Super Fake Love Song Read online

  But her lips drew a thin tight line, and nothing came out.

  Cirrus’s eyes had reset. It was as if a Topic of Conversation dial selector had just been switched to OFF by an unseen hand. Her phone blooped again—more AlloAllos—but she didn’t seem to hear it at all.

  I blanched. Had I just inadvertently disappointed her in some opaque way? It was entirely possible—ask my parents—but at the moment I could not fathom what that way could be.

  “I should head back,” she said, and stood.

  “Cool,” I said, blinking. But this was not cool. She was here, she was about to speak, and now she was suddenly leaving.

  “See you tomorrow at school?” she said.

  “Uh, sure,” I said. I wanted to kick myself, but I did not know why, or if I even needed to.

  So I just watched as Cirrus Soh floated away down the stairs to let herself out without a sound.

  Research

  Name: Cirrus Soh

  Ethnic background: Korean-American

  Language skills: unknown (traces of British accent)

  Social media footprint: apparently immense, must delve into AlloAllo

  Other details: unknown, so many questions

  Mamba

  I woke up with a yell:

  “Uhh!”

  I had had a dream. I sat in a beautiful green field full of five-leafed clovers. Cirrus sat by my side. A curtain of hair blew into her amber eyes, and she drew it back, and a flying football glanced off her temple.

  Nurrrrrrrrrddddddz, said a demonic Gunner.

  The bedroom door opened, and Dad poked his head in with his eyes closed.

  “I’m respecting your privacy and asking if everything’s okay,” said Dad.

  I reached over to silence my analog bedside clock (sleeping beside your phone has been proven to give you cancer), which had been buzzing. I removed my sleep cap and clutched it to my chest.

  “Just a bad dream,” I said through my night guard. “You can open your eyes.”

  Dad opened his eyes but kept them discreetly downcast. “I know how mornings can be for young men, and also how certain dreams can produce certain reactions, which is totally cool and understandable, especially with a new girl in the picture.”

  “I need you to not be here,” I said.

  “Yap,” said Dad, and vanished with a look of relief.

  I peeled my night guard out of my mouth and dropped it into its dedicated bowl of distilled water. I slid my bare feet into my high-density memory foam slippers, wrapped myself in a heavy robe to protect my body from the irksome chill of the morning, and began rummaging among my white plastic containers for something clean to wear.

  I hesitated at my ManSkirt® utility kilt—an ideal choice for a hot day like today, but blood-soaked bait for the Gunners of the world—and reached for my usual potato cargos instead. But they would not do. Not for my first day as Cirrus’s orientation buddy.

  Cirrus had left so abruptly last night. I reviewed our conversation as best as I could in my mind. But I could not tell if I had said or done anything off-putting. Had I driven her away somehow right as we were getting to know each other? I hoped I hadn’t been inadvertently insensitive. I harbored the secret fear that I could sometimes be inadvertently insensitive.

  I put on my vintage Kozmo.com tee shirt—an original from the dot-com era—which normally I liked because of its edgy orange and green color scheme, but it now felt stupid and incorrect. All my clothes felt stupid and incorrect.

  I opened the door, checked to make sure the hallway was clear, and went into Gray’s room. There I unearthed a black Linkin Park vee neck with moth holes artfully perforating the shoulder and lat areas.

  I put it on. Its long-long sleeves were perfectly too long and perfectly frayed. I ran a hand through my matted hair, raising it into spikes. My cargo shorts of course looked completely incongruous, so I replaced them with a pair of black skinny jeans as snug as the Ring of Baphomet now on my middle finger. I wrangled a guitar over my shoulder. It hung low on my hip like a minigun.

  I looked in the mirror. Everything was too tight—I could even see my package—and air passed through the moth holes to touch my skin in dozens of unfamiliar places, but I could not help but feel a little wilder, a little more lithe, like a mamba just wriggling free from the flaky gray tube of its old self.

  “To metal,” said I to my reflection.

  “Breakfast,” screamed a voice from below.

  I scrambled. I did not want my parents to see me playing dress-up in Gray’s clothes.

