I Believe in a Thing Called Love

by Maurene Goo

  “So I know you said you’re not in AP art, but are you in Art Club?” he asked. The flirty vibe from earlier was gone, and I couldn’t tell if that was because Wes was with me. But he was being friendly enough, so …

  I tried to remain composed. “Ha, no way.”

  He laughed—a honking laugh that made me break out in a huge grin. What an undignified laugh for such a hot specimen. Oh my God, stop being excited. You know where excitement leads, Desi. Stop! But I never made guys laugh. At this point in any of my interactions with guys, I had already done something spectacularly stupid. For the first time in forever, I felt a flicker of hope.

  Wes subtly walked up ahead of us.

  “Too bad,” Luca said, with an inscrutable expression. My heart thumped.

  Then. I felt it—a familiar loss of control, all competence taken over by nervous insecurity. No, no, no. “Too bad I’m not in Art Club?” I asked, my voice already reaching a strange pitch.

  “Yeah.”

  I shook my head. “I would never waste my time pursuing something at which I’m only mediocre.” Oh sweet Jesus, I was doing the know-it-all, strangely colonial-era talking. Stop, stop now and just be aloof and cool. ALOOF AND COOL. Check your posture.

  I watched his smile fade. The gleam in his eyes dulled. Okay, aloof-and-cool moment is officially gone. I knew I should stop now, but maybe I could save this. A surge of ballsiness coursed through me. Just explain yourself. Communication is key. “It’s just that I’m really busy.” His face froze—paralyzed, if you will. I powered through. “I have a lot riding on my shoulders. I’m school president, on varsity soccer and tennis, in five different clubs, and am pretty much slated to be valedictorian.”

  An all-too-familiar expression of politeness-disguising-panic took over Luca’s face. “Wow. Busy bee. All right, see you around then.”

  I blinked and shook my head, feeling my wits return to me as he walked off.

  “Wait, Luca!”

  He turned around, reluctantly, if one were to judge reluctance on the literal dragging of feet.

  Now what? Why the hell did I just do that?!

  I nervously pulled at the drawstrings on my sweats. “Um, when does Art Club meet?” All is not lost. Just try to flirt. Be cute. PLAY UP CUTE. I bit my lower lip for added effect.

  Luca’s eyes darted around, as if looking for a way to escape this. “Um, I’m not sure yet, but I think it’s on the website…” His voice trailed off.

  And then.

  My fashion sweatpants fell off. In a puddle at my feet.

  I looked down. Luca looked down. I looked up. Luca was still looking down.

  And I heard Wes yelp, “Are you kidding?”

  I pulled them up and ran. Like the wind.

  CHAPTER 4

  My phone was buzzing all that evening—Wes and Fiona were trying to cheer me up about the sweatpants incident but I ignored them. My last text to them had been: Consider me dead. Bye.

  When my dad came home from work, he found me in full-on pity-party mode: wearing my pajamas, I was watching a reality show about young women competing for their very own cupcake shop and was inhaling my binge-eating snack of choice—pickle spears. My dad stood in the entryway and tsked. “That many pickles?! Right now? Appa won’t make dinner for you.”

  He grumbled all the way into the kitchen, where he unloaded groceries. Normally, that was my job, but today I let myself luxuriate in my terrible mood. With my long history of flailures, you’d think the latest would just be a drop in the bucket. And in the past, after a couple of hours, the inevitable next urgent Desi Lee thing had distracted me—science fair, soccer game, etc. But I just couldn’t shake it off today. And something about the Luca flailure was sending me spiraling into some seriously embarrassing flashbacks.

  Jefferson Mahoney. First grade. I kicked my first crush, Jefferson, in the nuts during tae kwon do class, and he had to be taken to the ER.

  I stuck my hand into the jar for another pickle. My dad walked into the living room and shook his head at me. “Okay, whatchu going on?”

  Normally, whatchu going on got a giggle from me. I smiled halfheartedly. “Nothing.”

