Frankly in Love (18 page)

Traffic is hell—most of the roads heading into the hills are closed because of the brush fire—but Q and I hardly notice. We roll up the windows of the grumbling Consta, close the vents, and enjoy the AC. Three fire trucks go screaming by, whee-whee-whee.

We hardly notice because I’m busy telling Q everything, as instructed. I tell him:

• How the words
  I love you
  never quite traveled the air right toward Brit
  

• How I often found myself thinking of Joy first thing in the morning
  

• How such signs are now obvious in hindsight
  

• How the stupid touristy Landworth ship will forever mark the most romantic night of my short life so far
  

• How this black eye is really a passport stamp on my face, finally letting me out of the purgatory of Love Customs and into the welcoming area of Gate J Arrivals (the
  J
  stands for
  Joy
  )
  

“Your metaphors are giving me the pre-puke drools,” says Q. “Please don’t ever try to become a writer.”

“I think I’ve been through a lot.”

Q smiles at me. “Now that I know the whole story, you clearly deserve that eye. But Joy feels right. I’m happy for you.”

Q puts the car into Park to give me a side-hug. Someone honks at us from behind.

“Eat my butt cheek,” shouts Q to the rearview mirror.

We get to Q’s, crunch the white gravel path to his Byzantine double front doors, and are greeted with howls of worry and concern from his mom.

“It was a tetherball accident,” I say.

“You need to stop taking tetherball so seriously,” says Q’s mom.

“Tetherball is not a sport,” says Q’s dad, with a pair of glasses atop his head, another pair on his face, and another around his neck. “But that does not mean it’s harmless.”

We eat—this incredible osso buco—forget to clear our dishes, and run upstairs so Q can show me this
Pax Eterna
game everyone’s talking about.

“Poor Brit’s gotta be heartbroken,” says Q while the game loads. “But the heart wants what it wants.”

“I hate myself for hurting Brit,” I say. “But I had to be honest with myself.”

“I’m really, terribly, awfully happy for you, old bean,” says Q.

“It would’ve been worse to string Brit along, right?”

The game is ready. But Q can’t seem to shake a nagging thought. “You didn’t choose the tribe, did you?”

“That’s a valid question. But no way.” I switch hands to hold my ice bag. But now I find myself wondering:

Did I fall in love with Joy because we have more in common?

A favorite book of mine, the sci-fi comedy classic
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, says the secret to flying is simply to fall toward the ground without actually hitting it. The way you do this to forget the fact that you’re falling, even as you’re falling.

I love Joy because she is smart. Because she is ambitious, and a huge nerd endlessly fascinated by the built world around her. I love Joy because we go way back to when we were kids, and that counts for more than I realize. I love Joy because she is gorgeous.

But that’s the obvious stuff. At the core, I love Joy because she makes me laugh. A girl who can make you laugh is worth laughing with forever. And you know what? I love Joy because I make her laugh, too. When I’m with her, I become totally unself-conscious. I no longer think about who I am, or where I am, or when. I am simply present with Joy. I forget about the ground, and miss.

“I chose Joy,” I say. “Fuck the tribe.”

Q nods, impressed.

“Joy is my tribe,” I say.

Q nods.

“And so are you,” I say.

It’s like Q was waiting for me to say that, and he breaks into a big shy smile. We smile together for a long moment like this. Senior year is almost halfway over. Then it’s graduation. After that, college. In the meantime, I will see Joy as much as I can. But I will not neglect Q, either.

Twin sister Evon comes in, scans my face with a sexy cyborg gaze. “Tetherball, huh.”

I shrug.

“Do you have a phone charger I could borrow?” says Evon.

“Don’t you already have like seven of my chargers?” I say.

Evon snatches a Citrus-Spin™ orange charger from my bag and darts away into the magical deer forest where she dwells.

“Look how incredible this is,” Q says, turning my attention toward his huge screen. He scrolls through lists and lists of little maps, all marked with red Xs and the word
FAILED
.

“No one has won a game of
Pax Eterna
, not me and Paul Olmo, no one.”

I lean forward. “Huh?”

