"So… how have you been, Sarah?"

Sarah Tran hadn’t aged a day.

She styled her hair the same, she wore the same kind of clothes and I could have sworn even the glasses were the same ones I had once been used to see on her on a daily basis. Even her bad skin wasn’t showing any sign of a new day.

I didn’t like her. I never did. But who’d blame me.

She had a smug smile when she deliberately fell deeper into her chair to communicate that she was relaxed even though it was me she was talking to. “You know, not much. Got into the national team. Living on the brighter side of the life. You?”

I could have pretended that I was genuinely happy for her. I intended to do so and even promised myself to play nice with her but she was too much of a killjoy to carry that one out. Excluding her victorious smile and superior behavior was rather hard for me. It only made me wonder if it could have been Hanna on Sarah’s place in the national team if she was still alive.

"Having the time of my life", I said indifferently and monotonously. I didn’t bother to even try to convince her that I had the slightest bit of respect for her. "Now that the formalities are over, can both of you finally enlighten me about why I am here?"

I glanced at Sehun who hadn’t spoken a word since I arrived. For some inexplicable reason he looked almost apologetic. I couldn’t stand that. I couldn’t look at him with such a content yet gloomy face when my insides were so vague.

I looked back at Sarah. I hated to witness her condescending smile drawing closed when she straightened her body up and leaned towards me. “I have some information about your friend Hanna”, she whispered as if it was confidential information.

All I did was tug my eyebrows upwards as a gesture for her to stop the teasing and get to the point.

"I might know the reason she was acting all odd thorough the last of her years."

I wanted to roll my eyes but restrained myself. “Yeah? What is that?” I asked.

She cleared . “There was this one time we were having our usual Tuesday evening practice several years back from now. As you both know our coach has quite of a temper and he is a full-time perfectionist, so when something went wrong, especially when it went wrong for seventeen times in a row, he flipped”, she started.

"So, this one time something was wrong with Hanna. She looked like she was having her first steps on planet Earth. It was like she was straight out from a mental hospital. Everyone else assumed she was just tired or that she had lost her touch with volleyball but I kept my eye on her a bit more closely than the others. She kept failing all the time. It was the first time she was so bad at volleyball, I had never seen her like that. It looked like she was trying to play ice hockey or something. It was really bad and the coach lost his temper. He sent her out. He told her to go home and she did, or at least pretended she did." A weird noise between a chuckle and a shriek exhaled from her body.

"But she didn’t?" I asked.

Sarah shook her head. “No,” she said. “I wanted to know what was wrong with her and what she was up to. So I went after her. I followed her into the locker room and expected her to pack her stuff and flee but I was wrong. She stayed and I hid myself behind the lockers and waited. That’s when she met someone.”

I looked over at Sehun but he looked just as expressionless as I did. “Who was it?” I asked.

"The more important question is what they were doing. I couldn’t see properly because I had to hide myself so they wouldn’t see me lurking. I didn’t hear what they were talking about either but there were two motions I saw clearly. Hanna gave the guy money and the guy gave her something. I couldn’t see what it was since it was so tightly hidden inside both of their fists", she paused for a breath "as if it was secret. Judging by their speed I’d say this wasn’t their first time doing business. If you ask me I’d say in a heartbeat that she was buying drugs."

Immediately, I shook my head in denial. There was no way Hanna was involved in drugs. I would have noticed that. I was her best friend and I never saw her in such a groggy state that I would suspect her being on drugs.

Sarah, of course, saw this coming and knew there was no way I would believe it. “Well, she took her life with sleeping pills, didn’t she? What exactly is the part that screams she wasn’t an experienced junkie in that?”

My fist clenched. “She wasn’t a junkie”, I looked her dead in the eye and growled like a hound. “Why would’ve she been? She had no reason to get involved with drugs!” I raised my voice but straight after realized how sadly untrue that was. Somehow Sehun’s head managed to drop lower too.

Hanna was a foster child. Her mother had committed suicide and her father had harassed her. She was waiting for a child that she obviously refused to have with a yet unknown father. God, she even took her own life, that’s how bad things were with her. She had every reason to start using drugs.

