Hired To Be The Idol's Fake Babe

Someone knocked on the door of Kei Studio at 11:47 p.m. Keisha Adeyemi did not look up from her screen. "We're closed!" Knock. Knock. Knock. "Ngozi, if that's you and you've lost your keys again, I'm leaving you out there." Silence. Then a pause, and knocking with more deliberate care, as though whoever stood on the opposite side had been taught from childhood to apologize to doorways. Keisha sighed, saved the file (two hundred and forty wedding photos, one blinking groom) and padded across the studio in her socks. Kei Studio was located on a crooked side street of Seongsu-dong, tucked behind a flower shop, with exposed brick and a window that let in cold air that had not been sealed for months. Rent, due every first of the month, was a jump scare every time it came out on her bank account. But the name on the door was her own. No one had handed it to her. She had built it, invoice by invoice. Keisha opened the door. Three people stood in the corridor. A woman in a black coat, a tired man, who held a phone in each hand, and behind them, swallowed up by the darkness, a tall figure in a black cap, black mask, and black hoodie with a folded yellow umbrella in his arms. Her umbrella. "Ms. Adeyemi?" The woman's English was as crisp as the lines of her coat. "I'm Yoon Sora, of Meridian Entertainment. We apologize for the hour, may we have ten minutes?" "Meridian Entertainment," Keisha repeated. "Yes." "Is this about the wedding I shot for your accountant's sister? Because the groom blinked. That's not a photography issue. That's a groom issue." The tired man made a sound, either a laugh, or a cough. Sora did not blink. "It concerns Tuesday night." Tuesday. Keisha's stomach twisted. On the Tuesday she had walked home, soaked to the bone, after a late-night shoot that finished at nearly one in the morning. She had walked past the hospital on Hanri-ro, the large one with the glowing green cross, and seen a boy, face pressed into his hands, his shoulders shivering, with a sputtering street lamp above him. She did not know his face. She never would have stopped, if not for the fact that she had cried like that, once, years ago, on the floor of her mother's house. Keisha had sat on the floor next to him, her knees against her chest. "Whatever it is," she had said, "it won't feel like this forever." She left him her umbrella, and walked the rest of the way home, water soaking through her skirt. "That," said Keisha slowly. "Was one umbrella." "That was fourteen million views," said Sora. Before Keisha could process this impossible sentence, the man in the black cap stepped forward. He removed the cap, revealing the face of no one in particular. Not yet. For four months, Keisha had passed his face in bus shelters and subway ads, and on the side of a building in Gangnam, where he had been plastered across the screen as KAIROS, the debut singer for the boy band Meridian Entertainment, with a single, heart-stopping song called "Afterglow." Keisha had looked at her shoes every time. Before this face had become a heartthrob for millions, it had been the face of a boy with a wrinkled Lagos school uniform, who had once shared his lunch with her on a broken bench, saying, "Kei, one day I'll be somebody, and you'll be the first person I tell." It had not happened. Five years ago, he had just stopped answering her, mid-sentence. "Hi, Kei," said Marcus Rhee. His voice was lower than she remembered, rougher, a strange sound in her ears: Kei, Kei, Kei, as if he had been saving it up, and smoothing the edges off it with his tongue, until it fit in his mouth like a secret. "Don't," she said. "Kei—" "Stop saying it like that." He closed his mouth. He offered her the umbrella with both hands, a strange kind of gift. She did not take it. Yoon Sora took a tablet out of her coat and angled it towards Keisha's face. A video, filmed through a taxi window, grainy and blue with rain, showed a boy on a sidewalk, and a girl in a yellow raincoat, crouched beside him, one hand on his back. WHO IS YELLOW RAINCOAT GIRL?? (MARCUS RHEE CRYING) Fourteen million views. Two million comments. Someone already made a fan art. "Oh," Keisha whispered. "The internet has decided that you are his girlfriend," said Sora. "A secret one. A girlfriend that he's never told anyone about before. There's three theory videos and a hashtag." "I am not his girlfriend." "Yes," said Sora. "That is the problem. That is also the solution." "The solution to what?" Nobody answered. Marcus looked at the floor. He looked at Keisha. His eyes were red-rimmed, tired in a way no concealer could fix. "Kei," said Marcus quietly. "I know that I have no right to be here." "You really don't." "I know." "Five years, Marcus." "I know." "Five years of nothing, and the first thing you do is show up at midnight—" "I need you to be my girlfriend." A plate fell to the ground. Keisha stared at him. Then, very calmly, she said, "Say that again, slower. Like I'm a stranger." Marcus Rhee (idol, face on fourteen million screens, the boy who had broken her heart) swallowed. "Please," he said. "Pretend to be mine."