“I’m very close to my sister. It seems like we can read each other’s minds. We often think of similar things, even though we’re at different locations. Our personalities, though, are a little different. My sister is feminine, while I am more relaxed. My sister makes me feel secure. We haven’t seen each other too much recently, but our feelings for each other are the same as always.” - Jung Soojung, f(x)

In the first year just before university begins, Krystal cuts her lengthy black hair until the scissors reached her chin before she stopped. Cutting hair has always been said to be symbolic for a person, especially a woman’s new beginning. It usually poses as a drastic change from their previous lifestyle, usually one of past relationships or even mental illness. Krystal’s reason for cutting her hair is a mix of both; she claims it to be mostly the latter. But she knows it’s impossible to get rid of the memory of the boy who begrudged her youth.

That stupid boy, Krystal grits her teeth to stop herself from shaking apprehensively. She remembers her sister’s words.

“Don’t let anyone change you.”  Yet she was cutting her hair because of a boy. 

She tells her sister, who is banging wildly on the bathroom door, that she will only be a minute. But she is not stupid. Sixty seconds will not get rid of all her problems and post teenage-angst bull.

She has taken over an hour to gain the courage to cut her hair and not cry. Her shoulders can be seen shaking up and down. She is laughing at herself in distress. Suddenly the bathroom is filling up with her quivering laughter that flutters her body with a strange kind of radiance. She wipes her tears down with the back of her hands and blinks back the tears.

“I’m not sad. I’m not sad. I. Am. Not. Sad”

No.

Krystal is sad inside. She’s allowed to be.

She tries to monitor her breathing by slowly inhaling and exhaling as if she had just been asphyxiated by her insides crying; one last breath as she returns to her normal breathing pattern and unlocks the bathroom door to reassure her sister that she is fine.

Krystal is engulfed within Sica’s arms now. Sica the back of her younger sister's hair affectionately, incidentally making this comforting gesture an environment that Krystal can familiarize with. Sica’s natural scent brings Krystal back to the old days where the world was seen in black and white, where the only thing they would worry about was missing the start to various cartoons and anime on lazy school afternoons.

The cozy aura of being squished between several pillows and Sica, and the faint smell of incense brings Krystal back to her real self. Krystal looks up at her older sister with a melancholic smile that is returned back to her.  

 *

They return to the small group of family friends who are scattered around their house. Of those invited, Kim Myungsoo is the only one of a few she actually knows who comes to these family parties that are conducted by the Jung parents. Sica gently squeezes Krystal's hand and she squeezes it back with a light smile reassuring her sister once again that she will be okay for now. After a few contemplative seconds, Sica finally leaves her side to tend to some unavoidable small talk with their parents' acquaintances.

Krystal's mind shifts back to Myungsoo. She can think of many ways to describe him. She can label him as "L" back when he wanted to be a superhero with one letter as his superhero name. He can be the boy who got her through primary, middle and high school or as her possibly more-than-friends partner in crime. Like a typical teen movie, they were the couple that was not actually a couple, that people thought would look good together but who did not act on their seemingly silly romantic feelings. And now there’s this family party bringing them together again.

Krystal yawns, stepping onto her pavement along the backyard and casually stretching each limb in the twilight sun. She assumes that the dark-haired boy sitting on the grass with his back faced to her, shoulders clearly drooping and half-asleep, is Myungsoo. Krystal walks towards his direction, quickly ruffles his hair, and it catches him by surprise. She now walks past him and flops onto the hammock opposite him. 

“You okay?” he asks her plainly.

“I’m still breathing…” Krystal has a habit of letting her words drift off slowly as she speaks. “I think.” She sighs again, another habit of hers floating to the surface. A measured breath of warm air flows out of her lips. “Maybe I’m still alive.”

It was was at that precise moment that Myungsoo’s mind resided with the complete understanding that Krystal, who he considered his closest companion, is not a skilled conversationalist at all.  So instead of pushing the topic further, Myungsoo comments on how she cut her hair really short, but she cuts him short with a question.