I bit my tongue from saying that I knew her. I didn’t. I apparently never knew her at all and it was eating me bit by bit from the inside. I felt like caving in. I felt like crumbling into dust.

My best friend was like a stranger to me.

The most bothering part wasn’t even that Sarah just appeared and told such hazardous things as if she had just made them up. The most ailing part was that they matched up with what Hanna had wrote down. About Sarah knowing too much because she was a witness of Hanna meeting someone in the locker room. About ‘the magic of drug’ as she had said.

It made me sick. For a moment there I forgot how basic breathing works.

Sarah closely noted every single reaction I expressed. The nerve-wrecking smile was eroding into my brains and it soon became the only thing I was able to think about. It spread like a disease.

I never wondered why Sarah wanted to do this, tell this now. She was a sadist. She enjoyed other people’s emotional pain. She wanted to see me and Sehun suffer, she really did, there’s no doubt of this. There was a time she would have done anything to hunt Hanna down as well. All I knew about her was that she played volleyball and constantly tried to hurt Hanna.

"Who was the guy?" Sehun took the role of the interviewer when he noticed I wasn’t in a state of mind to grasp it.

"How should I know? His voice was so deep that I could barely hear it when he was talking silently. He was wearing a hood so I never saw his face either", Sarah explained. "But I did see a small tattoo on his left hand. It was right on the skin between his thumb and index finger. Looked circular. That’s all I know."

I hastily tried to recall every single person I knew that had a tattoo to begin with. There was no one I knew, let alone someone who had it in that specific place. I was falling into a desperation that I have never experienced before.

The two handfuls of fingers ran through my hair. I gulped. “There’s no way the Hanna Claire I knew would do drugs. No way.” I still lived in the denial.

"Well, seems like you didn’t know Hanna Claire at all, then. None of us did. She managed to conceal so many things about herself that it’s hard to follow what was real and what wasn’t", Sarah said. "She was fake."

 ”Who are you to even speak her name aloud? You’re the one who despised her more than a plague”, I snapped. I didn’t want to hear her. I didn’t want to see her. She had caused enough trouble as it already was.

Sarah raised her hands up as a sign of implicit surrender. “I was just trying to help you two little detectives to get more clues about this mystery. Sehun is the one who asked.”

"I want nothing from you", I spat out. My glare was setting Sarah ablaze.

Sehun stayed silent again. He always did. The last thing he wanted was to get into an argument let alone fight. The both of us, being friends of Hanna, disliked Sarah Tran more than a simple human mind is able to comprehend. It was just only Sehun that was capable to keep it in. He was too kind. He was too sweet.

"If you have nothing more to say I think we’re done here", I stood up on my feet and left my order there, completely untouched.

Sehun followed my movement like there was a mirror between us.

"Wait!" Sarah called behind us when we were about to leave. I was mere air for her. This time her eyes were keen on Sehun like a carnivore on a prey. "You do know that she had way more than a little crush on you, right? She adored you. She worshipped you. She spoke of you as if she was the solar system and you were the sun. She probably would have done absolutely anything for you, I hope you know that", and then she paused. "She probably would have even taken her own life for you."

I didn’t think. I jolted forward with my right fist already drawn backwards.

It would have collided with her face. I would have hit her right on the left side of her jaw but Sehun captured me before I got too close.

I screamed to her something that I have no memory of. I had a feeling it was something almost as filthy as her last sentence.

"Let’s just go, okay?" Sehun begged with a slim voice while he was still pulling my resisting body backwards.

Sarah grinned. “Listen to your brother. He’s smart”, she said. I was ready to give yet another endeavor to punch her but somehow me and Sehun were already out.

My mind was so foggy with wrath that I didn’t remember much from the rest of the scene. To be honest I didn’t remember much from the rest of the day except for cracking open in tears onto Sehun’s shoulder.

I think I took just one or two of the sleeping pills before I went to bed too. 

written by papercut (01.01.2015)

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