  I hefted the guitar back onto its stand. I peeled off the shirt, and now the jeans, hopping, hopping, and shoved them under the bed. I changed back into my shorts and my Kozmo.com shirt. My old familiar clothes now felt baggy and tired and just kind of indifferent. I prepared to descend the staircase into the day that lay beyond.

  But I stared at the black clothes lurking under the bed. They were far from indifferent—they were different. They beckoned. They impelled me to stuff them deep into my backpack to take to school.

  I traveled carefully downstairs, ate a bowl of oatmeal—steel-cut for a lower glycemic index—and bid my parents à plus tard.

  My parents said nothing. They did not notice my unusually stuffed backpack. They were scrolling that long, daily scroll of the American information worker that stopped only when it was time to sleep.

  In the garage I strapped on a helmet and donned my skid pads, which, after years of practice, now only took less than a minute—a tiny investment of time for a huge return on physical safety and, yes, style (ask any X Games athlete). I adjusted my backpack straps for even weight distribution. I stood on the platform pedals of my Velociraptor® Elite elliptical bicycle.

  But I paused.

  There was that Japanese proverb: The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.

  (At least the Japanese were open about their conformist groupthink. The American version would be more of a hypocritical camp cheer:

  In-di-vi-du-al-i-ty! Be ev-ry-thing you can be!

  Long as you are just like me!)

  I hated my old ten-speed. I hated how inefficient it was, how it squashed the perineum and abraded the groin.

  But I stripped off my helmet and skid pads and took it anyway.

  Ten minutes later, I slammed the horrid bike into the school bike rack. Then I eyed the old storage shed at the far end of the lot. I hopped a low hedge, casual as a bank robber, and slipped into the dusted-out, rusted-out vacuum of the shed.

  Two minutes later, I emerged like a mamba into the light of a tall grass field. The black vee hugged my chest and shoulders. The pants hugged everything else. My black shoes, being the wide-toe-box variety, actually matched in a teen-Frankenstein’s-monster kind of way.

  “To metal,” I whispered, and entered the school.

  As I walked, I felt like an astronaut approaching a steaming gantry. Eyes flicked toward me, followed, and flicked at each other in astonishment.

  To metal.

  I kept my eyes up, chin high, and walked. I felt a confidence buoy my limbs. Could the clothes be unlocking that feeling? Had they for Gray? They were just clothes. But still.

  All around, people were giving me the Look.

  I giggled to myself. Was it that easy?

  * * *

  —

  “There’s the—” I said.

  “—cafeteria,” said Cirrus.

  We left the concrete outdoor amphitheater, keeping to the right to avoid swimming upstream in the fast-moving current of students: introspective art girl, loud jock, et cetera.

  “Over there is where they—” I said.

  “—admin and nurse’s office,” said Cirrus.

  “I’ll just watch you guide yourself around campus,” I said. I shifted my books and stuff to my other arm. I had lef
t my Pets.com backpack in my locker. I made a mental sticky to check if there were any of Gray’s old backpacks in his closet.

  Cirrus, in contrast, carried nothing. No bag, no lunch, not even a class schedule. Just her in a neat black dress and sunglasses, looking like she’d ditched a wake.

  It occurred to me that between her black dress and my black outfit, we matched nicely.

  She eyed me with her big lenses. “I like your shirt.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I like your shirt, too. Your dress. Dresses are basically long shirts.”

  “No,” said Cirrus.

  “Why did you leave so quickly last night?” I asked, but not really. Instead, I said nothing as we walked, keeping an eye out for Gunner or his goons until we reached my locker.

  “This is me if you ever need to find me,” I said, pointing. Hot Girl Artemis appeared and snapped her head at the sight of Cirrus.

  “Who are you?” said Artemis, quickly shifting to Evaluate & Compare mode. She then performed a secondary scan of me, in an effort to map the exact nature of our relationship.

  I froze. I held my poise as best I could. For a nauseating moment I wondered if she would betray my charade—her smooth gynoid countenance breaking into a fit of monotonic laughter: The mega-nerd is trying to be cool for the weird new girl!

