Dopamine (9)
I made a new Twitter account. Wig on, heavy filters and edits so my real identity would be impossible to trace. I erased my face entirely, scrubbed away every mole on my body, slipped on gloves, and posted a photo that showed nothing but my navel. To my surprise, plenty of people still found it.
In the first ten minutes after uploading, the view count sat at one. An hour after the first retweet, it climbed to sixty. From there the numbers doubled every two hours. When I woke up the next morning, it had reached roughly five thousand. A dozen or so DMs had arrived as well.
The funny part was that the messages were no different from the ones flooding my official Instagram. The only real distinction was that the DMs sent to “Seo Jia” were obviously just crude attempts at sexual harassment, whereas the ones landing in this anonymous account contained far more people seriously asking to meet. Of course, no matter how handsome the man, I had zero interest in responding to strangers who slid into the DMs of a woman they didn’t even know. I mentally spat at them and uploaded another photo.
This time I wore pajamas, pulling the fabric tight across my back so the curves showed. The view count exploded again, and the DMs jumped from dozens to hundreds. Even while skimming them, I checked each one, saving the attached photos to my laptop for comparison.
I couldn’t always tell if the pictures were real or stolen, but most of the men looked surprisingly normal. The DMs that reached my Instagram usually came from overweight guys or obvious twigs, yet the ones arriving here mostly belonged to men who at least looked fit. Even the ones that were just close-ups of their dicks still showed visible abs. Instead of the usual sleazy lines, they added confident remarks, as if they genuinely believed they could seduce me.
It was so ridiculous that I lined up the saved photos and gave them a quick once-over.
…Using them as comparison material felt a little unpleasant, but every single one fell short of Kang Juhyuk. Of course, if we ignored Photoshop, plenty were better-looking, some had bigger dicks, and a few looked more muscular. Just none of them had everything at once. Even if they had, I doubt I would have felt any attraction.
“…”
Staring blankly at the naked male bodies, I suddenly felt pathetic. I dragged the folder into the trash and deleted everything at once. None of them were beautiful—just filthy. Strangely, the bodies of my group members and I felt far more attractive than those of men who were supposedly decent. Was it because Kang Juhyuk’s body had become so familiar? Even then, it wasn’t like my heart raced for him either. Maybe I had simply grown tired of men as a species altogether.
Whether I wore the idol mask or wandered around under an anonymous one with my name erased, these bastards were all the same—nothing but horny animals. There was no way I could feel sexual attraction toward someone who seemed mentally younger than me. No matter how handsome or cool a man looked, all I could picture were the piles of male bodies stacking up in my DMs and the commenters leaving malicious replies under my articles.
“Haa…”
I knew full well it wasn’t actually a gender issue. Half the people leaving hate comments were men, and the other half were women. The only difference was whether they wanted to pin me down or not. No matter how much I thought about my bad blood with the man living downstairs, the reason it no longer stirred anything in me probably wasn’t because he fit the male stereotype. Or maybe he was far above average. At least he didn’t smell. Whatever the case, things were moving forward. I still felt no affection for him, yet I couldn’t help noticing the malice I had been holding onto slowly melting away. It felt ironic that I now found the men who were simply trying to fuck me more repulsive than the one who had tried to rape me outright, but that didn’t mean I thought I had gone crazy.
…If the world ended and only three men remained—Kang Juhyuk, my former manager, and one of the guys who sent me lewd DMs—any woman would obviously choose Kang Juhyuk. It couldn’t be helped. He at least had enough charm to seduce my sister.
I considered posting another tweet, but I didn’t feel like it would be fun anymore, so I gave up and ate a late breakfast. Today was still a rest day. Starting tomorrow, the schedule would resume. The false rumors had died down enough, and the fandom wasn’t criticizing me—they were protecting me, calling me pitiful. The atmosphere was so intense that fans looked ready to protest outside the media outlets that had spread the rumors. I needed to show on Instagram that I was fine. In reality I wasn’t fine at all, so I had vented the stress in a strange way, but at least I had seen the true faces of the people who insulted me. For the first time since debuting as an idol, my mind felt strangely at ease. Even when I read the hate comments on communities and article sections, they no longer stirred anything in me. There was no need to care about random strangers insulting me. Just as they said, I was a loose woman, a trashy idol who betrayed her fans. At the same time, I was a pure idol, an idol to the people who supported me. The essence of who I was didn’t matter. Only the mask I wore did.
“Ah.”
I let out a small sigh at the thought that I would have to put the mask back on starting tomorrow, then glanced at my phone when another DM arrived. I hadn’t turned on notifications for the new account, though. Sure enough, the message had come to the account that only had one follower—not the new one. It was him again. The man who had stressed me out this much.
-You okay?
The man who didn’t suit the role of worrying about me. I frowned slightly at the message, picked up my phone, and replied briefly.
-I’m fine.
Up until yesterday it had been a little hard, but today I was okay. I was in good enough shape to calmly talk him down and send him away even if he came charging in. I packed that feeling into five characters and sent it. Without hesitation, he reached straight into my chest and dug his hand in.
-Delete the photos. You’ll get caught.
…How? How did he know? There was no way he could have figured it out. The photos were closer to drawings than actual pictures. I had edited them so heavily and worn a wig. How on earth…?
Don’t tell me he did something to my phone…
-Or take them without the pajamas.
Ah. The pajamas. He had definitely seen me wearing these before. I had worn them when I was sick, and at other times too. But even that didn’t explain everything. How had he even noticed the secret account in the first place? I had only made it yesterday. The account he was DMing from was one he had found by going through my phone himself, so that part wasn’t strange. But how had he found an account with barely over a hundred followers…?
A chill ran down my spine. I checked where my tweet had been retweeted. It wasn’t hard to find my post proudly displayed among all the lewd photos on an account with tens of thousands of followers. Just to be sure, I checked Kang Juhyuk’s account too—he was following that account as well. The silver lining was that only the first photo had been retweeted, not the one in pajamas. With the spoon still in my mouth, I broke into a cold sweat and hurriedly went into my account to delete the pajama tweet.
-Don’t do that kind of thing just because you’re stressed. It’s dangerous.
Not long after I deleted the tweet, a message that sounded more like advice than anything else arrived from him. The source of my stress was giving me that kind of warning. It was so absurd that I couldn’t even form a reply. Still, he wasn’t wrong, so I couldn’t argue either. No matter how I looked at it, what I had done was a dangerous deviation.
-I don’t want to hear that from you.
-I don’t post lewd photos online either.
-I didn’t post lewd photos either.
-Your job is different from mine.
I wasn’t an ordinary person. I was an idol who was constantly under public scrutiny, even at this very moment. Maybe that was why this dangerous deviation had felt so liberating. Just like how I had felt a vicarious thrill when Sua unnie posted a selfie on Twitter not long ago. Now that I had tasted this sense of freedom, stopping the deviation wasn’t easy. It was like a drug. It was the only way I could mock both the people who praised me and the people who slandered me.
-Still, if you’re going to do it, at least hide it well.
-It’s none of your business, so don’t worry about it.
I ignored half of his meddling advice, took off the pajamas I was wearing, threw them in the trash, changed into an ordinary white T-shirt and sweatpants, took a photo, and uploaded it. Defying him so openly felt surprisingly thrilling.