From Day One | JENSOO

Chapter 28

Different names for the same things.

"I have..." Lisa searched through her unkempt freezer and found something in the back, "ice cream bars."

Rosé was sitting on the floor, next to the refrigerator, her eyes traveling up Lisa's bare legs, watching as Lisa shifted her weight from her left leg to her right. She bit down on the inside of her cheek painfully and looked away.

"Ice cream bars? Really? You're like a teenager pretending to be an adult."

"Takes one to know one."

"Is that you trying to be witty?"

"This is me trying to be polite but I guess you can't—" Lisa began closing the freezer and Rosé shot out a hand.

"No!" It was an impulse reaction, she couldn't help it.

"Give me the stupid ice cream."

A victory for Lisa, a small one, but Lisa knew victories against Rosé were meant to be celebrated. She gave the ice cream to Rosé and sat down across from her, taking a bite.

"Do you tack on stupid to every noun? Everything is stupid to you," Lisa said, chewing on the melting ice cream.

Stupid Barbie made Rosé do it. It was her who made Rosé frustrated to the point where yes, everything became stupid.

"Do you always talk with your mouth full like a Neanderthal?"

Lisa shouldn't have smiled but she shouldn't have had sex with the enemy either. As long as she was spiraling down, she would have some fun.

After desecrating Lisa's kitchen, Lisa took Rosé to her room to give her something to wear. They went at it again in the bedroom because Rosé couldn't let go how easily Lisa had overpowered her. Now they were back in the kitchen, avoiding the subject of their spontaneous sex by using hunger as an excuse.

"You know most of our conversations are just questions?" Lisa said after coming to the realization.

It was a miracle they had conversations in the first place.

Rosé surveyed the apartment casually, nothing standing out of interest. It wasn't necessarily bland but Rosé grew up in mansions, villas in Spain and vacation homes on the beach so there wasn't much that impressed her anyway.

"So was being bartender Barbie your dream as a child or did you just screw up in life?"

It was the first question either of them had asked that had some relevance to their lives. The attempt wasn't lost on Lisa.

"I just kept falling short in everything I did except bartending so I did what I'm good at."

"Stop speaking in tongues and give me a straight answer."

Lisa didn't know it yet, but this was Rosé's tactic at getting people to talk since obviously, Lisa wasn't speaking in tongues. Lisa complied only because she could see right through Rosé's tactic.

"My brother is the prodigy child in the family. Whatever I did, he did better. I never cared, but my parents always pushed me to be like him. I couldn't be, so one day I thought I'd stop trying to live up to their expectations and try something different."

Without prompting, Rosé had already created a little file in her head for Lisa, making notes and deductions, but before she could start analyzing and picking Lisa apart like an experimental subject, she willed her brain to stop.

This was why she couldn't interact with people on an emotional level, it always turned out the same. She'd diagnose them as patients and pick out their issues. No one liked to be treated like a patient, especially when they were a person with flaws, like everyone else in the damn world. So Rosé went through people like they were inanimate objects. She didn't want to get to know them, because that meant getting to know their flaws, their problems and she'd never be able to see them as an individual but as an example of a disorder or a lecture from class. Somewhere along the way, Sooyoung and Jisoo became two of a tiny group of people Rosé appreciated as human beings.