Chapter 56
What time is it?
[It's 6:30, Master.]
“Whoa.”
I was glad I’d woken up on time, sure, but…
For a different reason, I was sitting upright in bed, completely out of it.
If I let myself relax like this, I felt like I’d fall right back asleep.
“I got so carried away for the first time in ages. I drank way too much.”
No.
Honestly, it wasn’t so much that I got carried away as that my friends went completely wild with excitement after meeting our girls.
The problem was that we’d partied nonstop until four in the morning.
At least, whatever else happened, my main job was looking after the Always girls.
Which meant I didn’t have to go straight to the office.
“Ha. Ugh.”
I smelled my own breath and shook my head.
My breath reeked of alcohol.
Even in that dazed state, my hand naturally reached for my smartphone first.
At this point, I think it’s impossible for people to live without smartphones.
[Group chat]
I checked our chat to see if the girls had all gotten home safely.
There were tons of pictures we’d taken together yesterday,
but the messages had all come to me individually.
[Won Mun-guk: If you ever need clothes, let me know.]
Wasn’t Mun-guk working at a fashion company?
I’d been a little bothered by wearing the same clothes every time I went to a music video shoot or music show.
Maybe I could look through their catalog later and ask for a sponsorship if I saw anything I liked.
[Seo Jong-hak: Call me when you’re shooting a music video or need anything. I’ll send a meal truck. For the Always girls!]
This guy. So. Uh…
[He said he works at a food company.]
“Oh, right. But these guys never even pretended they’d send me anything. They’re ready to bend over backward for our girls, though, huh?”
I’d suspected as much, but…
[Choi Kang-gyu: Coffee truck on standby 24/7. Beep beep! Just let me know three days ahead of time.]
“Damn. What a bunch of thirsty bastards.”
Now I understood why people who ran nightlife businesses made so much money.
I’d hung out with them once,
and now they were completely hooked, huh?
“A meal truck, a coffee truck, and clothes, too. I could ask them to come by when we shoot the music video.”
Our company was already so tight with its budget that we might not even get a meal truck,
and we might have to provide the clothes ourselves, too.
[Actually, it’s not just your company. Only the big companies pour hundreds of millions of won into music videos. It’s like this for all small and midsize companies.]
“Still, I’ll have to get them to pay up.”
Creating a miracle with a small budget?
I thought that was a beautiful idea.
But looking at it coldly, music videos made with bigger budgets usually looked better.
“Oh, right. There are more messages above, huh?”
I checked to see what they were about,
and all three of them had sent the exact same thing this time, too.
[Let me know as soon as your album comes out.]
“That woke me right up. Wide awake.”
I was so grateful,
but they were so damn annoying.
Thanks to them, I managed to pull myself together enough to get up.
Bubble, bubble—.
When I went into the living room, I saw Seong Se-ri stirring a ladle, her hair a total mess as if she’d just battled her way through a typhoon.
“What are you doing?”
“Making bean sprout soup.”
“I was going to do that.”
“I came out to the kitchen to see if you were making anything, Team Leader, but you weren’t here, so I started.”
“Thanks.”
“Did your friends all get home okay?”
“Yeah, seems like they did. And now it’s ‘let us know as soon as the album comes out,’ ‘we’ll send a meal truck,’ ‘we’ll send a coffee truck.’ The whole place went nuts.”
Seong Se-ri burst out laughing at that.
“No, after hanging out with them yesterday, I realized your friends are really innocent. I think one of them might’ve been a lifelong virgin, too.”
“Two of the guys there have never dated anyone.”
“Wow. A living cultural treasure. That’s crazy. Wait, are there people who’ve never had a girlfriend by the time they’re twenty-nine?”
“Enough! There are more than you think. Saying that could hurt someone’s feelings.”
Right.
Calling them cultural treasures was a bit much.
Anyway,
as I chatted with Seong Se-ri, I heard the others stirring and saw them slowly crawl out one by one.
