Super Fake Love Song Read online

  His Goat of Satan ring. It was still on my finger.

  “No,” I whined, suddenly thirteen years old again, the age when we grew irreversibly apart. I waited for Gray to start pummeling me with questions. What the hell were you doing in my room? What else have you gotten yourself into? Did you start dressing up as me to get some girl?

  But Gray asked no such questions; Gray simply returned to his game. “Whatever. It’s all junk up there.”

  I fumed. It wasn’t junk. It was important.

  But if Gray didn’t think so, was it?

  Gray played. He acted like I wasn’t there. For an absurd moment, I wished Gray would start interrogating me. I wished he would find out about my stupid mistake with Cirrus, and maybe even make fun of me, even if it made me feel awful.

  Because all Gray did was ignore me, and that felt awful, too.

  Gray glanced back with annoyance. At his little brother still fidgeting in the doorway.

  “Leave me alone,” he said, and flung the door shut.

  * * *

  —

  When I peeked into Gray’s old room the next morning, it was still exactly as I had left it. Untouched. A lost temple. Gray must have stayed in the basement billiard room all night.

  Just to make sure, I made the long journey downstairs, where Mom and Dad were already babbling away on a call, then farther downstairs to the level below. I went to the billiard room door and listened.

  Snoring.

  I opened the door silently. Gray was still on the recliner, controller in hand. The game console was still on. At least the television had had enough sense to put itself to sleep. The room smelled stuffy and hot. Still, even in his sleep-dead state, Gray looked cool. He had changed into an impossibly on-trend tracksuit covered in grenades and Snoopys; he wore a velvet designer bucket hat (available for $200) slumped over his eyes.

  I closed the door. I had wanted to make sure it was safe to search Gray’s wardrobe without interruption, but I hadn’t expected to feel depressed as a result. Gray was still not really here, even though he was physically here now.

  At breakfast, Dad looked up from his phonetablaptop shuffle and wondered:

  “Should I go check on Gray?”

  “Let him come up on his own,” said Mom.

  I said bye to a monotone chorus of Nns from my parents and rode the ten-speed to school. Once at the bike racks I dismounted and changed outfits: a digital black camo shirt with slashed jeans.

  Part of me wished Gray could see how cool I felt, without seeing the part where I was borrowing his clothes.

  Back in high school, Gray had already been a rock star. Less than a year after we moved to Rancho Ruby, he managed—despite being the single solitary lonely-only in his entire class—to charm his way into becoming universally popular across all the subgroups in the pantheon: jocks and preppies and thespians and student body politicians and so on.

  It was around that time that Gray stopped talking to me in public. It goes without saying that Gray and I no longer went on dungeon adventures together, either. In private, we gradually stopped stealing spoons.

  It took months for me to understand Gray’s increasing distance: As a high schooler, he could not afford to be seen talking to a middle schooler, much less a nerd like me. His surplus of cool would only be depleted by my uncool, and he needed every bit he could get.

  I guessed I could understand that. What else could I do?

  I would watch my big brother’s performances from the back of the auditorium, as mesmerized as the rest of the crowd. Gray: leaning his blackly ripped and distressed and studded self against the mic stand as if it were a staff, chopping away at his guitar to engulf the audience with its sparks.

  I had seen with my very eyes twelve white girls on the front line fall instantly in love with Gray. This was well before K-pop burrowed its way into the heart of American mainstream media and laid eggs there; the world had never seen a star who looked like Gray. Gray never paid the girls much attention. He would stare above the crowd with Gatsbian intensity, perhaps at the bright green EXIT sign way in the back. His obliviousness only made the girls want him more.

  Now, wearing the very same clothes that Gray had worn back in his high school rocker days, I felt regal. I felt sparky.

  Jamal and Milo goggled at me.

  “I think this rock persona actually suits you,” said Milo.

  Jamal looked down at his sweatshirt and sweatpants and walking sneakers.

  “Have I been Florida Man this whole time?” he said.

  “Gray’s closet has lots of clothes you could try,” I said. “He’s back, by the way.”

  Milo and Jamal froze.

  “Is everything okay?” said Milo.

  “He’s in between bands,” I said. “Other than that, it’s hard to tell anything when the guy won’t talk to you.”

  “So, still kind of a dick,” said Jamal.

  I shrugged: Yep.

  “Does Gray’s return present problems for our plan?” said Milo.

  “You mean Sunny’s plan,” said Jamal.

  “Hey,” said Milo. “Friends in need.”

  “I know, I know,” said Jamal.

  I thought of Gray ignoring me. “It shouldn’t present any problems,” I said. “On that note, how about we give the whole music thing a try ourselves in the practice room after school?”

  Jamal and Milo looked at each other: O-kay.

  Elf shot the food! cried my phone. I made a mental sticky to temporarily switch to a more conventionally acceptable and therefore more boring ringtone.

  Will you be my lunchmate? wrote Cirrus. I ate with the guidance counselor in her office yesterday and it was 1930s Berlin in there.

  I smiled the most ridiculous smile ever. I showed it to Jamal and Milo.

