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Yerim’s pointed toe breaches the barrier of cool, shiny wood mere moments before Joohyun calls out: “Good job, everyone. Practice again next week on Tuesday.”
She feels her lungs burning as her hands grasp for purchase at her thighs, and slender fingers wrap around her water bottle with the straw poking out before she has the chance to, taking a sip, punctuated by bright eyes and raised brows.
Yerim takes pause, losing herself in the inhale-exhale that’s brought back to its rhythm as she stills from her finishing pose, turning her head only once her mind returns to her and watching as a shorter girl slips through the archway, only catching the slightest of glimpses of auburn hair swishing in trepidation before it’s gone with a blink.
“What?” Chaewon tilts her head, following Yerim’s train of vision to the door
Yerim shakes her head. “Let’s just go home. Tteokbokki?”
Chaewon grins, toothy and crooked, “Sure.”
The first thing Yerim notices when she steps into the dance studio on one deceitfully uneventful Tuesday is a girl who’s only slightly shorter than her but with a smile of seemingly infinite permanence.
One might think it was etched onto her face, for how often Jiwoo smiles.
The second thing Yerim notices is how fake it seems.
Not fake in the snarky, two-faced way the popular girls in her grade are when they smile sweetly at their friends only to natter about them moments after they’ve left the room, but fake in that it doesn’t reach her eyes. Fake in the way that it appears hollow, shatterable with a light gust of wind, no — not even that, a simple exhale done so without thought or regard.
Yerim ponders it as she completes her stretches and makes her way into the beginning pose, eventually deciding to forget about it, though she’s wildly unsuccessful, clear in the way it haunts her as she ruptures the edges of sleep that night when insomnia greets her again.
Something Yerim would later find out, however, is that Tuesday was the most eventful of Tuesdays Yerim is able to recall in her sixteen years of living: the one in which Jiwoo had shoved herself purposefully into her life and refused to dislodge, seeping into Yerim’s cracks she’d covered so carefully with each coming day, unwinding them with ease, and making the sickly nectar all the more difficult to remove.
Jiwoo is picked for the main role in the performance, three months after the auditioning for roles had begun. Yerim had auditioned, of course, everyone had.
But the fact that she just wasn’t the best lies heavy in her chest like lead, the shock that had registered on Jiwoo’s face when her name had been called out as if truly, she weren’t expecting to be picked, has easily burned itself into her retinas, like the sun if you stare at it a little too long.
Jiwoo being picked, however, comes to no surprise to Yerim, or to anyone, perhaps, but unlike Yerim, some people hold their incertitudes.
Yerim is slipping her gym shoes into her bag, knuckles bruised and used after a particularly vigorous session of exercise, when two girls she doesn’t quite remember the names of at a glance from a twin cohort slip into the room.
There’s a few hushed whispers between the two of them, until something distinguishable reaches Yerim’s ears: “I heard her parents paid extra just so she’d get the spot.”
“Her parents?” The other girl echoes in disbelief, “Her dad is a deadbeat, you know.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway,” The girl continues, “I heard she’s a dy—”
Yerim slams the door of the changing rooms shut lest she hear another word. She’d forgotten to eat before practice and then didn’t have time in between strength training, and now she is feeling the effects in the sickening lurch of her stomach, though the conversation she’d just bore witness to certainly may have had an impact as well.
Yerim’s breath is hot, hotter than she thinks it’d ever been, or at least it’d felt like it in the biting cold winter in Sooyoung’s garden, even with her cheeks burning with the alcohol in her system.
Her lips stick together when she presses them firmly shut, and the lingering smoke on her tongue does little to sate her disease.
Alcohol is never a good idea, and much less so in the unbearing presence of senior boys who leer and jeer at the younger girls which is, for reasons that evade Yerim, appealing to her dancemates. They’d invited a heap over to Sooyoung’s for some celebration party of something to do with the boy’s dance conglomerate. Yerim doesn’t care enough to know.
She slips into a room hidden behind the stairwell and for good reasons, it seems, because when she catches her bearings, the sound of lips and breathy sighs has her cheeks reddening. Even so, nothing could have prepared her for the sight of one of the girls under a rival company and Jiwoo making out on the bed.
Jiwoo’s hands are tangled in the other girl’s hair cut ragged short — an impulse decision, Yerim would guess, she’s had her fair share of those, or thoughts, rather, but she’d always been much too restrained to act on them — and across her face is smeared cherry red, both the pigment of her skin and the residue of Jiwoo’s lipstick Yerim had seen her applying not an hour earlier.
Yena, her mind subconsciously registers. Choi Yena is her name, she thinks.
Yena’s eyes flutter open and she catches sight of Yerim, and Yerim stumbles back into a dresser, something clattering to the floor, but the older girl is nothing if not unphased by her presence, just gently pushes Jiwoo off her frame captured beneath her, heaving heavily but silently somehow in the tepid atmosphere the three of them now lie stagnant in, Yerim parallel to the two of them.
Yerim presses her lips together, sticky lollipop residue rubbing between her lips, mixing with the lip gloss she’d carefully swiped across the skin when she’d made another trip to the bathroom on account of drunkenness. Chaewon didn’t seem too concerned anyway, too preoccupied with this week’s boy on her arm.
Jiwoo’s eyes are big, big and brown and calculating. She is two years her senior, but in this moment Yerim feels if one were to go by looks, she might appear older. But still, Jiwoo is in the know, which means Yerim is in the dark.
