Wearing Her Face
Description
Sumin has lived her life alone in the shadows, shrouded in darkness. Her isolation has perpetuated a hateful obsession with a certain idol, Taeyeon, who tormented Sumin over a decade ago when they were in middle school together. All these years, her grudge against the idol has been building, and soon it will break. Mad desperation will take hold, and she will seize the chance not for revenge, but for something far worse.
Minor characters: other EXO and SNSD members
Foreword
Thirteen Years Earlier…
Sumin sat idly on the swing as she repeatedly kicked at the dirt mound below her until the shine of her black shoes was lost underneath a coating of gray dust and grime. She looked down at what the shoes had become, somewhat fascinated by how the dirt had changed them into something different, something ugly. They seemed to fit her better now, she thought. She looked then at the three girls to her left, each of whom occupied a swing in that set, their long black hair blowing around their faces as they swung back, and then fluttering out behind them as they swung forward. They looked beautiful, like three angels in a race to reach the clouds. Sumin, contrarily, hadn’t dared to let her feet leave the ground. To do so was to give up control, and that scared her more than anything else. She needed to feel the ground, to dig herself in, even if it meant feeling buried, feeling trapped. At least that was real. Up there in the air, there was nothing real. There was just the light and the weightlessness. It was a dream. And dreams were not real.
She reached into her pocket for the key to her house, which she then squeezed inside her hand. She did this sometimes, enjoying the feeling of the cold brass key cutting into the warmth of her palm. It reminded her that she was real, that she could feel something. Her mother had given Sumin the house key the previous fall, having grown tired of having to pick her up at school each day. “Now you can walk home and let yourself in,” her mother had said. Since then, her mother spent most of her time on the couch in front of the television, sometimes sleeping, but more often existing in a sleep-like state, the lights of the television screen reflecting off her glassy, half-open eyes as she lay there day after day.
Sumin continued to sit on that swing, kicking at the dirt while still squeezing that brass key, but then the sun emerged from behind the school up the hill, nearly blinding her. Through that light, a silhouette appeared. Sumin used her hand as a visor to see the girl standing in front of her. It was Taeyeon, who was the envy of all the other thirteen-year-old girls in their class. Everyone knew that Taeyeon was going to be a star. She had already been accepted to SM academy, traveling all those hours north to Seoul each Sunday to hone her vocal skills. Behind Taeyeon was the same crowd of girls that always followed her wherever she went.
“What are you doing?” Taeyeon asked, looking down at Sumin.
What happened next was like a dream, broken into nonsensical fragments. One moment she was staring up at Taeyeon, transfixed by the sunlight that seemed to surround her, and the next she was on the ground, her hair whipping across the dirt as she struggled below Taeyeon’s weight, trying to fight her off. Sumin could smell the ripe, earthy stench of the dirt, but more powerful than that was the perfume Taeyeon was wearing, a floral scent that, now mixed with the stench of the dirt, briefly reminded Sumin of her father’s burial… until the cacophony of shrieks and hollers from the crowd of girls surrounding that playground fight pulled her out of that memory. All this time, Sumin could feel the blood, how hot it was as it burst out from each new scrape down her face and down her arms. And yet, while her outside wounds were b with this heat, what she felt inside her, at her very core, was cold. It was an absolute hatred for Taeyeon, and it would consume Sumin not only that day on the playground, but each day after that for years and years and years…
A/N: This is going to be a dark and angsty story that will
have suggestive scenes and language, so please read at
your discretion. As always, be sure to subscribe to know
when a new chapter is up, kindly upvote if you're enjoying
the story, and comment along the way with your thoughts!
"Right off the bat, I know that I can't completely trust
[Sumin], that seeing things from her point of view isn't going
to tell me the whole story." - The Library Review Shop
An entry for Wicked Writing Contest
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