Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)(38)

“Go do you,” I call through the window, quoting Joy back to her.

“You too,” she says, strutting backward.

Then I drive over to Brit’s. I climb the steps to her house and knock on her red door and she appears immediately, as if she’d been waiting just on the other side.

We stand there for a moment, just admiring each other. Her tee shirt reads WHAT HAS FOUR LETTERS, which takes me a second to get. Brit immediately kisses me. She hangs on to my neck. And when Brit’s dad appears, she doesn’t let go. Again, I’m amazed at how comfortable her family is with open affection.

“Hey, Frankie,” says Brit’s dad, dressed in a gray tracksuit, cradling a beaker of tea.

“Hey, Mr. Means.”

“I read in the paper about this ice-cream exhibit thing. They’re calling it art for the Snapstory generation.”

Snapstory is an app where you can share photos. Everyone uses it, everyone loves it, everyone hates it. It’s basically this horrible corporate surveillance machine that cranks out nonstop soul-crushing envy as a side bonus.

“Eh, I’m taking a break from Snapstory these days,” I say. It’s true. I feel so much happier not having to obsess over getting or giving likes.

“Really?” says Mr. Means. “I was just thinking I should get up to speed on Snapstory.”

“It’s a super-self-conscious, super-judgy place. You can’t just be yourself.”

“So everyone there is faking it.” He sips his beaker.

I nod with a knowing eyebrow: Pathetic, right?

I shake Brit’s dad’s hand and dance away with his daughter down the steps, and when we get into the QL5 to drive away, Brit puts her hand atop mine atop the drive shifter knob and we sit in silence like a young king and queen sharing a scepter.

The pop-up museum is in what once was Playa Mesa’s old factory district. There’s a bunch of hipster restaurants and bars in converted warehouses; people my age go there to pretend we’re adults already. Hanna used to take me here before.

Before she got disowned.

I park and snap a pic of the outside of the museum: it looks like a corrugated hangar that’s been attacked by giant multicolored scoops of ice cream. But I don’t Snapstory it—I text it to Hanna.

Guess where I am.

Look at you, hipster, writes Hanna in a rare quick response. I wonder where she is. Is she at home, curled up next to Miles? On the train going home from work?

I miss you, I want to write. Also, I’m dating Brit by fakedating Joy. But me and Hanna don’t really talk like that. Instead we use the world as our backboard, like squash players.

I’m growing a beard and a man bun after this just to piss you off, I say. This means I wish you were here.

You do and I’ll come back and cut that shit off myself, says Hanna. This means I miss you too, little brother.

And when I say I dare you, I really mean: I wish you could come home and everything could be simple like it used to be.

I wait and wait for a response, then give up. When Hanna goes silent, it could be ten minutes or ten days before she writes again.

“Who’s that?” says Brit.

“Hanna.”

Brit knows I have a sister Hanna. She knows I love her. She knows she’s cool. Brit knows because I’ve told her so. But she doesn’t know about the Miles situation.

“Tell her I say hi,” says Brit.

“I will,” I say, but I don’t.

Inside the museum we find ourselves surrounded by a forest of towering sugar cones and Popsicles the size of felled trees.

Brit cranes her neck in amazement. “Guh, I feel like Brit and the Brownie Factory.”

“I feel like Frank and the Frozen Yogurt Factory.”

There’s a swing made of licorice; there’s a climbable wall of gumdrops the size of watermelons. In the distance, I can see people swimming in a pool full of rainbow-colored jimmy sprinkles. Everyone is doing the Snapstory dance: swing the phone up, pose for the photo, then chimp around the screen hunting for the perfect emoji, stickers, and filters to post with.

“This place is manipulating my brain at the ganglion cellular level,” says Brit. “Must. Take out. Phone.”

“Stay strong, dammit,” I say, shaking her shoulders. They’re awesome shoulders.

“Must. Snapstory.”

She takes her phone out of her back pocket, raises it, and tucks her face close in beside mine.

“Come on, one selfie,” she says, laughing. “Let’s brag about us. Let’s make everyone feel like shit compared with us.”

For a full second, panic racks my body like a fever. I imagine our selfie going up, then one of the Limbos seeing it, then one of their parents perhaps catching a glimpse over their shoulder, then phone calls to Joy’s mom and my mom, and then the slow rumble of suspicion and its impending questions looming dark in the sky.

But no way in Pastafarian hell can I deny Brit a selfie. To do so would be incredibly awkward. Like ruin-the-night awkward.

So we take the selfie. At the last second, Brit kisses my cheek. The kiss is captured. She tags it, stickers it, face-filters it, the whole nine, until it becomes a perfect mess of a social media garbage plate. Then she hits Share. It’s undeniably a boyfriend-girlfriend selfie. There is nothing at all friend-friend or study-buddy about it. She writes a caption: