I deliberately chose a turtleneck to cover the red marks on my neck, but when I put on the turtleneck and the clothing touched the wound on my neck, goosebumps rose all along my spine.
“Ah, it hurts.”
Still, I couldn’t wear clothes that would hideously expose my neck, so a tearful expression naturally formed on my face. When I went to the bathroom and looked closely at my nape, red abrasion marks that looked painful just by looking at them covered my neck.
Well, I had just gone through an attempted suicide that ended in failure… The wounds didn’t look like they would heal easily.
“Where is O-All Entertainment?”
To me, who had trained at a prominent agency in Korea, O-All Entertainment was a place I’d never heard of before. Seeing that I, who had been in the entertainment industry for quite a long period, didn’t know it, O-All Entertainment seemed to be either new, small-to-medium sized, or below that.
“Let’s go for now.”
O All En er ainmen
“Ah, shit.”
After fumbling several times, I finally managed to set up directions. Fortunately, it was in a nearby location about 15 minutes away on foot. Since I don’t know any of the roads in this area, I have to rely on the map app to get there.
“Let’s just go for a few days and then quit.”
Becoming a celebrity again might be good. But.
“I’ll end up meeting people I knew when I was alive.”
Even if I meet my acquaintances, I can’t acknowledge them and have to treat them like strangers I’m seeing for the first time—just imagining it is too painful. So if I’m going to cut off the sprout from the beginning, it seems better to eliminate contact points as much as possible.
With this resolution, I headed to O-All Entertainment like that.
Walking on the street? This was something I couldn’t even imagine when I was Cha Hohyeon of Fort. That’s why I had almost never walked on the street without being conscious of others’ gazes like now since debut, so right now I felt incredibly strange.
“Wow.”
Even just simply going out in front of my house, a hat, glasses, and mask were essential, and even under the blazing summer sun, I covered more than half my face with a hat.
But right now, walking on the street, no one cared about me. Among the people each going their own way, I could walk around without a hat, glasses, mask—without anything.
That was somehow strange, and I really felt the reality that I had died and was living someone else’s life.
“Oops.”
I was so distracted by the street that I almost went off course. I carefully examined the blurry map beyond the cracked screen and took steps one at a time.
“Is this it?”
Fortunately, I arrived safely, but I couldn’t find the entrance and wandered around for quite a while. As I looked around and peered about, the security guard uncle guided me to the desk.
He looked at me suspiciously when I said I was a trainee but couldn’t find the entrance, but only after arriving at the desk and confirming that I was on the trainee list did the security guard uncle withdraw his suspicious gaze.
The scale was bigger than I thought, so even the path to barely find the practice room was a continuous ordeal.
Fortunately, the person at the information desk kindly guided me so I was able to find it well, but what was a little embarrassing was when the desk staff said, “Jerim-ssi, won’t it be your fourth year as a trainee next year?” Perhaps they were someone who knew Ka Jerim, or maybe Ka Jerim’s information was written on the list earlier.
Surprised that Ka Jerim had been a trainee for nearly 4 years, I eventually worried about what to answer to her who was looking at me as if urging me, and barely managed a response of “That’s right” with an awkward smile.
When I said that, she looked at me with a face that said it was really strange.
Is this not it?
My face felt like it was completely heating up.
[Class B Practice Room]
Ka Jerim, Seonwoo An…
Perhaps because it was a “Ka” surname, the name was written first. Satisfied that I had finally found it, I proudly opened the practice room door.
What should I say when I go in? Should I say nice to meet you? No, Ka Jerim already knows these kids, so casual speech? Formal speech?
Contrary to my highly confused inner state, the door opened smoothly. When the door opened, all the kids inside looked at me. Five pairs of eyes that were dancing in the middle of practice and stared at me in unison. I carefully opened my mouth.
“Hello…”
“Hey, let’s stop practicing this and do something else.”
However, to the point where such worries of mine were meaningless, I actually didn’t need to worry at all.
“Yeah, I am tired.”
“Should we go eat?”
Because Ka Jerim was an invisible person among the trainees.
Music was playing, but they stopped dancing, even turned off the music, and soon prepared to leave. As if they didn’t want to be in the same space as Ka Jerim.
When I stared blankly at them as they slipped past through the door gap, they glared at me with displeased faces. Having almost never received such gazes, I reflexively froze at the hostile expressions of the kids.
Creak— Bang—
After the door closed, I turned my head and looked in the mirror.
