Chapter 1: The Call That Shatters the Night
As
The scream wasn’t sound, but vibration. A frantic, teeth-rattling buzz against the nightstand that sliced through the thick wool of sleep. Jihyo’s hand flailed out from the covers, knocking over the cold, half-full mug. The dregs of yesterday’s tea bled into the wood grain, dark as a bruise.
Her phone screen was a nuclear blast in the dark room. 3:07 AM.Nayeon. The name pulsed with a wrongness that had her thumb swiping answer before her brain could form a thought.
“Hey? Nayeon?”
Silence. But not empty silence. It was the heavy, wet kind, broken by a shuddering breath that sounded like it had been dragged over gravel.
“Nayeon, talk to me. What’s wrong?” Jihyo was sitting up now, back rigid against the headboard. The flickering lamp painted the walls with jumping, panicked shapes.
“Jihyo-ya.” Her voice was a shredded whisper. “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry for what?Are you hurt? Where are you?” The questions machine-gunned out of her, automatic, a professional protocol flipping on. But this wasn’t a patient. This was Nayeon. Her Nayeon. The one who used to laugh so hard she’d snort soda out her nose.
Another wet, ragged inhale. “I’m just… so tired. Of everything. The noise in my head. It doesn’t stop. It’s just… static and guilt and it’s so loud.”
Jihyo’s own breath hitched. This wasn’t the usual 2 AM ‘I’m a failure’ spiral. The texture was different. The words were too final, each one smoothed down by a terrible resolve.
“Okay. Okay, listen to me. The noise is lying. It’s a liar. Where are you? I’m coming to get you right now.”
“No.” The word was quiet, absolute. “Don’t. You’ve done enough. You’ve all done enough for me. I’m just… a leaky boat. You keep bailing me out and I just keep making more holes. You should be sleeping. You have a shift tomorrow.”
“I don’t give a shit about my shift!” Jihyo was on her feet now, the comforter pooling at her ankles. The chill of the floorboards bit into her soles. “Nayeon, tell me where you are. Please. Let me just… be there. We don’t have to talk. We can just sit.”
A faint, broken sound that might have been a laugh.“You always say that. ‘Just sit.’ You have no idea how much I want to just… stop. Not exist for a little while. Not be a problem.”
The word ‘problem’ was a nail hammered into Jihyo’s sternum. “You are not a problem. You are my friend. You’re in pain. That’s different.”
“It’s the same thing lately.” Nayeon’s voice faded, like she was turning her head away from the receiver. “I painted the walls today. The new apartment. You know the color you said was full of sunlight? ‘Buttercream.’ It just looks like sickness to me. It just looks like… nothing.”
Jihyo closed her eyes, scrambling. The painter, the artist who saw the world in colors Jihyo couldn’t even name—now seeing only absence in buttercream. This was the core of it. The erosion of her very senses.
“Then we’ll repaint it. Tomorrow. I’ll get the ugliest, loudest, most obnoxious color I can find.Electric lime. Neon puke. We’ll do it together.”
Silence again.Too long.
“Nayeon?”
“I think I need to go somewhere quiet. For a long time.”
The sentence hung in the dark, each word a crystal shard. Jihyo’s mind, trained for crisis, began racing through terrible databases. Quiet.Long time. Means what? A trip?A retreat? Or something without a return ticket?
Her voice dropped, low and urgent, stripping away all nurse-like calm. “Nayeon, listen to me. You are not allowed to go somewhere quiet. Do you hear me? The world needs your noise. I need your noise. Even if it’s angry or sad or just fucking static right now, I need it. It’s yours. It’s you.”
She was pleading now, pacing the short, worn path between her bed and the door. “Remember in tenth grade, when Choi Minsik tried to ask me out by throwing a note at my head in the cafeteria? And you stood up on the bench and yelled ‘She has standards, you troglodyte!’ and spilled his tray all over him?”
A tiny, watery exhale. A good sign. A fragment of the old Nayeon.
“You were so brave,” Jihyo whispered, pressing the advantage, weaving the memory like a lifeline. “You are still that person. You’re just stuck. That’s all this is. You’re stuck, and I’m coming to get you unstuck. Just tell me where.”
“It’s too late, Jihyo-ya.” The resignation was back, smothering. “I already made a mess. I just… I wanted to hear your voice. One more time.”
One more time.
The floor fell away. Jihyo’s stomach lurched. No protocol covered this. This was the freefall.
“Nayeon, don’t you dare. Don’t you dare say goodbye to me. You hang up this phone and I will find you. I will call the police. I will call every fucking hospital from here to Busan. I will never, ever stop looking.You hear me? You will not get quiet.”
Her words were sharp, desperate grenades. She heard a muffled sound on the other end.A door closing? The rustle of fabric?
“I have to go.”
“NO! Nayeon, please!”
“I’m sorry. For everything. I love you.”
The line died.
Not a click.A void. A sudden, screaming absence of sound that was louder than any scream.
“Nayeon? NAYEON!”
Jihyo stared at the black screen. She called back. It rang once, twice, three times—then went straight to voicemail. The recorded greeting, Nayeon’s cheerful, upbeat voice from a year ago, was a cruelty she couldn’t bear.
She was moving before she had a plan. Ripped the charging cable from the wall. Yanked open her dresser drawer, pulled on the first jeans and sweater she found. Her fingers were clumsy, thick. The metallic smell in the air was now the smell of pure fear.
Think.Think.
The new apartment. Nayeon had just moved last month. To a building near the river, because she said the water was soothing. Jihyo had helped her unpack boxes of art supplies and books she was too depressed to read.The river.
Her mind recoiled from the image, but her body was already in motion. She grabbed her keys, her wallet, her phone clenched in a white-knuckled fist. She didn’t bother with shoes, just jammed her feet into sneakers by the door.
The last thing she saw as she threw open her apartment door was the spilled tea, seeping into the grain of the nightstand, and the trembling circle of lamplight on her empty, rumpled bed.Then she was in the hall, running, the slap of her footsteps echoing in the stairwell, the only sound in a sleeping world.