#shinee texts

“Dude! Lei!” Lucas cheered into my ear as he (again) combed his fingers through my recently chopped black hair. Independent from those who cried that I ruined my visuals, he boasted, “I love this!”

Lucas was too excited. About my haircut, about my still-secret impending debut in SuperM’s comeback, about getting to work together after years of being best friends. Even as I struggled to escape his reach, trying to smooth my hair before a stylist could scold me for wasting their hours of hard work, trying to force my smile into the hard line that would fail to convince Lucas to behave, I laughed. I was too excited too.

My laughter died with the ever-present realization that somebody is always watching. That curse of being an idol meant that we couldn’t feel this way— carelessly happy— or, rather, that we shouldn’t.

Before I could remind Lucas (he always needed to be reminded), Mom’s voice broke through the on set bustle. “Break’s over, kids! Hands to yourself Lucas— this is why we have dating rumors! You don’t want to end up like the idol who never debuted!” She spoke without glancing up from her clipboard, without faltering in her fast-paced course to who knows where to do who knows what, the fabric of her bright red pantsuit swishing in time each step.

Lucas finally stepped away, instinctively abandoning his assault on me to stare after Mom. As I dropped my phone into my backpack, satisfied that there was nothing worth a response in my inbox or on social media, he whistled. “Dude, Mom is hot.”

Were I not used to that— Lucas referring to my mother as if she were also his, calling her hot— I might have cringed. Indifferent, I forced my eyes to roll because that was the kind of reaction Lucas liked. “Do you ever think that’s why you can’t get a girlfriend? The fact that you lust after my mother— our manager?”

Lucas shook his head. “Nah. I can’t get a girlfriend because everyone things I’m dating you.” He poked my forehead accusingly as if his smothering affection weren’t the cause of those false rumors, and I swatted his hand away. “Plus, didn’t ya hear? We can’t even touch a person of the opposite sex or else we’ll end up like the idol who never debuted.” His breath huffed out of his forever-swollen lips.

The story about the idol who never debuted because of an unplanned pregnancy was some kind of fable, myth, or urban legend that pervaded every aspect of life as an S.M. idol. Maybe nobody ever really believed it. Maybe everyone thought it was some cleverly crafted tale to get us to focus on training. Maybe we thought we wouldn’t hear it after debut, but it was whispered in response to every dating scandal and mentioned by Mom still on the (frequent) occurrence that Lucas ignored my boundaries.

All I know is that Lucas and I hated that story, and we expressed our hatred differently. Lucas was determined to rebel against it not by getting a real girlfriend but by committing to being my best friend in every sense of the word, regardless of what the press said, regardless of how fans often misinterpreted, regardless of Mom’s plentiful scoldings. And I— well, Lucas said that I was the perfect idol because I was as obedient as I was talented, but the truth was that becoming the scandalized idol in the next cautionary tale was my biggest fear. That’s why I strictly observed a self-imposed total dating ban: fear of controversy. And maybe deeper down, a fear of intimacy, but more on that later.

I shied away from Lucas’s reference to the scandalized idol, rationalizing to his widening eyes, “I’m due on B set. I have to re-do my introduction because I kept getting distracted by Taemin’s laugh yesterday.” I wondered what could have been so funny to Taemin, but I never would have asked back then.

Lucas’s mouth fell open, I’m sure, to tease me about being incapable of functioning around Taemin, but his turn to speak was stolen by a boisterous trio of men I would recognize anywhere.

The faces of Donghae, Eunhyuk, and Shindong were among the most familiar of my childhood. I could remember vaguely when they debuted. I was six years old, sitting backstage where Mom could find me as soon as the first Super Junior Stage was completed. Being an unofficial trainee at the time, I was studying Mandarin.

Anyway, what matters is that I couldn’t escape once Super Junior fixed their gaze on me. If I did, they would tell Mom, and I would be in trouble not only for disrespecting my elders from work but also my elders in a familial sense.

“Where’s our manager?” Shindong barked at nobody in particular. Nobody responded because Super Junior’s demands for Mom had become too commonplace to garner any attention.

“Isn’t this a bit bold?” I smiled gratefully while accepting a strawberry milkshake offered by Donghae, who greeted me with a small closed-mouth grin. “You guys have stormed onto the SuperM set every day this week.” Which meant I had a strawberry milkshake every day that week. Oops. Another failed diet.

