24. Chapter 24
Arthur was fast. He sent a reply to Eunjae”s questions before the second movie even hit the halfway mark. This was both good and bad. Good, because the answers made things clearer for Eunjae, narrowing the number of potential paths to take. Bad, because the answers and their implications inevitably consumed his thoughts. The rest of the second movie whipped past him in a blur.
Did he want to leave Apollo? If he did, he would drag the whole group through hell. There appeared to be no way around that, based on the contract. And after this, what would he do? Imagining an ordinary life was easy. The building of an ordinary life was decidedly not.
But what if he didn”t leave? He would resume a life that was, by most standards, extraordinary. Eunjae would continue to long for an escape, but as the years wore on, he”d lose both strength and conviction. He and his brothers would follow the natural cycle of a career in their industry. They”d stay together, likely seeing higher and higher success until it was time to gracefully fade from the spotlight, and all the while Eunjae would dedicate even more of himself to a dream he”d never chosen.
He didn”t realize that he”d fallen asleep. Awake, he’d been thinking about the contract. Dreaming, he”d paged through it and never questioned why it seemed to have no end. When Eunjae opened his eyes, it was 1:41am and he was under a striped blanket, sprawled on the floor in front of the TV. Denny”s deep breathing evoked the rumble of a dragon stirring in its lair.
No one had played the next movie in the series. The darkness was tinged a silvery blue as the TV rotated through a screensaver of ocean scenes, slowly moving from one underwater landscape to another. Shafts of sunlight pierced a curving wave. A kelp forest swayed with the current, fish threading through the fronds.
Eunjae searched for Jiyeon amid the pillows she”d claimed for herself, within arm’s length of where he’d settled earlier, but she wasn”t there. He happened to catch a glow coming through the living room window on the way back from refilling his glass of water. It was too bright to be moonlight peeking through the gap in the curtains. On a hunch, he padded over to the front door and peeked outside.
Jiyeon sat in a rattan chair parked outside the Hans’ front door, feet propped up on a plastic crate sourced from the trunk of her car. She had Denny”s laptop balanced on her knees and looked up when she heard Eunjae shuffle out.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. I just couldn”t sleep. Did I wake you up? I did drop my car keys on the floor at one point.”
Eunjae shook his head. “I’ll sleep through almost anything.” He hesitated, keeping one hand on the doorknob. “Can I sit with you? Just for a little while.”
“Oh, sure. Go borrow that chair over there. The neighbors won’t mind.”
But Eunjae opted to sit on the ground, in a patch of moonlight that came and went as clouds scudded across the sky. He was wary of getting too comfortable. He”d said he wouldn”t stay too long, and maybe Jiyeon was busy with something important.
She assured him that she wasn”t. “Looking at listings. Retail spaces, something that might work for a salon.” Jiyeon closed the laptop and leaned back, the chair creaking softly. “A place of my own. Then I could quit, you know? Go live the real dream.”
“I guess you haven”t found anything yet?”
“I”ve found plenty. Nothing that really seems right, though. I think I just like to look, and remind myself where I want to be one day, especially when it feels like I”ll never get there.”
Eunjae glanced back at her from where he was sitting. “You”ll get there.”
“So will you,” she replied. “Wherever it is you want to be.”
Where he wanted to be. Eunjae felt like he was starting to get a sense of that destination, catching glimpses through a thick scrim of fog. But if he’d known where he wanted to be, and if he”d been able to see with Jiyeon’s level of clarity, maybe he wouldn”t be here now. He might never have auditioned for Emerald back then.
He”d been so young when he went to Sydney to sing for Haewon and Soyeon, and the only clear thought in his head at the time was that he needed to do well. That was the only way to fix everything. His mother had said as much, and at the age of fourteen, reeling from both shock and grief in the wake of Vivian’s expulsion from his life, Eunjae had still believed in some of Leila’s promises. But he’d also realized, by then, that nailing the audition might open the door he’d been searching for.
If they liked him and his voice, he could leave. No more living in that house without Miss Vivi’s slippered tread on the stairs, trapped in rooms which no longer held the warmth of her presence. All he had to do was stop rejecting the dream his parents had assigned to him.
“The real dream. When did you figure it out? How did you decide what it was?”
Jiyeon hugged the laptop to her chest, thinking on it for a while. “For my eighth birthday, all I wanted was to get my hair cut in a real salon. My sister had already been going, but I was still having mine done at home, by Dad. I wanted it so badly that Mom decided I could go. That wasn’t just because Dad gave me and Denny the exact same bowl cut, either.”
Eunjae laughed at that. The memory teased a laugh out of her, too. “We have pictures. Unless my brother destroyed the evidence.”
“So those are gone, then.”
“Long gone. Never to be seen again.” Still smiling, Jiyeon said, “I had this doll, you know, where you could cut her hair and it would grow back. It was just extensions that stuck on with Velcro, but I think that’s partly where my fixation came from.
“Besides, I always wanted whatever Janie had. If she was doing it, I had to do it, too. She’s four years older than I am. It seemed so grown up, to go to a salon. I wanted to know what it was like to have an appointment, I thought that was really special. Not for the dentist or the doctor, but a fun appointment.”
“That’s a pretty reasonable goal.”
“Right? And when I got there, it was even better than I imagined. Everyone was talking and laughing. It seemed to me like people came in as their normal selves, but when they left they were brand new again. They had hope for something better around the bend. All because of a haircut.”
Jiyeon sighed. The smile faltered, and her gaze slipped a little further away. “I wanted to do that: help people feel brand new. I wanted to make my own magical place in the world that felt something like that salon we went to as kids. It didn’t have to be fancy, and it didn’t even have to be very big. If it had one chair and one mirror and a spot where people could sit and wait, that’d be fine. It’s the feeling that matters, right? That’s the magic.”
“It is,” Eunjae answered softly. “That’s the magic.”