When I was little, I’d foolishly believed that if I tried, I could be as pretty as I goddamned pleased. If the way of life read that I had to look nice to get what I wanted, then I would rise to that class, no matter what I had to do.

It started with make-up.

I was ten, and my brother fourteen, a simple age to be running out in the park with friends, playing an even simpler game of tag, or hide-and-go-seek. It definitely wasn’t an age to be digging through our mother’s makeup cabinet.

There was a boy – there was always a boy – that I’d wanted to impress.

His name was Im Jaebum.

He was the cool kid of our neighborhood. The kid with the wicked smile that made even the parents swoon in interest – knowing clear damned well that they’d be more than just imprisoned had they even damned think of something indecent with him. And not only did he have a nice face, but he was perfect in every other aspect as well; good in every field of the sporting world created and being the best student of the century, it was hard to deny his perfection.

The girls wanted him. The boys wanted him. And I can even swear I’d overheard my parents whisper in bed that they wished they had a child like him instead of me.

He was the type of kid too cool to go by just his name. JB was what he was called, and I was still just stupid ol’ Youngjae.

And what I’d assumed was simple admiration slowly grew to be something else.

I wanted to be with him. I wanted to be that curled into his arms and giggling at every little dumb, unfunny joke he cracked.

At my simple age of ten, I’d found the way to my mother’s restroom cabinet, wide eyed at the smelly materials that supposedly made my mother who she was in public. If it was able to transform the morning dragon in my mother to a peaceful business lady, I thought, why not me? With enough work, maybe it would be able to work the same magic on someone as plain – or, below average – as me.

This wasn’t a good idea.

The thought had been swarming the deeps of my brain since the minute I had stepped into the tiled baths of our parents’ master restroom. Each creak and drip that sounded around me automatically magnified to thousand decibels louder than it originally was. To put short, the taunt of guilt – of disobeying our father and entering the master bedroom without permission – was eating me alive.

But the thing was, I had to do this. It was the only way to make myself look at least halfway decent.

With my heart pounding away in my throat, I the sticky materials on the marble countertop. Five minutes. I’d be in here for five minutes working with the way my face worked. Then I’d be off. I’d try it out just once, and if it didn’t work, then I wouldn’t do it. Because then, I’d know clear well how hopeless I really was.

I was in the restroom for the whole five minutes that day. More maybe. Only after my face was completely unrecognizable, did I emerge from the room, bawling my eyes out. I still remember why: the makeup had gotten in my eye, and if anything, I looked uglier than before.

I hated it.

I was lucky mom and dad weren’t home that day, or I might have gotten the biggest spanking of my short ten year old life.

I was lucky it was Himchan that found me instead.