I Believe in a Thing Called Love

by Maurene Goo

  It was shockingly easy to avoid Luca. We never saw each other. Once I dropped out of Art Club (the first time in my life I’d ever dropped out of anything), I never had any reasons to bump into him. As far as I knew, he had died. Just kidding. (But it felt that way.)

  Three giant greasy slices of pizza teetered in a pile on my plate, which I topped off with some peanut-butter cookies. You know how some people lose their appetites when they go through a breakup? WELL, NOT I! I craved calories right now—the crappier the better. More grease and butter, please. And heaps of sugar to boot.

  When I finally got to our lunch table, I noticed that Violet and Leslie were there, too. Wes and Violet had started dating officially, something I had managed to notice even while living in my own personal production of Les Misérables. And it was no surprise that Leslie and Fi had gotten back together as well. Happy couples all around. Yippee.

  Everyone said hello but I could feel the concern vibes and I was so over it right now. I grunted my greeting and sat down with my heart-attack food.

  Wes broke the awkward silence. “So should we end senior year in a blaze of glory and rent a Hummer limo for prom?”

  “Are you serious?” Fiona asked with her lip curled. “I’d rather eat a dick.”

  Violet started choking on her food while laughing.

  Prom. Ugh. In my misery I had totally forgotten about it. We had made plans a while back to go as a group—which included Luca, of course. The thought of going now made me feel sick.

  “Um, yeah, count me out,” I muttered as I bit into my pizza slice.

  “Come on, Des, you have to go!” Wes whined as Violet took a surreptitious peek at my plate of food. It probably contained all the calories she usually ate in a month.

  Fiona pulled a leg up to her chest and rested her chin on her knee. “Normally I’d be all for rebellious Desi, but it would be weird to not have you there, Des. You’re the face of our senior class. It wouldn’t be right.”

  I didn’t answer, just kept my eyes on my food. Wes tossed a football up into the air, then caught it. And threw it up to catch it again. My eye twitched.

  “No, you guys go and have fun,” I said, trying to smile.

  “It’ll be your loss,” Wes said, tossing the football again. But he fumbled catching it and it landed on my plate of food, knocking a few cookies off the table and a slice of pizza onto the grass. Everyone was instantly silent.

  Wes scrambled to pick up my food. “Sorry, Des,” he said quickly, awkwardly placing the grass-covered slice back onto my plate.

  My instinct was to be nice, to not let my annoyance show, but I immediately thought of K drama heroines and how they only existed under a rainy cloud of misery when going through heartbreak. Specifically, any of the leads in the Four Seasons dramas when one of them was dying (they are all dying at some point).

  So I just smiled blandly at Wes. “Whatever.”

  I felt everyone exchanging uneasy glances. I took off my sunglasses and looked around. “Okay, I love you guys but I can’t handle the pity faces right now.” I stood up, tossed my plate into the trash, and stalked away.

  I heard Fiona cry out, “Des!” But I just kept walking.

  * * *

  When I got home that day, I headed straight for my room. I threw my backpack onto the floor and flopped into bed. The force of that made something clatter on my desk and I looked up to see my family photo lying facedown on my desk. How appropriate. The photo had landed right on top of the draft of my valedictorian speech. It had been sitting there gathering dust since the Luca/Stanford implosion.

  Stanford. I would be hearing from them in a couple of weeks. I was nervous, yes, but something interesting had happened in the past month: I cared, but just not that much. I’m sure some of it was owed to my current numb state—but it also felt like one piece of my life. Part of a bigger picture. And I had gotten into Boston University and Cornell already, both of which had higher ranked premed programs than Stanford, might I add. It felt scary and unfamiliar, this not caring. But in a way it was also liberating.

  I looked over at the draft of my speech and felt guilty for about 0.5 seconds before closing my eyes for a nap.

  Before I could settle into the covers, my door flew open and my dad stomped in.

  “Appa!” I snapped. “What the heck, don’t you knock anymore?”

  “Appa never knocked!” True.

