Work Text:
Graphophobia – fear of writing or handwriting
The line moves along steadily and silently. The sounds of excited chatter and screaming have long since faded into background noise for Taehyung. Grinning widely, he bids the girl before him goodbye with one last clasp of their hands. The next fan sidles up in front of him as Namjoon slides her album across to him. The girl, maybe around his own age, smiles politely and gives a small bow of her head as if to say hello without really speaking. Taehyung attempts to engage her in conversation as he unconsciously picks up the sign pen with his left hand, before flinching and dropping it as if he’d been burned by it. Memories begin flooding back to him in rushes of colour as his vision begins to blur around the edges and the noise in the room becomes louder once more.
It was Taehyung’s first day of school and he was as excited as a boy at the ripe age of 5 could be. His eomma had packed him a special snack of chapssaltteok; rice cakes in various colours that he could share with the friends his eomma said he’d be sure to make. His eomma took him to school in the morning and saw him off with a gentle kiss to his forehead and a delicate wave as he walked through the door to his classroom. He set his large backpack down carefully so as not to disturb the rice cakes nestled in the container within and made his way to sit with some of the other children before the lesson started. Just like his eomma had said, he made friends quickly and they made plans to eat together at lunch. Taehyung didn’t tell them about the rice cakes just yet. He wanted it to be a surprise.
The lesson started punctually at 9 o’clock and the students gathered around on the floor to greet their teacher. Taehyung looked up at her with adoration shining in his eyes, for she was more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen (besides his eomma, of course). The way she spoke was soft and flowing, and Taehyung knew he’d have a happy school year with her as his teacher.
After going around in a circle, everyone having introduced themselves, the teacher led them to small tables around which they sat as she announced they’d be doing art. She said they should draw the thing that was most important to them. Easy, Taehyung thought, picking up a deep brown crayon to begin colouring his mother’s beautiful eyes. He’d just finished perfecting a circle of an eye when the kind teacher appeared beside him, kneeling down.
“Uh-uh, Taehyung-ssi,” the teacher admonished, slipping the crayon from where he had it gripped tightly in the palm of his left hand.
The teacher placed the crayon in his right hand instead, closing his fingers around it and giving his wrist a gentle pat. Taehyung squeezed the crayon unsurely; it feeling so out of place nestled in the fingers of his right hand.
“But seonsaengnim, it doesn’t feel right,” Taehyung admitted in a small voice.
“Oh, but it is! Try it out,” she suggested, gesturing to the paper he had barely gotten a chance to mark.
Taehyung nodded. She was his teacher and she must be right if she was telling him it was. He unsteadily touched the crayon to the paper, attempting to draw a second circle to represent his eomma’s other eye. He did so shakily, the line fuzzy and the resulting shape looking more like a cloud than a circle; nothing like the first one he’d drawn.
“See!” Taehyung’s teacher exclaimed. “Isn’t that better?”
Taehyung bit his lip and stared down at his craft paper where the two circles (if the second one could be called that) glared back at him. The first one looked much more like a circle should than the second one did, and he’d felt much more comfortable when drawing it. However, if the teacher said the second one was better, she must be right. She was the teacher after all.
Taehyung nodded.
“Good boy!” she exclaimed with a smile, giving him a pat on the shoulder as she stood before stooping back down to whisper close to his ear, “And don’t let me see you using your left hand in my classroom ever again.”
Taehyung was startled by her harsh words and couldn’t bring himself to glance up at her. Instead he stared down resolutely at his paper, wondering how he could possibly capture his eomma’s beauty with such a shaky grip.
Taehyung tried, he really did.
He tried his best to draw his eomma. He gripped the crayon as tight as he could without breaking it in half and tried to trace the curve of his eomma’s pretty face the way he saw it in his mind. No matter how slow he went, the lines ended up wobbly. Frustrated, Taehyung transferred the crayon back to his left hand in the hopes of smoothing out the lines into a picture his eomma would be proud to pin up on the fridge.
A smack to the side of his head cause him to draw an ugly line right across his paper, marring the careful drawing Taehyung had done.
“Taehyung-ssi,” his teacher began lowly, wrenching him up to a standing position, “what did I say about using your left hand?”
