Chapter 56
“It just keeps raining…”
An Airbnb spacious enough to accommodate quite a few people.
It had plenty of rooms and a space suitable for use as a practice room, so we were quite pleased with it, but…
The problem was the weather.
The rain, which hadn’t been in the forecast, continued all day. It briefly weakened in the early morning, making us think it would finally stop, but the sky completely betrayed that hope and continued pouring as if a hole had opened in it.
Naturally, since this was a program that required busking, filming couldn’t proceed unless the weather cleared.
So for the time being, the production crew and cast had no choice but to pray and wait for the rain to stop.
“Siyeon. We’re going to practice… Would you like to come over here?”
“Oh. Yes!”
I scampered over to the practice room farther inside.
For this performance, I wasn’t going to sing; I would only be playing guitar as a session musician.
If the weather cleared, the busking would take place tomorrow.
I had a feeling it might not happen at all.
I had three songs to play this time.
None of them had particularly difficult chords, so practicing wasn’t difficult.
“Wow. You’ve already mastered it completely? You really aren’t ordinary, are you?”
“Hehe. Thank you.”
Lee Seunghyeon, who was scheduled to play piano this time, praised me while ruffling my hair.
I was worried that I had grown far too used to being treated like a little kid lately.
Still, being praised felt good.
I liked getting attention online, too, and I liked having people famous enough to be recognized by name dote on me and praise me.
It seemed I had an undeniable attention-seeking streak after all.
“Siyeon, would you like to go for a walk?”
“…In this rain?”
“I like it when it rains this hard. But you don’t have to come if you don’t want to!”
I thought over Baek Yuyeon’s suggestion for a moment, then accepted.
Because I was incredibly bored right now.
I’d had fun talking about music and getting to know everyone until morning, but even that grew tiresome after a day.
Actually, I still didn’t have much work of my own to present, so I had to base our conversations on their work…
‘It’s not like I know it that well.’
That was because I hadn’t even been in this world for a year. No matter how much I’d listened to their songs in preparation after seeing the cast lineup, it was hard to understand their music in as much detail as everyone else did.
Anyway, Baek Yuyeon, Saki, who had joined us partway through, Jia, and I headed to a nearby park.
Barcelona’s timeworn streets, wet with rainwater, felt different from Korea’s right down to the air.
The smell of moss from old stone buildings mingled with the damp humidity, while the rain tapping on our umbrellas felt like a lively percussion rhythm.
‘Maybe it only feels especially different because I’m abroad.’
“Wow, it’s really pretty. Doesn’t the rain make it feel even more atmospheric?”
Baek Yuyeon took the lead, delighted like a child. Saki and Jia followed behind her, while I hurried after them with a small children’s guitar strapped to my back.
I had specifically brought a bag because it had a device for securing an umbrella to it. Thanks to that, I didn’t have to hold my umbrella.
When we entered a small park near the accommodation, the green washed clean by the rain stood out vividly among the dense trees.
And in the middle of the park, where large roadside trees spread overhead like a natural roof, we saw a modestly decorated wooden stage.
“Huh? Look over there. Isn’t that a stage?”
The place Jia pointed to was a very small stage with a stone awning jutting out slightly above it to keep off the rain.
An old piano sat in the middle.
A few benches around it were wet with rainwater, and sparse footprints, as if children had been running around, marked the stage floor, but overall it was dry.
‘The composition is perfect.’
A misty park, wet trees, and a stage sitting quietly at the center.
It was a backdrop that could produce good footage even without the electronic equipment the production crew had set up—just a smartphone would be enough.
It wasn’t as if there were no people around, either.
Perhaps because it was a park in the middle of downtown, quite a few people passed by, and some sat resting on benches beneath covered areas nearby.
“Unnies, shall we just do one song here?”
At my suggestion, all three women turned their eyes toward me at once.
“Here? In the rain?”
“Right now?”
Saki and Jia asked, seeming flustered, but I had already unzipped my waterproof bag.
“At this rate, we won’t be able to busk tomorrow anyway… Let’s do at least one song somewhere like this. Yuyeon unnie, you can play piano, right?”
“Oh, yeah. This one’s not in bad condition. I think I can play it.”
I went up to the center of the stage and took out my small guitar. As I lightly plucked the strings while checking the tuning, the clear guitar notes pierced through the rain and spread throughout the park.
“Is this okay?”
“Just a moment. I’ll ask the PD.”
The cameraman who had followed us out hurriedly made a phone call.
Then, before long, he gave us an okay sign, apparently having received the PD’s permission.
“Wait a second. Can this be arranged for an ensemble?”
“You remember the song the two of you sang at last year’s year-end performance, right? Couldn’t we do that one?”
Saki and Jia had performed a duet the previous year. I had happened to see the performance while researching material at a PC bang, and I remembered it perfectly now.
“You mean ‘I’ll be the best,’ right?”
“Yes. That’s right. I can play this one. What about… Yuyeon unnie?”
“I can do it too. It’s such a famous song…”
It was a song with over a billion views on YouTube, so it was quite famous even in Korea. In fact, anyone who had learned an instrument had probably played it at least once.
Baek Yuyeon and I ran through the song together once.
In the meantime, Saki and Jia seemed to be posting Stories on social media saying they were here and inviting people to come watch the busking.
‘Will that actually help?’
Even if K-pop was gradually entering the stage of globalization, I doubted there were many people who could rush to a park in the middle of Spain at a moment’s notice.
Besides that song, Baek Yuyeon and I ran through several others that the two wanted to sing.
I was surprised that Baek Yuyeon knew most of the songs they mentioned.
I’d imagined that, judging by her image, she listened exclusively to historical-drama songs, but apparently she listened to a wider variety of music than I’d expected.
Anyway, we got the basic setup ready.
The hastily procured microphones and old-fashioned classical piano all sounded terrible, but they were still good enough to play together.
“Hehe. This isn’t so bad either. What do you think, sunbae?”
“This is the first time I’ve ever experienced anything like this… Well, it is pretty fascinating in its own way.”
While the two chatted together, people gradually began to gather.
We started playing to my signal.
* * *
“T-they’re busking around here?”
Clara, who was turning seventeen this year, shot to her feet in surprise when she saw the Instagram Story Saki of FYG had posted.
“Clara! What’s going on?”
“FYG is performing h-here!”
Clara was a huge K-pop fan, and especially a die-hard fan of FYG.
Originally introverted and timid, she had become more outgoing after falling for FYG and even joining the dance club. They had affected her so profoundly that it was fair to call them a turning point in her life.
Since the location wasn’t very far from her home, Clara got dressed and headed to the small stage in the park.
‘What’s with that little kid? They look awfully young.’
Seeing the child preparing for the performance with a small guitar among the adult women, Clara felt puzzled for a moment, but then spotted her favorite, Saki, and felt as if her heart had stopped.
In any case, the performance began under the direction of the little child.
Clara watched the performance, completely entranced.
Seeing Saki sing in person, when she had always only been able to watch her in videos, made Clara feel as if she might lose her mind.
‘B-but who is that little kid, really?!’
Still, she couldn’t help noticing the child who continued moving the performance along while saying this and that from the center.
The child had an exceedingly striking beauty, despite their very cold impression—more beautiful than most K-pop idols.
Clara naturally shifted some of her attention from Saki to the child as well, and in the process discovered one incongruous fact.
‘They start every song. They even signal the piano with hand gestures in the middle of them…’
Every band had a bandmaster, and every dance team had a leader.
Just like those people, the little child seemed to be directing everything on this stage.
“What…? Is something like that even possible at that age?”