I Believe in a Thing Called Love

by Maurene Goo

  Then he leaned back into the seat with a smile, head still turned to me. “Sometimes it’s nice to be surprised, yeah?”

  I struggled to find words to match the buzz and hum of my body—everything simultaneously frantic and languorous. Before I could actually think of a response, he drew my hand onto his knee and pulled out a pen from his pocket. Sticking the cap into his mouth, he scrawled something on the soft skin on the inside of my wrist. His phone number.

  I was mute the entire time and didn’t actually have a chance to speak because what he did next gave me zero time to think: he slipped out of the car, bent over to pop his head back in, and said, “Thanks for dinner.”

  And then he was gone, strolling across the street.

  It had happened. Luca and I had kissed.

  And then I started laughing and couldn’t stop, covering my mouth with my hands. Because guess what, Luca? Surprise or not, this was all going according to plan.

  STEP 15:

  Fall Deeply into Cringe-Inducing Mushy Love

  The next day I sat on my front step and stared at my phone. I typed in one word: Hi.

  Somehow that didn’t look cool and effortless. No, that was the text equivalent of just staring at someone. I deleted it.

  Can I see you?

  Good God, way too serious.

  Want to go graffiti together today?

  Ha-ha.

  So about that art project …

  Oh, shut up.

  Do you like me?

  Why don’t I just throw myself down a well to die a slow, painful death.

  I like you.

  Thrown into a well to die a slow death with two broken legs.

  After a startling first kiss, what would a K drama heroine do? I wanted to relax and feel like I’d accomplished something, but I remembered Song-Yi from My Love from Another Star, and how after her first kiss with the alien love interest, he avoided her like the plague. (Well, granted, he could die from the physical contact. But still.)

  It was a Saturday, so I had no reason to bump into Luca. And I wasn’t sure if I could survive the weekend without knowing what the heck he was thinking. Did he like me? Did he feel sorry for me? Was it just lust? I flushed thinking about it.

  I started to text Wes and Fiona to get their sage, masterly make-out advice, but realized that the conversation would just turn into a crapfest of jokes and opinions. I told my best friends everything, but the kiss with Luca was a little too fresh and special to share with them.

  I glanced at my K drama steps list, which was next to me on the front step. Oh, wonderful, wonderful K drama steps. You who have brought me my first kiss. Hm, the next few steps were post-kiss, all the blissful mushy stuff to follow.

  So I needed to make sure the mushy happened. Just do it, Des. I straightened my spine and texted Luca: Hey, what are you doing right now?

  I hit Send. Then shoved the list in my shorts pocket and got up to dribble a soccer ball in my backyard. Hell if I was going to sit around waiting for a text from a guy.

  I was balancing the ball on my knee when I felt a vibration in my pocket.

  The ball dropped onto the grass. It was a text from Luca.

  Working on my art project. Wanna join me?

  Heart catapulted off my ribs and into my throat. Should I wait a little—

  Sure—what are you defacing today? ☺

  * * *

  I think it’s totally cool if your dad drops you off on a date. When you’re seventeen.

  “Bye!” I slammed the door and waved goodbye with a big toothy smile so that he would just zoom off. Instead, the car patiently idled as he watched me.

  I looked around but couldn’t see Luca—just a bunch of tourists. “Okay, Luca’s meeting me inside the mission!” I said to my dad brightly, not wanting him to witness whatever awkward greeting Luca and I would have post-kiss.

  “Okay, have fun. Pick you up at six!” With that he was off, waving to me out the window. I squinted after the Buick, wondering if his chillness was just an act and he was secretly freaking out about his precious daughter going out with a boy. Or maybe my general lack of boyfriends made my dad trust me to an embarrassing degree.

  I walked up to the Mission San Juan Capistrano—a beautifully maintained Spanish-style compound built in the 1700s, complete with ruins of a chapel and a plaza of lush gardens. Once I reached the pool filled with lilies, I pulled out my phone to text Luca.

  “Hey.”

  I looked up, already smiling at the sound of that voice. “Hey.”