Donghae said, “We’ll cross improper lines for you mom every day of every week,” and Eunkhyuk added loudly, as if aspiring to arouse Baekhyun’s attention, “Yeah! She was our manager first! She loves Super Junior best!”

Baekhyun appeared out of nowhere. As always, his voice— a bright shout— preceded him. “Not a chance! She’s our manager now! I’ll never let you take her!”

And just as quickly as he had appeared by my side, Baekhyun dashed off in pursuit of Mom with Eunhyuk and Shindong following closely behind.

I shook my head. Goofball Baekhyun, running the wrong way.

“What is it?” Donghae tilted his head to meet my gaze. “She’s not that way?”

Donghae was so earnest, so intent on looking right into somebody’s soul, that these moments when I held his attention were blush-inducing. I squirmed, and Lucas snorted. “Oh, uh, I don’t know. I don’t know where Mom is. It’s been kinda hectic, and I haven’t seen her in a few hours—”

It was hard enough to lie to Donghae without Lucas butting in.

“What are you talking about?” Lucas had been quiet for too long, so he shouted through a mouthful of barbecue chips fished out of my backpack. Thief. “She just told us— ow!” He shrieked as I grabbed his hand and crushed it with all the force I could muster.

“Sorry, Donghae.” I bowed to my senior. “We really have to go! I hope you find my mother!” Guilty, my eyes flinched away from his frowning face.

Once we were out of Donghae’s earshot, and once I dropped Lucas’s hand, he stretched his digits and whined, “That hurt, Lei! Why did you do that? And why did you lie to Donghae about Mom?”

“Because,” I hissed, narrowly dodging an intern running with two tall cups of coffee, “they’re fighting.”

“They’re fighting?” Lucas gasped.

I nodded. “Yeah.”

Or, at least, I thought they were fighting. I didn’t know why Mom was avoiding Donghae, but I had overheard vague snippets of her conversations with Heechul when they were supposed to be watching some drama in the living room after dinner. I heard her sigh of relief when she learned that she would be responsible for organizing SuperM’s comeback and tour rather than assisting with the next Super Show. I didn’t need to know the specifics that Mom would never tell me. No matter how much I liked Donghae, if there was a fight, I was on Mom’s side.

“Here.” I passed my milkshake to Lucas after taking one long sip. “You can have this. I can’t take it onto set.”

“Ooooh!” Lucas’s eyes rounded in gratitude. He skipped off before turning back to shout, “Wait, Lei, what’s my schedule again?”

He needed to listen during briefings instead of playing around with my hair.

Having settled into the chair, sitting perfectly still so the audio technician could clip a microphone to the collar of my sheer black sweater, I responded (not loudly enough to disturb the tech), “You’re supposed to take pictures with Mark.”

“Okay! Thanks!” He grinned.

That time, my smile wasn’t forced for the camera; it was a reaction to Lucas.

Taemin and Kai were unapproachable, each for completely different reasons.

Lucas joked that I was the born and bred idol, and most people seemed to agree, but I always thought that if the perfect idol existed, his name was Lee Taemin. Like me, he debuted at 14. Unlike me, he proved himself worthy of fame and admiration with pure talent.

Hate comments didn’t need to remind me of the role Mom played in my success. I was grateful and, under my carefully crafted proud exterior, I was insecure. I was not talentless, and I worked hard almost in a vain attempt to distance myself from the poorly disguised mutters that I was only an idol because of Mom; Taemin was beyond talented, and he worked hard because he knew no other way to stride toward his goals.

“You need to stop being so weird,” Lucas told me after one of my first practices with the group. “You can’t just stare at Taemin when you pout about how everyone stares at you.”

Lucas was right. I hated being lumped in with the millions who failed to acknowledge Taemin’s humanity. But the truth— that I was some kind of hypocrite— was easy for Lucas to see; it was easy for him to say.

Lucas was the only person who didn’t seem to realize that Taemin was the center of every room. He was the only one who didn’t cling to Taemin’s every word. He was the only one who didn’t see Taemin’s other-worldly glow.

I think that’s why Lucas was my best friend: he didn’t see me or Taemin or anybody as idols. He saw us as people, liked us as people, and that was rare. From that first day at practice, I was torn between the desire to be like Lucas and the desire to be like Taemin.

