If there's one thing that people didn't really know about Jennie Kim it was that she was a collector.

When she was five, she liked to collect rocks. There’s a box in the corner of her closet full of different kinds, some shiny, some dull, but she loves all of them. She doesn't tell anyone because even at five she realizes the importance of not appearing like totally lame, but at night she sneaks into her closet, turns the light on and shuts the door. She spends hours looking at all her rocks, turning them over in her palm and watching the light play over them.

At five, her favorite rock is this big quartz her mom buys her at a science museum. She'll learn, when she's older, that it's actually called an amethyst, but the label at the museum store said QUARTZ and that's what she remembers. It's purple and pretty and she likes it best when she turns it under the light of her closet, watches the light reflect off the crystal.

At eighteen, her favorite rock is still quartz, but this one is a small polished tiger's eye.

She found it on Tuesday. She was eight. There's this really great park outside her house. Well it's not really a park so much as a little mini forest and It’s great for finding new rocks. In the afternoon, instead of doing things most kids her age do like homework or watching TV or hanging out with friends, she sneaks off into her forest and looks for rocks. She doesn't notice the other girl right away, it's rare that anyone else would be on these trails anyway so when she hears the soft voice behind her she almost falls over (she actually does fall over, but she doesn't like to tell people that).

"What are you doing?"

When she turns around enough to face her intruder she's surprised to see that the voice behind her belongs to a pretty girl she recognizes from her school. Chaeyoung, she thinks. The other girl, already tall for her age, is looming over her, staring quizzically at Jennie's crouching form, her dirt stained hands, and the small Ziploc bag beside her knee, already full of rocks.

Jennie thinks about lying, making up some excuse for why she's searching around in the dirt, but for some reason her voice disobeys her and, "Looking for rocks," comes out before she can say anything else.

"Cool!" Chaeyoung exclaims, crouching down beside her and putting her hands down beside Jennie's, palms on the ground. "Can I help?"

Jennie doesn't say yes, just looks at the other girl and nods a little, gives a shrug that says whatever before going back to her task. It takes her a little bit to adjust to having another person help her, but it's kind of fun. She gets to share her excitement over a good find with someone else for the first time and Chaeyoung never wavers once in her enthusiasm. An hour later Chaeyoung finds a particularly awesome rock.

"Wow! Look at this one," she exclaims, holding it out for Jennie to inspect.

It's really cool. Like really cool. Not as cool as her amythest, but she likes it a lot regardless. It's all brown and orange and goldish and smooth like the rocks at the museum. She wants it. Bad.

But Chaeyoung found it and she can feel the dread creeping into her stomach; it's like seeing a really amazing toy on TV and then not getting it for Christmas. She has manners at this age, she's not a complete and total yet and she knows that finders keepers is definitely the law of the land and therefore Chaeyoung will be starting her rock collection with an extremely cool new rock.

But then, before she can think of some way to convince Chaeyoung that the rock is really dumb and she should just throw it back on the ground (where Jennie can come back later and retrieve it), the taller girl is pressing the small cold rock into her palm, eyes bright with happiness and excitement. She thinks it's just so that Jennie can look it over but Chaeyoung's moving away from her and going back to look for more rocks, not hovering over her hand like Jennie would be, protecting her newfound property.

"You like it, right?" Chaeyoung asks, looking over her shoulder, her eyes wide and innocent and that's when Jennie realizes it. Chaeyoung just found one of the coolest rocks ever found on this trail and she's giving it to Jennie.

"It's great," she whispers in an awe-filled voice, alternating her gaze between Chaeyoung and the new rock. "Thanks."

"Good!" And Chaeyoung's back to crawling through the dirt.

Jennie decides right then and there that they're going to be bestfriends. And so they are.

--

When she was seven, she liked to collect bottle caps. There's a box for these too that sits right next to her rock collection in her closet. At seven years old her favorite bottle cap is from a bottle of Miller Chill her dad drank on Sunday evening. She sneaks into the kitchen late at night and digs the cap out of the trash and whenever she holds it she feels all kinds of rebellious, like having the bottle cap to a beer is the same as drinking one.

At eighteen, though, her favorite bottle cap is from a bottle of ABC root beer she drank when she was thirteen. It had been a long day in the summer and she remembers being tired, and hot, and sick of having to do these dumb pre-high school cheer camps.

By thirteen she was joined at the hip with Chaeyoung, so fused together that people already considered them one entity, so she knows, that if she's in a bad mood, Chaeyoung probably is too. But when her best friend comes to sit with her on the front porch of her house, there's a wide infectious smile on her face, and she's holding two brown bottles, dripping with condensation in the humid summer air.

"Hey," Chaeyoung greets, handing her a cold bottle and taking a seat next to her.

