“Yesterday?!” I ask, shocked. Manager Kong left that part out. “Why did she get cut?”
“I don’t think any one thing,” says Binna, shifting uncomfortably. “EunJeong was a great dancer, a great singer—”
“Oh, a really good singer,” adds JinJoo.
“She was really hardworking, too,” says Binna. “She was one trainee everyone thought would debut, no question. But sometime in April, she just seemed to get burned out, lost her fire. It was very subtle, but everyone noticed. None of us thought they’d just cut her, though. It was brutal.”
I do some mental math and realize S.A.Y. announced the auditions in Jersey in April. Why did Manager Kong think I could have anything to offer that these girls don’t?
Binna finally comes over and sweeps Helena’s stuff off my bed.
“Hey!” says Helena.
I put down my giant duffel. I’m so thankful to Binna I could cry.
I’ve barely closed my eyes when I’m shaken awake at four a.m.
“Hurry up,” says Binna. “We’re supposed to be at the gym already.”
“Seriously?” I blink up at the harsh fluorescent lights. I’m not exactly tired—all the adrenaline and stress from yesterday comes flooding into today—but still, the last thing I want to do is get out of bed to exercise.
I drag myself upstairs behind Binna to the gym on the hundredth floor, which is spacious yet packed with fifty girls stretching, lunging, and sprinting on treadmills. “Fire-Eyed Girl” by SLK is thumping. These girls are going hard. Some of us, including me, look like the walking dead, but others, like Aram, look as if they got eleven hours of sleep in a bathtub full of coconut milk and rose petals.
Right in the middle of the gym is a boy in an orange T-shirt doing bench presses, grunting loudly with each rep.
“Binna,” I whisper urgently. “How did a boy trainee sneak in here?”
Binna looks around, puzzled, then laughs when she sees who I’m talking about. “That’s not a boy trainee. That’s JiHoon-oppa. He’s one of the junior managers. He assists Manager Kong and Manager Shin.” She adds, whispering so softly it sounds like ASMR: “Watch out for him, he’s the biggest jerk.”
“Why is a boy a junior manager on the girls’ side?” I ask.
Binna shrugs. “I think JiHoon-oppa has connections at this company or something.”
JiHoon doesn’t look much older than any of us, although he must be. Oppa is the male version of unnie, what girls are supposed to call their big brothers or any boy who’s older than them. But oppa can have another meaning, depending on how it’s used; the only English equivalent I can think of is zaddy, something a girl might call a guy to flirt with him. Just laying eyes on JiHoon once, I can tell he’s the type of guy who’d like having fifty pretty girls calling him oppa a little too much. I vow never to give him that satisfaction.
Binna has me do an exercise where I lean over and crawl with my hands on the floor. “To improve your strength and flexibility,” she says.
JiHoon struts right up to us. “You’re the new girl,” he says to me.
I can’t bring myself to bow to him—there’s something about his whole vibe I really don’t like. I nod my head slightly. He walks in a circle around me, breathing wheezily through his mouth. I can feel his gaze slithering all over me.
“You’re not overweight,” he declares, “but you have no shape.”
Ex-squeeze me?! Binna sighs heavily as she lowers herself into a split but doesn’t say anything.
I want to clap back at JiHoon: Well, you’re shaped like a fire hydrant—is that the ideal shape for guys? But it’s too early in my K-pop career to put an authority figure on blast, so I get up and let JiHoon make me do so many squats I feel like my butt’s about to fall off.
As sweaty as I am, I don’t even get to take a shower after the workout, because as Team Two’s maknae, I’m the last to use the bathroom, and Aram spends a full twenty minutes on her beauty routine. When Aram finally emerges from the bathroom as glamorous and fresh as a Glossier ad, she says, “It’s your job to clear the drain after all of us have showered.”
I wanna snap, Clean it yourself, fam! But instead I bow meekly.
Our bathroom is tiny, and the shower isn’t separated by a door or even a curtain. The water just splashes all over the sink and toilet and drenches everything, including the toilet paper, so the whole room is always as humid as a Florida swamp, and there’s a drain in the middle of the floor, blocked by a massive mound of black and strawberry-blond hair. Even though it probably smells like flowery shampoo, I pinch my nose and hold my breath as I pick up the foot-long clump and plop it into the toilet.
The cafeteria is back on the hundredth floor, the top floor of the entire ShinBi headquarters. It’s split down the middle by a glass wall—the knife through the block of tofu—so the boys and girls can see each other during meals. Occasionally the trainees will bow to each other through the Gender Glass, but mostly, the boys and girls ignore each other because everyone’s dead tired and the orange-shirted junior managers, including a still-sweaty JiHoon, are keeping watch.
Breakfast is sweet potatoes and boiled eggs—a far cry from my favorite breakfast, which is sausage-egg-and-cheese McGriddles. Even though the junior managers watch us like hawks, we’re pretty much free to take whatever portion we want. I take one sweet potato and two eggs. JiHoon scowls from next to the serving line, his arms crossed, as if daring us to take more.
I spot Binna and JinJoo, who wave me over. They’re sitting at a table with two girls I haven’t met yet. I eye how much the other girls are eating. JinJoo has only half a sweet potato and no egg on her plate. Binna has one full sweet potato and two eggs, just like me.
Binna and JinJoo introduce me to the other two girls. BowHee is from Team One. She’s as small as I am and has big buckteeth, giving off strong tomboy vibes despite her long ringlets of violet hair. “Hi! You must be the American! What year were you born?!”
I wince, but Abba told me that it’s normal for Korean people to ask you your age right when they meet you—it tells them how to talk to you, whether to use formal language (jondaetmal) or casual (banmal), and how to treat you in general.
“Ah, so you’re the maknae of this table!” BowHee exclaims with a laugh. For a person so tiny, BowHee’s voice is surprisingly husky and loud. For some reason, I have a mental image of her kicking boys in the shin on a school playground.
The last girl bows wordlessly to me. She has a bowl cut and thick glasses and reminds me of a cute cartoon turtle—not an idol type at all, which makes me like her right away.
“That’s RaLa!” pipes BowHee. “She’s from Team Six and never talks!”
Through the Gender Glass, I see the boys eating in their identical half of the cafeteria, except their breakfast looks way better than ours: porridge, scrambled eggs, and sausage—even if their portions are small, too. I briefly catch eyes with a super-cute boy, taller than all the boys around him. Not everyone here looks like an idol yet, but this guy definitely does. I might be wrong, but he nods at me.
I quickly look back down at my sweet potato, thinking of Iseul and HyunTaek—their promising K-pop careers in jeopardy, just for being caught holding hands.