| Episode 17. Meeting with the CEO (1)
Their preparations for school ended with each of them receiving a slice of steaming toast.
I saw them off as they somehow managed to find and put on their shoes in the chaotic entryway while firmly guarding their toast.
“Watch out for cars, watch your faces, don’t do anything stupid, and go show them how diligent you are.”
At that, Kang Giyeon muttered with a sullen face.
“Seriously, even my parents don’t nag as much as you do, hyung.”
Is that so? I wouldn’t know, since I’d never been nagged by my parents.
“So? Are you saying our Kang Giyeon isn’t going to watch out for cars, won’t take care of his face, and is going to do stupid things?”
Having missed his chance to argue, Kang Giyeon grumbled about how the conversation had turned into that.
I patted the shoulder of the guy who must have been exhausted going to school at the crack of dawn and said,
“Giyeon.”
“What?”
“At least I’m not telling you to go study hard.”
“……”
“Just come back without doing anything dumb. Got it?”
Then I showed Kang Giyeon a kindly smile. At my affectionate side, Kang Giyeon shuddered.
With a send-off wishing them a healthy and trouble-free day, the three high school students left the dorm. It was a noisy morning.
* * *
“So you toasted bread?”
Choi Jeho, who had woken up and come out like clockwork at his usual wake-up time of eight, asked.
I answered while transferring the slightly cooled toast onto a plate.
“Yeah. I toasted extra while I was making theirs. Want some?”
“Yeah.”
Park Juu, who had passed the high school equivalency exam and therefore didn’t need to go to school, was already diligently eating the toast he’d been rationed.
Come to think of it, Lee Cheonghyeon had left while muttering, “I’m jealous of Juu hyung……”
“High school students, huh. Must be nice.”
“You talk like you graduated ten years ago or something.”
How did you know, man?
Even though it hadn’t been my intention, I pretended not to hear Choi Jeho’s words, just in case a judgment came down saying a secret related to my regression had been leaked.
As I quietly gauged the mood and chewed on my toast, Park Juu, for some reason, joined the conversation.
“……Hyung, what were you planning to do after graduating high school?”
“Huh?”
“You said you’d never been a trainee before……”
I was planning to go to college.
That college I should have gone to but ended up unable to.
Park Juu, that kid, had been called the hidden king of reading the room even during Spark, and his skill at striking where it hurt was truly artistic. Thanks to him, I nearly teared up mid-bread.
Because of the system, I was the only one in an awkward position. It wasn’t like I could say I had gone before, but somehow, in this life, I couldn’t.
Choi Jeho and Park Juu, who had no idea how deeply wounded I was, only stared blankly at me.
If it was going to make a person lie, it could at least provide a usable model answer along with it.
For a guy like me, who had neither a talent for making things up nor a talent for lying, this kind of situation was cruel.
After thinking for a moment, I chose to answer as indirectly as possible.
“I debated whether to go or not, but in the end, I didn’t.”
“……Why?”
“I couldn’t pay the tuition.”
Why did I have to regress after the registration date, of all things?
As I chewed my toast hard with anger that had nowhere to go, the expressions of the guys sitting across from me turned strange.
They looked as if they had asked something they shouldn’t have.
“Why are your faces so……”
Ah.
Did they think I couldn’t pay the tuition because my family had no money?
I debated for about three seconds whether I should correct this misunderstanding, then gave up.
To begin with, the money I had right now was borrowed from my older sister, so it wasn’t exactly wrong.
Even if I had regressed before the registration date, kicked UA aside, and registered for college by putting in every bit of money I had, since the family home I’d been staying at back then was gone, I would have had to attend school while sleeping on the street.
The moment I returned to the past with nothing but my body, my degree had become Schrödinger’s diploma.
I thought of the diploma that had left my side, and the entirety of the savings I had scraped together by enduring like a dog at Hanpyeong Industries. Did you really have to take all of it for you to feel satisfied……
Of course, I wasn’t confident I could explain all these twists and turns to them while also keeping the secret. Nor was I obligated to.
‘I’ll just say I’m armed to the teeth with a hungry spirit, then.’
As I was making that bitter resolve, Choi Jeho said, showing an amount of tact I had never seen from him in my life,
“Well…… cheer up.”
Encouragement from Choi Jeho.
Not anyone else, but that Choi Jeho encouraging someone when there wasn’t even a camera around.
It was a rare sight even Department Head Nam’s daughter, a die-hard Choi Jeho fan, probably hadn’t seen. The world truly was something you had to live long enough to witness.
+
[SYSTEM] A “hidden task” has been completed.
▷ Details: Have a private conversation with a colleague
▷ Reward: Experience (10)
▷ Accumulated Experience: 10
▷ Accumulated Points: 0
+
That wasn’t all. Perhaps it wanted to encourage a harmonious trainee life, but a hidden task was completed on its own too.
I was already busy building up my abilities, and now I had to foster friendships too.
No matter how important communication was in an organization, it felt like my experience was standing still while only my workload doubled.
* * *
The high school students returned one by one in the afternoon.
Their place of return was, of course, the practice room.
I handed a handkerchief to Lee Cheonghyeon, who had come back after washing his hands, and asked,
“Did you make it back safely? Is your face all right?”
“Of course. I returned without a single scratch!”
“Now that’s the right attitude. Excellent.”
“Hyung, aren’t you a little too obsessed with the safety of our faces?”
Lee Cheonghyeon said something frivolous.
It seemed he had no idea how many commercials would have to be filmed with that face of his.
I thought that, even if only to repay UA for investing money into me, I should take out insurance on each of the members’ faces before debut.
“But if you go to school, when do you practice?”
“Seongbin hyung and Giyeon attend just enough to meet the minimum number of days. Arts high schools make some accommodations for schedules.”
