She would cough up her lungs at 27, insides stained tar black as her nails, less sheen. Death would turn her into mineral and amethyst. There were no flowery words that could justify, correct nor fantasize her life into a narrative of shimmering haze. Too bad that was the way Krystal liked it, and if it was Krystal, she'd have her way.
At least her eyeliner would be perfect.
Midnight. The night closes like velvet curtains.
She dances on the edges of the pool steps, a cola in her hand, candy striped straw up carbonized sugar. Her free hand moves from her hips, turns to adjusting her sunglasses: cat-eyed, pink, Miu Miu, lenses olive tinted. She her lips clean of excess cherry coke, tongue picks up some streaks of coral lipstick too.
The pool is inviting, cool and azure, an incandescent mosaic of versicolored floodlights, star shine and reflection floating atop. Bright blue ripples tickle her ankles, the smell of chlorine nauseatingly bites the inside of . She hears Baekhyun in an echoed distance, whipping Sehun and Jongin with a wet towel and Taemin's quick snides from across the motel courtyard.
Jinri's arms drape around Soojung's collar, lazy and lightweight. Her visage is a mirror, taking the cheap floodlights and painting her face in fine-penned luminance, a kaleidoscope of feverish violets, emeralds, ceruleans and cerise, flecked with shadows of spider legs from her eyelashes.
Soojung gives Jinri's lips a taste of cola, Jinri gives Soojung's lips a taste of strawberry Sobranie, both sickly sweet and slices of pink.
"We jumping in?"
"But of course."
Soojung tosses her cola on the lawn with a dull reverberation, lifts her beloved shades onto the crown of her head. Jinri adjusts the straps of her new bikini, gingham, hues of damask rose and flavescent crèmes. She thinks of how well it matches with Soojung's skin, takes another drag and flicks her cigarette to the side. The two pinch their noses, intertwine arms and fingers, and jump. The pool is colder than it looks.
Naturally, they open their eyes, blue chemicals stinging. Jinri smiles, oxygen bubbling to the surface. She wipes the running mascara off of Soojung's eyelids, giggles a little more and swallows a little water. They sink to the bottom in fluorescent halos and comfortable silence, as true friends ought to be, listening to underwater hymns and muffled murmurs of distilled teenage youth.
They travel from beach to beach, motel to motel, all in Taemin's powder blue 50s Cadillac. Baekhyun and Sehun in the back, next to Krystal and Sulli, hair tossed with the wind, Jongin in the passenger seat. Simple case of wanderlust, really, boredom, perhaps, disinterest in college semesters and a definitive future, truly. Hormones revved and boys as boys; the clique of four, bounded by mutual interests and shared classes of cinematographic aesthetics, readily agreed to running off in phosphenes and rosy skies with the girls, screwing parents out of their well-invested university semester funds, middle finger to authorities.
They were Sulli's, the boys; picked up by Sulli when they tried to pick her up. She had a penchant for Taemin though, Krystal's recognized that a few days into their aimless California wanderings.
Krystal was only okay with them because they always had extra change in their front pockets.
She likes Baekhyun, she likes Taemin, she likes Sehun, but, she guesses, she likes Jongin a little bit more than all of them. He never bothered to talk to her. Krystal lifts her feet in the air, adjusts her hips a bit, breathes in, then out. She pulls out her compact mirror, takes out the tube of coral lipstick Sulli had given her for her nineteenth birthdate, and, habitually, applies it out with delicacy and care. Smacks her lips twice, then grabs for her blackberry schnapps and chews on the straw.
"Here," an unfamiliar hand offers her a glass of Cristal, "Have some."
She lifts her sunglasses — Sulli's, they were a bit too retro for Krystal's tastes — and recognizes Jongin, ends with a decline. "There's nothing to celebrate for."
"You don't need an occasion to just drink some champagne." He takes the lawn chair next to her, rubs his cracked heels into the fake evergreen grass.
Krystal decides she doesn't like him after all.
Easily, easily, Soojung could recall the circumstances and situation she had met Jinri under.
High school, vicious with imbalanced patience and tensions, flutters of new passing loves and ephemeral relationships. Krystal grew up with sleepy on her eyes, a sharp tongue, and dull emotion on a violent edge. She's got height to boast, a proud figure and a tiny waist, and every aspect of cruelty in her stature with the name to match. Her head high, chin always out, never swaying below her shoulder line. Everyone would reel back in distaste, whisperlings of a waste of a pretty face, critiques of needed maladaptive personality adjustment.
She used to think that she wanted to be good, she wanted to be kind, she wanted to be liked, but it was all pretty difficult. The strain and effort were too much, too wasteful of time. So she shrugged off their misplaced sense of superiority and continued on with her straightforward flicks of tongue.
("I like your lipstick," Sulli had said, earnestly and eagerly. "What is it?"
