The K-Pop Idol on the Cruise

Part One — The Frosted Wall

Four in the afternoon at the Port of Barcelona was a kind of time Lee Hae-won had not owned once in six years.

Time with nowhere to be. Time when no one was looking for her. Time when her phone did not ring.

The Serenity of the Seas sat at the pier like an apartment complex laid on its side, seventeen decks of white hull swallowing the whole view. Haewon stood in front of it for a moment, hand on her suitcase handle. The Mediterranean sun settled on the back of her neck. It stung, and it felt wonderful.

Twenty-eight nights.

Barcelona to Singapore. Twenty-eight nights and twenty-nine days, bought with a broken savings account. Call it six years of severance and the balance still looked thin, but she had decided to leave her regrets on the pier before she climbed the gangway.

The check-in line was long. Ahead of her, a silver-haired German couple; behind her, an American family with a selfie stick. No Korean anywhere. That felt wonderful too.

At the counter she handed over her passport and voucher, and the agent handed back a plastic card with her name on it. A SeaPass, they called it. Room key, ID, and wallet in one. On this ship, her entire existence could be summarized by this one card. She liked that. It was so much lighter than the things that used to summarize her — the employee badge, the venue passes, the job title in the group chat.

Past the gangway, the ship opened into an atrium five decks tall. Glass elevators slid up past a chandelier, and somewhere a string trio was playing. Haewon stood in the middle of it and looked up. It was grand, and it was excessive, and the excess was strangely comforting. It was a stage — but for once, a stage where nobody was going to put her to work.

When the announcement came for the safety drill, she lined up at her muster station to learn how to wear a life jacket. The white-haired Australian couple next to her grinned: “This is our eighth time on this ship.” Eighth. Haewon rolled the number around in her head. Some people lived lives that almost never got here once. Other people came eight times.

Six years. She had joined VIVID Entertainment’s styling team at twenty-one and turned in her resignation at twenty-seven. Three a.m. wardrobe pickups. Kimbap eaten behind a container at festival grounds. Buttons popping thirty seconds before a stage. The team lead’s sighs. Hands aging faster than the artists they dressed. Her last two years she’d been assigned to a rookie girl group. After their debut showcase, watching the kids cry on stage, Haewon caught her own reflection in the dressing-room mirror. There was no face there. More precisely, no expression.

She wrote her resignation that night.

The three weeks after quitting were strange. Her eyes opened without an alarm, and the moment they did, her body shot upright and went looking for something. Something to steam. Something to pick up. Something to mend. When it confirmed there was nothing, the body just stood in the middle of the room. A body that had forgotten how to rest.

The cruise was an impulse. At three in the morning, sleepless, she’d been watching travel videos when an ad played at the end. Barcelona to Singapore, twenty-eight nights. A repositioning special — the ship was moving house from Europe to Asia and would carry passengers along at half price. Haewon did the math on the spot. Breaking her savings would cover it. The savings had been earmarked someday, my own shop — but at this rate she was going to break before someday arrived.

At the bank window, the teller asked, “Early termination lowers your interest rate significantly. Are you sure?” She was sure. There was something more urgent than interest. Breathing.

“You’ve come far, haven’t you,” the teller’s stamp seemed to say. She took the money and booked the longest escape on the market.

Her stateroom was 11021. Balcony class, Deck 11. When she opened the door, a towel folded into a swan sat on the bed, and beyond the glass was the sea.

The sea was wide, and it wore no color at all.

Haewon didn’t even open her suitcase. She went straight out to the balcony. Below the glass railing lay the pier, and beyond it, the hill of Montjuïc. Between her balcony and the next stood a frosted acrylic partition. Taller than a person, opaque, unyielding. A wall. A good wall.

She went back inside and pulled a notebook from the inner pocket of her bag — three thousand won at a stationery store, sky-blue cover. She had already written the title on the first page.

The List of Things I Won’t Do

She’d written it instead of an itinerary. Not things to do — things she would not do. She had spent six years doing nothing but things to do.

1. Do not wake before five a.m.

2. Do not fix anyone’s clothes.

3. Do not calculate wait times.

4. Do not say sorry for things that aren’t your fault.

5. Do not touch the word idol. Don’t listen, don’t look, don’t search.

She underlined the fifth item twice. Then she held the pen in her mouth for a moment and added one more line at the very bottom.

10. No falling in love.

Items six through nine she left blank. The voyage was long; things not to do would keep presenting themselves. She wrote number ten first only because a list needs an ending to feel safe. It meant nothing beyond that. Truly nothing.

