The Genius Actor Who Brings Misfortune (1)
“Next question! I'm sure you're tired of hearing this one by now, but I simply can't let it go. How does it feel to have become the youngest actor in history to win Best Actor?”
The corners of my mouth lifted into a soft smile.
“It's hard to believe, honestly. All of it is, really. It still feels strange that I'm on television.”
“Oh, you can't still be feeling awkward! You've been in the industry quite a while now, haven't you?”
The woman conducting the interview was cheerful from start to finish.
Her bright expression only faltered when she glanced down at the script in her hand. She paused for a beat, then pulled an apologetic look.
“The next question is… about your elementary school days. It's been trending online lately…”
“Ah.”
“I'm sorry. I know it's uncomfortable. We can skip it.”
I shook my head at her crestfallen face, as if it were nothing at all, and paired it with an easy smile.
“I heard about it. That there's a rumor going around that I was ostracized in elementary school. Things got a little distorted along the way, but it's not entirely baseless.”
“Really?”
“I got hurt a lot when I was little. To an almost… abnormal degree, actually.”
Then again, kids that age have a harder time finding days they don't get hurt.
But I was a far cry from the children who scraped themselves up through wild, heedless play.
“I suppose because of how bad the injuries were, some of the kids thought I was unlucky. Cursed, even.”
When I finished with a smile, the woman winced theatrically.
“That's such a childish thing to say! Calling you unlucky makes no sense given where you are now. You've broken records with every single project you've been in.”
“Thank you for saying so.”
“Oh, please~ I'm only stating facts.”
For her final question, she asked what acting meant to actor Lee Yeonjae.
I fell silent for a moment, then answered playfully.
“Something I have to do to survive?”
“My, that's more romantic than I expected.”
She clearly took it as a joke, and I smiled back at her laughter.
It's not a joke.
I became an actor to survive.
To put it a little more precisely, I started acting to escape misfortune.
What does that mean, you ask?
Explaining it requires going back several years.
“Today's the seventeenth, right? Let's have number seventeen read from the first sentence.”
In the afternoon light drifting lazily through the windows, every gaze in the classroom swung toward a single point at the teacher's words. Following those stares, the teacher's eyes came to rest in the same place—and began to tremble.
I met that trembling head-on and answered.
“My textbook suddenly went missing. I'm sorry.”
“…Ahem. Then let's have number eighteen read.”
After a brief silence, I listened to number eighteen's voice ring through the room and thought:
Even for me, isn't this a bit much today?
It had started with the mud.
The moment I stepped out of the orphanage on my way to school, there was a wet slap and a deeply unpleasant sensation. Glancing down, I found yesterday's freshly washed sneakers half-buried in mud. Mud, of all things, in the middle of a paved road. I cleaned up as fast as I could, but it was a lost cause.
At school, a soccer ball came out of nowhere and smacked me in the head; on the stairs, I stepped on an ice cream stick someone had abandoned mid-treat and went tumbling down. In math class, I sliced my hand flipping open my textbook, and in music class, my perfectly fine recorder snapped in two and gashed my cheek.
It was less than a month after I'd started elementary school—so, maybe around my tenth visit to the nurse's office.
The school nurse, who had once asked me hesitantly whether I was being bullied, now handed over bandages without so much as a flicker of alarm.
Well, fair enough. After five years of this, it would be stranger if she were still surprised.
I wasn't bullied.
To put it precisely, no one ever came close enough to me to even try. Twelve-year-olds who considered themselves practically adults could be locked in the same room all day, and yet somehow, astonishingly, not a single one had any real interaction with me.
More often than not, I went an entire day without exchanging a single word before returning to the orphanage—so draw your own conclusions.
Wait a second… isn't this also called being ostracized?
I was dutifully copying down the teacher's words into the notebook I'd hastily pulled out when my hand froze mid-stroke. A teacher who said nothing even with my textbook missing, a desk partner who treated me like an invisible man. Hmm. So I was being ostracized.
Though wouldn't “has no friends” be a touch more accurate than “ostracized”?
While I deliberated over a set of options where every choice led to misery, an hour slipped by in an instant.
“We'll start page fifty-two next time. Don't forget your homework!”
The moment the bell rang, the teacher slammed her book shut as though she'd been waiting for it, then shot a quick glance in my direction.
“And Lee Yeonjae—if you can't find your textbook, come by the teachers' office. I'll give you one of mine.”
“Yes. Thank yo—”
She was out the door in a scramble before I could even finish.
At the same time, my desk partner sprang up and bolted toward the kids in the neighboring column.
“Anyone hitting the PC café after school?”
“Can't. I started essay academy today.”
“Brutal. Aren't you already doing coding, though?”
“Who took my—”
I looked around the classroom as it burst into noisy chatter, then rose slowly to my feet.
As I walked toward the back door, I could feel eyes sidling after me. The moment I slipped outside and quietly shut the door, the room grew louder still.
Probably not them, though.
I'd become aware of my outcast status through comparatively less miserable means, but I didn't think the missing textbook had anything to do with it.
These were kids who hated even meeting my eyes. There wasn't anyone in this class brave enough to lay hands on my things just to torment me.
“Where did it go, I wonder.”
Whether some brave soul took it, or whether my textbook had spontaneously grown legs and leapt away chasing its dreams of self-actualization, there was nothing I could do about it anyway.
