Chapter 13
“Hmm…”
Even today, I was standing in front of the vending machine outside the filming-set restroom, debating whether to have milk coffee or hot chocolate.
Just as I finally rose onto my tiptoes to get the milk coffee,
I unconsciously grabbed the hem of my skirt and pulled it down at the sensation of air against my legs.
“Hn.”
The short pleated skirt, which came nearly to the tops of my thighs, was terribly burdensome for someone wearing a skirt for the first time in her life.
Even though I was wearing shorts underneath, the peculiar sense of exposure a skirt gave me was not something I could get used to in such a short time.
“Little one. Short on money again?”
“N-no!”
As expected, the owner of that familiar voice was Joo Jin-woo.
His complexion looked strangely haggard, and since he might try to get hot chocolate on his own again like last time, I answered quickly.
“Today, I’m definitely having coffee.”
“Can a kid like you even appreciate the taste of coffee?”
“Milk coffee is sweet.”
“Aha!”
I looked over his face, which somehow seemed incredibly tired.
Joo Jin-woo leaned against the vending machine and looked down at the paper cup of milk coffee I had gotten, his eyes hollow.
He was over 180 centimeters tall and only wearing a hoodie, yet the pressure he gave off was no joke. But he couldn’t hide the anxiety slowly seeping through that solid physique.
“What about you, Mr. Joo? It’s right before your stage. Aren’t you going to have one?”
“I’m fine. My throat’s tight.”
He answered shortly and roughly swept back the sides of his two-block haircut.
His fingertips were trembling slightly.
My keen senses told me that wasn’t simple nervousness.
It was an early symptom of an obsession with perfection eating away at him from within.
“Your team has a flashy lineup. You gathered only people who are at least pretty capable.”
At my words, the corners of Joo Jin-woo’s mouth twisted into a smile.
“How did you know? Well, yeah. They’re all good. At singing, anyway. I suppose it’ll be enough to fill the stage.”
“I’m not sure. It seems less like the stage will be full and more like it’s about to burst.”
“What?”
I wrapped both hands around the hot paper cup and continued in a dry tone.
“When you gather people with powerful voices, they all try to be the protagonist. It’s like an orchestra with five soloists and no conductor. Then, if even one of them slips up…”
Joo Jin-woo’s eyes widened for an instant. It seemed I had hit the nail on the head.
He stared at me, then let out a laugh mixed with a sigh.
“That’s not something you’d expect to hear from a nine-year-old…”
“It’s obvious if you think about it for even a little while. There are plenty of examples, too.”
I unwrapped a coffee candy and popped it into my mouth before pointing toward the stage.
“You may pride yourselves on being perfectly prepared, but be careful. Singing isn’t a test where you guess the right answer. If you get too rigid, you’ll snap.”
This was also my sincere advice to him.
Before he was my competitor, Joo Jin-woo was a promising talent with limitless potential.
If he broke down and disappeared on Singerstar this time, it would feel like a real shame even from my perspective, since I planned to make my career in the K-pop industry.
I took quick little steps toward the waiting room.
Because of the short skirt, my hands kept reaching for its hem.
‘Damn it. Why did they have to coordinate our outfits like this?’
* * *
“Ohhh! Si-yeon is so adorable!! Isn’t she, guys?”
“Right? She looks way better than when she wears pants.”
“Her face is seriously…”
“Ahaha…”
I gave an embarrassed laugh.
Ever since I became Seo Si-yeon, I had constantly heard compliments about how cute or pretty I was, but I still cringed whenever I heard them.
Maybe it was because I had hardly ever received that kind of compliment in my previous life.
Well, back then, the compliments had all been about songs I had written.
Being praised for my creations made me happy, but being praised personally also gave me this strangely ticklish feeling in my chest.
“Joo Jin-woo oppa’s team is kind of scary…”
“It is.”
The first team up was Joo Jin-woo’s.
With his first pick, he had gathered as many talented people of his own type as possible, and with so many outstanding vocalists, it was a stage that promised a vocal power show.
The ordinary audience members and the judges seated in front of the stage were all waiting for their performance with considerable anticipation.
“Oh, this should be exciting.”
“Me too.”
“It’s a predictable kind of stage, but there’s pleasure in this sort of thing, too.”
Joo Jin-woo’s team took the stage in earnest.
As the people who had left strong impressions as vocalists during the preliminaries lined up in a row, the oppressive presence radiating from them alone overwhelmed the venue.
