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Everyone begins to be beautiful when Joohyun is thirteen.
She has a new respect for the executives who peek through plexiglass into her dance classes and line the back walls of her showcases, for their numinous ability to know, beforehand, which plain children might one day sprout into nymphs. She begins to study herself in the mirror, to look for signs that she, too, will begin to bloom, but she just looks like Joohyun, hulking at her own reflection, stringy hair, puffy eyes and all. It's okay. She has years left to transform.
There are always new girls, but this is the first year she feels them there. There are lines of preteens in the singing and acting halls, cross-legged, backs to the walls as they puzzle through their homework and wait for their turns in the studio. They all look the same, like blank canvasses. Faces clear of makeup, hair long and unstylish. Just like Joohyun.
Jessica hates them. "After a couple of months, when they've gotten over themselves, then we can be friends," she says, her hand stringing through Joohyun's hair — Jessica treats her favorites more like cats than peers. "That's how long it took all of you to become tolerable. Right now they're still poisoned with elation."
"I miss that feeling," says Yoona seriously. "You can only feel it once. One second you're any girl, and the next... you're special. They want you."
"This one is still intolerable," Jessica tells Sooyoung unblinkingly, even as Yoona burrows into her, hooked in by Jessica's own elbow.
Yoona's still stuck on 'any girl' at lunch. "What do you think we might be doing right now if we weren't training?" she asks Joohyun and Hwanhee, not letting them answer before she sweeps into a narrative — ordinary Yoona is out shopping with her ordinary friends, and she looks up and sees Dong Bang Shin Gi on a bus and wonders if they really look like that, in real life —
That's about as far as she gets. "What if you don't become a celebrity?" Hwanhee wants to know. "It's not a given for the three of us. We're not Liyin or Hyoyeon."
"It's just a game," says Yoona, hurt. "A fantasy. Didn't you wonder about people like that before you came here?"
"I never cared about pop music before I was a trainee," says Joohyun. She leaves out that she once thought that being an entertainer was something stupid people did. She doesn't think that anymore, but she's not sure it will be well-received. "Or shopping. When I started coming here, my mom still bought my clothes."
She understands when Yoona wilts away a couple of minutes later to sit with Chanmi. It can be tiring, having Hwanhee around all the time, because she's always like that, making people nervous with her practicality and her mathematics (how do you debut eighty trainees, Joohyun, split them into twelves and sixteens? Easier to just leave some of them behind). What separates us from any of the rest of them?, she always asks, nervously. It's a question all their teachers want answered too, implied every week when they rap their pens impatiently on the desk, and ask, already anticipating the next girl, what have you accomplished since we last saw you? Joohyun always has concrete things to tell them: I've learned fourteen new Mandarin verbs, I've mastered Chopin's prelude in B minor. She doesn't think concrete is what they want, though. Not really. They want Kwon Yuri's unkempt charm, Stella Kim's sultry smirk. Intangibilities, the true secret to their formula. Vivacity. Stage presence. They want to see a hundred girls pressed into their cookie cutters so they can pick out the handful that shine out of them.
She shuts her eyes, and thinks of what her mother has told her. Remember to have humility, but don't let it get in the way of knowing what you are worth. She's not quite there, but Joohyun's gotten better at the affirmations as she's gotten older. She has talent. She is focused. She is well-rounded. She never gets sick.
"How long did Boa train, do you know?" one of the new girls asks her. Summer feels hot and thick in the room their Chinese lessons meet in, and for once Joohyun is almost glad that their instructor is late (it's still very irresponsible of her), because she feels limp and unfocused.
"Two years," says Joohyun timidly, surprised at her ignorance, and the irritated face the girl doesn't hide when she hears that, like she can't take two years of this. Like she deserves faster. Like some of them haven't already been here longer than two years. Maybe they haven't given her the speech yet: do you think you are Boa? You are not Kwon Boa. If you were, you'd be out there, a celebrity already, and not in here with me. I taught her myself, she was spectacular. You are mediocre. We'll be lucky if we can fuss you into good enough shape to even debut.
You are special, but you aren't that special.
(I am well-rounded. I never get sick. No one can frighten me out of my dream.)
"Joohyun-ah!," calls Kim Hyoyeon when they file out of Chinese class. Her hair is newly braided into a hundred different ropes. She drops her voice to a whisper and says, "I hear they might be considering putting you in that advertisement with Dong Bang Shin Gi, congratulations."
"I haven't heard anything about that," says Joohyun suspiciously.
"Sometimes you don't," says Hyoyeon. "But they'll pick you. You have the face for it. The kind of face people fall in love with."
"I'm not very good at modelling." Unnatural, they say.
"Sure you are. Chin up, Joohyun, you look like a ghoul today." She turns, moves to leave, but Joohyun catches her.
"Unnie," Joohyun surprises herself by asking. "Do you ever worry about debuting?"
Hyoyeon shrugs. "It'll be different. Scary."
"No," Joohyun shakes her head. "No, I mean, about debuting at all. That they won't pick you."
"Are you worried about that?" Hyoyeon asks, incredulity slipping into her voice.
"Aren't you?" It's not quite an admission.
"No," says Hyoyeon finally.
"Really?"
Hyoyeon reaches out for Joohyun's hand. "Really. It's not up to fate or fortune. The decisions are half-made, what's left is just pushing the fence-sitters in one direction or another. Do you think you're a fence-sitter, Joohyun?"
Joohyun takes a long moment to roll the phrase around in her head before she answers no.
"No," repeats Hyoyeon. "We're the lucky ones. We're getting there, Joohyun. All we have to do is wait."