Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)(73)

I even want to ask:


Can you tell I lost my virginity last night, and does it make you feel awkward?





I teeter on the edge of asking these questions but never do, because I know I won’t get any real answers anyway. Makes for a terrific thirty-minute drive.

We get to the Songs’ house. I step out into the air made briny and sweet by the nearby ocean and six plumeria trees, each individually underlit. Who has the time and money to install a special light for each tree like that?

Rich people.

I reflexively look at Dad, who’s busy snapping a loose thread from the front edge of his passenger seat. So that one’s tearing, too. Again I wonder if Dad is happy. I wonder if he’s envious of how Joy’s dad managed to race so much farther ahead of him despite starting from the same line. I wonder if he’s envious, having saved for so long to buy his prized QL5 only to watch his junior mentee go on to buy a QL6, and then a pair of QL7s.

I hope not. I hope he had a fixed finish line that he one day crossed and stopped running because that’s just his kind of happiness.

Here’s what I imagine rich people like Joy’s dad to be like: forever chasing a finish line that’s actually the horizon, never to be reached. Is that a kind of happiness too?

Joy’s dad’s face appears on a security screen before we can even touch the doorbell.

“Ri-sunbae osyeotseumnida!” he cries. Mentor Li is here!

Inside smells all warm and garlicky and sagey. I mumble my annyong haseyo and bow, give Mom a hug—she’s already here, having called a Ryde on her fartphone for the first time ever, very exciting—and climb the stairs to Joy’s room, where the Limbos are.

“Hey, guys,” I say.

“Hey, Frank,” say the Limbos. I notice John Lim and Ella Chang are sitting next to each other, but not touching. That’s some discipline, right there.

Andrew Kim’s on his back gazing up at his phone, using it for what he calls mirror training, which is where actors study and perfect their own facial expressions.

Joy appears all in black. When she takes my hand, I can see our blacks match: cool on cool. “There you are,” she says. “Can you help me with something real quick?”

“Huh?”

“In this room.”

She leads me quickly to the vast shimmering darkness of her parents’ master bedroom and spins around to give me the longest kiss in the history of people ever.

“I missed you,” she breathes.

“Me too,” I breathe back.

“Expect regular breaks like this all night.”

“Roger that.”

“Ooo,” say two small voices.

Me and Joy shoot our gaze to a corner of the dark room, where little people crouch by a potted plant.

“Ben, you guys go somewhere else,” barks Joy.

Ben, Joy’s little brother, darts giggling out of the room. He’s followed by Anna Kim, Andrew Kim’s little sister.

We roll our eyes in sync, get back into character, and reenter the Limbo room.

“You just flip the circuit breaker if it trips,” I say. “Just turn stuff off first.”

“Good to know,” says Joy. “Thanks.”

The three Limbos look at us, unimpressed with our charade. No one has ever been interested in circuit breakers, ever.

“Why bother pretending?” says Ella. “Just tell us you’re going on a make-out break.”

“Make-out break,” says John Lim, in a way that sounds like Good idea, Ella.

“Everybody!” shouts a voice from below. “Dinner!”

We turn to head down. John Lim and Ella Chang dawdle.

I look at Joy: Aw, let them dawdle.

Dinner is Joy’s mom-n-dad’s version of gastropub food: craft beers, whiskeys, hearty roasted chicken and beef sliders and sweet potato fries and so on. It’s great. They even give us kids those little flights of beer, where you get four tiny glasses of different beers—ales, IPAs, lagers, I have no idea—on a slat of wood with the words BAR SONG burned into it. Pretty extravagant.

The grown-ups sit at the grown-ups’ table. The big kids sit at the big kids’ table. The two little kids—Ben Song and Anna Kim—bury themselves on a far couch with a tablet and play Karate Fruit Chop.

I take a sip of something called a Scotch ale, immediately start to feel shit-faced drunk, and push it away. Andrew Kim pounds his like it’s an energy drink.

“My old friends,” says Andrew Kim. “The sky changes, and will ever change again, and still again.”

“Huh?” I say. The guy is talking like fake Shakespeare. Fakespeare.

John Lim sips his tiny beer. “I think he’s trying to be philosophical.”

Andrew nods slowly, like he’s at church.

“Anyway, I think what Andrew wants to talk about is the winds of change, as in graduation, and then summer,” says Ella. “And whatever happens to us after.”

“I mean, I guess we find out where we got in soon enough,” says Joy. “School’s basically over. Only thing left to do is have fun in the meantime, right?”

“That’s the only thing to do,” says Ella. “We have to just be open to whatever may happen in college, so that we can grow as individual people.”

Joy glances at me, I glance back, and we squeeze hands under the table. There will come a day—super, super soon—when I will give Joy one last dip before she twirls away to the other side of the country.