Work Text:
Sophia landed at LAX and twenty minutes later had six new texts from Lara, all sent from the hotel lobby. Im not u so these bitches wont let me in ur roooooooom!!! The rest were selfies, some really zoomed-in so Sophia could see her agony, others taken with her arms outstretched so Sophia could see her sprawled out across a crushed-velvet lounger.
She sighed. Her Uber driver glanced back over his shoulder. “It’s my friend,” she said—unnecessarily, because he didn’t care. It was good that she’d said friend and not groupmate, and not member, good that it was Lara, so she hadn’t hesitated in a way that could have made him interested in her.
But was that even the right instinct? Could she afford to be private right now? She’d been recognized at the baggage claim but not mobbed, not the way she would be when she went back to Manila. She wasn’t not thinking about it. She’d been away too long, more than six months without even a stopover, two or three days in the states to do press. Of course it had weakened her brand.
Then again, she’d been one woman in jeans and a plain white t-shirt, wrestling with two suitcases, not six girls styled in matching tracksuits. She never knew what to expect now. Sometimes she thought she’d left LA just to soften the blow of finding out, out of all the clamor around the group, how much had been just for her.
Lara was escalating to voice memos, and in spite of herself Sophia had to laugh. She sent a string of hearts, then squinted at the ETA on the phone anchored to the dashboard. Los Angeles traffic was easy, cruise-y, after Manila, but cars were backed up on the freeway and they were still ten minutes away.
I’ll be there in 15, she sent, after debating whether to say ten or five. One would have been honest; the other would have been manifestation, which she did still believe in, but she decided it was better to exceed expectations and show up early.
Miss you badddd, Lara texted back. Miss you downnn, and then, They gave me snacks HAHAHA they think im dying, and another selfie, kissyfaced, holding two Nutrigrain bars.
Sophia checked Instagram. Good, Dani had made her flight. On her story was a blurry shot of the runway at Incheon, the glassy green terminal Sophia remembered from what felt like another life.
LA wasn’t like that, but also wasn’t not like that. So many parts of her life were in transition, wavering between extremes, right now. When she’d first come to LA on the promise of a chance she had felt that way, and she tucked her phone away and turned to watch bright palm trees slip by. No matter what came to pass, she was not nineteen anymore. Although, she thought, and chided herself a moment later for being ungrateful, HYBE had paid for that Uber.
The minutes passed in a blink and then they were pulling up outside the Hotel Bel Air, where, Lara had kept saying, HYBE could have gotten her a suite for the weekend, just to make things fair, even though she lived basically fifteen minutes down the road. Instead she was going to sleep over in Sophia’s—either just tonight or every night of the stay; Sophia hadn’t asked her. Megan was coming over tonight, too. They were going to watch Yoonchae’s new drama and probably go live; Sophia’s skin was tingling a little bit in anticipation of posting the tweet, which had been sitting in her drafts for weeks, and watching the all-caps replies roll in as the Eyekons went wild. They’d been barred from saying anything specific about the reunion, the concert, but they could hint about it. It was good to drum up some excitement, anyway. It had been almost three years.
Then she was dragging her suitcases onto the curb, towards the white stucco arches, and thank god, someone came rushing out through the glass doors to help her. Then she was inside, searching and scanning the lobby for her, spotting her—and then it didn’t matter that she and Lara hadn’t seen each other in a year, or that Lara was either wearing a different perfume now or Sophia hadn’t remembered it correctly, or that Lara had new hand tattoos she’d only seen on Instagram, or that they’d been seventeen and nineteen when they’d met and they were twenty-seven and twenty-nine now.
With pretty much all of them she could have seen them again anytime, anywhere, and Lara would have still been her Lara, and Dani her Dani, and Megan her Meiyok, and Yoonchae her Yoonchip, still fifteen on some level. When they went too long without seeing each other, they started texting each other, remember when…? Remember when…? Except for Yoonchae, who usually just sent Sophia uncaptioned photos of Enhypen merch you could only buy at chain coffee shops in Korea.
Twenty-seven and twenty-nine was not too old to have, basically, a sleepover.
