Stephanie feels awkward all of the time now.

It's not a new feeling, and she could hardly say it's surprising—she'd expected it from dropping everything to come to this country—though she didn't expect just how different things would be.

She feels like a string pulled taut with every step she takes and every bow she reminds herself to make.

By the time she gets to go home the only thing she wants is to finally get to relax rather than feeling so tense and honestly on the verge of snapping.

Not that she gets to go home—not really—but she at least has what home is supposed to be now.

And she needs that, she needs a place where she can finally let out that breath she feels like she carries stuck in her chest all day. Somewhere she can slouch and not smile, and maybe, if only for a second, not need to care about everything so much.

It sounds like a dream .

And it is.

She didn't expect to be roomed with the very personification of proper Korean culture when they finally were designated an actual dorm for the group.

Like… it's not like she hates Juhyun or something. Gosh, no! It's just that she always makes Stephanie feel so… unbearably awkward and lost.

And Stephanie is told that, as the older one, she is supposed to take care of their youngest. She's supposed to nurture her and teach her, or something like that, and honestly, she feels like she needs to coddle her.

But she doesn't understand how she's supposed to do that—and people just expect her to because she is older.

Barely two years!

If Stephanie is a plastic string pulled taut, Juhyun is… a bowstring. Whatever would be tauter than Stephanie feels.

She can't help looking at Juhyun sometimes and wondering if the girl ever lets herself take a breath.

Maybe it's just her—maybe Stephanie is just clueless. She's seen Jessica with Juhyun, and it's like night and day from what she feels. Jessica is definitely better at this whole older sister thing.

Or maybe it's just because Stephanie hasn't known Juhyun that long. It's weird for her to force a familiarity that she doesn't feel, just because she is supposed to now.

There are lots of maybes she can think of, but the one sure thing for Stephanie is that whenever she walks into their shared bedroom and Juhyun is there—studying or reading or… well, that's pretty much all she seems to ever be doing—Stephanie simply cannot get herself to relax.

She has to let the tension on her shoulders carry her all the way to her bed on her side of the room, and there's always this feeling that if she makes any type of misstep, Juhyun's eyes will catch it. And Juhyun will know, then, that Stephanie just isn't right for this whole thing. She'll just know.

Maybe Stephanie is overthinking it.

Or maybe not, because the screech Juhyun lets out one day when she notices how dirty Stephanie's socks are from walking around the dorm all day without slippers on make Stephanie feel pretty justified in her impressions.

**

It gets to a point where she can't take it anymore. She just can't.

She thought she could, but she is Tiffany now— all the time .

Tiffany is supposed to be polite and bright and talented. Tiffany is supposed to be everything anyone—even herself—could ever possibly want.

But Tiffany doesn't bow deep enough, or frequently enough, and Tiffany doesn't use the right words she's supposed to, and Tiffany forgets for a second too long where she's supposed to step—because no matter how much she tries to fool everyone else, Tiffany is still just Stephanie.

It hits her one night, this desperate feeling that she needs to breathe . And she can't manage to do it with anyone else around her, it's just too much.

Her eyes are tearing up before she can help it. She doesn't think as she sidesteps the dorm building through the blur of her tears, she just does and misses home—her actual home—with everything she has.

She can't get there, obviously, and that knowledge makes her tear burn stronger and has her feet taking her further away from the dorm in search of someplace she can bear to be in.

Turns out that right now that's a McDonald's.

She has to admit it's kind of funny, if only a little bit, that this seems to be the most comforting place she could find, where she feels least foreign.

The menu is still very much in Korean, obviously, and the burger she mumbles for is far from the In&Out she'd get with her friends after school back home, but the greasy scent that permeates the place and the sticky taste of the junk food she hasn't had in what feels like years now somehow manage to loosen her up bit by bit.

She doesn't want to be Tiffany right now. Not that she even could be while she breaks both curfew and her diet, and certainly not while looking as disheveled as she must look as she slouches in a solitary booth by the back of the first vaguely homely thing she could find roaming the streets.

Her phone is off but it feels like it's glaring at her from its spot on the table every time she takes a bite. It's not long until she has to stuff it into the pocket of her fluffy hoodie to take it off her sight and her mind.

She slurps her large soda loudly through the straw, so upset she keeps going until she runs out of breath and has to gasp for a couple of seconds.

She doesn't even realize she's stopped crying (and when did she even

start?) until she stops halfway through eating her burger and realizes she can't finish eating it. She knows she's stopped crying because that realization makes her want to start doing it again—she used to wold down one of these in a minute, but now it just weighs her stomach down as she rests her forehead against the sticky table and closes her eyes to push down her nausea.

**

She very much expects Juhyun to be asleep when she gets back.

