Super Fake Love Song - David Yoon Page 0,12

kind of way.

“To metal,” I whispered, and entered the school.

As I walked, I felt like an astronaut approaching a steaming gantry. Eyes flicked toward me, followed, and flicked at each other in astonishment.

To metal.

I kept my eyes up, chin high, and walked. I felt a confidence buoy my limbs. Could the clothes be unlocking that feeling? Had they for Gray? They were just clothes. But still.

All around, people were giving me the Look.

I giggled to myself. Was it that easy?

* * *

—

“There’s the—” I said.

“—cafeteria,” said Cirrus.

We left the concrete outdoor amphitheater, keeping to the right to avoid swimming upstream in the fast-moving current of students: introspective art girl, loud jock, et cetera.

“Over there is where they—” I said.

“—admin and nurse’s office,” said Cirrus.

“I’ll just watch you guide yourself around campus,” I said. I shifted my books and stuff to my other arm. I had left my Pets.com backpack in my locker. I made a mental sticky to check if there were any of Gray’s old backpacks in his closet.

Cirrus, in contrast, carried nothing. No bag, no lunch, not even a class schedule. Just her in a neat black dress and sunglasses, looking like she’d ditched a wake.

It occurred to me that between her black dress and my black outfit, we matched nicely.

She eyed me with her big lenses. “I like your shirt.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I like your shirt, too. Your dress. Dresses are basically long shirts.”

“No,” said Cirrus.

“Why did you leave so quickly last night?” I asked, but not really. Instead, I said nothing as we walked, keeping an eye out for Gunner or his goons until we reached my locker.

“This is me if you ever need to find me,” I said, pointing. Hot Girl Artemis appeared and snapped her head at the sight of Cirrus.

“Who are you?” said Artemis, quickly shifting to Evaluate & Compare mode. She then performed a secondary scan of me, in an effort to map the exact nature of our relationship.

I froze. I held my poise as best I could. For a nauseating moment I wondered if she would betray my charade—her smooth gynoid countenance breaking into a fit of monotonic laughter: The mega-nerd is trying to be cool for the weird new girl!

“You first,” said Cirrus coolly.

“Ecgh,” said Artemis with revulsion. “What?”

“That’s how it works,” said Cirrus. “You introduce yourself first. Then you let the other person reciprocate.”

Maybe it was because Artemis could not match any criteria in her meager database to link me and Cirrus together in any meaningful way; maybe, in the wretched control bridge of her heart, she calculated that Cirrus represented no threat to her preprogrammed objectives.

Whatever the case, Hot Girl Artemis’s haphazardly coded algorithm must have deemed this encounter not worth a nanosecond more of her runtime, for she spat out a final Ecgh, disengaged her E&C scan, and executed a walkaway: a huff, a locker door slam, a flawless strut.

“Nice to meet you, too,” said Cirrus.

“Sorry about her,” I said.

“Every school has one,” said Cirrus.

Her phone buzzed, and she answered. “You might like this,” she said. “My friend in Japan is in a feminist grunge band called Hervana.”

She showed me a video of four impossibly cool girls playing to a crowd waving their arms in unison.

“My god, they’re incredible,” I said.

Cirrus backhanded my shoulder. “From one rock star to another.”

“Ha,” I said.

In Cirrus’s mind, I fit in with her international network of creative hipsters constantly pinging her from all around the globe. In her mind, I was just as cool as them. Maybe, I suspected, even more so.

Cirrus did not know that, in reality, I was but quarry for meat-eaters such as Gunner. She did not know that I used to be a reputational liability for my own brother, who avoided me in school. She did not know that I single-handedly made up 33.33 percent of the nerd caste at Ruby High.

I knew this whole thing was wrong.

But I loved it.

“Ugh, more AlloAllos,” said Cirrus. She typed for a bit before putting her phone on mute and stuffing it away. “Enough.”

“You have lots of friends,” I said.

“I’ve been to lots of schools,” said Cirrus with a shrug.

We kept walking until we reached the center courtyard of the school. Cirrus stood atop a bench to survey things with arms folded.

“If that’s the one hundred block there,” she said, squinting, “then that must be two hundred. Then three. And so on.”

I raised my eyebrows: You are correct.

“Gym there,” she continued. “Locker room. Weight room. Industrial classes there. They