Super Fake Love Song - David Yoon Page 0,38

it was super humid and bugs were singing all around me, and it was the first time I had red bean ice cream.”

“Very cool,” I said, admiring the acorn. Although really, it could’ve been an acorn from this country, or most any other country with oak trees.

“And this,” she said, “is a spare nut for that big bridge in Sydney. Harbor whatever. It’s huge. That was from my first summer Christmas Down Under.”

I hefted the heavy nut. It was as big as a hockey puck.

“Here’s a feather from one of those birds in Hawaii,” she said.

I held the feather to the light. “Which bird?”

“The details are just details,” she continued. “I remember waiting for a bus. And there it was: my first double rainbow ever. Then this feather blew right into my lap.”

Soon we had a collection of objects in front of us: a key-chain light, a rock, a dried leaf, a cheap plastic car. Objects so ordinary that they could’ve come from anywhere or nowhere. A safety pin, a carved toothpick. She had arranged them in a specific order, which I quickly realized was chronological. The sight of these little trinkets made me inexplicably sad.

“These are all my firsts from everywhere I’ve ever lived,” she said, gazing at them.

I gazed at them, too. “All together they’re like this really cool museum piece.”

“I’m terrified you think this is weird,” she said, not looking at me.

“I don’t,” I said. “It’s not.”

“Nothing about me is normal,” she muttered. “My whole childhood was not normal.”

“You forget how weird human beings can get,” I said. “I don’t think your weirdness measures up to even the most basic cat hoarder or compulsive coin swallower.”

“No, but sometimes my charm box makes me happy,” she said. “Sometimes the charms just look like a pile of crap. Because it’s crap, isn’t it. It’s pathetic, isn’t it.”

I placed two fingers on her shoulder. “People fill entire houses with pathetic piles of crap to gild their lives with the illusion of meaning. Thousands of hours picking and choosing, thousands of dollars shopping. Everyone is pathetic. Everyone suspects life is meaningless, that there is nothing after death, and that all our fancy culture and history and society is just this grand illusion we choose to perpetuate every day. Your way of performing the grand illusion is just more thrifty, and space saving.”

The laugh worked. She blinked up at me with a smile.

“Even when you’re cynical, you make me feel better,” she said. “Or maybe because you’re cynical.”

“Cynical detachment is my way of dealing with the futility of the universe,” I said.

“Oh, Sunny Dae,” she said.

Her phone buzzed with three AlloAllo alerts in a row, and she dismissed them all, silenced her device, and slid it far across the carpet.

“I have four hundred friends from twenty different countries all stuffed into my phone,” said Cirrus. “But I’ve never shown any of them my charm box until you.”

I was bursting with the urge to just tell her the truth and be done with it. Sing a song of the repentant fool on a broken lyre. But the burst burst, and left only the usual fear.

“I’ve spent every day since grade school terrified of everyone and everything,” I said. “I’ve never told anyone this. Because I’ve been too terrified to.”

This was the truest thing I’d ever told Cirrus.

She tilted her head in genuine disbelief. “But why?”

“I’m not as confident as I seem,” I said.

“You got me fooled,” she said with a sly smile.

From the tin she fished out a blood-red coin. Not a coin—a guitar pick.

“I stole this from your room,” she said, and laid it down alongside her other charms. It became just another object among objects. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“It’s yours,” I said quickly.

“You don’t need it?” she said.

“I have multiple,” I said.

“Right, because when you’re up there rocking out, you might drop it and then what would you do,” said Cirrus. She gazed at me. “Duh.”

I could tell what she was doing. She was picturing me onstage.

I felt a rising bolus of dread. “Yeah,” was all I could say.

“Like at the talent show,” she said.

The bolus came back up. “The talent show,” I said.

“They put up posters,” said Cirrus. “I just assumed, since you guys have been practicing. Probably small potatoes for a band like yours, though, ha.”

She gave me the Look. It was the longest Look ever.

My eyes suddenly flooded with terror—and excitement. And lights.

Lights: beams of cyan and magenta and yellow, rising and falling. Hot air stinking of