Super Fake Love Song Page 3

  I dropped the spoon in and slid the drawer shut.

  Who knew what Gray was up to these days? I imagined him on a stage bathed in light. I imagined him in a slick studio booth, transfixing a team of producers with his rock star magnetism.

  Gray had been in a few bands in high school—pop, rap, folk, whatever was trending at the time—but the Mortals were my favorite. They were dark. They were metal. Gray played a growling dropped D, as metal demanded. They had played the legendary Miss Mayhem on Sunset; Gray was only eighteen at the time.

  We are mere Mortals, Gray would boom into the mic. And so are you.

  Behind an amp head I spied a royal-yellow club flyer taped to the wall.

  THE MORTALS—OCTOBER 15—FINAL NIGHT OF THE 2ND ANNUAL ASIAN AMERICAN AND PACIFIC ISLANDER ROCK AND ROLL FESTIVAL SPONSORED BY KOREATOWN AUTO MALL—AT THE WORLD-FAMOUS MISS MAYHEM ON SUNSET STRIP IN HOLLYWOOD, CA

  It had been torn; a corner dangled.

  I looked in Gray’s closet. I pushed aside a bulging cardboard box full of unsold Mortals merch: tee shirts, lighters, stickers. I found a thermal long-sleeve shirt adorned with skulls. I slam-danced out of my loathsome blazer and tie and put it on. Was it still cool?

  Felt cool to me.

  I turned, brushing against a guitar that chimed with dissonance. One of these days I should teach myself how to play beyond the six chords I already sort of knew.

  Atop an amp sat a darkly glittering thing.

  Gray’s Goat of Satan ring.

  Metal cool and fantasy nerd, forged as one into a chrome-plated steel homage to Baphomet himself.

  When the Mortals were active, Gray’s two bandmates would bring their matching rings together in a sacred fist bump and growl the prayer:

  To metal.

  I put the ring on, relished the weight of the thing.

  Elf shot the food! said my phone. It was a ringtone from an early primitive arcade role-playing game. I peered at it, wondering if Gray had felt his ears burning miles from here.

  It wasn’t Gray. It was Dad, texting me from downstairs.

  Cirrus Soh is here!

  Immortals

  I made my way downstairs, where the front door was already open. Beyond where Dad stood, I could see a ghostly girl straight out of a Japanese horror movie lurking in the dark beyond. Instinctively I clutched at the banister with both hands.

  “Hello?” I said.

  Dad gestured, and the girl-ghost slowly stepped in. She turned out to be a real girl: heavy charcoal eyeliner, blue lips, in white jeans and a white tee shirt with the words I NO KUNG FU and an illustration of a hand with two fingers—middle and index—held straight up.

  Her gaze traveled around the house slowly, as if she had just emerged into a crypt, and came to rest. On me.

  “Hey,” she said, as if perplexed by my existence.

  I relaxed my grip. I approached. I kept a good eight feet away from the girl. “You’re not a ghost.”

  She cocked her head. “Are you?”

  “And we’re off and running!” cried Dad with a hand clap. He glanced at my shirt Gray’s shirt, blinked, then moved on, oblivious. “Cirrus, this is Sunny, Sunny, this is Cirrus.”

  My palms immediately grew hot and moist, like they did whenever I was confronted by a pretty girl.

  You just said she was pretty.

  Well, she is.

  I never said I thought she wasn’t.

  We’re actually all in violent agreement.

  Cirrus let out a huge moan of a yawn.

  “I’m just in from London,” she said, “so I’m good and knackered.”

  “Great,” I said. What was naccud?

  “So it’s Sunny,” said Cirrus, nodding seriously at Dad. “I thought you were calling him sonny.”

  “Yeppers, Sunny Dae,” said Dad with a sideways laugh. He turned to me. “Sunny, Cirrus is—”

  “Daughter of Jane and Brandon Soh,” I said, like an automated information kiosk. “They are our new neighbors. You are old friends.”

  “Your name is Sunny Dae,” said Cirrus, thinking. “And your brother’s name is Gray Dae. Sunny day. Gray day.”