  He came over and took me by the arm, dragging me out of bed. I struggled and swatted at him. “What are you doing?” I yelped.

  “Appa sick and tired of you doing nothing. Get up and help me outside.”

  I groaned. “I don’t want to.”

  He stopped and stared at me. “You what?”

  My body straightened immediately. I knew I could only push my dad so far. “Never mind,” I muttered, following him outside. The garage door was open and there was a car sitting in it, lifted on some jacks. And not just some car, Luca’s car. What the hell. I glared at my dad. He shrugged. “I have to fix it still and thought I would do it at home.”

  He got onto the creeper, the flat rolly thing that goes under cars, and wheeled himself beneath the Civic. “Okay, you get on the other one, put on headlamp, and keep the tool kit near you.” I sighed heavily and dragged the giant tool kit over to the car and then lay down on the other creeper, pushing my bare feet against the garage floor to get under the car.

  I turned my headlamp on to look at the underbelly of the Honda. My dad pointed and explained the situation. “The oil and fuel filters and spark plugs are old and are totally no good. They need to be replaced or it will never pass smog test. You’re going to help me swap out the filters, okay?”

  I knew what that entailed and started to disassemble the heat shield with a socket wrench. While I did that, my dad watched with an eagle eye. After a few seconds he asked, “So, Appa always curious, how do spark plugs actually work? They’re just made of metals!”

  I worked at the filter, squinting to make sure I wasn’t going to make anything explode somehow. “Well, I think because there’s electricity that makes a spark at the tip of the plug, which ignites the gasoline, causing combustion.”

  My dad made a thoughtful noise. “Ohhh, okay. That makes sense.” That was his polite response whenever he didn’t really know what the eff I was going on about. “Hand me the bigger socket wrench now.” I rolled out from under the car and dug around the tool kit until I found it. I handed it to him, sitting up and letting my dad take over.

  “So what are you going to do about Luca?”

  I started. “What do you mean? We broke up.” While I had tried to keep my sadness to a minimum around my dad, I had told him about our breakup because there would be no other explanation as to why Luca was never around anymore.

  My dad grunted. “When did you become quitter?”

  “Sometimes you just have to accept the shit that life hands you,” I said. The self-pitying words were out of my mouth before I realized whom I was speaking to.

  “Yes, I know. I know very well, okay?” He rolled out from under the car, wiping his hands on a cloth he kept on his creeper.

  “I know you know,” I said in a small voice.

  My dad sat up and took a swig from his water bottle, then looked at me. “Will you finally tell me what happened?”

  I had avoided going into it with my dad. I was so embarrassed by the entire ordeal. But I was ready now. And I told him everything.

  Afterward he was quiet for a second. “So … that is why you watch dramas so much lately.”

  I managed to laugh, the first time in weeks. “Yeah, but also I like them now.”

  “You know, Luca must think you’re very crazy.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Because this is very crazy thing, kind of.”

  Kind of very crazy. Summed up perfectly by my dad, as per usual. “Yep.”

  “Why did you do this, then? Why couldn’t you just get him to like you normal way?”

  We sat side
by side on our creepers in silence for a minute, my dad ever so patient as I tried to piece together what to tell him—the patchwork of flailures and insecurities brought on by not feeling control over this one thing in my life.

  But despite everything, even after a lifetime of trusting my dad with all the minutiae of my life, I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell him that despite all his hard work and love and care, I was terribly insecure about this.

  “You know me, have to follow the steps to feel comfortable, Appa.”

  “Ha, just like your mom.”

  Yeah. Uh-huh. I’m sure my mom never needed a list.

  My dad cleared his throat. “You know what? If not for Appa, you would not be born.”

  I cringed. Shades of our sex talk from years ago …

  “Because your mom, she was worst at quitting on us. I had to fight many times to keep her from throwing in the blanket.”

  “Throwing in the towel.”

