“Mom?” There’s a gentle shake of Sulli’s arm, and her thoughts scatter. “Mom!” Sulli breaks out into a smile and draws up a chair. “You should sit down,” she says in a far away voice, “this story could take a while to tell.” Once Taewoo settles herself into the stool next to me, I begin the long and twisting a turning tale of Krystal and I. “I like to think that the best day of my life was when the two of us met.” 

A chuckle escaped Sulli’s lips at the memory. “It was the first day of my freshman year, my family and I had just moved from Busan to Seoul into a house in the suburbs of the booming city.....” 

Fifteen year old Choi Jinri hops out of the backseat of her parents’ van and stepped out onto the freshly paved asphalt of her family’s new house. Her breath blew out in little puffs of white clouds, and the bone chilling wind whipped her long flowing hair off her coat-clad shoulders. Yunho groans as he steps next to his sister, lugging his overstuffed luggage behind him as he scurries to the front porch, “It’s only October, and it’s already freezing here!” Sulli rolls her eyes at her brothers’ complaining: sometimes, she feels as if she’s the eldest child instead of him. The taller girl surveys her new neighborhood, eyes slipping over each large sun window dotting the towering, massive homes that were almost large enough to be mansions, until something caught her eye. Sulli sees something in her next door neighbors’ second story window. An angelic girl with lengthy hair dripping with ebon, with ivory skin and frosted eyes, stands in one of them.

An ashen hand holds onto the beautiful silk curtains, while the other is pressed to her lips. Those dark eyes of hers flash with little sparks of prankishness, flecks of alluring cocoa, and charming rings of ginger. After a second, Sulli realizes it’s incredibly odd that she’s able to make out all the little details of the girl when she’s so far away, but is quickly distracted when a gorgeous smile sweeps over . Sulli can feel something shifting and moving in the depths of her heart as she watches the action. She knows this girl is unlike any other she’s ever met before, and it makes the hairs on her arms and neck and legs stand on end. The mystery girl lets the drapes fall limp as she raises a hand in greeting to Sulli. The sensation spills inside of her, washing over her, and she feels her heart warm and stutter inside of her chest, and her knees buckle with fatigue. 

Who is this girl and why is she having this effect on me? Sulli thinks as she musters up the strength to stand tall and feebly raise her arm above her head, a smile painted perfectly on her lips. “Sulli!” Yunho screams as he jumps off their new houses’ front steps, waving a frantic hand in front of her face, “Dude, you’ve been standing out here for hours, hurry up and unpack already! Mom and Dad said they’d take us out to eat if we...”, the boy trails off as he follows Sulli’s fixed gaze. He stops cold at the sight of the breathtakingly beautiful girl standing there, and Sulli feels a deeper, darker feeling haunting her heart. She rolls her eyes and drags Yunho by the scruff of his coat into the house, “Let’s go, idiot.” 

She can’t shake the feeling of eyes boring into her back as she closed the door behind her and scampers up the stairs. “Who is she?” Sulli screams as soon as she flops herself on top of the bare mattress of her bed, nearly tripping over her cherry red suitcase as she does so. As if in response, a crisply made paper airplane shoots through a crack in her window, and knocks into her head. “Owww,” the tall girl whines, rubbing her head. She spins around just in time to catch the scene of a strand of charcoal hair whipping around the corner of the window exactly across from hers, and a smile caresses as the anger melts and she unfolds the stationery on top of her pillow. The beautiful scrawl of Korean characters marked the pages made Sulli smile. 

Her signature lies at the bottom of the page, and she furrows her brows at the word. “Soojung.” Sulli tries out the name for the first time, and it rolls off of her tongue as natural as her own name, “Jung Soojung.”