  Jamal looked at me, awestruck. “That means you’re married.”

  As you wish, I wrote back.

  Foot-ball

  Are you ready for a real American lunch at a real American school?” I said.

  I found Cirrus standing on a concrete berm by the outdoor amphitheater, which was already imprinting in my mind as a sacred site of great significance and origin. She observed the rivers of braying teenfolk with arms folded and the hard eyes of a desert shepherd.

  “Show me all of your country’s secrets,” she said with a smile.

  I was feeling bold, so I held out a hand to help her down. She just slapped me five and jumped.

  “I get to sit with the cool kids,” she said.

  I faked a rakish snarl. “Come on.”

  I felt a swagger rising within me. I was walking with the mysterious and beautiful new girl, who happened to live just down the street, no big deal.

  My swagger froze and shattered as soon as I glimpsed the lunch area. At the far end were Milo and Jamal glaring up at Gunner, who, right on cue, snatched away Milo’s basket of fries and tipped his sports drink into his tray for good measure. His hairless, gray-skinned sidekick cackled through rotting teeth:

  “Nerd tax.”

  The sight gutted me of all confidence, leaving it to splatter and curdle all over the floor.

  I began to hyperventilate. Cirrus thought I was cool. She thought I was brave. Because she thought I was something I was not. Because I’d told her I was someone I was not.

  If you became friends with someone who turned out to be someone else, did that mean you’d have to start all over again with the real them? Would you even want to?

  “Over here,” I said, veering us off-course toward a blank wall concealed by planters.

  I sat down on the ground. Cirrus cheerfully followed, not knowing any better. She did not know this area had no coolness to it whatsoever. How could she?

  I wished I could rewind time and simply say,

  This is actually Gray’s room. No
t mine.

  But time travel had not yet been invented and never would be, no matter how many lazy-brained sci-fi movies fantasized about it without proper peer-reviewed study.

  This was a stupid, stupid problem, and I kicked myself for having created it.

  I peered and watched Gunner saunter away in the distance. Milo poured out his flooded tray into a drain in the floor with practiced care. I felt bad that I hadn’t been there to help absorb and defuse the abuse. Instead, I was safe here with Cirrus. It felt selfish of me.

  Cirrus and I opened our bags and investigated our lunches. Cirrus unwrapped what looked like an al pastor cemita sandwich, but on pretzel bread—quite the twist. I groaned with an almost sexual desire at the sight of it.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “An experiment,” said Cirrus. “My parents let me pick whatever I want for grocery delivery, since it’s mostly just me in the house anyway. I wind up messing around with food just for kicks.”

  I revealed my lunch: pita sandwiches filled not with gyros but leftover bulgogi and dabs of sambal oelek. Lunches were always random, slapdash affairs haphazardly assembled with whatever I could find in the refrigerator. But they were always good, too.

  “Trade, trade, trade,” said Cirrus with big eyes.

  We traded. We ate.

  “This is amazing,” I said.

  “This is amazing,” said Cirrus. “And not too wet.”

  I looked at her.

  “I’m not a huge fan of wet foods,” said Cirrus. “Cereal, most soups, tuna salad sandwiches.”

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  “We definitely have the best lunches out of any of these genetically engineered philistines,” said Cirrus.

  One person’s usual is another person’s brand new.

  A sudden wave of nausea swelled. Because right now I was very much liking being with Cirrus. And I could tell she was liking being with me. Or what she thought was me.

  “So is it considered cool to sit here because Americans aspire to set themselves apart from the rest of the herd?” said Cirrus. “I saw an ad that said something like that.”

  “Americans are brainwashed from an early age to believe that they are blesséd children of God with total sovereign autonomy and unlimited individual control over their destinies no matter what systemic prejudices or disadvantages they might have been born into, which in turn allows their government to forsake all social responsibility and focus on groveling facedown in the gutter to let the great amoral capitalistic parasites slither through the diseased streets of the nation’s corpus unimpeded and unquestioned,” I said.

  “Cool,” said Cirrus. Then she broke into cackles. “You’re weird.”

  Had I gone on and on? I sometimes had a tendency to go on and on.

  I remembered my outfit. I remembered I was cool.

  “Honestly, I eat here because it’s quiet,” I said. “I don’t need to hear a bunch of screaming about which filter looks better.”

  “Or whose hair makes a candidate more electable,” said Cirrus.

  “Or how our team needs to score more points than the other guys to win at football,” I said. “The answer is more. The answer is always more.”

  We cackled together, two crazies holding up a wall. We ate.

  “That’s something I’ve been curious about in your exotic land,” said Cirrus. “American foot-ball. It seems very important here.”

  I pulled out my phone, scrolled around the horribly designed school website, and showed slick professional photos of our team to her.

  “It is,” I said. “The whole school revolves around the sport.”

  “The one where boys in super-tight, super-sexy pants hold endless outdoor meetings about the fate of an inflated pig bladder while pretending to not have hidden desires for one another,” said Cirrus.

  I stopped mid-chew and gazed at her, amazed. Because she was amazing. “That’s the one,” I said.

