Round 11: Fool Me Twice
Title: Fool Me Twice
Team: Canon
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: 2NE1
Pairing: None
Summary: Dara knew better than this.
Prompt Used: TVXQ - Keep Your Head Down
As soon as she walked through the door and saw Sanghyun propped against the wall by the entrance, poised to pounce, she mentally prepared herself for a lecture.
"I know what you've been doing," he said. He grabbed her elbow as they walked briskly through the SBS lobby. Her five-inch stage heels clacked on the linoleum, punctuating her silence. This was the only time they saw each other when things got really busy: in passing while at work.
"You should stop," he said. He spoke in a way that was neutral, because he'd never order his older sister around, but the barbs of warning were there.
"Don't worry about me," she said. She smiled. The door to the dressing room swung shut behind her.
It was comeback preparation time. This was a mildly irritating period of time for Dara, because she got a lot of interview questions like, "Aren't you excited for your comeback?" and "Aren't you ready to get back to work again?" Work is work, she thought. Somebody else made the hits, she got on a stage. The end. It was difficult for her to muster up a sense of performance as magical when it was so routine, like brushing her teeth for an audience.
Some of these questions came from her bandmates, who fidgeted around the apartment in anticipation. Even with less than two hours of sleep under their eyelids, they managed to spend the 40 minutes of morning prep time speculating about concepts and stages. Dara usually joined in on the general bounciness because it helped her wake up.
"What do you think the title song is gonna be?" Chaerin asked as she smeared foundation across her forehead, a poorly iced cake, her blending slap-shod because she could barely keep her eyes open.
"Why should we have to pick?" Dara said. She shook her freshly-showered hair like a wet Golden Retriever, causing Bom to shriek and duck "All the songs will be our title songs!" Chaerin groaned at the thought.
When Yang Goon sat down in his leather executive chair, crossed his legs, and told them that they would be performing three title songs, Dara felt somehow responsible.
She was on set for a photoshoot when her cellphone starting ringing, and she let it go four times before she picked it up. She had learned over the years to be calculated about these things: three rings was still too desperate, but five made her seem too busy to answer a call.
"Hello?" she answered, forced cheer sounding even more forced with her ear against the cold screen of her cell.
"Sandara? Can you talk right now?" It was a woman's voice. Gentle, but all business.
"Sure, I have about 20 minutes until my shoot. What's the news?"
"The news is that there's no news."
Dara inhaled, tasted hairspray.
"What happened to that lead? The man at the bar?"
"Dead end. Just thought I should keep you updated. We aren't giving up on finding your father, but we're starting over for now. Stay healthy, Sandara."
The call ended with a beep. The words repeated in her head for the rest of the day. Dead End she thought, staring into the lens of the camera, letting the flash make gunshots across her vision. "More life, please," The photographer shouted. "Less deer-in-headlights." She held the compact mirror at 90 degrees, grinning into it. What if he was dead? In an alley somewhere, finally done in by a loan shark. She closed her mouth to keep herself from throwing up under the heat of the studio lights. The lipstick she was supposed to be advertising-#52, Pearl Bombshell-felt like superglue, cosmetic lock-jaw.
"Where do you see us in ten years?" Bom asked. They were in the bathroom, cleaning off their makeup, and Bom's eyeliner alone used up five of their face wipes. This was a question that Dara had to tiptoe around. Bom had faced enough rejection in her life for all four of them, but still had an innocent ideal about where this job would take them. "Is 'job' really the right word?" Bom had asked once, pouting around a spoonful of pudding.
"Ten years is a long time. I don’t know, Bommie," Dara said after she spit out her mouthwash. The truth was that Dara saw herself washed up in ten years, probably sooner. She saw herself in front of the TV, playing mahjong on her laptop while she watched her brother talk about her on a variety show where the host needed to stop first to explain who "Sandara Park" was, since the audience looked confused.
They were out for an all-American drive. Being abroad meant going out on their own, or as on their own as they could be with a cameraman following behind them. Dara sat at the wheel, curling her bare toes into the grooves of the break pedal as they waited for the light to turn green.
"I wish we could just stay here, seriously," Chaerin said. She sniffed deep, her nose wedged between the buns of an In n' Out Double Double
"And make it big," Minji said, and nodded. Her focus was on the women who walked down the West Hollywood sidewalks as if they were on runways, perched on Jeffery Campell heels, their sunglasses big enough to encroach on their hairlines.