“So, in
Pax Eterna
each time you start a new game, you get this pristine tropical island with everything you could possibly need, all there and ready,” says Q. He moves his God-hand cursor to give me a rapid-fire tour. “Ore, water, fertile lands, blablabla.”

I squint at dozens of tiny black skull icons. “Are these dead bodies?”

Q strokes a pretend beard. “My god, it’s happening all over again.”

“How do you win?” I say.

“The way to win
Pax Eterna
is to build—and hold—a successful, stable society for a full month. There’s a twenty-thousand-dollar jackpot prize. No one’s done it yet.”

I examine data in a sidebar. “So they’ve made a game out of the biggest human challenge ever. World peace.”

“Here’s the thing,” says Q. “Anyone can join any
Pax Eterna
game in progress. So in me and Paul’s island here, there’s only two factions, but already they’ve started killing each other. And it’s only been a couple hours.”

“Jesus,” I say. “No one’s ever gonna win that jackpot. Just like no one’s figured out world peace.”

“It’s the mystery of the ages,” says Q, lost in the screen.

“The only winning move is not to play,” I say, quoting one of my favorite movies ever. I have no idea how this applies, but I toss it out there just to see how Q will react.

Q clutches his head as if it’s gonna burst. “Not to play,” he says. “I gotta call Paul. Thank you, Frank Li!”

When I get home, I give Mom the same excuse—tetherball gone wild—and beg off her insistent offers to boil up some Chinese herbal medicine (hanyak, pronounced hawn-yawk) to speed the healing. That stuff is a blood-brown suicide drink of pickle juice and coffee and silt and pure fear.

Mercifully my phone buzzes—a video call from Joy—and I make my escape.

“Hey,” I say.

“Oh my god what the fuck did Wu do I’m gonna run him
over with my car three times to make sure he’s dead,” shouts Joy.

Video call. Joy can see my face. Aha.

“Don’t,” I say over the screaming. “Don’t run Wu over.”

“I’m gonna re-kill him,” says Joy, “after I kill him.”

“Just—just—” I say, and an idea comes to me. “Just come over.”

This stops Joy.

I see her face change. She gets it.

Just come over.

Because now she can finally go to the house of her official, certified boyfriend as an official, certified girlfriend.

And when she does come over, my god, when Joy Song does indeed show up at my doorstep in her sweatpants and her too-big Carnegie Mellon University sweatshirt and her hair done up in a spiky, sloppy bun, my heart beats two beats faster.

She bows to Mom and says
annyong haseyo
in her shitty Korean.

She holds my head. She kisses my eye. In front of Mom and everything.

“Ow,” I say, but with wonder, like a boy who’s just hit his head on the ornate ceiling of heaven.

“Aigu,” says Mom at the sight of the kiss. “Make germs.”

But Mom’s smiling, too.

And then—and
then
—we go
upstairs
. To my
room
.

Alone.

Just like they do in the movies.

“I cutting melon,” says Mom, and vanishes.
I cutting
melon
means
I’ll give you a few minutes alone together, but because I’m your mother and this is my damn house, I will bring you a snack as a pretense to make sure you’re not up there having sex.

When we get up there, we of course don’t shut the door—so not quite like the movies, but close—and find a spot out of sight to attack each other with kisses.

“Get in as many as you can,” Joy breathes into my ear.

“Stolen moments,” I breathe back.

Joy has a tiny brown mole on the back of her perfect neck, and I love it to death.

“Melon,” says Mom.

When Mom enters, all she sees is me and Joy sitting quiet and neat as can be on separate chairs, like we were waiting this whole time.

She sets the tray of melon wedges before us, first apologizing that they’re not that sweet, melons weren’t on sale, etc. That’s just host humility talking. But I see she’s used the nice cocktail forks, the ones with the tiny peach birthing two microscopic doves and the word
JUST
. I hold one up to let Mom know I appreciate her enthusiasm and approval.

Joy bunches her shoulders and says, “Jal meokgesseumnida,” which translates dorkily to
I’m gonna eat well
but really just means
thank you
as a form of mealtime grace. Anyway, Mom eats it up. I want to jab Joy in the ribs and tell her,
We don’t have to pretend anymore.

