The Stalker

Seunghyun was standing outside the front entrance again the next morning. Sumin wished he wasn’t. Her rage had kept her up most of the night and, because of that, her face was swollen and blotchy this morning. She didn’t want to deal with Seunghyun today, or anyone else for that matter. In a way, that was why she stayed with her housekeeping job for as long as she had; it allowed her to work alone. She enjoyed stepping into other people’s homes when they weren’t there and imagining herself as owning that house, as owning that life. It was nice to imagine being anyone other than herself.

She pushed the front door open, intending to just walk straight past Seunghyun, but he lowered his arm down in front of her, stopping her as soon as she stepped outside.

“Late night?” he asked, his voice smokier than usual.

She wanted to tell him that it was none of his business, but couldn’t muster the words.

“Sounded like you were screaming and smashing things up there,” he said.

Sumin breathed in deeply. She didn’t remember smashing her computer repeatedly against the hard wood floor last night, but when she had awoken this morning to see all the pieces everywhere, she knew that she must have. Back when she was a child, when these blackouts first started happening, she had been scared of them. She didn’t like missing those pieces of her life. It was like they were stolen from her. But she wasn’t scared of them anymore. She had grown instead to appreciate the lapses because they allowed her to sort of bypass the more tragic moments of her life with the added benefit of not having to take responsibility for whatever she had done during them. 

“Or was it just some violent perhaps?” he asked, almost nonchalantly.

Sumin’s mouth fell open in astonishment over his brashness. “What?”

Seunghyun took a long drag off his cigarette, tilting his head back as he did. He then smiled as he breathed the smoke out of the corner of his mouth, blowing it away from Sumin’s face but never once taking his eyes off her. “Yeah, I can see you as the violent type.”

“Excuse me?” still hung open. No one had ever talked to her like this before.

He leaned forward, his face so close that she could smell the stale, ashy odor of his hot mouth. “Bet you like to tie your men up. Make ‘em beg.” He smiled again, his thin lips curled up at the corners. “And maybe you smack ‘em around a little, too? After all, bad boys need to be punished, am I right?”

Sumin slapped him hard, her palm cracking against his cheek. She was surprised at how fully aware of her actions she was. No blackout, no foggy perspective. She was wide-eyed and alert.

Seunghyun held his cheek and smiled somewhat creepily at her. “Just like I thought,” he said.

She realized then that she had played right into his sick fantasy. Not knowing what else to do, she stomped away and briskly walked in the direction of the subway station, looking back every now and then to see Seunghyun still standing outside their building, watching her. 

Sumin had been to the SM Entertainment building plenty of times before, sometimes lurking on the sidewalk out front, sometimes hiding in the parking lot out back… anything to get a glimpse of Taeyeon. This morning, because there were already half a dozen fangirls hanging around in front the building, she decided instead to head to the playground just across the narrow street and watch the building from there.

She sat on one of the swings and kicked at the ground beneath her, just as she had that day in middle school thirteen years ago. Sometimes, she still felt as lost as that little girl she once was, like she didn’t know her place in the world. Everything about her seemed to revolve around her hatred for Taeyeon. Who was she without that idol to hate?

After a while, she pulled out her phone and checked the online forums, seeing that they were filled with fans upset at the news that Taeyeon was dating Baekhyun. It wasn’t so much the actual relationship that bothered the fans, but the way the couple had handled it. Sumin didn’t care about any of this. She wasn’t a fan. She didn’t feel tricked. She was an anti-fan, if anything, and the fact that people were now turning on Taeyeon made her happy. She felt that, finally, they were learning about the kind of person Taeyeon really was. But the comments weren’t hateful enough for Sumin. She wanted them to be angrier, to really break Taeyeon down and throw her off her pedestal. 

The hours of that day outside the SM building passed like minutes as more fangirls came and went, all without even a glimpse of their biases. Sumin took some pride in knowing that while they had all given up, she had not. No one, apparently, was as determined as she was. All this time, she continued checking the forums, relishing every hateful comment, but more and more, much to her chagrin, she began to see fans defending Taeyeon.

By early evening, Sumin’s stomach was growling loudly and her legs were nearly numb from sitting so long on that swing but, still, she persisted. Another group of fangirls had since arrived at the SM building, but this particular group had brought signs in support of Taeyeon. They held the signs high as they stared up at the blue-tinted windows of the building and began chanting.

“One, two, three! We love you Taeyeon-unni!”

Sumin couldn’t understand this. Taeyeon had betrayed her fans. Wasn’t that enough? How could people still love her despite this? The fangirls’ chant seemed to grow louder and louder, invading Sumin’s head.

“One, two, three! We love you Taeyeon-unni!”

Sumin quickly stood from the swing and covered her ears as tightly as she could while shaking her head to try to dispel their voices, but to no avail. The more they repeated the chant, the crazier it made her. But then the sound of her ringtone cut into the madness, nearly saving her from the brink. She answered the call, and the chant then faded into the background as her employer spoke into her ear, asking where she had been all day and why she hadn’t come to work.

Sumin gripped the phone tightly, wanting to answer but not knowing what to say. She could hear the employer sigh on the other end.

“I have no choice but to let you go,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

The call had ended but Sumin continued to stand there with the phone to her ear, her body trembling until, suddenly, she began to hear the fans’ excited cries across the street at the sight of Taeyeon, who had just stepped out of the SM building. Sumin’s eyes zeroed in on the idol as she moved through the crowd, smiling and thanking each fan. It all appeared to Sumin as if in slow-motion, the scene dramatic in her mind, with Taeyeon the star of that scene… always the star, the blinding light in Sumin’s otherwise dark world.

All Sumin could think about was how unfair it was for Taeyeon to be happy and supported by fans when that scandal should’ve destroyed her, and how unfair it was that, at that exact moment, Sumin had just been dealt yet another blow by losing her job. It seemed, to Sumin, that the world had positioned she and Taeyeon at antithetical ends, like opposing forces, with Sumin destined to descend in a constant downspiral while Taeyeon was destined to ascend ever upwards. If their lives were indeed tied in this way, then that meant that Sumin was suffering solely because Taeyeon existed. The only way, it seemed, for Sumin to be happy, was if Taeyeon just… didn’t exist.