Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)(12)

Thank you, Lake Girlfriend.

Physical performance is the future of electronic dance music, I believe. As good as my timing is, I am still human and therefore prone to being off by a few milliseconds here and there, which is why performed music will always have a warmth and intuition that perfectly sequencing computers can’t match. Next I want to try making electronic dance music with acoustic instruments, in a band with other people, no amplification. Call it chamber step, maybe.

I’ve got the room nodding their heads. I’ve got Ms. Nobuyuki nodding her head.

But I feel phantom buzzes in my back pocket the whole time. It takes all my effort to stay focused until the final measure of the song.

Class ends and finallyfinallyfinally it’s lunch. Just gotta check in with Q before going off on my own.

I find Q waiting for me by the elephant tree: this big melted biomass of spiny leaves and branches oozing its way out of a rectangle in the concrete. Apparently it’s not a tree, but a giant yucca evolving along its own isolated vector.

Q’s already got his miniature hero figurines—a tiny wizard, elf, and paladin—standing in delta formation on a lunch table. His dice are lined up and waiting: a four-sided pyramid, a cube, an octahedron, dodecahedron, and finally the twenty-sided icosahedron. Paul Olmo’s sitting next to Q with his graph paper, ready to start mapping dungeons and marking the locations of dragons.

“Hey,” I say. “Just wanted to let you know I gotta go meet someone, so.”

Q dims his eyes. “Oh my god.”

“What?” says Paul. Paul Olmo looks exactly like his elven archer figurine.

“We’ll pick up the campaign tomorrow,” I say. I mean the Dungeons & Dragons game. “Sorry.”

“My god,” says Q.

I just nod. Yes, Q. Yes.

Q rises and hugs me like a father sending his son off to college.

“I’ll see you guys later,” I say.

“Oh my god,” shouts Q.

“What happened?” shouts Paul.

I leave.

I walk the glossy hallways like an adventurer discovering a cave full of crystals. Past the teachers’ lounge exuding coffee and microwave food. Through a seldom-used back door leading into the seldom-seen teachers’ section of the parking lot, at the end of which stands the almost-never-visited greenhouse.

I’m halfway across the parking lot when I realize I’ve left my lunch in my locker.

Whatever.

Because behind the greenhouse, among the hoes and wheelbarrows and bags of soil, there she sits. On a large upturned pot, like a magical creature. Just smiling now at my arrival. Hair blowing in the wind like a ribbon in water.

I glance behind me. No one there. I take a sidestep and put the greenhouse between me and the rest of the world.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” says Brit Means.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

She stands. She takes a step toward me.

And we just kiss.

Everything falls silent. The birds stop singing. The wind stops. Blades of grass release their bend and straighten in the motionless air. A flap of corrugated metal pauses its squeaking as a courtesy.

I long to feel those little muscles in the small of her back—and so I do, and I can’t believe I am allowed to do this. Even more unbelievable: she feels mine, too. As if she’s been longing, too.

When we stop for air, the wind around us resumes. The grass relaxes.

“Are you sure we won’t get caught back here?” she whispers.

“If we did, I guess that would make things official.”

“Last night didn’t make things official?”

“I guess it did, huh,” I say.

“Pretty sure we’re official.”

“You said we.”

“That’s right.”

And we kiss some more. The sun, ignored, sprints around the earth and hurries back to its original position, just to see if it can sneak in a whole revolution without us noticing.

We don’t notice a thing.

I’m torn between wanting to kiss and wanting to stare at her face, so I decide to stare at her face for a minute. I can see myself actually reflected in her eyes, tiny bulbous Frank Li twins, and my gaze bounces back and forth between them. In the even tinier reflections of the eyes of those two reflected Frank Lis are in turn reflected two tiny Brit Means, and so on and so on infinity plus one.

“Whoa,” says a girl’s voice.

We freeze, as if freezing will make us somehow invisible.

Brit dares a glance to the side. “Oh, Joy.”

I turn, and there’s Joy Song standing there with a face like a lemur. She is tethered to a powerfully tracksuited Wu Tang, who gives me a chiseled smile like Nice, bro.

We should spring apart, but I’m thrilled to find that Brit doesn’t move an inch; we stand there with both hands clasped, like defiant dancers interrupted.

“Hey,” I say to Joy.

“Awkward,” sings Joy after a moment, and finally we can all laugh a little.

“Is this like your guys’ spot or something?” I say.

“It’s all good,” says Wu Tang. Everything he says he turns into a little dance move. “We got other spots. Like the roof.” He does this little pointing maneuver.

“Oh, word?” I say.