I rushed out of the lobby in a daze.
The elevator had already gone down some time ago.
I took the stairs two at a time.
Naturally, when I reached the first-floor lobby,
there was no way U-a unni would still be there.
All I felt was the chill of the night air against my thin clothes—the summer gone, and autumn already striding in, sketching winter just ahead.
I suddenly wondered if I had ever gone for a walk at this hour lately.
I probably hadn’t had any spare time at all.
The last time must have been once after our activities ended.
Even so, I walked aimlessly in the direction of the company building, then broke into a run again.
I wondered what I would say if I met her.
But I had a feeling she would have gone there.
Somewhere quiet.
Somewhere that wouldn’t inconvenience anyone else.
A place where, since she was young, unni would sometimes hole herself up alone.
It took only a few minutes to catch up.
Before I even reached the company building, there was a park halfway down the road.
“Unni!”
At my call, unni flinched in surprise and stumbled.
“Unni, first of all—”
“L-let go.”
It was dark, but I could see her clearly when I gripped her shoulder and turned her around. Her nose was red, and her eyes were swollen.
As if she had been crying until just moments ago.
“Look at you. You’re going to catch a cold.”
She was wearing short sleeves, without even a jacket over them.
“......”
U-a unni turned her head away to avoid my gaze. With a sniff, she lightly slapped my hand away.
“......”
Faced with this attitude from her for the first time,
I didn’t know what to say.
I couldn’t bring myself to open my mouth easily.
I kept choosing and discarding words inside my head, over and over,
while unni simply curled up on the pavilion beside us.
Then she mumbled.
“I—I don’t want to talk like this, in this state. In this state...”
The awkward standoff seemed to continue for nearly several minutes.
By my sense of time, the silence lasted more than ten minutes.
The one who spoke first was U-a unni. After stealing a glance at my expression, she lowered her head deeply onto her knees.
“Do you remember when we were trainees?”
Her voice still sounded congested.
So I simply...
sat down beside her.
“You remember everything, right...? Your memory’s good too.”
The words unni let out were muffled by her hunched posture.
Her trapped voice sounded even more indistinct, but—
“There were actually a lot of trainees who disliked you besides Han Sia, you know?”
Since it was a park in the dead of night, silent except for crickets and insects chirping,
every word reached me with perfect clarity.
“Actually... children are the most sensitive to people’s gazes. They’re just not good at interpreting what lies beneath them. But they read the mood faster than anyone. Even if adults pretend otherwise... it all shows.”
So I listened intently in silence.
“For trainees, teachers are everything... so they’re even more sensitive.”
I had already been mentally mature since I was young.
“To think you were already getting paid back then...”
I might not have understood how children felt.
“I only found out today, but...”
“And it would be a lie to say I didn’t feel anything about it...”
Even if I thought I had been considerate in my own way, perhaps it hadn’t been enough.
“But... all the trainees knew anyway. There wasn’t a single one who didn’t know you were guaranteed to debut. Me included. Me too.”
“Yeah.”
“One time, when the teacher and the CEO were scolding you, everyone said you were putting on a show behind their backs...”
Of course, everything unni was confessing was something I already knew.
“We were all at the age where we worried about what we would do later if we didn’t debut. But Dohee... I guess she was jealous because that wasn’t your problem.”
I had simply ignored it.
That hadn’t changed even now.
“But thinking about it now, kids are still kids, right...? They’re innocent. Instead of disliking you, if they’d just stayed close to you, they would’ve stood out more to Teacher Sohyeon and the CEO. It would’ve been easier for them to make the debut team...”
Unni laughed self-deprecatingly and stole another glance at me.
“So sometimes I wonder if I made the debut team just because I was close to you.”
“Un—”
I reflexively tried to say that wasn’t true, but—
“But!”
Unni cut me off faster.
“It’s just... putting all that aside...”
So I could do nothing but listen again.
“I just liked you so much. So much that I couldn’t understand how anyone could dislike you. Do you remember the day we first met? Hehe... I remember it again. Even though I was the one who said you had such a good memory.”
Did she still mean that she liked me now?
Or was it a story about the past—something that was no longer true?
For someone like me, who thought far too much about every word and every syllable, unni continued.
“You were really pretty, you know? I thought it was amazing that you were the person who would debut with me. I bragged about you to Mom like crazy that day.”
Then she lowered her head even deeper into her knees.
“I bragged about you every single day.”
Her voice damp with tears, she soon poured out the words.
“My dongsaeng is so amazing.”
“My dongsaeng is this pretty.”
“My dongsaeng is really good at studying, too.”
“But she’s also... incredibly, incredibly good at playing the piano, you know?”
“She’s gotten better at singing and dancing so quickly, too. She’s already so amazing.”
