I don't open my eyes right away after I wake up.

The mattress beneath me is warm where I lay but the rest is cool to the touch. The pillows are fluffy and relaxing. I hear birds outside and the gentle, far-away sound of waves. This strikes me as odd. . . . Actually, now that I think of it, so does this amazing bed. I don't have an amazing bed at home. I focus my hearing more closely.

There are other people in the room.

I open my eyes slowly. I'm confused to see that I'm not staring up at my unique ceiling of posters and crystals, but at a plain white one. The sun streaks through the window brightly, though I sense that it's not that late in the day. The digital clock on the nightstand tells me it's not even eight yet.

Why am I still at Amber's lake house? I thought we were supposed to go home . . .

I survey the room I'm in. Sleeping beside me is little Rosie, her lips parted and her short hair splayed all over her face. There is also a bed across the room – identical to the queen sized one that Rosie and I are sharing – that contains a vulnerable and harmless looking Courtney Whites. With her hair out of its bun and her tough demeanor let down for slumber, she sorely reminds me of Juliet.

My sister and I haven't really been on speaking terms since our fight. We don't make an effort to avoid each other but you can feel the tension in the room. Our parents don't know what's going on. They've learned to let their kids work out their own fights between them – but Dave, Juliet, and I have also discovered that that resolution doesn't last forever; after a while they get sick of the silence and broody teenagers. That's when Mother starts to question us. I hope this whole thing is fixed before then.

I sit up carefully, as to avoid jostling Rosie, and notice that Amber's nowhere in sight. There's a slight concave in the mattress on the other side of Courtney; Amber's shoes and hoodie are also gone with the person. I quietly glide out from between the sheets and tiptoe around the room to pull on my baggy sweatpants and t-shirt and scavenge around our pile of bags for my other shoe. When I'm dressed I slip out of the room, pulling the door behind me gently.

I walk out into the living room and quickly realize why the sunshine was so sharp in the bedroom. Through the two large windows on either side of the fireplace, the sun bounces off the clear, still water and launches its blinding light into the house. I squint and turn to the kitchen. I rip open the box of granola bars that Aron had given us yesterday. I begin to eat one and shove the other into my pocket.

I glance around one more time to make sure that I hadn't somehow overlooked Amber and creep on out of the house to the beach. As I'm walking down the steps I spot a solitary figure sitting on the dock, feet dangling. I kick off my shoes at the bottom of the hill and stroll along the beach, heading for the lonely person on the dock.

My feet leave the sand to walk on wood. The hollow sound of my footsteps makes Amber glance over her shoulder before turning back towards the lake. I sit beside her and offer her the second granola bar while I bite another chunk of off mine. She accepts it without a word.

Amber is somber right now. She tries not to get this way frequently and especially not in front of anyone else besides me. The year she was twelve and I was eleven, she would constantly lapse into this state of quiet. All she's really doing though is thinking and mirroring back on her life, on her thoughts, about what's going on around her.

"What happened to your girlfriend?" I ask, also looking out over the water.

"Maddie?" Amber's voice is low and quiet. Tired. "Nothing. I just broke up with her."

"I thought you were happy."

She shrugs. The movement's hardly existent. "I was. I loved her, but it was already a long distance relationship. If I had thought that I would someday meet her, moving to Korea totally ruined that idea. It was just too hard. So I broke up with her a month after I was accepted."

I nod slowly. "Where did the boys come in?" I ask. Amber's lips twitch and her face softens a bit. The small change in expression makes her look like the Amber everyone knows and loves. "I met JongHyun the next day. I was curious to see what the first Pledis trainee was like. I didn't really thing he would become my best bro. We met the others along the way.

"The day after I broke up with Maddie and met JR, I felt like that was a sign. That meeting JR and BaekHo and MinHyun and Aron and Ren was my reward, was my new life, for making a small yet hard decision." Amber tilts her head towards the sun, closing her eyes. "I didn't want to let her go," she breathes.

