Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)(63)

I love Joy because she is smart. Because she is ambitious, and a huge nerd endlessly fascinated by the built world around her. I love Joy because we go way back to when we were kids, and that counts for more than I realize. I love Joy because she is gorgeous.

But that’s the obvious stuff. At the core, I love Joy because she makes me laugh. A girl who can make you laugh is worth laughing with forever. And you know what? I love Joy because I make her laugh, too. When I’m with her, I become totally unself-conscious. I no longer think about who I am, or where I am, or when. I am simply present with Joy. I forget about the ground, and miss.

“I chose Joy,” I say. “Fuck the tribe.”

Q nods, impressed.

“Joy is my tribe,” I say.

Q nods.

“And so are you,” I say.

It’s like Q was waiting for me to say that, and he breaks into a big shy smile. We smile together for a long moment like this. Senior year is almost halfway over. Then it’s graduation. After that, college. In the meantime, I will see Joy as much as I can. But I will not neglect Q, either.

Twin sister Evon comes in, scans my face with a sexy cyborg gaze. “Tetherball, huh.”

I shrug.

“Do you have a phone charger I could borrow?” says Evon.

“Don’t you already have like seven of my chargers?” I say.

Evon snatches a Citrus-Spin? orange charger from my bag and darts away into the magical deer forest where she dwells.

“Look how incredible this is,” Q says, turning my attention toward his huge screen. He scrolls through lists and lists of little maps, all marked with red Xs and the word FAILED.

“No one has won a game of Pax Eterna, not me and Paul Olmo, no one.”

I lean forward. “Huh?”

“So, in Pax Eterna each time you start a new game, you get this pristine tropical island with everything you could possibly need, all there and ready,” says Q. He moves his God-hand cursor to give me a rapid-fire tour. “Ore, water, fertile lands, blablabla.”

I squint at dozens of tiny black skull icons. “Are these dead bodies?”

Q strokes a pretend beard. “My god, it’s happening all over again.”

“How do you win?” I say.

“The way to win Pax Eterna is to build—and hold—a successful, stable society for a full month. There’s a twenty-thousand-dollar jackpot prize. No one’s done it yet.”

I examine data in a sidebar. “So they’ve made a game out of the biggest human challenge ever. World peace.”

“Here’s the thing,” says Q. “Anyone can join any Pax Eterna game in progress. So in me and Paul’s island here, there’s only two factions, but already they’ve started killing each other. And it’s only been a couple hours.”

“Jesus,” I say. “No one’s ever gonna win that jackpot. Just like no one’s figured out world peace.”

“It’s the mystery of the ages,” says Q, lost in the screen.

“The only winning move is not to play,” I say, quoting one of my favorite movies ever. I have no idea how this applies, but I toss it out there just to see how Q will react.

Q clutches his head as if it’s gonna burst. “Not to play,” he says. “I gotta call Paul. Thank you, Frank Li!”



* * *



? ? ?

When I get home, I give Mom the same excuse—tetherball gone wild—and beg off her insistent offers to boil up some Chinese herbal medicine (hanyak, pronounced hawn-yawk) to speed the healing. That stuff is a blood-brown suicide drink of pickle juice and coffee and silt and pure fear.

Mercifully my phone buzzes—a video call from Joy—and I make my escape.

“Hey,” I say.

“Oh my god what the fuck did Wu do I’m gonna run him over with my car three times to make sure he’s dead,” shouts Joy.

Video call. Joy can see my face. Aha.

“Don’t,” I say over the screaming. “Don’t run Wu over.”

“I’m gonna re-kill him,” says Joy, “after I kill him.”

“Just—just—” I say, and an idea comes to me. “Just come over.”

This stops Joy.

I see her face change. She gets it.

Just come over.

Because now she can finally go to the house of her official, certified boyfriend as an official, certified girlfriend.

And when she does come over, my god, when Joy Song does indeed show up at my doorstep in her sweatpants and her too-big Carnegie Mellon University sweatshirt and her hair done up in a spiky, sloppy bun, my heart beats two beats faster.

She bows to Mom and says annyong haseyo in her shitty Korean.

She holds my head. She kisses my eye. In front of Mom and everything.

“Ow,” I say, but with wonder, like a boy who’s just hit his head on the ornate ceiling of heaven.

“Aigu,” says Mom at the sight of the kiss. “Make germs.”

But Mom’s smiling, too.

And then—and then—we go upstairs. To my room.

Alone.

Just like they do in the movies.

“I cutting melon,” says Mom, and vanishes. I cutting melon means I’ll give you a few minutes alone together, but because I’m your mother and this is my damn house, I will bring you a snack as a pretense to make sure you’re not up there having sex.