Author's Note: Okay, so please read before continuing because unlike all my other stories, there won't be continual Author's Notes in the following chapters. I feel it kind of ruins the vibe/mood etc. of this story if there are constant immersion-breaking notes at the beginning and/or end of each chapter, so this will be the only one until the very end.

This is going to be slightly different to my other stories. The writing style will remain wholly the same as something like Stargirl or I Don't Know You but Would You Like Some Coffee? but the chapters will be shorter. They're going to be more like "snapshots" than full-on chapters, which is the type of story I'm aiming for here, since it's different for me. They'll still probably be 2500-4000 words per chapter, which I guess it still long lol, but compared to most of my chapters, which are normally minimum 5000, then yeah, they're shorter.

Anyway, that's about it. And just because I won't keep parroting it at the start of each chapter, comments and discussions are always welcome, and always will be! I love hearing feedback, theories, discussions, praise, negativitiy, whatever - just anything from readers is amazing. Anyway, I've rambled long enough, and I'm sure you're ready to read, so enjoy!

<3

October 2016.

If she had known that night, she would have never gone.

She had just finished her makeup when the knock at the door came. She could hear music out in the hall already. Somewhere in the distant confines of another room. And then the knocking again, and laughing, and someone murmuring close by.

‘Seulgi. Hurry up. We’ve got to go.’

‘I’ll be a minute,’ Seulgi said. She took a final look at herself in the mirror. Her face palely dolled in the plaster light, soft and round and muted, a casual look, nothing extreme, nothing that drew too much attention to her. Years later she would look back on this moment with something approaching extreme regret and she would cry and imagine some other true reality where she stood peering in at that selfsame countenance, reaching hand to the hand from some other side of life, and she would pretend she was ill, that she wasn’t feeling it tonight. That she didn’t want to go. Maybe they’d try and push her along. Maybe they’d tell her it was for the best, that it was good to meet new people, to get out, especially so close to the start of the academic year. What use was it sitting in your room? University’s for the social life. Of course it is. And she imagined that in this alternate world she would turn around and tell them that she really wasn’t feeling good at all and she promised she would go with them on Wednesday or Thursday instead but not tonight. I’m staying in tonight. I’m staying in and I’m never going to meet her. I’m never going to even say hello.

She answered the door to Yeri and Joy. They were sharing a cheap bottle of wine from the off-license in the courtyard. The music was coming from one of the rooms just down the hall, dimly lit in the smoky corridor light, the door propped wide open. Already a group had gathered, people she didn’t know from other blocks, people from downstairs she had only acknowledged in passing in the week previous, faces she had come to recognise in her insobriety but not otherwise, like shadows seen through a dusty windowpane, figures of her life and yet not at all. The girl next door was called Wendy. She had introduced herself on the first day. They had sat together and drank while everyone got to know each other. Wendy was her first real friend there. One of a few.

‘How do I look?’ Seulgi said.

‘You look fine,’ said Yeri. ‘Come on. We’ll be late.’

Joy nodded towards the room just down the hall. ‘What’s she doing tonight?’ she said.

‘Wendy?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Just having a get-together with a couple people from downstairs.’

‘Why are you coming with us then?’

‘Instead of staying here?’

Joy nodded. Seulgi could only shrug. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I guess because you asked me first.’

‘Or because you think we’ll be more fun.’

Seulgi laughed. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Maybe. Something like that.’

‘Come on. Let’s go.’

‘Where are we even going?’

‘It’s a couple blocks over,’ Yeri said.

‘Which block?’

‘Spruces.’

‘Haven’t heard of it.’

‘Well. We’ve only been here a week, I guess.’ Yeri tipped back the wine and winced. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ll be late.’

‘You’ve said that already.’

She laughed. ‘Yeah, well. It’s true.’

‘Are you sure I look okay?’

‘Yeah. Why?’ Yeri smiled coyly. ‘You trying to impress someone tonight?’

‘You never know,’ Seulgi said with a grin. ‘I might get lucky.’

*  *  *

They left into a dark and cloudless night and faintly the sound of music and laughter from one of the rooms above them. A gibbous moon hung pale, like some bright polyp coolly luminescent in the heavens, and the stars as they fell over the very vault of all the world looked like fixtures of light incandescing. It had rained earlier in the day and as they navigated with some drunkenness the complexity of the herringbone path between the buildings they tracked up the loam from the rain’s wet descent where it lay like some impression of an older time, a mezzotint of some cold hiemal season. They passed the bottle of wine back and forth and they talked about their week so far and all they had come to know in the past seven days and all they had done. It amounted to little more than drink and dance and to that they could find no complaint and they laughed and all was new and good and different.