“I had the flu a month ago and nobody made soup for me,” Lara said, a little wetly, against Sophia’s shoulder,
“I know,” Sophia said. “You texted me about it, like, a thousand times,” and then she squeezed her extremely tightly, missed you, missed you, missed you.
-
“It’s so funny that Dani ended up in Korea.” Megan said hours later. She was lying across Sophia’s bed, replying to Dani’s story, Sophia was eating dakganjeong and with her free hand, texting Yoonchae, YOONCHIP!!!!!!!! Mission was a spy drama; Yoonchae was the second lead, kind of a femme fatale. They had just watched her, three episodes in, make out with a tall, brooding double agent.
“It's probably a good idea,” Lara had said, practically, once they’d all stopped shrieking. “People need to remember she's not fifteen anymore."
Yes, probably, Sophia thought now, and hit send anyway, and licked soy glaze from her fingers and rolled over to consider Dani, who had come to LA only vaguely knowing Gangnam Style and had been living in Korea for more than a year now. HYBE had brought her over as the special dance judge on a boys’ survival show; Sophia had seen the viral clips, Dani’s feedback censored and bleeped out and a roomful of floppy-haired teenagers staring in wide-eyed shock at her.
They’d been being made to do some kind of partnered dance.What did you say to them?? Sophia had texted her, and Dani had told her.
Why do you all look so awkward? Aren’t, like, half of you gay?
And now she was on panel variety shows speaking passable or maybe bad Korean; Yoonchae was cagey in her assessments of exactly how fluent Dani was, but if she was the butt of the joke she knew it, and it didn’t bother her. She and Yoonchae had been together in Hongdae the week before, sending the group chat photos of their iced matcha lattes. They weren’t on the same plane now only because Dani’s flight had been booked by HYBE, and Yoonchae’s by her new agency.
“I can’t wait to see her,” Sophia said, instead of really opining, and then, “and Yoonchae,” because she couldn’t wait to see Yoonchae. After a moment, during which Lara and Megan both looked at her, she said, “And Manon,” because after all this time she was still the leader, and it wasn’t that she didn’t want to see Manon. It was more complicated than that.
“Hm,” Lara said. She was trying to sound neutral, but Sophia kind of appreciated that. It warned her to steel herself; they were talking about Manon now. “Have you listened to her song?”
“I posted about it when it came out.”
“Girl, I know,” Lara said. Megan snorted and then covered her mouth, looking guilty. “Did you listen to it, though.”
“Obviously I listened to it.” Of course Sophia had listened to it. If any one of them had put out three minutes of silence she would have listened to it, and commented on the announcement post, and shared it to her story. omg manon, she had commented, and then, ARTISTE. She could hear the melody of the hook in her head now; she just couldn’t remember the words.
Not to mention that this was Manon’s first song, her first release. She’d done nothing at all musically for almost three years, and Sophia could imagine the conversations about carpe-dieming it, about momentum. She thought Lara was the one who, in the end, had convinced Manon to just drop the track. She still couldn’t decide whether it should have been her.
But she’d never been that to Manon. It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried. I need space, Manon had said to her. I need to breathe. Or sometimes she’d said, It’s fine. Dani and I talked; I feel better now.
Manon had been the first to say she hadn’t been going to re-sign, the first message in the groupchat. “So,” Megan had said, looking up from her phone, “it’s over, right? That’s what this means, right? That it’s over?” It had been a real, not-rhetorical question, directed at Sophia on the other side of the table. They’d gone out to brunch to distract themselves, but when their phones had chimed, Sophia’s soufflé pancake had gone dry in her mouth.
Like they hadn’t all seen it coming. Like they hadn’t done six solo performances during their last concert. If they’d all re-signed, it would have been to individual contracts with individual terms. Yoonchae had already told Sophia in confidence that she’d wanted to change agencies. Sophia hadn’t been able to blame Manon for it, and Manon hadn’t been the only one.
It had been the wildfires all over again, when they’d let her search Zillow for six-bedroom listings to send to HYBE. Then one day, Manon had been all, “Dani and I found an apartment.”
“You and Dani,” Sophia had said, trying to keep her voice even. Later she’d found out Megan and Lara had been looking, too. It hadn’t been a secret; they hadn’t been working to keep it from her. They’d just all come to the same conclusion, and assumed she had, too.
