Chapter 15
In the wake of the broadcast’s flashy ending, only the cold glow of a monitor lingered inside a cramped, dark studio apartment.
Plump fingers roughly spun the mouse wheel downward. The screen was packed with news about Glassy Sky topping the charts and comments praising Seo Si-yeon. Im Ji-hye bit her lips until they bled.
“Only nine years old…”
Ji-hye looked at the old acoustic guitar sitting in the corner of her room.
At some point, her life had been swallowed up by music.
For all three years of high school, she had been a trainee at one of Korea’s biggest entertainment agencies. She had made it to the threshold of the debut lineup, only to be pushed out at the last moment because of her appearance and age.
She belatedly enrolled in a music college, but establishing herself as a solo singer was a long and arduous journey.
No matter how many songs she released, no one listened, and fans were like mirages that disappeared the moment they seemed within reach.
Several years had passed since she began chasing the mirage of music while juggling guide recordings and part-time jobs, and she had now reached her mid-to-late twenties.
The weight she had gained from binge eating caused by the stress of one failure after another was an added burden.
-If you’re a musician, prove it onstage.
The words Si-yeon had just spoken on TV sank into her chest like a dagger.
“What do you know? Do you know what it feels like to cry while staring at a practice-room mirror for ten years?”
Did that little brat even know that some people hadn’t been allowed onstage at all?
Singerstar was her final challenge and her last chance.
A haze of inferiority and hatred clouded Ji-hye’s eyes.
She knew better than anyone that Seo Si-yeon’s songs were good.
Having devoted more than ten years to music, including her trainee years and time at music college, she found the songs Seo Si-yeon had created utterly shocking.
But that was precisely why she couldn’t accept them.
Watching a child who hadn’t even lost her baby fat casually toss out the level of perfection Ji-hye had spent her entire youth struggling to attain made her feel as though her whole life had been denied.
“Talent? Genius? Don’t make me laugh.”
She had been singing all her life and had continued honing her skills.
That was why she believed she was the best singer on Singerstar right now.
Joo Jin-woo was excluded, of course.
“I’ll show the world that the people who work hard are the ones who win. I wasn’t eliminated because I lacked the skill. I lost my place to lucky kids like you.”
More than anyone, she had to earn that person’s recognition.
‘I’m sorry, Ji-hye.’
‘Is a six-member group really impossible?’
‘Yeah. I’m sorry.’
The person who had kicked her out of the debut lineup at the very end.
That person was now sitting there as one of the judges.
The other five, excluding her, had become idols whose faces were recognized everywhere they went in Korea.
The third generation was fading along with them, but no one could deny that they had stood at its peak.
“I… I should have been there!”
Even so, she still had a chance.
If she defeated Seo Si-yeon, the little girl who had drawn the most attention on Singerstar this time, and advanced, she could finally be rewarded for all the years she had spent.
She felt that way.
* * *
“A KY trainee… huh.”
In truth, aside from being a KY trainee, she was nothing special.
Her vocals were typical of an applied-music major’s—technically good, but lacking any charm.
A textbook ordinary vocalist with nothing of her own.
“That’s not what’s important right now.”
At that moment, I had three pink, flower-shaped plastic hairpins stuck in my hair, and a glittery cape of unknown origin draped over my shoulders.
“Come on, Si-yeon unni! Smile like a princess!”
Minhee, the youngest of the orphanage children at five years old, pressed both my cheeks with her tiny hands. As a result, my lips jutted out like fish lips, and my speech came out muffled.
“Minhee… unni’s gotta think up a song right now (Minhee… I need to come up with a song right now).”
“No! Princesses don’t look at sheet music! Here, wear this crown too!”
‘Shouldn’t a princess wear a tiara, not a crown?’
Minhee forcefully placed a crude paper crown on my head.
With a look of resignation, I sighed and stared at the laptop on my lap. (I was borrowing an old laptop tucked away in a corner of the orphanage storeroom.)
On the screen was a practice video from Im Ji-hye’s trainee days.
In truth, I had no particular reason to watch it. She was very different from the person she had been in the past.
It was merely simple curiosity.
I wanted to know what kind of person the woman who had glared at me like an enemy throughout filming was.