  “You first,” said Cirrus coolly.

  “Ecgh,” said Artemis with revulsion. “What?”

  “That’s how it works,” said Cirrus. “You introduce yourself first. Then you let the other person reciprocate.”

  Maybe it was because Artemis could not match any criteria in her meager database to link me and Cirrus together in any meaningful way; maybe, in the wretched control bridge of her heart, she calculated that Cirrus represented no threat to her preprogrammed objectives.

  Whatever the case, Hot Girl Artemis’s haphazardly coded algorithm must have deemed this encounter not worth a nanosecond more of her runtime, for she spat out a final Ecgh, disengaged her E&C scan, and executed a walkaway: a huff, a locker door slam, a flawless strut.

  “Nice to meet you, too,” said Cirrus.

  “Sorry about her,” I said.

  “Every school has one,” said Cirrus.

  Her phone buzzed, and she answered. “You might like this,” she said. “My friend in Japan is in a feminist grunge band called Hervana.”

  She showed me a video of four impossibly cool girls playing to a crowd waving their arms in unison.

  “My god, they’re incredible,” I said.

  Cirrus backhanded my shoulder. “From one rock star to another.”

  “Ha,” I said.

  In Cirrus’s mind, I fit in with her international network of creative hipsters constantly pinging her from all around the globe. In her mind, I was just as cool as them. Maybe, I suspected, even more so.

  Cirrus did not know that, in reality, I was but quarry for meat-eaters such as Gunner. She did not know that I used to be a reputational liability for my own brother, who avoided me in school. She did not know that I single-handedly made up 33.33 percent of the nerd caste at Ruby High.

  I knew this whole thing was wrong.

  But I loved it.

  “Ugh, more AlloAllos,” said Cirrus. She typed for a bit before putting her phone on mute and stuffing it away. “Enough.”

  “You have lots of friends,” I said.

  “I’ve been to lots of schools,” said Cirrus with a shrug.

  We kept walking until we reached the center courtyard of the school. Cirrus stood atop a bench to survey things with arms folded.

  “If that’s the one hundred block there,” she said, squinting, “then that must be two hundred. Then three. And so on.”

  I raised my eyebrows: You are correct.

  “Gym there,” she continued. “Locker room. Weight room. Industrial classes there. They usually like to keep pipes and vents and stuff all in one part of the school.”

  “It’s like you can see the matrix,” I said.

  “All schools are the same,” muttered Cirrus. “Sometimes I feel like I’m just appearing in the same place. Again and again. Just alternate realities in an infinite multiverse.”

  Up until this point in my young life I had never heard anything more romantic.

  I sat on the bench, only to realize I looked like an upskirt creeper. So I stood and leaned as rakishly as I could on a nearby trash can, only to realize it stank of barf gone leathery solid in the heat. I returned to my original place and held one hand over the other like some kind of drunk valet.

  I cleared my throat. She shot me a look, as if I had just materialized.

  “So do you miss your mother country?” I said, cool as can be.

  “Huh?” said Cirrus.

  “Jolly old England?” I said, faltering now.

  “I’m not from-from there, actually,” said Cirrus.

  “So, uh,” I said. “What’s your background?”

  Cirrus looked at me. “Background.”

  “Where were you born, blablabla, ha ha,” I said, laughing for absolutely no reason.

  “Right, this question,” said Cirrus, drawing forth a ready answer. “Born in Sweden mostly by accident. Technically, I’m a citizen there. But also my dad was adopted by a family in Germany. So I have a second passport. Mom’s American. So.”

  “Nice,” I said, as if I understood what any of that meant. Inside, I was spellbound.

  “Most everywhere is basically the same,” she said.

  “Totally,” I said, with a bogus Jedi-wave of the hand.

  “Kids want friends, grown-ups want a house and a job,” said Cirrus.

  “We’re all just people,” I said.

  “If it’s different you’re looking for,” said Cirrus, “then hike Masoala, or try those live butod grubs in Sabah.” She widened her face with amazement. “I like bugs, but those are like No, thank you, you know?”