But then I realize Joy’s not pretending. She’s just being nice.

She’s just being.

Mom leaves us again. She’ll of course be back soon to pick up the tray. But until then, Joy and I are alone. I eat melon. Joy eats melon. We stare at each other.

“Do you think Brit’s doing okay?” says Joy.

I hang my head a centimeter. “Probably not.”

“Are you doing okay?”

“Better,” I say, “now that everything’s out in the open. You think Wu’s okay?”

“Ask your face,” says Joy.

We stare at each other some more.

“Life is funny,” I say.

Joy scoots an inch closer. “What is?”

“I think I probably liked you for longer than I realize,” I say. “But I unconsciously nixed you as a possibility from the start, because I was paranoid about our parents trying to micro-manage us. Because that’s what old-skool Korean parents do when families, you know, merge.”

“You think we would’ve started dating sooner, if it wasn’t for them?”

“Maybe,” I say, and scoot closer. “But whatever. We’re here now.”

Joy smiles. “I feel like we made it through some weird test.”

“We did,” I say. And indeed, I can feel it: a relief, a lightness slowly dawning among the dark clouds of guilt.

I run my hand through her hair and examine the green hiding there. I’ve always wanted to do this. And now I can.

“You know,” says Joy, “I’ve always thought you were cute from when we were little.”

This blows my mind. “I think you’re hot,” I say.

“Shut up,” says Joy. She scoots in close. She pins my arm down with one hand and feels my biceps with the other. “Make a muscle,” she says.

So I do. Joy’s hand dives into my shirt and begins roaming around my chest, my back. Her hand is cold and thrilling. It reaches up to cool the back of my neck.

“Keep making a muscle,” says Joy, and kisses me with her melon-sweet tongue.

No way can I keep making a muscle. I dive into her shirt as well. My hand is hot and stutters along her skin. This sweatshirt is much too big for her. I discover the clasp of her bra.

But then I hear the front door scrape open downstairs. We both freeze.

“Frankie-ya!” calls Mom. “Daddy home!”

Dad’s home? It’s only seven. Dad doesn’t get home for another two hours.

Joy and I creep to the top of the stairs, where we greet Dad with a loud “Hi.”

“Oh,” says Dad, bewildered. He looks tired. He looks like he just survived a long hike. “Joy here? Hi, Joy.”

“Hi, Mr. Li,” says Joy.

“You’re home early,” I say.

“Few customer today,” says Dad. “Fire making whole of sky smoky. Everybody staying home.”

I’m puzzled. Mom-n-Dad work at The Store every day, from morning to evening, on weekends, holidays, New Year’s Day, 365 days out of every year without a single vacation for as long as me and Hanna have been alive, even on slow days.

Dad manages a smile. “Nice see you, Joy.”

“Nice to see you too,” says Joy. She’s quietly bursting. Am I, too?

Because here we are.

It wasn’t pretty along the way, but here we are.

“You eating melon,” says Dad, and laughs brightly through his fatigue. His eyes linger on us for a moment—his son and his girlfriend, both of the tribe—just long enough to feel like pride. And say what you will, but things are already easier this way. It feels like a guilty pleasure. It feels like a cheat code.

My girlfriend of the tribe.

Mom-n-Dad walk away. If I remain still, I can manage to hear them. At first the Korean is simple enough for me to understand.

MOM:
Did it take a long time?

DAD:
No.

MOM:
Did it hurt?

DAD:
A little. I’m okay.

Then the Korean gets too advanced and is cut short with a latch of a door.

“Did what hurt?” I whisper.

“Probably his chest wound,” says Joy.

“Man, it keeps hitting me that Dad got shot,” I say. “That actually happened.”

“Everything’s okay now,” says Joy.

Joy holds me. I hold her back. We are both carrying and being carried at the same time, in a hug that defies gravity.

The next few weeks before winter break are an ontological free-for-all. It’s like someone accidentally bumped the settings of reality, fumbled to fix them, and wound up only making things worse. Up becomes down, light becomes dark, the water in the toilet bowl starts spinning the other way from usual. Counterclockwise? Clockwise?

