“Get more sleep, Baekhyun-ah,” I chide, popping the dish of concealer (marked “Baekhyun”) open. “We all want to see that pretty face of yours, but I keep having to cover it up.” 

I swipe around the edges of the container with my pinky finger and put it back into my bag, making a mental note to send for more.

“Sorry, noona,” he chirps, sending a tower of evil piggies to their demise. “I try.”

I mmhmm and move around to face him. “Chin up; you can play later.”

He obediently puts the iPad away and begins to chatter away about the cold weather. When Chanyeol passes by, he wrenches his head around to yell an annyeong!, and I pull my hand away just in time to avoid drawing a long smear of eyeliner onto his temple.

“Oops!” he grins, shrugging, and what can I do?

“Are you ready for the show?” I ask as I finish outlining his other eye. “Show Champion with Shindong-ssi, remember?”

“Don’t worry; I remember. I’m supposed to explain the concept for our music video, after Joonmyeon explains our title track,” he replies. “You worry too much, Hyosoon noona.”

“I just don’t want anything bad to happen to you,” I say, patting him on the shoulder. “Go and send Luhan in now, please.”

He leans in close to the mirror and examines his reflection, grinning so the corners of his eyes crinkle. “Kamsahamnida!”

Luhan takes less time to perfect-ify than Baekhyun because he usually takes good care of himself, but he’s as quiet as always, charming with his accented Korean when I ask something but otherwise with nothing to say. In an effort to dispel some of his shyness, I smile as he leaves, patting the back of his head as if something happened to it while he wasn’t looking, but I think it just ends up looking creepy.

Kris and Tao pass by just as quickly, though Kris makes more of an effort at conversation and Tao gets flustered several times as he stumbles over his tenses. Then the dressing rooms are silent, like in the aftermath of a great storm. I clean up my station and leave a note for Lay with that Chinese restaurant’s address on it.

“Hyosoon! Want to get some coffee with us?” Minji calls as I finish packing my bag.

“Maybe next time!” I reply, shrugging my jacket on. “I’m really tired right now!”

She rolls her eyes and half-teases, half-berates, “You’re no fun!”

I smile and sling one bag over each shoulder, makeup bag on the left and purse on the right. As the last of my colleagues walk out the door, I wave and teeter to the parking lot on my heels, disoriented because they’re taller than I’m used to.

The other stylists and makeup artists like to joke that even though I’m the youngest of us, I complain of fatigue and invisible aches more than the oldest, who just celebrated her thirtieth birthday last month. They never do more than smile and leave, though, and maybe it’s because even though I erupt in tears during dramas and sad movies, I’ve always been one to keep the real tears tightly leashed and the real feelings concealed. To them, I’m a fixture on the team that’s always been there, but never really considered beyond the properties of a cardboard cutout.

When I reach home I realize I forgot to turn the heat back on this morning and my apartment is freezing. This makes me inexplicably miserable so I make some rice porridge from the leftovers in the fridge and eat it huddled under a tent of covers, listening to the soft pings the heaters give off as my eyes flutter shut.

…

When I wake up the next morning my makeup is smeared and I’m still tired but I quickly shower and get dressed because EXO-M is catching a flight to Beijing this afternoon and I’m on it. I’ve had my suitcase packed for a few days now, so I leave it by the door while I head to the bakery down the street for breakfast.

The woman behind the counter knows me by name and smiles as she hands me a steaming meat bun. When I leave, shoulders hunched against the wind, she calls, “Have a nice day!”

I wave back.

It’s almost ten by the time I get home with a few items from the convenience store, and I need to be at SM by eleven to check that everything’s been packed. I quickly once-over the apartment, turn the heat off, and call a taxi company. While I wait on the curb outside my apartment building my phone buzzes with a text.

U can drop ur stuff off at SM and meet us at the usual restaurant. We r going 2 check everything after lunch.

I slip off one glove and manage to type out, Ok. Will we be at the airport in time?

Dont worry, the flight will prob get delayed ne way.

Ok.

When the cab arrives I heave my suitcase into the back seat and slide in after it, breathing out, “Incheon Airport” as the door slams.

Lunch is the same as always, painfully boring but deceptively fun with its light small talk and unavoidable “deep” moment in which a girl from clothing lets slip that her boyfriend’s broken up with her and she’s wasted the last four years of her life on a dead end. It’s the same monster dressed in different clothes and I pick at my caesar salad, knowing I won’t touch it beyond the first tentative bite I took when it arrived.

It’s finally over when the last girl finishes her fruity dessert the menu claims is the Healthy Choice. We could take the subway, being so close and all, but instead we pile into three cabs and make it back to SM just in time to sign off on the various boxes of clothes, makeup, and hair supplies. I am asleep on my feet when we pass through airport security and I fall asleep on Jisoo, who is my only real competition when it comes to technical skill, after putting my purse underneath my seat. I sleep through takeoff and beverage services.

…

Promotion time is always a whirlwind of sets, stages, and hotel rooms, but for the first week of EXO’s comeback promotions I am a complete zombie, not quite sure who Bae Hyosoon is and what exactly she has to do with me. It must be good though, because my supervisor compliments me twice, and she’s usually so frugal with handing out praise.

“Is something wrong, Hyosoon-ssi?” Xiumin asks one day while I ask him to look up so I can get to his waterline.

“What do you mean, Minseok-ah?”

“I mean, are you feeling well? You don’t seem well.”

“No, no,” I say, fixing his cheekbones with a brush. “I’m perfectly fine. Work hard for me, okay?”

“Okay,” he repeats as he slides off the chair, hand involuntarily coming up to fix his hair. I’m not sure if his smile is one of reassurance or pity.

…

The weekend offers a brief respite while EXO-M goes to a photoshoot, and I spend all of it looking through the photo album in my purse, the one I carry everywhere, the one my mother put together for me.

A red-faced baby with tufts of black hair and a smile that is among the most hideous I have ever seen, distorting her face and making her eyes disappear.

A toddler pouting in a corner, toys strewn everywhere. Her expression and posture scream I do what I want with my things.

Another toddler, slightly older, smiling brightly and holding a picture she drew. Underneath my mother wrote see page 1, and even though I know what page 1 contains, every time I flip back to page 1, compare the smiles, decide the girl hasn’t changed from her infant self, and smile to myself.

The next page is a portion of a storybook about the girl’s family she wrote. In the particular page, she is queen of some distant land, and her family has come to visit her and see how much she’s grown.

By the time I reach this point in the album, I am slightly frantic, and the next pictures pass by so quickly that their subjects are unclear impressions in my mind, of the girl at various stages of growth, smiling the same smile on the first day of school, shyly holding hands with a playmate, on family vacations, displaying awards, smiling at plastic and ink.

But then I reach the last picture, and it never fails to stop me in my tracks. The girl, whom I have grown to love over the course of the album, holding a certificate of which the only word visible is cosmetology, smiling the same baby smile. Every time I reach this point in the album, I sit back against the wall, or the chair, or the bed, and look at the stains on the ceiling from the neighbor’s broken bathtub, and I wonder what happened to the girl.