-33-
After staring at the ceiling for a while, Bunhong rolled over and pulled out a book about travel essays from the drawer under his bed, muttering to himself.
“Dad… I miss you so much today.”
He gently rubbed the spot where the author’s name was written with his hand for a while, then flipped through the randomly opened pages, murmuring the names of cities that appeared like he was talking to himself. These were destinations he wanted to visit someday if he succeeded as an idol singer, combining tours with travel.
Right, these cities that were so picturesquely beautiful they could blind your eyes, Bunhong thought as he gazed at the photos for a while before closing the book and beginning to organize all the items in his room.
‘I don’t know when I’ll have to pack up and leave, so I should organize everything now.’
Before regression, during his trainee days before moving into the dormitory, he used to live a repetitive life going back and forth between his home and the company.
But this time, to focus on the upcoming program, even though he was still a trainee, he decided to stay only in the dormitory provided by the company.
So he was organizing in advance before his busy schedule began. After carefully packing the necessary items into boxes, he dusted off his hands.
As he rubbed his stiff back from bending over for so long and was lost in thought for a moment, he received a message.
It was a text message from Jeong Ido.
[Come back. Kim Bunhong.]
There was one last place he had to go. Since he’d made a deal, he had to pay the price accordingly. Since Ido had deposited the promised money, now it was his turn to keep his promise.
The next day, his steps headed toward the destination without hesitation.
“……”
Before boarding the bus to the company, Kim Bunhong turned around one last time to look back. Soon the wheels began rolling with a rattling sound.
“……It’s been a while.”
Starting over again meant facing everything that had once been familiar.
[Class A Practice Room]
Standing still in front of the door for a moment, Kim Bunhong thought.
He was going to end up coming back here anyway, yet he’d taken such a roundabout way to get here.
Inside, practice seemed to be in full swing as thumping music sounds flowed out through the crack of the door.
‘Why is he standing there like that? Is there someone he knows inside?’
His back remained motionless for quite a while in front of the practice room door, enough that other people passing by glanced at him and thought it was strange.
Bunhong, the owner of that back, was standing there for a moment, steadying his breathing to release tension. At the same time, Bunhong worried inwardly.
‘I absolutely hate being the center of attention.’
No matter how many times he repeated it, he could never get used to it – the gazes of people looking at him.
Bunhong squeezed his eyes shut. Biting his lips tightly and lowering his head, he leaned against the cold practice room door to cool his head, and as soon as the music inside stopped, he opened the door handle without hesitation.
Then the door opened forcefully with a bang- sound as if it had been waiting.
* * *
Han Chayeon was in a particularly bad mood that day. What was the reason? There were too many to explain. Don’t we all have days like that? That day was one of those unlucky days when bad things happened continuously like the commonly mentioned Murphy’s Law, when luck started going wrong. If it were a weather forecast, the discomfort index would be about 100.
Unlike his usual sleep habits of getting up sharp as a knife when the alarm rang, he strangely felt sluggish that day and overslept, so he unintentionally skipped his dawn jogging for the first time.
His shoelaces came undone at the exact moment the traffic light changed, so he couldn’t cross the crosswalk he absolutely had to cross, and therefore had to use public transportation to avoid being late.
“Huh? Why are you coming out from here, hyung?”
You always walk since it’s only three stops away.
And the first person Chayeon encountered when he arrived at the agency in such an uncharacteristically flustered state was, of all the many trainees, the one most famous for having a loose mouth.
As he got off the bus, Chayeon coldly stared at the trainee who was asking him questions one after another with a puzzled expression, then roughly swept back the hair that was tickling his forehead.
Despite the clearly dismissive behavior, the trainee came closer to Chayeon and said,
“Seeing hyung looking so disheveled, what a thing to witness after living so long in this world.”
Chayeon, who had used a headband to fix his hair that was hanging down limply from sweat, silently began doing warm-up exercises in front of the practice room mirror before dancing.
When the trainee who had followed him and stood awkwardly beside him continued staring at him while running his loose mouth, Han Chayeon finally opened his mouth for the first time.
“Hey. Aren’t you going to practice?”
“……”
“If you didn’t come here to fool around, then get your head straight.”
Though Chayeon’s face couldn’t be seen since he was facing forward, his expression was clearly visible in the mirror.