"Plum Blossom." Krystal had bought it merely for its name, not for the color. That was the way she worked. If it sounded like purple prose and poetry, it'd be hers.)
Of course, they condemned her. Let little Sulli know all about the devil with plum blossom lipstick, the girl with no concern or empathy for others. Jinri shrugged and pulled a seat next to Soojung, gave her a strawberry candy pop, and Soojung reciprocated the gift with the lipstick.
It was a common teenage story, a rerun of every Skins episode. They would smoke on the school roof, would dangle their legs off the ledge, would talk about the Arctic Monkeys — mainly Alex Turner — or how Mr. Choi, their english teacher, was a major pretentious -prick. They would get lost in Chinatown, beautiful delirium and neon lights, would do each others eyeliner on sad summer nights, would go to fancy hotel rooms with De Gournay delicately paneled all over the walls ($235 apiece) and would plaster over the paper with magazine clippings, letters with lipstick stains and sun-drenched polaroids of the infamous Soojung and Jinri.
And they grew up that way. Grew to be exuberant young ladies, grew to be embodiments of effortless femininity, and all that the color pink is supposed to represent. Soojung figured it was alright to be honest, brutally, if needed; figured it was alright to be in her own natural shell; figured it was alright with Jinri's warm influence. Jinri lit paper lanterns and cosmos along Soojung's spine, in the marrow of her bones, in her very breath. Jinri, the l'eau de printemps, of Sicilian oranges, mandarin, peony and creamy white musk, of cheeks as delicate and dainty as cigarette paper, of lips of Grenache Rosé, of lashes of almond blossoms, branches reaching for the sun, overgrown and too much grace, of eyes like china doll. Jinri, a rarity, the greatest gift ever given to Soojung. She loves that Jinri. She loves every kind of Jinri. Platonic or romantic, she didn't know.
The girl of nitroglycerine and the girl of celestial beauty and lavender crisp. Deux femme fatale, born to rule the raw hearts of fallen men with their lips and skinny hips.
She picks at dead skin underneath her fingernails, touches the lining of her coral lipstick. Jongin watches with patience.
"Soojung—"
"Don't call me that. Only Jinri can call me that."
"Alright, Krystal," he offered her a cigarette, "Just innocently wanted to know if you needed a smoke."
She takes it, of course, with him smirking, of course. He lights it with his novelty Zippo, a pin-up girl's décolletage that Sehun and he had gotten at Huntington Beach. She takes a drag, smoke blooming in her lungs, making pretty little ash flowers and blue dreams in the confines of organ.
His smile deepens, wonder and love sinking into his pupils and wrinkles. She finds herself smiling too, incredulously. Curiously close and sublime enough to be an intimate affair.
"If I were a guy, I'd totally go for you, Soojung."
"No way, if I were a guy, I'd go for you."
Jinri laughs, prettily and sweet.
"I'd fall head over heels for you, and then you'd go and break my heart."
"I'd never do that," Soojung curls her toes. "I'd force you to marry me and I'd take you to my coffin."
"How romantic."
Jongin was simple, really. Is simple. Taught time and space to himself, how to vanish and appear at right times to keep the second party's interest piqued. He was a film student, of course he had to master such things, if not by lenses, then by self. Perhaps he was the only film student amongst his friends.
He had met Sulli one day, sitting in Taemin's lap, driver's seat of his '53 Eldorado, voiture classique. Modest petals of a girl, psalms dedicated to her collarbones. After that, Taemin was always talking about renting motels and driving big miles, Los Angeles and Monterey, Sunset Boulevard and Chateau Marmont. He agreed to go, curiosity the best of him and a sense that he might find different angles, different compositions of pastel nuances, and different inspirations within the palm trees and honeydew.
Like it knew it was expected, there she was, inspiration, Krystal, vermillion red-dyed hair, gentle ease and soft demeanor, all sorts of opposite to her tongue. High-waisted shorts, retro sunglasses like a heartbreaker, and to an extent, she was, to him. A lulled ache in the pit of his stomach when she was next to him, sharing the air and sharing his cigarettes. With every little ash dust, one by one, he and she grew closer.
They always lag behind, scuffing his Converse as she drinks her Coca-Cola, long lapses of silence and sometimes detailed conversations of Kubrick and his personal favorite, Wes Anderson. Sulli and The Boys left to their own desires and delicate accords, Jongin with his. She never seemed interested, but never particularly disinterested either. She's meant to be something of a nonchalant, immature girl of spontaneity and freshness, an extension, an ode to morning dew and plain veins, and he likes the idea of keeping something so unkempt and so unattainable in his hands' reach.
The motel walls are paper thin, as always, sheared and cracked, expected of a room that costed forty three dollars a night. Thin enough to smell Sulli's chypre perfume and smoking incense of lilac fumes, thin enough to hear their vinyls playing through the night, Briggite Bardot and Vampire Weekend's latest, Diane Young.