Dara didn't get it. Why would you want to be away from home, singing and dancing for people who will always just see you as foreign? Even if it works, and you get attention, why risk them getting sick of you once the novelty of your differentness gets old?
"There are people at home who need us more," she said. And she was, quite frankly, tired of traveling. She pushed into the accelerator, suddenly aware of the faint vibration of her phone in the pocket of her jeans.
Sometimes Dara wanted to tear them down. She wanted to grab Minji by the shoulders and shake her, watch her elementary school bob bounce hard enough to snap her neck, and say, "Nobody's that naive. You have to know that this life will destroy you." She wanted to stomp all of Bom's alternative medicine into powder on the floor, throw it in her face and say, "Grow the fuck up and see a real doctor. None of this shit will fix your problems, you are 26 years old." She wanted to tell Chaerin to stop trying so hard, just give it up, before everybody else gives up on her.
Then there were days when she remembered why she liked this. Like when they fell asleep in the van on the way to the airport, Minji's hair tickling her shoulder and Bom snoring like a fog horn with her mouth open so wide that Chaerin was seeing how many eyeliner pencils she could fit inside. They were given permission to have fun on stage, real fun, not what Dara remembered from the Philippines and 24 hour schedules, when the smiles were stretched thin and threadbare.
The girls used to be shocked and concerned when Dara was sent to the hospital for an IV drip. Bom even sent flowers once, complete with a little "Get Well Soon!" card, which had made her laugh outright. They were still too new to get it then, but this was part of the job description. She held her arm out, limp, as the nurse struggled to find a vein. Needless to say, there were no flowers anymore. Her eyes were still adjusting to the familiar, bleak white of the walls. 15 Symptoms of Food Poisoning, a chart across from her bed announced. What to Do if You Have Swine Flu. She imagined the chart that would tell her what she really needed: How to Find Your Deadbeat Dad. She looked at the screen of her phone, which was way too bright for her eyes right now, and it announced that she had three missed calls. Sanghyun, Chaerin, Jiyong. None of them the call she needed.
Dara worried the most about Minji, because she saw her tired, younger self in the girl. Dara thought about how different she'd be if she hadn't let herself burn out so early. Would things have changed if she'd been given just a few more years to be the awkward foreigner who nobody talked to before she became a star, and then did what all stars do: explode? But Dara realized when she watched Minji in the practice room and noticed that she was still smiling even though this was hour number 12, and the mirrors were getting foggy from their body heat, that maybe Minji was determined in a way that Dara had never been.
"It's okay to be tired," she told Minji. She wiped the younger girl's forehead with the bottom of her own baggy shirt. "Admitting that you're tired doesn't make you weak." Minji frowned at this.
When Dara went to bed she stared at the bottom of the bunk bed on top of hers, studied the shifting lump that was Chaerin probably having bad dreams about being on stage naked. It's okay to be tired, Dara assured herself. It's okay to be tired of this.
She was damp, a thin layer of sweat between her stomach and the fabric of her shirt. They were practicing in sweatpants and heels, which made her feel stupid, but she had learned a long time ago not to let other people know when she felt stupid. So she grinned and struck a sexy pose, hiking up one leg of her sweat-soaked pants.
"How does it feel to do this again?" Chaerin asked, bangs plastered to her forehead by sweat. She was lying on her stomach, knees bent so that her feet kicked above her. Sometimes Chaerin seemed to act her age.
"I mean," Chaerin continued, "This is your second chance, right?"
Second chances are weird, Sandara thought. You watch your contracts slowly expire. You take your sleazy, dominatrix-inspired Maxim photoshoot. You track the slow decline in membership at your fan forum. You even watch the activity at your anti-fan forum dwindle too, and for some reason that hurts the most, because it means that nobody even cares enough to hate you anymore. All your sand is in the wrong end of the hourglass.
Then suddenly, there's that spotlight. She had a hard time explaining what it's like to feel the lights on your skin again. It's photosynthesis, all those fame-activated chloroplasts back in action. But the second time around, you can feel the clock ticking in your ears. If you're smart, you use it as a metronome.
