First Snow
Yaebin, Jieqiong

“Yaebin,” Yaebin pauses the music, turns, “Yaebin, you’re done, right?”

Nayoung-unnie pokes her head into the room.

Well, technically Yaebin isn’t exactly done. She could do with a few more rounds of practice before their next evaluation but yes, she has the dance moves down proper and she could head back home if she wanted to. Also, if Nayoung-unnie needs her to be done, she will be done. Yaebin has realized that she will do many, many things for Nayoung-unnie. She has not yet figured out why that is - perhaps because Nayoung-unnie is serious and does not ask for help unless she needs it, perhaps because Nayoung-unnie is the most adorable person on earth.

Who knows. Yaebin certainly does not.

Yaebin nods.

Nayoung-unnie makes that face, that one face that Yaebin can never say no to, “Could I ask a favor of you?”

Yaebin tugs her iPod out from the speakers, “Yeah, sure.”

Nayoung-unnie rolls her eyes, “I haven’t even said what it is.”

Yaebin shrugs, “You’re a reasonable person, it’s gonna be reasonable.”

She beams as Nayoung-unnie blushes, mutters something like that sound suspiciously like I don’t deserve you guys.

“Well,” Yaebin coils up her headphones from the pile she left them in, “What’s up?”

Yaebin has not really interacted all that much with Pinky.

Well, they have spoken, she has corrected the other’s dance moves before, but Pinky knows Jeonghyun better and they mostly hang out with each other. Or something. Yaebin does not know all that much, she has only been at Pledis for less than a year.

How she finds herself sitting in the train with Pinky heading out to buy pipa strings she does not know.

Well, she does know.

“Well,” Nayoung had said, “you said you played the drums, right? So maybe you’ll be able to show her around somewhere you can buy strings?”

Yaebin had opened to counter that drums have nothing at all to do with pipa strings, but then closed it at the look on Nayoung’s face.

“Sure,” Yaebin had said, which, she supposes now, is how they are in this situation.

Pinky is fiddling with something on her phone as the train whizzes through the underground.

“Hey,” Yaebin says.

Pinky looks up, smiles at her.

“Are they like, special strings? I mean, I know they’re for the pipa, but are there like levels of strings? Like-” Yaebin frowns, makes a hand gesture, tries to think of how to evoke a sense of high-quality strings with just her hands, unsure if she should expect Pinky to understand.

Pinky shrugs, “I’ll take whatever they have.”

“Ah,” Yaebin says, wants to ask if there are specialty Chinese shops, then shuts , because if there were, they would be on the way there instead of to Nakwon. Maybe.

Yaebin has not actually been here before.

Yes, she plays the drums, yes the drums are an instrument, but no, she has never actually bought her own before. She is 13 going on 14 and a drum set is kind of a bunch of money.

There a whole ton of shops, all really shiny, most with a ton of really shiny guitars with crazy price tags on them. Yaebin gulps. This is probably a mistake, probably a really bad idea. They probably don’t sell pipa strings.

She tears her eyes away from the million won guitar hanging in the storefront to find that Pinky has already gone into the shop.

“Excuse me,” Pinky says, “do you sell strings for the pipa?”

“The what?”

Pinky shrinks a little, “The pipa. It’s a-It’s alright. Thank you for your time.”

She grabs Yaebin’s hand and tugs her out of the shop. Yaebin can feel her hands shake a little.

They stop about halfway down the hall, well, Yaebin does. Pinky looks back at her, confused.

Yaebin fiddles with the straps on her backpack, takes in a deep breath, “You asked in this shop, so I’ll ask in the next one.”

Pinky’s eyes widen.

Well.

They sit in McDonald’s, Yaebin scooping ice cream out from a sundae, Pinky nibbling on an apple pie, having asked basically every shop in the building if they sold pipa strings.

“So,” Yaebin asks, “this is probably a dumb question, but you play the pipa?”

Pinky looks up from her apple pie, nods.

“Is this like, urgent?”

“Urgent?”

“Like, do you need the strings now?”

Pinky pauses.

“Oh,” says Yaebin, realizing that strings rarely break unless they are being used, “were you practicing for the evaluation?”

Pinky nods, “Yeah.”

Yaebin frowns, “Then what are you going to do?”

Pinky’s eyes narrow a little.

Yaebin holds her hands up, “I just want to help. I-I- Nayoung-unnie asked me to help, so all I want to do is help.”

Pinky shrugs again but she twists a napkin between her fingers, “I’ll just do a dance or something.”

The evaluation is next week. There is time to learn a new dance but not all that much time to properly master it. Yaebin does not know exactly how critical it is that they blow the coaches away with this evaluation but a week really is not a long time.

She scoops the last bit of ice cream out of the bottom of her sundae, “C’mon. There’s still places we can go.”

“Eh?”

“Uhm,” Yaebin says to herself, as they step out from Daelim station, “I think I might not have thought this through.”

The 40 minute train ride to a place that the internet said might have something has ended up putting them in a place that looks like China alright, but the more important part is that it is now dark, and in the middle of winter, whatever shop might have sold pipa strings is likely to be closed.

And it is snowi