Jiho

Loud voices echoed down the hallway behind us. Junghoon and I stood frozen in place, gaping at each other.

“You must have some idea where he is. You’re the damn leader! You’re supposed to keep them in line!” Spit flew from Junghoon’s mouth, while his face had turned an ugly red, making him look like a dokgaebi, the ugly goblins from our fairy tales.

“Don’t you think I know that?” I snapped. “What about you? You’re our manager!”

Junghoon opened his mouth, probably to give me the verbal beatdown of the century, when Shin came bursting in.

“I’ve been trying to reach you fools for the past hour!” he said. “Why even have phones if you’re not going to use them?”

“Not now,” we said in unison.

Shin raised an eyebrow. “Okay, so I guess neither of you care that Doyoon’s gone back to Seoul?”

“He did what?” I yelped, spinning around so fast the damn tea nearly sloshed all over my designer hoodie.

“No, no,” Shin said, waving his hand, “clearly you’re both busy. I’ll come back…”

The bastard actually left the room, smirking at our shell-shocked expressions. Junghoon came to his senses first, roaring, “Come back here, you silver-haired brat!”

Shin popped his head back through the doorway. “But I thought you said, ‘Not now.’”

“What are you talking about? Doyoon can’t be in Seoul. He’s supposed to be here, rehearsing! When did he say he was coming back?”

“Wait, who’s gone to Seoul?” Great. Now ZT was here.

Strangled yelps were leaking out of Junghoon. His knees gave way and he sunk onto the floor on his hands and knees, small drops falling from his downturned face. “Oh my god. Oh god, this is it. I’m absolutely done for. My career is dead. What the hell am I supposed to tell the people at the VMAs?”

He gasped, breaking out into hiccups. “What am I going to tell Mr. Song?”

This wasn’t too far off from what I was thinking as well. Visions of Mr. Song flying to New York to personally chop my head off with a blunt knife danced around my brain. I wouldn’t put it past him.

“Hey, hey! Why didn’t anyone tell me we were having a secret meeting? Trying to vote me off the island, eh?” An undercurrent of insecurity ran through LEO’s light-hearted swagger as he strolled into the room.

Shin huffed impatiently, “Not everything’s about you. Seems like ol’ Doyoon’s voted himself out.”

LEO’s eyes widened as he took in the completely spotless dressing room. “Whoa. Like, left left?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out!” Junghoon whimpered. “This is so bad. Mr. Song is going to kill me and bury my body in the swamp where no one will find me and fifty years from now someone will solve my murder in one of those unsolved crime shows.”

While Shin tried to calm Junghoon down before he could strangle himself with his own tie (“It’ll be faster if I do it myself!”), I stepped into a quiet corner to try Doyoon’s cell. No answer. I tried again. Straight to voicemail.

I considered just hanging up and trying again, but a flash of white-hot rage coursed through me. I raised the phone to my ear.

“It’s me, you selfish bastard. Do you know what you’ve just done? You screwed us all, thanks to your petty personal problems. Go to hell.”

“Doyoon...he’s coming back right?” This from LEO, who for once sounded every bit as young as he was. I forgot sometimes underneath all those jokes and bluster he was just another teenage boy who was a little in over his head. We all were sometimes.

When no one answered, ZT finally voiced the question that’d been hanging over all of us.

“What happens if he doesn’t?”

***

Doyoon

The skyscrapers turned into pinpricks, then nothing at all as we disappeared into the clouds. All the worries that had followed me to New York, all the problems I’d agonized over, seemed so small up here, thousands of meters in the air.

Free as a bird. For the first time, I truly understood what that meant. For the first time in weeks—no, months—I could finally breathe.

The gnawing guilt in my stomach for letting my group down aside, it was a perfect moment. It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried to tell the guys. I’d tried a thousand times to tell them, especially Jiho, that I wasn’t happy and was ready to leave. I almost managed to spit it out yesterday during practice after the rabid fans practically tore us apart by the limbs. It had all seemed so senseless.

I shuddered at the thought of holding that much power over another human being. The words I said, the food I ate, even the very way I held my fork, was dissected to death.

Jiho’s disdainful eyes, cold and impersonal, as he shrugged off the fight yesterday came to me in a flash. I could never be like that. All I’d ever wanted from life was music. A place to sing and dance. Maybe even a kid I could teach some moves to, a wife that smelled like home.

Not this. I spied a girl two seats ahead of me sneakily angling for a photo. I slid deeper into my seat, tugging my hoodie down so far it almost obscured my nose.

