Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)(31)

“What’s a Gathering?” says Brit with genuine curiosity.

A warm feeling comes over me. My forehead, which I’ve been holding tense this whole time, goes slack. Because I realize that for Brit, I am the book she just started reading, too.

“So,” I say, “my parents and their friends promised to keep in touch when they came to America, and every month we have these get-togethers. We’ve had them ever since I was a baby. Before, too.”

“That sounds incredible.”

“It kinda is,” I say, because Brit is right. It is incredible. Suddenly that game of yut nori downstairs clicks into place in the cosmic timeline: it’s not just a board game, but an ongoing celebration of sorts that says, We came all the way here. Look at us now. Look what we brought with us.

The roomful of Limbos suddenly becomes the most precious of life’s achievements: children who will never want for anything, who speak native English, who will go to the best schools in the world and never have to run an office furniture rental service (like Joy’s parents), a dry cleaner (Ella’s), a beauty supply (Andrew’s), a tourist gift shop (John’s), or a grocery store (mine).

These amazing children, the living proof of so much hard work and sacrifice in an alien land, now come blundering like idiot clowns out of Andrew’s room and spot me standing there with my phone cupped in my hands like a boy clearly talking to his girl.

“Who you talking to?” says Andrew. “Is that Brit?”

“Behold,” says John, as if witnessing a mystery revealed. “Frank Li in love.”

Ella rushes up to me, reads my phone screen, and turns her face to meet the mic. “Hi, Brit.”

“Hi, Brit,” say Andrew and Ella and John.

“Buzz, buzz, leave him alone,” says Joy. But then she, too, hoots cross-eyed into the mic. “Brit means it, mothafucka.”

Andrew’s mom screeches from downstairs: “Dinner ready!”

The Limbos go tumbling down, making faces at me the whole way. Joy gives me a stage wink before turning, hitting her elbow on a doorknob, and muttering, “Fuck.” I guess she had that beer all right.

“Who was that?” says Brit, laughing.

“Friends,” I say. “All us kids of the parents. They get buzzed off of one beer.”

“They sound so crazy. I wish I could see.”

“Eh, it’s boring,” I say. “I mean not boring, but not like fun-fun.”

“It’s family stuff.”

“Yeah.”

“I get it,” says Brit. “Still, I would love to see it. I would love to see you out of your usual context.”

Her words love and see you gently topple me so that I must lean on the wall.

“Like it would be so endearing to see what Frankly is like around his mom and dad and sister. How does he move? How does he talk?”

The mention of Hanna makes my heart clench.

I know I can’t both date Brit and prevent her from meeting my parents. Meeting family is not only inevitable, it’s normal: normal people date, things get serious, and then they start meeting the people most important to them. It’s just what happens. I’ve already met Brit’s parents, twice, and I liked it. I liked seeing her with them. I get what she’s saying about different contexts.

The idea of keeping worlds separate—the world of Frank-n-Brit and the world of Mom-n-Dad—sounds about as impossible as, oh, I don’t know, keeping the worlds of Korea and America apart here in Playa Mesa.

You can’t keep them separate for long.

I can hear what Brit is going to say next before she even says it.

“Maybe I could come over to your context this weekend?” she says. “See Frank Li in his natural habitat?”

“Oh yeah, totally, that would be sweet, sure,” I say, which translates to Think, dammit, think. My toes start to float off the ground. No way I could’ve said no to her. That would’ve been tremendously weird. But how do I deal with an actual visit?

“That would be amazing,” says Brit. “Sorry.”

“Why sorry?”

“I made a promise to myself to stop saying amazing so much. It’s a dead word.”

“That’s an amazing goal,” I say, to buy my brain more time to scramble up a plan.

“Stupid,” she says, with a smile in her voice.

Finally an idea hits me: safety in numbers.

“I could get my mom to cook up some Korean barbecue,” I say. “We could invite a bunch of Apeys and have a gathering of our own.”

“Oh,” says Brit.

I wince, because I know what she’d been picturing, and I know a big loud barbecue party was not it. I know she had an image of an intimate dinner with Mom-n-Dad, like how white kids do it in the movies. She wanted to be introduced.

There’s a pause, and I can feel Brit let that image dissolve away.

She brightens. “Yeah, that sounds amazing. Not amazing, um.”

“How about illuminating?” I say.

She can say amazing in every sentence for all I care. I exhale with relief. This way, in this party-type situation, Brit gets to meet Mom-n-Dad—like normal couples do—and I get to keep my ruse with Joy intact. I can kill two birds with one stone, to use an unnecessarily violent expression.

“Illuminating,” she says, and I can hear her smile again.