  “Yeah, what I said. Anyway, she so many times almost gave up. In high school, when her parents hated me, she said we had to stop loving each other.” I smiled at my dad’s choice of words. “When she knew she had to move here, she was ready to say bye-bye. I had to prove it would work, I moved here and I knew no English and we were very poor. So many times your mom cry and say this was bad idea. But I never give up.”

  He scooted over to me and put his hands on either side of my face, gently. “You cannot control who you love, Desi, but you can always control how hard you fight, okay?” His eyes crinkled with his grin. “Yes, you did a bad thing, but not so bad that you cannot explain it and have him forgive you.”

  I rubbed my eyes with my sweatshirt sleeves. “Appa, trust me. I have some pride, you know? He won’t even answer my texts—there’s no way to even explain it!”

  “Then you need to find a way to be heard.”

  Those words reverberated in my brain hours later as I lay sprawled on my bed, trying to slog through A Man for All Seasons.

  How could I make myself heard?

  I was tossing the book aside on a pile of stuff by my bed when the K drama notebook caught my eye. Ugh, why hadn’t I destroyed that thing already? I picked it up with the intention of burning it in a ritualistic fashion. Then I remembered one of the steps. I flipped to the list and skimmed it until I stopped at number 23.

  23. Take Drastic Measures for Your Happy Ending

  Something epically dramatic now has to occur in order to throw you two back together, so that while you are both trying to move on, you realize that you must be together against all odds. You are MEANT TO BE. Prove it. Again, life-threatening is always best. Perhaps an avalanche escape.

  Drastic measures.

  I thought of holding his hand for the first time and running down the road in a red lace dress. Of Luca putting his beanie on me. Of his arm slamming across me during the car accident. Of his warm hand when it held my neck during our first kiss. His hunched back as he stared into the ocean, feeling sad for me.

  I was literally having a K drama romance-montage moment.

  Then I felt a familiar frenzy take hold of me—the determination that helped me push through all things in life, the thing that never let me take no for an answer. The thing that convinced me as a kid that I had moved a pencil with my mind.

  And it was all further impacted by Luca. Luca’s hands, his smile when he glanced at me sideways, the way he tugged on his beanie. The way he always came through when I needed him.

  I couldn’t predict my future with Stanford, but I could do something about Luca. All was not lost. Yet. The K drama steps had won me Luca once; I had to try one last time.

  I dug my English notebook out from the pile. My fingers grazed over the doodle from the first day we met. Me in that black dress. I picked up my phone and texted Luca’s stepmom: Hi Lillian, do you think I could get a prom dress made in two weeks?

  Instantly: Hells yes, honey.

  CHAPTER STEP 23:

  Take Drastic Measures for Your Happy Ending

  “If he doesn’t go for it, you always have Max the freshman as backup boyfriend,” Wes offered helpfully from the other side of Violet. I groaned and leaned back into the leather upholstery of the limo.

  Fiona slid away from her date, Leslie, and hobbled across the limo in her heels to crouch down in front of me. “Hey, just be honest, okay? He’s going to forgive you.” I clutched her hands and stared at them nervously. Her nails spelled out FIONA and LESLI in hot pink.

  “Ugh, everyone’s in love.” I groaned. Fiona shrugged.

  “Ew, who said anything about love?” Violet said while edging away from Wes. He grabbed her lightning quick and pulled her into his lap. She slapped him away, but she wasn’t kidding anyone.

  “Violet, are you sure Luca will be there?” I asked for the billionth time.

  She rolled her eyes. “How many times are you going to ask me this, Hye-Jin. Cassidy promised.” We had convinced Cassidy to ask Luca to prom, even though she felt nervous about the whole thing. While the thought of Luca coming to prom with someone else made me want to jab out my eyeballs, I trusted Cassidy and was grateful for help. Although I couldn’t help but suspect that she probably enjoyed it a little bit.

  We finally pulled up to the hotel where prom was being held—a castle-like building on top of a hill overlooking the ocean, all lit up with fairy lights. Everyone piled out of the limo and I could hear the music before we even stepped onto the property. The dance was on the terraced grounds, a beautifully manicured area complete with gazebos and a giant swimming pool.

