We finished practicing to the song without making any mistakes. Since we had to go onstage in two days, it was more or less complete. When Lee Sehan said we should rest for thirty minutes and then continue, the trainees sank down where they stood. Sitting in a corner, I watched Lee Sehan talking to Shin Giyoung.
Just as I had ordered, Shin Giyoung acted the way he usually did. Pretending to hate me, pretending to be close with Lee Sehan. It would have been best if I got close to Lee Sehan myself, but what could I do when Lee Sehan kept avoiding me? Lee Sehan got along fucking great with Shin Giyoung, so that was fine, but still. It put me in a strangely shitty mood. Being worse than a pervert bastard was kind of unpleasant.
The bastards sitting around together let out little exclamations. They were noisy, probably watching episode two, which had aired yesterday. Right after Lee Sehan’s voice asked whether it would be all right to arrange the song, I heard the old-looking bastard say, “Sehan, do everything however you want.” Nice editing. I was thinking that when the trainees watching the video started glancing at me. One of them hesitated, then said,
“Yuha hyung, did you do something to get on the producer’s bad side?”
When I did not answer, the bastard made a serious face.
“You know every part with you in it got edited out, right? Even in episode one, you only showed up in group shots. The part where you sang was all cut. And in episode two, that cunty diva… that all got edited out too.”
The old-looking bastard cut in.
“Hey, shit, you think that’s all? If anyone even talks to that bastard, that gets cut too. No, they cut out anything that even mentions him.”
“Hyung! How can you swear when this is going to air?”
“Cursing that bastard won’t air anyway. You saw it. They cut out the part where I fought with him too.”
“You wanted to air in a two-shot with me?”
When I said it playfully, the old-looking bastard lost his shit and told me not to talk nonsense. Did that bastard really have no brain? If not for me getting edited out, all of his bullshit toward Lee Sehan would have aired too. I already felt like shit, so I looked at the old-looking bastard and smiled innocently.
“I know you’re disappointed you didn’t make it on air. You like me, don’t you?”
“What the hell are you even saying?!”
“You’re acting like this because you want my attention. You’re being so obvious.”
“You crazy bastard, seriously…”
“A crazy bastard is way too attractive, right?”
The old-looking bastard huffed, dumbfounded, “Hah! Hah-hah…!” If that kept going until hyperventilation and he passed out, it would have been funny, but the trainees beside him pretended to be nice and told him to calm down. The old-looking bastard with his dogshit temper roughly shoved a teammate aside and came closer to me. I smiled, enjoying the thought of how I should make this bastard completely lose it. When I smiled, the bastard’s blood pressure shot up and he was about to run his mouth, but Lee Sehan cut in.
“Should we get back to practicing?”
“No, this bastard just—!”
“We have less than two days left, so we should get along. We’re going to debut, right, hyung?”
“Ah, seriously…”
The old-looking bastard messed up his hair, then went back into formation. The trainees also got up and made a little show of refreshing the mood. Since I had the most impactful opening part, I went to the center. I tapped my leg along with the accompaniment and sang while looking at the front mirror. When my eyes met Lee Sehan’s in the mirror, I thought, that bastard was doing it again. Lee Sehan had looked at me first, but the second our eyes met, the bastard startled like hell. Lee Sehan had been doing that shit constantly since the first day we met as teammates.
When I moved back, Lee Sehan stepped to the center. The singing was clean and the dancing was smooth. That bastard had excellent skills, yet had handed the most eye-catching part to me. Even when saying, “How about Yuha hyung sings the opening? Your voice is good,” Lee Sehan had not looked in my direction once. Wasn’t that strange? Park Yuhyeon had asked Shin Giyoung to get rid of me. But this bastard was trying to make me stand out.
I kept staring, and our eyes met. This time too, Lee Sehan hurriedly turned away. As I studied Lee Sehan, I felt another fucking nasty gaze. The pervert bastard was staring at me with those disgusting eyes again. It put me in such a fucking shitty mood that after that, I only looked at myself in the mirror.
*****
After practice, we went to eat dinner. Throughout practice, Shin Giyoung had glared at me with those crazed eyes. I somehow endured the urge to gouge those fucking eyes out. I only endured it because I had a fucking deep well of patience. If it had been any other bastard, they would have killed that fucker already and thrown him into the sea. The way that pervert bastard stared was that fucking disgusting. If there was one good thing, it was that the monkey bastards understood those deranged eyes in the exact opposite way.
One guy walking alongside us suddenly asked,
“You two were classmates, right? Why do you get along so badly?”
“We look like we get along badly? Me and Park Yuha?”
Shin Giyoung grinned like he loved that. Like the pervert bastard he was, he heard that in the most fucked-up way possible and enjoyed it in the most goddamn disgusting way possible. The flustered trainee spoke awkwardly.
“Yeah… kind of. Don’t you hate Yuha hyung, Giyoung hyung?”
“That’s true. I fucking hate Park Yuha being an idol.”
“It’s that bad? There are rumors going around among the guys…”
The bastard glanced around, then lowered his voice sharply.
“They say Yuha hyung ran off with your money.”
“……”
“Or that he stole your girlfriend of seven years. Some people say he did both.”