Taehyung’s eyes filled with embarrassed tears as he felt the eyes of all his classmates on him; eyeing the way the teacher was holding him by his shirt collar. He kept his eyes on his shoes. His eomma had bought them for him to specifically wear to school and he’d been so excited to show everyone the way they looked like a rainbow. Now he could barely distinguish the different colours on them through his tears.
His teacher yanked on his collar to obtain his attention.
“Answer me, Taehyung-ssi.”
“You said I shouldn’t use it,” Taehyung stuttered out as loudly as he could, wanting to be respectful.
No matter if she embarrassed him, she was still the teacher and Taehyung had to be respectful. His eomma had taught him that.
“So why did you?” she snarled.
“It – it was easier than using my right –”
“We don’t take the easy way out here, Taehyung-ssi.” She let go of his collar, stepping back. “Now pack up what you’ve used, art time is over.”
Taehyung packed up in silence, conscious of the way the other students spoke around him but not to him.
When lunch rolled around, Taehyung had mostly forgotten about what had happened during art time and excitedly took the container of rice cakes from his backpack. He padded over to the friends he’d made that morning and sat down with them, placing the container before him and trying to pry the lid off with his chubby fingers.
“Yah! You can’t sit with us.”
Taehyung’s fingers paused from where they’d managed to pull one corner of the lid off the container. He glanced up to the boy who had said the words and found him staring right back.
“Wh – what?” Taehyung stuttered out, fingers curling nervously around the lid.
“You’re a freak, the teacher said so,” the same boy explained.
“Yeah, go away!” the little girl who’d been the first to greet Taehyung that morning yelled.
Taehyung blinked back the shocked tears which were threatening to spill over and he felt like a big baby for crying twice in one day. He hastily pushed the lid back into place on the container and scrambled up from the floor. He didn’t know where else to go; all the other students had already separated out into little groups, each and every one of them sneering at him as he toddled around looking for a place to sit.
Taehyung ended up by his backpack again. He turned his back to the room and faced his backpack as if it were his friend. He didn’t feel like eating at all, but he knew he should eat at least some of the rice cake’s his eomma had made especially for him and his friends – well, if he had managed to make any, that is.
Taehyung sat facing his backpack for the entirety of the lunch break, only disturbed by the teacher who crouched down gently and told him she didn’t mean to be so harsh, but she had to ensure he learned the correct way. Taehyung nodded in understanding, promising her he’d try harder. She’d handed him his drawing and he’d stuffed it into his backpack. There was no way he’d show it to his eomma.
That first day of school Taehyung considered the worst day of his life, but he stayed positive, thinking things couldn’t get much worse. However, despite her kind words of consolation during that lunch break, the teacher continued to insist that Taehyung write and draw and do everything he would with his left hand with his right instead. As a result, he fell behind in classroom activities which he normally would have been good at. He couldn’t form the letters properly once they’d learned how to write them, and he couldn’t make artworks like he’d used to. His eomma had asked him about it once, but Taehyung had said that he was waiting to make something really special to show her (he refused to admit to her the backpack section full of crumpled art paper and shaky crayon lines). She assured him anything he did she would adore, and he wished that were true. It would only be perfect if it were done by his right hand and he just couldn’t control it yet.
By 3rd grade, Taehyung’s teachers and peers would not have noticed anything abnormal about him using his right hand. Of course his peers still left him isolated, but few of them remembered the reason why they did so. He wrote with confidence and would always remember the day he’d taken his first drawing home to his eomma, the work of his right hand, and the delighted smile his mother had given him. If it made her happy, then surely using his right hand was a good thing.
A hard squeeze to his thigh brings Taehyung back to the present and the noise around him filters out until all he can hear is an insistent repetition of his name.
He turns to Hoseok who stops his murmuring at the eye contact, though he squeezes the younger’s leg tightly again.
“You okay?” he questions.
Taehyung’s eyes look at him, unfocused, but another sharp squeeze on his thigh jolts him back to reality. Taehyung shakes his head to rid himself of all the negative memories that had flashed through his mind in the span on a few seconds, as the same girl still stands before him waiting for her autograph.
“Yeah, I’m fine, hyung.”
Taehyung proves his point by squeezing the hand which rests on his thigh and Hoseok seems satisfied, nodding curtly before going back to signing the album for the fan in front of him.
Taehyung picks his own sign pen up again with his right hand, and continues to chat to the fans and sign his autograph. There are no negative thoughts plaguing him anymore, for he is doing the right thing.