The guys wouldn’t have understood. LEO, with his heartbreaking good looks and easy confidence, was born for stardom. ZT, quiet and brooding, had an unshakable charisma that made him stand apart without even trying. Shin was brash, but he was the kind of unstoppable force that would more easily break the world than have it break him. And Jiho…

Jiho had it all. The good looks, the charm, the drive—not only that, he shone with this indescribable aura that we all wanted but couldn’t quite get. He was as bright as a flame and just as unpredictable. How could I have told them how difficult it was to be a regular person when the whole world was looking for you to be something extraordinary?

Every day that passed I was less “Doyoon” and more “what the fans wanted Doyoon to be.”

They never had to be anyone different to be loved by the adoring crowd. LEO, the seductive playboy. ZT, the cold and mysterious one. Shin, the energetic everything-man. Jiho, the dark Prince. And me? Who would love me as I was, the regular guy who’d rather spend the day eating Shin ramen and vegging out in sweatpants than going to Milan or traveling the world with a hot supermodel girlfriend?

So, I made a persona. The sweet, sensitive one. The angelic do-gooder that all the ahjummas couldn’t get enough of—“Oh, he’s a good boy!”

At first, the plastic smile didn’t quite fit on my face, sliding off during meet-and-greets or during selfies. But as time went on, the fake “Doyoon” started becoming easier and easier to put on, until I could no longer tell who the real me was. If I didn’t get out now, I might lose myself forever. No matter how hard it might be to leave now, it was my only option.

I sighed. How was I going to explain this to my parents? Hopefully, by the time I arrived in Korea, they would be waking up in Sydney and I’d be able to catch them before they could hear the news from anyone else.

Fly faster, I silently begged the pilot. Get me home.

***

Hana

It took an hour of scrubbing my body raw in boiling hot water before I finally felt clean enough to meet Eunji for dinner. Even then, the smell of sour milk seemed to float around me like a cloud and Eunji wrinkled her nose, pulling back immediately from our hug.

“Ew, you smell like a garbage dump.”

“Don’t get me started.” I held up two fingers to the proprietor of the little dumpling shop. She nodded and got to work on our orders.

“Let me guess. Emily? Again?”

“It’s not just her. It’s living with three roommates in an awful, small apartment. The landlord saw the garbage chute door fall off in my hands and do you know what she did?” Eunji shook her head, and I continued. “She told me I had to pay for any damages! I don’t even have a crappy job to pay for my equally crappy apartment, so I might not even be able to afford that soon.”

An earsplitting shriek came from the next table over. I nearly jumped out of my seat.

“Doyoon! No!” Actual, honest-to-God tears were streaming down the girl’s face. We turned to watch a reporter on TV announcing Doyoon’s sudden departure from New York and maybe CNTR, and Eunji gasped. As the reporter listed out the known reasons for his exit (personal, of course), equally distraught girls in black outfits could be seen clutching each other and sobbing behind her.

I rolled my eyes, “God, why is everyone so obsessed with them? It’s not like they’re royalty.”

Eunji hushed me, eyes glued to the screen. “Where have you been the past two years? CNTR’s the hottest thing since EXO. They are royalty.”

“Pfft,” I waved at her dismissively. “They’re okay, I guess. Besides, any group that the guy who got me fired is in, is automatically on my shit list. Sorry.”

Even if it was a really hot, really talented guy.

“I know, I agree with you that it was wrong of Jiho to do,” Eunji said quickly. “But don’t blame the whole group for it! Doyoon is a sweetheart!”

“I literally could care less about CNTR, Jiji,” I rubbed my hands over my face. “If I don’t get a job ASAP, I’m going to get evicted. That’s what I care about, not some boy band.”

Eunji’s phone chirped, and she tapped the screen to check on the notification. I peered out at her through my fingers, sighing pitifully.

“Hello? Earth to best friend? Kind of in the middle of a full-on mental breakdown here?”

This time Eunji ignored me completely, typing something furiously into her phone. I sighed and popped dumpling after dumpling into my mouth, snatching some from her plate in petty revenge. Half the table was clear by the time she looked up.

“Oh? Remembered I was here?”

“I just got an alert from CenU.”

“That stupid CNTR fan café?” I asked. “You’re choosing to ignore your soon-to-be-homeless best friend for your fan site?”

“It looks like they’re holding tryouts to find a replacement to take Doyoon’s place at the VMA’s.

“Oh my god, you’re just as bad as that girl over there.” The girl shot me a dirty look, which I promptly ignored, “Who cares, Jiji?”

“You should care,” she said, holding out her screen for me to see. A cartoon version of Jiho scowled at me from the screen, holding a giant text bubble proclaiming, “You’re in!”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Why?”

Eunji grinned. “Because I just entered you as a participant!”