  “You were named after a variety of cloud,” I said. I added a smile to make that statement seem less whiny, but it did not help.

  Dad stared at his son and this girl, waiting to see what happened next.

  Cirrus seemed to relax a millimeter. “It’s nice to meet you.” She stuck out a hand.

  I lunged to receive it. “Nice to meet you, too.” Then I lunged right back.

  “Intros made!” shouted Dad to himself. He turned to Cirrus. “Anything you need, any school intel, fun hot spots around town, you just ask Sunny.”

  “Everything here is so foreign and exotic,” said Cirrus, peering around with mock theater. She smiled. “But really. Thank you, Mr. Dae. Thank you, Sunny.”

  The way she said my name was as shocking and brilliant as a thousand diamond beams of white starlight all converging at once on my dumbstruck face.

  “Yeah of course you got it hurr,” I said in a single breath.

  “Sunny’ll take good care of you,” said Dad, who gave my back an irritating forehand and then vanished.

  We stood in our socks in the foyer.

  “Great,” I said to Cirrus.

  “Yow,” Cirrus said, jumping at a buzzing phone in her pocket. She smiled at it, and began typing. “Sorry, it’s AlloAllo. Are you on AlloAllo?”

  “No, yes, I used to be, not that much,” I said, fairly certain she was talking about an app. I suddenly felt intensely stupid for not knowing what AlloAllo was, and fervently promised myself I would sign up as soon as possible even if it meant relinquishing all my privacy and basic human rights in the process.

  I knit my fingers at my quaking belly. Just above Cirrus’s collarbone I noticed a tiny triangle of skin, pulsating at a rate definitely slower than my own heartbeat.

  “Looks like my friends in Zurich are up,” said Cirrus. She finished up, put the phone away. “They’re such morning people over there.”

  “I know,” I said.

  I know?

  “You’ve been?” said Cirrus.

  “Not for a while,” I said.

  What was I saying? I had never left Southern California in my entire life.

  Moths were batting away at the porch lanterns, so I shut the front door. “How long you in the States for?” I said, marking the first time I’d ever referred to America as the States.

  “Right up until I leave,” said Cirrus with finger pistols and a shake of her long black hair. “Seriously, though. Probably until I graduate. I mean we. One sec.”

  She pulled out her phone again, smiled, typed. “School just let out in Sydney. Oi, Audrey, oi, Simon.”

  “Sydney is in Australia,” I said resolutely.

  Cirrus tucked her chin at her shirt. “I’m actually wearing Simon, speak of the devil.”

  Her shirt once belonged to Simon? Simon was the name of her shirt?

  “Great,” I said, making this the third time I used the word great. I was struggling very hard now. Cirrus was cool. Cirrus was so, so cool. She had just arrived from London. She had friends all over the world. Friends who did cool things and were therefore also so, so cool. She came from an entirely cool world. She did not belong in such an uncool house in an uncool neighborhood with an uncool loser like—

  “My friend Simon made this tee shirt,” said Cirrus. “Amazing artist. Youngest ever to show at White Rabbit Gallery. He made it for my other friend. Audrey. She’s got this brilliant metal band protesting Asian stereotypes, called I No Kung Fu. Get it?”

  “I like art,” I said, wiping my forehead. Say something interesting. “I hate Asian stereotypes.”

  I said interesting! Interesting!

  I knew no artists. I
knew no musicians, other than long-gone Gray. I knew no one cool.

  I wanted to blurt out, My brother is a musician! but managed to restrain myself. Instead, I found myself asking the most noninteresting question possible.

  “Where, uh, what are your parents working on, doing?” I said.

  “A big mixed-use thing downtown,” said Cirrus, “because apparently Los Angeles doesn’t have enough luxury malls and luxury condos.”

  “It doesn’t?” I said.

  “That was a joke,” said Cirrus.

  Now my ears ignited, because normally I had at least intermediate to advanced skill at identifying jokes.

  “Hahahahahaha,” I said, busted as hell. “Anyway, malls are cool.”