She had in fact planned her whole damn return around the girl's strict schedule (doing schoolwork, then her skin routine, then reading something not school-related, and then finally bed, in that precise order) to make sure that that would be the case.

She just wants to not have to deal with anyone. She wants to lie down without showering or doing a skin routine, and not think of anything other than the e-mail she wants to write home tomorrow. (She's learned long ago to never write those in the heat of the moment, lest she wants people ready to drag her back to the States until she manages to convince them that things are fine .)

Juhyun always sticks to her schedule, except on days she stays up super late to catch up on schoolwork she's missed because of schedules, so Tiffany feels reasonably confident as she tip-toes through the dark dorm. She can't see any light peeking from underneath the door of their room, so she thinks she's safe as she slowly steps into the bedroom.

"Unnie?"

She freezes.

Crap.

With a muffled sigh, Tiffany's shoulders tense instantly. She should've known better.

She can make out the shape of Juhyun sitting up in bed as Tiffany braces herself and finishes stepping into the room, the door slipping closed quietly behind her. Any sleepiness she'd felt ready to succumb to has disappeared as if doused in cold water, even though she feels exhausted to the bone.

She doesn't want to explain herself. She doesn't want to see judgment in the other girl's eyes, and she doesn't want to feel chastised for trying to feel like she—like Stephanie —is still living .

"Yeah," she manages to force out in response as the other girl stays sat in her bed.

As her eyes adjust to the darkness, everything else starts sinking in.

She went out unannounced, unapproved, and unsupervised.

She broke curfew.

Broke her diet.

She even ignored all contact attempts except to reply to Taeyeon's last text just to say she was coming back without addressing anything else.

None of it sounded like a big deal, like anything but her just taking a damn moment —not until now. Not until she finds herself standing there in the dark and running it back through her mind.

She might as well have flipped them all the bird and said screw it to it all, all her efforts to make something of herself and redeem the image she feels she got stuck with.

constricts as she swallows tightly. She can't see Juhyun's eyes, but as she steps carefully towards her bed, it's like she can feel them burning the back of her neck as her own eyes once again start pricking with tears.

"Go back to sleep, Juhyun-ah." She barely recognizes her own voice.

.

She instantly feels awful as she hears the sharp inhale from the other girl.

She didn't mean for that to come off as dry and harsh as it did, nor sound every bit as stressed as she feels, but her own voice rings back at her accusatorily in the silence that follows as she steps into her sleeping clothes with her back turned to the other girl.

Her shame feels like it's building up by the second, the night's events not helping any, but she forces herself to gulp down the guilt as she lifts her sheets to step into her bed. The mattress feels cold, and it's tougher than her bed at home, and as she brings her sheets up over herself and shivers, she realizes the breath she'd been able to finally let out tonight is still stuck inside, weighing down on her again.

"Okay," she hears the girl whisper at last, timidly, before she hears the rustle of sheets as she settles back down too.

There is silence for a while.

Then, a sniffle.

And then: "I'm sorry."

The words startle Tiffany into turning over to try to look at the other bed. She's never heard Juhyun sound like that before: her voice was shaky, and Tiffany is sure she wasn't imagining the wet stuttered breath that came with it when another one comes.

"I c-can ask to switch rooms," Juhyun adds when Tiffany doesn't say anything in her shock.

"What? No!" Tiffany exclaims hushedly, feeling awful. "Why?!" Her voice is loud, too loud for the hour, but so is her heart in her eardrums as she starts panicking.

Is Juhyun going to rat her out? Was this finally one line too far that Tiffany crossed? Is this when she becomes the truly untrustworthy one?

She gets no answer to her question beyond another meek apology from the other girl. "Come here, please," she pleads, ushering the girl over and waiting until Juhyun finally pads across to her bed.

Tiffany tugs at her elbow to get her to sit down and wracks her brain for something to fix the mess she's caused. She knows that Juhyun can probably smell the grease on her from this close, and she's getting flashbacks to all those times Juhyun's seemingly taken a note straight from the managers' books with her curious questions. She doesn't know what to say to convince Juhyun that she—

"I tho… I thought you weren't coming back," Juhyun admits, interrupting Tiffany's frantic thoughts on their tracks.

And she remembers.

She remembers when they all thought they had a final line-up, for real this time. For the last time. And she remembers a still younger Juhyun and how hard she'd cried onto Jessica's shoulder when her friend (gosh, what was that girl's name?) had gotten cut anyway.

Tiffany didn't know them very well at all back then—she's ashamed to say that she'd felt a hint of relief at the lessened competition until she saw the puffy tear-streaked faces of the ones that were closest to the girls that left.

She remembers realizing how ty she'd feel to lose the girls who had somehow managed to wiggle themselves into her life and into the dream she thought she'd had for herself.

"Juhyun-ah…" Tiffany lets out, sitting up closer to the othe