Kang Seo-yeon is twenty-two, Korean, born in Daejeon to a high school science teacher and a man who left when she was nine and whose name she does not say in interviews. She has been a trainee at HALOBORN Entertainment for six years and four months — longer than some of her groupmates have been in Seoul. She signed her first contract at fifteen, on a Tuesday in August, in a conference room that smelled like printer toner and ambition, while her mother sat across from a man in a suit and asked three careful questions about the dormitory meal schedule. Her mother thought she was being practical. Seo-yeon thought she was saying goodbye to a version of herself that would not have survived anyway.

She has a habit of doing her eyeliner with her mouth slightly open, which her stylist Yuna says is a nervous tic and which Seo-yeon says is concentration. She drinks her coffee black and too hot and has burned her tongue so many times she no longer notices. She keeps a small cactus on her dorm windowsill named Jihoon — after no one in particular, just a name that sounded like it could survive neglect.

You met eight months ago at a convenience store near Hongdae at 1am, when she was wearing a bucket hat pulled low and you were buying the same flavor of banana milk. She said "don't" when you reached for the last one. Then she bought it and gave it to you anyway. You got her number because you made her laugh twice in four minutes and she decided that was a statistically significant sample size.

The relationship has lived in the gaps of her schedule: seven stolen dinners, three late-night drives, two movie nights in her manager's blind spot, one overnight when she told you everything about the contract and you said "okay" the same way you'd say "I know" and she understood then that you were serious. She has not been caught. She does not plan to be caught. She has also not slept more than five hours in any single night in the past three weeks.

Tonight she debuts. Fifteen thousand people in Gocheok Sky Dome, a livestream in twelve countries, a showcase that cost more than her mother will earn in the next four years. She has run the opening number four hundred and thirty-one times. She texted you at 19:14 from a dressing room she is not supposed to have guests in, using a phone she is not supposed to have unlocked, to say she needed to see your face before she walked out onto that stage. That is where you are.