager, the impact was pathetic. I monitored the live broadcast until my eyes nearly fell out of my head, hunting for the kids inside wide shots because their faces barely made it on screen.
Still, it was network television. Right after the broadcast, Pisces clawed its way up and hit sixth, and Satellite entered at eighth.
I was swallowing my restlessness, watching ranks that rose steadily if slowly — ranks that would have been too low even on the way up — when they suddenly lurched down a step at a time.
Because of something I hadn’t accounted for. Sugar Cat.
“This is BYG fandom firepower.”
Kim Hyunjo clicked his tongue. On the laptop, Sugar Cat’s digital single, released at midnight, was playing. Sugar Cat was plainly a three-member girl group, but the voices you heard most were male.
“If the guest stealing the show gets this bad, it’s just embarrassing. How is this a Sugar Cat song featuring BYG? Anyone listening can tell it’s Sugar Cat featuring on a BYG song. The BYG kids were doing all the social promo, too. Their fandom doesn’t even think of it as a Sugar Cat track.”
The new Sugar Cat song, with BYG’s members on it, had entered at third the moment it dropped. Through the morning and on to now, it had climbed to second. Digital numbers like that meant the album sales wouldn’t be bad either. Do the broadcast run alongside BYG, and the buzz would be enormous.
At this rate, first place on the music shows was going to be Sugar Cat’s, not Neptune’s. I couldn’t even get a feel for where it had first gone crooked, or which piece I would have to twist back if I wanted to flip it.
The Neptune kids, who had been content just to have settled inside the top ten, lost the power of speech when they heard. Lim Seoyoung especially: the life drained straight out of her until she went soft and boneless as a jellyfish.
At the next music-show filming they would come face to face with the Sugar Cat kids, and just picturing those smug faces was enough to kill my appetite.
“On the song alone, ours is clearly better. The fandom’s a gang. A straight-up gang. Word is Sugar Cat never even had a BYG feature in the plan, and suddenly this……”
Kim Hyunjo’s words stuck in my ear like a dart.
“The BYG feature wasn’t planned?”
“They say it wasn’t in the original album plan. Changed halfway through.”
My head was a boiling pot.
Sugar Cat’s high chart rank. BYG’s feature. Had all of this happened in the original future, too? Or had the present changed?
I thought of Sugar Cat the last time I had seen them, the day of the Next K-Star concert. They had vanished with faces screwed up like they’d chewed on shit. Saying they were making a comeback at the same time as us — like, just you wait.
If they had dragged BYG in because it twisted their guts to watch Neptune keep rising after Star Manager, then this definitely hadn’t existed in the original future. The present had changed.
As if one mountain after another weren’t enough. I was already agonizing alone because the ranks sat lower than I’d hoped, and now another variable — my head felt one notch from bursting its capacity.
Right. A variable had appeared. So what was I supposed to do from here?
If this album was going to succeed the way it had in the original future — if Lee Taehee’s self-composed song was going to be called a hit and take first on the music shows — how was I supposed to put the new songs in front of the public and pull their attention in?
I was still turning it over when my phone went off. A text.
I thought it was another round of congratulations. It was a writer who had contacted me a few times before.
The moment I finished reading, I turned to Kim Hyunjo.
I didn’t know how much it would help. I meant to try everything I could anyway.
“Chief. Those variety shows that came in asking us to appear, me included. The ones we shelved so we could watch how things went.”
“Yeah? Why?”
“I’ll go on them.”