Seven Stars Unseen

The stylist had me in a corset again.

Not the painful kind, the kind that makes you hold your breath through three songs and then pass out backstage. This one was soft, silk-lined, the color of a peach at the exact moment before it goes bad. Chaquita had approved it with a single nod from across the dressing room, which was how I knew it was the right choice. Our leader had a face that could reject an outfit without saying a word.

"You're doing the thing," Lisa said, watching me in the mirror.

"What thing."

"The thing where you look at yourself like you're a stranger. Stop it. You won."

I turned away from the glass. Chaquita was on her phone in the corner, reading something with her jaw tight. Yoonche was getting her lashes done and humming a song that wouldn't come out for another year. Rosé had her guitar out, which meant she was nervous. Jisoo was eating a rice cake she'd smuggled past the manager, and Jinnie was applying lip tint with the precision of a surgeon.

Seven of us. I was the youngest. I had two beauty awards sitting on a shelf in my apartment that I hadn't looked at in months, because looking at them made me feel like a fraud in a room full of people who could actually sing.

"Two years in a row," Lisa said, still on it. "Do you know how insane that is? Nobody does that."

"People do it."

"Nobody in our group."

I didn't answer. Down the hall, I could hear the low rumble of another group's dressing room. The kind of rumble that means seven men are laughing at something one of them said, and the sound carries because they don't care who hears it.

BTS. They were performing tonight too. Same show, different category. I'd seen them in passing at two other events this year, and both times I'd kept my eyes on the floor, because that was the rule I'd made for myself after the first time.

The first time had been at MAMA. I was walking to the bathroom with Jinnie, and we passed their table, and I felt it before I saw it. A weight. A pull. I looked up for half a second and met eyes with the one who writes the sad songs, the one whose voice makes you feel like you've lost something you never had. He was looking at me like he already knew me. I looked away so fast my neck hurt.

Jinnie noticed. She always notices.

"Don't," she'd said. Just that. One word.

So I didn't. And I hadn't. And tonight, our seats were arranged with us in front of them. Of course they were. The universe has a sense of humor and it's not a kind one.

---

The venue was the kind of place that made you whisper even when you didn't have to. Velvet seats, gold trim, a ceiling so high you couldn't see where the lights ended and the dark began. We filed into our row in order of seniority, which meant I was on the end, closest to the aisle, closest to the walkway where staff kept passing with clipboards and headsets.

Chaquita sat down first, then Yoonche, then Jisoo, then Jinnie, then Rosé, then Lisa. Then me.

Behind us, the noise of seven men settling into their seats. I could hear one of them complaining about the temperature. Another one laughing low. The smell of cologne, something woodsy and expensive, drifted forward and settled in my hair.

I kept my eyes on the stage. The host was doing a bit about the year in music. Nobody was listening.

"You're stiff," Lisa whispered.

"I'm fine."

"You're sitting like you're about to be interrogated."

"Maybe I am."

She snorted, then covered it with a cough. On stage, the host announced the first award. Best choreography. We weren't nominated. I let my shoulders drop an inch.

It's not that I hated them. I didn't know them. That was the thing people didn't understand. I didn't know them at all. I knew their music, sure. Everyone knew their music. I knew that the one with the dimples was the leader, that the one with the pink hair had a laugh you could hear across a stadium, that the quiet one wrote lyrics that made you want to call your mother. I knew them the way you know weather. From a distance. From the outside.

But at MAMA, when I'd looked up, I'd felt like I was standing in a room I'd been in before. Like something had already happened between us, even though nothing had. Even though nothing could.

The rules in our industry are unwritten but they're real. You don't date. You don't touch. You don't look too long. You don't give the tabloids a story. And if you're a woman, especially, you don't do anything that could be read as wanting. Wanting is dangerous. Wanting is a scandal waiting to happen.

I'd learned that at nineteen, when a reporter asked me if I had a boyfriend and I said no and he wrote that I was cold. Then I'd learned it again at twenty, when I smiled at a male idol at a fan sign and the comments section called me desperate.

So I kept my eyes forward. I clapped when we were supposed to clap. I laughed at the host's jokes when the cameras were on our row. I was good at this. I was the beautiful one. That was my job. To sit there and be looked at and give nothing back.

Behind me, someone shifted. A knee bumped the back of my seat. I felt it in my spine.

"Sorry," a voice said. Low. Quiet. Just for me.

I didn't turn around. I didn't nod. I didn't do anything except stare at the stage and count my breaths like I was about to go on.

One. Two. Three.

Lisa's hand found mine under the armrest and squeezed. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. She knew the rules too.

The award for Best Female Group was next. We were nominated. So were three other groups. My heart was doing something stupid in my chest, the same way it did every time, even though I knew it didn't matter. Even though I knew that if we won, I'd have to stand up and walk to the stage and smile and thank people I'd never met, and if we lost, I'd have to sit here and smile and clap for someone else.

Either way, I'd have to be looked at.

Behind me, the woodsy cologne drifted closer. Or maybe I was imagining it. Maybe I was imagining all of it. Maybe the knee against my seat was nothing, and the voice was nothing, and the feeling I'd had at MAMA was just exhaustion and too much caffeine and the kind of loneliness that makes you see things that aren't there.

The host opened the envelope.

I held my breath.