  We were about to enter the lobby when I stopped. “Wait!” I called out, panicked. Everyone turned around and stared at me.

  “How … how do I look?” The desperation in my voice was not becoming.

  There was a second of everyone assessing me and I felt my stomach drop. Then:

  “Hot.” Wes.

  “Pretty good, for you.” Violet.

  “Worthy of love.” Fiona.

  I laughed and covered my face to hide the creeping blush. When I glanced at my reflection in the lobby mirror, I hoped they weren’t just being nice.

  The dress had come out perfectly. Lillian came through like a millennial fairy godmother—using her fashion networking, she had my dress made in record time. And it fit me like a glove: made up of black lace, it was strapless, and short in the front, then the back was a long bustled skirt covered with black feathers. My hair was insanely blown out like a supermodel’s (Fiona had to get a massage after finishing the task, my thick hair was no joke) and was swept to one side, exposing an ear studded with shoulder-length silver earrings (some clip-on, I wasn’t willing to get extra piercings, even for Luca). The final touches? Black lace gloves and a killer pair of strappy black heels.

  I was Luca’s drawing come to life.

  And in real life, it was kind of a bonkers outfit.

  But I hoped, prayed, that he would recognize it. That was step 1. That he would recognize it and soften, giving me a chance to talk to him. To show him with action how much he meant to me. And then if that didn’t work … well, we would see.

  Leslie got swept up in a group of cheerleaders and Fiona made a face and grabbed my elbow. “Let’s eat, I’m starving,” she said, leading me to the buffet table.

  I scanned the landscape for Luca, but no sign. Fi squeezed my arm. “He’ll be here.”

  I relaxed and looked at her, fully registering how beautiful my best friend was that night. Her hair was dyed in a rainbow ombre, her natural black roots turning into shades of indigo, dark blue, turquoise, then sea-foam green at the tips. It fell into waves around her face and down her back. The hair matched her dress—an off-the-shoulder ice-blue concoction that hugged every curve of her bangin’ bod. She looked like a badass mermaid.

  “Have I told you lately that I love you?” I said, hugging her.

  She scowled but hugged me back. “Okay, let’s not get carried away.”

  “Selfie!” Wes exclaimed, jumping in with
Violet and taking a photo of us with his phone. I made a peace sign with my fingers.

  The night started pleasantly—it was great to see everyone so happy and excited. I couldn’t believe that this group of people, many of whom I had known for thirteen years of my life, was soon going to scatter. All of us going on our separate journeys. And wherever mine would lead, Stanford or not, I knew that I could be happy there. That is, once I tied up some Luca loose ends.

  Everyone was in a mushy, nostalgic mood. People came up to me and made poignant comments and while it was a little overwhelming, I was undeniably touched. Even Helen Carter, the captain of the soccer team and a girl whom I had always referred to as She of One Facial Expression, had started tearing up as we danced to Rihanna.

  It was such a nice evening that I almost forgot about Luca. Almost.

  Then I spotted him across the dance floor, laughing at something some Art Club guy was saying. I stopped in my tracks. Cassidy was standing next to him and when she spotted me her eyes widened. She mouthed, Wow, and looked me up and down. I smiled and made a thumbs-up sign at her.

  And then … Luca turned his head slightly and our eyes met. In a slim navy suit and crisp white shirt without a tie, he looked so devastating that I almost ran over to him. Standing here, not moving, felt like the most unnatural thing to do.

  But I was frozen, because I was watching his face register me. His eyes swept over me—from my feet to the top of my head. His lips pressed together and his eyes filled with a flash of emotion before going blank. I held my breath, waiting.

  And then he turned around and walked away.

  My legs almost collapsed beneath me. Cassidy threw me a helpless look before running after him. Wes immediately crossed the dance floor and came over to me. “Are you okay?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Stubborn-ass John Stamos,” he muttered.

  Fiona was right behind him and looked determined. “Don’t worry, Des. Just give him some time. He’s got to register the dress, your general hotness in that dress, and then—”