Only after saying all that did unni—
“They say jealousy and admiration are separated by just a hair...”
She seemed to regret it for a moment,
but then—
“Thinking about it, I guess I thought of you like an unni. Isn’t that strange? I’m the unni. Your unni by two years...”
In the end, the tension seemed to leave her, and her shoulders relaxed.
“Whenever I saw Dohee, I always wanted to stick close to you, to hug you. I wanted Dohee to come looking for me, too.”
A brief silence passed between us.
“But when Dohee debuted as part of Seven... when I was left behind, I gradually became scared. I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to debut together.”
For a moment, it seemed she was hyperventilating. She repeatedly drew in deep breaths and exhaled, trying to steady herself.
“Director Sohyeon told me not to worry and just be myself, so I practiced hard as usual.”
Then, as if she had resigned herself to something, she brought up something seemingly unrelated.
“It’s common, you know. Trainees standing onstage as dancers for their seniors.”
Although my thoughts were still a mess, I simply nodded.
“One time, the director said I was going to be onstage, so I thought it would just be something like dancing... but this time, it was a special performance where we acted starting from the VCR and even onstage.”
She seemed to be talking about the comeback stage of one of the company’s senior solo artists, filmed three years ago.
“But you know, right? Anyone could tell it was a camera test before debut. Any trainee would be nervous. Right?”
But I couldn’t answer so easily.
“That’s what came to mind then.”
Unni didn’t seem to want an answer that said anyone would feel the same.
“Dohee had already played the female lead in a music video when you were in your first year of middle school. How were you not nervous...? You were too busy enjoying yourself reading the comments... Then later, you even came first in the audition without getting nervous, looking so cool...”
U-a unni laughed again, a soft, breathy chuckle.
“Do you know what I thought at the time...?”
As though she truly didn’t know how to explain it—
“It wasn’t, ‘What if I can’t debut?’ It wasn’t jealousy, either, or admiration. It was just that, for the first time...”
Or perhaps she was putting herself down.
“For the first time, I had that thought. What if I became a burden even if I debuted?”
And then unni lifted her head.
Even with her emotions already running high,
perhaps she worried about disturbing people so late at night,
or inconveniencing others.
“So I told the teacher I wanted to learn an instrument.”
Forgetting even her effort to speak quietly,
she raised her head and burst out.
As if she had been holding it in for a very long time.
“Even before you came back, I studied instruments with Chiyo and Naeun unni. I even wondered if we could write songs together.”
“When you went to Song Camp, I worked really hard at learning guitar then, too.”
“I even tried making dances all by myself!”
“And I tried writing lyrics Dohee would like!”
“I—”
Tears were streaming endlessly from her eyes.
“I was afraid that... if I became a burden, Dohee would hate me.”
Even as unni hurriedly wiped her tears away with the backs of her hands—
“I didn’t want to say any of this today.”
“I didn’t want to burden you like this, either.”
“I didn’t want to make things hard for you, or hurt you...”
Sniffling and swallowing back her mucus, she continued.
“Because when you came in, you looked completely fine.”
“You looked like your usual self.”
“You said you weren’t struggling at all.”
Then, for the first time that night, she met my eyes.
“I was afraid that maybe you really thought... it didn’t matter how we felt about anything.”
Her face was drenched in tears.
“I was afraid you might see us as nothing more, and nothing less, than people who had happened to end up on the same team...”
“So that... that was too scary. I was scared, and I didn’t have the courage to look you in the eye. What am I supposed to dooo?”
That version of unni was only bigger in body.
“...Unni.”
She was no different from the first time we met, when she had been small and lovable.
“People...”
Her sobs and sniffles were the same, too.
“People keep, keep saying I have such a strong personality... but I—I’m not really like that. I’m actually so...”
Unable to control her emotions, her breathing became tangled with her tears.
“I just, just don’t want to be a burden to you.”
Her shoulders heaved, and her body trembled.
“I just want to hug Dohee like this, like we used to... I just, just want to act like a kid...”
At first, unni cried aloud.
“I’m scared you’ll find me burdensome... or annoying—”
But as her emotions overwhelmed her breathing, she could no longer make a sound. She sobbed like a child in my arms.
As I patted and comforted her, my own eyes slowly grew wet with tears.
“It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s because I—I haven’t been good at expressing myself all this time.”
“I’m sorry to you, too. I’m so sorry.”
It was a complicated feeling.
It felt something like philia, simply expressed.
Even while preserving all the passion and anxiety of adolescence—
“I probably like you a lot, too.”
“Much more than you think, unni. Really.”
“Much more than you think.”
The pure desire for the other person to do well.
Even when that wish was mutual,
the complexity of a moment in which both sides recognized it as mutual.