“Nothing’s over,” Sophia had told Megan. She’d paid for her pancake and Megan’s ricotta toast, both of their iced coffees. Why didn’t you tell me? she’d texted Manon, standing by the hostess stand, waiting for Megan to finish peeing or taking moody posed selfies or throwing up in the butter-yellow tiled bathroom.
I did tell you?, Manon had sent, Then more question marks. To Sophia, she’d just been pretending to miss the point, but whatever.
“I liked Manon’s song,” Sophia said, three and a half years later, and hummed the hook to prove that she had listened to it. Lara, reaching for one of the takeout containers, found the harmony automatically.
“Wait, guys,” Megan said, holding up her phone. Over the Pacific, Yoonchae had found one spot of reception in the air. DON’T watch the next episode, she’d texted, so of course they all scrambled for Sophia’s laptop, and Lara pressed play.
As the opening credits played Sophia watched Megan out of the corner of her eye. She’d been doing it all evening; she sensed that Megan knew, and was letting her. She worried about Megan sometimes, even though Megan’s last single had charted, even though she’d just moved into a new airy two-bedroom in Venice Beach and had shown them all pictures, even though she’d come from a meeting with “some really interesting producers,” one of whom Lara knew and had worked with before.
“I just keep thinking that this is all there is,” Megan had said a month after their disbandment, which hadn’t been a disbandment but a coordinated exploration of new individual paths, or something; after three years Sophia couldn’t remember the exact language of the statement. Megan had been calling from somewhere in Hawaii; Sophia had still been in LA, but with no plan to stick around. “We’re just all going to get less and less famous until we die.”
Sophia had stayed on the phone with her for four hours, messaging the whole time with Sylvia. The next morning Megan had called again to say basically that she’d been hammered, which Sophia had known, obviously, so it hadn’t been that reassuring to her.
In this moment there was no sign that Megan was anything other than happy, but Sophia just had to go right on worrying about her. Megan would always be Megan and Sophia would always worry about her, and Manon would always be Manon and Sophia would always wonder how much the rest of them really knew, and Yoonchae would always be fifteen, even onscreen in this—oh, wow.
It was kind of like a leather getup, very strappy.
“Yoonchae,” Lara said, scandalized. “Daddy,” and Megan fell off the bed and landed hard on the floor.
-
The night before the press release they’d met up at Megan and Lara’s apartment. They’d had no agenda; they’d just had a sense that they’d needed to all be together. They had lain across the couches and on the living room floor, talking about nothing. Remember when…? They’d been drinking white wine, which had been weirdly adult and not something they had done before.
Yoonchae had turned up late, strangely nervous and fidgety, which Sophia had chalked up to the eleven-hour countdown in all their heads. But then she’d pulled up her shirt and shown them the tiny constellation inked across her ribcage: six stars.
“Yoonchae!” Dani had said, and burst into tears. “I would have gone with you!”
That would have set them all off if Sophia hadn’t already been crying—she’d realized she had felt swollen and waterlogged for a week. Longer. Two weeks, a month, ever since Yoonchae had told her she’d had another offer, since Yoonchae had said, “I think it’s a good offer, maybe,” sounding how she’d used to when she’d wanted Sophia to order in restaurants for her. The whole time Sophia had been waiting for the dam to burst open and now it had, and she was crying onto Megan and Lara’s carpet, and then into Dani’s hair.
When they’d finished crying and laughing at themselves for crying and a third thing, cry-laughing, they’d tried for about four minutes, not very seriously, to play Monopoly. Then they’d given up and gone back to reminiscing. Remember when…? After midnight, after Dani had passed out on the couch, Manon had stood up, yawning. She’d had a flight in the morning. Sophia had disentangled herself from Lara.
She and Manon had left together and for some reason had gotten into the same Uber, even though by then Manon had been living up in the hills. And, Sophia had realized much later, hadn’t she had a car? In the back seat they’d gotten into the worst, most vicious fight of their careers, maybe their lives, and looking back, Sophia couldn’t remember what had triggered it, or anything she’d said. She’d said something, because Manon had said, “You’re acting like we’re still teenagers.” And Manon had said, “Your ego’s invested in being the princess of everything.” And Manon had said, “You have, like, reverse abandonment issues; no one’s ever left you.” Ninety seconds in, their driver had silently reached for his AirPods, so the whole thing had been scored to faint Spanish rap, the muted bleed-through.
