Frankly in Love

by David Yoon

  “Sorry,” she says.

  “Me too,” I say.

  “Huh?” says Brit.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  For some reason, this makes Brit smile this smile that says: But I do.

  “Wanna get through this stuff?” she says.

  “Right,” I say.

  Solving the problems is the easy part. It’s the sketching that takes time. Brit plays some music on her phone, but then switches to a proper wireless speaker.

  “I hate listening on tiny speakers,” she says, seconds before I can, and my heart does a triple jump.

  Once I recover, I get started on the work. I sketch small—less surface area to cover—and finish fast. Brit picks up on my tactic and sketches small, too. Our pencil leads scritch and scratch. She elbows me.

  “You’re such a cheater.”

  “I’m still doing the assignment,” I say. “I’m just being efficient about it.”

  “Done,” she says.

  We retract our leads and set our pencils down.

  “Yours look good,” I say.

  “Yours look good too,” she says, gazing at me.

  Dear lord Flying Spaghetti Monster in Pastafarian heaven. I think Brit Means is flirting with me.

  “What do you wanna do now?” I say.

  “I don’t know, what do you want to do?”

  She sits closer. Now is the moment in the teen movie where I sweep the homework to the floor and kiss her. But like I said, my kissing track record is exactly one item long, and was an accident.

  I’m pretty sure Brit’s kissing track record is as short as mine. But she must be ready. Right? Why else would she be sitting so close? Is that how this works?

  I have no idea how anything works. I have no idea what is happening. I stare back into her eternal ancient gray eyes looking all ancient and gray and eternal into mine and find that they are also inscrutable. I could be totally wrong. It could be that Brit’s just the strange type of girl who likes to sit close and stare and say nothing.

  “Forgot my glasses,” says a voice, and we look up just in time to see Brit’s dad’s hoodie vanishing around a corner.

  “Let’s go outside,” says Brit, suddenly standing. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  * * *

  • • •

  We step out into a night full of crickets on loop. Like most of Playa Vista, there is only one streetlamp for miles. Outside that single icy cone of light is the pure impenetrable darkness of the new moon sky, with only the stars and the glint of many parked cars visible.

  “What’s with all the cars?” I say.

  “Someone’s having a big house party. I’m pretty sure it’s Armenian independence day.” Brit hops and crouches, inspecting the cars. She moves like a long-haired imp.

  “Look,” she says, and cracks open one of the cars.

  “Brit,” I say, laughing.

  “They’re never locked,” she says, opening it farther. “I find it so revealing about people’s biases. People just assume certain things about certain neighborhoods. They wouldn’t leave their doors unlocked like this over in Delgado Beach.”

  “Well, Playa Mesa is freakishly safe, after all.”

  “If we did a study, we would find a correlation between unlocked cars and neighborhood income levels, I bet you a million bucks.”

  “Ha ha,” I say, but stop short. Because to my horror, Brit has ducked her head inside the car and is now emerging with a tin of mints. She pops one in her mouth. She tosses me a mint, too.

  “Have one,” she says.

  “You’re insane,” I say, and laugh, and look around.

  But I eat the mint.

  Brit carefully closes the door, then latches it shut with a bump of her hip. “People keep the artifacts of their lives in their cars. Makes me feel like an archaeologist. A carchaeologist.”

  “We’re gonna get busted.”

  “Frankly, Frank Li, you’re being paranoid,” says Brit, with mock sass. “Anyway, even if we do get busted all I have to do is be all, Oh-em-gee, I’m so drunk, anyway you should really lock your car, bye!”

  Brit has switched to California Valley Girl Patois with no effort, and it makes me twitch a little.

  In Language class Ms. Chit would called this code switching. It’s like switching accents, but at a more micro level.

  The idea is that you don’t speak the same way with your friends (California English Casual) that you do with a teacher (California English Formal), or a girl (California English Singsong), or your immigrant parents (California English Exasperated). You change how you talk to best adapt to whoever you’re talking to. But it’s not just about adaptation, as Ms. Chit explained. People can code switch to confuse others, express dominance or submission, or disguise themselves.

