Hwayeon's Story (1)

I still remember the first time we met. Siha was beautiful — even I could see that — and you, Seoha, hiding behind her to steal glances at me, were cute enough that I wanted to take a bite of you.

The day the two of you first came to the daycare, the other children swarmed you so thickly I couldn't get close. Not that I'd had any intention of trying.

Siha, with that pretty face and gentle nature, monopolized the affection of every child and every teacher there. You were younger, and the girls adored you for how adorable you looked. I was already dark-tempered and ugly, so I couldn't bring myself anywhere near either of you. I just sat in the corner with a picture book.

Remember? Siha, you think you were the one who spoke to me first. But it was you, Seoha, who came to me.

"Noona. Wha's that?"

"......The Sun and the Moon."

"Can I see too?"

You mumbled it, your tongue still too short for the words, and even I thought you were cute enough to eat. But that was exactly why you frightened me. Next to someone who glittered the way you did — nothing like me — I was afraid I would only come to hate myself more.

"......Go ask your sister to show you."

I said it coldly. Your face crumpled, and you ran to Siha and buried yourself in her arms.

It hurt to watch. I told myself a pain like that was nothing, shut the feeling off, and decided you wouldn't come near me again.

I was wrong.

The next day, and the day after that, and the day after that — every single day, you spoke to me once. I got irritated. I snatched the book and threw it. I made you cry. And the next day, without fail, you spoke to me again.

When I asked why you kept bothering me, you said,

"Don't cry, Noona."

You don't remember?

I wasn't crying. I hadn't raised my voice even once since I started at that daycare. But the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠moment I heard you, Seoha, my chest hurt past enduring. The tears came, and for the first time in my life I cried with all my heart.

Once I started, you welled up and cried with me, and the teachers came running — you too, Siha — all of them trying to soothe him. Me? I just cried alone. No one was looking at me. But you shook off the teachers and Siha, the ones holding you, and came to me. You grabbed onto me and began to sob even harder than I was.

I was sad. My chest hurt. And yet, seeing you weep so much more bitterly than I did, my tears simply stopped of their own accord. So I soothed you. Told you not to cry. Told you I wasn't crying. And you — that child, face a mess of tears and snot, grinning heh-heh at me...

After that day, you started paying attention to me too, Siha, and Seoha came to me even more often. The two of you were the most popular children in the daycare, and with me set between you, the other children began to approach as well. The teachers started looking at me again.

Before you came, I barely spoke. I had no expression. I was ugly, and my temper was worse. If anyone drew near, I got angry, threw whatever was in reach, and glared. Naturally I fell out of the group, and neither the teachers nor the children paid me any mind. Then the two of you arrived, and everything around me changed.

At first it annoyed me. I didn't want the attention. I didn't want the children clinging to me. I didn't want Siha trying to look after me, or you, Seoha, holding my hand and refusing to let go. Being with you meant my feelings showed. I had been drilled, harshly, to hide what I felt in front of other people, and I couldn't understand what the two of you were.

But... forced to spend my days with you, I began, at some point, to think that I was happy. Watching kind, gentle Siha look after the other children alongside me, watching you show off like a puppy, cute as anything — I started to feel that I was myself. That even a child born because someone needed her might have found the place she was supposed to be.

From the very beginning, neither of you hid yourselves. You came to me as you were, and little by little I opened my heart to you.

I don't have a father.

Twenty-two years ago, at a meeting of the Cabinet, someone apparently raised the point that the sitting president — unmarried, and childless — was open to criticism on that count, as a representative of the people. Up until then, my mother's political faith had been that Korea itself was her husband, and the people of Korea the precious children she was bound to protect. But studies had begun to appear, concluding that a woman who went on unmarried and without a child might be taken as urging that same life upon the nation.

The resolve she came to was this. I cannot marry. But I must have a child.

In vitro fertilization. A test-tube baby.

After a long sorting and screening at a sperm bank, my mother selected the sperm of the man judged most superior, fertilized an egg outside the body, and had it implanted in her womb. That was me. It was only natural she could feel nothing for a baby brought into the world without love, and without affection.

For the first year of my life I was nursed on her milk, and from the age of two I began to be educated through the countless specialists in child-rearing and upbringing that she brought in. My clear memories start at four. A great house. A crowd of people around me. Every kind of knowledge poured in without end, and a childhood spent under constant restraint, so that I would never do anything to tarnish my mother's name.

My existence was made public on the website of the Blue House, the presidential residence, but where I was being raised, and how, and what I looked like — all of that was kept secret. Now and then they dressed me until even the people around us wouldn't have known me, and staged an outing with my mother. In substance, though, I went back and forth between the house and the daycare, and every hour left over was given to endless instruction. I was granted no freedom to think, and no freedom to act.