"Sometimes I feel like I'm an addict, and this is my relapse," she said. Chaerin laughed because Chaerin appreciated the morbid side of Dara, in a way that most people didn't.
Dara was in the Inkigayo dressing room when her cellphone went off. It was an unidentified number, and she wasn't really allowed to accept those for obvious security reasons. But it could've been the call she'd been waiting for, the "we found him, for real this time." She frantically checked her hair in the mirror before she picked up.
"Hello?" she said.
"Hello." Her stomach flipped about 12 times, organ arobatics. It was her father. He was alive.
"Dad? Hi." She collapsed hard onto the couch, both shaking hands on her cellphone. "Hello."
"You’ve been looking for me."
"Yeah, Dad, I--"
"They said you’ve been looking for me," he repeated, words slurred. It took Dara a second to realize he was drunk. It had been so long since she’d heard his voice, she forgot what he sounded like sober.
"Yeah. I was looking for you. Guess I found you," she said, her body wilting into the cushion of the couch. She remembered Sanghyun's warning. This was what she got, for assuming her father could leave for two years and become somebody else. There was a painful silence during which she considered just hanging up.
"I watch you," he said, suddenly, his words a little clearer. "On the music shows, when I can. You and your brother." There was yelling in the background, and the sound of glass breaking. Bar fight, maybe. "I'm proud of both of you. And sorry. So sorry for what I put you through."
"Thanks, Dad," she forced herself to say. "That means a lot."
"Can I call you sometime?"
"Sure. But I can get pretty busy, you remember how it is. I have to go."
"I miss you," he said.
"I have to go now," she whispered.
Dara hung up, closed her eyes, and let the back of her head hit the wall.
The next day, she submitted a request to the company for a new cellphone number, citing anti-fan harassment. Dara knew about second chances. She knew there was a risk on both sides, on the one taking the chance and on the one offering it. But gambling was not an inherited family trait.
And when she got on stage the next week, felt her eyelashes heavy with mascara and the lights burning her face, she did it for the girls standing next to her, who were breathing just as hard as she was, sweating even harder than she was, and who deserved this more than anybody. Because who was she to say, "hey, wake up," when here she was, still dreaming the same hopeless dream.
Poll Round 11: Fool Me Twice
Team: Canon
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: 2NE1
Pairing: None
Summary: Dara knew better than this.
Prompt Used: TVXQ - Keep Your Head Down
As soon as she walked through the door and saw Sanghyun propped against the wall by the entrance, poised to pounce, she mentally prepared herself for a lecture.
"I know what you've been doing," he said. He grabbed her elbow as they walked briskly through the SBS lobby. Her five-inch stage heels clacked on the linoleum, punctuating her silence. This was the only time they saw each other when things got really busy: in passing while at work.
"You should stop," he said. He spoke in a way that was neutral, because he'd never order his older sister around, but the barbs of warning were there.
"Don't worry about me," she said. She smiled. The door to the dressing room swung shut behind her.
It was comeback preparation time. This was a mildly irritating period of time for Dara, because she got a lot of interview questions like, "Aren't you excited for your comeback?" and "Aren't you ready to get back to work again?" Work is work, she thought. Somebody else made the hits, she got on a stage. The end. It was difficult for her to muster up a sense of performance as magical when it was so routine, like brushing her teeth for an audience.
Some of these questions came from her bandmates, who fidgeted around the apartment in anticipation. Even with less than two hours of sleep under their eyelids, they managed to spend the 40 minutes of morning prep time speculating about concepts and stages. Dara usually joined in on the general bounciness because it helped her wake up.
"What do you think the title song is gonna be?" Chaerin asked as she smeared foundation across her forehead, a poorly iced cake, her blending slap-shod because she could barely keep her eyes open.
"Why should we have to pick?" Dara said. She shook her freshly-showered hair like a wet Golden Retriever, causing Bom to shriek and duck "All the songs will be our title songs!" Chaerin groaned at the thought.
When Yang Goon sat down in his leather executive chair, crossed his legs, and told them that they would be performing three title songs, Dara felt somehow responsible.
She was on set for a photoshoot when her cellphone starting ringing, and she let it go four times before she picked it up. She had learned over the years to be calculated about these things: three rings was still too desperate, but five made her seem too busy to answer a call.
"Hello?" she answered, forced cheer sounding even more forced with her ear against the cold screen of her cell.