A face pale as a sheet, shaggy bangs that even covered my eyes, bloodless lips, and a scrawny body had been trembling faintly from the moment I saw those kids. As if even without Ka Jerim’s soul, only Ka Jerim’s body remembered them.
When I barely put strength into my trembling body, the trembling gradually stopped. Then, beyond the closed door, I heard the sounds of the trainees who had just left chattering.
[I don’t want to practice with that guy. It was nice when he didn’t come for a while.]
[Right. He’s gloomy, so just looking at him puts me in a bad mood.]
Ka Jerim was thoroughly ostracized within this small space. The word ‘contempt’ naturally came to mind from the gazes with which they looked at Ka Jerim.
Why exactly do they hate Ka Jerim?
I have no way of knowing Ka Jerim’s personality, so I have no idea of the reason. Of course, being very thin makes the overall impression depressingly beyond gloomy to the point of looking sick, but people wouldn’t hate someone for that reason.
“Well, there doesn’t necessarily have to be a reason for people to hate people.”
Let’s not care.
Since it’s a place I’ll quit soon anyway.
After standing blankly at the door, I soon slowly looked around the practice room. Through the transparent window on the right wall of the practice room, I could see people passing by in the hallway, and in front was a mirror and next to it was audio equipment connected to a laptop where you could select songs.
The inside of the practice room was clean and comfortable, and the audio sound quality also seemed quite good when I heard it briefly earlier.
While thinking such thoughts and looking around, a man with glasses who was passing by busily in the hallway stopped and made eye contact with me. Since I was also looking outside, I blinked and stared at him, and he frowned, pointed at me with his finger, and kept saying something.
“What?”
But the sounds of him chattering beyond the wall couldn’t be conveyed to me.
Eventually, when I didn’t understand and tilted my head in puzzlement, I belatedly understood when I saw him slowly mouth words as if frustrated.
“Prac…tice…?”
Ah, I think he’s telling me to practice. Because I’m a trainee.
When I approached the laptop as if awkwardly selecting a song while reading his mood, he immediately nodded his head as if that was it and left.
What was that? Someone who monitors trainees? It seemed like someone who knew Ka Jerim… After looking for a moment at where the man disappeared, I started selecting songs on the player.
“Wow, it’s been a really long time.”
From old songs to recent songs, the variety was really diverse.
Because I loved songs and dancing so much, I excitedly listened to songs and stopped my finger at a familiar tune.
[POT – Pit a pat]
‘Are we really doing this song? Us?’
Ha Moon hyung listening to the song with a horrified face, and Juno hyung next to him with a similarly crumpled expression. Robi hyung who was inwardly shocked but didn’t show his dislike because a PD-nim was sitting in front, Yoon hyung glaring at the screen silently, and me who said without any thought while smiling.
‘Why? It’s cringy but the melody is really cute.’
This song sang about the sweetness of spring, and was the most cringy among our Fort’s songs, but a song I personally quite liked. The choreography was also very cute, so it was a song we danced to in different versions every day when we went to fan meetings, and it received a lot of love from fans.
I suddenly remembered that time and laughed softly, then played the next song.
♩♬♪~
“Wow. It’s Jins, Jins.”
This song that played along with an upbeat beat was a song called <Jins>, a song that all the members hated the most and had the highest difficulty level of dance among Fort’s songs. Actually, it was a song I practiced in rehearsal until the day before I died, and even though I heard <Jins> here, which I was sick of wanting to please stop hearing, it felt like hearing it after a very long time even though it wasn’t hearing it after a long time.
“We really suffered a lot because of this choreography.”
Not only were there high-difficulty moves, but it was difficult choreography to the point where it would immediately show if even one person was clumsy.
Overall teamwork was necessary, but since each individual’s dancing ability was the key, all the members suffered tremendously. But to that extent, it was a song that received a lot of love from people along with the praise of ‘knife-like group dance.’
I paused this song for a moment and stood looking at the mirror. A height that seemed a span shorter than my original body, and a slender body—I couldn’t adapt at all, but just once—
“Should I try it?”
I wanted to try the choreography.
Actually, I’ve felt it since I opened my eyes, but Ka Jerim’s body was light and flexible, so if I danced, it would probably feel quite different from what I originally danced. Of course, there were many things I needed to solve and figure out right now.
“I have to practice anyway, so let’s do it with this song.”
Since the only thing a trainee in a practice room has to do is practice anyway, as soon as I judged that there was nothing wrong with me practicing right now, I started warming up as if I’d been waiting. While stretching starting from the neck and diligently stretching over about 5 minutes, the entire time I kept letting out exclamations. Ka Jerim’s body was really soft.