The buildings all looked the same. A sign hung in white by the door that said Spruces and they entered out of the cold bearing the wine like an instrument of some strange mortality in front of them, swaying from foot to foot, Seulgi the least drunk amongst them. They followed Yeri to the third floor. On the landing they could already hear the music. It seemed to be running under their feet. They went in and through the hallway to the door at the end marked number nine. It was already open. A group of eight sat inside. There were two guys sat at the table with a poker hand going and two more and a girl on the bed and two girls sat on swivelchairs on the right and a girl sat leaning against the side of bed with her feet stretched out in front of her. They introduced themselves and in turn so did the group. Yeri knew only the girl sat against the bed. Her name was Irene and they had met at a club the week before and promised to meet up. She gave Yeri a big hug and when Seulgi saw that smile she knew like nothing she had ever known in her long life that she was going to get know Irene very well, that they were going to get along just fine. In later moments she would look back on that smile as the first and the last and she would wish like nothing else that she had never seen it. Never gone to that room. Please. Either give me it back or make it so I never saw it at all. Because I can’t get rid of it now. It’s in my head.

*  *  *

Irene introduced each of them and they sat. They drank the wine, they listened to the music from Irene’s laptop. They talked about a girl down the hall that had thrown up in a bucket on the landing and they laughed about that. Irene said that another girl living across the hall would be in and out all night. When they had finished the wine Irene offered them vodka chased down with Sprite and they thanked her and drank and listened to the music. From her place beside Irene Seulgi watched each of them in turn. Such moments as these. In all her time she had not done something like this, had not gone to university. She looked at Irene next to her for a while. At the sharp countenance of her figure, her jawline, the sweet tang of lemon from her woody perfume. The way curved into such a brilliant smile.

By the time they had finished their drinks again the room had quietened. The two guys at the table had disappeared and so had one of the girls and Yeri and Joy were out in the corridor with some of the others from across the hall. Seulgi sat with the empty cup in her hand. She studied the stains in the bottom, the bubbles of Sprite around the rim. And she spoke very little until Irene spoke to her. ‘You’re nervous,’ Irene said.

Seulgi looked at her. She smiled shyly. ‘Sorry,’ Seulgi said. ‘A little.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t like being around people that much.’

‘You don’t like being around me?’

‘No. I mean, I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t mind people. I just don’t like getting to know them. I’m at it, you know? I can’t do it. Never have been able to.’

Irene looked at her curiously. ‘Yeah,’ she said with a small smile. ‘I get that. I mean, I’m not too bad at it, but it can get bad at times. That’s why I’ve got this.’ She shook her glass at Seulgi. ‘Want another?’

‘Sure.’

She fetched up a second bottle of vodka from the fridge and came back with the Sprite and filled their cups and they drank and toasted to a new start, a new life. ‘This is your first year, right?’ Irene said. ‘You’re with them, I mean.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How’re you finding it so far?’

‘It’s alright, I guess. I mean, term only started last week. Not really a whole lot to do besides drink and go out, right?’

‘Yeah. I know what you mean.’

‘What about you?’

‘Same really,’ Irene said. She sipped at her drink. ‘I’m not complaining or anything, though. I know it’ll get harder once the work kicks in. The essays and stuff.’

‘Yeah.’

Irene looked at her for a long time. As if there was some calculation in those wide brown eyes Seulgi could not fathom or recognise. Then she said, ‘You look older than eighteen. No offense if you are eighteen, of course. That sounded a bit rude.’

‘It’s alright.’ Seulgi laughed. ‘I’m twenty-four.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Me too.’

‘Yeah?’

Irene nodded. She drank. ‘Kind of a late starter, right? I kind of wanted to go when all my friends did but I realised I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, I only thought I did. And I always thought that was dangerous, you know? Guessing what you want your whole career to be based around straight out of school. I wanted to get stuff figured out first. So, I decided to start working instead. Get my head straight, save up some money, you know? And now here I am. Finally with it figured out.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘History.’

Seulgi nodded. ‘That’s cool,’ she said. ‘I mean it. Sorry if it sounded insincere. I told you I’m at talking to new people.’

‘It’s alright. But yeah, it’s what I figured out I genuinely want to do. What I want to learn. I want to be a teacher. Or an archaeologist, but that all comes later. After I finish.’ She drank her drink again. ‘What about you?’ she said. ‘What do you do?’

‘Politics,’ said Seulgi.

‘Yeah? How’s that?’

‘I don’t really know yet. I’m sure I’ll find out once term gets going. Properly going, I mean.’

‘Right.’

‘But for now, it seems alright. Everyone’s really cool and stuff.’

‘What do you want to do, then?’

‘Honestly? I don’t really know. I’m just sort of drifting now. I spent a few years working different jobs, and I didn’t really find anything I wanted to do. But I want to do something big. Something that’ll change something. And I figured politics is one of the main ways to do that, right?’