"Sandara? Can you talk right now?" It was a woman's voice. Gentle, but all business.
"Sure, I have about 20 minutes until my shoot. What's the news?"
"The news is that there's no news."
Dara inhaled, tasted hairspray.
"What happened to that lead? The man at the bar?"
"Dead end. Just thought I should keep you updated. We aren't giving up on finding your father, but we're starting over for now. Stay healthy, Sandara."
The call ended with a beep. The words repeated in her head for the rest of the day. Dead End she thought, staring into the lens of the camera, letting the flash make gunshots across her vision. "More life, please," The photographer shouted. "Less deer-in-headlights." She held the compact mirror at 90 degrees, grinning into it. What if he was dead? In an alley somewhere, finally done in by a loan shark. She closed her mouth to keep herself from throwing up under the heat of the studio lights. The lipstick she was supposed to be advertising-#52, Pearl Bombshell-felt like superglue, cosmetic lock-jaw.
"Where do you see us in ten years?" Bom asked. They were in the bathroom, cleaning off their makeup, and Bom's eyeliner alone used up five of their face wipes. This was a question that Dara had to tiptoe around. Bom had faced enough rejection in her life for all four of them, but still had an innocent ideal about where this job would take them. "Is 'job' really the right word?" Bom had asked once, pouting around a spoonful of pudding.
"Ten years is a long time. I don’t know, Bommie," Dara said after she spit out her mouthwash. The truth was that Dara saw herself washed up in ten years, probably sooner. She saw herself in front of the TV, playing mahjong on her laptop while she watched her brother talk about her on a variety show where the host needed to stop first to explain who "Sandara Park" was, since the audience looked confused.
They were out for an all-American drive. Being abroad meant going out on their own, or as on their own as they could be with a cameraman following behind them. Dara sat at the wheel, curling her bare toes into the grooves of the break pedal as they waited for the light to turn green.
"I wish we could just stay here, seriously," Chaerin said. She sniffed deep, her nose wedged between the buns of an In n' Out Double Double
"And make it big," Minji said, and nodded. Her focus was on the women who walked down the West Hollywood sidewalks as if they were on runways, perched on Jeffery Campell heels, their sunglasses big enough to encroach on their hairlines.
Dara didn't get it. Why would you want to be away from home, singing and dancing for people who will always just see you as foreign? Even if it works, and you get attention, why risk them getting sick of you once the novelty of your differentness gets old?
"There are people at home who need us more," she said. And she was, quite frankly, tired of traveling. She pushed into the accelerator, suddenly aware of the faint vibration of her phone in the pocket of her jeans.
Sometimes Dara wanted to tear them down. She wanted to grab Minji by the shoulders and shake her, watch her elementary school bob bounce hard enough to snap her neck, and say, "Nobody's that naive. You have to know that this life will destroy you." She wanted to stomp all of Bom's alternative medicine into powder on the floor, throw it in her face and say, "Grow the fuck up and see a real doctor. None of this shit will fix your problems, you are 26 years old." She wanted to tell Chaerin to stop trying so hard, just give it up, before everybody else gives up on her.
Then there were days when she remembered why she liked this. Like when they fell asleep in the van on the way to the airport, Minji's hair tickling her shoulder and Bom snoring like a fog horn with her mouth open so wide that Chaerin was seeing how many eyeliner pencils she could fit inside. They were given permission to have fun on stage, real fun, not what Dara remembered from the Philippines and 24 hour schedules, when the smiles were stretched thin and threadbare.
The girls used to be shocked and concerned when Dara was sent to the hospital for an IV drip. Bom even sent flowers once, complete with a little "Get Well Soon!" card, which had made her laugh outright. They were still too new to get it then, but this was part of the job description. She held her arm out, limp, as the nurse struggled to find a vein. Needless to say, there were no flowers anymore. Her eyes were still adjusting to the familiar, bleak white of the walls. 15 Symptoms of Food Poisoning, a chart across from her bed announced. What to Do if You Have Swine Flu. She imagined the chart that would tell her what she really needed: How to Find Your Deadbeat Dad. She looked at the screen of her phone, which was way too bright for her eyes right now, and it announced that she had three missed calls. Sanghyun, Chaerin, Jiyong. None of them the call she needed.