  I’ve always thought I’m pretty good at code switching. But the way Brit does it is true mastery. It’s like watching her become a different person entirely. It makes me wonder what other codes she can speak.

  “This one . . . No, there’s a blinking light on the dash,” she says. “This one, maybe.”

  She pops the door open: “Aha.”

  “I am jacking cars with Brit Means,” I say.

  “Tell me, though: is it jacking if they’re unlocked?” she says.

  “How long has this been a hobby of yours?”

  “Only a couple months. I’ve found alcohol, cash, just cash lying out in the open. An old instant camera. It’s crazy.”

  “Wait, are you keeping this stuff?”

  Brit unearths something. “Look. High-fidelity compact discs. Who listens to CDs?”

  She flings one at me and I fumble to catch it like a Frisbee. It’s all in Armenian.

  “Dude, put this back,” I say. I wipe the disc clean of my fingerprints, just in case the FBI gets called to investigate, and start to fling it back to her when she quickly hits the car’s lock button and slams the door shut.

  “Too late,” she says, giggling. “You’re stuck with that.”

  “I already said you’re insane, right?” I say, and slip the disc into my back pocket.

  “And to answer your question, no, I don’t take the stuff. I just redistribute it to other cars.”

  “That’s hilarious. It’s like a metaphor for something.”

  “For what?”

  I think for a moment. Metaphor not incoming.

  Is this bad? Sure. It’s just a little bad. To be sure, it’s nothing compared with what other kids are doing, like failing out or getting pregnant or arrested or, in the case of Deckland Ayers, drunk-racing his brand-new Q2S sport coupe into a pole and failing out in the most permanent and tragic way.

  But for Apeys, it’s just bad enough.

  And I love it.

  “Hey, a minivan,” I say. “A trove of treasures.”

  The minivan is the same as Q’s mom’s, so I know it has sliding doors on both sides. I guide Brit to the minivan’s shadow, quell her sputtering giggles by squashing her cheeks with both hands, and then try the handle with practiced familiarity.

  Click, whoosh.

  Inside the van are toddler seats and stuffed animals and spilled puffed crackers and so on. I guide her in and can feel every sinew of the small of her back with my open hand. And together, we slowly slide the door shut behind us. The silence is absolute and ringing. I can hear her every breath. I can hear the brush of her fingertips on my shorts.

  “It smells kinda good in here,” she says.

  And it does, because here we are, crushing toasted Os beneath our knees. Releasing their stale aroma. The space we are in is small and new and secret, and no one else in the world knows about it because no one else in the world is here but us two.

  Brit is waiting. Brit is nervous. As nervous as me.

  I find our mu
tual nervousness strangely comforting. It makes something in my heart loosen its grip and let go.

  I pull her in and our mouths fit perfectly.

  This is really happening to me. I am kissing Brit Means.

  And, I realize, this is really happening to Brit Means, too.

  Has she been planning this? How long has she liked me? To think, we’ve been friends all through high school, and this—this kiss—has been waiting in plain sight the whole time.

  “Hi,” I say, breathing.

  “Hi,” she says.

  Her gray eyes are dilated wide to see in the night. We kiss deeper this time, and I don’t care that she can now taste the garlic pita in my mouth because I can now taste it in hers, too. The silence focuses in. Every shift in our bodies crushing another piece of toasted cereal. The fierce breathing through nostrils flared wide. It takes me forever to realize the dome light has come on.

  The light is on inside the van.

  Someone has clicked a key fob remote. Someone close by, getting closer by the second.

  We spring apart and duck.

  “Oh shit,” says Brit. Her eyes have tightened.

  I’m still gasping for air. “Okay. Uh. I think we should probably go.”

  In the far distance, voices.

  “I think you’re probably right,” she says, and snorts.