“Good morning, Team Leader.”
Hee-ju, who’d tried to send my shoulder to the emergency room yesterday, looked perfectly fine.
“Do you remember what you did yesterday?”
Hee-ju nodded.
“Yes. I think it was a happy time.”
Was ramming her head into my shoulder what made her happy?
“O-Oppa.”
Then I saw Gil Min-seo looking so pale that I hurried over, startled.
Min-seo grabbed my hand with tears in her eyes and said,
“……Ugh. Please pat my back, Oppa.”
“Jeez! You scared me. All right, let’s go to the bathroom.”
Lee Da-young seemed perfectly fine, too.
Though she did look like she had slight dark circles under her eyes.
“Didn’t you sleep?”
“My head was pounding from the hangover, so I just watched a drama on Noflix before coming out.”
“All right! Let’s have some hot hangover soup and wake up. We took yesterday off, so starting today we’re going full throttle again.”
At Seong Se-ri’s words, everyone moved briskly to set the table and gather around it.
It hit me that we’d been spending so much time together that this had truly become normal for us.
“Oh, right. Listen to this while you eat.”
The songs I hadn’t had a chance to mention yesterday—
I played the ones Composer Kim Gi-bok had sent me.
[Endless]
[Pineapple]
Two songs.
If Radiance felt like an overture, Endless felt like the finale.
Pineapple seemed like a separate, refreshing concept song.
Though I hadn’t listened to them myself yet, so I couldn’t say for sure.
-♬♪♬♪
“Huh?”
Now that they’d become full-fledged trainees, the girls had grown sensitive to music, and they all reacted in exactly the same way.
“Is this Composer Kim Gi-bok’s song?”
“Yeah. You can tell just from the intro? He sent them yesterday.”
The melodies and chords still sounded good.
And Pineapple was a little easier than Radiance and Endless, which we’d heard before.
But…
“Ah! The composer did the guide vocals himself again.”
“I really can’t listen to this.”
Since Composer Kim Gi-bok, a man, kept recording guide vocals for songs meant for women and sending them to us,
it was a little painful to listen to them over and over.
“Hehe.”
Even Min-seo, who was always positive, just laughed awkwardly and let it pass. That said it all.
I gulped down some refreshing bean sprout soup, and Seong Se-ri asked,
“We’re going today, right? To the composer’s studio. It’d be a sin to let such good songs go to waste. A sin.”
“Yeah. Of course. I’ll contact the composer ahead of time in a bit. The songs all seem good, right?”
“More than good. They’re great again this time.”
Radiance, Endless, and Pineapple.
They each had slightly different concepts, in a way,
but they had one thing in common.
There wasn’t the slightest hint of ‘sexy’ in them.
It wasn’t as if they were completely covered up with no skin showing,
and they did have elements that could make a woman look attractive.
But neither the songs nor the choreography had anything that blatantly brought lewdness to mind.
Naturally, we’d shoot the music video in the same vein.
“When I was a trainee, it was all about sexy concepts.”
“Even just a few years ago, yeah. Sexy is still a concept a lot of agencies push.”
Sexy that walked a fine line was inevitably one of the most provocative concepts.
“There were so many girls who cried because of that. They’d admired their favorite idols, then became trainees, and the adults kept trying to make them strip and do lewd dances. But the ones who wanted to succeed so badly were willing to do it anyway.”
“What could they do? There was demand, so it worked. And the agencies had no choice if they wanted to survive.”
As we talked about this and that,
I noticed Min-seo excitedly searching for something.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh. I was wondering if anyone had filmed our performance at the bar yesterday and uploaded it to MeTube or social media. I wanted to watch it again.”
At that, everyone craned their necks to look at Min-seo’s phone.
“Is there anything?”
“No. Hng.”
Min-seo sounded disappointed.
“Huh? What? There were tons of people filming us yesterday.”
Lee Da-young gave a logical explanation.
