The End: Part 2

Sehun and Sunny continued to stand there, staring at her. Sumin stumbled back, her paranoia getting the better of her as she decided to run the other way, back to the lobby. She realized that escaping in such a way would only fuel their suspicion, but she saw no other choice.

She ran down the hallway with a sense of desperation she had never before felt. Her heart was pounding and her thoughts were racing, making her feel like she would soon explode. She imagined this now, her body and mind giving up and violently breaking open, the parts of her flying in all directions as her insides lay exposed in that hallway for all to see. They’d see her for who she truly was then, she thought.

She continued to run, trying to ignore the craziness of her thoughts; however, her escape came to a crashing end when, just after turning the corner for the lobby, she collided right into someone. It was the older man in the suit from the studio.

He looked her up and down, seemingly alarmed by her frenzied state.

“I want to quit,” Sumin suddenly blurted out. “I don’t care about my reputation. Go ahead and smear my name all over the place!”

“What?” He shook his head. “What’s wrong with you today, Taeyeon?” He reached into his pocket for his cellphone and swiped the screens to get to his email. “I’m going to make a note to myself to change your diet. It’s probably all that yanggaeng you snack on. Sugar can make you crazy you know…”

“I’m not crazy,” Sumin said.

The man looked up from his cellphone with a displeased expression. “Fine. Then let me remind you that you’re contractually obligated to—”

“Go ahead and sue me,” Sumin said. “Ruin my name. I don’t care.”

A small crowd had begun to gather in that lobby, lured by the commotion Sumin was creating. She turned in a dizzy circle, overwhelmed by their judgmental stares. And then she spotted Baekhyun in the crowd, his face expressing the same confusion as everyone else.

Sumin pointed to him. “You, of all people, have no right to judge me,” she said. “You’re just as much of a phony as Taeyeon!” She didn’t even realize that she had referred to Taeyeon by name, in third-person. Her anger had taken hold and she no longer had control over herself.

“Noona, I…” Baekhyun was speechless.

Sumin looked around at the rest of them, all there as witnesses to the great spectacle of her end. She felt small in the center of them, as if she was nothing but an insect that they were closing in on. “I hate all of you!” she cried. With that, she turned and ran to the front entrance of the lobby, wanting only to flee from this building and all that it represented. Once she slammed the front door open and felt the air on her face, she felt a sudden sense of relief, and yet this feeling was fleeting for she soon noticed a group of girls standing just outside. Sumin looked around at their fresh faces, seeing within them a sense of idealism that she had never once experienced. They all looked so young and hopeful, so full of life, and for this reason, Sumin immediately hated them. “You’re wasting your lives,” she cried out. She was past the point of swallowing her pain. She was now choking on it. “False idols,” she muttered. “All of them. You’re worshipping false idols.”

The door behind her suddenly opened as the crowd inside that lobby flooded out. The man in the suit looked down at Sumin and then scanned the faces of the girls outside. “Irene, Seulgi… get inside,” he said, as he waved them all in.

Sumin turned around to face the man, confused. She had thought she had been speaking to fans, not to more idols. The crowd around the man started to filter out on the sidewalk around her. She felt trapped, more so than ever before. There seemed to be no end to her suffering.

Sehun squeezed through the crowd, making his way to the front. The afternoon sun shimmered down his profile, and for a moment, Sumin thought that he looked just as Taeyeon had that day in the playground all those years ago.

“What’s wrong with you?” Sehun quietly asked. “This isn’t you.”

No, Sumin thought. It’s not me.

Just then, there was a somewhat indecipherable shout. Everyone outside turned to look down the street where they all saw a girl running toward the building. Sumin looked, too, and upon seeing who it was, she immediately fell to her knees. On the ground now, in the shadow of the idols, she peered through the bodies surrounding her and watched as Taeyeon—the real Taeyeon—continued running toward them, her body slowly and more clearly coming into view. She was wearing Sumin’s clothes.

Just behind Taeyeon, off in the distance a little bit, Sumin could see Seunghyun’s idling van and could just make out his silhouette behind the wheel, but as soon as she saw him, he was gone, his van having quickly pulled around and sputtered away, fading into the distance.

A voice in the crowd suddenly rose above the others. “Is that…?” More voices soon joined in, and once they, too, realized who the girl was, they all turned to look down at Sumin in shock.

Sumin brought her hands to her head as if guarding herself and let her body hunch ever deeper toward the ground, her knees scraping the concrete. She wanted to dig herself into the concrete and dirt, to bury herself beneath this sidewalk until not even an inch of her could be seen. She begged at that moment for a blackout, for her consciousness to slip so that she didn’t have to feel the enormity of this moment, but it seemed that she couldn’t give herself even that bit of reprieve. And so she cried. She cried more loudly than she’d had in her entire life, the pain coming from deep within her, raw, finally emptying out, finally leaving her. Her tears ran down her face, stinging her skin. She fell to her side then, curled up in a fetal position, her cries no longer roaring out of her but instead coming out in breathless yelps, as if there was nothing left to let out, nothing left to give to the world.

She thought of her mother, of all the time she had lain in this very position with glazed-over eyes as she sunk ever deeper into her depression. And she thought of her father, of his body slowly rotting beneath the earth in another part of Seoul. She felt abandoned and empty and she knew, consciously knew, that she needed help.

She thought of Seunghyun then, but rather than feel abandoned and empty, she felt a burgeoning sense of relief, a deliverance from her pain. By allowing Taeyeon to go free, by giving her up in that way, he had allowed Sumin to finally give Taeyeon up and be free, too.

Through the shuffling feet of the idols around her, most of whom were making their way to help Taeyeon, Sumin could see the playground across the street and could just barely make out the swingset in the center. The wind had picked up and each swing, powered by that slight wind, swung gently and lonely, as if being ridden by ghosts. There was something beautiful about the loneliness of that scene, something sad yet beautiful.