  Brit Means snorts!

  I pull the door handle and slowly slide it open. We slink out into the street. As quietly as I can, I slide the door shut, but it needs one good shove to latch closed. Usually I can get Q’s mom’s van to shut with barely a sound. But I guess it must be my heart dropping beats or the fact that my arms feel like they’re in zero-g, because the best I can manage is a crisp, clearly audible chunk.

  “Ei,” says a voice. “Inch dzhokhk yek anum?”

  “Go go go,” I hiss.

  “Sorry, can’t understand you,” yells Brit.

  We sprint into the darkness, leaving a trail of giggles behind us.

  Just bad enough.

  But so good.

  chapter 5

  plane crash

  I’m in class the next morning, struggling to keep my eyes forward. I know Brit is too. I can feel it. We are like two horse statues facing the same direction.

  Horse statues?

  Q’s eyes rally between Brit and me. I smile back with derp teeth. He knows something is up.

  What the hell is up with your stupid face? say his eyebrows.

  “Frank and Brit, nice work with the volumes,” says Mr. Soft. “Could you draw a little tinier next time?”

  I am barely listening. I like hearing him say Frank and Brit like that. Like we’re officially Frank-n-Brit. Frankenbrit.

  Brit smiles. She glances at me and bites her thumb, breaking the first Rule of Being a Person.

  “Q and Paul, you turkeys ready?” says Mr. Soft.

  Q gives me a parting eyeroll, gets into character, and stands. “Yes.”

  He and Paul approach a lumpy cloth spread on a table and lift it to reveal six grapefruit-sized geometric forms done in KlayKreate.

  “Behold,” says Q. “The new Platonics.”

  For the first time in my short life, I want Calculus to never end. But it does, and after we leave the classroom I find myself doing something I never normally do: walk and text.

  Meet me behind the greenhouse at lunch?

  My phone buzzes back.

  Okay, says Brit, with a little purple heart.

  The day passes. AP Bio, AP English Lit, and finally my favorite, CompSci Music, where I get some serious time hammering out live beats on the flashing Dotpad made up of the samples I recorded at Lake Girlfriend. I think about the coins in the water there.

  Thank you, Lake Girlfriend.

  Physical performance is the future of electronic dance music, I believe. As good as my timing is, I am still human and therefore prone to being off by a few milliseconds here and there, which is why performed music will always have a warmth and intuition that perfectly sequencing computers can’t match. Next I want to try making electronic dance music with acoustic instruments, in a band with other people, no amplification. Call it chamber step, maybe.

  I’ve got the room nodding their heads. I’ve got Ms. Nobuyuki nodding her head.

  But I feel phantom buzzes in my back pocket the whole time. It takes all my effort to stay focused until the final measure of the song.

  Class ends and finallyfinallyfinally it’s lunch. Just gotta check in with Q before going off on my own.

  I find Q waiting for me by the elephant tree: this big melted biomass of spiny leaves and branches oozing its way out of a rectangle in the concrete. Apparently it’s not a tree, but a giant yucca evolving along its own isolated vector.

  Q’s already got his miniature hero figurines—a tiny wizard, elf, and paladin—standing in delta formation on a lunch table. His dice are lined up and waiting: a four-sided pyramid, a cube, an octahedron, dodecahedron, and finally the twenty-sided icosahedron. Paul Olmo’s sitting next to Q with his graph paper, ready to start mapping dungeons and marking the locations of dragons.

  “Hey,” I say. “Just wanted to let you know I gotta go meet someone, so.”

  Q dims his eyes. “Oh my god.”

  “What?” says Paul. Paul Olmo looks exactly like his elven archer figurine.

  “We’ll pick up the campaign tomorrow,” I say. I mean the Dungeons & Dragons game. “Sorry.”

  “My god,” says Q.

  I just nod. Yes, Q. Yes.

  Q rises and hugs me like a father sending his son off to college.

  “I’ll see you guys later,” I say.

