Super Fake Love Song - David Yoon Page 0,36

if you’d like to drop everything and come rescue me from the abyss this fine rainy Saturday morning that would be fun, wrote Cirrus finally.

I flung off my face shield. Fantasy props could wait. Everything could wait.

Ok I’ve dropped everything to the floor, I wrote. Where?

My house? wrote Cirrus.

O, I typed.

K, I typed.

!, I typed.

Send!

I threw on the first outfit I could find—a bootleg Microsoft Zune tank top and extremely rare pair of LimeWire running shorts—before realizing I could not go to Cirrus’s house looking like I had just corporate fun-runned my way through time from the early 2000s.

I crossed the hall to Gray’s old bedroom, a habit at this point, and picked out what I remembered of Gray’s leisure wear choices from two years ago—tight black joggers, black camo hoodie—and put them in a backpack. I packed sunglasses, too: mirrored cop things that covered half my face.

At the top of the stairs I jumped, clamped my arms around the banister, slid silently down with my socks on the side trim rail. I loved this stupid grand staircase. I retracted any statements I might have made in the past—I now loved all stairs everywhere.

“Bye,” I called.

No reply. I looked. Mom and Dad ate standing up at the kitchen island, hunched over their screens without a word, work-work-working on a Saturday morning. Other parents barbecued or went to the movies or pursued their ding-dang hobbies on the weekends. I had no idea what my parents’ hobbies even were.

Did Mom and Dad still hold the magic, standing over their plates like they were now?

I could probably change into Gray’s clothes right here, and they wouldn’t even notice. But I didn’t dare risk it. The last thing I needed was questions, and then a potential offhand comment to Jane or Brandon Soh.

As soon as Sunny met Cirrus, he started wearing Gray’s clothes for attention.

Like mating plumage!

How adorable!

Et cetera. No.

I called to them again. “Bye?”

Mom glanced up with the blank awareness of a hypnosis victim hearing a bell. “Bye, sweetie.”

“Make good choices,” droned Dad without looking up.

“Already have,” I said, and left.

But have I? I thought.

Since there was no old storage shed between my house and Cirrus’s, I figured the juniper lining the side entrance of the Cernoseks’ house would do. Although there were so few cars (and even less foot traffic) on the spotless, wide streets of Rancho Ruby that I probably could have changed out in the open. I had gotten my whole switcheroo routine down to sixteen seconds (PR).

When I knocked on Cirrus’s door, I was huffing and puffing even though I had barely expended any calories on the bike ride over.

Huffing and puffing, heart pounding.

The door opened to reveal Cirrus in a professional-looking black apron, the kind you see chefs wearing on cooking shows. She had fine white dust on her perfect nose, in her perfect hair. “I just put in Brazilian pizza.”

“What’s Brazilian pizza?” I said.

“We’ll see,” said Cirrus, with a shrug. “I gotta pee. Come meet me upstairs!”

She bounded away two steps at a time with astonishing strength and speed.

I stepped into the condo, which was already perfumed with yeast and garlic. I slipped off my shoes. My feet rested on white tile. I felt compelled to line my shoes up with the other pairs impeccably arranged there.

I peered around. My eyes blipped. I don’t know what I had expected Cirrus’s house would look like, but it was not this.

I knew Cirrus had lived all over the world, so I had imagined mind-boggling knickknacks and gadgets and foodstuffs the likes of which we provincial Americans could never even think to search for with our limited bumpkin query terms.

I knew her parents were away a lot for work and were also fairly vivre-et-laisser-vivre, so I imagined Cirrus had free rein to do things like graffiti an entire wall with award-winning artwork or set up a professional DJ stack in the living room or keep a clever family of potbellied pigs in luxurious dedicated quarters.

But there was none of that. All I could see was white.

The carpet was white, the walls were white, the ceiling was white, everything white and blank but the furniture and picture frames.

Except there was no furniture or picture frames.

There was nothing.

A television sat marooned on the floor with only a sad cable modem as its companion.

I nudged open a door. There was a bathroom. Its toilet still had the factory label marketing stickers on the ceramic tank. In the sink was a hammer, a measuring