He’d let them out and they’d argued all the way up to the door of Manon’s building, at which point Sophia had realized she’d no longer been in the Uber. After this it had turned half-hearted, not because they had resolved anything but because she’d been in Manon’s living room, looking at the new art on her walls, leaning down absently to straighten a huge pile of unopened mail. Manon had disappeared into the kitchen and come back with shot glasses. She hadn’t told Sophia to leave, so where else had it been going to go?
Then they’d been kissing. Then Manon had been pulling her shirt over her head; the dim light had been curving around her breasts, splitting her stomach into silver planes. “This is a terrible idea,” she’d said, leaning over her, easing Sophia down onto her bed. That had felt like Sophia’s line, but they hadn’t been themselves. They’d been people they’d both thought they’d left behind a long time ago.
At four in the morning, Manon had had to leave to get on a plane. In the last unreal hours before the announcement, Sophia had taken an apocalyptic bath in Manon’s claw-foot bathtub with all the lights off and santal candles burning, listening to no music, drinking sparkling water and mango nectar out of a coffee mug.
After that the world had kept on barrel-turning around the sun. Two weeks later, Manon had been in Vegas, getting married to a man none of them had ever met before. Sophia had found out from Instagram. Congratulations, she’d commented—no heart. She’d turned her phone off for six days and when she’d powered it back on she’d had unread messages from all five of them, and—she’d been startled by this notification—from Sophie.
-
The morning meeting the next day was supposed to cover concept, setlist, and staging, Dani arrived just a moment after them and hollered their names across the underground garage. There she was, pushing her sunglasses up onto her forehead, climbing out of a new but equally low-slung and cherry-red car.
They were all led up to a boardroom. There were interesting print-outs on the table—concept art. Sophia poured cups of coffee, not because anybody had asked her to but because she wanted to do something with her hands.
A few minutes later, someone knocked softly on the big double doors. “Yoonchae, you can just go in,” she heard Manon say, holding back laughter.
And there they were, and nothing about them was surprising, because Sophia followed them both on Instagram and FaceTimed Yoonchae all the time. They were two minutes late, which didn’t matter but it was what Sophia thought about, even as she got up to rescue Yoonchae from Lara, who wanted to discuss the drama, and wrap her arms around her.
She had been the first one to set foot in the boardroom, and Manon had followed Yoonchae through the door. And that didn’t matter either, but there was a part of her that liked when she was first and Manon was last to anything, when they bookended anything. Isn’t this right? It started with me and it ended with you.
“Hi, Sophia,” Manon said, and hugged her, and it wasn’t perfunctory, but Sophia sensed that it didn’t last as long as it could have, either. She hadn’t forgotten the smell of Manon’s perfume, but she didn’t actually think she’d been misremembering Lara’s. Lara was just wearing a new one these days and Manon wasn’t, and Manon’s hair was in the same braids it had been in on that last night they’d spent together, which was a fourth part of this encounter that had no meaning at all.
Manon sat down across from her. Sophia poured coffee for her. “Thank you,” Manon said, still looking amused, but it was the shape of her mouth. That was all.
-
At eleven they took a break from discussing nail art and a potential Gnarly remix. Manon excused herself to go to the bathroom. Yoonchae was showing Megan something on her phone. Sophia took a croissant from the untouched continental breakfast spread on the sideboard and unwound it into a long, buttery strip, counting seconds in her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said to—somebody’s assistant, a man who had been shadowing one of the creative directors. “Where did you say the bathroom was?”
She thought she knew, but it had been three years; maybe they’d remodeled. The hallways seemed to shift as she walked down them. She knew, then didn’t. What seemed familiar was in the next moment foreign to her.
The Geffen bathrooms still had the worst lighting, fluorescent and blinding white, and Sophia winced a little as she let the door swing closed behind her. That had been one of their in-jokes. She remembered Megan washing her hands with her eyes shut tight. Manon was somehow unaffected by it, which by this point had ceased to be surprising; she still looked relaxed and tan, leaning back against the sink counter.
