Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)(66)

I buy drinks from the alarmingly hip and beautiful male barista. Tea for me and Q, coffee for Joy. Coffee is disgusting, no matter how much milk and sugar you cut it with. Before I can even sit, Joy grabs my hand and forces me to fingerprint in to my laptop.

“Ready?” says Q. “Click on the count of three.”

“One,” I say.

“Fifteen sixty,” cries Joy. “Oh my god I got fifteen sixty.”

I rush to kiss her, then see my screen has updated, too. “Fifteen forty,” I yell.

We both look at Q, who has become an amazed zombie. I turn his laptop.

“Sixteen,” I say. “You got sixteen, old bean.”

I stand. “People of the college! This fine fellow right here just achieved a perfect score on the SAT!”

The students applaud—pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man—then put their headphones back on and resume their work.

“I did it,” says Q, very quietly.

“We did it,” I say, and high-five both Joy and Q. Q high-fives me and Joy, and Joy high-fives Q and me, and after a while we have to use both hands to keep up.

“We can go anywhere,” says Q, still staring at his screen.

“I bet I could even get into Stanford,” I wonder aloud. I look at Q. “We could go to the same school.”

“Pittsburgh, I’m coming at ya,” says Joy.

This stops me. Joy and I, Frankenjoy, are finite.

“Does CMU have a computer music program?” I say. I place my hand atop hers.

“Frank,” says Joy. She places a hand atop mine atop hers.

“I’m just wondering,” I say, and complete the double-decker hand sandwich.

“You need to go where you need to go,” says Joy. “We all do.”

“It’s just kinda dawning on me,” I say. “I’m having a hard time imagining it.”

“Everything looks different already,” says Q. “Goodbye, cup. Farewell, napkins.”

“Until it’s time to go, we have each other,” says Joy. She fondles my earlobe.

The barista appears at our table and sets a slice of pound cake in front of Q. “On the house, Mr. Perfect Score,” he says, and leaves with a flip of his long black bangs.

My phone buzzes with a calendar alert. “Oh, hey, it’s free museum night up in LA. This exhibit called The Edible Wunderkammer: Snack Food Curiosities from Thirty Countries. Let’s go.”

Joy slams her laptop shut and bolts up. “We leave now, we can beat the traffic.”

I get up too, but Q remains. “You guys go ahead,” he says.

“You’re not coming?” I say.

“Go and have a date, you know?” says Q. “Have the best date you possibly can.”

I hug his head. “What are you gonna do?”

“Eat my free cake,” says Q. “But first I might just want to sit with it for a while.”

“Just sit,” I say, nodding.

“I did it, Frank,” says Q. “I did it.”



* * *



? ? ?

We get in the car. The messages are rolling in. Paul Olmo scored 1480. Amelie Shim got the exact same. Naima Gupta scored a decent 1390, but there’s one final round, and I’m sure she’ll break 1400 like she wanted to. As for the Limbos, John Lim, Ella Chang, and Andrew Kim all scored in the high fourteens or low fifteens. Excellent all around. The world feels like it’s accelerating on its axis.

I hear Brit Means scored 1540, same as me. Should I text her congratulations? I want to. But I probably shouldn’t. I probably have no right.

Whatever. 1540, same as me, major congrats! I say.

After a long pause, Brit replies. Congrats to you too, amazing I want to point out that she used amazing, but don’t.

I guide the lugubrious Consta on to the freeway, where it propels us northward. Joy takes care of the parental management protocols on both our phones while I drive: Headed to LA and Might be home late and blablabla. Mom-n-Dad write back, Have a fun. Joy’s more fluent, better-educated parents write Have a great time.

It’s funny. To the parents, nothing has changed. My drama with Brit and Joy’s drama with Wu have been invisible to them. To the parents, Joy and I started dating one night at a Gathering and have been together without a hitch ever since. We swapped the gems out, then swapped them right back. And no one was the wiser.

“Can I just say again how nice it is not having to fake-date anymore?” I say.

Joy leans over to kiss my cheek, my ear, my neck, and it is hands-down-at-ten-and-two the most erotic thing that has ever happened to me in the Consta or anywhere else.

We reach downtown Los Angeles in record time. But there’s a road closure, then another, then another. When Joy checks the map, it’s full of angry red lines.

“Crap,” she says. “There’s some kind of festival going on. It says another hour just to get around it.”

I refuse to let this bring me down—I’m in too good a mood. “Let’s roll with it, then,” I say. “To the festival?”

“To the festival,” says Joy, like Why not?

We get out of the car, skip like idiots on the sidewalk for a quarter mile, and reach the packed festival entrance thumping with music.