After her parents diligently pick her up from her school parking lot at 12 o’clock sharp, dragging her band gear to the trunk of the car and forcing herself up the stairs to her room seem like a marathon. Krystal shuts the door to her bedroom softly and falls on her mattress, ready for a nice long date with sleep. Her eyelids are drooping lower and lower, and she begins to slip into a half asleep trance, when her phone rings. It jolts her out of the realm of sleep and she fumbles for the phone, slightly irritated at the interruption, and proceeds to hit her head on her bedside lamp when she flicks on the lights. When she squints at the illuminated screen of her handheld, all she can see are the words “Blocked Number” for the Caller ID, but she knows exactly who’s calling her at such an hour as this. There’s only one person Krystal knows who would call her in the middle of the night. 

    She answers it with shaking hands that nearly drop the smart phone onto the carpeted floor and with an even shakier tone that cracks with each syllable she whispers into the microphone. “H-hello?” Krystal sounds like a lost child in the mall searching for her parents aimlessly, and it makes her wince as goosebumps crawl over her skin. There’s nothing on the other line for a while except for the slightest sound of muffled breathing Krystal has to strain her ears to catch, she’s been longing to hear just the tiniest bit of Sulli’s voice for so long, she doesn’t want to imagine herself hearing it. She can feel her heart beating within , rapidly thumping against her rib cage and pulsing in her ears, she can feel the adrenaline coursing through her veins as she chokes out the name of her ex-girlfriend.  “Sulli?” 

    Krystal hears a sigh, and a little thud, as if someone’d banged the back of their head onto a wall. And then the other line speaks, and Krystal knows it’s her. “Goodbye.” The words were soft, as if they were fingers caressing her cheek. And then the line disconnected harshly, leaving Krystal with the fleeting words that are etching themselves into her mind and her skin and leaving scars on her flesh in the shape of the letters. Because that was like all of Sulli’s goodbyes had combined themselves into a massive tidal wave that crashed into Krystal and realization dawned on her. She tossed her phone on the ground, tears threatening to bloom in her eyes, and pulled the covers over her, falling into fits of restless sleep where she fought off a girl with brunette hair and angelic face.

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    “What’s that?” Amber asks, face screwing up in curiosity as she peers over her blond friends’ shoulder from the desk behind her. It’s Monday, and two days before, Sulli had been on the phone and Krystal was gazing intently at a photograph on her screen. The tomboy leans in closer, her face hovering inches away from Krystal’s ear, and speaks once more. “Isn’t that the photo Sulli sent you a month ago?” And Krystal feels her blood freeze within her veins, because Amber had discovered a secret she’d meant to keep hidden from everyone that wasn’t herself. Hurriedly, she tries to exit out of that particular screen, jamming her ivory thumb on the home button of her iPhone, but the handheld takes more than three seconds to escape from the sight. “Um, no?” Krystal tries to weakly deflect the idea, but Amber knows better, and now her friend is staring worriedly at her, not with judging eyes, but with eyes filled with concern. 

    And Krystal doesn’t know what’s worse, the fact that Amber pities her, or the fact that she knows she has no valid reason to keep those photos except for truth. Krystal lowers the phone into her lap slowly and tries to keep a straight face plastered over her features, which were currently shaking ever so slightly. And the truth was that she wasn’t over Sulli like Sulli was over her, she was still cut up and nursing wounds silently. So that still meant Sulli’s photos living in her phone, yet to be deleted, but she’d bet anything that her own photos on Sulli’s cellular had already been erased a long time ago. Krystal knew that it would have been best to deleted the photographs, the stupid selfies, the secret snapshots of her ex slurping noodles cutely - but she knew that the memories would just stay alive inside he