Dara worried the most about Minji, because she saw her tired, younger self in the girl. Dara thought about how different she'd be if she hadn't let herself burn out so early. Would things have changed if she'd been given just a few more years to be the awkward foreigner who nobody talked to before she became a star, and then did what all stars do: explode? But Dara realized when she watched Minji in the practice room and noticed that she was still smiling even though this was hour number 12, and the mirrors were getting foggy from their body heat, that maybe Minji was determined in a way that Dara had never been.
"It's okay to be tired," she told Minji. She wiped the younger girl's forehead with the bottom of her own baggy shirt. "Admitting that you're tired doesn't make you weak." Minji frowned at this.
When Dara went to bed she stared at the bottom of the bunk bed on top of hers, studied the shifting lump that was Chaerin probably having bad dreams about being on stage naked. It's okay to be tired, Dara assured herself. It's okay to be tired of this.
She was damp, a thin layer of sweat between her stomach and the fabric of her shirt. They were practicing in sweatpants and heels, which made her feel stupid, but she had learned a long time ago not to let other people know when she felt stupid. So she grinned and struck a sexy pose, hiking up one leg of her sweat-soaked pants.
"How does it feel to do this again?" Chaerin asked, bangs plastered to her forehead by sweat. She was lying on her stomach, knees bent so that her feet kicked above her. Sometimes Chaerin seemed to act her age.
"I mean," Chaerin continued, "This is your second chance, right?"
Second chances are weird, Sandara thought. You watch your contracts slowly expire. You take your sleazy, dominatrix-inspired Maxim photoshoot. You track the slow decline in membership at your fan forum. You even watch the activity at your anti-fan forum dwindle too, and for some reason that hurts the most, because it means that nobody even cares enough to hate you anymore. All your sand is in the wrong end of the hourglass.
Then suddenly, there's that spotlight. She had a hard time explaining what it's like to feel the lights on your skin again. It's photosynthesis, all those fame-activated chloroplasts back in action. But the second time around, you can feel the clock ticking in your ears. If you're smart, you use it as a metronome.
"Sometimes I feel like I'm an addict, and this is my relapse," she said. Chaerin laughed because Chaerin appreciated the morbid side of Dara, in a way that most people didn't.
Dara was in the Inkigayo dressing room when her cellphone went off. It was an unidentified number, and she wasn't really allowed to accept those for obvious security reasons. But it could've been the call she'd been waiting for, the "we found him, for real this time." She frantically checked her hair in the mirror before she picked up.
"Hello?" she said.
"Hello." Her stomach flipped about 12 times, organ arobatics. It was her father. He was alive.
"Dad? Hi." She collapsed hard onto the couch, both shaking hands on her cellphone. "Hello."
"You’ve been looking for me."
"Yeah, Dad, I--"
"They said you’ve been looking for me," he repeated, words slurred. It took Dara a second to realize he was drunk. It had been so long since she’d heard his voice, she forgot what he sounded like sober.
"Yeah. I was looking for you. Guess I found you," she said, her body wilting into the cushion of the couch. She remembered Sanghyun's warning. This was what she got, for assuming her father could leave for two years and become somebody else. There was a painful silence during which she considered just hanging up.
"I watch you," he said, suddenly, his words a little clearer. "On the music shows, when I can. You and your brother." There was yelling in the background, and the sound of glass breaking. Bar fight, maybe. "I'm proud of both of you. And sorry. So sorry for what I put you through."
"Thanks, Dad," she forced herself to say. "That means a lot."
"Can I call you sometime?"
"Sure. But I can get pretty busy, you remember how it is. I have to go."
"I miss you," he said.
"I have to go now," she whispered.
Dara hung up, closed her eyes, and let the back of her head hit the wall.
The next day, she submitted a request to the company for a new cellphone number, citing anti-fan harassment. Dara knew about second chances. She knew there was a risk on both sides, on the one taking the chance and on the one offering it. But gambling was not an inherited family trait.
And when she got on stage the next week, felt her eyelashes heavy with mascara and the lights burning her face, she did it for the girls standing next to her, who were breathing just as hard as she was, sweating even harder than she was, and who deserved this more than anybody. Because who was she to say, "hey, wake up," when here she was, still dreaming the same hopeless dream.
Poll Round 11: Fool Me Twice