Page 13 of Perfect Martinis
“Come again?”
“Pathetic little child,” Jeong-Ki nearly spits. “Our old manager used to call me that whenever I had an issue with another member in the group, usually the same little prick. He—” He pauses to look at me. “You literally know nothing about BurntUp, do you?”
“Not a thing. Sorry.”
“Our label had big plans for us and while usually in K-pop, management and label are one, our label outsourced our management to someone in the US. Stefan Lear. He used to work with one of the biggest US music managers, but they parted ways and he had his own company.
“He was a colossal jerk. Especially to me. I was the workhorse. Spent extra time in the studio polishing up tracks while the other two vocalists didn’t have to — not that they could have anyway — and yet it was never enough.
“We had a pretty big break coming in the west. He was counting on us to make him millions of dollars and billions of won. But I had a breakdown.
“Between him and the one member, I lost my mind. Pil-Sung, the member who always pissed me off, crossed a line and I was done. I quit, relinquished most of my assets to pay for the broken contract, and hid until I decided to join the Special Forces.
“The last thing Lear said to me was, ‘You will pay for this, you pathetic little child.’”
Jeong-Ki’s hands shake and I reach out and hold them both in mine, thumb rubbing across the scar on his knuckles.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
“I’m not a victim,” he says. “Don’t pity me.”
Pursing my lips, I reply, “I can be sorry you were under a bad contract, with a manager who didn’t care about you, with a bandmate who drove you to literal insanity. It’s not pity to acknowledge that you went through things that, on the surface, may have looked like your choosing but were the results of one choice that snowballed and got out of your control.”
He squeezes my hands, silent for a moment. The humid summer breeze wafts in the air, and the city noises are faint in the distance.
“No one ever said that.”
“Said what?”
“That it wasn’t my fault, or my choice. Everyone kept saying, ‘Obviously he chose that path,’ when every fucking thing after I signed a contract would’ve resulted in penalties if I fought them. I didn’t have a choice; they just made it look like I did,” he admits. He looks up and meets my eyes. “Thank you, jagiya.”
I melt a little inside at that endearment and can’t help but kiss him.
Trust me, you would too.
When I pull away he shakes the paper in his free hand. “Let me get the arrow too. I’ll still run everything for prints but I’m pretty sure we got our guy. Now we just need to find him.”
The last part of the sentence hangs in the air, unspoken.
“Find him … and kill him.”
* * *
While Jeong-Ki was at the police headquarters, I settled at my computer to research Stefan Lear, music mogul whose career nosedived when Jeong-Ki quit. It’s evident some people on social media dislike Jeong-Ki a lot, despite the fact his career ended a decade ago.
“He couldn’t handle that PS was going to be more famous,” someone wrote.
“More famous?” another replied. “That flop can’t sing; if anyone tanked Lear and his company, it was him and that screeching gasp he gives at every high note.”
I assume PS means Pil-Sung, the member Jeong-Ki mentioned earlier.
I read more, mostly opinion pieces, but many truth bombs are dropped in those. The psychological torment, whispers of physical and sexual abuse against Jeong-Ki, and the fact that the group’s fans always would push it under the rug.
“HE IS FINE. THIS IS HIS CHOSEN FAMILY!” their largest online fanbase wrote right before Jeong-Ki quit. “STOP MALIGNING HIS CHOICES.”
Maybe if you people stuck up for him instead of believing pretty lies, he wouldn’t have had a breakdown, I think as I scroll. I skip over anything about the group that doesn’t include the manager. If I never cared about them before, I certainly don’t now.
Lear shut down all his socials after this Pil-Sung person failed as a soloist in both Korea and the west, and there are a ton of people with his name in America, and none in South Korea anymore.
