Please remind me (who I really am)

Chapter 12

On Friday evening, Lisa had spent the whole evening moping. Rosé and Jisoo had called the others over, and they had an impromptu games night at Rosé and Lisa's. Jisoo brought over rather a lot of alcohol and Lisa had overindulged, meaning that she spent Saturday morning with her arms wrapped around the toilet. The alcohol, rather than making her happy and relaxed, had made her morose and unwilling, and eventually unable, to join in most of the conversations.

Later that afternoon, she had gone to work. As she passed the newsstand on the way to the bookstore, she hadn't been able to avoid seeing the front pages of the overnight newspapers, Jennie's face plastered all over them. She could see Jennie's face, contorted in shock and irritation. In some, they had cropped the photos so that all you could see was her face, and in others they'd kept the full body shots. There was Jennie Kim, the papers said, looking like she'd just rolled out of a bed she very clearly hadn't spent much time sleeping in. Her hair was in beautiful disarray, some papers had highlighted the dark spots on her neck and collarbone, the rainbow on her top zoomed in on, and some had a smaller photo of Lisa in one of the corners. The titles all had various unimaginative titles along the lines of Jennie Kim's Lesbian Getaway, and Lisa angrily stalked past the newsstand as if it had personally offended her.

By the time she'd arrived at work, which Hanbin had been taking care of for her, it was much busier than usual. Naively she wondered whether there was something special about today, but when she'd walked in, she'd felt every eye turn to stare at her. A newspaper with Jennie's face on it had flashed in front of her eyes as someone asked her whether it was her in the photo. It turned out that the newspaper had printed Lisa's first name, although not her last, so she was at least being afforded some small measure of privacy. Perhaps Rosé's colleague Rhea hadn't been absolutely, 100% heartless.

She denied all the questions, although it hurt her to do so and she wasn't sure that anyone believed her. Lisa retreated into the storeroom and sorted out the stock in the boxes ready for Monday morning when she'd next be in. Rosé knew that Lisa had to keep busy in order to keep her mind off things, so for the next week, whenever neither of them was at work, she and Rosé went to the theater to see a matinee of Hamilton and the evening Wicked show, the fairground where Lisa won a bear so large it had been the star of a photoshoot on the subway, for long walks on Staten Island sharing ice cream.

She knew she needed to give Jennie the time she'd asked for, but that didn't stop her from checking her cell every few minutes to see whether she had any messages. Logically, she knew Jennie had probably had meetings that spanned many time zones, and that she had already left for Utah and was already filming Space Pirates, but the tiny amount of communication sucked.

The truth was that it had only been a few days, but Lisa already missed Jennie terribly. She had quickly grown used to waking up with Jennie's voice soft with sleep, her being around all the time, and her not being there had left a hole in Lisa's life that she hadn't expected to be so large. Internally, she berated herself for falling so far so fast, but she also knew she couldn't help it. Someone like Jennie, who so easily fitted in Lisa's life and heart, didn't come around very often.

The first Friday after Jennie had left, she'd spent the whole afternoon painting nothing and everything. She'd spent far too long trying to mix the exact shade of brown that Jennie's eyes turned when she looked at Lisa, and the subtle mixing of colors soothed her. She hadn't managed it, but the various browns she had come out with ended up on the canvas in the form of a forest, a grey castle in the distance, indistinct banners unfurled and waving in an imagined morning breeze.

Lisa was getting ready for bed in the bathroom when she heard her phone ringing in her bedroom. By the time she'd finished brushing her teeth, it had stopped ringing. Earlier she'd thrown her cell across the bed, and when she came back in and saw that she had a missed call from Jennie, her heart skipped a beat. She dived dramatically across the bed and picked her phone up, made herself comfortable, and called Jennie back.