Super Fake Love Song

  Also by David Yoon

  Frankly in Love

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  Copyright © 2020 by Alloy Entertainment LLC and David Yoon

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 9781984812247

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art © 2020 by Timba Smits / Design by Theresa Evangelista

  pid_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  To nerds

  and anyone else just trying to be themselves,

  but first, nerds

  Contents

  Origin

  I

  Spark

  Fakery

  Immortals

  Research

  Mamba

  Solution

  II

  Regroup

  Foot-ball

  Gee

  Salsa

  Shame

  Murder

  Originals

  Charms

  Courage

  Kerrang

  Promise

  III

  Blotter

  Shred

  $3,000

  Part-A

  Sylphs

  90%

  Pathetic

  Eucalyptus

  Ready

  IV

  Sunset

  Losers

  Pity

  Cool

  Coldplay

  Believe

  Beautiful

  V

  Doomed

  Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.

  —Bruce Lee

  If you find the false, you find the true.

  —Gary Gygax

  What is the most embarrassing thing you have ever done for love?

  Once upon a time, a girl sent flowers to herself from a fake secret admirer to draw attention from a boy, only to be found out by the boy’s friend’s mother, who owned the flower shop.

  Once upon a time, a boy crashed his car with that of a boy’s just for a chance to talk to him, only to send them both to the hospital and get charged with gross negligence.

  Once upon a time, a girl faked a French accent at her new school to pique the interest of a Francophile girl, only to be busted by the arrival of an actual French student.

  Once upon a time, a boy faked being the front man of a rock band in order to impress a girl, only to—

  Origin

  Every superhero has an origin story. Every villain has an origin story.

  Every loser has an origin story, too.

  Did you know that?

  I do.

  My time of judgment officially fell one moment in middle school. This one moment clearly defined me as a loser. This one moment cast my loserdom into cold carbonite.

  I was thirteen. My family had only recently moved from the tiny humble hamlet of Arroyo Plato to the sprawling opulence of Rancho Ruby.

  I had returned from Math to find my locker hanging ajar, its padlock somehow picked. We had lockers in middle school—I missed the backpack hooks of my old school of yesteryear and their implicit belief in the goodness of society—and I liked to keep my paladin figurine on the topmost shelf to visit between classes.

  A paladin was a warrior blessed with the power of divine magic.

  I had scraped the figurine into form by my own hand from a small block of plaster, then painted it, then sprayed it with a clear coat to protect against scratches.

  The sword. The shield. The sigil. The spurs.

  It was my one and only copy; I hadn’t learned how to cast molds yet, or electroplate, or airbrush, or any of the other things I would later master.

  On this day, I opened my locker to discover the figurine had gone missing. In its place was a line, drawn in white chalk, leading down and away. Scrawled instructions read:

  THIS WAY SUNNY DAE

  I knew this clumsy handwriting; I suspected it was that of Gunner Schwinghammer, who had been born as a fully grown man-child and wowed the adult administration with his preternatural ability to catch and run a football with high school–level acumen. While my friend count never grew beyond two—Milo and Jamal—Gunner’s friend count was always increasing.

  And indeed, as I followed the line past the water fountains and down the breezeway, I glanced up to see Gunner following me with glittering eyes.

  I shook him off. Gunner weighed fifty-two thousand pounds; I weighed six. Gunner was royalty incumbent; I was a serf with stinking mud caked on my boots.

  For now, I could only hope that the figurine hadn’t gotten dinged beyond the point of reasonable repair.

  I continued to follow the line of chalk as it skipped over cracks and jumped down a curb and into the fresh stinking black of the parking lot.

  ALMOST THERE PUBIC HAIR

  How far did this stupid line go?

  As far as the last car, and into the eraser-red concrete of the baseball area. Down three quick steps, careening right into the shade of an empty dugout.

  Around me, the indifferent sun was busy sparkling the dew of another beautiful morning laden with the scent of fresh-cut grass, which was actually a distress chemical released by the mutilated blades in an anguished effort to repair themselves.

  The line finally came to rest in the perpetual darkness beneath the fiberglass benches.

  PRIZE-A-PALOOZA

  YOU TOTAL NERD LOOZA

  What I saw was worse than all the looks and all the whispers. What I saw would always be worse than all that Gunner would come to offer: the outright name-calling, the cafeteria-tray flipping, the body checks in the hallway. All the stuff that would follow me past middle school and across the quad into the domain of senior high.

  What I saw was my first warning ever.

  Paladin Gray had been worn down to a nub, because the figurine itself had been used to draw the line that led me here.

  This, the line warned, marks the end of your childhood.

  From that day on, I understood.

