Sakura’s six hours into a seven hour-long rehearsal when she feels something, her heart seizing up in panic a few seconds too late. Coming out of a clumsy arabesque penchee, she knows even before her foot even hits the ground that she’s messed it up. She can see it in the fear prickling in her mother’s eyes as she watches from the wings of the stage.

Chaewon’s feet sweep the floor like she’s performing a beautiful glissade on stage, but she’s not fast enough. She doesn’t catch Sakura in time, and Sakura lands with her legs in unnatural, wrong angles, crumpling to the glossy floor with a sob.

Surgery within two weeks, Chaewon tells her, sitting next to Sakura on the bed. Two months of crutches and physical therapy.

Chaewon says some other things that Sakura tunes out as she looks at the slender, white column of Chaewon’s neck. She was born to be a dancer, Sakura thinks, enviously, before swallowing painfully and staring at her own ankle with a look that could cut through glass.

Two months, and the dress rehearsal of Swan Lake is in a week. 

“It’s not a death sentence,” Chaewon says, very gently. Her loose hair brushes Sakura’s arm.

But it is. Sakura is eighteen and her time is running out.

. . .

It’s a week later when her phone lights up. Sakura frowns, sticking her hands straight out for balance. Chaewon told her a million times that she can’t put too much weight on one leg, but Sakura never listened, jerking her hand out of Chaewon’s grasp brattily every single time.

She doesn’t look too closely at the number as she picks up, dragging a palm tiredly over her face. “Hello –– “

“I’m sorry.”

Sakura almost knocks her hip into a desk in surprise. She blinks. The person on the other line is definitely not Chaewon. Her voice is scrapped raw, and her breathing is unsteady, like they’ve been… crying, and there’s a raw gasp that sounds like tears burning at the back of someone’s throat. It reminds Sakura of how she cried after she fell, and her heart feels like it’s broken cleanly in half.

It’s a few seconds until the voice speaks again, quieter now, “It’s so hard here. I don’t think I can do this anymore. What if I’m not good enough?” There’s some rustling on the other line as the girl –– Sakura still wonders, but she’s almost sure that the mystery caller is female –– sniffles, maybe wiping her nose on her sleeve. Sakura can make out a quiet sigh. “Everyone is so much better. I think I made a huge mistake.”

Sakura’s asked herself the same question before. Leaving felt like running, but years later, she’s unsure, one foot stuck in the past for a decision she’ll never be ready to make, one foot stubbornly pointed forward, because what else is there to do?

When Sakura was fifteen, she spotted a shiny poster advertising idol auditions in the window of her local grocery store. Her mother was already rolling the shopping cart out the automatic doors, but Sakura stood, frozen in place, for what felt like hours, ice cream sandwich melting in her hand.

Would her life be different if she saw the same poster now, and this time: if she decided to take the risk and go?

“You’re trying,” Sakura finally says, saying what she needed someone to tell her for the longest time, “you’re tired, right? I can tell. But you’re trying and it’ll pay off. You have to believe that.”

“You’re not…” The girl catches herself mid-sentence, and says bashfully instead, “You’re a good listener.”

She sounds young, and embarrassed, but why wouldn’t she be? She just left a part of herself on display for everyone to see. No one wants to do that. Sakura doesn’t know how to tell her that there’s a little caged monster that screams the same thoughts, that tells her that hard work is never enough, that results are all that matter. She can’t. She can’t tell anyone that, and it frustrates her.

“I’m trying to be a better one,” Sakura admits. “I’m sort of a work-in-progress.” That’s an understatement. I’m doing the best I can probably sounds like an excuse to so many people now, even though Sakura’s really –– really –– trying her best, with honest intentions but the clumsiest of results.

“I’d recommend you.”

. . .

The next time the girl calls her (it doesn’t feel right to call her a stranger, even though they’ve only talked once), it’s too early, a Saturday morning.

Sakura’s sleeves are pushed up to her elbows as she goes back to mixing pancake batter, her phone tucked carefully between her ear and her shoulder.

She hadn’t saved the number –– Sakura doesn’t even have a name to put under her contacts if she wanted to, anyway –– but it would be a lie to say that Sakura’s heart didn’t warm exponentially when it flashed quickly across the screen. “Bad time?” the girl asks when Sakura picks up.

“Not really,” Sakura says lightly, pouring in melted butter that oozes creamily and unhelpfully around the sides of the pan. “Not if you don’t count my ongoing battle with making pancakes.” She smiles when she hears a snort on the other end.

“I don’t,” the girl says, sounding amused.

“So you called me after two weeks… just to say hello?”

There’s a shy laugh on the other line, but the girl doesn’t deny it. “I wanted to say thank you,” the girl admits, and the affectionate trust in the way she says it presses warmly into Sakura’s heart.

“So you really called me after two weeks just to say thank you,” Sakura teases, scraping the bottom of the bowl with her whisk. It works, and the batter is soon smooth. There’s an annoyed huff on the other line, and she almost gets away with it –– but Sakura can make out bright, sunshiny laughter, even though it sounds like it’s being muffled by someone’s hand.

“I wish my roommates would bring me pancakes,” the girl says wistfully, “but they’d just eat it all, probably.”

