Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)(25)

“Hey,” I say.

And with that, he gives me a hug. “I had a feeling about you, buddy. You want a beer?”

“Uh,” I say. “I’m eighteen?”

“Ah, right. How about some weed, then?” He hugs himself and laughs. “Just kidding.”

“Good to see you again, Frank,” croons a voice, and it’s Brit’s mom, also in a gray hoodie. Brit appears behind her, holding a thin sweater.

I regard the four of us, parents in matching hoodies, kids in matching novelty shirts, and want to giggle at the cuteness of it all. A moment passes through the room like a warm updraft in a night vale.

“We should get going,” says Brit.

“Don’t want to miss the previews,” I say.

“I was just going to say that,” says Brit, quietly impressed, and gives me a tilted smile.

“Before you go,” says Brit’s dad, “I wanted to give you something. Brit says you’re into found audio assemblage.”

The words found audio assemblage ping-pong around in my mind. So there’s a phrase for it. And Brit’s dad knows it. An incredible feeling pricks my skin, like when your name is called over the loudspeaker at an awards assembly and everyone looks at you.

Brit’s dad hands me a small round tin. “When Brit’s mom and I were still just courting back in Brooklyn, I had this hobby of recording subway sounds. You might dig it.”

“Whoa,” I say, accepting the tin. “Are you sure?”

“See what it inspires,” he says, and gives Brit a wink.

Brit does not eyeroll or sigh or do any of the teenagery things teenagers are supposed to do. She holds her gaze upon me, like she’s sure I’ll do something great with this small old tin. And indeed her look makes me want to do something great.



* * *



? ? ?

The best part of Old New Loves isn’t the movie itself—although it’s great, a perfect blend of rom and com, two of my favorite things in the world—but the part before the movie where Brit and I are in line waiting to get snacks. In line, among the other couples young and old, boys with girls holding their thin sweaters and men with women holding their thin sweaters, plus the occasional boy with boy or girl with girl also holding their respective thin sweaters.

I feel like I’ve joined a club. A club of couples.

“Can we get extra jalape?os for the nachos?” says Brit to the cashier.

“I was just going to say that,” I say, drunk with wonder.

We give the previews our full attention and whispered critique, because it turns out we’re both like that. We give the movie our full attention, too. By the end a single hot tear is shining down my cheek, and Brit wipes her own eyes before wiping mine.

We save our kissing for the end credits. I can taste pepper and cheese and she can too, because we both get the urge to wash our mouths out with soda before trying again.

“Much better,” I say.

A short drive away there’s a dumb little cafe over in Crescent Beach, the kind of place with oars and license plates on the walls and old music and older patrons. There’s no reason to ever go to a cafe like this, really. I mean: it’s even called Scudders.

Except now with me and Brit sitting side by side in a booth with cups of cocoa, it’s the perfect place to be.

“I love Scudders,” I say. I take out my Tascam and record a length of ambient audio—all soft clinks and murmurs and long chair scrapes sounding like whalesong—then put it away.

“It’s beautiful in its own way,” says Brit, examining a cluster of glass floats. “Not kitschy, though. I hate kitsch. Kitsch is not seeing something for what it is, but what you think it should be.”

“It’s like making fun of someone else’s taste.”

“It’s so mean,” says Brit.

I think about Mom’s chickens and Dad’s hooks. Are they kitsch? Am I mean about them?

I realize I kind of am. It makes me wonder if chickens and souvenir hooks were big in Korea in the eighties.

“It really is mean,” I say, vowing to be better from now on. There’s a glass clock on the wall filled with bubbling amber liquid and shaped like a beer mug. It must be fifty years old. “See, that’s not kitsch right there. That’s beautiful.”

“Are you okay for time, by the way?” says Brit.

“I’m good,” I say. “We have tons of time.”

“Yesss,” says Brit like a kid.

We have tons of time because I now have a special arrangement with Joy, I think. But Brit turns to face me and her hair dips into her cocoa, banishing the thought from my mind as I rush to push her mug aside.

“Your hair got in your drink,” I say.

She sticks the wet lock in my face. “Taste it,” she says.

“Gah,” I say. But I do.

“You’re crazy, Frank Li,” says Brit.

We both get serious for a moment. In this particular moment, right here. Sucking cocoa from a girl’s hair is weird. Who does this sort of thing? And who lets them? But Brit is letting me. She wants me to.

I am extremely proud to be the only person who has ever sucked Brit Means’s hair.

We order more cocoa, and then a plate of fries. We don’t look at our phones once. I know there’s at least an hour before Return to Base, which is the time Joy and I have agreed to each return home just in case we need to keep our timelines straight. Eventually the waitstaff begin upending chairs. On the drive home we both scoop the air with our hands sticking out either side of the car like wings.