  “Not that other football, where openly racist hooligans jeer each other over which player pulled off a foul with the most convincing theatrics,” she said with a sly smile.

  Gazelles wished they could leap high enough to match the grace of her wit.

  “Six of one,” I said, and smiled back.

  “I also saw something about a Hawking dance?” said Cirrus.

  I groaned. “Sadie Hawkins. The revolutionary concept behind that event is that the girl asks the boy to attend, not the other way around.”

  “Reminds me of White Day in Asia,” said Cirrus. “The revolutionary concept behind that is that the girl gives chocolates to the boy.”

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “Doesn’t take much,” said Cirrus.

  “Mind blown,” I said, and we cackled some more.

  “So I guess we have some to-do items in our cultural orientation queue,” said Cirrus.

  I found myself smiling so much that my head exploded with light that consumed our planet to transform it into a new rival star.

  Cirrus ate her last bite, wadded up the eco-friendly, compostable wrapper, and swished a trash can ten feet away with ease. She lobbed mine, too: swish.

  She glanced again at my phone.

  “It looks like the next American foot-ball match is tomorrow night,” said Cirrus.

  “It is,” I said warily.

  “What’s a foot-ball match like?” she said.

  “They’re a spectacular example of what happens when an entire culture represses their sexuality under the banner of sport,” I said.

  In truth, however, I didn’t know—I had never attended a football game. Why would I waste time on that kind of bull-sparkle?

  “Foot-ball sounds like it would be hilarious to watch,” said Cirrus.

  And with that, I decided O hell yes, I must now go to a foot-ball match.

  “I’ll swing by your house tomorrow and we can witness it together,” I said.

  It was one of the bravest things I’d ever said in my whole life. Not just because I had never gone to a high school football game before, but also because I had never asked a girl out to anything ever. Now I just had. And the girl was named Cirrus.

  She leaned back. She considered me.

  “I meant to say earlier that I like your outfit,” she said now with a smile that could revive crops withered by atomic fallout. “Do you have a gig tonight or something?”

  “Nah,” I said. “It’s just Wednesday.”

  Bam!

  It’s! Just! Wednesday!

  “Well,” said Cirrus with a tilt of her head. “I think you look really cool.”

  Everything went silent but for the lingering ell of Cirrus’s cool.

  you look really coooolllllllllll

  “. . .” said Cirrus. “. . . . . . . . .”

  I marveled as a nearby skateboard slid to a halt without a sound. A study group broke into mute laughter. Classroom doors silently flapped open and shut.

  “?” said Cirrus. “? ?, ?!, ?!?!”

  The world returned with a whoosh and a pop, and I realized Cirrus had placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “Hello?” said Cirrus.

  “Heyyyyyyy—” I said. “—yyyyyyyyyyy—”

  “—yyyyyyy,” said two voices, joining in.

  Milo and Jamal, looking down at me like There you are. We rose from our hidden lunch spot.

  “Where’s your outfits?” said Cirrus, indicating their rudimentary choices in clothing.

  They glanced at me with their brows lowered just a millimeter, just enough to let me know they were fully committed to my charade. Thank god for Milo and Jamal.

  “We keep things basic when we’re off-duty,” said Milo, “because we’re not the front man.”

  Cirrus looked at me with fresh eyes. She mimed screaming into a mic. Then she punche
d my shoulder.

  The bell rang.

  “Front man,” she said, and left.

  “Bye,” I said slowly, as if I had just learned basic greetings.

  I smiled as Cirrus vanished into the commotion surrounding us.

  “Higher cognitive process express, now boarding,” called a woman. The vice principal. “Let’s motivate.”

  “Motivating,” I called back. We launched into a walking speed of 0.25 meters per second.

  “You look like the real thing,” said Milo.

  “I do?” I said, picking at my shirt.

  “She punched you,” said Milo.

  “I wish someone would punch me,” said Jamal.

  “I’m never washing this . . . what’s this arm muscle called?” I said.

  “You might not have that muscle yet,” said Milo.

  “Listen,” said Jamal, suddenly serious. “Have your fun and whatever, but I’m warning you right now: Don’t go crazy.”

  “It’s just a black shirt and black pants,” I said.

  “What I’m saying,” said Jamal, “is that if she gets too used to this version of you, she’ll run away when our plan completes and you go back to being the real you.”

  “Thanks?” I said.

  “We play, we pretend to argue, we break up,” said Milo.

  “And then everything goes back to normal,” said Jamal.

  “Okay,” I said.

  But it wasn’t okay. I liked how the clothes made me feel. I even liked the attention, which was a surprise.

  “First Immortals practice after school,” I said, in my best front-man pose. “Let’s rock the thing out with extreme urgency.”

  Gee

  So this is the music room,” said Jamal.

  “We never come here,” said Milo.

  It was true. We never hung out in the music room at school. The only people who came here were students focused on marching band, orchestra, or jazz. The music room was a state-of-the-art chamber, with cable lassos and a mixer board and speakers and doors that latched close like airlocks. It was serious. It had an aroma of seriousness.

  No one was here now, because classes had ended for the day.