PROMISE | I-Land

11 - Safety

The I-Landers set off to practice for the rest of the day, figuring out part distribution and learning choreography and lyrics.

Jia began to lead the part distribution in her team. "I think Heeseung should do part 1 cause he'll be the best at the solo intro."

"Oh, I was gonna say that you should do it, Jia, cause I thought you would be good at it too and it would make us stand out more if we had a girl doing the solo," Heeseung said. "What do you guys think?" he asked the team.

"I think Jia would suit it more, she can dance softer," Sunghoon said.

"All of us here can dance softly, so it's just a matter of presence and high notes," Jia added. "What do you think, Sunoo?"

"I was thinking Heeseung would be better suited to part 1..." said Sunoo.

"So, how should we decide then?" Heeseung asked, "Rock, paper, scissors, or what?"

"Pros and cons list?" Jia suggested.

"That would be too offensive," Sunoo said. "Just do rock, paper, scissors, then if the producers think we should switch it, we'll do that."

Jia won the rock, paper, scissors match, earning her part 1. Heeseung received part 2, Sunghoon received part 3, and Sunoo received part 4. Everyone was happy with their parts because they all had quite a fair line distribution.

Since Jia was the leader of her team, she got to decide their first steps after distributing parts. She thought it would be best for everyone to roughly learn their parts individually, and then rejoin the group and clean it up.

In one of the small practice rooms, Jia was learning the choreography for her solo part, but she was having trouble remembering it. About an hour had passed, and she was trying to fix details because she did not like the shapes she made while dancing. As much of a perfectionist she was, she thought she could never make this choreography perfect. She considered giving the part to Heeseung, but it would be embarrassing to give up after just one hour.

Her panting filled the room after her last full-out run through of the solo. She gulped water as she looked out the window into the lobby and saw Jungwon zoning out on his chair. Her stomach started to grumble out of hunger, but she could not eat until she perfected the choreography.

Feeling discouraged, Jia stared at herself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror and started to notice everything about herself. Her body looked so different from what she saw a month ago. From all the extensive physical exercise and dancing, not paying as much attention to her meals, to the building stress, she had lost so much weight that she compared herself to a skeleton. She had already been underweight as a trainee, being 48kg at 165cm, but now she guessed she had dropped about 5kg.

She realized how much stress piled on top of her after really seeing her state and examining her body. She hadn't even noticed that she missed her period. Tears began to slowly fall down her pale cheeks and she collapsed to her knees, creating a loud thump that echoed into the practice rooms below. She didn't care though, because she knew someone would come in anyway and try to tell her that everything was okay, when she thought the opposite.

Her tendencies to bottle up her emotions never helped her, but she hated to burden others with them. It was somewhat automatic to her. After the incident with her ex-boyfriend's text in part 1, she felt immensely guilty for putting it on them. She didn't even need tell the I-Landers to protect her because they had already felt obliged to.

So many thoughts ran through her head as she sat on her knees, and she realized there had been no update about Leo since he texted. This made her feel scared: What if he leaked the video and nobody told her? What if he was planning something else to sabotage her in part 2? She dropped from her knees to her bottom and laid down on her side, curling into a ball. There were too many emotions happening and she just kept crying, even when the door opened and footsteps ran beside her.