The Traitor
"Waaaaah!"
I tore around the room with a dinosaur plush clutched in my arms. Lately I had fallen completely for dinosaurs. I still loved Little Magician Rumi, of course, but dinosaurs were every bit as incredible.
I had bought them by the armful off online shops and decorated the room with the lot. One of them was nearly as big as I was. The species were all different, and though I didn't know their proper names, their mere presence was imposing enough.
Up on the desk I played with the dinosaur I'd gotten last time as a bonus for eating a hamburger. Dinosaurs really were the greatest. The floor had turned into a wreck of plushies, but I didn't care. It was my room, and who was going to scold its owner for doing as she pleased?
Someone, however, opened the door and came in.
"Hana!"
It was Haru. Study time had come around again. The problems were easy enough to make me yawn, so I was all set to throw my chest out and get to work with my head held high — until I saw that the workbook she'd brought included Korean. The moment I laid eyes on it, I backed away.
Haru set the workbook on the desk and looked around the room. She seemed to sigh. For no particular reason, I stood there fidgeting, watching her face.
She set about cleaning at once. The dinosaur plushies rolling around on the floor and the Little Magician Rumi dolls were returned to their proper places, and everywhere her hands passed, things grew neat.
Before I knew it the tidying was done, and Haru clapped her hands.
"All right, Hana. Shall we start studying?"
Today of all days, I did not want to study Korean. If only it were math, or anything else...
Come to think of it, maybe God had made me hopeless at Korean on purpose, so I wouldn't turn into a total munchkin once I started elementary school.
Then again, elementary school didn't sound so bad. I was confident I could score a perfect hundred on every subject except Korean, and for someone who loved showing off, that was just right.
"Hana?"
"Yes..."
Korean study, though, was the worst, so I burrowed in among the dinosaur plushies. They were big and soft, more than enough to hide me.
Help me, dolls.
I tucked myself behind them and spoke, dropping my voice low on purpose for good measure.
"Hana's not here..."
Haru grinned and planted herself in front of the plushies.
"Then who are you?"
Her playful voice drifted over. From behind the big dinosaur I thought of as Rumi's partner — the one I had named Rooney — I answered.
"I... am Rooney. Hana's friend."
Still hidden, I worked the dinosaur's head back and forth with my hands. A flawless performance, the sort of stunt that could have fooled even the police. Pride swelled quietly in my chest. I was pretty sure I could make it as an actor.
"Oh? Do you know where Hana went?"
"She went outside."
"Is that so? Then I suppose I'll have to go look for her."
With that, I heard her footsteps growing distant. Fortunately, she didn't seem to realize I was here. I sighed in relief and waited until the sound had faded completely.
Is she gone...?
Certain she had left the room, I poked my head out for a look. She really did seem to have fallen for the act and walked right out, so I started to emerge, slowly.
"Peekaboo!"
Haru appeared all at once, right in front of my eyes, and I jumped. I had definitely heard her footsteps fading — so how had she hidden here? The thought crossed my mind that she might be a hunter.
I scrambled back behind Rooney and, just as before, dropped my voice low and insisted I wasn't there.
Haru, however, snatched up the very plush I was hiding behind.
"Oh, Hana's right here?"
"Ah... aah!"
My perfect camouflage was blown. I tried to burrow back in among the plushies.
But Haru held Rooney's mouth up to her own ear.
"Hana. Rooney says we should study together."
As if Rooney would ever say we should study...
"That's a lie! Rooney's a liar!"
I decided to pin the crime on Rooney. I had trusted that plush with all my heart, and I did not appreciate how it surrendered the instant Haru got hold of it.
Haru, however, showed no mercy. Betrayed by Rooney, I had no choice but to study, and I resolved that the moment she left, that dinosaur was getting a proper education.
"Boss, where did the Starlight Lotion that was here go?"
"Oh, that? It's all sold out."
"Huh? There were ten of them just yesterday, weren't there?"
"I know. A bunch of men in sunglasses bought them up this afternoon... It should come in tomorrow, so if you stop by then, you ought to be fine."
"Ah. All right."
Neither the woman who had come for Starlight Lotion nor the owner of the cosmetics shop selling it paid the sellout much mind. It would be back in stock tomorrow, after all.
In the early days the price had been cheap for what the lotion did, and people had snapped it up in a hoarding frenzy. Since then the price had climbed as high as it was going to, and so much stock had been released that you could see Starlight Lotion all over the streets. Before long it no longer sold out to the last bottle, settling into the life of an ordinary cosmetic.
A hundred milliliters was a small bottle, granted, but you only had to apply it once a day. Among daily users, a heavy hand could make one last a month, and a light hand two. People who saved it for special occasions — weddings, family ceremonies, and the like — could stretch a single bottle past a year. That was why sales, for all their stormy climb, had caught on a speed bump and were holding steady.
It had never made much sense in the first place that such a tiny bottle, priced at three hundred thousand won, would sell in these quantities. Some people insisted it was viral marketing, or an outright scam. The ones saying so, of course, were simply people who had never seen what Starlight Lotion actually did. Anyone who had seen the effects rushed to praise it, and Kim Younggeun — who ran a cosmetics shop in a reasonably busy part of Seoul — was of the same mind.
Early on, like every other shop owner, he had looked on the lotion with displeasure. A revolutionary product that improved your skin on contact had the predictable result that other skincare stopped selling. If Starlight Lotion alone was enough, there was no reason to buy anything else, and in those first days nearly half his shop's revenue had vanished.
Once the price rose and more customers started saving it for special days, though, sales of the older cosmetics recovered to a degree. Not to what they had been. Then, word having gotten out somehow, the number of tourists arriving specifically to buy Starlight Lotion exploded. They didn't stop at the one bottle. They bought other cosmetics too, and the revenue that had slumped at the start not only came back — it grew past where it had been.
"Even so, fifty a week lately still isn't enough..."
Running his small cosmetics shop, Kim Younggeun received fifty bottles of Starlight Lotion every week, and they sold out exactly on the day before the next shipment arrived.
A single cosmetic was leaving him sixty million won in sales every month. An ordinary mid- to low-priced product would have to move several thousand units a month to post numbers like that. When he thought of the three hundred million won an average cosmetics shop brought in, Starlight Lotion — pulling in over seven hundred million a year from one item alone — was a golden goose. Count the other cosmetics on top of that, and the figures climbed higher still.
He decided he would have to raise his incoming order to sixty bottles.
The next day, when the shipment arrived, Kim Younggeun could only jump.
"Driver! I clearly ordered fifty — what is this!"
The driver had brought the Starlight Lotion without any trouble. What had Kim Younggeun jumping was something else entirely.
"Sending only five is completely out of line!"
Fifty bottles should have arrived, but what the driver had delivered was drastically short of that.
The driver, for his part, had something to say.
"I only got the notice today myself. They said they're short on materials, so they have no choice but to cut the volume."
"Telling me to sell only five — that's far too harsh, isn't it!"
"Don't take it out on me. Talk to headquarters yourself."
And with that, Kim Younggeun could only stare blankly at the driver's back as the man headed off somewhere else.
The communities that spent their time talking cosmetics went into an uproar.
Once Starlight Lotion dried up entirely, the Starlight Cosmetics headquarters website descended into chaos.