  Cirrus gave me a perplexed smirk: You know better than to call that sort of thing cool.

  I scrambled to refurbish my last statement. “I meant cool in the sense that this new mall will help humanity finally get their carbon footprint big enough to make the Amazon rain forest the planet’s hot new desert,” I said.

  “Jesus, you’re cynical,” whispered Cirrus, impressed.

  By this point, my feet were as hot as my hands and my ears. My body was all-hot.

  “How is the UK?” I said. UK stood for United Kingdom. Then I remembered Brexit, and the possibility that the UK would no longer exist, and wished I could do it over again to prove I wasn’t an ignorant American.

  Cirrus thought. “Lots of history. Bit crowded. Bit rainy. Not like here, which is lovely.”

  “Sure, cool cool cool cool,” I said. I made a mental sticky note to add London to my weather app to compare.

  “I like your shirt,” said Cirrus.

  Instantly my chin shot down to my shirt and shot right back up. I’d forgotten that this shirt was not my shirt. This was Gray’s shirt. It was quite tight.

  And she liked it.

  “Oh, this stupid old rag?” I said, far too loudly. The old part was true. I didn’t mention the part about it being Gray’s and not mine. Maybe that was the stupid part. I picked at Gray’s shirt’s sleeves.

  “The skulls give it a throwback vibe,” said Cirrus.

  I had no idea what the hell that meant, so I focused on her shirt instead.

  “What does that hand gesture mean?” I said. I held two fingers straight up, middle and index, like it showed on her shirt.

  Cirrus demonstrated by holding up two fingers herself, then curling her index finger down so that only the middle one remained standing.

  “It means this, but in Australia,” said Cirrus.

  I lowered and raised my index finger: middle finger, two fingers, middle finger, two fingers. “So, eff you, eff you, eff you, eff you.”

  Cirrus did this thing where she covered her mouth with the back of her hand to laugh—she had the velvet laugh of a villainess—and for a moment I stood spellbound. Finally I put my hand away like an amateur magician stashing his last, best trick.

  Cirrus slowly flexed one leg after another, as if tired from standing for a long period of—

  You let her stand in the foyer this whole time?

  “How about we go sit in my room!” I cried, and headed up the stairs.

  “Sounds great?” said Cirrus, and followed.

  I reached the landing and hesitated. An image flashed in my mind: Cirrus, sitting in my room, amid my stacks of white plastic storage containers. Cirrus, opening the containers one by one. Loudly saying,

  Got lots of swords and shields and nerdy stuff. Are you one of those big mega-nerds?

  I halted abruptly enough to have Cirrus literally bump into my back.

  “Oop,” said Cirrus, sidestepping me to slide into my room.

  Except it was Gray’s room.

  “Ohhhhahhh,” I began, without finishing.

  Gray’s door was always open, because that’s how Gray liked things. The door to my room was always shut, because that’s how I liked things.

  My door was blank and unadorned. My door could have led to anything—a linen closet, a brick wall, an alternate universe.

  You only get one chance to make a first impression, Mom liked to say. It was characteristically shallow advice, but there was a truth to it that I only now realized.

  I followed Cirrus, heading left into Gray’s room instead of right into mine.

  Cirrus had already made herself at home in Gray’s salvaged steel swivel chair. She drummed her fingers on her thighs, as if eager to be introduced to the room’s history.

  I started to say something, then stopped.

  I started to say something else, then stopped.

  I started to—

  Cirrus eyed me with growing concern.

  “So are you—” she said.

  “These are guitars,” I said suddenly. I craned my neck back to look at them. I stretched, sniffed, did all the things amateurs do when gearing up for a big lie. “They’re my guitars.”

  Cirrus brightened. “Wait. Are you in a band?”

  “Phtphpthpt,” I said with a full-body spasm. “It’s just a little band, but yes: I am.”

  Cirrus looked at the guitars again, as if they had changed. “Very cool.”

  I heard none of this, because my lie was still busy pinging around the inside of my big empty head like a stray shot. Shocking, how easily the lie had slipped out.

