I Returned as the Childhood Friend of a Genius Actor
I used to think I'd seen it all in my time on this earth.
After all, working in broadcasting meant weathering more than your share of turbulence, and I'd been confident I could face just about anything without blinking.
"And yet somehow, I never once considered regression as a possibility."
I ran a hand over my cheek in the mirror.
Being young really was a cheat code, apparently — the moment my fingers made contact, soft baby fat greeted them like an old friend. My child's body still didn't quite feel like my own, though. Maybe I'd adjust once I was at least a middle or high schooler.
"Tae-oh, did you get something on your face?"
"No, Mother."
"Is there any toy you'd like? Anything at all?"
"I'm fine, thank you."
"Goodness, why is our boy so poised for his age?"
"Poised is a good thing, isn't it?"
"Whose son are you, anyway? ...Then again, I'd probably just sigh and complain if you acted too much like a kid."
A mother and father twenty years younger than I remembered were there with me, too.
A full year had passed since my regression. Having opened my eyes at six, I had somehow already turned seven.
Just then, someone pressed our doorbell.
"Tae-oh~. Go answer the door for me, sweetie."
"Yes, ma'am."
My parents told me to do it without even checking who it was. I sometimes wondered if they weren't being a little too careless, but then, I already knew exactly who was at the door. I hurriedly threw on some clothes and went to greet the little rascal.
The moment my seven-year-old arm stretched up to open the door, a child far, far smaller than me popped into view.
"Hi."
"...Hey. Good to see you."
"Read me a book today too."
"You read it."
"No way. I like your voice, Tae-oh!"
"Oh my, Yu-rin, you like Tae-oh's voice?"
"Yeah! Tae-oh's voice is the best!"
"More than Mommy's?"
"Yeah!"
"...Ahem."
The little rascal was, of course, none other than a very young Seo Yu-rin.
Every time I see her, it puts me on edge.
Was it because she was the reason I died? No — I hadn't exactly died because of her, more that I'd stupidly followed a woman who took her own life. Whatever the case, something about this girl always made my stomach twist.
From behind her, a woman who looked like an exact copy of Seo Yu-rin — her mother — patted my head.
"Yu-rin will be in your care again today, Tae-oh. I'm always sorry about this."
"It's no trouble at all. I'd be bored on my own anyway."
Yu-rin's parents were a dual-income couple who worked weekends, too.
I had no idea what kind of work kept them out of the house more often than not, even on weekends, but since no one could leave a small child home alone, our house had effectively become Seo Yu-rin's kindergarten.
My mother greeted Yu-rin warmly.
"Yu-rin, honey~ Goodness, how are you this pretty again today? If you want anything to eat, just say so, and have fun playing, okay?"
"Thank you."
"You and Tae-oh are both such little grown-ups. You two really suit each other."
"Mom."
I shot her a glare.
She just snickered and made herself scarce. When I turned back around, Seo Yu-rin had vanished — and my bedroom door was standing open.
"I told you not to climb onto my bed without permission."
"Don't wanna. It's soft here."
Instead, Seo Yu-rin patted the space beside her. Get over here and sit down.
Who was the host here, and whose room was this? The guest had most decisively become the master of the house.
Seo Yu-rin in this state was simply invincible.
Why? Because if I didn't come over, she'd burst into tears on the spot. A little girl's tears were a weapon with no counter — and when she happened to be the adorable girl next door, there wasn't even a fight to be had.
I sat down beside her.
"Heehee."
Seo Yu-rin beamed at me the moment I took the book.
She was, beyond any shadow of a doubt, beautiful.
Looking at a girl who hadn't even lost her baby fat, anyone would normally think cute rather than pretty. This child was different. It was as if someone had sculpted the very concept of beauty into human form.
Or maybe it was just that I knew the future Seo Yu-rin, and the two images were overlapping in my mind.
This is the kid whose mind was supposed to break?
She'd said it herself — Seo Yu-rin's mind had been deteriorating since she was very young. The trouble was, I couldn't get a feel for exactly when it started. No matter how much I turned it over now, no answer would come.
Should I make her get regular checkups every year?
I filed that thought away for later and opened the book.
"Jiiiiiii—"
Because Seo Yu-rin was glaring at me from the side, shooting lasers out of her eyes.
Snow White.
A fairy tale included in the children's storybook compiled by the Brothers Grimm.
The Frog Prince, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel — all the tales we know so well belonged to this same collection.
And just to be clear, "Grimm's fairy tales" doesn't mean fairy tales with pictures in them — it means tales written by the Grimms. Dig a little deeper and you'd find they weren't even fairy tales to begin with, but that's a story for another day.
"Once upon a time—"
And so, with the time-honored opening every fairy tale demands, my recitation began.
Seo Yu-rin, with the ease of long practice, laid her head down on my thigh. This was her default posture.
"And so the Queen asked her mirror, 'Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?'"
"Snow White!"
"That's right. That's what the mirror said. Snow White! The Queen's blood boiled from head to toe the moment the mirror added an exclamation point on top of it. What? I'm not the most beautiful anymore? Fine then. I suppose Snow White simply has to die."
"That's so mean!"
"I know, right? And the world's absolutely full of beautiful people, too."
The old Grimm tales did have a certain cruelty to them.
It was only natural — they weren't really children's stories at all, but folk tales that had circulated among adults of their era.
Snow White, poisoned by an apple out of pure jealousy.
Rapunzel, locked in a tower out of greed.
Hansel and Gretel, lured in by a house made of sweets.
Reread them with adult eyes, and the stories are so merciless you wonder how children were ever allowed near them.
I've never read them myself, but I hear the first editions were worse still. What I held in my hands was a Snow White sanded down and polished, again and again, until it was something a child could bear to hear.
