Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)(5)

I call us the Limbos.

Every month I dread going to these awkward reunions with the Limbos, to wait out time in between worlds. But every month I’m also reminded that most of the Limbos are actually pretty cool.

Like John Lim (character count: seven), who made his own game that’s selling pretty well on the app store.

Or Ella Chang (nine), who shreds at the cello.

Or Andrew Kim (nine), who cowrote a pretty popular book with his YouTube partner.

I used to think the character count in our names was a weird Korean thing.

But it wasn’t a weird Korean thing. It was just weird.

I think the type of person who is willing to live in a totally different country is also willing to make up their own weird traditions. Weird makes weird.

Weird also makes for incredibly lucky lives for us kids, and for that I’m always grateful. For real.

At tonight’s Gathering the Limbos are holed up in Andrew’s room, playing a multiplayer brawler game.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” they say.

There’s John Lim steering his controller in the air, as if that will help anything. There’s Andrew Kim, hissing with effort. There’s Ella Chang, calmly kicking everyone’s ass from behind her horn rims.

“Wanna play?” drawls Ella.

“In a sec.”

One of the Limbos is missing. I wander around the house until I find her: Joy Song, sitting alone among big Lego bricks in the pastel room of Andrew Kim’s little sister.

Joy Song (character count: seven), second name Yu-Jin Song (nine).

When we were five, six, seven, Joy and I used to sneak the crispy bits off the barbecue table before it was time to eat. We used to stand on our chairs, hold noodles as high as we could, and lower them into each other’s open mouths below. We used to put blades of grass down each other’s pants, until one day I caught a glimpse of her front and understood that it was now time to be afraid of girls. I’ve been afraid ever since.

Now Joy Song sits in the corner smelling her upper lip. She glances up at me—oh, it’s just Frank—and keeps her upper lip curled. It adds an edge of defiance to a face otherwise made up of simple ovalettes. She returns to what she was doing: arranging the Lego bricks in a line.

She’s also listening to music through her tiny phone speakers. It sounds like bugs shouting.

“Isn’t that just the best way to listen to music?” I say. “Really respects the artistic intent of the musicians.”

“Hi, Frank,” says Joy, joylessly.

“How you been?”

“Oh, not much,” she says, answering some other question in her head.

I sit at the pile of Lego and feel like I’m ten. “You wanna build something?”

“It’s just that the solid ones are ABS plastic, and the clear pieces are polycarbonate.”

“Oh-kay.” I notice that Joy has changed her hair. On the outside it’s the usual ink-brown shell, but the inside layer has been dyed a lime green that’s visible only in flashes.

She runs her hand through her hair—green flash—and stops, holding her head sideways. Lost in thought. “You can’t 3D-print ABS or polycarbonate. At least I can’t. I don’t have the requisite tech.”

She releases her hair, and the green layer becomes hidden again.

Me and Joy both go to Palomino High. Our classes never intersect. No one outside the Limbos knows we’re Gathering friends. When we pass in the hallways, we just kind of look at each other and move along.

Now that I think about it, why don’t we Limbos hang out outside Gatherings?

“Let’s make a tower,” she says.

We fall into an old habit: building a four-by-four tower with the colors ascending in spectral ROYGBIV order. Chk, chk, brick by brick. We do this for a long time, in silence.

The noise of the party phase-shifts, and I look up to see my mom peering in from the doorway. She doesn’t have to say anything. All she has to do is look at me, then at Joy, and smile this corny tilted smile.

After Mom vanishes, Joy rolls her eyes hard and groans to the heavens.

“Joy, will you marry me so that House Li and House Song may finally be joined as one?” I say.

“Shut the fuck up,” she says, and throws a Lego at me.

She’s got a bizarre laugh, kind of like a herd of squirrels.

“God, I’m so screwed,” she says finally.

“What’s going on?”

“Wu—you know Wu.”

Of course I know Wu. Wu is Chinese-American, third gen. Wu is six two, 190 pounds of fighting muscle; a hawk-eyed warrior prince somehow lost in the American high school wilderness. A single glance from him frequently makes girls walk face-first into their lockers.

Wu is 99 percent likely to go to the University of Southern California, which is in Los Angeles. His dad went to USC. His mom went to USC. They have USC license-plate frames on their cars. They still go to the football games.

I once saw Wu and Joy making out between a pair of columns, and the sight of her ovalette jaw moving with his angular one produced that paralyzing mixture of revulsion and fascination you get when you’re seeing something you know must surely exist but never thought you’d see with your own eyes.

Q thinks Joy is gorgeous. As a non-Gathering friend, Q is allowed to think that.