2013

“Nervous?” Alice peers over her shoulder whilst Ara’s fingers find Alice’s.

“Just a bit” she breathes heavily

“You’ll be amazing ok, you’re Hello Venus”

Alice squeezes her hands three times real tight before she’s about to step out onto the stage without her members for the first time since their debut.

“We’ll be watching you, every step of the way” Alice grins and Lime standing behind her chimes in

“If you make a mistake we’ll know”

+

2012

Ara sometimes goes disappearing for hours on end, and when debut is so close around the corner, it gets the entire production team riled up. “Where is your leader? Why isn’t she with you?” their manager hisses. There are disciplinary threats being tossed around the room “If anyone does this – they’re going to cut you from-”

There’s a knot that ties up in Alice’s stomach, “I know where she is”, she lies.

The girls look over at Alice feeling rather betrayed that she had kept this information to herself. “Well…” their team manager says “Go get her then”

Her breath trips over her heart for a second, and she reaches for her jacket on the table and dashes out of the front door without so much as a second thought.

+

Alice finds her, eventually, on the rooftop of their soon to be old dorm. “I think I’m going to miss this place the most”

“Joohee unnie”

It’s Joohee unnie as soon as she steps through the door of their dorm, Joohee with beads of sweat dripping from her forehead, Alice without all the glitz and glamour, all the makeup and high heels is Joohee. Ara wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I should’ve figured you’d be here” Alice collapses on the bench “What are you doing here?”

“Me? Just thinking”

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately”

“There’s been a lot of think about lately”

Alice doesn’t say anything, she lets the sun her hair with its arms as it sets, and she just enjoys the view from their rooftop building. “We’ve had some good memories here…” she says as she looks down at the café they always loved spending time at, the park they went for late night workouts in or the convenient store they’ve spent a bit more time at than their company would like. “Like when Yooyoung burnt her hair eating the jokbal”

Ara tries to suppress her grin from turning into a manic laugh at the memory. “Oh” she replies after she regains her composure.

“What’s wrong?” Alice nudges her gently

Ara sways a bit like a branch in the winds, she smiles, and looks down nervously at her hands “I’m scared unnie, nervous even”

“It’s normal”

“No, it’s not…” Ara clenches her fist and presses her lips into a straight line “You all nominated me to be your leader, I can’t even give an interview without feeling like I want to curl over, I can’t give an introduction without looking at the floor, or at my shoes, like they’re so interesting, I can’t stand on stage without fear that I’m going to trip over my toes, or do something terribly embarrassing in front of an entire nation…I can’t”

Her tears are beginning to spill, and the words are all caught up in

“There’s a reason we all picked you to become a leader” Alice pulls Ara in closer towards her, shoulder pressed up side by side, arms strapped around her shoulders, fingers laced in her long black hair. “Although you don’t believe in yourself, we do – just be yourself, the girl we all see in the practice rooms, bold, beautiful and so charismatic even if you’re terrible at rapping the CEO tells you to keep trying”

“Yah”

“How about this?” Alice grabs Ara’s hands and clasps them in her own “Whenever you’re nervous, whenever you feel like you’re about to fall over, reach for my hand – like this…” Alice laces her finger with Ara’s and flashes it up in the air, “and look at me…”

“At you?”

“At me – and I’ll help you”

“Promise”

“Yes”

+

2013

The stage is bright and it’s hard to see anyone in the crowd, there’s a lot of screams and chanting from the audience. Ara closes her eyes and lets her hands grasp comfortably on the microphone. She does what she’s been taught to do for the past three years, she sings, but the nerves never really go away. She needs Alice, she needs her members to make her feel better, this is foreign, performing on stage without them, with two other people, this is strange and it doesn’t sit well with her.

“Yoo Ara fighting!” she hears like a chorus of angels singing, those five voices she’s heard sing to her many times before in the practice rooms or in the recording studio.

But the stage is too bright, the spotlight is almost blinding, and she can only hear their voices mixed in with a sea of what sounds like soldier’s war cries.

As the song winds down, as she’s about to go for her final bow for the night, she’s afraid she really will trip over her feet. But she spots them from across the room - five girls, all counted for, sitting across the front row, arms in the air, waving, screaming and cheering for her. Then there’s Alice sitting gracefully, clapping and smiling.

Ara smiles, she knows and she believes for the first time she can do it so long as around her was Alice, so long as she had Hello Venus.