"And then Snow White took a bite of the poisoned apple the witch gave her, and she fell down and never got up."
"Waaang!"
"I know. There was truly no other way to describe that situation than waaang."
Eating, without a moment's hesitation, the poisoned apple from a witch who had materialized out of nowhere in the middle of a forest. Was there any waaang-ier situation in all the world? If there's a granny lurking deep in the woods, you start with suspicion — that's rule one. Maybe Snow White's world would have gone differently if it had operated on martial-arts-novel logic, where children, old women, and women in general were all to be feared.
The seven dwarfs, who had guarded her so devotedly, couldn't even complain about how unfair it was.
"Then a prince on a white horse came and saved the fallen Snow White, and the two of them lived happily ever after."
"Wow!"
And with that, the ending that every fairy tale on earth is contractually obligated to deliver.
Seo Yu-rin bounced up and down on the bed, apparently beside herself with joy.
Well, to be fair — it was only because I'd come here dopamine-soaked from the modern era that it felt stale to me. To a kid, a good-triumphs-evil story like this probably landed like a charm.
My parents had been worried lately that I was too adult for my age, so I figured studying a bit of childlike behavior wouldn't hurt.
Seo Yu-rin plucked the book from my hands and started flipping through the pages.
"There's a scene I wanna try acting out!"
My body flinched.
...She wanted to act? Not unusual for a little kid, honestly.
Except this was Seo Yu-rin's acting we were talking about.
Truthfully, I didn't want to watch. For some reason, the Seo Yu-rin I'd seen in my past life had performances that turned your stomach inside out.
"Go ahead."
After all, I knew the plot of Snow White far too well.
Whatever scene she picked, I was confident I could match her instantly. Anything, so long as she didn't suddenly lie back on the bed and demand a kiss from her prince.
And that was the moment.
Both of Seo Yu-rin's hands clamped down on my cheeks.
A faint heat rose from my face. It wasn't embarrassment — it was just that her grip hurt.
"Hey, hold on. That hurts—"
"Mirror. O mirror."
I tried to pry her hands off. Useless.
Seo Yu-rin was already fully submerged in her performance.
Madness swirled in her eyes. Her face drew even closer. Close enough for our noses to touch, she breathed the words:
"Who is the fairest of them all?"
My breath caught.
The emotion came through, vivid and unmistakable.
Jealousy.
Only — the flavor was subtly different from the Snow White I knew.
Beneath the jealousy, a faint tenderness was blooming. This wasn't the jealousy of a queen resenting that someone more beautiful than her existed.
It was the jealousy of a woman whose mirror — her mirror — had dared to speak another's beauty aloud.
The Queen knew.
She knew perfectly well that Snow White was fairer than she was.
And even so, she had hoped — desperately — that her mirror would give her back a lie instead of the truth.
The Queen was in love with her mirror.
The grip that seemed ready to tear my cheek clean off even now was proof of it.
This was not the Snow White everyone assumed they knew. It was Seo Yu-rin's own reinterpretation of the tale — an emotional throughline that belonged to her alone.
This is a seven-year-old's interpretation?
What frightened me most was her expressiveness — the way she conveyed that entire storm of feeling with nothing more than a shift of her expression.
Talent that defied belief. An actress born of heaven, so gifted it raised goosebumps.
Technically, of course, my past life was leagues ahead of her. But the sheer power of her emotion — the way it reaches out and grabs you — is on a completely different dimensional level.
What on earth had happened to her in that previous life, to make her lose this? It was a brilliant, maddeningly brilliant performance—
"Answer me. And if you don't— Ayah?!"
—though admittedly, that was no reason to yank my cheek hard enough to peel it off.
I gave her a flick on the forehead.
"My cheek hurts."
"Wha—?! I'm shorry!!!"
Only then did Seo Yu-rin register the state of my face, and she descended into a full-blown panic.
It did hurt, I'll admit. Enough that my child's body reflexively welled up tears in self-defense.
Hah. In my past life I could've been pinched a hundred days straight without feeling a thing. The toll of having a child's body was becoming very, very real.
"I'm, I'm shorry… I did a bad fing…"
"Ah, come on. It's fine, just—"
"WAAAAAANG!!!"
The dam broke. Tears, everywhere.
It took my mother no more than a few seconds to open my door and sweep into the room.
"Sniff… I did, I did a bad fing…"
"I told you, I'm fine."
Explaining the whole incident from start to finish didn't take long.
"Er — sorry about that, Tae-oh."
"It's all right."
"Next time, Mommy will buy you anything you want. Anything at all…!"
I did get a knuckle rap on the head for it, but measured against a granted wish, a single noogie was a bargain. Should I ask her to buy me some Sam sung or Hooynix stock?
...No, that might be pushing my luck a little too early.
"By the way — Yu-rin was acting?"
"She was really good at it, actually."
"Was she now?"
My mother clearly wasn't buying it. How good could a little kid's acting possibly be? I could read the thought on her face. And to be fair, that was the perfectly natural reaction.
My father, who normally kept his distance whenever Yu-rin and I were together, decided to weigh in.
"I could hear you from the other room. Yu-rin did some acting?"
"Yes."
"Tae-oh, how was it?"
"She was good. Really good."
"Yu-rin, could you show us one more time?"
"Yesh!"
Seo Yu-rin performed the same scene from my bedroom, once more, exactly as before.
Maybe it's the audience — that earlier potential isn't quite coming through.
Even so, it was a superb performance. If the earlier take had been a perfect hundred, this one sat somewhere around ninety.
My father, mouth hanging open as he watched, soon seized Yu-rin's hands and dropped to his knees.
"Yu-rin. Have you ever thought about becoming a child actress?"
"A child actresh?"
Both of Seo Yu-rin's eyes lit up like stars.