I stay quiet. The minnows are clustering around my toes, curious. They nip and it tickles. I find these tiny fish endearing suddenly and I don't know why.

"Then I saw Choi MinKi," Amber continues. Her voice has turned a degree warmer at the name of the boy she loves. "The second I saw him I couldn't take my eyes away. The second I heard him speak I never wanted to listen to anything else. And when he smiled or laughed . . ." Amber trails off into her memories and I let her. While Amber finds relief in talking in her solemn times, I find calm in getting her talking. I like hearing her wistful voice and the emotions that come through when she recaps her past.

"I actually forgot about Maddie – or the pain that I carried with her memory, at least. She was a name in the back of my mind, a dust bunny. MinKi filled my mind entirely. And so did the other boys, when we all hung out. I had so much fun with them as trainees. We were a team. JR was an obvious favorite to the company because he was the first, he showed promise, and they planned to put him in their first boy band. When the other members came into Pledis, rumors started to fly after a while, about how they were going to be put into a group and how they were up and earning favors from the adults. Not that that was true in the least.

"That's when the friendships between the six of us helped. We were strong for each other and stuck up for one another. When we were all together having a good time, it was like our happiness became a deflective barrier, a force field, to any harmful words, sneers, any type of bullying that we received. When I was apart from the guys, though, I didn't get picked on – it was only when I was seen associating with them that I was instantly merged in with them or ignored because the other trainees would act like jackasses anyway."

Amber sighs and plays with the wrapper of the granola bar. She hasn't opened it yet so I gently reclaim it from her fingers and tear it open, pulling down the cellophane, and handing it back to her. She grasps it. She observes it for a moment before bringing it to . When she swallows, she's back to talking about her ex.

"How old is Maddie now? She's three years older than me. Starry, math and I are still mad at each other." Amber takes another chewy bite.

I add three years on her. "She's . . . oh, wow, she should be twenty now."

"We're in July, right? Then she's still nineteen; her birthday isn't until November. . . . That's funny: she shares the same birthday month as my Rennie." She laughs a little, but it's not filled with humor. It's a laugh towards irony.

There's a shuffling in the distance. We both glance in the direction of the cabin. Rosie and Courtney are coming up the beach, barefooted, and attired in I-did-just-roll-out-of-bed comfort clothes. It's an odd yet familiar image to see the two of them side-by-side. Courtney's tall and lean and has her hands shoved into her sweatshirt pockets. Rosie's shorter and has an air of buoyancy and lightness and a feathery look to her. While Court's coming straight to the dock, Rosie's frolicking a bit, looking over the lake, kicking sand, letting the waves catch her feet and then jumping away like she's afraid of getting her wet skin wet.

"Hey," Courtney greets me and Amber when she approaches us. She takes the spot beside me, letting one leg hang over the dock and leaning her back on one of the wooden posts. Rosie catches up a second later and lightly plops down on her stomach on the other side of Amber.

Amber smiles affectionately at us. The four of us have grown up together. We're sisters, quadruplets, best friends, and I'm even sure that at some point we've swapped a smidge of blood with at least one of the other three. We stick like gum that you can't scrape off of the bottom of your sneaker; through thick and thin, we never abandoned each other.

Physically, maybe. Amber in Korea and Rosie up north. But never mentally or emotionally. We could never leave. I could never leave. Not from my girls. I love them too much. They've so much of my life away that when half of us disappeared, I felt like I was lacking something. I'd stand in a room wondering why it felt like I still needed something when I didn't. Courtney felt the same emptiness as well – we've mentioned it to each other before. It's not a depressing, oh-dear-God-I-can't-live-another-day feeling; there was just a hollowness that we couldn't shake.

But, sitting here on the dock, quietly watching the sun rise higher, I know that the four of us are here, right now, in this moment – and none of us are going to bother ourselves with thoughts of our various futures.