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Wonyoung's nails are varnished in light blue. The shade is a perfect match for the spare helmet of Alba's dangling from her hooked fingers. Most likely it's just coincidence, some happy accident of a concert outfit she’ll be wearing tomorrow or the day after, but it feels significant in a way Alba finds difficult to resist thinking of as fate. One of the unexpected corollaries of driving for Ferrari, that stately, storied name mantling her: sometimes everything seems like a portent, caught in a finely glimmering mesh of symbolic meaning. A cloudless sky. A small bird perched on a windowsill, preening its bright red wingfeathers. Wonyoung in Alba’s garage with her nails painted blue.
"Are you superstitious?" Alba asks.
Wonyoung hums. "Not really," she says. With her spare hand she shifts the dark, lustrous sheet of her hair over her shoulder. “It’s more the opposite. I think anything can be a sign, but like, you decide what the sign means. If you can find the luck in everything, then everything is lucky."
Las Vegas at night is glittering and alive, nearly brighter outside than it is in daylight. In the mouth of the garage the media team fusses and flits around the car Alba will be driving for the hot lap, naturally a gorgeous glossy red Ferrari, as they finish setting up the onboard filming rig. Their lapel mics aren’t live yet, but everywhere on the paddock there are cameras, people watching. For her part Wonyoung seems totally at ease, as if she hasn’t noticed the gleam of lenses and lights ringing them, though of course she has. She isn't posing, not exactly, but there’s a deliberateness to the placement of her body. A kind of comprehensive spatial awareness Alba almost envies. She carries herself with the assurance of someone who belongs in every room, unselfconscious in her height and presence; Alba had thought this the first time they'd met, too, at that Tommy Hilfiger shoot. So unafraid to take up space, turn her face towards the light. It's all in the posture: the butterflied shoulders and lifted chin and steady core, the projection of invincibility and effortlessness. Reflexively Alba finds herself mirroring it; her body knows this stance. There's no space for fear on the track and even less on the stage, where the vehicle to be piloted is your own body.
"That's a good mindset to have," Alba says. "Have you ever tried karting?"
“No, no,” Wonyoung says, shaking her head emphatically. Pearly flash of teeth, rueful. “I can't drive, I’m very, like. I’m not good with that kind of thing.”
"You don't have to know how to drive to kart," Alba says. "Or even to race. I mean, I don’t have a normal licence either—well, I started karting when I was eleven, of course they wouldn’t let me drive a car. But I think you should give karting a go. I think you'd be good at it."
A delicate eyebrow rises. “Really?”
"You have the coordination," Alba explains. "From dancing, I guess? And you’re so confident. Karting, you have to just back yourself. That's the main thing. I'd take you if we had more time, but…”
“I couldn’t go that fast,” Wonyoung says. “I’ll be way too scared.”
“You perform in front of millions of people like, every day! I think that's so much scarier.”
“But you could do that too," Wonyoung says. A long arm unfurls in the direction of the filming crew. “You're so good at this, I’ve seen you in front of the camera.”
“What? No way,” Alba says, laughing. “I can't sing or dance at all. And I still get nervous every time I have to give a big speech.”
"Well, it's like what you said about driving and karting,” Wonyoung says. “You don't have to know how to do all those things either. You can learn it. You just need to have the," Wonyoung pauses for a moment, tilting her head in consideration, "light. Like a star."
The thing about racing is that it isn’t just racing. So much lies in the penumbra of the track. You don’t think about it when you jump in a kart for the first time and all you want to do is go faster than light, just how much you have to be in order to earn your place in the car. Driver, ambassador, idol, symbol, star. Alba knows why it is necessary, and even more so when she wears the red, but sometimes she imagines, childishly, guiltily, that she could be the kind of person who wished it didn’t have to be. Who wished she only had to drive. She sees that ambivalence flicker over the other girls on the grid, too, steeling themselves before the camera lights blink on like they’re preparing for a blow. Payton breathing in deep before relaxing her face into a smile, Alisha’s brisk and uncompromising confidence. The red breadth of Maya’s back. By now the process is muscle memory for Alba, only another of the million and one routines adjacent to the racing that make it possible for the racing to happen. Butterflied shoulders, lifted chin. Steadiness from the core until it becomes true.
"That's a bit like something they always say about junior drivers. Like, you can teach consistency but you can't teach speed.” Alba is fast. She knows this. She knows. “I think maybe it’s the same thing. About being brave, even if you’re scared.”
“Exactly!” Wonyoung leans forward. The glitter under her eyes scintillates, miniaturised sun-glare off a metal chassis. “You have to believe it first, and then the rest of the world believes it too. Definitely. But you already know that, right?”
The great weight has borne down on her since she was eleven and it has been her privilege to meet it for just as long. She wonders if there was a time before Wonyoung knew how to manage her own light; she knows vaguely that Wonyoung started almost as young. She could ask it now: do you ever wish you didn’t have to be more than yourself? But she knows already what Wonyoung would tell her, which is what she would tell Wonyoung too. Now, on the other side of it: there is nothing in the world she wouldn’t trade for the thrill and terror of the still, bracing moment in the darkness before she steps onto the stage, like waiting for the lights to go out, inverted.
“Yes,” Alba says. Warmth that has nothing to do with the glowing LED stands radiates up from under her sternum to her cheeks. Feeling inexplicably like she's confessing something, she adds, “It's really nice having you in the garage. I feel really good about the weekend.”
“It’s your last race?”
Alba nods. “It’s season finale.”
“I’ll be cheering for you,” Wonyoung promises. “Listen for me when you’re racing. But, probably, you’re driving faster than the sound of my voice.”
“My lucky charm,” Alba says. “I’ll remember it.”
“We’re good to go when you are,” announces one of the camerapeople crouched by the car. Alba doesn’t startle, and neither does Wonyoung, but there’s a moment like her earplugs have fallen out, the conscious awareness of external sound filtering back in. The lenses, the lights. Everything coloured with meaning.
Wonyoung's hands lift the helmet, and then the motion halts, at the same time Alba says, “Your hair—”
“Oh, I almost forgot—”
"Here, let me—" Alba takes the helmet from Wonyoung. “Do you need…”
Wonyoung is already twisting her hair up at the nape of her neck and securing the coil in place with an elastic she’s produced out of nowhere. “I’m all good,” she says, holding a hand out for the helmet.
Instead of giving the helmet back to her, Alba steps forward and gently fits the helmet over Wonyoung’s head. She rests her fingers on the blue carbon fibre over Wonyoung’s temples, adjusts the angle of the helmet until Wonyoung's face is centred. Wonyoung barely blinks; she’s probably used to makeup artists and hairstylists fussing and flitting around her head, another thing trained into muscle memory, the adjacent and necessary routine that allows her to do the thing she loves. "Feels secure? Not too tight?"
"It's perfect," Wonyoung says, meeting her gaze with ease. How easy it is to imagine the jewelly gleam of her eyes through a visor gap, bright and fearless.
Alba grins, sees the expression reflected back at her on Wonyoung's lovely face, mirror and response. "Let's go for a drive," Alba says.