“Maybe it hasn’t been picked up by the algorithm yet, or maybe it’s just too soon. Someone might be editing it before uploading, or maybe they just can’t be bothered.”
“Then let’s upload it ourselves. Oppa, did you record it?”
At Gil Min-seo’s expectant gaze, I naturally picked up my bowl of bean sprout soup.
“Whoa! This really hits the spot.”
“I’ll get you some more, Team Leader.”
Hee-ju jumped up and ladled some more bean sprout soup into my bowl.
Hmm.
I hadn’t really wanted more, though.
“Thanks. I’ll enjoy it.”
“Yes.”
A little while later, after we’d mostly finished tidying up,
I’d contacted Composer Kim Gi-bok and was just about to head to the studio.
Ding—.
A text came in.
[There is a meeting today.]
[The participating teams are as follows.]
The participating teams included the Budget Team and Management Team 4, which I led.
And Park Joo-yong’s obnoxious team, too.
[Time: 11:00 a.m.]
[Location: 4th floor, Conference Room 3]
[The CEO will also be attending, so please be seated five minutes early and do not be late. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the progress of the girl group currently preparing to debut, as well as the music video budget. We would appreciate it if you could give some thought to any problems, their causes, and possible solutions.]
“Team Leader?”
“Hmm? Oh. You guys should go ahead and do some recording on your own today. Don’t bother the composer.”
“Why?”
“Oh, a meeting came up. I’ll finish it quickly and head back to the studio, so don’t worry. Se-ri, you’re the eldest and the leader, so look after the girls, okay?”
I told the girls not to overdo it, gave them a few pats on the head, then hit the gas.
“I’ll get to see that obnoxious face again today.”
Vroooom—.
I’d been glad not to see him or hear about him all this time.
* * *
“Ah, I got here way too early.”
I’d been worried the roads from the studio to the company might be congested,
and I’d always had a habit of arriving ten minutes before the time I was expected.
Maybe because those two things combined, I ended up getting there almost an hour early.
The meeting was at eleven,
and I arrived at ten.
“Ha. Fuck.”
I was already nervous, thinking I might run into Park Joo-yong. My heart was pounding.
[Are you still afraid of Park Joo-yong?]
You don’t avoid shit because you’re scared of it.
You avoid it because it’s filthy.
It wasn’t that I was afraid of him. Just dealing with that inhuman piece of shit was fucking awful.
It was even worse because I’d barely run into him lately.
You’d realize this once you worked at a management company,
but contrary to what you might think, you don’t really have many reasons to see anyone besides the celebrities you’re in charge of, even if you work at the same company.
Maybe that was why I hadn’t seen the Oasis girls in a while, either.
[Radiance’s choreography was so intense that you deliberately booked the practice room at times when no one else was around. Besides, this company is going under, so there aren’t that many trainees.]
True.
Hey, now that you put it that way, that’s kind of depressing.
A company that’s going under.
This is still the company I work for right now,
you bitch.
‘Since I’m here early, maybe I’ll go see the Oasis girls.’
I was thinking that to myself and about to head to the second-floor practice room when—
“Huh?”
The moment I heard that “Huh?” I could already smell that all-too-familiar trouble.
“Team Leader Kim. Long time no see.”
Yoon Won-seok, you bastard.
How did he manage to find me like this every time I came to the company?
At this point, I was starting to wonder if he’d registered my location on his GPS, just like Hee-ju had.
“I’m busy. Let’s go our separate ways today, Won-seok.”
The cute, affectionate Oasis girls, or Yoon Won-seok, who mooched coffee off me every day.
It wasn’t even a choice.
What good is a man’s face to another man?
I waved him off coldly and headed for the elevator, but…
“Don’t you want to hear that Team Leader Park is in big trouble?”
At that, I got off the elevator I’d just stepped into and asked,
“Want me to buy you jokbal?”
I really fucking wanted to hear it, though—those words.