Anyway, Kai didn’t like me. He didn’t hate me (at first) or anything, and he didn’t particularly dislike me, but he was the only member (aside from Taemin, who I admired too much to approach for fear of saying something stupid) who didn’t know me pre-SuperM.

Even once I was approved to debut with them, Kai hadn’t held eye contact with me for more than three seconds at a time. I wasn’t sensitive about it, and I wasn’t in the market for a new best friend— Lucas was more than enough— but Kai’s aversion to me was inconvenient, annoying, and frustrating considering that we were cast into a subunit together.

We recorded our songs (which were the most sensual of my career because they were meant to evolve my image from bubble gum pop Idol to something more “adult”) separately. Despite the quickly approaching tour dates, we hadn’t once practiced our choreography together. Kai was my senior, so I couldn’t approach him with my concerns about our lack of preparation. That’s why he was unapproachable; I had to wait patiently for him to address our tension.

I hoped that he would have taken the first step toward me before we had to shoot promotions, but Kai still couldn’t meet my eyes— despite the photographer’s repeated demands that were carefully phrased as requests— as our bodies were pressed flush together before a swarm of cameras.

Although I would rather forget, I think I can pinpoint the moment Kai decided to hate me. He flinched away from my touch again as I draped my arms over his shoulders and laced my fingers together behind his neck, per the photographer’s instructions.

“Come on, Kai!” I rolled my eyes, whining in unison with the rest of the members, who had gathered around the set nearly an hour ago after finishing their schedules. My face was hot not because of the close proximity to somebody as handsome as Kai, not because of the glare that hooded his dark eyes, but because my patience had run out. “Everybody is waiting for us! Can’t you just act professionally so we can get this done some time this year?”

His eyes widened as if I had slapped him across the face. Note: if you ever want to insult Kai— and I can’t imagine why you would— challenge his idea of professionalism.

Kai’s jaw tightened as he forced his eyes away from me to glance tiredly at Mom. “Manager, do we have to do this? I would really like to avoid a dating scandal.”

My next few words were kind of hypocritical since nobody feared dating scandals more than I did. “A dating scandal? These are pictures for our subunit— for our job. Stop making it weird.”

“It is weird!” Kai argued without looking away from Mom as she pinched at the bridge of her nose. He took two big steps backward, and my hands fell from around his neck to my sides. “And I don’t understand—”

“Just do it like this, Kai!” Baekhyun bounced onto the set, leading Lucas by the hand. After winking at the camera, encouraged by Lucas’s laughter (and Mark’s panicked, “Yo, man, what are they doing?”), Baekhyun threw his arms around Lucas’s shoulders and tossed his head back.

When everyone except me, Mom, and Kai laughed, Baekhyun leaped into Lucas. They toppled onto the hard ground, the only indication that they hadn’t broken their neck or any other bones being their ear-splitting laughter.

“Fine!” Mom was calm despite her sharp increase in volume that made me flinch.  “If you don’t want to be in a subunit with Lei, Kai, then you won’t be.”

While Kai sighed in relief, I wheezed, dejected. My heart sank down to my ankles. It was bad enough to lose the opportunity to be in a subunit with one of the best dancers at S.M., it was worse to lose it at work where I couldn’t express disappointment, and it was worst to lose it in front of Taemin, who stood stiff and red at slack-jawed Taeyong’s side.

Embarrassed and eager to escape the stares, I bowed to Kai and set to scoop Lucas off the floor, where he still laid giggling with Baekhyun, because he would make me laugh hard enough to drive away this sinking sensation.

“Where are you going?” Mom’s voice stopped me in my tracks. “Stay where you are, Lei. Kai—”

She didn’t have to finish the order. I understood mainly from Kai’s wince that he was ejected from our subunit— not me.

“Wait,” Ten said slowly, in time with my realization, “Lei’s subunit is still a thing?” His eyes sparkled. He smiled because the choreography he created for me and Kai would still find an audience.

Lei’s subunit. My subunit. The title was exciting and terrifying all at the same time.

Who would replace Kai? I wondered, watching him sulk to Taemin’s side. As Taemin’s eyes flashed to meet mine for the briefest second before he muttered something to Kai— probably words of comfort, probably words to condemn my role in Kai’s semi-public disgrace— I could only think Please not Taemin. Don’t let it be Taemin. Anyone but Taemin.

And I looked at Mom pleadingly, as if she would be able to read those thoughts through my eyes. She blinked back at me.