I forget.

Calculus becomes boss-level awkward as Brit stonewalls me. Mr. Soft chops away at his nominators and denominators. But the Apeys can feel that me and Brit are no longer together. Worse, they can sense I was the one who did the leaving.

For a few days, Brit wears long baggy clothes, then tight clothes, all black, all white. She shockingly cuts her hair almost entirely into a bob that, it turns out, looks pretty damn good on her. It’s like she’s trying on different Brits to see
which one is real. I want to hug her. I want to tell her she’s beautiful and she will find the right boy, that it just wasn’t me. She’s right there, after all. But I can’t reach out to her. I would never dare intrude.

Meanwhile, me and Joy keep our own relationship on the down low. Neither of us want to hurt Brit or Wu. Or deal with questions from friends. They know me and Joy are now Frankenjoy, but we keep ourselves out of sight and hopefully also out of mind.

We can’t bear to hide on the roof or behind the greenhouse—too many associations—but we do manage to discover a beautifully awkward bit of space formed between the old brick school, its newer concrete wing, and a cluster of tall AC units grinding away in the heat, loud enough to mask any sound. It is a literal slice of heaven.

On weekends we see movies, hit the taco trucks (
Cheese Barrel Grille never again,
said Joy), or hang out at Joy’s house and snuggle up by the quartz fire table glittering poolside as the sun sets on the Playa Mesa peninsula.

Openly. With her parents around.

Her parents like me. I think. They’re too formal to really tell.

No one wins a game of
Pax Eterna
. The jackpot remains untouched.

Q remains single. His object of affection still a mystery.

I see Brit in the hallway, and papers spill out of her binder as I pass.

I catch eyes with Wu, and he misses an easy free throw on the yard.

I feel a little like a poltergeist leaving chaos in my wake.

The college applications either already have flown off or are gassed up and on deck. Already I’m dreading the months of March and April. That is supposedly when the bulk of responses will come in. I’ve heard stories of soul-crushing displays of elation on the feeds by friends, and friends of friends, and people you don’t even know. So-and-so got into your dream school, but you didn’t! Give their post a big smiley, why don’t you?

To hell with that kind of trauma. I’ve already tried brokering a protocol for Social Media Silence for the spring months among the Apeys and the Limbos, but people looked at me like I was a time traveler from the 1800s. So I instead did the next best thing: brokered a protocol with the two most important people in my world, Joy and Q.

We opted for snail mail notifications.

We instructed our parents to hide any and all mail from our eyes.

As a final precaution, we set up email filters to quarantine any errant messages from schools. We did that part together at Cafe Adagio, our laptops arranged in triangle formation, a sort of nerdy blood pact: we do this whole college thing together.

We have the same agreement for test-related emails. Emails like this one, just now:

Dear Test-Taker,

Thank you for taking the SAT on December 1, 2019! We are pleased to inform you your test scores are
ready. To view your scores, please click the link below and follow the instructions provided blablablablablabla

I don’t read the rest. I take out my fartphone.

Don’t click the link yet,
I say to both Joy and Q.

Wat link,
says Joy.

OMC THAT link,
says Joy. The
C
stands for
Cthulhu
.

Rendezvous at the Consta asap,
I say.
We shall click together!

But it’s only third period,
says Q.

I guess we should wait then,
I say.

Shut up,
says Q.

As soon as the bell rings, we all speed-walk from our respective classes straight to the Consta in the parking lot. Once we hit the streets, I let the engine zoom.

Q closes his eyes and chants, “Sixteen, sixteen, sixteen.” He means a perfect score of 1600.

Cafe Adagio is near Peninsula College. Cafe Adagio feels cool. The baristas move slow and don’t care if you sit there all day. Flyers and posters cover every inch of the walls. It’s full of students hunched over stickered laptops, no doubt doing beautiful things: writing poetry, modeling physics, composing symphonies. I look at them, and it hits me: I’m going to be one of these college students soon, forging my own path beyond the boundaries of the textbook. Some are intense with focus, others frustrated, others lost in their own creative dreams. They’re putting in time for the long game, because they know it’ll be worth it in the end, and I admire them for it.