I didn't feel, then, that any of it was strange.

I felt the strangeness when I first went to daycare, at six. No — I felt that the other children were the strange ones. But I, whose assessments had found me five years more mature than my actual age, came to understand that it wasn't the other children who were strange. It was me.

Do those children even think as they live? Why do their parents leave them so neglected? If they aren't educated from the time they're small, how do they mean to survive later? Why don't I have a father? Why doesn't my mother raise me herself, instead of hiring servants?

But the schedule of instruction was so tight I could barely manage my own affairs, and I forced myself to cut off any connection with the outside. Taking in the knowledge the adults poured into me was already more than I could handle. I had no room to spare for the other children. Once a week, for a mere hour, I could see my mother — and for the sake of that hour I studied, and absorbed knowledge, and read books, and repeated my lessons in etiquette, over and over. That one hour with her was a review of everything I had learned in the week before.

I grew more and more exhausted.

Why was I born? What am I? Those children have a mother and a father beside them. Why do I have only a mother? Why doesn't she come to see me? Doesn't she love me?

In the middle of the night, missing her so badly I cried, I called ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠my mother. The answer that came back was this.

Don't cry. I'm all right. I was all right then because I knew nothing, and I'm all right now because I have you.

That year, as my view of what lay around me widened, I learned that my mother held the office of president. And from conversations among the servants of the house, I learned the secret of my birth. More than the fact that she was president, learning that I was a being born without love left me breathless, as if I had been driven to the end of a road. It felt as if great walls of cement were closing in from every side, pressing down on me. A life in which even breathing was difficult went on and on.

Word must have reached her that something was wrong with me, because she began coming to see me once every two days. Nothing changed. Her concern was nothing but pretense. I was so full of the thought that I had been born because I was needed that I took my temper out on everything around me, and throwing things became commonplace.

And into the middle of that, the two of you appeared. A single thread of hope, let down from the sky.

The six months I spent with you were, to put it one way, a rope lowered to me where I had fallen down a well. They were a ventilator, breathing for a patient who was brain-dead. No matter how I explain it, it would never be enough to tell you how much salvation I received from the two of you.

And then the time came to leave the daycare and enter school, and I grew afraid. If we were parted like this, I felt certain I would slide back into the person I used to be. If I went back, I didn't think I could endure it. As if she'd sensed as much, Siha asked which elementary school I would be entering — and enrolled in the same one.

When Siha and I turned seven and started elementary school, we had to leave the daycare behind, and you, Seoha, sobbed and clung to both of us, begging us not to go. Seeing you like that, something swelled in my chest until it ached.

You like me this much...

I was soothing you as you whimpered and cried, and then, those two puppy eyes brimming with tears, you said it.

"Then I'm gonna marry you, Noona."

Heh. You don't remember, do you?

"I'm ugly, so no. Find someone else."

"Nuh-uh! I'm gonna marry Hwayeoni Noona!!"

"Didn't you say you were going to marry Mom, Seoha~?"

"Dad said Mom's his! He said I can't marry Mom!"

"Family can't marry each other. You can't marry Siha, either."

"Why?"

"Because it's the law."

"Wha's a law?"

"If you don't keep it, you get in trouble."

"Then I'll get in trouble!"

"......Then who are you going to marry? Me, Siha, or Mom?"

"All of you!"

"......Marriage is something you do with only one person."

"Mmm. Then I'll do it with Hwayeoni Noona."

"You... like me that much?"

"Noona's hurting, so I'm gonna blow on it and make it all better!"

Your answer caught in my throat. How does this child know what I feel so well?

"......Th-that's why you want to marry me?"

"Because I like Noona!"

"You said you liked me too!"

"I like Sia Noona too, an' I like Hwayeoni Noona too!"

"Tch. Says he likes everybody."

That someone had come to love me — I can't put into words how happy that made me. And that someone was you, Seoha, the one who had become a light for me. I was so happy I thought I might suffocate and die of it.

"All right. When we're grown, I'll marry you."

"Really?! Yay~!"

After that, the three of us played together all the time — until the year Siha and I were in fifth grade, and you were in third. Until that day came.

"I don't wanna marry you."

"......Why? You said you liked me."

"I dunno! I'm just not gonna marry you."

After school, you said you had something to tell me, so I waited behind the school annex, where the other children rarely went. A little while later you arrived, and what you said was a terrible shock.

Looking back now, you were a little off that day — not quite yourself. But at the time, the shock of your words left me barely able to think. By then my mother was personally putting me through special training to survive Phase World. It was agony, in body and in mind, and I suffered terribly. If I hadn't had the hours I spent with you, the hours in which you healed me, I don't think I could have endured it. Hearing what I heard from you, in that state, felt like the sky falling in.