“Oh my God!” Mark shot both hands up in the air and waved them excitedly. “I’ll be in Lei’s subunit! Let me do it, Momager! Please!”

Oh God. Please not Mark. Don’t let it be Mark. Anyone but Mark.

“Why should you get to do it?” Ten glared up at the standing Mark from his metallic folding chair. “I choreographed their dances, so I should be cast.”

“But I’m, like, the king of subunits!” Mark rose to his tiptoes and waved his arms again in an effort to secure my attention. “If you pick me, Lei, I’ll get you into NCT Dream!”

That was a bit of a running joke— my longtime aspiration to perform with Dream. Hearing it in that moment of high stress made me laugh out loud. One of those side-splitting laughs. Real. Mark smiled at having untangled the knot in my stomach with little effort. In moments like those, I thought it wasn’t so bad that he had a crush on me.

“First of all,” Taeyong interjected, ever the mediator in NCT conflicts, “Mark, you can’t get anyone into Dream—”

“Who do you think talked the agency into making Dream a fixed unit?” Mark’s face turned scarlet as he yelled, and Taeyong didn’t bat a single eyelash.

“— Second of all, Lei doesn’t get to pick who takes Kai’s place.” We all shifted at Taeyong’s casual acknowledgment of Kai’s ejection. “Ms. Kim does. So both of you—” Taeyong eyed Ten and Mark sternly, and I wondered how they didn’t fall apart under his gaze— “be quiet and let her make her decision.”

Mom nodded at Taeyong gratefully. “It’s not much of a decision to make; I’ll just employ the second choice—”

“It’s me, right?” Baekhyun finally jumped off of Lucas, stood upright, and brushed off his all-black suit while flicking his bleached bangs out of his eyes.

Baekhyun’s goofy smile faltered when Mom shook her head. “Lucas, get up. Your dream is coming true: I’m giving you permission to touch Lei.”

“Oh yeah!” Lucas flew to my side.

Before I could wrap my mind around the fact that I would be in a subunit with him— my best friend, my rumored boyfriend— Lucas grabbed me around my waist, which was exposed under a fitted white crop top— and pulled me flush against him into the pose Kai had struggled with for hours. “Leicas forever, suckers!”

As Mom ushered Baekhyun to stand with the others off set, and everybody groaned at Lucas’s ever-enthusiastic embrace of our rumors, I laughed.

The camera flashed at last. Finally relieved enough to breathe, I returned Lucas’s embrace and joked, “Is that going to be our subunit’s name? That silly ship name?”

Lucas laughed as he lowered to press his forehead to mine. That was how things should have been all along: me and Lucas free to smile at each other and express our friendship— as silly and affectionate and beautiful as it was— to the whole world without fearing backlash.

“Look at this.” 

I slid my phone to Lucas across the glossy light wood floor as we sat, stretching in preparation for dance practice. I watched his eyebrows knit together as he scooped the phone into his hands; I watched his jaw fall open as he scrolled past the headline and through the fans’ comments. 

“Hey.” Taeyong kicked at Lucas’s foot before joining us on the floor. Always the leader (even without the title in SuperM), he reminded, “Phones aren’t allowed in practice.”

Lowering effortlessly into a stretch that resembled the splits, Ten defended, “Momager isn’t here yet, so—”

“Look at this!” Lucas shoved my phone into Taeyong’s face. Then, as if Taeyong couldn’t read for himself, Lucas said, “Pop News is writing about the idol who never debuted!”

As Taeyong gripped the phone with his slender hands (and a curious Ten and slack-jawed, messy-haired Mark gathered around him to gawk at the screen), Taemin plopped onto the floor next to me. His knee brushed against mine, and I stiffened while he smiled despite the room’s tension, skin shimmering without the aid of makeup. 

“We don’t have to worry if it’s Pop News,” Taemin said. “They aren’t exactly a credible source— remember how they covered that ‘Any Other Name’ scandal?”

Nobody could forget the chaos surrounding the Korean adaptation of a best-selling novel written by a young American woman. The love triangle between the author, a scandalized actor (Jungkook) and the author’s best friend/famous fashion designer (Jimin) was the biggest scandal in recent history. Everybody knew that gossip as if it were the plot of a classic blockbuster film or an almost distant, almost tangible high school memory, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by Taemin’s reference. 

“You keep up with celebrity gossip?” I asked Taemin quietly, my eyes narrowing to see how this information fit with my conception of him.