The lights dimmed, and a majestic orchestral sound began to play.
The song they had chosen was a typical rock ballad.
It was a song built around explosive high notes and flashy harmonies. Joo Jin-woo’s heavy mid-low register opened the introduction.
-Clinging to the end of memory, I walk through the cold rain…
His voice, at least, was undeniably cheat-level.
Joo Jin-woo’s voice was so solid that it echoed throughout the studio through the microphone. But when the other members came in afterward, I furrowed my brow.
Rather than matching their voices to one another, they pushed out their volume with the veins in their necks standing out, as though trying to prove that they were better.
To my ears, it sounded less like harmony and more like each of them screaming separately.
And apparently the members of Blooming beside me felt the same way, because they all watched the stage with expressions of mild bewilderment.
As the song moved into its middle section and the chorus began, my concerns became reality.
In the sections where they were supposed to build harmonies, not one of them yielded, and everyone raised their voice to the level of the main melody.
‘Why on earth did it get that bad?’
Normally, they would have yielded to one another appropriately and divided up the parts.
On the screen, Yoo Sang-hyeon’s expression gradually hardened.
He had been expecting a perfectly controlled army of vocalists, not an uncontrollable runaway locomotive.
And disaster struck during the bridge just before the climax.
Perhaps because he had pushed himself too hard on the most spectacular high note, one team member completely flubbed the lyrics in the next bar.
-Toward the place we can never return to… um, ……!
There was a moment of silence. The flustered team members’ eyes wavered, and Joo Jin-woo hurriedly shouted to cover the part, but the flow had already been broken.
‘Joo Jin-woo’s talent is the real deal, but he’s still inexperienced onstage.’
This was a scene that revealed that inexperience in full.
If he had been a vocalist accustomed to performing, he probably could have salvaged the situation to some degree.
But Joo Jin-woo was being swept up in it and collapsing along with everyone else.
The person who had flubbed the lyrics was Julian, who was half Korean and half German.
The fact that his Korean was still somewhat unpolished had been a vulnerability, and it had erupted at the worst possible moment on this stage.
In the end, every team member was swept up in the atmosphere and began making mistake after mistake.
The stage that had felt as though it would last an eternity finally ended.
They forced out the final high note as if screaming, but the response from the audience was bewildered applause rather than enthusiasm.
Only a cold silence lingered among the judges.
Everyone looked as though they had been left speechless by the unimaginable catastrophe.
I felt much the same way.
No, I had expected them to flounder to some degree.
In an audition program like this, it was incredibly difficult for a group of strong-willed people to come together and succeed.
But I had never imagined they would collapse this miserably.
“Uh… I don’t know what to say. Did you all actually practice?”
Yoo Sang-hyeon’s opening assessment was razor-sharp.
“Jin-woo’s vocals were as strong as ever, but I would like to deduct points for his lack of ability to lead the team. There’s absolutely no harmony. This isn’t singing… it’s noise!”
Gina’s assessment was cold as well.
As a producer who mainly cultivated idols, she naturally placed the greatest importance on how well the members worked together in a group performance.
From her perspective, this stage could only receive a failing grade.
In the waiting room, the Blooming girls watching the monitor had gone pale.
They covered their mouths, murmuring things like, “That team is falling apart like this?”
I drank the last sip of my cold milk coffee and stood up.
“See? Singing and working together are two different things.”
I opened my violin case.
It was the instrument I had spent the most time with in my previous life, and the only one I had received professional training on.
The smooth feel of its body beneath my fingertips was unfamiliar, yet terribly familiar.
The one I had borrowed from Uncle Park Han-su’s instrument shop wasn’t an expensive masterpiece, but once I had reacquainted myself with it, it produced a fairly clear, solid sound.
What the judges were asking of the contestants in this round was clear.
How organically could people who had lived entirely different lives fuse together within a single melody?
Ultimately, as long as one continued in the profession of music, the process of coordinating with someone else was an unavoidable fate. Right now, it was time to submit proof of that cooperation.
The vocal power show Joo Jin-woo’s team had just put on had paradoxically laid out the perfect stage for us.
Everyone had witnessed how exhausting the discord created by selfishness could be for the entire venue.
“Let’s go. Just do it the way we practiced.”
At my quiet, chilly command, the Blooming members picked up their instruments with grim expressions.
Their eyes, stiff with tension, began converging on a single focus with me as their center.
Blooming and I would dominate this round.
No, I had already set things up so that we would.
All that remained was to put it into action onstage.