The Cafe Adagio password today is
straightUpGrindin
.

I buy drinks from the alarmingly hip and beautiful male barista. Tea for me and Q, coffee for Joy. Coffee is disgusting, no matter how much milk and sugar you cut it with. Before I can even sit, Joy grabs my hand and forces me to fingerprint in to my laptop.

“Ready?” says Q. “Click on the count of three.”

“One,” I say.

“Fifteen sixty,” cries Joy. “Oh my god I got fifteen sixty.”

I rush to kiss her, then see my screen has updated, too. “Fifteen forty,” I yell.

We both look at Q, who has become an amazed zombie. I turn his laptop.

“Sixteen,” I say. “You got sixteen, old bean.”

I stand. “People of the college! This fine fellow right here just achieved a perfect score on the SAT!”

The students applaud—
pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man
—then put their headphones back on and resume their work.

“I did it,” says Q, very quietly.

“We did it,” I say, and high-five both Joy and Q. Q high-fives me and Joy, and Joy high-fives Q and me, and after a while we have to use both hands to keep up.

“We can go anywhere,” says Q, still staring at his screen.

“I bet I could even get into Stanford,” I wonder aloud. I look at Q. “We could go to the same school.”

“Pittsburgh, I’m coming at ya,” says Joy.

This stops me. Joy and I, Frankenjoy, are finite.

“Does CMU have a computer music program?” I say. I place my hand atop hers.

“Frank,” says Joy. She places a hand atop mine atop hers.

“I’m just wondering,” I say, and complete the double-decker hand sandwich.

“You need to go where you need to go,” says Joy. “We all do.”

“It’s just kinda dawning on me,” I say. “I’m having a hard time imagining it.”

“Everything looks different already,” says Q. “Goodbye, cup. Farewell, napkins.”

“Until it’s time to go, we have each other,” says Joy. She fondles my earlobe.

The barista appears at our table and sets a slice of pound cake in front of Q. “On the house, Mr. Perfect Score,” he says, and leaves with a flip of his long black bangs.

My phone buzzes with a calendar alert. “Oh, hey, it’s free museum night up in LA. This exhibit called
The Edible Wunderkammer: Snack Food Curiosities from Thirty Countries
. Let’s go.”

Joy slams her laptop shut and bolts up. “We leave now, we can beat the traffic.”

I get up too, but Q remains. “You guys go ahead,” he says.

“You’re not coming?” I say.

“Go and have a
date
, you know?” says Q. “Have the best date you possibly can.”

I hug his head. “What are you gonna do?”

“Eat my free cake,” says Q. “But first I might just want to sit with it for a while.”

“Just sit,” I say, nodding.

“I did it, Frank,” says Q. “I did it.”

We get in the car. The messages are rolling in. Paul Olmo scored 1480. Amelie Shim got the exact same. Naima Gupta scored a decent 1390, but there’s one final round, and I’m sure she’ll break 1400 like she wanted to. As for the Limbos, John Lim, Ella Chang, and Andrew Kim all scored in the high fourteens or low fifteens. Excellent all around. The world feels like it’s accelerating on its axis.

I hear Brit Means scored 1540, same as me. Should I text her congratulations? I want to. But I probably shouldn’t. I probably have no right.

Whatever.
1540, same as me, major congrats!
I say.

After a long pause, Brit replies.
Congrats to you too, amazing

I want to point out that she used
amazing
, but don’t.

I guide the lugubrious Consta on to the freeway, where it propels us northward. Joy takes care of the parental management protocols on both our phones while I drive:
Headed to LA
and
Might be home late
and blablabla. Mom-n-Dad write back,
Have a fun.
Joy’s more fluent, better-educated parents write
Have a great time.

It’s funny. To the parents, nothing has changed. My drama with Brit and Joy’s drama with Wu have been invisible to them. To the parents, Joy and I started dating one night at a Gathering and have been together without a hitch ever since. We swapped the gems out, then swapped them right back. And no one was the wiser.

