She thought she had gotten rid of them all.

Rose could remembered that very night where she had taken the photos of her and Vanessa down from her notice board and placed them all in the bin. How could she not? It had been a long painful process, with tears streaming down her face and sob echoing out of her mouth, quietly so not to wake her Dad. But she had to get rid of them. Vanessa didn’t – couldn’t – return the feelings Rose had for the ginger haired girl and Rose was starting to develop feelings for Claire. Rose couldn’t hold onto the past and those Vanessa orientated feelings that went with it. She had to find closure. She had to let it go.

She could remember emptying her bedroom waste bucket into the larger bin outside, forcing her head away so she did not take a single glance at the contents inside. She knew that if she did, she would have snatched them all back.

Now the bin-men had long since emptied that bin and taken all those photos away to the dump. Even if those photos had somehow escaped from their unfortunate fate that day, she had long since moved from that house. There was no way she would ever see those photos. She had thought she would never come across a Vanessa photo ever again.

Not until she was rifling through her books and that one photo she missed flew out, fluttering to the floor. She must have used it as a bookmark or something, perhaps thinking to put it up on her board at a later date but forgetting that train of thought, as she often did when she got lost in a good book. Now she almost wished she had remembered as she stared at that photograph, stunned, too shock to make a move of picking it up.

Even by taking those pictures down from her walls, she hadn’t got rid of the past quite that easily.

Slowly, she reached down and picked the picture up.

It was one of those small little photos you got at those photo booths in shopping centres and such. The type where you could take more than one picture and, you could even add smileys or stickers to the photo, before you printed them out on a little slip of paper. Those photo booths were used for serious photos such as the ones you find on passports. If Rose’s memory was not mistaken, she had gone to that photo booth for that reason. But they were also used by best friends to take fun photos of them pulling silly faces together, like crossing their eyes and sticking out their tongues. Those were the set of pictures she and Vanessa had taken straight after the boring serious passport photos and the set of the pictures Rose was holding in her hands now.