She was doing nothing, not even pretending to touch up her makeup. Sophia felt faintly miffed, even though she hadn’t expected to surprise her.
“I liked your song,” she said, even though she’d texted Manon that already. She’d commented, and she’d used all caps; there was no way to do that here without shouting at her. They should have been past pretenses, but then again, they’d never been. It was this or another whispered fight in the back of an Uber.
Manon laughed. It might have been fond, or maybe she just thought Sophia was absurd. She said, “I didn’t think it would be your style.”
“No, it is.” That was reactive. Manon raised her eyebrows, and Sophia sighed. “I don’t care, I still like it.” Anyway, gun to her head, she didn’t know if she could have named her own style.
“It’s not about you.” Manon’s tone was entirely conversational.
Sophia blinked. “I know.” She hadn’t even considered the possibility.
As she’d understood it, it hadn’t been about any one person, or even truly about love, just—womanhood, maybe sensuality. It was very Manon, and in that way she really did think it was a triumph. That was what her management had been trying to get out of her for three years, something personal. Stripped-back, intimate; she’d been trying to write songs for almost a decade, but everything that came from her pen was about someone else, and too Broadway.
Yoonchae had done OSTs; Dani had dropped an EP. With Manon’s release, Sophia was the only one of them who hadn’t put out anything. She’d spent three years on stage, mostly, singing songs originated by other people.
But she’d just wanted to perform and maybe contribute a few words; she’d wanted to be an idol. It was her label that wanted to brand her as a singer-songwriter. In her dreams she’d been glossed and polished always; that was hard to shake off. The survival show should have taught her that vulnerability was what was really marketable.
Did you wish it was? she thought Manon might ask. Were you hoping it would be?
“We can be weird about this if you want,” was what Manon said instead, What was this? But just from the tilt of Manon’s head, Sophia kind of knew.
She said nothing. Manon held up her left hand—no ring. She said, “Sophia, literally no one thought that it was real except you.”
So Sophia had leapt to conclusions. So she’d left that comment, which had sparked wild rumors—not that she’d been jilted, but just the usual. She’d never liked Manon; she resented her for breaking up the group, or just for pulling a stupid stunt. Admittedly as she’d looked at Manon’s post her brain had spun wild and spat out insane interviewspeak ways to frame it: a brand-new direction for us! And then she’d been suddenly, inexplicably furious, not because Manon hadn’t been marrying her (fuck, obviously), but because they’d been in a group together for seven years, and Manon had still been someone who would have done that kind of thing without telling her.
Six days later, once she’d parsed all their texts, she'd understood that Manon had just been fucking with the fans, and maybe with her. She’d looked at the post a second time and observed many relevant details, for example Manon’s new “husband”’s MALEWIFE crop top. And the Elvis impersonator.
“What was I supposed to think, okay? You were in a white dress and everything.” But when she’d looked at it again, it hadn’t been a wedding dress, not truly.
“Oh, sure.” Manon’s mouth was twitching towards a smile, which was not fair at all. They’d never really talked about it; Sophia had just apologized stiffly, although she still wasn’t exactly sure what she’d been apologizing for. “You had met him, though.”
“No, I hadn’t,” Sophia said blankly. Nothing about him had been familiar.
Manon frowned. “Yes, you did; you met him at Art Basel.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Huh,” Manon said. Sophia really did hate how hard she was trying not to laugh. “Then I don’t know who that was.”
It truly was a stupid thing to have barely spoken for almost three years over, but it had been about that and it hadn’t, which Manon had to know.
“You could have invited me,” Sophia said. She felt herself start to cross her arms, but it was a childish thing to say and that would have made it worse. She forced herself to let them fall.
“To my fake wedding,” Manon said. “My joke wedding.”
“You could have fake invited me,” Sophia said mulishly. “Dani was there.”
“You never, ever change,” Manon said, and now she did just sound fond. Like Sophia didn’t know that about herself. Like she hadn’t heard that before. Stop saying we in interviews, her manager kept telling her; stop saying, Lara just texted me—you need to talk about yourself. People are saying you’re a clout-chaser. Leader was like maknae; it was a relative position. Outside of the group, you couldn't carry it with you. But Yoonchae had been waiting for years to shake that title; Sophia couldn’t relate to that. In too many people's eyes she was capable of infinite self-improvement, when in reality she'd been in limbo for years. Manon was maybe the only person who understood this about her.
