Chapter 8: The First BINX Fan Event—Bin and Ji-soo's Almost

The fan event was held in a converted gallery space in Yeonnam-dong, three subway stops from Hongdae, in a building that had been a furniture warehouse before someone hung track lighting from the exposed ceiling beams and called it a venue. Ji-soo arrived at eleven-fifteen, forty-five minutes before the volunteers were due, because she had been awake since seven constructing arguments for why this was purely professional and the construction had taken time.

The audio setup was a compact board, two floor monitors, four overhead speakers positioned with moderate competence, and a laptop running a proprietary HanStar playback system she had not encountered before. She spent the first twenty minutes learning it. The manual was in a laminated sleeve taped to the underside of the board, which she found by reaching underneath without being told, which was the kind of thing she did reflexively and which other people sometimes called remarkable and which she called reading a room.

She called it reading a room.