Kelsey cried the whole way home.
Tears streamed, hot and silent, blurring the red rock mesas into watercolor smudges. She knew these roads by heart—every curve where he’d drum his fingers on the dashboard, every straightaway where they’d sing too loud with the top down. The steering wheel felt alien in her grip without his commentary from the passenger seat. She pulled into her driveway and killed the engine, sitting in the sudden quiet until the heat became unbearable. Then she slipped inside, past the empty living room, and went straight downstairs to her bedroom. She didn’t bother washing her face. She just fell onto her bed, still in her clothes, and pressed her cheek into the pillow that smelled like her shampoo and, faintly, like him.
The summer that followed was the most boring summer she’d ever had.
She filled the hours with babysitting jobs for neighbors, even when they didn’t really need her. She organized the garage twice. She started running at five in the morning, when the desert air was still cool and the streets were empty, pushing herself until her lungs burned and her thoughts blurred into a single, rhythmic beat. Her friends called, inviting her to pool parties and bonfires out at the riverbed, but she always declined. The thought of laughing in a crowd, of pretending nothing had shifted, made her chest feel tight and hollow.
Her dad noticed. Of course he did. He didn’t ask, didn’t give her one of his careful, searching looks. Instead, he’d find her in the kitchen staring blankly into the open fridge and say, “C’mon, kid. I’m replacing the alternator on the truck.” He’d hand her a wrench and point, his voice steady as he explained the purpose of each bolt. He taught her how to grout tile in the downstairs bathroom, how to calibrate the sprinkler system, how to sharpen a knife until it could slice paper. It was his language of care—tangible, useful, a series of problems with clear solutions. She clung to it.
They texted sometimes. Jisung’s messages arrived in her time zone’s deep night, brief bursts of energy from his tomorrow: *Just finished practice. Dead.* Or a photo of a bizarre snack from a Korean convenience store with the caption, *You would hate this.* She’d reply when she woke up, keeping it light, matching his tone: *Looks disgusting. Get some sleep.* The twelve-hour time difference felt like a physical chasm. His day was her night, his exhaustion her morning coffee. He was living in a future she couldn’t touch, and she was stuck in a present that felt like a recording on loop.
She kept the ache to herself. She folded it neatly and tucked it away, same as she’d done with the charged silence in her bedroom, the tension on the dance floor. It was easier. For her, because if she didn’t name it, it couldn’t fully break her. For him, because his path was set in stone oceans away, and her confession would only be a burden. So she let the texts be just texts, and the memories be just memories, and the love she finally admitted to herself in the dark remained a silent, private truth.
Senior year began with a blast of air conditioning and the squeak of new sneakers on polished linoleum. Kelsey walked the familiar halls with a strange sense of detachment. She was still captain of the cheer squad, still smiling in the hallways, still laughing with her friends at lunch. But it felt like she was watching herself perform a well-rehearsed role. The sounds were too sharp, the colors too bright, as if she’d been living in soft focus for months and someone had suddenly twisted the lens.
Her bedroom became a museum of before. The bottle of nail polish he’d used sat on her dresser, half-empty. A stray guitar pick he’d left behind was wedged in the frame of her mirror. She didn’t move them. They were just facts of the landscape now, like the scar on her knee from childhood. One Tuesday night in late September, her phone buzzed with a video call request. Jisung’s name glowed on the screen. Her heart performed a frantic, painful somersault. She took a breath, smoothed her hair, and answered.
His face filled her screen, pixelated for a second before clearing. He was in what looked like a practice room, white walls and mirrors behind him. He looked older. Not in a dramatic way, but in the set of his shoulders, the slight shadows under his eyes that even his bright smile couldn’t erase. “Kels,” he said, and the familiar nickname, in his voice, after so long hearing it only in her head, was a physical shock.
“Hey, you.” She leaned back against her headboard, hoping she looked casual. “Aren’t you supposed to be, like, sleeping?”
“Couldn’t. We just wrapped. Wanted to see your face.” His gaze was intense, even through the screen. He studied her, a small frown forming. “You look tired.”
“Gee, thanks.” She laughed, but it sounded thin. “Senior year. You know. It’s a lot.” It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the truth, and from the way his eyes stayed on hers, he knew it.
“Tell me something normal,” he said, his voice dropping. “Something boring. Please.”
So she did. She told him about her dad’s latest project, restoring an old dirt bike. She described the epic failure of the homecoming float committee’s first meeting. She talked about her little brother Kohl’s obsession with a new video game. As she spoke, his expression softened, the performer’s edge melting away to reveal the boy who’d sat at her kitchen table eating cereal. He listened like he was drinking it in, interjecting only to ask small, precise questions: *What color is the bike? Did your mom make her seven-layer dip for the meeting?*
“It’s quiet there,” he said finally, when she trailed off.
“It’s midnight.”
“No, I mean… it feels quiet. In the video. Around you.” He paused, searching for the words. “Your room is so still.”
Her room had always been chaotic—clothes piled on her desk chair, posters curling at the edges, life bursting out of every corner. Now it was tidy. The bed was made. The surfaces were clear. It was the room of someone who had nothing left to spill. She just shrugged, a tight movement of one shoulder.
“Kelsey.” He said her full name, and it sounded like a question and an answer all at once.
“Don’t,” she whispered, looking away from the screen, focusing on the guitar pick in her mirror. If he asked, she would shatter. If he acknowledged the canyon between them, she would not be able to pretend it was just a ditch she could step over.
He was silent for a long moment. She could hear faint, tinny music from his end—someone else’s practice. “Okay,” he said, his voice rough. “Okay.” He didn’t push. He never did. That was their dance. He would step to the edge, see her flinch, and retreat. It was the contract of their friendship, and it had never felt more like a cage.
“Tell me something about there,” she said, forcing brightness back into her tone. “Something good.”
He told her about a song they were working on, humming a few bars. He described a funny mistake during a variety show recording. But his heart wasn’t in it. His eyes kept drifting from the camera, as if he were looking at something just beyond it, something he couldn’t show her. The distance wasn’t just miles or hours. It was worlds. He was building a life, piece by piece, on a stage she could only watch from the wings.
“I should let you go,” he said eventually, though neither of them moved to end the call. “You have school.”
“Yeah.”
“Kels?”
“Hmm?”
He leaned closer to the camera, his face becoming a constellation of pixels and familiar features. “I miss the roads,” he said quietly. “I miss driving with you.”
It was such a specific, harmless thing. But it undid her. Because he didn’t say he missed *her*. He missed the action, the shared space, the *them* that existed in motion. It was the safest way to say the dangerous thing. A sob climbed her throat, sharp and sudden. She pressed her lips together, hard, and nodded, unable to speak.
He saw it. His expression fractured, the careful composure slipping to reveal a raw, helpless yearning that mirrored her own. “Hey,” he breathed. “Don’t cry.”
“I’m not,” she choked out, wiping hastily at her eyes. “It’s just late.”
“Look at me.”
She dragged her gaze back to the screen. He was right there, and he was impossibly far away. His hand came up, as if he could reach through the glass and brush her cheek. It hovered there, a ghost of a touch, before falling back to his knee. “I have to go,” he said, but it sounded like a plea.
“Okay.”
“Goodnight, Kelsey.”
“Goodnight, Jisung.”
The call ended. Her screen went dark, reflecting her own tear-streaked face in the gloom. The quiet of her room rushed in, absolute and suffocating. She curled onto her side, clutching her phone to her chest, and let the silence swallow her whole. Outside, an Arizona wind kicked up, whispering through the mesquite trees, carrying nothing but dust and the lingering heat of a day that was already over.