Clenching on her sheets, Soojung tried to shut down all the noises exploding right outside of her room as her parents blasted off into another huge fight of words and how they regretted falling for each other, and how they should do a divorce (which never came through, because along the way, they would calm down and think of Soojung, poor Soojung holding her sobs in her room, still fifteen and will never be ready to see a wreckage of a family).

But she could never take it, she would never be able to make it through the night if she was to shut their voices with music or even smashing everything in her room. She needed another voice that felt like home and not this place close to her ears.

She needed Seulgi and she opened her phone and was going to dial her number when she thought of the previous event in the morning when she saw how Seulgi and Wonwoo clung to each other and she was crying in the rain. Mingyu had pulled her to run to the nearby station before it got heavier. 

She couldn’t dare to call Seulgi when she was this broken. Soojung’d push herself to fix Seulgi of all the things that was destroyed or she destroyed with the tip of her fingers.

Her fingers speeded up to dial the sunkissed boy who’d always give her a smile resembling a lost constellation. It was 8 PM, and Soojung didn’t hope too much. Mingyu was probably with his family-

“Soojung, what’s wrong?” It wasn’t like the usual for Soojung to call him in the night like this. He was in his study table, working on his homework. She was breathing heavily and he immediately knew something was wrong. “Soojung,” he approached her more softly now, his other hand skimming through his black locks and looked to the ceilings of his room with a fluorecent white bulb.

“I’m-My parents are fighting outside and I don’t want to call Seulgi so I called you,” she stuttered, her voice cracked in the middle. “Are you working on something? I’m sorry, I will just hang up I don’t want to bother you, sorry-”

“No, no. It’s okay. I just finished working on my homework,” he glanced to the remaining ten numbers of Math equation still unsolved. “Do you want to talk? What do you want to talk about?”

A pause and a few heavy breathings. He waited for her.

Soojung sat up to her bed, her yellow blanket were up to her arms. Her breathing fell steadier. 

“What’s your favourite memory, Mingyu?” Soojung began and it already made him smile, dropping his pen and relaxed to his seat.

“My favourite memory? Well, there are a lot.”

“Just pick something that pops into your mind.”

When you held my hand for the first time, even though you did it just because we had to make a circle. “It was when I first won a soccer competition in sixth grade. I remember everything in detail, like that day was pretty breezy and it wasn’t too hot or too cold. It was around January and it was my first match so I was pretty nervous-”

Mingyu went on and on about telling his experience, and Soojung drowned herself and focused on Mingyu’s voice, nodding her head even though he couldn’t see then she chose to hum instead. She put her phone on speaker to kill the shouts that drummed and haunted her.

Mingyu’s voice was in a transition, his voice began to get deep but not as deep as Wonwoo's. It was a light bass, and it always spoke friendliness and warmth.

“-how did it feel? To score your first goal?” Soojung hugged the penguin doll beside her.

“It was amazing, it felt like flying was possible,” Soojung chortled at this, and it made him chuckle also, shaking his head on the other line.

“How about yours, Soojung?” Mingyu got up and walked into his bathroom, switching the light on and took his red toothbrush near the sink and clipped his phone by the crook of his neck as he squeezed the toothpaste out. 

“My favourite memory was my worst one-” her voice fell, the humiliation was real that day. “But it’s okay, something good happened beside it.”

“What happened?” His voice was leaking concern and care, though muffled by the foaming mint paste in his mouth, it was still comprehensible.

“You must be brushing your teeth?” a small smile rose to her face, as his voice seemed so. 

He hummed, then covered the speaker and spat into the water, taking a handful of water falling after he the faucet and washed his mouth clean from germs and past dinner his mother had cooked. He faced the mirror in front of him, looking at his sunkissed skin from playing soccer out in the sun, his cursive eyes and black hair swept to the side and he flashed himself a smile with his slightly crooked yet sparkly white teeth to check if everything was cleansed.

He uncovered the speaker from his hand. “Yeah, gotta flosh my teeth for a minute there. Anyway, now I’m listening. I want to hear everything,” he emphasized the last sentence as he took a seat in his chair again.

Her eyes fleet to the window beside her, where the view outside was the empty lawn of her house, across of it was her neighbor’s tall house that seemingly could reach the black and starless sky, blanketed in smoke, unlike her that was all covered in the coziness of Mingyu’s voice and her blanket..