  “I know,” I said, absurdly.

  “Then again, I also couldn’t do live baby octopus in Korea, so maybe I just have a thing about food that’s still moving, you know?” said Cirrus.

  “I know,” I said again, as if I did.

  “I’m talking a lot, aren’t I,” said Cirrus.

  “I’m easy to talk to,” I said, and was immediately delighted at this sudden display of genuine wit against all odds.

  “I have to admit I still get a little nervous when I just get to someplace new,” said Cirrus. “So thanks.”

  “Day nodda,” I said.

  My smile held steady, but my mind was spinning faster and faster, having been dazzled by her kaleidoscopic cosmopolitan cool.

  How many kinds of people had Cirrus met, I wondered, and in how many places? How many archetypes in the student pantheon?

  Had she met other Sunnys before Rancho Ruby? Nerd Sunny, Super Macho Sunny, Cool Sunny, Fake Cool Sunny? One Sunny being just okay, but at least better than the other, and so on?

  And how was this Sunny?

  I began to feel increasingly unspecial.

  The bell clanged. Just like it clanged at schools everywhere.

  “So your next class is—” I said, but Cirrus wasn’t listening.

  “Those two guys are staring at us,” said Cirrus.

  I spotted Milo and Jamal, and made tight fists behind my back. “Let me introduce you to my friends,” I said.

  “Hiiiiiii,” moaned Jamal, jamazed.

  “Wowwww,” said Milo, milozmerized.

  My two best friends wore what they normally wore, which was to say a combination of low-performance joggers and blank polos that were so normcore, they went through dadcore and into weekend dadcore beyond.

  I should fix their wardrobe, I found myself thinking, then shook off the thought.

  Their abject incoherence must have charmed Cirrus, because sh
e covered her mouth with the back of her hand—such a refined gesture—and laughed.

  “Hallooooooh to yooooou tooooo,” she said, her eyes as big as eggs. “You must be the Immortals.”

  Jamal and Milo looked puzzled, as expected. I nodded with great earnestness from behind Cirrus. Just say yes.

  Milo clued in first. “Yes,” he said.

  “That’s us,” said Jamal, dutifully mimicking my bobbing head.

  “Very cool,” said Cirrus.

  Milo and Jamal exploded with gasps of nerd pleasure bordering on the profane. They were unaccustomed to this word cool, and now laved at it like dogs discovering fallen chocolate.

  I pantomimed a dual-blade decapitation with my hands. Knock it off.

  They stopped. They awaited further instruction.

  I lowered downward-facing palms slowly, as if calming a cross-eyed horse. Be cool.

  “Cirrus,” I said, “is a Soh, the daughter of old friends of my parents. They just moved to Los Angeles to mastermind the next great architectural icon.”

  “It’s a mall,” said Cirrus.

  Milo gestured with his hands. “When did you get in, your plane? Airport?”

  Cirrus stifled another giggle. “Sorry. I’m still jet-lagged, so I might find everything amusing right now. I’ve been in beautiful Rancho Ruby less than a week.”

  “Jet lag’s like Whatever The Flip,” said Jamal with a shrug so unorthodox he had to take a sidestep to maintain balance. “W-T-F dubs tha eff.”

  “Sorry to cut in, but I only have a few minutes to show her the rest of the school,” I said quickly. “Shall we?”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Cirrus to Jamal and Milo.

  “Nice to meet you,” they howled back.

  As I led Cirrus away, Jamal glared at me: What the hell?

  I bobbled my head back: I’ll explain later!

  But I had no idea how I would do that without sounding like I’d lost my mind.

  Solution

  That evening, I changed out of Gray’s clothes, put on my regular civvies, and strapped on my helmet and skid pads. I launched out onto the serene night streets of Rancho Ruby on my Velociraptor® Elite elliptical bicycle, which was propelled using a fluid striding motion on large foot platforms. The comfort level was vastly superior to the track-style fixies ridden by fools—you never saw mature men riding those, that’s for sure, and for darn good health reasons.