My head went faint. The strength ran out of my legs and they shook under me. My hands trembled. It felt as if the sky were yellowing and drawing near, and the ground were rising up to rush me.

From the day you said you wanted to marry me, I had paid careful attention to my face and my body. But my looks hadn't improved at all. Standing beside Siha, blooming prettier by the day like a lily coming into flower, I had every reason to feel worthless about my appearance. And for some time I'd had the feeling you were avoiding me, little by little. I wondered if it was this ugly face of mine, which no amount of care could fix, so I tended my skin as best I could and threw myself into exercise, trying to lose the weight. It was a cursed body. The face that looked swollen, the figure that spread sideways — none of it would correct.

I was twelve, with a body bloated beyond my years and muscle buried under the fat. My face was always puffy, and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠they mocked me for a pig. On top of that, I had grown so used to having no expression that what little feeling showed on my face was faint. Had you come to dislike me because I was ugly? The shock left my chest numb, but the education I had received let me keep it from showing.

"Is it because I call you squirt?"

"......It's not that."

"If it isn't that, then what is it? If there's something you don't like, I'll fix it, so tell me. Is it because I'm ugly? I've been exercising, trying to lose the weight, and my face... I'll get surgery if I have to. So..."

"What?! No! It's not that!"

Absurd, isn't it. The moment you said it wasn't my looks, anger boiled up inside me.

Then what was it? What was the reason? I liked you, Seoha — I liked you so much! Your smile, that bright nature of yours, how much they had healed me, how much strength they had given me to go on! You were as good as everything I had. And you... you disliked me?

"I like you, Seoha! Do you know how happy I was when I heard you were going to marry me! How happy I was! How hard I tried, for you!! It's because I'm ugly! Because I'm fat! That's why you don't want me!!"

The sight of me angry must have been a great shock to you. You looked stunned, unable to get another word out, and seeing you like that, rage and grief surged up before I knew it, and I shoved you. Hard.

"Agh!"

You went down with a heavy thud.

In that instant, I knew I had made a mistake. The difference in our ages meant I was already taller, and the enormous, regimented training on my schedule had given me a strength no girl my age ought to have possessed. I hadn't thought of any of that when I shoved you with everything I had.

There was a small, dull sound as you fell, and then you lay there without moving, and I knew something had gone wrong. The shock of being rejected, the guilt of having used violence — I couldn't breathe, and my head spun — but the sight of you not moving at all was more frightening still.

Shoved down by my hand, you lay with your eyes closed, still. I held a trembling finger beneath your nose, and thankfully, you were breathing. I took your wrist and checked your pulse. Nothing wrong there. But the dampness I felt at the back of your head. The stone, lying where you had fallen. The moment I saw the blood on that stone, the world went black before my eyes.

When I came back to myself, an ambulance had arrived and was taking you away, and Siha's pretty face was smeared with tears. I looked down at my shaking right hand and saw my phone, still connected to Siha's. And the blood on my left. The moment I understood it was your blood, Seoha, I just wanted to pass out.

Even then, Siha looked at me with worry. I couldn't open my mouth.

I don't remember how I got home from school that day. Guilt and sorrow and misery kept me from sleeping, and the night simply ended. I went to school with a heavy heart, saw Siha's empty seat — she was absent — and at break I went to your classroom and saw your seat empty too, and whatever I had meant to say left me. Siha called. I didn't have the courage to answer.

I couldn't get through the after-school training for a second day, and my mother scolded me severely and punished me. But the fear of what I would do if something had truly gone wrong with you was worse, and I didn't even feel the pain of the beating. That night was harder, and more frightening, and more miserable than the one before. Close my eyes, and I saw you lying there as if dead. Open them, and in the dark my left hand showed red, soaked in blood.

So I didn't sleep the second night either, and when the third day came, I realized something was strange. I had gone to your homeroom teacher to learn which hospital you'd been admitted to, and it struck me then: you had been hurt badly enough to be hospitalized, and yet the teachers, the children, even your parents — none of them had said a word to me.

In the end I bolted out in the middle of class and made it to the front of the hospital where you were staying. And then I only stood at the entrance. I couldn't go in.

I was afraid.

Did someone who had hurt you even have the right to come visiting like this? What if your father and mother wouldn't let me in — what if they cursed me and drove me off? If you had come to hate me, if Siha had too, was I supposed to die now? I grew more and more afraid, until I sank down at the hospital entrance and cried, and then I felt someone stroking my hair.

I lifted my head. I don't know when he had come out, but there was your father, his hand resting on my hair.

"Come to see the boy, have you."

"Sob. Is Seoha all right...?"

"See for yourself."