Taemin’s face flushed pink. He mistook my interest for criticism as he often did in those days, and I didn’t know how to correct him. 

While trying (and failing) to connect his phone to the Bluetooth speaker, Kai started, “Maybe Pop News isn’t credible—”

“They’re definitely not credible.” Ten crawled to the side of the room to tuck my phone into my bubble-gum pink backpack. Turning back to the group, he grinned, “Pop News is, like, if Mark was a news outlet: cringey, baseless—”

“Hey! I’m not baseless!”

“Anyway.” Kai puffed his cheeks full of air. “Pop News may be a scam, but they have a lot of followers. Sometimes if a lie is heard by enough people, it becomes like the truth.”

It would have been nice to be able to disagree, to believe that truth is truth, and lies are lies, and rumors are just rumors. I wanted to disagree. But I couldn’t. 

Kai continued, “And obviously Pop News isn’t wrong about everything. Jungkook and that author were dating! They’re even engaged now!”

So Kai kept up with celebrity gossip too. Was that the kind of thing he and Taemin talked about over meals? 

While my pulse quickened at the talk about dating scandals and I tried to ease my anxiety by resuming stretches, Baekhyun stirred from his nap in the corner of the room. 

“Well!” Baekhyun yawned. “If you ask me, Momager is the idol who never debuted.” 

“What?” The rest of us shrieked in unison, and Baekhyun laughed like a maniac at our identical wide-eyed open-mouthed expressions. 

“Just think about it! When Taemin, the king of dance—” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Taemin stiffen at Baekhyun’s playful compliment despite the bashful smile pulling his lips taut— “kept screwing up that choreo, Momager demonstrated. And she was no amateur.”

Considering Baekhyun’s evidence, I gnawed on my cheek. Mom was a gifted dancer; her precision, like Baekhyun said, rivaled Taemin’s. No, her precision enabled her to find fault in Taemin— perfect Taemin. 

Baekhyun wouldn’t mention this, but Mom was also a natural singer. She proved that on the first day in the studio when she coached Baekhyun through a challenging run. After he crossed his arms and whined, “What you want is impossible!” she stunned him silent by belting the notes in one attempt. 

But Mom couldn’t be the idol who never debuted, I frowned, because that meant I was the reason—

“Look, Mom is totally hot enough to be an idol,” Lucas smirked before his eyebrows lowered skeptically. “But don’t you think Lei would know if her mom was a former trainee?”

At that remark, everybody turned to face me. 

No, I wouldn’t know if Mom was a former trainee. 

I knew very little about Mom’s past because I hadn’t asked many questions. I knew that I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, her hometown. I knew that I could not remember the last time we spoke to my father. I knew that life didn’t really begin until Mom started her career by managing Super Junior. 

I didn’t remember anything before Donghae started bringing me milkshakes, and Heechul started making me laugh with funny faces, and Ryeowook (or Wookie, as I had always called him) started fitting our tea parties into his busy schedule, and Eunhyuk started unofficially training me to be an idol through dance lessons. I didn’t remember anything before Super Junior became my family. 

As I crumbled under my members’ stares, as I drowned in the guilt of having neglected Mom’s pain if she was the idol who never debuted (in the guilt of knowing I had never asked about her because the spotlight had always been on me), Baekhyun repeated, “Momager is the idol who never debuted!” “What?” 

We all turned to see Mom’s ghostly pale face in the doorway so quickly that we whimpered and rubbed at the backs of our necks. Whiplash. Great. 

“Don’t say stupid things, Baekhyun,” Heechul scolded as he nudged Mom’s motionless body into the dance studio. “Of course Kimberly isn’t a failed trainee! That story about the idol who never debuted is just something we tell you kids—” he jabbed an accusatory finger at me and Lucas— “to keep you from dating!”

Lucas boasted, “I knew it!” And everyone laughed as he triumphantly pumped his fists into the air. 

My laughter was forced, though.  

A glance down at my watch confirmed that Mom was half an hour late; Mom was never late. Heechul never escorted her to her schedules. Heechul never called her by her full name; to him, she had always been Kimi. Heechul never pressed a comforting kiss to the top of her head. 

Something was wrong, and I couldn’t ask what because we were at practice. And I wouldn’t have been brave enough to ask in the privacy of our home. And I wouldn’t have been strong enough to stomach the answer.