“Can I just say again how nice it is not having to fake-date anymore?” I say.

Joy leans over to kiss my cheek, my ear, my neck, and it is hands-down-at-ten-and-two the most erotic thing that has ever happened to me in the Consta or anywhere else.

We reach downtown Los Angeles in record time. But there’s a road closure, then another, then another. When Joy checks the map, it’s full of angry red lines.

“Crap,” she says. “There’s some kind of festival going on. It says another hour just to get around it.”

I refuse to let this bring me down—I’m in too good a mood. “Let’s roll with it, then,” I say. “To the festival?”

“To the festival,” says Joy, like
Why not?

We get out of the car, skip like idiots on the sidewalk for a quarter mile, and reach the packed festival entrance thumping with music.

46
TH
A
NNUAL

L
OS
A
NGELES
K
OREAN
W
INTER
S
TREET
F
ESTIVAL

P
RESENTED BY

A
JU
E
LECTRONICS
N
ORTH
A
MERICA

We stare agog at the throngs of people. K-pop pounds from towering black steles of speakers. Streamers crisscross the venue. On a rainbow-lit stage, little kids in white doboks warm up for an ultra-cute hapkido demonstration. Dancers in traditional dress float among the crowd, twirling ribbons affixed to their hats in long flowing swirls.

And the food. There’s barbecue, sure, kimchi, sure, but then there’s all the other stuff that most people never get to see—fiery red tteokbokki rice cakes, perfect pyramids of kimbap
seaweed rice, patbingsu shaved ice with sweet rice bean, even mountains of freshly roasted beondegi.

Joy points at the beondegi stall. “You eat it,” she says.

“You eat it,” I say.

Beondegi are silkworm pupae. The stall owner beckons me in Korean, and I ask for a sample in English. It’s not bad—nutty, mushroomy, and with a fantastic crunch—and I immediately kiss Joy to let her taste it, too.

“Ew,” she says, licks her teeth in contemplation, then orders a paper-coneful.

We stroll along, and we stroll along, and there’s a samulnori percussion quartet banging out a frenzied brass whirlwind of beats, with one crazy old man dancing along and twin toddler girls holding their ears shut. I record it with my Tascam—these rhythms remade with electronic instruments would be a sick kind of mash-up.

We hop up and down. Joy’s hair flashes green and black, green and black. Above us garlands of cafe lights sparkle to life against a cool velvet sky. I guess the sun set without telling us.

Farther along is another little stage, fancier than the first, with an ensemble of samgo-mu dancers performing in ornate individual stalls lined with traditional barrel drums. They’re all women, all impeccably dressed in shimmering hanbok, all with deadly perfect timing as they strike drums to the left, right, and before them in unison with their sticks. At one point they bend way, way back and whack out a crescendo of unrelenting eighth notes on the booming drum skin, then the cracking rim, then back.

“Abs of steel,” yells Joy.

She kisses me as the drums thunder louder and louder to completion. Applause erupts. There is something happening here inside me. I look at Joy and can tell she can feel it too. The lights, the music, this great celebration of a culture that we supposedly belong to. Everyone here, looking like we do. The food, the drums, the kids in their white doboks. One of them looks like me when I was little.

Me and Joy grew up exposed to this world. We know all of its elements, even if we don’t always know their names in Korean. They’re not weird or exotic to us. They have the feeling of home.

If not for the skyline of Los Angeles in the background, I can fool myself into thinking I’m in Korea. Even better: I can fool myself into thinking that
I am Korean
.

Me and Joy move forth, skipping like idiots.

Joy stops in her tracks. She slowly points to a delicately fluttering pink-and-white booth decorated with hundreds of tiny soft pillows, each the size of a baby’s cheek.

“It’s those sweet rice cake thingies,” moans Joy.

Some of the cakes are plain; some are filled with sweet red bean paste, some with powdered sesame. The more exotic ones here have mango frosting and even chocolate.

I rack my brain for the word.
Chalttok
. Pretty sure these cakes are called chalttok.