The trainee, who finally sensed the seriousness of the situation from the gaze they met through the mirror, slunk away with his tail between his legs, pouting and grumbling.
“Your debut is already confirmed, so why don’t you take it a bit easier now.”
At Chayeon’s scolding, the trainee scratched his head awkwardly, when suddenly a shadow fell over his head and someone boldly climbed on top of him and crushed him down. The trainee screamed.
“Ah, you scared me!”
The trainee who ended up carrying the person who had so boldly climbed onto his back couldn’t withstand the sudden heavy weight and collapsed right there on the spot.
Han Chayeon, who could be called the idol of all trainees, looked at this pathetic sight and thought.
‘He should work out more diligently.’
And beside him stood Duho, who was stubbornly sucking on a popsicle he had somehow obtained secretly from the dance teacher, trapped in the infinite Möbius strip known as “diet resolutions lasting three days.”
Neither of them seemed to have any intention of helping up the trainee who was sprawled miserably on the floor.
Actually, the culprit who had just thrown his heavy body onto the trainee and knocked him down was Duho himself, but surprisingly, he seemed to have no thoughts about the fallen trainee. Instead, he looked at the expressionless Chayeon and said playfully,
“I wonder who it could be. The lucky guy who gets to debut with our hero, AT Entertainment’s official practice bug Han Chayeon?”
“……”
“That would be me~”
Han Chayeon, who had momentarily reacted to his name being called suddenly, whipped his head around and immediately encountered Duho’s grinning face, causing him to scrunch up his expression like crumpled tissue thrown in a trash can.
As if that contemptuous expression was familiar and didn’t bother him at all, Duho went even further, staring at Chayeon while making a flower gesture with his hands, and showed interest in the person on the floor for the first time.
“Oh my. But why are you lying there like that?”
Duho, who had been staring at the fallen trainee with wistful eyes as if recalling his first love from 10 years ago, asked.
“Our Seung… ho?”
Duho tilted his head with an innocent expression as if he had forgotten the fact that he had knocked him down just one second ago. Of course, there still seemed to be no thought in his head of helping up the fallen person.
Chayeon, who couldn’t stand it anymore, pointed out,
“That guy’s name. It’s not Seungho, it’s Seunghyun. You’ve been practicing together for over a month, how can you not know?”
Seunghyun shouted in shock,
“Damn it, hyung. You still can’t memorize my name properly? You must be crazy, seriously.”
Finally, with a fed-up expression, Seunghyun got up from the floor with his own strength. Then he left that spot to find other trainees who would listen to his chatter.
Goodbye, little fish. Strangely, seeing that retreating figure reminded Duho of the goldfish Nemo he had raised when he was five, and he silently wiped away tears.
In the finally quiet atmosphere, Han Chayeon now did warm-up exercises to loosen his leg muscles while staring at himself in the mirror and thinking.
‘Come to think of it, it’s already been 6 years now.’
AT Entertainment’s longest-serving trainee. 6th year. As his long-awaited debut had been canceled multiple times, everyone started calling him just by that title instead of his actual name “Han Chayeon.”
At the same time, as he inevitably went through a stage of questioning his own identity, Chayeon thought of himself as an apple waiting to be sold someday in a store, tagged as a trainee.
Holding onto such indefinite hope without being able to let it go was extremely painful in itself. Like an apple that had been constantly gnawed at until only the skin remained. Even if the sweetness remained, many things were bound to change in the flowing passage of countless time.
As rumors spread within the agency that there were no plans to debut a boy group for a while, the trainees who had been practicing together left one by one.
They went to other agencies to debut anew or moved into completely different fields.
While everyone else left to find their own way to survive, Han Chayeon, who remained behind, stubbornly dug into only one path like a fool.
This was the right path, no, the correct one. There were times when he practiced with certainty and confidence, but as a result, he had somehow become such a tasteless apple that no one sought out, left alone in the display case.
Being a spectacle was sickening. The feeling of becoming an out-of-season apple that attracted only meaningless flies before it could even bloom was really… to put it crudely, fucking awful.
On the day his fifth debut was officially canceled despite having the debut lineup already formed, he thought he cried secretly in the bathroom for the first time.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