  I understood that here, in Rancho Ruby, no part of my thirteen-year-old self was up to standard. I understood that from now on, every day was a new day in the worst possible way: each day I would be challenged, and each day I would likely fail.

  I could not afford to cry—everywhere was now a dangerous place—so I kicked a hole in the orange earth with my heel and dropped the chunk in. I covered it over. I stomped thrice to mask the seam.

  And I stepped back into the sun to survey the new realm before me.

  I

  Mimic octopuses change shape and hue.

  When they are scared, they become something new.

  Spark

  I was now seventeen. />
  I now lived on the other side of the quad, at Rancho Ruby Senior High.

  It was Monday. It was school.

  What was there to say about school?

  Lockers. Class bells. The pantheon of student archetypes: the introspective art girl, the loud jock, the rebel in black. Put your phones away. Will you help me cheat on the quiz. Who will sit next to me at lunch. The kind teacher. The mean teacher. The tough-as-nails vice principal with the secret soft spot.

  There was the hot girl, Artemis, whose locker was next to mine, who answered every one of my Good mornings with a broadcast-quality eyeroll.

  There were the nerds, who were me, Milo, and Jamal.

  There could of course be no nerds without a bully—for the bully makes the nerd—and mine was and would ever be Gunner.

  Gunner, the human Aryan Tales™ action figure. Gunner (orig. Gunnar, Nordic for “warrior”), now the superstar feature back of the Ruby High Ravagers, celebrated for his high-RPM piston quads and record number of berserkergang end-zone dances.

  Gunner would invade my table at lunch to steal chips to feed his illiterate golem of a sidekick and tip our drink bottles and so on, like he had routinely done since the middle school era. He called it the nerd tax. By now I was able to instinctively avoid him and his sidekick, with an outward annoyance that was actually barely disguised fear.

  What a cliché.

  I regarded Ruby High through skeptical eyes, as if it did not really exist. It was a school like many other schools in the country, all repeating similar patterns in similar fashion, again and again throughout all ages, world without end.

  Track and field—track for short—was where I could lounge with my two best-slash-only friends in the Californian golden hour, picking clovers for fifty minutes straight before performing a few minutes of burst activity: long jump (me), shot put (Milo), and high jump (Jamal).

  Ruby High was a football school. Track was what donkey-brained football superstars and their sycophantic coaches did to obsessively fill every minute of every hour with training. No one gave two dungballs about track. No one came to track meets.

  I loved track.

  Track fulfilled the Physical Education requirement with almost no effort.

  “Here comes Coach Oldtimer,” said Jamal. Coach Oldtimer’s real name was We Did Not Care What His Real Name Was. “Pretend you’re stretching.” He opened his arms and mimed shooting invisible arrows, pew, pew. Jamal (third-generation Jamaican-American) was stretched so tall and thin, he was nearly featureless.

  “Oh, stretching,” I cried.

  Milo (third-generation Guatemalan-American) lay flat and gently rolled side to side, flattening the grass with his muscular superhero body, which he had done nothing to achieve and did nothing to maintain. He even wore thick black prescription glasses as if he harbored a secret identity.

  I, Sunny (third-generation Korean-American), bent my unremarkable physique to vigorously rub calf muscles as tender and delicate as veal, rub rub rub.

  Together, we three represented 42.85714286 percent of the entire nonwhite population of Ruby High. The other four were Indian, Indian, East Asian, and nonwhite Hispanic, all girls and therefore off-limits, for Milo and Jamal and I did not possess the ability to talk to girls. At Ruby High, we were the lonely-onlies in a sea of everybodies.

  “Stretching stretching,” I said.

  “Go away Coach go away Coach,” said Milo under his breath.

  But Coach Oldtimer did not go away. Coach, an older white man with the face of an enchanted tree scarred by the emerald fires of war, drew near. He’d been with the school since its founding six thousand years ago.

  “I like this little dance you guys got going on right here,” said Coach. “Miles, you sure you don’t want to run tight end for the football team? Quick, strong guy like you?”

  “It’s Milo,” said Milo.

  “I’ll join football,” said Jamal.

  Coach gave skinny Jamal an eyeful of pity. “It gets pretty rough,” he said.

  “Toxic masculinity,” coughed Jamal into his fist.

  “What?” said Coach, pouting.

  “How can we help you, Coach Oldtimer?” I said.

  Coach shook off his bewilderment and maintained his smile. “It’s huddle-up time to give all you boys the dope on next week’s track meet with Montsange High.”

  A football jock in the distance cupped his hands to his face and juked an imaginary blitz. Gunner.

  “Give us the dope, Coach!” said Gunner. Then he gave a crouched Neanderthal glance over to the girls’ track-and-field team to see if they noticed. They did, spasmodically flipping their long flawless locks of hair in autonomic limbic response.