He smiled, kindly, took my hand, and led me to the room where you were staying. Only when I saw the patients greeting him each time he passed did I understand that this hospital was his. He took me to a private ward at the innermost end of the fifth floor, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and the closer we drew, the more your voices reached my ears, and the tears started again.

"I said I'm fine! I'm completely okay!"

"You cracked your head on a rock and got five stitches! You are not fine and you are not okay, so stay put!"

"Why! I'm bored!"

"Oh, for—! Mom! Moom! Come hold him! He keeps trying to leave~!"

I stopped where I was, tears falling, and your father stroked my hair as he spoke. What he said then still lives in my heart.

My chest went so tight it hurt. And I envied you — truly envied you. The family I had dreamed of was yours.

"Please, just stop running around like that...! Oh? Hwayeon!"

"Oh. It's Hwayeon Noona."

And there you were, smiling at me bright as anything, as if what had happened the day before yesterday had never once crossed your mind. I felt that something was wrong.

"We ran tests after the boy came to. Nothing out of the ordinary."

"He took a wound to the back of the head. A boy can stand a scar or two."

Your mother shot him a wounded glare at the flat way he said it. But I couldn't keep it hidden. While your father, your mother, and Siha were all gathered in one place, I told them everything — how it had happened.

"Hm. So that's how it was."

"Haah... Our boy isn't the sort of child who'd do that..."

"The other day he made Mom cry, saying she was embarrassing, and now he's made Hwayeon cry too?"

I had spoken expecting to be cursed at and thrown out, and the reaction was so different that I was a little — no, very — surprised. I knew how much your mother loved you, Seoha. I had even braced myself to be struck.

"The boy will have had his reasons for saying what he said. So don't hate him. Keep getting along, from here on."

"But Seoha was hurt because of me. I pushed him, and he ended up with a bad wound on his head..."

"That was his fault! Saying something that cruel out of nowhere... These two days must have been so hard, weren't they? I'll apologize for him. I'm sorry."

"No! Seoha's the one who got hurt! I'm the one who should apologize!"

When I heard your mother say that, I felt as if I couldn't breathe. I just wanted to cry. So I started to, and she took me into a warm embrace, and I cried even harder. It was the warmest embrace I had ever felt in my life.

Do you remember what came after?

Yes. You do. Just as you said. When I asked you afterward, you told me you'd fallen and hit your head, but that you'd forgotten why you fell there. You had been startled by the sight of me angry, and while you were still like that I shoved you and you fell. The blow to your head brought on a partial loss of memory.

I wanted to tell you what had happened, too. I was too ashamed, and too sorry, and I couldn't. Your father and your mother, and Siha, said they understood how I felt, and they kept it a secret for me. I learned later that my own mother had gone to them herself and apologized. She had meant to offer material compensation as well, and was refused, with the words that children sometimes fight.

After that, as you know, we were in touch less and less, and when I moved up to middle school, contact broke off completely. Siha entered Euihan Middle School, and I entered Daehan Middle School, so even the time I could spend with her grew short. But I didn't want to be apart from her. We kept exchanging messages, kept calling, met whenever we had the time, and the distance between us never grew at all.

With you, of course, it was cut off entirely. But through Siha, I heard now and then how you were getting on. And the year you entered sixth grade, I was pulled into Phase World.

Phase World wasn't all that hard. Thanks to my mother's Spartan education and training, no truly difficult situation ever arose, and because I awakened quickly as a body-enhancement ability user, lasting the fifteen days was simple.

......Why do you look like that?

You feel wronged?

......?

Anyway. After I became a body-enhancement ability user, the constitution whose puffiness never went down, the heavy bones, the tendency toward obesity — all of it vanished, and I became what I am now. And I worked even harder than before, so I wouldn't lose this. I wanted, when you came of age, to appear before you looking beautiful. And then—

Mm. No. Pretend you didn't hear that.

Thanks to Siha, I knew your story in detail. After we lost contact, you fell into comic books, and into games, and into novels. Around the time you entered middle school, puberty hit, and you started in on strange behavior and a strange way of talking that made things difficult for your mother and for Siha. From then on, I heard, you turned plump and cute. And in your third year of middle school you came to your senses and studied hard, so you could get into Euihan High School, where Siha went. I even knew that the little squirt — small, and plump — had been pulled into Phase World not long ago, and had come back alive and safe.

When I heard you'd been pulled into Phase World, I went blank. But I believed that if it was you, you would make it out safely, and so I was able to come back to myself soon enough. And I started dragging listless Siha around with me, teaching her the ways of surviving Phase World that I had learned. Right after you were taken, she was so fragile it was truly hard to look at her.

And fifteen days later, you came back alive.

That's as far as the story goes. Nothing left you're curious about, is there?