  Diego Valdez. Fourth grade. He asked me if I wanted to look at his “special” books and I told him I wasn’t allowed to look at pornography. Turned out to be comic books and he didn’t even know how babies were made yet. I was a fourth-grade perv.

  “Those are the special pickles I get from Persian market. Give to me, they’re Appa’s favorites.”

  I hugged the jar close to me and turned my back to him. “No!”

  Oliver Sprague. Seventh grade. We were at the Halloween dance and he leaned in to give me my first kiss but I started laughing until I cried.

  My dad pursed his lips. “Okay, stop. This isn’t funny anymore. Appa has to watch the show and you are being very annoying.”

  “Rude.”

  He plopped down next to me so forcefully that I bounced and some pickle juice splattered on me. Then he wrestled the jar from me. “No dinner for both of us, then.” He took a bite before picking up the remote.

  “Let’s watch something else.” I had never been able to sit through an entire K drama and I was in the mood for something way more sinister and miserable.

  My dad ignored me as he deftly navigated the smart-TV options to the Internet and launched his K drama streaming site. He could barely e-mail but he could launch that website in his sleep. I tried to grab the remote from him and he bonked me over the head with it.

  “What’s the matter with you? I work all day, what did you do, pickle monster? No, you watch what Appa watches.”

  I rubbed my head and glared at him. “I don’t wanna.”

  Nyma Amiri. Sophmore year. I sent Nyma secret-admirer notes for a few weeks, only to discover that he knew it was me from the beginning. Because I accidentally signed the first one.

  Another bonk. “Ya, stop complaining. Also, we are watching because this is the last episode of the show and Appa been soooo excited to see this one.”

  As the title credits rolled over the theme music I had heard in the background all week, I felt something snap. “How are you even remotely excited about this? They all end the same. These people”—I pointed to the screen, at the wide-eyed nymph and the Bieber-coiffed cad—“there’s no way in hell they should be together. But miracle of miracles, they end up happily ever after. It’s complete bullshit.”

  Max Peralta: Phlegm rocket.

  Luca Drakos: Pantsed myself.

  My dad shoved my head. “Watch your mouth, Miss Complaining USA. Don’t you know that if it’s true love, even bad beginnings end happy?”

  True love. I wanted to scoff at that, but the lurch in my chest when I saw Luca’s drawing was something I had never felt before. The light-headed buzz in his proximity was new. I had crushed hard in the past, but I had the nagging feeling that this was something different.

  I sat back out of sheer laziness and watched the start of the episode. My dad helpfully turned on the English subtitles so I could follow along with my remedial Korean skills.

  The scene opened on a busy city intersection—the two main characters standing on opposite sides of the street, staring at each other in the rain. Music was swelling as the cars sped by them.

  My dad gleefully clapped. “Oh, finally!” he said. “Finally they see each other after so many bad things! This is where they’ll kiss!” He glanced at me. “Maybe this is adult stuff.”

  I scoffed. “Appa, seriously? We watched Brokeback Mountain together.”

  Just as the light was about to turn green for the two lovers to meet, there was a flashback: The girl is sitting in a supply closet at work, her skirt hiked up, mending her torn stocking with clear nail polish. The guy accidentally walks in on her, and she startles and throws her arms up in the air—tossing the nail polish bottle at his eye. He howls and when the girl scrambles up to help him, he yells at her and shoves her aside. The girl’s mood changes instantly and she kicks him and he
falls face-forward into a bucket.

  I snorted. “Yeah, so super-believable that they go from this to kissing passionately in the rain.”

  My dad shoved me again. “Be quiet, Desi. Just watch, they show everything that happened in all the other episodes.”

  In the next flashback, the girl stumbles into a cabin from a snowstorm. The guy rushes over to her, yelling; he’s furious that she put herself in danger. Then he notices she’s limping and injured. He sits her down on a stool and wraps her ankle gently in a bandage, and as his eyes skim from her bare ankle up to her face, they lock eyes awkwardly. He shoves her away and she falls off the stool.

  I smiled. Okay, admittedly that was pretty cute despite the slightly violent element.