“That day was the day my parents didn’t fight,” the smile in his face darkened. “Yeah, my mother hummed her favourite tune and my father was reading his newspaper in the morning. They usually already shouted to each other in the morning. It was strange, but that was my favourite memory. All the time I was present, they didn’t fight-” her voice sounded so faraway into her memories. Mingyu listened.

“I was too happy, it was so stupid and it was my fault. That day, our teacher asked us what we wished for if a star was to shoot down to Earth. I shot up and told them that I want to live forever,” Soojung prepared for the upcoming laughter, upcoming humiliation from her friend. She could feel herself shaking and tears forming in her eyes. 

Mingyu was silent but she could hear his constant steady breathing. “Do you still want to live forever?”

Soojung slumped down to her bed, facing the white ceiling above her. “I’m not sure. I was so happy back then that I felt life was a good place to live in, after all,” her voice was a mix of brokenness and confusion. 

“Then, Seulgi became my friend. She told me that if I believed in it hard enough, it will come true. I was so thankful that she chose to say that to me, when everyone was laughing at me,” her voice went a pitch higher, and he could tell that she was smiling her smile that resembled the rainbow, iridescent and never failing to rise after the rain poured in. 

Soojung loved the rain, for it washed the world from all sins and impurity. 

When the rain came, they would accompany the sad, being left to their bleeding heart and tears. The rain would bring the flowers back to life. No matter how harsh and cruel the rain was, there would always be a rainbow accompanying them. 

Rainbows existed with the promise coming from the sun itself, its gleam willingly reflected spectrums of light from droplets of rainfall.

Soojung loved the rain and she told him that evening when they waited under the bus station, Wonwoo and Seulgi not seemingly to come to their shelter.

That’s why Soojung was radiant and colourful, because she didn’t hold back and opened up herself to him. Even though it was risky, but she trusted him, that Mingyu wouldn’t laugh at her.

“Your favourite memory is pretty deep compared to mine. I feel like I’m not treasuring my life enough,” he jested, looking at the clock on top of his desk. 9. 35 PM. 

“Don’t be like that, we have our own favourite moments. You must love soccer pretty much then.”

“I am.”

For a while they stayed in a comfortable silence, merely listening to each other’s breathing, alone yet not lonely as they were aware of each other’s presence even three or four neighborhoods away.

“What’s your favourite flower, Soojung?”

After three seconds more of silence, her voice submerged again. “I have one. I even remember its latin name. It’s Diphylleia grayi, more known as skeleton flower. There are none around here though-”

“Do you want to know why?”

There was an honest kind of subtleness in her voice, as if she was going to mention something fragile that would hurt. “Why?”

“They turn transluscent when water hits them, like rain,” then a sigh came following it, sounding mellow yet thoughtful. “Like Seulgi-”

“The closer you are to touch her, the more she’ll hide herself. That's what happened back there," Mingyu's mind flew to his best friend and how much trouble he was in, to love the impossible like Seulgi. 

He heaved a painful sigh, running his hand through his hair. "Then, how were you able to get closer, Soojung?"

"Seulgi pulled me closer. She was the one who inserted me into her life," Soojung uttered, feeling sorry for Wonwoo and how painful it was to see them. Suddenly, it wasn't about her and her fighting parents, her and Mingyu conversing in the night. It all fell to their bestfriends who were at the edge of the cliff.

"Wonwoo likes her so much. He needs her, he's lonely. Soojung, Wonwoo likes her a lot," his voice sounded desperate, as if he was asking for Soojung to coax Seulgi out and it was pathetic, but did it matter to him? No.

Mingyu wanted to break this pen he held in his hand. His friend suffered a lot mentally, even though he rarely spoken of it. Holidays all by himself that most of the time, Wonwoo spent it with Mingyu's family. It was cruel, because he finally found someone he really felt like home, where he was fine being himself who was both rough and gentle at the same time. 

Soojung didn't know what to answer. Sometimes, Seulgi was just too far out of her reach and some decisions she held could never be affected by her own opinion. "I'm sorry, Mingyu. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry-"

And that night, they were both broken for the hearts of their friends who couldn't be put together, even when the both of them were halves of each other's souls.