Menhera Stalker (2)
The entrance interview for the Professional Actor Class at Geumhwa Arts High School.
Five admissions examiners sat in front of me, and not one of them was expecting anything remarkable from my acting.
What would you even expect from a middle schooler?
This wasn't an audition. It was a high school entrance exam—not a casting session for a role, but a place to choose the students they wanted to teach. Fall a little short on acting and you could still pass. What mattered wasn't skill so much as showing them potential.
I have to give them something memorable.
They must already have watched hundreds of applicants. Of course it mattered whether you stuck in the memory. Memorable, though, didn't simply mean intense. The prompt for this exam was to perform the acting you were most confident in, and when you told someone to act without assigning a role, most people burst into something forceful. An everyday scene like "There's a new crepe shop in front of the station today—want to go together?" looked like anyone could play it, and it was far too ordinary besides.
The applicants before me, and the ones who would come after, would almost all have no choice but to go intense. If I wanted to be set apart from them, I needed delicacy along with the force.
And the character I understood better than any other was a menhera.
"Ah... I'm so jealous..."
I let the lines I'd prepared leave my mouth.
Ever since I'd become Son Yuna, I had been thinking it through and practicing—what kind of performance I would give. I had always loved menhera characters, and Son Yuna herself had that tendency. From the very start, there had never been a choice besides menhera acting.
Menhera.
The most important thing in understanding a menhera, I thought, was lack. Self-worth stayed low because something was missing, and the feeling changed depending on what, exactly, was gone.
"Why are you loved like that?"
So the theme I'd chosen this time was jealousy.
The setup went like this. You, loved by everyone. Me, hated by everyone. Your family was good, your grades were good, your personality was perfect, and you were beautiful besides—my opposite in every way.
I couldn't permit you to exist in my world. It made me pathetic. Everything I had ever wanted, you held so easily—as if the world itself were denying me, as if I'd been stripped of the right to live, as if even breathing were something I hadn't been forgiven for.
I had to erase you from this world.
"Jealous, jealous, jealous, jealous, jealous..."
I knew that repeating the same line made it read more menhera. Murmuring it under my breath, I moved. Hood pulled up, posture lowered, I closed in on you.
If you disappeared—could I become you?
I knew, dimly, that no such thing would ever happen. Even so, your existence disgusted me past the point of endurance.
And so I reached out—
"Yes. That's all."
I stopped the performance there.
What met me were the admissions examiners' faces, eyes gone wide.
"...Thank you for your effort. Son Yuna, you may leave now."
One of the examiners barely managed to force the words out.
Son Yuna answered with a short "Yes," bowed, and walked out.
The interview room had frozen solid. Every examiner swallowed what they'd been about to say, quietly picked up a pen, and began to score.
"Sh-shouldn't we call the next student...?"
"Riiight..."
Only after they had finished scoring Son Yuna could the admissions examiners manage a word at a time.
Applicants kept filing into the interview room after that, and they too were told to perform the acting they felt most confident in.
"Why did you dump me...! Hic, hnn..."
"Hold on. Student, why are you crying right now?"
"Huh...? W-well, I confessed and got rejected..."
"Yes, we can see you're trying to show us tears. So what, exactly, is the emotional line? Is it only sadness? Aren't you angry at all?"
"Th-that's..."
From time to time the examiners put questions to the applicants. Performances of rage, performances of grief—with so many of them choosing something intense, anger and sorrow were what the panel kept running into. Applicants who could act out precisely why they were angry, or why they were sad... were, as expected, few.
Well, they're kids. Of course.
Confessed and got turned down, so they must be sad? The human heart wasn't a math formula. Students thin on detail were especially common, and with all of them so young, that couldn't be helped.
No. Was this really something you could wave away with a single couldn't be helped?
"Everyone... wasn't Son Yuna's acting rather good?"
Oh Yeo-jeong said.
She was one of the admissions examiners, and already a teacher in charge of the Professional Actor Class. Before she became a teacher, she had worked as an actress. To her eye, Son Yuna's performance was the kind that stayed with you whether you wanted it to or not. The applicants who followed had all been somehow flat, and the comparison was merciless.
At Oh Yeo-jeong's words, the other examiners nodded.
"Son Yuna, you mean. The moment I saw her face, I was thinking of passing her."
"Director, you have to watch the acting."
"A pretty face is a talent too, isn't it? She'll get people talking."
These were students who hadn't even graduated middle school. Naturally, few of this year's applicants had finished acting. The hope was to admit the ones with potential first and let them grow through the Professional Actor Class. Looks, though, were a realm you couldn't do anything about. No amount of accumulated experience would turn an unattractive person into a beauty overnight. Plastic surgery existed as a way to become prettier, of course, but—
"Son Yuna seemed a little mature, didn't she? And she had a peculiar aura."
"The mood around her was calm. And she felt a bit like a land mine."
"A land mine?"
"Like if you poked her the wrong way, she'd go off. Precarious, somehow. Dizzying, maybe?"
It might have been because she'd played a stalker. There was a corner of her that made a viewer uneasy for no good reason. And that, paradoxically, made it impossible to look away until the end. If a land mine might detonate at any moment, you had no choice but to keep watching it.
It was the same with her. Son Yuna had that kind of aura. This, at least, was something surgery couldn't buy. Could another student pile up enough experience to grow an aura like that?
"So I was already a little inclined to pass her on her face alone, and the acting was good too. Her understanding of the role was especially high. Her expressiveness is still a touch lacking, which is a shame."
"I actually liked that. Where would you find someone perfect from the start? I think what matters for newcomers is showing room to grow. That's what makes you want to keep watching."
"That's true. But her understanding of the character... wasn't it a little too high?"
The question landed out of nowhere, and the other admissions examiners nodded.
"Now that you mention it. Let's see... On paper, it doesn't look like Son Yuna has any experience as a child actor."
"And she gave a performance like that?"
The theme of this interview was the acting you were most confident in. The most ordinary strategy was to take experiences you'd already lived and emotions you already knew, and shape them into a performance. These were middle schoolers, their years still short. Which meant—what kind of life had Son Yuna lived, to act like that?
"Sh-she hasn't actually stalked anyone, has she...?"
"Surely not. Even so..."
And yet her understanding of a stalker had been strangely high...
...It couldn't be. Could it?
On the way home after the interview.
"I think I passed."
The words slipped out of me before I knew it. The examiners' reactions had been a little strange. When something in a performance didn't sit right with them, they asked questions or picked it apart. They had watched mine all the way to the end.
So what did that mean? Either there had been nothing to fault, or it had been so wretched it wasn't even worth criticizing.
"And I was pretty satisfied with how I acted."
The first one, then. It had to be the first one. So I decided to believe it was the first one.
Someone had once said Son Yuna's talent as an actress was only middling. Turn middling around, though, and it also meant she wasn't entirely without talent as an actress. It sounded like wordplay, but Son Yuna was, after all, a third-rate villainess in Geumhwa Arts High School Acting Department. Which meant she had at least enough skill to scrape into the Professional Actor Class by the skin of her teeth. If she hadn't been good enough to pass, how would she have shown up as a villain?
Maybe that was why the last few days of practice had gone rather well.
"I'll count it as a pass and pick up some fried chicken."
Just because I'd acted a menhera didn't mean I had to be one. Fretting with anxiety had never been my taste. I was a mentally healthy person, thank you very much.
So I bought chicken on the way home and ate it happily.
Time passed, and a text arrived.