Her eyes glimmer with something Yerim does not understand, though she wishes to, and they are not going by looks, and so Yerim feels like a child under Jiwoo’s unfaltering stare. Though both girls stare at her, Yena’s gaze pales in comparison to the waves that rack through her now limp form, reduced to a matter of atoms if Jiwoo might have anything to say about it.
Yerim awkwardly wipes her lips, as if she were the one who had been caught red handed, red cheeked, and red mouthed, liplocked onto a girl — a girl — a girl. A girl. Yerim’s stomach churns, and she supposes this now is confirmation of the gossip those girls in that gym all those months ago had been whispering amongst themselves.
Yerim reminds herself she’d slipped only into the room for a break from the festivities. Chaewon and her older guy attempting to subtly suck face beneath the awning of Sooyoung’s backyard doing her head in, but she finds that she might have regretted less staying as a third wheel underneath the party lights, her head swimming with the lingering inhibition of the wine cooler Sooyoung had snuck in for the younger girls.
Yerim reaches for her purse, gaze dropping to the faux leather as she searches in vain again for the lipgloss she knows is caught in some department that would require the most meticulous of searches, something Yerim has not the time, patience or desire to partake in right now.
She doesn’t look up at either of them as they adjust from their places at the bed, instead continues fiddling with her bag. Leaving the room and never speaking of it again is a possibility, but there’s something that had been in Jiwoo’s gaze which doesn’t allow her to move from her spot pressed against the dresser.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Jiwoo whispers, breath against Yerim’s shoulder once Yena is gone, and Yerim just nods, knuckles white beneath the fabric of her tennis skirt as she grips the smooth wood tighter than she’d previously thought possible.
Months of grueling practice, many a blister and bruise suffered to the foot, leg, and any place of the body one could name, and Yerim has mastered her routine, despite it’s length and magnificence something to sniff at in comparison to Jiwoo’s.
She flexes her foot, watches as the bones shine through her skin, watches as her pointe shoe shimmers in the blurry reflection of the bus’s metal walls, and sighs. Three hours ‘til the performance of her ballet career, and Yerim doesn’t feel a thing except an insatiable urge to get it over with.
The time is gone in a blink, and soon they’re lining up in single file to make their way onto the stage, powder beneath their feet and dreams cradled like stars in their hands, burning hot against used skin.
Yerim thinks it feels far less momentous than it should, because what is weighing on her mind and coursing through her blood is not what awaits them beneath the glaring lights of the stage, but the way Jiwoo had looked at her in the reflection of the bus. This feels final, in all the ways something might, and Yerim is unsure of how to feel about it.
The performance is perfect, as expected. Jiwoo delivers her main role with the kind of emotion you’d either have to have braved a thousand tears shed — or so Yerim hears from her dance instructor whispered to someone backstage — or be a master in the craft of performance, which of course, Jiwoo is.
They all know it. Yerim knows it. Yerim knows Jiwoo is well experienced in that regard, in all regards necessary for performance, so she doesn’t put it past Jiwoo to have staged the entire thing, though it’s more of an observation than anything else. That’s what it’s about though, she realizes belatedly, pretending and putting on a show.
In truth, Yerim can’t remember how she did. She remembers the roses thrown onto the stage, and she remembers the way Chaewon had grinned through countless layers of foundation, so wide Yerim had feared her face might tear in two, and she remembers Jiwoo at the center of it all, everyone just standing around her as if she were the sun and they were just planets, notable, sure, but not the main attraction. Never the main attraction, not when Jiwoo’s around.
Yerim sips at a slushie from the overpriced canteen who’d graciously provided free drinks to the performers. Cherry-peach flavor, the text beneath the dull glow of the machine had read, and it’s definitely... that.
“Yerimie,” Someone calls out as Yerim steps through the exit an hour or so later when she’s the last one left, and Yerim turns.
“Jiwoossi,” She breathes, when she catches sight of the girl smiling evenly at her, holding a bouquet of violets, the sun’s rays framing auburn hair turned golden, picturesque in the evening light. Yerim doesn’t wonder who gifted it to her, but she does remember reading violets held a sort of significance in that regard...
“Please,” Jiwoo huffs, “Call me unnie.”
Jiwoo walks over to her, and Yerim, hesitant, begins, “Alright... unnie. Was there..."
Jiwoo tilts her head.
“Was there something you wanted?”
Jiwoo swings back and forth on her feet, heels rocking against the concrete. “I, well. I just wanted to tell you ‘good job’ on your performance. You did really amazing.”
“Oh,” Yerim says, though she’s not sure how much Jiwoo’d caught of it considering she’d been on the stage the entire time focusing on her own, “Thanks, then. Unnie.”
“Are you going for nationals?”
Yerim shifts her gaze from side to side, “I’m not sure,” she pauses, before hastily adding, “You should, though. You’re really good.”
“Yeah,” Jiwoo says slowly, “Well, they came today and asked me to, so I think I will.”
“Oh, wow. That’s great. Good luck, then.”
Jiwoo smiles, tight lipped.
She watches as Yerim’s gaze falls to her feet, before thrusting her hands forward into Yerim’s, plying her fingers free and shoving the bouquet into her grasp.
The plastic surrounding the flowers pinches at Yerim’s skin, but it’s not this she reacts to, it’s the gesture itself. She looks up at Jiwoo in silent question, but Jiwoo’s not facing her anymore, having turned on her heels and sauntering off into the sunset.
Yerim watches as she saunters off, about fifty meters away when she waves before running off, and wonders something she dare not voice nor pay mind to.