“Then what about you?”
“My school doesn’t cut any slack. But my school is close, and Giyeon’s school is far, so if you factor in commute time and all that, it comes out about the same.”
Sure enough, Kang Giyeon was stretching beside us with an extremely regretful expression.
“You should still have time to sleep. I’m worried.”
At that, Kang Giyeon replied,
“Hyung, you practice until night every day.”
“I’m fine because I’m pretty much done growing.”
“Well, I mean…… They say there are people who still grow after going to the army.”
That’s those people, and you won’t.
Kang Giyeon’s height didn’t change after debut. This was a fact Kang Giyeon himself had personally revealed.
‘You’re asking if I ever had a growth spurt? Sparkler…… we agreed not to talk about height.’
‘Isn’t Kang-gyeon way too sincerely bitter? This is seriously funny.’
‘I’ve stayed the same since either my second or third year of high school……’
‘Giyeon-sseu, you’re not crying, right?’
In other words, this meant now was Kang Giyeon’s final chance to put on a spurt.
In such an important period, if he missed the golden window and stayed awake day and night, it would be hard to see any good results.
I had wondered what he was doing alone while all the members were growing.
With this little sleep, it was only natural his height wouldn’t increase. Considering his diet of only bread and salad, even more so. Where on earth had they sold off the protein?
‘If possible, I’ll try to secure time for the kids to sleep…… and if that doesn’t work, I’ll have no choice but to make them drink milk in the morning.’
Was there originally this much to consider when debuting idols?
I wasn’t sure, but I couldn’t deny that being able to do something was far better than being able to do nothing.
That night, only after buying two cartons of low-fat milk with Kang Giyeon in the early spring night breeze was I able to return to the dorm.
‘I should’ve applied to change my career path to manager instead of idol.’
It was a regretful night.
And that regret would soon come into full bloom.
* * *
For a while, my schedule was fairly stable.
These days, my day went……
7:00 Wake up and toast bread for the high school students (+ prepare low-fat milk for Kang Giyeon)
8:00 Eat breakfast and get ready to go practice
9:00–24:00 Practice and so on
00:00–00:30 Reflect on the day’s clumsiness while washing up
00:30– Worry about the future, establish plans for Spark’s revival, and so on
……It was extremely monotonous. Sometimes I made them French toast too, and they ate it well.
Preparing for the next monthly evaluation was also going smoothly.
It was thanks to my vocal proficiency increasing, allowing me to at least sense where and how I was lacking when I sang.
If I combined the problems I had identified with the training routes I had reverse-engineered from the training the members must have received so far, I could roughly predict the feedback I’d receive at the next evaluation too.
All that remained was choosing a song that could most clearly show that the feedback I was about to receive had been improved upon, and that part was neatly resolved as well.
Because Spark’s human karaoke songbook, Jeong Seongbin, heard the conditions once and brought me twenty songs in a single day.
He’d looked so sorry over me toasting him bread a few times that I’d only tried bringing it up.
‘There are fewer songs than last time?’
‘Listening to every single one is hard too, you know. Considering the taste I guessed from your last list and the song you sang at the monthly evaluation, I narrowed it down a bit more on my end…… Do you prefer having more candidates?’
‘No. You’re a genius.’
And so, evaluation preparation was proceeding without a hitch.
Now I just had to upgrade my dancing from a runaway locomotive to the level of a steam locomotive.
For reference, my goal with dancing was simply not to derail.
“You really have no talent for dancing.”
“People are always most incompetent one month after joining a company.”
“What kind of analogy is that supposed to be?”
No sooner had I resolved to simply avoid derailing than Choi Jeho lifted my elbow. It seemed the angle was wrong again.
Sure enough, Choi Jeho immediately pointed it out.
“If you look in the mirror, you can see the angle doesn’t match. Has it still not sunk into your body?”
If I had a body capable of parallel processing to that degree, I wouldn’t be suffering like this.
I missed Kang Giyeon, who, although strict, at least taught me from a more humane perspective than Choi Jeho.
“You have to be able to do at least one cover dance so you’ll have something to say at the meeting.”
“Meeting?”
“Our company does individual meetings at the beginning of each month. With the CEO, the manager, and the management team.”
Buddy. If something like that exists, shouldn’t you tell me a little sooner?
A meeting with the CEO was dreadful beyond words. Was there anything as unproductive as a meeting with someone in power?
Right on cue, the system shone brightly between me and Choi Jeho and displayed a new task.
+
[SYSTEM] A “new task” has been assigned.
▷ Details: Proceed with your first meeting with the CEO
▷ Reward: Experience (10)
+
If my focus shifted while I was in the middle of talking to someone, rumors might spread that I was seeing things.
I quickly read only the key points, then looked back at Choi Jeho and asked,
“What do you usually talk about when you go?”
“We don’t really talk about much. Stuff like whether being a trainee is manageable, and whether you’ve been doing well lately.”
That was fucking important.
Didn’t he know how exhausting company life became if you were branded as someone maladjusted to the organization?
‘Well, it’s not like he’s the type to care about that.’
I recalled the last meeting I’d had with Department Head Nam.
The part where he told me he’d been diligently praising Assistant Manager Kim to the higher-ups, and that because of it, he felt so watched he could die.
And finally, the part where he told me to hurry up and finish that banner or whatever it was that his kid had requested. That meeting had been like Department Head Nam’s one-man talk show.
I sincerely hoped UA’s CEO had no expectations of me whatsoever.
Furthermore, even if he had an idol-fan child under his care, I desperately hoped he wasn’t the kind of thoughtless person who brought that into the workplace.
As if Choi Jeho’s words had been foreshadowing, a few days later, the trainees were notified of their individual meeting times.