  The next flashback: The girl’s at dinner with some other bland-looking dude, and the guy rushes in angrily, taking long strides across the fancy restaurant to grab her wrist and pull her away. She shouts at him and starts pounding his chest with her little fists, furious, but he kisses her roughly and she melts against him.

  Hmm … that was kind of … hot. I straightened up and leaned forward. The last flashback: The two are at work, and the girl is getting yelled at by her boss. He throws a folder at her, papers flying everywhere. The guy is watching her, his face contorted with emotion. She makes meaningful eye contact with him and walks out of the room with her head held up high.

  My dad elbowed me. “That was when she took blame for something he did wrong.”

  We flashed back to present day, the couple staring longingly at each other after so much misunderstanding and suffering. The light turns green and the two walk toward each other in slow motion. Just as they were about to meet in the middle of the street, I grabbed the remote and paused it.

  “Desi!” my dad yelled.

  I looked at him, and even though you don’t usually feel your eyes gleaming, I felt my eyes gleaming. I had always assumed that when relationships went bad, that was the end. But the entire premise of K dramas was that they always ended happily. And that if you looked closely, there was a formula for making a guy fall in love with you. One that often began with a heavy dose of humiliation for the girl. And why had all my flailures, my humiliations come to nothing? It was because I never had a plan. There had never been any steps to follow.

  But the steps were right in front of my eyes all along. Just slightly blocked by my dad’s big head. I sprang up from the sofa. “It’s like a freaking equation! Why didn’t I ever see it?” I yelped. “We’re starting from the first episode!”

  My dad’s jaw dropped and he threw his arms up helplessly at the screen, where the two were about to kiss, eyes closed, leaning in. There would be about thirty more excruciating seconds of them squinting their eyes to lean in for this kiss, moving a millimeter per second.

  Like everything else, Luca could be won over with some good old-fashioned planning. This renewed sense of order propelled me up the stairs to grab a notebook. I might be a flailure in love, but I was the motherf-ing boss of studying. And until Luca, the motivation to study and plan my way out of humiliation had just never come to me.

  * * *

  Two days later, on Monday morning, it was done.

  I turned off the TV and leaned back into the crinkly leather sofa. My mouth was parched. My contacts were stickers on my eyeballs. I glanced over at my dad, who, when he wasn’t working, had joined me for the marathon on and off during the weekend. Then, last night, he had conked out next to me on the couch while I stayed up all night. He was sleeping with his mouth open, white-sock-clad feet tangled up in the plaid comforter I had brought for him.

  I looked down at my notebook. I had done it—I had watched three entire K drama series over the course of the weekend, including the one that we had started on Friday night. When my dad had asked why I was on this sudden K drama kick, I said it was for a school research project. Part of that wasn’t a lie.

  The dramas I watched were all of the romantic comedy variety, because that was clearly the genre that best fit my current life scenario. I hadn’t left my house, showered, or seen another human aside from my dad in that entire time. I had ignored texts from Fiona and Wes.

  It was funny, K dramas had been the white noise of my life. They were always on in the background as I washed the dishes, did homework, or hung out with friends upstairs in my room. But I had never sat there with my dad and fully given myself up to the K drama drug.

  Over the course of an entire weekend, I had become a convert. I had graduated from K Drama Rom-Com School.

  I had laughed, cried, felt the entire spectrum of K drama emotions. When I started the first episode, it took me a while to take the general aesthetic of the show seriously. First of all, the hairstyles on the male actors—OMG, so distracting and outrageous. Then, somehow, they evolved from ridonk to cute and dreamy! And while the posh sets of “rich people” made my eyes roll violently, they were offset by the cozy and romantic snapshots of Seoul—midnight drinks and hot snacks in pojangmachas (pop-up tents), adorable coffee shops playing American Top 40 music, city avenues lined with cherry trees in bloom, the iconic Han River at night. Seoul just seemed so pleasant and alive.

