Frankly in Love - David Yoon

before we begin

Well, I have two names.

That’s what I say when people ask me what my middle name is. I say:

Well, I have two names.

My first name is Frank Li. Mom-n-Dad gave me that name mostly with the character count in mind.

No, really: F+R+A+N+K+L+I contains seven characters, and seven is a lucky number in America.

Frank is my American name, meaning it’s my name-name.

My second name is Sung-Min Li, and it’s my Korean name, and it follows similar numerological cosmology:

S+U+N+G+M+I+N+L+I contains nine characters, and nine is a lucky number in Korea. Nobody calls me Sung-Min, not even Mom-n-Dad. They just call me Frank.

So I don’t have a middle name. Instead, I have two names.

Anyway: I guess having both lucky numbers seven and nine is supposed to make me some kind of bridge between cultures or some shit.

America, this is Korea, Korea, this is America.

Everyone good? Can I go do my thing now?

Good.

the fall season

of the senior year

of the high school period

of early human life

chapter 1

lake girlfriend

Senior year is begun.

Is begun sounds cooler than the more normal has begun, because if you say it right, you sound like a lone surviving knight delivering dire news to a weary king on the brink of defeat, his limp hand raking his face with dread. The final breach is begun, your grace. The downfall of House Li is begun.

I’m the king in that scenario, by the way, raking my face with dread.

For senior year is begun.

Sometimes I look way back to six months ago, during the halcyon days of junior year. How we pranced in the meadows after taking the PSAT: a practice run of the SAT, which in Playa Mesa, in California, in the United States of America, is widely used to gauge whether an early human is fit for entrance into an institution of higher learning.

But the PSAT?

A mere trial, we juniors sang. What counts not for shit, your grace!

How we lazed in the sunlight, sharing jokes about that one reading comprehension passage about the experiment testing whether dogs found it easier to tip a bin (easier) for food or pull a rope (trickier). Based on the passage and results in Figure 4, were the dogs

A) more likely to solve the rope task than the bin task?

B) more frustrated by the rope task than the bin task?

C) more likely to resent their human caregivers for being presented with such absurd tasks to begin with, I mean, just give us the food in a damn dog bowl like normal people?

Or

D) more likely to rake a paw over their face with dread?

The answer was D.

For come Score Day, I discovered I got a total of 1400 points out of a possible 1520, the 96th percentile. This earned me plenty of robust, spontaneous high fives from my friends, but to me they sounded like palms—ptt ptt ptt—slapping the sealed door of a crypt.

The target was 1500.

When I told Mom-n-Dad, they stared at me with pity and disbelief, like I was a little dead sparrow in the park. And Mom actually said this, for real:

Don’t worry, we still love you.

Mom has said the words I love you exactly two times in my life. Once for the 1400, and another time when she called after her mother’s funeral in Korea when I was ten. Hanna and I didn’t go. Dad was at The Store; he didn’t go either.

In retrospect, it’s weird we didn’t all go.

Secretly, in retrospect: I’m glad I didn’t go. I met my grandma only once, when I was six. She spoke no English, me no Korean.

So in retro-retrospect, maybe it’s not so weird that we didn’t all go.

Dad has said the words I love you exactly zero times in my life.

Let’s go back to that PSAT score.

As a leading indicator, a bellwether, augury, harbinger, and many other words from the now-useless PSAT vocabulary study guide, a score of 1500 would mean I would probably kick the real SAT’s ass high enough to gain the attention of The Harvard, which is the Number One Top School in Whole of United States, according to Mom-n-Dad.

A 1400 means I’ll probably only ess-ay-tee just high enough to get into the University of California at Berkeley, which in Mom-n-Dad’s mind is a sad consolation prize compared with The Harvard. And sometimes, just for a nanosecond, their brainlock actually has me thinking:

Berkeley sucks.

My big sister, Hanna, coined the term brainlock, which is like a headlock but for your mind. Hanna lives in Boston near the other Berkeley, the Berklee College of Music.

Berklee