“If my roommate doesn’t wake up soon, it won’t be an accident on my end.”

The girl startles herself by laughing –– Sakura can hear it in the startled little oh! when she knocks over something with her elbow. “I live with fifteen other girls,” the girl says, endearingly flustered now, and it's Sakura's turn to blink rapidly now. What? There’s a blank, uncomfortable silence, before the girl laughs awkwardly and presses, “At least it’s never boring, right? Is it just her and you?”

“Yeah,” Sakura says, and then a second later: “It’s just me and her.” She doesn’t say anything else, but the shift in the air is noticeable. She says, it’s just me and her, but what she really wants to say is all we have is each other, and I don’t know if that’s enough, if I’m enough.

“You know, I could use the listening practice,” the girl says, sweetly, and Sakura smiles at the implied keep talking, keep talking, I want to listen, I care, “And I bet she’ll like the pancakes too.”

. . .

She’s right.

Sakura snaps a picture of Nako mid-bite, and the younger girl complains through a mouthful of pancakes until she remembers Sakura doesn’t even have anything to upload it on anyway.

What Nako doesn’t know is that Sakura sends the picture to someone while Nako is diligently covering every inch of Sakura’s cast with glittery pens:

You were right! She loves them. Thanks.

. . .

“You’re looking happier lately,” Chaewon comments, hanging off of Sakura like a very attractive coat.

Sakura lets out a small laugh when the mystery girl sends her a picture of three (Japanese?) girls draped over each other in the back of a dimly-lit van. Two are pulling at their mouths and making funny faces at the camera, and the other –– the other girl is sitting primly, hands folded carefully in her lap, eyes straight ahead, like she’s determined to prove to the world that she doesn’t know them.

“That’s exactly what I needed to hear,” Sakura says, smiling, stumbling into Chaewon’s arms and pulling her up with her. It’s the first time she’s tried to dance in two months, but today, Sakura feels brave.

. . .

“She’s just a kid,” the girl stresses, “she didn’t mean it.”

But Sakura is resentful, and there’s an ache in the back of . She feels like she’s been running for too long and too hard, and she’s finally run out of time. “She’s fifteen,” Sakura lashes out, and she hears the cruelness in her voice, but she keeps going, “and I’m eighteen. I’m not her––”

She feels the stinging at the corner of her eyes. Nako had slammed the door in her face and scoffed, fine, talk to her if you’re not going to talk to me, then! That’s all you do lately! but Sakura’s quieter than usual as the girl tries with, “Unnie––”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What do you want me to say––what do you want me to call you?”

Sakura closes her eyes and leans back against the brick wall of her apartment. The girl must think that this is all an act, that somehow––acting like this will pull everyone back into her orbit, back into her life, but it’s never been like that.

“Sakura,” she says, pianissimo. She listens to herself speak, as if she’s listening to someone else.  “Miyawaki Sakura, disappointment, because I can’t––” She swallows painfully, her voice raw enough to cut through glass, and looks towards the sky. “I can’t do anything anymore.” The moon is bright.

“You don’t know that. Why do you keep saying that? Why do you keep acting so fatalistic about this?”

“Because it is fatalistic! Why does no one––”

“I’m a dancer, too. I don’t think I ever told you that, but I am, and it’s not all that you are! People lose jobs all the time, people lose––I mean, I think I just lost the chance of a lifetime, but I know that if I work hard enough, they’ll be another one. And another one. And another. I’ll work hard until the day I die, but––even if I give up, I still have a whole life outside of dancing!”

“Don’t you get it? Because I don’t think you get it! Do you think Lee Chaeyeon, idol trainee…” There’s a sharp intake of breath, and Sakura’s hands are white-knuckled at her sides. “...could have gotten through being homesick without you? That if she packed up and left everything behind today, you wouldn’t be one of the only things she would miss?”

“Chaeyeon,” Sakura repeats, testing it, feeling like she’s called it a thousand times someplace else, some other time. She could have taken a million other paths. If she had trained to be an idol in Japan, could she have met Chaeyeon earlier? A few years down the road? It doesn’t matter, because there’s a stirring in Sakura’s chest that feels like it’s taking flight. She’s never felt that before––she feels right, now, like everything’s meant to be.

“I hate that name.” She can feel Chaeyeon grimacing, and Sakura wants to wrap her fingers around her hand, to say thank you. “But I don’t mind as much when you say it.”

Without realizing it, the tension has left Sakura’s shoulders. She rolls them back and looks up towards the apartment building. Nako’s bedroom light is still on. “Thanks for listening. You’re––good at it.”

Chaeyeon hums, and there’s something musical about the way she laughs, she realizes. Sakura gets it now. The girl, the trainee, the girl on the other end of the line says:

“Until next time?”

And Sakura smiles tenderly, even though she knows Chaeyeon can’t see her. “Until next time.”

It's a brand-new day. 

. . .

THREE YEARS, PRODUCE 48 ERA

@39sakuchan: CHAEYEON!!! YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL INSIDE AND OUT!! Fan since before day one!!!!! It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, I will always support and love you!!!! And whatever you do: don't give up!!!