Most of what happened to me fell somewhere on the border between the surreal and the coincidental, untouched by anyone's particular intent or will—I'd learned that over a long stretch of time.
It was simpler to just accept it as what was going to happen, happened.
Still, today really is unusually bad.
It was barely past noon, and my knee was bleeding while bandages plastered my hand and cheek. Feeling the sting and dull ache—sensations far too familiar by now—I resolved to be careful until the day was over.
Knew it.
Laughably enough, that was my very first thought as my body went hurtling into the air.
So that was what all those accidents this morning had been building toward.
The strange, electric thrill of everything finally clicking into place was enough to dull even the pain blooming across my ribs.
“Oh my god! Somebody call 911!”
My cheek pressed against cold asphalt. Through a blurred field of vision, I could make out a passenger car shrinking rapidly into the distance.
Speeding and a hit-and-run, in a school zone, no less. That should carry enhanced penalties.
…Wow. This really hurts.
I tried to distract myself with other thoughts, but the pain made concentration impossible.
Breathing felt off, too.
“Are you okay?! First, we need—ambulance—”
“Over here—stay with us—”
The voices of people shouting urgently went dull and distant, and even the eyes I'd barely been holding open slipped shut. Darkness swallowed me whole in an instant.
It felt like I remained in that pitch-black dark for a very, very long time.
Slowly, sensation crept back, starting from the tips of my toes.
But the pain I'd braced myself for—expected to come crashing in—never arrived.
And I was still standing in the dark.
“…Huh. So my voice works.”
Raising a hand, I felt my way across my face, my body, my legs in turn. The texture of the fabric under my palm was vivid. My sense of touch was fine.
My voice came out normally, so my larynx seemed intact, and my hearing was unimpaired.
What else was I supposed to check here?
I tried to recall a book I'd read a few days ago, but my thoughts wouldn't string together.
If I can't see anything, is something wrong with my eyesight? No—blurry as it is, I can still make out my own hand.
It was as if I were standing in a room so dark that not a single thread of light got in.
None of the aftereffects I should have at least faintly felt were present, and no hospital in its right mind would leave a patient in a place like this after an accident.
Which led me to one conclusion: this wasn't a physical space.
“So, some kind of lucid dream?”
I'd never had a dream this vivid, which made it fascinating… but was it really a dream?
The senses were so alarmingly real that doubt crept in.
What if none of this was real? Hallucinations, then. Mental derangement? Schizophrenia? What kind of treatment would I need—and how would we pay for it?
I could picture it perfectly: the director's face, pained and helpless. Without meaning to, I pressed my lips hard together—and that was when I sensed something approaching from far off.
Before I could follow the thought any further, it strode right up to me. It looked something like fog, or like a gray cloud. Repeating an endless cycle of scattering and coalescing, it abruptly shaped itself into a form and spoke to me.
“Whoa! This is my first time seeing a human here! You are a human, right?”
Yes. A fog had just spoken to me.
I quietly upgraded the odds of my having gone insane.
“Incredible! How are you even here?”
A woman with a bright, sunny laugh circled round and round me. At some point, the fog had taken the shape of a woman.
To be precise, one of the teachers from the orphanage.
Though plenty was off about it. The way her eyes blinked far too much, the angle of her smiling mouth, even the way her eyebrows arched. The whole impression was nothing like the teacher I knew.
Like someone had crawled inside her body…
Above all, I had watched the fog gather and shift into her shape with my own eyes.
Therefore, that was not her.
So I cut to the chase.
“Who are you?”
“Me? Hmm, how should I put this. Haha! Awkward! It's been so long since I've talked to anyone!”
“Why do you look like Teacher Lee Sihyun?”
“So that's what this human's called? I just pulled out one of the humans who shows up most often in your memory, that's all!”
What could possibly be that entertaining? Watching her grin and push those exaggeratedly upturned corners of her mouth even higher, I quietly closed my eyes.
“Huh? Why are you closing your eyes?”
“…”
“Why aren't you answering? Am I boring now? Hellooo? Human?”
I figured if I shut my eyes, I might wake up from whatever this was—dream, hallucination, or otherwise.
Instead, I only felt the fog's restless fidgeting in front of me more keenly.
Come to think of it, everything around me had brightened since it appeared, as though a light had switched on. Maybe that was why I could see it clearly, in the teacher's shape, forcibly prying my eyelids open.
“Don't touch me.”
“You talk so nicely! Why'd you stop all of a sudden? Were you thinking about something else?”
It felt exactly like a human hand, and that sent chills down my spine.
Whether I glared or stayed silent, the fog kept chattering away.
“You're really quiet, you know. Boring! But then why is your body shaking like that?”
“…Because I think I've lost my mind.”
If I'd gone insane on top of everything else, there'd be no coming back. Maybe I should retreat into the mountains before it got any worse.
No matter how I looked at it, this didn't seem like a dream… but if it was all a hallucination, then was I actually lying in a hospital bed right now?
Standing in a hallway like a lunatic, talking to myself?
Just imagining it made me feel dizzy. I rubbed my face dry with both hands, and the fog, unable to wait out even that, leaned in shamelessly.
“Why would you think that? Hm? What makes you think you've gone crazy?”
“…”
Please, for the love of everything, stop talking.