TWENTY
She's done it before.
She's sure she can do it again.
She just doesn't remember how she did it.
It's different this time.
She's not angry at her mom.
Not yet, at least.
She's not angry at him.
How can she ever be angry at him?
(She wasn't really angry at him before either. At least not for long.)
She forgets about Lisa.
Until, in rare moments, all she can do is remember Lisa.
She decides to stop drinking when she stumbles on her way home alone one night.
She can't remember how she gets the scar on her shin, except that it happened that night.
(It's the same scar she got on the same shin doing the same stupid thing she did the first time around.)
She doesn't write.
She doesn't call.
(Except she calls Kai one night. He's happy to be her mistake. Again.)
She shouldn't call.
She shouldn't write.
It's hard enough just to drag herself to class each day.
She nearly drops all of her classes. Her mom won't let her. It's almost a fight. She stops herself just in time.
Instead, she just barely passes her marketing class and her paintings go dark and abstract. No more vivid greens. Indra doesn't say much, at least not at first.
She sees her mom every weekend. It would be more if her mom would let her, but she won't. When she goes home, they don't talk much. It's still better than nothing at all.
She's in the art studio or her room the rest of the time. She's happy to give up what little collegiate social life she's had. Jisoo and Bambam and Kris seem to understand.
Chahee comes home more often, too. This is when things changed with Chahee, the first time around. They'd recovered from the Wells debacle of freshman year and then her dad dies and her mom disappears and somehow Chahee ended up on her mom's side of everything. She felt like she lost her dad and her mom and her best friend all in one fell swoop. So she keeps going home and not talking to her mom but not because she doesn't want to and Chahee keeps showing up and giving her this look that makes her feel like she should be doing something. She just doesn't know what.
She's decided that she's not losing Chahee this time around and she'll do her damnedest not to lose her mom either. She hasn't changed fate yet, but she figures she has to be able to change something. She can't keep living this same life without them. Or she's not losing them without a fight, at least.
If she can't change his death, she'll change everything else.
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Heart Beat Here
RomanceAt twenty-four, she had woken up in her sixteen year-old body and in her sixteen year-old life. She had woken up to familiar walls plastered with bad charcoal drawings and sloppy watercolors. She'd shaken her head and closed her eyes and then closed...