Living by lists was a six-year habit. Call sheets, wardrobe lists, pickup checklists, return checklists. Her days had always been line items, and crossing them off was how a day proved it had happened. The first thing she’d thrown out after quitting was her planner — she was going to live without line items. Three weeks later she was standing in a stationery store buying this notebook. But this time she had flipped the direction. Not things to do — things she wouldn’t. Not lines to cross off — lines to keep. Maybe that was the only shape of freedom she knew. Freedom, borrowing the format of a list.

At six p.m. the horn sounded three times and the ship pushed away from the pier. Haewon watched Barcelona shrink from her balcony until the spires of the Sagrada Família sank into the sunset. When the city was the size of a fingernail, she said it out loud.

“I hereby vow. On this ship, I am nobody in particular.”

The wind answered by tousling her hair.

The sail-away deck was a festival. A band struck up by the pool on Deck 12, crew carried trays of welcome cocktails, and passengers pressed against the rails, raising glasses at the retreating land. Haewon stood at the edge of the commotion with a Coke. It was the first party of her life where she knew no one. For six years, every party she’d stood in had been full of familiar faces, and every familiar face had given her something to do.

Here, nobody gave her anything to do. The band played old pop songs, a couple she’d never met danced by the pool, and the sunset dyed the ship’s wake orange. She finished her Coke and went down to her room. Commotion was a fine thing — as long as you were allowed to turn your back on it whenever you liked.

Dinner was the buffet, alone. She piled shrimp on her plate like a small mountain and ate all of it.

The shrimp had a history. Six years ago, her first day on the job, the team dinner had been at a hotel buffet. As the maknae of the team she’d spent the night ferrying plates and refilling glasses; her own plate held a few sad leaves of salad. At the shrimp station, her team lead had said, “Kid, this job means going to buffets and never eating the shrimp. Can’t peel shrimp and answer the radio at the same time.” It was a joke. It turned out to be a prophecy. For six years she had not eaten the shrimp. Her hands were always reserved for something else.

Tonight she peeled about thirty of them. The radio never crackled. Her hands belonged entirely to her, and the shrimp were sweet enough to make her eyes sting.

On the way back she bought four cans of beer from the cooler by the duty-free shop. Spanish beer. She bought it because the label was pretty.

Ten p.m. Haewon sank into the balcony chair and cracked the first can. The psst folded itself into the sound of waves. The line between sky and sea had dissolved long ago, and the ship slid through the middle of that blackness. The engine’s vibration rose faintly through the soles of her feet.

I might actually live.

That was the sentence that surfaced. I might actually live. For the first time in six years.

The can was half empty when it happened.

Sounds from beyond the partition. A chair scraping. A glass bottle set down on the deck. So the neighbor was out on their balcony too. Haewon paid no attention. The wall was tall and opaque. The person next door was the person next door, and she was she. That was cruise etiquette.

Then the person began to hum.

Low — very low. The sound of someone singing only for themselves. Four bars of humming, then one phrase with the words half-swallowed.

Haewon’s hand stopped around the can.

She knew that song.

It was a song she had no right to know.

That melody did not exist in the world. Never released, never broadcast, never leaked. It had lived and died four years ago in CHROMA’s practice rooms and dressing rooms. A demo TEO had started and abandoned in his second year — a song that twenty-three-year-old Haewon, standing guard over garment bags beside her team lead, had heard hundreds of times through the steam of a pressing iron. Four bars that dipped a half-step right before the chorus, which was what made them so strangely lonely.

Her body remembered before her mind did — remembered the very air of the rooms where those four bars used to play. The steam and the hairspray, the rattle of rolling racks on linoleum, the static of radios. Beneath all that noise, always, that melody. During downtime Teo would sit with one earbud in, humming it, and no one ever asked what the song was, and at some point she had begun waiting for the next phrase. The next phrase that never came.

Why that song. On this ship. Now.

Her mouth moved before her brain could file an objection.

Haewon hummed the next phrase.

Down the half-step. Exactly where it belonged.

The sound beyond the partition cut off.

Only the waves were left. The ship parting the water. Foreigners laughing somewhere far away. Haewon finally understood what she had just done, and a cold sweat bloomed on the palm wrapped around the can.

You idiot. You absolute idiot, Lee Hae-won.

A chair scraped. Someone stepped close, right up to the partition. Through the frosted acrylic, a human silhouette wavered — neither tall nor short, but the line of the shoulders unmistakably straight.

And a voice came over the wall. Low, dry, careful.

“...Just now.”

Haewon stopped breathing.

“That song. How do you know it?”

Eleven decks below, the black sea pushed the ship onward. Counting this one, twenty-eight nights remained to the final port.