"Hi," Jennie returns, twisting the cap off of the bottle and taking a long sip of the liquid. The root beer feels good going down her parched throat and she gulps at it greedily before hearing Chaeyoung giggle next to her.

She wipes her lips with the back of her hand before asking, "What's so funny?"

"Life," Chaeyoung answers and if it were anyone else Jennie might roll her eyes, but she starts giggling instead because this is Chaeyoung and Jennie's pretty sure that in Chaeyoung's world, life is pretty funny.

"Yeah," Jennie agrees with a chuckle and another long pull of her root beer.

"I love you, you know," Chaeyoung says with the same humor in her voice as before. It's not the first time Chaeyoung's said it to her, it's not like Jennie has never heard the words, or has never said them back, but even at thirteen she can recognize that Chaeyoung is the only person in her life that says it and makes it feel like it's true, like Jennie can't not believe in it. It makes her chest feel tight every time, even though she doesn't really know why.

"I know," Jennie replies, playing with the bottle cap she twisted off in her hand and feeling the sharp edge of it cut into her fingers. "I know," she repeats, smiling and bumping her shoulder against the other girl.

At the time, the moment is pretty insignificant, lost in the collection of many hot summer afternoons and hundreds of bottles of soda and millions of times Chaeyoung says the same three words to her, but when she's older, looking back at her life, for some reason, this afternoon, this bottle of root beer, and these specific three words come back to her the most.

Maybe it's the way Chaeyoung looked at her, or the way her voice sounded, soft and warm, mingling with the warmth of the sun on their faces and the hot breeze that ruffled their hair. Maybe it's that Chaeyoung knew exactly what Jennie needed, a cold soda and a happy reminder that she's loved, or maybe it's the way Jennie realized that she so sick of summer camps and school and all the other things thirteen year olds are sick of but she can't imagine ever getting sick of this - sitting with Chaeyoung, her hair a sweaty mess and her thighs aching from exhaustion, but her heart light as air and an exuberance in her lungs that wasn't there five minutes ago.

She doesn't think anything of it when she first takes that bottle cap and puts it in her box (it's instinct more than anything), but at eighteen, when she pulls it out to look at it, a storm of memories comes out.

--

When she was ten, she liked to collect movie ticket stubs, much to the annoyance of her mother who considers them nothing more than trash. She doesn't keep these in a box, but she does keep them in her closet. There's this large poster board sized corkboard that rests against the back of her closet, half obscured by hanging clothes but easily accessible. A few weeks after she decides to start collecting the stubs there, it's already covered in the tiny pieces of paper. Some are from midnight premieres of Harry Potter that she will never admit to having gone to and some are from cheesy romantic comedies that she sees with Chaeyoung to pass the time on a lazy Saturday morning.

At ten, her favorite ticket stub is the one to The Notebook. She doesn't admit it after they see the movie because, again, she's not like, lame, but she loved it. A lot. Ryan Gosling was her summer crush that year and Momo McAdams has this laugh in the beginning of the movie that makes her feel all warm and gooey like she believes in things like love and destiny and soulmates.

At eighteen, her favorite ticket stub is this one that's nearly falling apart - it's frayed at the edges and the words are barely legible, almost destroyed by being washed in the pocket of her favorite jeans. But Jennie is well acquainted with this stub and she can still make out the name of that stupid action flick she and Chaeyoung saw when they were fifteen. The actual movie isn't that memorable and even though she can kind of recognize the faded title that's not why the ticket stub is important.

When they saw the movie she'd already been kissing her best friend for months and by fifteen, she's doing a real good job of pretending like it's all totally normal. They're not like dating or anything gay like that, just making out on Jennie's couch when her mom works late or in that treehouse in Chaeyoung's back yard when they finally escape from her older sister.

Jennie doesn't analyze it because she doesn't want it to stop and she's pretty sure if she thinks about it for more than two seconds she'll realize just how gay it really all is and will have to actually do something about it. But Chaeyoung seems content to ignore all the implications of their kissing and just go with the flow, happy to tangle her fingers with Jennie's and press their lips together while hiding from the world.

They don't do it in public, obviously. Jennie is a master commander at keeping secrets anyway so it's not hard to hide the fact that her new favorite afternoon hobby is making out with her best friend, who is a girl.

But then, they go see this movie that Chaeyoung wants to see. Jennie's skeptical because she's pretty sure she saw the preview and some guy definitely gets his head blown off and his arm mutilated and that's just the trailer. Chaeyoung can barely watch The Little Mermaid without getting freaked out, much less something as gory as she expects this film to be. Jennie may be good at a lot of things but refusing things to Chaeyoung is not one of them. So they go to the theater.

The thing that's memorable isn't so much that she bought both of their tickets and their po