blackpink oneshots

eighty-four books || jensoo

Jisoo has eighty-four books in her shop, and Jennie vows to read every single one.

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There are eighty-four books in her small shop, and she often thinks, when she's dusting the shelves-most people have more than this on their shelves at home. They're all rare-special editions, collected by her since her teenage years-but her shop looks empty, and it doesn't even have that distinctive smell that most bookshops seem to have. Here, it just smells of rotting wood. It smells of lost hopes and destroyed dreams. It smells of failure.

Jisoo had, once upon a time, wanted to be a writer. A poet, more specifically. She wrote a lot of poems, mostly about girls with long flowing hair and sparkling eyes. She got teased all through secondary school about her paper fantasies. It was so cliché: The notebook teasingly held aloft, mocking voice ringing out through the classroom.

Now, she doesn't get many customers. She chucks glitter everywhere to try to liven the place up, and then she sits alone for six hours, occasionally leafing through one of the books that are 'For Sale'.

She used to be proud of them, that's the thing. She swore she'd never give them away, or sell them, because they were special. They were signed or old, and they were her private collection of antiques, of things that were worth something. As it turns out, they aren't worth a penny in Seoul.

She falls asleep with her head on the desk around lunchtime, forgetting to eat, as always, her head creasing the pages of a limited edition of Anne of Green Gables. It was the first of her collection, because her mom had noticed her love for reading and had got it for her as a birthday present when she was seven. It had been a hard book for a child so young, but she'd persisted. Her mom had always said that was her most admirable trait: that Jisoo never gave up. That's half the reason she's still sat behind the till in this crummy old bookshop, alone.

The tinkling of the bell breaks her out of her doze, and she leaps up, watching the new arrival, hawk-like.

Brown hair, long and wavy, like one of the princesses in Jisoo's earlier poems, and caramel skin with wide, striking eyes. She's wearing a blue, off the shoulder top. She's wearing jeans and checkered slip on vans. Jisoo loves it. She sits up straighter at the desk, calls out: "Can I help you?"

"Oh, hi! I'm just looking for a good book," she replies, smiling.

"I think all of my books are good," Jisoo grins back. "What sort are you looking for?"

"Um, something old. One of the classics, I guess. And...something sad."

"You'd love Gatsby," Jisoo suggests, skipping out from behind her desk. She knows exactly where to find it, all the shelves sorted into alphabetical order as they are.

"That one with Leonardo DiCaprio?" the other girl inquires.

"This isn't a DVD store," Jisoo bristles. "This is the book. Written in 1925 by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about a fictional man called Jay Gatsby."

"Alright, alright. I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I just loved this book since I was thirteen, and it was never a film to me. It was words written on pages, telling a story. Now Baz Luhrmann's interpretation is all anyone cares to talk about."

"It was good, though. I watched it four times."

"Did you ever think of reading it?" Jisoo asks, selecting the book from the shelf and passing it to her companion. It's faded, and the pages are yellowing, but it's from the 1940s and Jennie always loved it. She wonders if this colourful girl will love it half as much. She doubts it.

"I did," the other girl nods. "How much is it?"

The thing is, Jisoo doesn't know. She's never priced these things; it's too depressing for her. She doesn't know how much they're supposed to go for.