  When standing so close to him, I could smell his deodorant—which I was oddly flattered by. No puffy vest for this unusually warm January day, just a short-sleeved white T-shirt and jeans. Black high-top Vans and beanie still part of the uniform though. (And a backpack full of spray paint, of course.) Also, up close, I noticed a zit or two on the jawline of his otherwise flawless face. And weirdly enough, those two zits relaxed me. Like they were saying, “Hey, we’re not perfect either.” I also noticed, with relief, that his black eye from yesterday had almost all but faded already.

  I thought there would be an awkward shy moment, or maybe he would act like nothing had happened and we would be back to being friends, but those fears were instantly dashed when he grabbed my hand. “Ready?” he asked.

  Ah!

  Here’s the thing. A kiss is the ultimate, I get it. In K dramas they take a billion episodes to get to it, and it’s replayed over and over again from fifty different angles. And the kiss is so chaste and close-mouthed that it’s almost comical to your typical Western audience used to open-mouthed kissing followed by panting and groping. (But K dramas understand the importance of the sweetness of the moment, too. And all the anticipation, woo boy. All those episodes building an agonizing tension so taut that when their lips do meet, you are dying. Anyway.)

  And last night’s kiss felt like that, for sure. But it was so sudden, because despite all my planning, I hadn’t anticipated it coming at that moment. So after a night of agonizing over what that kiss meant—whether Luca liked me or if he was just caught up in some moment—holding hands with him right now created the same heart-thumping adrenaline rush. Holding hands was also something you didn’t do in the heat of the moment, it was something you did while thinking, purposely. To make a public statement about your relationship to each other.

  We started to weave through the crowd and I said, “So, uh, I’m guessing we’re not tagging on the actual mission?”

  His silence made me freeze midstep. “Luca?!” I yelped.

  He squeezed my hand. “You’re way too easy sometimes. What kind of monster do you think I am?”

  “Well, you do deface public property.”

  “So a mild one?”

  “Yeah, mild monster.” My grin almost cracked my face open. He led me farther away from the mission and toward the quaint San Juan Capistrano train station until we reached a gate covered in bright fuchsia bougainvillea. Suddenly I felt a little nervous. “Luca, what if we get caught? Aren’t you on probation?”

  “Don’t worry, this place is totally hidden.” As if on cue, he flipped a flimsy latch and slipped through the gate, taking me with him.

  I felt and heard a deep rumble from somewhere not that far away, and I clutched Luca’s hand. Or I should say, attempted to. Our hands were pretty sweaty at this point, to be honest. “I hear a train!”

  Luca cocked his head. “You’re right. Let’s go over here,” he said while pulling me toward the tracks.

  I yanked his hand back and stood perfectly still. “Luca!”

  He glanced back at me, genuinely surprised. “What?”

  “You can’t … You can’t just cross the tracks!”

  “Why not?”

  There was a list of reasons. Before I could answer, Luca let go of my hand and hopped over the tracks in two seconds. The rumbling grew louder as he stood on the other side motioning for me to cross over.

  Screw it.

  I sprinted and nimbly hopped over the tra
cks, landing on the other side, right into Luca’s outstretched arms. He wrapped them around me tighter and I fit against his chest like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “Hi.” His voice was quiet but I could feel the smile before seeing it.

  I looked up. “Hi. For a wimp you sure don’t mind putting yourself in danger.”

  The train whizzed past, my long braid coming undone in wisps that whipped across both our faces. The earth vibrated beneath our feet, and this time I stood up on my tippy-toes and brushed my lips against his. Soft and a bit hesitant. And he kissed me back just as softly, with a little pressure at the very end.

  And when the train finally passed us, we were left with a whole lot of silence.

  He leaned his forehead against mine and I swore I couldn’t feel my feet. Did I have feet?!

  “Yeeeah. I like you,” he breathed.

  I heard the words but couldn’t register them.

  “Hm?” My voice was abnormally loud.

  “Desi. You cute nerd. I like you.”

  I pushed him away, laughing. “So romantic.” But I couldn’t stop smiling and my hand covered my mouth to hide it.