  And although I’m Korean American, there was a bit of culture shock. Like, how a hug was a momentous relationship marker (in American shows the leads would barely blink twice before jumping into bed). Or how huge obstacles were brought on by class differences, and how it was considered kind of okay for a rich mom to start hitting a grown woman for daring to date her son despite being poor. And the grown woman would just sit there and take it because the rich mom was her elder!

  Then there were the emotions. My God, I have never witnessed this level of emotion from human beings, on-screen or off. So. Many. Tears. So much yelling. I now understood why my dad spoke in all-caps, why everything was laced with incredulity. Not to mention all the fierce hugs, sweeping across rooms and grabbing girls, and close-ups of quivering mouths and clenched jaws. Hello, Hollywood casting directors who think there aren’t any Asians with star power? You need to go to Korea.

  Yeah, the stories could be formulaic, downright clichéd at times, but with the strong characters, it all worked. Characters that you rooted for, that you hated with the heat of a thousand suns, that you crushed on hard-core, that you envied, that you cared about. They were more real than anything the Oscars served up.

  K dramas bottled up swoony true love in addictive ten-to-twenty-hour packages. My reactions to chaste first kisses were akin to heart attacks. I bawled with abandon when couples had to break up, when one of them was suffering. I sighed happily with glazed eyes when my characters finally got their happy endings.

  And now I had to go to boring school. In America. But I was armed with something that I truly believed would work.

  “Appa … Appa! Wake up!” I nudged him until he finally stirred. It was like waking up a giant four-year-old, but I managed to get him upstairs to shower. When he closed his bathroom door, I glanced down at my phone. I had a good twenty minutes before Fiona showed up.

  CHAPTER STEP 5:

  Have a Secret Dream That Brings You Closer to the Guy

  Fiona was late and it was cold. Waiting for her in my driveway, I hugged my thermos of coffee, which was barely saving me on zero hours of sleep. A quick glance at my phone’s weather app showed that it was fifty-two degrees. Freaking glacial for Orange County, even if it was December. I was about to rage-text Fiona when I heard a loud clattering noise just before her copper-colored death-on-wheels, lovingly called Penny, turned the corner. I could sense all my uptight neighbors flicking their venetian blinds aside to stare out at the loud hooligan car.

  Fiona’s music was blasting, too, but I couldn’t hear that over the clattering until she was pulled up right in front of me. I hopped in and immediately turned the volume down on the Swedish reggae. “God, you’re going to go deaf. Either from terrible music or your trash-can car. You do realize Penny has an exhaust leak?” Always the mechanic’s daughter, I could ident
ify a car by the sound of its exhaust in my sleep.

  “I ran over a neighbor’s skateboard the other day, maybe it was that.” Fiona pondered for a second before glaring at me. “Were you in hibernation because of the sweatpants flailure?”

  “In part.”

  She tapped her long lavender nails on the steering wheel. “Well, I’m glad to see you’re not dead. If it wasn’t for your cryptic post on Instagram last night I would have sent the cops over.”

  “I know, sorry. I was just super–caught up in something this weekend.”

  She glanced over at me again. “Look at you today. All sharp.”

  I was wearing dark jeans, black flats, and a gray peacoat over a heart-patterned sweater. “Fi. I’m just wearing normal clothes.”

  Fiona, on the other hand, was wearing shorts overalls over tights, a long-sleeved thermal, and a giant tweed men’s coat over the entire ensemble. Her lips crimson, her faux-red hair tied in a high, messy knot. Bow down.

  I nervously snuck a peek at myself in the visor mirror. I had managed to execute my favorite hairstyle—worn down with soft waves framing my face. I saw a flash of Luca’s drawing of me, the long hair swept to one side.

  “I have something to tell you.”

  A beat of silence. “Okaaay, I’m listening.”

  “Well, it’s always been kind of lame that despite how well I do in so many things, I can’t seem to get a boyfriend because of my flailures, right? Clearly, there’s that magic something I’m missing, that all you overdeveloped lovers seem to have.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. So … you know how my dad’s always watching those Korean dramas?”

  “Yes, adorable.” My dad melted even the coolest of hearts.