“I don’t think she meant to go through with it. If she was determined to really end it, there should’ve been a note or something. Regardless, I don’t think there is just one reason behind her decision.”

“So what are those reasons? Shouldn’t you know some of it? You lived with her.”

“People keep telling me that, but … I feel like I knew so little of Jimin, perhaps even less than what everyone else saw in her … So even though it’s too late, I’m trying to trace her path, get to know her …”

“At first, the student society considered connecting her suicide with the current regime’s tyranny. Remember the Sunbe who threw himself off the library the night before the school festival? Last October?”

“Yeah, the one who tried to organize the Busan Gyungnam Student Association under the supervision of the National Student Assembly.”

“The activist set himself on fire, screaming, ‘Down with the military dictatorship. ’ He even left behind a letter written in blood with the slogan, ‘Battle on.’”

“Yeah, now he’s buried in the May 18th Memorial Cemetery. But I’m not following why you’re bringing this up.”

Sol continues: “Well, let me put it this way. During the Student Assembly meeting, some people in our student protest group voiced that we need to connect his suicide with her suicide. I know it’s a stretch to connect a suicide for personal reasons with the rhetoric of student protest, even if she was an active member. Some voiced that doing something like that would make the whole student protest movement look bad. You know, and I heard Jimin had some sort of depression or dissociative disorder for a while. She had to take handfuls of pills every day, right?”

“Who the fuck is saying that?”

“Well, Hyangsook Unni … The pretty Sunbe with a cute mole on her nose? The one with the nasal voice? She said she was Jimin’s best friend and knew everything about her.”

“No, no, you’ve got it all wrong! Stop telling me this! Stop!”

“Don’t get so upset, Yeoul! This is a secret, but … a few days before her death, Jimin asked me why pharmacies only sell sleeping pills one at a time, and if there were pills that could induce miscarriage. Why would she have asked that? She couldn’t have been pregnant, could she? So today I plan to meet her parents and ask them why they cremated her body in such a hurry and why they didn’t call the police …”

It’s like Sol thinks of herself as some sort of detective, she almost seems excited as she rambles on. She got into pharmacy school as an honor student. She’s booksmart, but she runs so goddamn slow. We met at a student protest and I had to drag her along. Get up, do you wanna be trampled to death? The riot police almost killed us both.