POST CREDITS: Girls Will Be Girls

MINHO - 7 MONTHS LATER

June 12, 2025 - CJ ENM Center, Sangam-dong, Seoul

"Ssibal," I muttered, cutting between two girls with Light Rings and a staff member holding six iced Americanos in a cardboard tray. "Fuck, fuck, sorry, excuse me - sorry."

The staff member with the coffees gave me a nasty look. One of the girls turned, saw my face, frowned like she was trying to place me, then decided I was either also staff or a very sweaty nobody and moved on.

Probably better that way.

I checked my phone again while pounding down the pavement outside the CJ ENM building, which was an atrocious decision because my body had chosen survival and she'd had chosen psychological warfare.

Yeji:

Don't be late

Yeji:I mean it

Yeji:If I look up and you're missing I'm changing the door code.

Yeji:Btw eat before you come because you get weird when you're hungry

Yeji:

Actually just a snack. Jimin booked us sushi after the show and I want to feed you 🖤

I had, in fact, eaten. Barely, as instructed - a triangle kimbap inhaled in a CU near the office. The problem was that work had run late, then the subway had stalled between stations, then a middle school boy in an aespa hoodie had dropped an entire pouch of grape jelly drink on my shoe and said, with stunning sincerity, "Sorry, unc."

Unc.

For fuck's sake, I was twenty-five. I'm the same age as the girls on your fucking hoodie. Though my knees and back certainly begged to differ.

I'd survived jealousy, betrayal, a villa full of idols with boundary issues, Hwang Yeji discovering tenderness through violence, but apparently the thing that would kill me was public transportation and one child with purple sugar water.

The time on my phone read 6:45 PM.

Call time, according to Yeji, was "be there before seven or don't bother coming home", which wasn't really an official M Countdown policy but bore more legal significance in my life than anything CJ ENM had ever printed on a pass. I'd be sleeping on my studio couch if I missed her intro.

Then again, making it on time didn't exactly guarantee sleep either. I knew from experience that Yeji came down from these performances pacing the apartment like a leopardess in heat, incapable of working off the adrenaline high until she had me pinned to the mattress. My odds of getting a full eight hours tonight were zero either way. But staying awake because she was riding me through the bed was at least slightly preferable to enduring the broken spring on the studio couch.

Staff in black directed the live audience through check-in, routing fans who were absolutely buzzing with the raw thrill. To be fair, it wasn't every day you got to catch a comeback stage before the internet could turn it into clips.

I knew that energy now. Fans kept their phones clutched to their chests and traded muted theories, tracking every opening door. Comeback day carried an abrasive pulse of devotion and hunger, and tonight it felt louder than I remembered. Maybe every guy thought the crowd sounded different when his girlfriend was about to appear under broadcast lights and possibly murder him later for missing her entrance.

The timeline still felt surreal. It had been ten months since Jeju. Seven months since JYP had greenlit their sixth-anniversary cinematic universe - a whole-ass Resident Evil survival concept for the comeback. The fans were currently losing their minds over the lore, writing literal essays dissecting every frame of the teasers. They were analyzing Yeji's new bob, breaking down the symbolism of the post-apocalyptic bunker, and trending hashtags about the clip where Ryujin flatlines until JYP himself kicks down the door with a boombox to restart her heart.

They thought it was a creative masterpiece, a brilliant metaphor for the group's rebirth. I knew it was just an extremely expensive, highly choreographed recreation of actual trauma. Which would've been funny if it hadn't hit so close. Everyone online was calling it concept lore, but I just kept thinking about Ryujin on the deck in Jeju, quiet in a way that made the whole villa feel wrong. I kept thinking about how all five of them had spent that week dragging each other back from places nobody was allowed to film. Now JYPE had turned the clean version into a trailer, and the crowd was screaming for it like they actually knew what it meant.

I shoved the phone into my pocket and started running again.

The crowd thickened near the corner, and I cut around a group of MIDZY comparing photocards, muttering apologies I didn't have time to actually mean. Imminent homelessness aside, I wasn't about to miss the comeback she'd accidentally let me name. That phrase still sounded fake in my head, knowing that I'd fully been rambling when they'd slipped out of my mouth.

"Minho-ya!"

I turned toward the voice just as a shapely woman in a black mask, with dark sunglasses pushed back into her hair, broke away from the entrance with a tall, lanky man beside her. Even attempting celebrity caution in dark denim and a skin-tight black mock neck, Jimin moved like she expected the pavement to make room.

Of course she did. Jimin just had that celebrity aura, even dressed down, even masked, even pretending she was here as a normal supportive friend and not one of the most recognizable women in the building.

"Yah, you made it," she said, delighted, and grabbed the collar of my shirt before I could answer. "Good. You're safe. Yeji can stop planning your funeral."

Then she yanked me forward and launched herself into a hug.

Though calling it a hug felt illegal. It was more like a friendly tackle. Jimin's arms locked around my neck, her torso crashing into mine, and my face landed directly between the famous aespa assets I'd once manhandled in the absence of fabric and still somehow wasn't prepared to encounter fully encased in skin-tight black spandex. The thin shirt clung aggressively to her ribs and pushed her chest out straight into my personal space, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination. Naked had been naked - this was a pop quiz administered by her God to check whether I'd learned anything since Jeju.

Holy fuck, I couldn't breathe.

"So," Jimin asked casually. "You keeping my homegirl happy and fed at home?"

"Mmph-gllgh," I tried to choke out. Trying to shout from the valley between the only two peaks of flesh in Korea taller than Hallasan was a lost cause.

