I waited another thirty minutes after that, but Lee Cheonghyeon didn’t come.

It was the point where it became clear there was something off about his state of mind.

‘How is it that not a single one of them just lets things slide.’

I found myself newly admiring the teachers who graduate dozens of high schoolers in puberty every year.

“What on earth could be going on.......”

Jeong Seongbin said in a worried voice.

It seemed no one could guess why Lee Cheonghyeon had suddenly skipped practice.

As far as I could remember, I had never heard any rumor that Lee Cheonghyeon ran away back when he was a trainee.

A fight between Choi Jeho and Kang Giyeon or the conflict around Jeong Seongbin—those were things that were originally supposed to happen and just got moved up, but this was the first time something that didn’t exist before had happened.

‘If it’s an event different from before that involves Lee Cheonghyeon, the only thing is that the debut song changed.’

Like the other trainees, Lee Cheonghyeon wouldn’t have a phone, so there was no chance he heard anything about the debut song while coming home from school.

But no matter how I turned it over, there was nothing besides Lee Cheonghyeon’s self-composed track that could be a problem.

‘Or did this kid...... catch on?’

On the surface he looks pretty dopey, but Lee Cheonghyeon actually has a decent sense for reading the room.

He’s the one who used to gather the last of his soul to smooth things over on shows whenever Choi Jeho or Kang Giyeon soured the mood.

In other words, given the situation, he might have completed the hypothesis that the song he composed could be used as the debut title.

He was fine when his self-composed track went in as a B-side, but being selected as the title would affect him emotionally?

And that after he made a song even more jaw-dropping than before?

If so, the reason he bolted is obvious without seeing it.

‘He doesn’t want to stand out.’

More precisely, he doesn’t want to be the one front and center.

Maybe all that “camera guy of Spark” energy after debut really was a service act.

Or maybe it was a figure he grew into as the member in charge of variety within the team and as the years stacked up.

You see them now and then. People who work well but don’t show it.

There were more than a few of those hidden contributors at Hanpyeong Industries too.

The reasons for not showing it varied.

They were shy, or they grew up hearing too long that humility is a virtue.

Or they were so busy working they had no bandwidth to collect their own results.

And then the likes of Deputy Manager Nam would neatly skim off their achievements and get promoted. Bastards.

Anyway. Right now, Lee Cheonghyeon was a high schooler.

It wouldn’t be strange for someone his age to feel burdened that the first song he ever made just happened to become the title.

‘So that’s why the new assignment was like that.’

“Secure the debut song” basically meant “go persuade the runaway Lee Cheonghyeon.”

I didn’t want to force him against his will, but his song was far too good to relegate to a B-side like before.

Between Jeong Seongbin’s emotional wandering and everything else, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was dead set on tangling things up.

Like a fuse connected to gunpowder had caught fire and I was just chasing after it sweeping up ash.

‘For now...... I’d better go catch him.’

I grabbed the workout top I’d folded on the practice room sofa.

I had a bad feeling it was going to be a long day.

“Hey, you’re just going to head out when you don’t even know where he went?”

“Yeah. If I’m lucky, I think I can find him.”

A few years ago, I once combed through bars looking for a necktie Deputy Manager Nam lost somewhere during a dinner with the executives.

The only clues were the corporate card transaction records I got from Accounting and the general vibe of the seat where he said he sat.

Long story short, I did find the {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} necktie he lost that day.

From beneath the chairs of countless bars all over the Gangnam area.

I stopped myself from recalling the whole process because I might actually cry.

‘I found a plain black tie; you think I can’t find a person?’

Even if he moved, Lee Cheonghyeon is a high schooler; he’d definitely be within the range you can reach by public transit.

All the trainees except me get their spending money from their parents.

I started searching on the smartphone I’d gotten from the manager.

Every bus stop near Lee Cheonghyeon’s school and every bus that stopped there—every last one.

Next, I retraced the criteria I used back when I wanted to quit and was looking at real estate.

‘The most important thing is how far you can get from the place you want to run away from.’

How much I agreed with that coworker who said if she quit, she wouldn’t even park in the direction where Hanpyeong Industries was.

I picked five terminals, ranked by how far they were from Lee Cheonghyeon’s high school and UA’s practice room.

Then I crossed off downtowns and so-called hot places.

I’d read something Lee Cheonghyeon wrote on a Post-it at a fan sign once.

If Cheonghyeon were given a free day off

Comfortably walking around crowded places ( ) vs Quietly resting somewhere secluded (○)

I even remembered how he wrote, in neat letters under the choices, ‘Recommend me a healing travel spot next time!’

He didn’t look like it, but maybe when he had a lot on his mind he tended to sink into thought.

Plus, he’s a trainee about to debut. I believed he wouldn’t be dumb enough to loiter somewhere inappropriate and get caught up in gossip.