From the look on that bastard’s face, he was betting on “both,” wasn’t he? I let out a dry laugh. The bastards jealous of me must have spread bullshit rumors. I could understand them being jealous of my brilliance in deducing the “cunty diva” concept. Being too outstanding really was a problem. I was shaking my head when—what? Gone? Not here.
I looked ahead, then behind me, but Lee Sehan was nowhere to be seen.
When I stood still, Shin Giyoung, who had been giving an explanation that sounded suspiciously like an insult—“There’s no way! Do you think I hate Park Yuha that much?!”—called my name in confusion. I cleanly ignored the pervert bastard and turned back the way we had come. Then, to the trainee calling after me and asking where I was going, I answered, “Practice room.” I walked in the opposite direction from the trainees and smiled crookedly.
Couldn’t miss this chance. When else would I get to dig around inside Lee Sehan’s guts? When I arrived at the practice room, I saw Lee Sehan. As expected, that bastard was practicing alone. I leaned against the wall by the practice room door, looked at Lee Sehan reflected in the mirror, and asked,
“Practicing hard. Not going to eat?”
Lee Sehan flinched, then turned off the song. Then the bastard turned around and looked at me.
“Why did you come here?”
“Why are you still here?”
“But, um… you’re talking casually now?”
“You’re twenty-three. I’m twenty-four.”
“No, you used to speak politely…”
I smiled spitefully.
“I dropped the formal speech a while ago. You kept avoiding me, so you were the only one who didn’t know.”
“Ah…”
“Why are you avoiding me? I’m curious.”
Other than the old-looking bastard who looked as old as he appeared, I had switched to casual speech with most of them. The trainees were uncomfortable with politeness too, and being polite when we first met was more than enough courtesy. Lee Sehan must have been dying of embarrassment, because that bastard kept looking down and chewing at the lips. I straightened from where I had been leaning and approached Lee Sehan.
“Come to think of it, you did call me a ‘fucking bastard.’ Did you start hating me back then?”
“No! It’s really not that… Back then, I said it because I was flustered, but after spending time with you, you were better than I thought… You don’t slack off either, and you quietly work hard at what you’re assigned…”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“That’s, I mean… why do you keep coming closer?”
“You won’t come to me, so I have to go to you.”
I stopped about three steps away from Lee Sehan. Lee Sehan stiffened completely, eyes darting all over the place. For a bastard who was not exactly tiny, playing weak suited that face surprisingly well.
Looking closer, the lines were delicate like a woman’s. A slim jawline, red-rimmed eyes. And the eyes were strangely cloudy. Like my older uncle’s eyes when I was little. Lee Sehan searched for words, then spoke in an unstable voice.
“Because I’m a fucking bastard.”
“……”
“There’s something I want, and I was told that if I wanted to achieve it, I had to become a fucking bastard… so I decided to. But then I started feeling guilty. Even though I’m not going to stop. I didn’t know it, but I’m a real fucking bastard.”
When I only stared, Lee Sehan laughed awkwardly and said, “You don’t know what I mean, do you?” I understood exactly what that meant. So this bastard had been avoiding me because of some pathetic guilt. Guess the thought of fucking me over made Lee Sehan feel sorry. That was why Lee Sehan had handed me the important part too.
What an actual idiot. Park Yuhyeon too, but this bastard was fucking slow. If I were Park Yuhyeon, I would have just killed me right away. I would not have done something stupid like calling me out before killing me and saying he would let me off if I apologized. Looking at Lee Sehan now made me curious all over again.
Did Park Yuhyeon feel guilty after I died? What state had Park Yuhyeon been in right before he killed me? I looked at Lee Sehan as if measuring that, then said flatly,
“Why feel guilty? It’s only natural to do whatever it takes to get what you want.”
“…That still doesn’t mean you should hurt other people.”
“Why not?”
“What…?”
“You seem to be mistaken, but competing from the same position in the first place is already hurting someone. Someone who gets eliminated from the competition will think that.”
I smiled lightly.
“If only you hadn’t been there, I would’ve debuted.”
“……”
“And you’ll think it too. Thank God that one got dropped. Thank God it wasn’t me. In the end, it comes down to that, doesn’t it? I have to trample that bastard and climb up myself.”
“That’s…”
“Don’t feel some pathetic guilt. If you’re a fucking bastard, then everyone else is a fucking bastard too.”
It was sophistry. There was an obvious difference between working hard to become better than others in order to succeed, and intentionally hurting someone else in order to succeed. Even without the condition of “in order to succeed,” physically or mentally hurting someone else was obviously something you were not supposed to do, according to common sense. It was bullshit any normal person should ignore.
So anyone who accepted this kind of shitty logic had to be a fucking bastard. Or someone who had gone off the rails for whatever reason. Lee Sehan’s cloudy eyes gradually brightened. It was the face of someone who had just been saved by God. Looking at that, I was purely impressed. So that was the kind of face an ordinary person made at the moment they transformed into a crazy murderer. Fucking hilarious.
I held back with all my strength the urge to laugh my ass off. I lowered my head and covered my mouth with the back of my hand, pressing down the smile that had started to creep out. Whether all ability to notice me had been thrown into the trash or not, Lee Sehan thanked me in a bright voice. Then the bastard added that from now on, Lee Sehan would not avoid me.