"Actually, you don't even need to answer," she continued, patting the back of my stranded head. "She tells me everything anyway. You still have a passing grade."

Against the stretched black fabric, Jimin's overwhelming breasts squished and compressed around my face, and for one dangerous second, every lesson I'd learned since Jeju left my body through the grape-stained shoe.

My hands froze in the air. Somewhere in the back of my mind, Yuna's black bikini - the one with the gold chains - flashed.

Don't stare at the pretty idol, don't make the pretty idol's body the start of another national crisis, don't help create another comeback through catastrophic horniness -

Thankfully, Jimin pulled back before I blacked out, eyes crinkling above her mask.

"Wait, did I hit your jaw?" she asked, already laughing. "Sorry. You look a little slow today. And sticky. Gotta keep up, unc."

I would've screamed that we were the same fucking age if I hadn't just been winded from involuntarily motorboating her tits.

Beside her, the tall guy watched me recover. He stood loose in a dark blazer, observant but quiet, tracking the overhead lighting before our faces and the venue exits.

"This is Junho," Jimin said, turning her head toward him with a grin I could hear through the mask. "My... person."

Junho gave her a look.

Jimin's shoulders lifted. "What? You are."

"I'm the guy keeping her from getting us kicked out of the lobby," Junho clarified dryly, offering his hand.

"Minho," I choked out, shaking it. "Good luck with that."

"Thanks." His mouth twitched in a slow, knowing smile. "I hear you've got your own hands full."

A fellow survivor of the idol-situationship-boyfriend industrial complex. I liked him immediately.

Jimin looked between us, pleased with herself in that dorky cheesecat way everybody knew and now loved. "See? Easy. Nobody died."

"Give it five," I said.

She laughed heartily, hooked her arm through mine, and started dragging both of us toward the entrance. "Come on - your lady is scary when she's proud."

I let her pull me forward into the hall.

Inside, the heavy studio doors chopped off the street traffic and shoved us straight into a wall of noise.

The venue swallowed us whole. The deeper we pushed into our section, the more individual bodies stopped being people and blurred into a massive, breathing entity. Rows of MIDZY packed shoulder to shoulder in the dark, sweating and murmuring in one continuous drone. The heat of the person next to me became mine.

We elbowed our way through the dense mass of limbs and Light Rings until we finally dropped into our assigned seats. I ended up wedged tightly between Jimin and Junho. On my right, Junho tilted his head back, quietly studying the ceiling trusses. On my left, Jimin bounced her knee so hard her seat rattled.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket to check the time.

Jimin's elbow dug sharply into my ribs.

"Eyes up," she hissed. "She catches you looking down, you're dead."

I shoved the phone back into my pocket. "Right."

"I'm not doing this for you. I'm protecting the comeback."

The house lights died before I could answer. The massive crowd around us held its breath all at once, thousands of chests pulling in the same anxious inhale in the pitch black, before it was abruptly shattered by a loud voice that originated from my immediate left.

"HWANG YEJI! CHOI JISU! SHIN RYUJIN! LEE CHAERYEONG! SHIN YUNA! ITZY!" Jimin yelled at the top of her lungs, ripping through the total darkness.

Some evidently hardcore MIDZY in the row directly in front of us whipped around and violently shushed her.

Jimin squared her shoulders instantly, ready to throw hands over the seat. "Excuse you? Since when are we anti-fun at music shows?"

On my right, Junho reached directly across my chest, holding out the printed eungwonbeop slip the fan managers had been passing out in the entry line.

"Jagi," he murmured patiently. "That part comes during the dance break."

Jimin dropped back into her seat and snatched the cheer guide out of his hand, squinting at the highlighted syllables in the dark.

"This is such a JYP PD-nim decision," she muttered, glaring at the paper instead of apologizing. "I can literally smell it."

Red light suddenly bled across the set, catching the marble stairs, the tall arches, and the massive sign suspended above the floor: Girls Will Be Girls. Heavy smoke poured over the stage lip.

And then the backing track kicked in.

Girls, girls. Gi-gi-gi-gi-gi-gi-gi-gi.

The stage flooded with brilliant white light.

And there they were -

Five silhouettes emerged through the smoke. The crowd exploded into a deafening roar, shaking the floor beneath my feet.

They looked untouchable up there.

Girls will be girls, will be girls, Will be girls, will be girls, Will be girls, will be girls...

Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the crowd bellowed in reply, and so did I, my voice lost in the sea of MIDZY.

A gibberish phrase born from an aftercare conversation many months ago was now massive, glowing neon words suspended above a national broadcast. I gripped the edge of my seat. Everyone around me was screaming for the polished, invincible version, for perfect lighting and better hair, but I was looking at five girls who had been a complete fucking disaster on an island and somehow came out of it closer.

And I wasn't just someone in the crowd watching from the back row anymore.

Jimin grabbed my arm, shrieking their names again at an ungodly volume. Still on the wrong cue, to the annoyance of everyone around us. On my right, Junho caught my eye and shook his head, a slow smile breaking across his face.

They'd all survived being girls on that island: messy but loyal, trapped but yearning, terrified but brave. Now, they got to be girls for the whole world.

Looking up at them, owning a stage I'd accidentally helped name, I let the whole ridiculous, impossible thing be true. The hurt, the pride, the love, the secrets only I knew and would carry forever.

And under the broadcast lights, with every piece of chaotic history transformed into the roar around me, with all of them in all of us:

They were ITZY.