‘Yeah. Right.’

‘So, there you go.’

‘That’s pretty cool.’

‘I mean, it’s politics. So no really. But I appreciate the support.’

Irene laughed. ‘Good to meet someone my own age, at least. Not that there’s anything wrong with teenagers. Just, you know.’

‘Yeah. I know.’

‘Here’s to being old, then.’

She held out her glass and Seulgi clinked it with her own and they drank until they had finished. ‘Yeah,’ Seulgi said. She smiled slowly. ‘Here’s to being old.’

*  *  *

She spent most of that month not thinking about her own position or where she would be or what she would do and in truth she had not thought about it for a long time. Maybe that was for the best. Each night she slept less and less but it didn’t matter as long as she ignored it. Ignored her own eternal misery. Or whatever else aside. There were days she remembered from before her flatmates were born and days before their parents had ever met. Before the internet, before mobile phones or high-speed transport or twenty-four-hour convenience stores or Bluetooth or a hundred channels on the TV or even TVs at all. She remembered ration cards and post-war confusion and the North-South divide and American troops on the border and American troops in the street and in her home and she remembered her mother never being able to grow old and die peaceful and her father with his cancer and her grandparents before them and she remembered her sister. Her sister would be eighty-eight if not for the cruel and unusual fate of the universe bestowing unto her the curse of heart failure. She would still be alive. Alive to watch Seulgi like so many others had, like an experiment formed in a laboratory, cold and distant. Timeless avatar of some infernal curse, some wicked torment. If only my heart were stone. I would turn rain for all of time. I would do it. I would.

She stood by the door waiting. Someone down the hall had been cooking and she could smell it. Someone else laughed, then two people. In the other corridor there was music playing, people getting ready for a night out. But not her. She stood obscured in the light, waiting. When Irene answered she was dressed down, a casual oversized shirt and a pair of shorts and slippers, her makeup free and easy, face lightly dolled, eyes piping and soot, hair messy about her shoulders. And that smile. A smile Seulgi would never forget. Never could.

‘Hey,’ Irene said.

‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing. Just bored. Didn’t know what else to do.’

‘Not got any work yet?’

Irene shook her head. She let Seulgi in. It smelled vaguely of incense and there was no light save that of the computer screen on the desk in the back-left corner and a small bedside lamp, the bulb pulsing dim in its glassjar casing. ‘No,’ Irene said. ‘Nothing yet. Nothing important, anyway. It’s only been like three weeks. We don’t get our coursework until near Christmas. What about you?’

‘Same, pretty much.’

Irene sat on the bed. ‘Come sit down,’ she said. ‘I figured we could watch a movie. If that’s alright with you, of course.’

‘Sure. Whatever. I’m doing much anyway.’

‘What do you want to watch?’

‘I don’t know. Whatever you want.’

‘Well.’

‘Well?’

‘Well I don’t know either.’

Seulgi laughed. ‘Pick something, then.’

‘Alright. Hey, you want a drink?’

Irene stood and went to the fridge and came back with a bottle of dry gin. She held it up in the thin and sallow light. Outside someone laughed. ‘Are you serious?’ Seulgi said.

‘Yeah. Why not?’

‘On a Saturday night?’

‘Come on. Live a little. We’re students, right? That’s what students do.’

Seulgi looked at her. At that smile. Always at that smile. She could smell the sweet hint of lemon from Irene’s throat and she saw the white keyboard grin of her teeth and she smiled herself. ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘Whatever.’

‘Great.’ Irene poured them each a cup of gin and they sat drinking and watching a film neither could remember two hours later and when it had finished they talked into the night. They talked about themselves and they talked at length about their interests. They talked about their friends, they laughed. They talked about their families. Irene told the truth, Seulgi lied. She said her family were estranged. She had lost contact with her mum a few years ago. Maybe she’d get in contact someday. Just to say hello again. But she couldn’t. Her mother had been dead forty years.

Later she would remember that night on the bed as the night she regretted perhaps the most in her whole life. Like some pinpoint memory, like a bright light in a room that lay thick with fog, indistinct and obscure but there very brightly, clearer than anything else. And to reflect on it made her cry on many occasions. Because it had been the night she had fallen for Irene, and she knew that like she knew nothing else. It had been the night she had first looked at Irene, at that devastating smile, all teeth and red lips, the sharp line of her jaw, the flush of her pale throat, her delicate eyes, so full of stories, her messy hair tousled and unwashed, the soft scent of fresh lemon and woody notes in her perfume, and she knew that she had fallen for her right there. The first night of many. Of so many years. And after so much time it still hurt. It would never get any easier. Not if she lived a thousand years. A thousand lifetimes.

Irene was always there, and she was always just that. She was always perfect.