There was a flicker of a memory. Manon, twenty-one or twenty-two, maybe a little drunk or stoned or just very sleep-deprived. Manon lying in a hotel bed beside her, batting at her ankle, saying, Sophia, let's just go out sometime and just be totally different people.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” It was the question that had dogged their whole relationship. Why didn’t you talk to me? It had never been about need; Manon was older than her, and had always had her own circle. Why didn’t you want to?
Manon said, “Because you would have said it was stupid.”
“It was stupid.”
Manon held her gaze evenly. “I know.” She shook her head; somehow the movement of her braids was shockingly familiar. “Sometimes things are just stupid. and that's the point. I don't think you get that.” She was right. Sophia didn’t, and probably never would.
Why was it always like this? That was what she wanted to ask. Why was it always so hard with you and me? But she knew the answer; they were too different, and they’d done some things too early and others too late. Now it would always be too late.She liked Manon. That was part of the problem. She was never going to stop wanting to make her better.
Why did you take so long to release a song? she wanted to ask her. But she had that answer too, or at least an idea of it. She'd been stockpiling filled-up notebooks, all unusable. Manon just hadn't felt the need to.
They’d been gone for too long. Sophia’s phone buzzed in her pocket. That was Dani, most likely, and the text was something like, Are you guys fucking?? If she’d been feeling really devilish, she would have wrestled Yoonchae’s phone away from her and sent it from that number.
“Let’s get a drink after this,” Manon said. She straightened up, peeling herself off the wall; they were done discussing this, maybe. “You and me.”
Could they afford to do that—be seen together? Sophia asked, “Where?” At any rate, it would have been one way to drum up publicity. They’d been in the same group for seven years; there was nothing illicit about it. They hadn’t been told not to. The commenters on the live the night before had begged for Yoonchae, Manon, and Dani.
“My hotel room?” When Sophia looked at her, Manon shrugged. “Minibar.”
“What will we talk about?”
It wasn’t a joke but Manon looked at her for a moment and then burst out laughing. She said, “Sophia." She leaned in, and for an instant Sophia thought she'd kiss her on the mouth, but instead Manon just pressed her lips lightly to her forehead. She had to rock up onto her toes. Sophia guessed she understood; it was just that she’d never stopped wanting structure—an agenda or a stack of laminated index cards, set questions to tease out everything she still hadn’t learned about Manon after all these years. But that wasn’t how it worked; she would get only what Manon wanted to give her. She was thinking, too, about what she could change about herself in the next eight hours. It was in part her fault that they’d fallen out of touch like this, and stayed out of touch for so long. (Thumb-to-pinky, thumb-to-pinky. That was never going to leave her.)
Probably there was absolutely nothing she could do, she concluded wearily, apart from following Manon into another Uber.
For now they went back down the hallway; one of them should have hung back, but they were sort of past the point of plausible deniability. The execs would just assume that they’d been fighting in the hallway, which had actually never really been their m.o.
In a way, Sophia was just happy to have a role to play again, and maybe a secret. For the next six weeks there would be nothing but the concert to prepare for, and that would be her goal and her finish line and her anchor. She wasn’t going to get a song out of this; she’d never even tried to write about the first time. When that thought occurred to her, there was nothing to do but laugh a little.
“Missed you,” Manon said, with the boardroom doors in sight, and squeezed her elbow.
-
Back in the boardroom, Sophia could have done something stupid, like slipped her heel off and drawn her foot up along the inside of Manon’s bare ankle. She could have kicked Manon in the shins; there was still a part of her that wanted to. She could feel Manon’s gaze on her—watching, waiting. They were close enough to each other.
Give it space, she thought. She raised her head and met Manon’s dark eyes. They hadn’t been nineteen in a long time. Let it breathe.
So she just leaned back a little, exhaled, and then, after a moment, uncrossed her ankles, even as on the other side of the table, Manon snorted and then played it off as a loud cough into her palm. Sophia narrowed her eyes at her. Manon just batted her lashes. It was so annoying to be known and to be liked just for what you were.