  Track was what mouth-breathing football cheerleaders did to ensure they remained visible to donkey-brained football players for every possible minute of every day.

  I sat up. “I’m not sure our performance will be significantly enhanced by your dope.”

  Finally Coach’s smile fell. “Your friggin’ loss.” He stalked away.

  “Final grades are decided by attendance, not performance,” I called.

  “Friggin’ nerds,” muttered Coach Oldtimer.

  “We’re not nerds,” I whined.

  “Okay, nerds,” said Gunner.

  “Nerds,” said some of the girls in the distance.

  “Nerds,” whispered the wind.

  “Why does everyone keep calling us nerds?” said Milo, and made a worried face that asked, Did someone find out about DIY Fantasy FX?

  He was referring to our ScreenJunkie channel, where for three years we had been posting homemade videos showing how even the most craft-impaired butterfingers could fashion impressive practical effects from simple household materials for their next LARP event.

  LARP, or live action role playing, was when people dressed and acted like their Dungeons & Dragons game characters out in real life.

  We did not LARP. We could never. In this temporal plane, we would only get discovered and buried alive under a nonstop torrent of ridicule. As it was, we made sure to never show our faces in our videos—my idea.

  Jamal leaned in. “So there’s some pretty exciting audience activity on our channel.”

  “Give us the dope, Jamal!” yodeled Milo, and gave an ironic glance over at the girls’ team, who glared back at him like tigers in the sun.

  “We finally broke a hundred,” cried Jamal.

  Me and Milo exchanged a look. One hundred ScreenJunkie followers. One step closer to advertisers and sponsorships.

  “And,” said Jamal, with a wild smile, “we sold three tee shirts! Three!”

  Me and Milo exchanged another look, this time with our mouths in twin Os.

  “And finally,” said Jamal, hiding his glee behind his very long fingers, “Lady Lashblade liked our ‘Pod of Mending’ episode.”

  “She liked my glitterbomb,” I said.

  “She liked your glitterbomb,” said Jamal.

  I gripped the turf like it had just quaked.

  Everyone knew how influential Lady Lashblade (best friends with Lady Steelsash (producer of What Kingdoms May Rise (starring actor Stephan Deming (husband of Elise Patel (head organizer for Fantastic Faire (the largest medieval and Renaissance-themed outdoor festival in the country)))))) was.

  “That is huge,” said Milo.

  I hugged Jamal, who recoiled because physical contact was not his absolute favorite, before hugging Milo, who was big on hugging as well as simply big.

  “We gotta keep going with new episodes, you guys,” I said.

  “Heck yeah we do,” said Jamal, with a grin as wide as his neck.

  “We gotta brainstorm our next custom prop,” I said.

  Milo pushed up his glasses. “Right now?”

  “Right now,” said Jamal.

  �
��So, I was thinking, what if we made a—” I was saying when a football glanced off my temple.

  “Catch,” said Gunner.

  “Asswipe,” I muttered.

  “What?” said Gunner. “What did you call me?”

  Coach Oldtimer reappeared upon a fetid cloud of menthol rub. “Ladies, take a powder.”

  “He started it,” I said, instantly wishing I hadn’t sounded so whinging. I pointed at my temple and the football on the grass.

  “I don’t care who started it,” said Coach Oldtimer. “Warm-ups, let’s go.”

  “Coach said warm-ups, nerds,” sang Gunner, who caught up with Coach Oldtimer to share a side-hug and a laugh.

  I heaved myself up. “Right as I was pitching my idea.”

  “Asswipe,” said Milo, loud enough to make Gunner glance back and make Milo cower. This made as much sense as a pit bull backing down to a Chihuahua—Milo was big and strong enough to easily kick Gunner back into first grade if he wanted.

  “To be continued, you guys,” I said. I broke into the world’s slowest jog, still rubbing my temple. “To be continued!”

  I ran my long jumps and averaged three meters, a new personal low.

  Milo threw the shot put n meters, n being a number Milo neither remembered nor cared about, because shot put meant about as much as playing Frisbee in the dark with a corpse.

  Jamal got the high bar stuck between his legs while midair and abraded the groin muscle next to his right testicle.

  But who cared? Who cared about track, or Gunner, or his football? What was important was that DIY Fantasy FX had reached some kind of tipping point. Its next phase was about to begin.

  * * *

  —

  The week accelerated until it became a multicolored blur smearing across time and space. This happened whenever I focused hard on a new prop project. You could say this was what I loved most about DIY Fantasy FX: the effect it had on time.

  I spent my school day sketching prop ideas on the sly, then holding my phone under my desk to text photos of those sketches to Milo and Jamal. In this way we held our design meetings.