  “You’re more than cool,” continued Cirrus. “You’re brave. Most people barely have hobbies, if they bother to try anything at all. Most people let the dream starve and die in the kill-basement of their soul and only visit the rotting corpse when they themselves are finally on death’s door wondering, What was I so afraid of this whole time?”

  “Jesus, you’re cynical,” I whispered.

  Cirrus spotted something behind my guitars Gray’s guitars: the torn Mortals flyer. “Is that you?”

  I cleared my throat, which was already clear. “That’s, uh, my old band,” I said. “We split up. I’m working on a new thing.”

  “Cool-cool,” said Cirrus, nodding blankly.

  Then she flashed me a look.

  Not just any look.

  The Look.

  I recognized the Look from when Gray was still at school. The Look was a particular type of glance Gray got often—a combination of burning curiosity barely masked by bogus nonchalance. Everyone badly wanted to know Gray; everyone pretended they didn’t.

  The Look was the expression people gave to someone doing something well, and with passion. It was an instinctive attraction to creativity—the highest form of human endeavor—expressed by emitting little hearts out of our eyes. It was falling a little bit in love with people who were fashioning something new with their hands and their imaginations.

  I had always wondered what it would feel like to get the Look, and now I realized I had just found out.

  The Look was pure deadly sweet terror, and it felt incredible.

  I instantly wanted another.

  Cirrus moved on, her face neutral again. She nodded at something on Gray’s old guitar amp. “What’s that?”

  “My ring?” I said.

  It was slightly easier this time, calling it my ring, as if lying were a thing that became easier with practice.

  I let her hold the Goat of Satan ring. She leaned forward, accepted it, put it on.

  “It’s heavy,” she said, amazed.

  “It’s the Goat of Satan,” I said. The goat’s name was Barthomat, Birtalmont, Baccarat—

  “And then you make a fist and say ‘To metal,’” I growled.

  “To metal,” she growled back. Then she studied the ring with a pensive eye, as if it reminded her of something sad. She took it off, handed it back. I put the ring on with a deftness that implied I’d been wearing the thing for years. My finger absorbed her lingering warmth. For an idiotic moment I felt like we had just someho
w kissed.

  “So what’s your new band called?” said Cirrus.

  She threw me the Look again before turning to gaze at nothing in particular. I realized what she was doing. She was wanting for something from me, while pretending her question was no big deal.

  My mind seized up. I fiddled with my fingers at my belly, which had gone a little sour. I shoved my hands into my pockets, only to find it was too hot for pockets. So I took them out again and just kind of rested my fingertips on my ribs. Many people sat like this all the time, except those who didn’t, which was everybody.

  “Our working band name,” I said, “is the Immortals.”

  Immediately I wished I could take it back.

  Cirrus smiled. “So you were the Mortals. And now you are the Immortals.”

  “Okay, shut up.”

  “And I thought I was lazy,” she said with a chuckle.

  “I know, I know,” I said, with a wild marionette’s shrug. “We wanted to maintain brand recognition?”

  “No, I like it,” said Cirrus. “Also it’s got this dorky Dungeons & Dragons vibe, like Fools, you cannot defeat the immortals!”

  “You’re just being nice,” I said, openly knitting my fingers now. Dorky, she said. Dungeons & Dragons, she said.

  “I am,” said Cirrus, then laughed until she had to place a hand on my shoulder for support, at which moment I decided she could laugh however long she wanted. All night would be fine by me.

  “Seriously, though,” she said. “I could never put myself out there like that. I’d love to see you guys at your next gig.”

  All I could do was shrug and turn the ring around and around. Baphomet. The goat was called Baphomet.

  “Ffshhhffshssh,” I said, nodding and nodding.

  Cirrus grew quiet. She seemed to be considering something, and gave a wan little chuckle to whatever thought was in her head. She opened her mouth to speak.

  My gut quivered. I felt I was about to learn something deep and interesting and extraordinarily personal from this new girl. And only fifteen minutes into our very first conversation! The first conversation of many!