Page 32 of This Time It's Real
“But?”
“But, like, for instance: In an old interview, I mentioned this singer I was really loving. And then the next month, he was exposed for doing drugs—which I hadno ideaabout, I just thought he was a creative lyricist. But somehow the story turned into me encouraging teenagers to do drugs, and I had to issue a public apology, and it took weeks for all that to die down—mostly because this other actor made the headlines for misquoting a classic novel.”
As he speaks, I get a startling glimpse of the boy behind the glossy magazine cover. Someone a little afraid. That part I can relate to, at least.
So it’s with full, gentle sincerity that I say, “Well, you’re safe with me. I’ll only write the story you want to tell for this essay; I won’t twist your words or anything like that. Promise.”
A long pause. A soft breeze brushes through the grass, past my cheek.
When Caz glances up again, he looks different. Or he’s looking at me differently, his eyes less black than brown, the rich shade of freshly upturned earth.
“Fine,” he says at last. “I’ll talk.”
Caz Song broke his arm when he was thirteen.
Butbreakis too gentle a word. What he really did was fracture it and dislocate it at once, splitting the bone down the center. In certain places the bone had been shattered so completely that tiny white shards had poked up against his skin, threatening to pierce straight through. The pain, according to him, was manageable. Nothing more than a brief flash of agony, a crushing sensation, fire spreading up from his fingers—followed by numbness.
The pain, I imagine, was unbearable.
He had injured himself performing a stunt for a historical C-drama. It was his first time playing a fairly important role—the crown prince’s spy—and he wanted to prove he was up for the job. If he didn’t, there were at least four other actors his age with more connections who could replace him at a moment’s notice.
The stunt required that he leap over two sloping palace roofs (with the help of wires, of course) and do a double flip in the air before launching directly into a fight scene. He managed to make the jump over one roof before one of the wires accidentally went slack. He stumbled, landed hard at the wrong angle. By instinct, he’d lifted his right arm to protect himself. A mistake.
“I knew pretty much straightaway that I’d broken it,” he says, rolling back his sleeve to show me. The ghost of a jagged white line trails from his elbow down to his wrist, cutting its way into lean cords of muscle. I have to fight this strange, abrupt urge to trace my fingers over the scar, just to see if it still hurts. To see if he would let me. “I mean, Iheardit.”
A jolt of imaginary pain lances through my own arm at the thought.
“But you kept going,” I guess, tearing my eyes away from his scar before I can do something foolish.
“The cameras were still rolling.” He shrugs. “Everyone was waiting. I figured I could afford to finish the scene.”
And so he did. He finished that scene, and the next, and the one after that. For two whole hours he said nothing, just kept his head up and stayed in character and pulled off all the remaining stunts himself. It wasn’t until his scenes were done for the day and the director was completely satisfied with everything that Caz asked, quite calmly, whether he could go see a doctor, as he couldn’t feel his fingers. The staff member assigned to bring him there had taken one look at his arm—now no longer hidden by the thick, layered sleeves of his costume—and almost screamed.
The doctor had been horrified as well. Shocked that Caz hadn’t passed out from the pain at that point. Caz had simply smiled his famous, crooked white smile—the smile that made all his costars and viewers fall at least a little bit in love with him—and said,Come on, it’s barely a scratch.
“And what did the doctor say to that?” I ask.
He runs a hand through his perpetually messy hair. “Honestly? The drugs kind of kicked in at that point, so I can’t be sure.”
“Nice.” I snort.
“Though Iimaginehe shook his head in admiration and murmured to the nurse beside him,What a brave young man.Maybe even a few tears were shed.”
“And then everyone in the operating room burst into loud applause?” I say sarcastically.
He stares at me in fake shock. “How did you know?”
A small, involuntary giggle rises up my throat, though I quickly squash it down again. Still—agiggle.It doesn’t make any sense for me to feel that way now.
No. I need to clear my head. Refocus. I’m not here to make friends, to get my hopes up about people only to be let down over and over again.Especiallynot when it comes to Caz Song, who makes a literal living off pretending to feel things he doesn’t.
Nothing else.
“Go on,” I tell Caz, sitting back, a safer distance away from him. “What happens next?”
He hesitates, as if sensing the change in my tone, however subtle. But after another beat, he nods and picks up where he left off.
After the operation, the doctor advised Caz to rest for at least a month. The next week, he went back on set again. He worked with the director to devise a way to hide his cast under his costume and refused to restrict his movements in any of his scenes. Even when he went back to the hospital for further treatment or was forced by his parents to rest, he secretly studied his script under the covers of his bed, repeating lines to himself over and over again.
