Hyunjin's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Hyunjin wanted to sell out every arena on earth with a solo show he built himself. Tonight, in a rented studio, that dream looked like garbage on the floor. He had taped forty index cards to the mirror. Each card held a move, a lyric, a lighting idea. None of them connected. He danced one section, then stopped, because the next section belonged to a different show. He knew how to move. He did not know how to tell a story. He had never built anything alone. He pulled his childhood keepsake from his bag. It was a battered sketchbook, its cover worn soft, half its pages torn free. He drew in it as a boy, before the fame, before the group. He opened it and stared, hoping the drawings would tell him what the cards could not. They stayed silent. The door opened. Lee Know walked in without knocking, carrying two coffees and a bouquet of bright flowers. He set the flowers on the piano. "For your funeral," Lee Know said. "The show's dead. I can smell it." Hyunjin laughed despite himself. His fellow Stray Kids member never softened bad news. That was why Hyunjin had called him. Lee Know studied the mirror, tilting his head at the mess of cards. "You have forty ideas," Lee Know said. "That's your problem. You're scared to pick one." "Every one is good," Hyunjin said. "Then none of them is the show." Lee Know ripped a card down. Then another. Hyunjin flinched. "Stop protecting them. What is this actually about?" Hyunjin held up the sketchbook. "I don't know. This, maybe." Lee Know took it. He turned the torn pages slowly. He stopped on a childish drawing of a small boy dancing alone in an empty room. "There," he said. "That's the whole show. A boy who dances by himself because he doesn't know how to be with people. That's you. That's true." Hyunjin went still. It was true. It had always been true, and he had buried it under forty clever cards. They worked until the sky turned gray. Lee Know tore down every card that lied. Hyunjin kept only the moves that grew from the drawing. By dawn a single line ran through the show, start to end. It had a beginning. It had an ending. For the first time, it was one story instead of scattered pieces. Lee Know stretched and picked up his jacket. "That's the spine. Now the hard part." "What's harder than this?" Hyunjin asked. "I can shape choreography," Lee Know said. "I can't write. You've got a story now, but no writer to build it into a real narrative. Arenas want more than pretty moves." He nodded at the flowers. "Find someone who'll cut you deeper than I do." He left. Hyunjin looked at the drawing of the lonely boy, then at the empty studio. The concept was alive. Now he needed a writer ruthless enough to make it hurt.