"So she listens to these things." Jongin tosses his cigarette stub over the balcony, Taemin snickers. "What?"
"You got a thing for her, don't you?" Sehun teases as he cracks open an emergency flare, the pink highlight swallowing them and the sable night. Baekhyun lights some firework wands, amber sparks radiating the leftover shadows. "Krystal, I mean."
"Why not?" Taemin swings back some brandy. "Though I don't see why you don't go for Sulli instead."
Jongin weighs the thought of her, her skipping around like a dandelion and her skin of lily milk. He remembers her as a cotton candied teenage dream, always smiling and giggling softly into Krystal's shoulder, remembers her as someone you'd want to empty pockets for. Taemin obliges easily, and perhaps that was why Sulli would always choose him over Baekhyun. He could understand her appeal, the general spectrum of their silent admiration. She had a more than pleasing effeminate esthetic. Sulli was beautiful, like a hazy summer night, eternally young and carefree.
Then there was her counterpart, the more sharp, the more sophisticated and the more tough as nails; correctly more shaken than stirred. Krystal, in her tropic bandeaus, in her crop tops, covering the bare minimum of her crystalline skin. Her litheness and laughter, Jongin thinks, brings back miles and miles of sensation and subtle memories.
She is literature and muse to Jongin, he decides. She is a muse made of romantic lunacy.
It is an hour past dawn, 6 a.m., and they don't know why they're awake. The tide pools swirl, full and nourished, leaving foam on fissures and crevices of skin, on Jongin's toes, on Krystal's toes. A creeping red blush sweeps their cheeks and the tip of their noses, spider vein cracks, isabelline like overdue bruises. Vintage filters and film grains and the polarized pale grey sky.
"Sulli's lips are so pretty," Krystal sighs with hints of dream. "Aren't they?"
Jongin shrugs.
And so it begins, the decision between quiet and ceaseless trails of words of director lingo and Krystal's gushes of her bambi-eyed best friend. They settle with silence, choose the opulent sound of Sulli's cataclysmic laughter as Baekhyun shoves Sehun into the water, choose the cadence and panorama of waves and gulls.
They draw little hearts in the sand with their toes, languid and effortless, let the water swell and erase the evidence.
A familiar scene, in the middle of the atrium, glass film and room, Krystal on a lawn chair, bralette and the matching skirt, sunglasses in place, curls tangled, and a mouth full of Cola with a hint of apricot crème liquor.
Jongin takes his perceived rightful place next to her. They share a last cigarette, solitary applause for the summer that is drawing to a close. He speaks to her, in a romanticized narrative, reads it off of a crumpled napkin (evidence of multiple rewrites at midnight):
"While you were sitting in the back seat of his Cadillac, smoking a cigarette and sharing lipstick with her, keeping your secrets with an enigmatic hue, I was falling deep, deep in love with you, and I am deeply in love with you. I just never told you until just now."
She's never liked him. Sometimes she did, sometimes she didn't. Never liked how he looks at her, however. And he looks at her, now, Venus reborn, glaze of syrupy light, honey sheen, stripped of pathos. Saw her as something for viewing pleasure, a subject for placing impersonal angles on, a capsule for her lashes and line of her jaw. She was not a museum, but a mere theatre for the temporary Coppola-like cinema. She is a goddess, but in his presence, she is reduced to an object for the demeaning male gaze. She knows, knows that he doesn’t understand her, never will or did. Knows that he lacks the patience and qualities to understand her purpose and tenacity. And that he can never amount enough to catch her true beauty. He would dilute her to his pace through cracked lenses.
She pauses, frisson tickling her spine and running back into the nape of her neck. Dying stars burn and bubble Jongin's blood and irradiates his cheeks. And he knew. Cul de sac of the blinded heart.
Wet breath exits the petals of her muted plum blossom lips. A summer breeze sweeps over them, caressing, and stirs the dainty pleats of her skirt. “ you," she simply says.
Then she is alone, listens to Jinri murder Taemin's heart minutes later and spit fire at them all.
Nighttime makes Krystal think of things, replaying the past in her head. Sulli's sleepful breathing as a constant reminder of the past, Krystal makes the same realization that, up to a certain point, she was always alone. She was used to alone, just as she was used to whisperlings of a wasted pretty face and needed maladaptive personality adjustment. She could do alone as Krystal.
"Jinri." Soojung calls for her, and like magic, she breathes to life by her side. She mumbles a few words, rouses from her sleep and dips her nose into the facet of Soojung's shoulder.
"You alright, Jung?"
But Jinri's presence made her Soojung, amaranthine, infinite.
And that was all she was looking for, all she needed.
"All good."
Summer descends in suspended heat and lack of grandeur, well-documented by polaroids of the infamous Soojung and Jinri, ends without a mere glimmer of sound.
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