  “Oh my god,” shouts Q.

  “What happened?” shouts Paul.

  I leave.

  I walk the glossy hallways like an adventurer discovering a cave full of crystals. Past the teachers’ lounge exuding coffee and microwave food. Through a seldom-used back door leading into the seldom-seen teachers’ section of the parking lot, at the end of which stands the almost-never-visited greenhouse.

  I’m halfway across the parking lot when I realize I’ve left my lunch in my locker.

  Whatever.

  Because behind the greenhouse, among the hoes and wheelbarrows and bags of soil, there she sits. On a large upturned pot, like a magical creature. Just smiling now at my arrival. Hair blowing in the wind like a ribbon in water.

  I glance behind me. No one there. I take a sidestep and put the greenhouse between me and the rest of the world.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” says Brit Means.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  She stands. She takes a step toward me.

  And we just kiss.

  Everything falls silent. The birds stop singing. The wind stops. Blades of grass release their bend and straighten in the motionless air. A flap of corrugated metal pauses its squeaking as a courtesy.

  I long to feel those little muscles in the small of her back—and so I do, and I can’t believe I am allowed to do this. Even more unbelievable: she feels mine, too. As if she’s been longing, too.

  When we stop for air, the wind around us resumes. The grass relaxes.

  “Are you sure we won’t get caught back here?” she whispers.

  “If we did, I guess that would make things official.”

  “Last night didn’t make things official?”

  “I guess it did, huh,” I say.

  “Pretty sure we’re official.”

  “You said we.”

  “That’s right.”

  And we kiss some more. The sun, ignored, sprints around the earth and hurries back to its original position, just to see if it can sneak in a whole revolution without us noticing.

  We don’t notice a thing.

&nbs
p; I’m torn between wanting to kiss and wanting to stare at her face, so I decide to stare at her face for a minute. I can see myself actually reflected in her eyes, tiny bulbous Frank Li twins, and my gaze bounces back and forth between them. In the even tinier reflections of the eyes of those two reflected Frank Lis are in turn reflected two tiny Brit Means, and so on and so on infinity plus one.

  “Whoa,” says a girl’s voice.

  We freeze, as if freezing will make us somehow invisible.

  Brit dares a glance to the side. “Oh, Joy.”

  I turn, and there’s Joy Song standing there with a face like a lemur. She is tethered to a powerfully tracksuited Wu Tang, who gives me a chiseled smile like Nice, bro.

  We should spring apart, but I’m thrilled to find that Brit doesn’t move an inch; we stand there with both hands clasped, like defiant dancers interrupted.

  “Hey,” I say to Joy.

  “Awkward,” sings Joy after a moment, and finally we can all laugh a little.

  “Is this like your guys’ spot or something?” I say.

  “It’s all good,” says Wu Tang. Everything he says he turns into a little dance move. “We got other spots. Like the roof.” He does this little pointing maneuver.

  “Oh, word?” I say.

  “Wurd.” Point.

  “But Joy didn’t want to get her new skirt dirty.” He says it all stupid like durr-tay.

  Wu Tang is so stupid that he loops it all the way around until stupid starts to seem kinda cool.

  “Aha,” I say.

  “Okay, well,” says Joy, and turns to leave.

  Brit’s hands are getting sweaty in mine. I can feel my body cooling. I can feel the wind moving in the gap between us. The moment’s been cut short.

  Joy mutters to herself. “Guess I’m not the only one with a problem.” She winces at her own words.

  “Okay, bye,” I say loudly. I need Joy to go away, even though I know she’s right.

  Brit Means is white.

  “Problem?” says Brit. She’s irked, and she has every right to be. But how am I supposed to explain what the word problem means here? Where do I even begin? Chinese boy problems? Me and Joy’s conversation at the last Gathering—hell, every conversation I’ve ever had at Gatherings—seems so divorced from reality that it’s like we speak a different kind of English there, one that doesn’t translate to this dimensional plane. So I just say: