The Way You Make Me Feel(3)

And if there was one thing that bonded the three of us, it was the ease of our friendship. There was never any drama or conflict. We existed in a carefully balanced ecosystem of chill—while making sure we kept things interesting, always.

And normally something like running for prom queen would be considered too much work. I looked at Patrick and Felix, who had gotten me into this mess. “You know, this backfired on you guys. I was going to drop out, but then freaking Rose Carver confronted me after the assembly,” I said, swinging myself up on the counter by the coffee machine.

“Clara!”

I blew Warren a kiss. “Just keepin’ it warm.” He harrumphed but continued to organize cigarettes.

Patrick frowned. “What did Overlord Carver have to say?”

“I should drop out since I don’t really care about winning.”

Felix plopped down next to Cynthia and tossed an arm across her shoulders. “Who does?”

Cynthia snorted as she snuggled into Felix. “Dorks.”

Felix and Patrick laughed, and I let out a brief guffaw. Something about Cynthia’s jokes never flew with me, but I knew if I didn’t laugh I’d hear it from Felix later. He was always asking me to be nicer to her, as if we should naturally be friends by our gender alone. Or by the fact that we’ve both had his tongue down our throats.

“So, are we gonna do this? Really?” Felix asked.

I nodded. “Yup, good job, bozos. We’re in this now.”

“All right. I guess we’ve gotta up our campaign game,” Patrick said, tossing the foil hot dog wrapper into the trash. “Signs, slogan, the whole eight yards.”

My eyelid twitched. “Nine yards.”

He shrugged. Precision was not Patrick’s strong suit. He was funny, though—quick to abuse his slim body to make us laugh, and a pitch-perfect impersonator who once made me pee my pants during a school play by imitating the lead’s nasal voice, which had vibrated with phlegm on every vowel. I was never bored with Patrick.

I leaned back against the wall. “Can I just be the pretty face of the campaign?”

“Consider us your campaign managers,” Felix said, feeding Cynthia some Sour Patch Kids. Ugh. While Patrick and Felix brainstormed ways to win me the junior prom crown, I flipped through a celebrity tabloid magazine, making Warren rate all the outfits.

*

The smell of frying fish hit me the second I stepped into my apartment. Although I had eaten an entire bag of Doritos (topped off with Red Vines) mere minutes ago, my stomach grumbled with hunger.

Nineties hip-hop was blasting, and my dad was in the kitchen, fanning the smoke detector with a dish towel. Our cat, Flo, hid under the sofa, her striped tail poofed like a raccoon’s and sticking out in plain view.

“Pai, it smells like all the grease in the world came here to die,” I said, flinging some windows open to air the apartment out.

“You’re such a poet, Shorty,” he said as he tucked the towel into his back pocket and checked the pans on the stove before facing me to ruffle my hair—long, unruly, and growing out of its lavender dye job on the bottom.

“What’s for dinner?” I asked. I peered over his shoulder.

“Fried catfish. I found a cool recipe that uses a batter inspired by KFC’s secret recipe,” he said, adjusting the splatter guard on one of the pans.

I swiped a bottle of some fancy root beer on the counter and took a sip. “Uh, like Kentucky Fried Chicken KFC?”

“No, the other one, Kentucky Fried Corn.”

Root beer bubbled into my nose as I laughed. My dad hit my back, hard, when I started to choke.

My dad, Adrian, was always experimenting with recipes. As the owner and chef of a food truck, that was pretty much his job. Since before I was born, he’d always worked at various restaurants, starting off as a busboy when he first immigrated here from Brazil (“Adrian” was the Americanized “Adriano”). My clearest childhood memories were the nights when, after his late shift, my dad would pick me up from my babysitter’s and carry me home on his shoulders as I dozed off. Finally, two years ago, he had saved up enough money to open his own food truck, the KoBra—a literal and metaphorical merging of Korea and Brazil. My grandparents had made the trek from Seoul to S?o Paulo, a city with an established Korean immigrant population, where my dad was born. Months before I was born, my parents packed up for LA.

The food was symbolic of my dad’s upbringing. People were always confused by my dad’s Korean face and Portuguese-accented English. It helped with the ladies, though, which was gross.

While it hadn’t been a wild overnight success, the KoBra had a pretty loyal following. My dad’s dream, though, was to open a restaurant. He was hoping the KoBra could springboard that.

I pulled myself up onto the counter and swung my legs back and forth as I watched him cook. “Guess what?”

“What?” He drizzled some olive oil on a neat row of green beans laid in a cast-iron pan.

“I got nominated for junior prom queen.”

He looked at me quizzically, a half smile on his face. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah, Patrick and Felix nominated me, and somehow I’m on the prom court. Which means people get to vote on whether or not I become prom queen.”

My dad cackled as he opened the oven and slid the pan of beans onto a rack. “You? Prom queen? I would pay good money to see that.”