Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)(81)

“What?”

“. . .”

“Oh no,” says Joy again and again. “Oh no, oh no.”

She asks what kind it is, when he found out, all that. I tell her. She says she gets it now—she gets why Dad would freak out at the party like he did. Anyone under that kind of stress would be ready to snap. She understands this quickly, because she is Joy.

“I have to tell Mom-n-Dad,” says Joy.

“Don’t do that,” I say.

“But then they’d understand why your dad got so mad.”

“My mom doesn’t want anyone to know. She says it’ll cause all kinds of stress.”

“But—if I had cancer, the first thing I’d do is tell my close friends.”

“She’s afraid of burdening people with heavy news,” I say. “She says she wants to wait till Dad gets better to tell everyone.”

Joy’s face unfolds. “But yubs . . .”

“I know.”

“Your dad isn’t gonna get better.”

“I know,” I cry, and bury my face in her neck.

“Shh,” is all Joy will say, because what else is there to say? She holds my head and rocks it for a long time. For a long moment I feel like I’ll fall asleep. Joy says “Shh” and “Shh,” again and again, and I never want her to stop.

Joy takes a breath as she realizes something. “I guess we should lie low for a while, huh.”

Joy is right. Because imagine Dad coming home to find his ex–best friend’s daughter here. He wouldn’t yell, or kick Joy out, or accuse me of betrayal. Nothing as dramatic as that.

Instead, he would just get really sad. And cancer feasts upon sad. Cancer is uniquely evil in that way.

“Yeah, we should,” I say.

“Just when we were done with the fake dating,” says Joy.

“Hi, irony,” I say.

“Should we fire up the shared calendar again?”

“Nah,” I say. “We’re pros by now.”

Joy gives me a weak laugh. Then her face falls. It’s a sad, miserable little joke.

“We’ll just take it as it comes,” I say. “We still have the rest of the year.”

“The rest of the year,” says Joy.

A whisper in my head says, I just want to walk away from it all. I don’t exactly know what this means. But I don’t dare say it out loud. Not while Joy and I lie here under this warm felled sunbeam. I just want to walk away from it all makes it sound like Joy is part of the problem. I just want to walk away from it all makes it sound like I want to break up with her, which I do not.

But it would make things simpler, though, wouldn’t it, says the whisper.

Sure, I say back. Just like living alone in a desert bunker would make things simpler.

Joy is part of the problem just like I’m part of the problem just like Mom-n-Dad are part of the problem and so on. We’re all part of it whether we want to be or not. Everyone is part of the problem, and everyone is part of the solution, and that’s what makes everything so infuriating.

I think all I really want to say is I wish things were simpler. But I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot lately. It hurts a little more each time.

Summer will come and go. Dad will most likely pass on. In Korean, to pass on is doragada, which means to go back.

Oh my god, back to where?

Joy leaves.

Then Mom comes home, with only a ten-minute gap in between and Mom none the wiser. We excel at running down low, me and Joy.

Hi, irony.

Usually Mom fusses over me when she gets home: you eating something, you go playing Q’s house, you study for SAT, and so on. But she just sits at the empty dining table, which we never use, and listens to the distant freeway traffic go shh, shh.

“Store so hot today,” says Mom.

“Did Dad turn on the AC?”

“He don’t!” cries Mom. “He so stingy.”

The urge to say, What the fuck’s he waiting for? rages, then ebbs.

“Aigu, so tired today,” says Mom. She goes to the living room couch and rests her body there.

Mom takes a deep breath, holds it, and sighs one big sigh. She flops her wrist across her eyes. “Mommy so tired,” she says.

I watch her begin to slip out of consciousness.

“So hot,” mumbles Mom, even though it’s not. “Frankie-ya, you open window?”

I open up the house to let the breeze in. “That better?” I say.

But Mom doesn’t answer, because she’s already still.

The white curtains from the open windows billow back and forth without a sound. Back and forth, moved by the breathing of the warm sun-swept wind.





chapter 29


thins & fats



The High School Era is slowly disintegrating into a preapocalyptic orgy of wanton dereliction. People ditch school to have lunch off-campus. The bell rings, but people ignore it to continue lying on the grass or whatever. There’s a mandatory assembly for some presentation by the Associated Student Body to show off all their accomplishments; hardly anyone shows up. Even the school president herself is absent. Five minutes in, a flock of corn tortillas go flying onto the stage from somewhere in the audience, and the vice principal literally throws his hands up and walks away.