“Why do guys think that girls with long hair are innocent and way more feminine?”

Myungsoo reconsiders his previous assumption and thinks carefully about how to answer Krystal’s question without insulting her being. Sure he was used to her antics and rare bursts of enthusiasm, but he never really thought that he knew her and was not even sure that he knows her right this moment. 

“Well you’re not exactly the epitome of feminine, but you do have some of the characteristics of an innocent maiden.”

Krystal smirks and raises an eye brow at him. So to return her amused expression, Myungsoo attempts to slyly wink at her while his flirtatious gesture comes off as a humorous attempt to make her smile. And it works. Krystal covers though her muffled laughter is still very audible to his ears.

"You didn't answer the question silly," she points out.

"I honestly don't know, Soojung. But I think it's a perception thing. I mean the way people see women is kind of in general terms right? Like they're all the same, but they're actually not."

Krystal has earphones plugged snugly into her ears, she is half-listening to him speak and his eyebrows are narrowing together. Myungsoo gets up, wipes the dirt off his pants and walks over to where Krystal is laying on the hammock peacefully. She takes her left ear phone out and hardly contains her smirk when she sees his rarely irritated face.

"As I was saying, before you rudely dismissed me for your music, some women have long hair but quirky personalities, some women can have pixie cuts and still be more sophisiticated than the long haired ones. It really depends on how you look at it, and it's not really my place to tell you how you can or should act based on the length of your hair. That's just plain dumb." 

Krystal nods in agreement and gestures for Myungsoo to lay down beside her. He blushes before he refuses the offer politely. 

He tells her that she sits more wide-open than his friend Sungjong and she laughs without refraining herself. He tells her playfully to close her legs and tries to close them for her but in the history of Myungsoo being clumsy; this particular moment could be dubbed the clumsiest. He trips over his feet just to fall face first onto her lap. 

There is a short pause that feels like hell for Myungsoo. Krystal glares down and sinisterly asks Myungsoo what he is doing. The poor boy fumbles over his words trying to think of a reasonable, non judgmental explanation.

“Soojunggie!” Sica calls out from the lounge room.

The moment is paused cinematically. They exchange slightly mortified, slightly calm glances; the two conflicting emotions battling with one another as Myungsoo stands up and gathers himself together while Krystal goes off to run an errand for her sister.

 *

Myungsoo dials ferociously into his phone and a friendly voice greets him on the other line. His emotions overwhelm his ability to articulate his speech and words that do not normally go together find a way to mix up the sentences he really wants to say. 

“I’m sorry but Myungsoo, you really, really have to speak up, I’m at work at the moment,” the voice squeaked.

“But Sulli,” he whines to the only person he has known since kindergarten. “Wait you’re still at work right?”

“Nahhh, I’m just whispering down to my pocket because I feel like it. Of course I’m at work! I finish in an hour though,” Sulli says.

“We need to talk.”

“Uhh now is not a good idea, Myungsoo. Plus, the ‘we need to talk’ one liner usually implies something bad and I'm not good with dealing with the bad. You should know that by now.”

“It’s not something bad; it’s actually very painfully awkward to talk about over the phone. So I’m dropping by, ok?”

A frustrated sigh is heard from the other side.

“Fine, you can drop by. Just so long as you buy something from the drive-through menu, at least a Happy Meal or something will buy us enough time to have a nice chat about your little school-boy love for Krystal,” says Sulli, clearly satisfied with his stunned response.

 “How did you know?” Myungsoo asks.

“Woman’s intuition,” Sulli softly chuckles. “I guess.” 

Author's ramble: whoa it has been exactly a month. Sorry for the long wait guys, I simply have no excuses other than the fact that I haven't been able to write this chapter without erasing and editing it five billion times. BUT here is Krystal's "short" hair so let's appreciate the Jung Sister's beauty instead of my procrastination skills here: 

Let's pretend that she has chin length reddish/pink hair. ^^