With a flower pin in my hair, a cape on my shoulders, and my lips pushed out like fish lips, I muttered inwardly.
‘Im Ji-hye… Your vibrato in the high register has become far too formulaic. You weren’t like that before… You’ve actually regressed from your past.’
“Unni! Why do you keep making a scary face? You’re supposed to smile!”
Minhee pinched my cheek again. I forcibly pulled up the corners of my mouth and let out a soulless “Hehe.” The children my age watching from beside us snickered.
“Puhaha! Hey, look at Seo Si-yeon.”
“Shut up… I’m dying of embarrassment.”
I warned them in a low voice, but Minhee hung a toy jewel necklace around my neck, completely ruining my dignity.
In truth, if I put my mind to it, separating the children from me would have been easy.
But perhaps because of the memories from my previous life, I didn’t entirely dislike this moment when these children growing up without parents treated me not as some amazing older girl who appeared on TV, but simply as family who played with them.
The shame would last only a moment, but this memory would remain with these children for quite a while.
“Unni, look! I drew you!”
The sketchbook Minhee held out contained a circle that might have been a person or a potato, with nothing but a pair of blue eyes drawn on it.
Blue eyes. Seo Si-yeon’s only distinctive genetic trait was something the child had carefully depicted in her own way.
“Uh… thanks. You drew it well.”
I awkwardly patted Minhee’s head.
Then I turned my gaze back to the laptop. Im Ji-hye had radiated inferiority and hatred at me and declared that she would prove how hard she had worked.
But there was one thing she had overlooked.
’ It wasn’t as if I hadn’t worked hard either…’
In fact, I had worked harder than anyone.
There was no way I could have coasted into the position of executive producer at a fairly large company in my previous life without putting in the effort.
If anything, I was probably the one who had poured more of my life into music.
“I want to show them something new this time…”
This round had a completely free theme.
I could simply put together whatever stage I wanted.
Lately, I had realized that time was passing incredibly quickly.
Before I knew it, summer vacation was right around the corner, and half the year had already passed.
In other words, this moment would not last forever.
I wanted to try putting on a stage that could only be done at an age this young.
In truth, the stage I had performed with Blooming was something I could still do after becoming an adult.
“Come to think of it, Yoo Seol-ha has looked really frantic lately.”
In fact, Yoo Seol-ha was the main vocalist of Glassy Sky.
The song she had sung was dominating the number-one spot on the charts, and her voice was playing everywhere she went.
Apparently, she was going crazy because too many people recognized her, and so many people came to her school just to see her.
The same was true for me, actually.
I wished people would recognize me just a little less.
-But my parents hated me doing music… I think this made them change their minds a little! Hehe, thanks—it’s all thanks to you, Si-yeon!
I replied to the embarrassingly heartfelt text with an emoji.
Yoo Seol-ha’s parents ran a fairly large semiconductor company.
Apparently, they made semiconductor equipment… I looked them up and was a little surprised to find that it was quite a large company.
It wasn’t a conglomerate, but it was just below that level.
Honestly, it was only natural for such a rigid businessperson to dislike their daughter becoming an entertainer.
“Something I can only do at this age…”
Objectively speaking, my greatest advantage right now was my cute appearance.
I wasn’t merely cute. I was fucking adorable. It wasn’t for no reason that I was loved wherever I went.
Honestly, could the strange disdain I had experienced before possessing this body have stemmed from jealousy of my looks?
As I was pondering that alone, a huge cheer rang out, creating the illusion that the orphanage itself was shaking.
The sudden shout made my brow twitch as I glared at the laptop screen.
Inside the old CRT television, the trajectory of a white ball streaked across the green grass.
The orphanage teachers and children all shouted and jumped in place. The voices of the commentators on TV rose to a fever pitch, and the speakers blared as though they might tear apart.
-It clears the wall! A lightning-fast solo home run on the first pitch of the bottom of the eighth! Incheon takes the lead at home!
Along with the caster’s shout, a roar of cheering songs filled the stadium.
The screen immediately switched from the batter rounding the bases to the stands.
More than ten thousand people extended their arms to create a wave, waving red towels in the team’s symbolic color and singing at the tops of their lungs.
In the middle of that blazing heat, I spotted figures moving in perfect unison on a platform.
“Cheerleaders?”