Lastly, I searched a portal site for “walking trails on the outskirts of Seoul” and checked which place had the most recommendation posts in the end.

A kid who says he hasn’t made many PPTs doesn’t exactly scream “good at searching.”

At best he would have borrowed his friends’ phones at school for a moment to search, so he wouldn’t have had much time to deliberate.

I checked the location of the spot with the most influencer recommendations. It was a long bus ride away.

If I catch this punk, I’m absolutely going to hold him accountable for leaving the workplace without permission.

I made up my mind and texted the manager that I’d bring Lee Cheonghyeon back.

Of course, I didn’t forget to step into the convenience store right in front of me and buy a transit card.

I was dying to ask if I could bill UA for the costs of looking for Lee Cheonghyeon.

Lee Cheonghyeon sat on a bench, moving only his knees, kicking his legs back and forth.

Every time his feet brushed the ground, dust lifted.

The view below his feet was so far away it felt like a different space altogether.

Raised by a mother and father who had lived their whole lives diligently, and taught at home with nothing to find fault with, Lee Cheonghyeon had never even once done the cliché thing of skipping cram school.

Which meant that right now was his second act of deviance ever.

The first time had just been going to the neighborhood playground with Kang Giyeon instead of the practice room, so he didn’t even get scolded.

Given he’d even made the debut lineup, this time he had no excuse if he got a major scolding.

‘Is this how Kang Giyeon feels when he goes on walks every evaluation day?’

The day he learned his same-age friend had a habit of getting nervous at crucial moments.

Lee Cheonghyeon had pulled Kang Giyeon out of a bathroom stall where he was holding back his temper and walked around outside with him for a long time until his friend’s head cooled.

He didn’t fully understand Kang Giyeon’s anxiety. Lee Cheonghyeon wasn’t the type to get nervous much.

He had simply dragged his friend outside because he was so stifled he couldn’t stand to watch him suffocate.

He never imagined that at the end of that long outing there would be his own escape.

Unlike always being with Kang Giyeon, today’s Lee Cheonghyeon was alone. And he couldn’t unwind the lumped-up, clogged feeling in his chest by walking.

His wristwatch showed it was already an hour past the time to be at the practice room.

But right now he didn’t want to go to the practice room.

Maybe it was truer to say he couldn’t go.

He had a feeling some uncomfortable news was waiting for him there.

To the point he found himself hoping his guess was just counting his chickens before they hatched.

Lee Cheonghyeon had the brazenness to say, ‘This one goes in the black history file, so nobody talks about it anywhere, okay!’ with an embarrassed act and move on.

But unfortunately, he also knew very well that compared to the average person, he was quick on the uptake.

He had a sense his song might be used as the group’s debut title ever since his roommate hyung started writing what he called a proposal with bloodshot eyes.

It wasn’t that he believed in his coworker’s passion so much as that the result his coworker produced forced that line of thought.

Once a persuasive document came out, he couldn’t ignore the surrounding circumstances.

An agency whose curriculum wasn’t set—so even after the debut team was decided, they kept adding and dropping classes and bumping through trial and error—didn’t seem likely to toss a concept this polished.

In an era overflowing with capable, talented idols, passing up the chance to carry the tag “self-produced group” would also be wasteful from the company’s perspective.

Lee Cheonghyeon understood the whole situation and accepted it.

But......

‘What if we crash and burn.’

By his common sense, using a song a high schooler made as the title didn’t compute.

Using a song he made for every part was a different problem than taking responsibility for a few rap bars.

Let alone that the people debuting with that song were the members he’d watched from right beside them all this time.

He knew all too well how hard everyone had worked with debut as their goal.

All the more reason he wanted his teammates to debut with an even cooler song.

Of course, all these worries would also end if he just declared he wouldn’t use his song.

But that wasn’t easy either.

Pathetically enough, Lee Cheonghyeon himself found it extremely hard to refuse what adults told him.

The only time he’d ever gone against his parents’ wishes was when he declared he would become an idol. Exactly once.

For someone like that, raising a flag against the agency’s opinion—the collective of adults more distant and more daunting than family, objectively in the position of power, and able to actively influence his career—was out of the question.

Especially now that he even knew that Jeong Seongbin, who had been at the company far longer than him and was like the trainees’ leader, was being bullied by a senior singer from the same company.

It was perhaps only natural for Lee Cheonghyeon to be wracked with anxiety, unable to rebel against the adult world.

‘I want to run away.’

As he was thinking that, a long shadow fell across his eyes.

At the same time, a cool voice came down from above his head.

“Figured you’d be here.”

At the familiar voice, Lee Cheonghyeon lifted his head.

Maybe because of the backlight, his coworker and roommate looked even gloomier than usual as he stood there, expressionless.