#jlkabout

01. You are Kim Jinae, and you were born to Kim Sooah and Daejung, two immigrants from Daegu. Your father, everyone swears, loved you and eomma more than anything else. You never believed them. After all, if he loved you so much, then why did he leave you to go to Hell?

02. (At least, that’s what your maid says. Daejung gambled and scammed and drug-dealt till the day a bullet found its way into his brain. A man like that has surely gotten his due reward.)

02. When Richard Levy comes into your life, you are four and he is tall with salt-and-pepper hair and he looks down on you, his stormy suit slicing through the dove-wing Pacific sky. Yet his eyes, pitch black and brooding, glimmer with kindness as he looks into your own watery ones. You have always been easily lost, and all you wanted was an ice cream bar. The convenience store was not too far down the street from the children’s home, but you’re lucky it’s Richard Levy who appears like a guardian angel. He stoops to guide you.

03. You dive deep, deep into the crowds of people, unafraid with the gentle giant at your side. He and the aging old woman who runs the home step into her office and have a chat, glancing at you through the window all the while.

04. He is a bank mogul in Seattle, Washington. It is no difficult choice for the other children to wave as you drive away to Richard Levy’s Pike’s Place condominium.

05. Age ten, and you are the happiest you’ve ever been.

06. “Jinae,” croons Ingrid King, “is too difficult to say. Darling, give her another name.”

07. Ingrid King. You hated her from the moment you saw her. Father always told you to marry a person with kind eyes— someone who looked at you sweetly with love and affection, and you have always assumed he would do the same. But Ingrid— her eyes are pale, pale blue and dead, dead, dead. Her skin is stretched tight across her skull, her fingers skeletal, and her updo’d hair poorly-spun yellow yarn with expensive pearls slapped on. She is the sister-in-law of a friend of a friend… and she, the demon, has her sights set on your sweet father.

08. They plan a June wedding.

09. You attend as Juniper Levy. You chose the name carefully with your father. Juniper— Juniper, like the beloved trees that dot Puget Sound.

10. The bride’s side is surprised to see that the flower girl in her sweet lavender dress, famously beloved by the millionaire Richard Levy, princess of Seattle’s most prestigious banking family… has straight brows over pretty monolids over warm, chocolate eyes. “Juniper...” they coo, “Juniper…” And just like that, they love you.

11. When Ingrid Levy-King has her first child, you become Juniper Levy-Kim. The Levy-Kings, and the Levy-Kim— Juniper Levy-Kim, the fake-fake-fake who was born Jinae, the mousy little Asian girl playing pretend amongst aristocrats. Your father calls you still, with affection on his baritone voice— “Jinae, can you come down here a moment!”

12. “Jinae, my love,” he says, rugged fingers gentle when they pinch your jaw. Ingrid’s bone-stare regards you coolly. “Your brothers and sisters—” Her daughters and sons, you correct bitterly in your mind, “—will need an influence to look up to as they grow. Ingrid suggested you make a name for yourself.”

13. What Ingrid suggested with that slithering, slimy tongue, was to get you away. She can barely contain the disgusted looks, the smiles that are just a little too sweet, too saccharine— it is you, and you alone, who will always be the light of your father’s life. So you, Juniper Levy-Kim, age fourteen, beneath the wing of a private jet, kiss his cheek goodbye. And like that, you’re off.

14. You are to study abroad in Seoul. A surgeon, Ingrid says, or maybe a newscaster. But the plane touches down, and they— Worldwide Records— oh, do they have a different vision.

15. Your pretty face and rosy cheeks and sweet disposition are reminiscent of that of Cherish. Street-casting: it’s brutal and effective, and they lure you in with the promise of fame and love— and maybe, just maybe, they saw your eyes, red and puffy from a long flight spent crying— but maybe they understood that you were lonely.

16. Your father cancels your dorm and enrollment to the private academy and instead rents you an apartment suite right in the glitzy Worldwide neighborhood. There’s nothing that can be done about the tuition; nearly hundreds of thousands of dollars lost cancelling tuition then signing you to Worldwide, but his voice, soft over the phone, assures you that it’s nothing. That there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for his little girl. You bark out a laugh then; even miles and miles away, not even Ingrid King can diminish your father’s love for you.

17. You train for two years. Never mind that you’ve never counted on a beat in your whole life, or that you hardly even know what a pitch is. But your voice is good enough that you debut, at sixteen, with Luxuri.

18. The Nation’s First Love, they call you. One of the Sweethearts of Worldwide. The Next Dahye. You’re glitzed in pink skirts and curled hair for miles. You even have a catchphrase: “Don’t leave me lonely, ‘kay?” It was something stupid from an idiot lip gloss commercial. But you, Juniper Levy-Kim—

19. You’ve fallen in love with love.

20. Every kiss you blow, every heart you make; it’s love, sheer love. Love for your fans, love for your group, love for your father, maybe even a little bit of twisted love for Ingrid King who sent you here. And you gobble up the love you receive in return, lick your sweetly-glossed lips and beam for the crowds who go wild at your request.

21. Then you meet him one day: Woojin. Woojin, Hero’s Woojin; it’s a miracle you haven’t met each other before, being signed under the same company. He’s heard of you— Luxuri has, by now, long since earned the name of the Holy Trinity. He’s charming and handsome and everything everyone says he would be. You’re surprised you thought you knew what love was before, because Woojin— he is it. Your nineteen-year-old heart is smitten.

22. But they find out. Worldwide always does. Woojin walks away unscathed, but you? You are made to fall to your knees and beg forgiveness for a hateless, heart-full crime. You were desperate to feel less lonely, and he gave you that fulfillment; yet he moves on, taking fragments of your heart with him, and you are left behind to scavenge what pieces you can.

23. And what sharp, jagged pieces they are. You go from one of the most loved women in the country to the most hated. You learn what it is like to be controlled, to be manipulated, to be made to beg for forgiveness on a national scale. They call you so many things after; there is no word too low for the girl who stole the heart of the Nation’s Boyfriend. Diva, slut, vixen.

24. That’s all you are.