  He tugged on his backpack straps impatiently. “Is that it?”

  “Is what it?”

  He stared at me.

  Oh.

  “Anyway, so where’s this graffiti we’re graffitiing over?” More silence as I walked ahead of him, pretending to be absorbed in finding the tagging spot. “Is it, like, on a wall or maybe some old railroad equipment…?” I let my voice trail off. I was going to milk this for all it was worth.

  Then I felt something hit my back. Something blunt but still a little heavy. I whipped around to see Luca standing in the same spot, wielding a rotting avocado. His feet were surrounded by them—all mushy and gross after days in the sun.

  My mouth opened to speak, but I shut it quickly. Let him suffer. I turned around, and instantly felt another thud, on my butt this time. I yelped, “Gross! It’s going to stain my clothes!”

  He grabbed another one off the ground and drew his arm back as if to toss it. I screeched and ran out of the way. He started chasing after me, the occasional avocado pelting me on the arm or back. I ran into a thicket of overgrown morning glory vines and live oak trees, safely away from the train tracks.

  I was hiding in there, holding my breath, my eyes trying to adjust to the dark when I felt hands grab me from behind.

  “I said I liked you.” His voice was muffled, his lips on my hair.

  I shook my head, feeling the top of it rub against his face. “I like you, too.”

  And that was that. Those simple words ended a very complicated few weeks. The K drama steps worked. Nervous relief unburdened the pressure of all this scheming.

  Luca’s voice broke through my thoughts. “I really resisted this, you know. When I had to move here, all I wanted to do was get the next few months over with and have zero connections to anyone here. Especially a girlfriend,” he said, and I felt his smile against my hair.

  I turned around and looked at the shadowy outlines of his face. “Girlfriend?”

  And although it was dark, I could see his happy expression falter for a second. “Oh, do you—can you not date? Or…”

  I mentally squealed into a megaphone so big that the sound reverberated into space, reaching Pluto, then bouncing back. I responded with an articulate, “I—no—I mean—”

  How to reveal to this hot guy that I had never had a boyfriend? He probably started dating when he was three years old. The Mr. Darcy of Montessori School.

  And then I thought of how endearing it was when K drama heroines were inexperienced in love, like Hang-Ah from The King 2 Hearts. How it drove the prince crazy to find out that this strong and hot soldier lady was so innocent.

  I swallowed. “To be honest, I’ve never dated anyone before.”

  And there it was. The truth in all its humiliating starkness. I waited for some jaw dropping, some disbelief, or perhaps a snort of derision. But he just bit his bottom lip and looked at me in that inscrutable way of his.

  “I’m your first boyfriend?” he asked.

  I couldn’t even—boyfriend? Unreal! “Yes,” I replied simply.

  “What about Wes?”

  Ohmygod. I kept a straight face. “Nah, that was nothing important.”

  He paused. “So … I’m your first boyfriend?’

  “Yes.”

  He kissed my forehead. “Nerd.”

  STEP 16:

  Pick Your Very Own Love Ballad to Blast Jarringly Over and Over Again!

  That night, Luca and I didn’t sleep.

  Because we were talking. On the phone.

  I glanced at the clock. It was 4:34 a.m. My comforter twisted around my legs as I burrowed deeper into my bed. I positioned my head so that my phone didn’t dig into my cheek as much.

  “So now what are you doing?”

  I giggled. “Um, pretty much the same thing I was doing the last time you asked.”

  His voice was scratchy on the other end of the line. “I don’t know, you could have started a plan for a citywide tree planting in those fifteen minutes.”

  “True. What are you doing?”

  I heard a muffled sound on the other end. “I’m … I just moved onto the floor.”

  “Why?”

  “My bed got too hot.”

  Visions of an overheated Luca in bed was enough to make me kick off my blankets entirely. “My dad likes to sleep on the floor sometimes,” I said.

  “For some reason that doesn’t surprise me.”

  I smiled. “It’s not because of eccentricity. He grew up sleeping on the floor. A lot of Koreans still do it, not because they can’t afford beds or anything, but because they find it more comfortable.”

  “I bet my mom would dig that. She does this thing called grounding. Have you heard of it?”

  I shifted to my back. “Um, I know what it means in physics, but I doubt it’s what your mom does.”

  “What’s it mean in physics?”

  “Well, it’s this way of removing excess charge on an object by transferring electrons between it and another object of a pretty big size…” I could hear him snoring, or pretending to. “Hey! Look alive, buddy.”

  He made a fake startled noise, like he was being jolted awake. “Oh, uh, what were you saying?”

  “Anyway. What’s it mean according to your mother?”

  More shuffling noises on his end. “It’s kind of amazing. In a way that you will, of course, mock. It’s this idea that you should walk barefoot outside a few times a day, to literally touch the earth. People believe there are benefits to this.”

  “Oh please, tell me those benefits.”

  He let out a honk of laughter. “I can practically feel your glee over the phone. Anyway, the main benefit is that a plant’s electric energy goes into the ground and then directly into your body.” He paused. “Got that? So all these medical benefits come from having the earth’s good, natural energy enter your body.”

  I tried to keep my voice composed. “’Kay, like what?”

  “Improving blood flow for one. And helping with fatigue, poor sleep, inflammation. And, um, it may eliminate diabetes.”

  My entire body started shaking with laughter as I kept my hand clasped over my mouth. He could sense it. “Are you still there? Or are you writing to all the major medical journals about it?”

  “I’m here. Wow. Grounding. You learn something new every day.”

  “I’m sure you think my mom’s a total nut.”

  I shrugged even though he couldn’t see me. “I don’t know. She sounds interesting.”

  A noise that sounded suspiciously like a yawn carried over. “Mm, she is. We’ve been through a lot together. Compared to other moms, I’m sure she can seem kind of flaky. But it’s always been us against the world.” He paused for a second and I listened to his breathing. “Although sometimes I feel like we’re equal parental units to each other. Like I take care
of her as much as she does me. Does that make her sound bad?”

  I lowered my voice, even though there was no way in hell my dad was still awake. “No, I get you. I mean, obviously my dad is in charge and has done everything for me. But I like to think that I’ve also taken care of him over the years.”

  “You do. I mean, almost everything you do is about your dad.” He definitely yawned this time.

  I yawned, too. My eyes fluttered closed. “Whaddya mean?”

  “What I just said. You’re like a little helicopter watching over him. Are there such things as helicopter daughters?”

  I barely registered what he had said and murmured, “What are you talking about, you weirdo? I think we’re getting … delirious.”

  “You are but not me. I’m as awake as”—a huge yawn—“as coffee.”

  “Awake as coffee?”

  “Yeah, you heard me.”

  I started cracking up when I heard a door open in the hall. I froze. “Uh-oh, my dad’s awake. I think I have to go for real.”

  “Nooo … pretend to sleep.”

  My dad’s heavy footsteps padded by my door, then stopped. I shoved my phone under my pillow in one swift movement. The door opened just as I shut my eyes. The bright light in the hallway sent diffused halos through my eyelids and I didn’t move a muscle until I heard the door shut again. When I was sure my dad was back in his room, I pulled out my phone. “Luca?” I whispered.

  No answer.

  “Luca?”

  A few seconds of silence passed and then I heard it. Soft breathing. Rhythmic. I smiled and whispered, “Sweet dreams,” before falling asleep to Luca’s breathing.

  * * *

  I stood back and admired Luca’s handiwork.

  It was late afternoon the next day and we were back at the train tracks by the mission—somehow still standing after just a couple of hours of sleep. Luca hadn’t been able to finish before my dad came to pick me up yesterday so I agreed to join him again today. His “canvas” was a wall on a dilapidated little shack that he had somehow found in one of his searches for good graffiti. It was hidden from the passing trains by a thicket of oaks and eucalyptus. The other side of the shack faced a large open field, part of a nature preserve. The late-day sun transformed the tips of the grass into gold, the temperature dipped suddenly, and the air took on a slightly metallic scent.