Super Fake Love Song - David Yoon Page 0,39

smoke and sour spilled beer of the ages. I could hear Milo’s drums now thick and deep enough to shake the floor; I could see Jamal throwing himself around like a snapped cable and hammering at the heavy wound steel of a growling bass.

My chin was glued to the mesh of a mic buzzing with barely suppressed electricity as I sang. There was the weight of a guitar around my neck; my right hand sawed out a metal chain of sublime noise.

She stood in the crowd—the glowing nucleus of it all—and watched with a backhand covering a chuckle of astonishment. I dove off the stage, and floated straight into her arms.

I blinked back to reality. My pulse, I realized, was even. My voice was normal.

“We’re in the show, sure,” I said with the utmost cool.

“I knew it, yesss,” said Cirrus. “I call front row.”

“VIP backstage whatever,” I said.

Cirrus beamed. Her cheeks bright as apples.

I made a mental sticky to tell Jamal and Milo that we were as of today performing in the talent show. I made another mental sticky to wear a helmet while I told them.

“Anyway,” said Cirrus, quiet as a breath now. “This guitar pick is from the moment when I knew that, uh.”

She tried again: “From that moment I realized that I, um, I—”

“Me too,” I breathed back.

I stopped moving, and so did she. Everything stopped for a long moment.

I had never told anyone I liked them in my whole life. I always thought admitting such a thing would be the most terrifying thing possible, equivalent to lowering the chair and the whip and hoping the lion came in for a hug and not the jugular.

But right now, with everything stopped as it was, I felt no fear at all. It was the strangest feeling—like a muscle long held had suddenly relaxed to let the hot blood thunder unimpeded. Where had the fear gone?

Right now, I felt like the chosen recipient of the most wonderful news that just had to be shared with the most urgency.

“I like you, Cirrus,” I said. “A lot.”

“I like you too.”

We smiled. The air around us resumed. I had said the words, and they had come out so easily.

I could smell her sleepyhead smell; the closer I got, the more I could smell it, which drew me in closer, which made me smell it more, which drew me closer still.

Her lips, just twenty centimeters from mine.

From downstairs came a steady beeping.

“That’s the pizza,” said Cirrus.

“Then we better hurry,” I said, and kissed her.

We moved with intense curiosity now, our fingertips very gently testing the hair, the bone behind the ear, the pulsing neck; arm muscles that went strong, then soft; those fascinating, perfectly sized gaps between each rib.

Cirrus lowered her hand to mine. She twirled the heavy ring on my finger like it was a gain knob on an amp cranking the kitchen timer beeping harder and harder until it screeched with brain-bending distortion.

I was not who Cirrus thought I was. Therefore Cirrus did not like me; she liked the Other Me. The one created by my lie that first night we met. Telling Cirrus I liked her—kissing Cirrus—only made my lie that much bigger.

At this moment I knew I was supposed to reassure myself that my lie was only temporary, and that I could be the Real Me soon once again.

Downstairs, the kitchen timer stopped.

I realized something in this silence.

I realized that I liked the Other Me, too.

Courage

I had told Cirrus that I liked her. Cirrus had said the same thing back. That had actually happened. I floated around my room like a happy heart-shaped balloon, which, if inverted, could also look like a pair of humongous buttocks, and that was absolutely hilarious!

Cirrus and me had just become we.

I held a paradise-pink flyer in my hands.

RUBY HIGH TALENT SHOW—AT THE

LEGENDARY MISS MAYHEM ON SUNSET STRIP

IN HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA—

NO PRESSURE LOL

“We will rock you,” I said.

The cool comes later, replied the flyer, quoting Mr. Tweed.

I knew Jamal and Milo were not interested in getting the cool. I already had a fake version of it—but now I wanted the real.

I wanted to be that Other Me.

I wanted to play the show.

I wanted to be up on that stage, vamping with Gatsbian heroism. I wanted a new word to define my high school self, I decided. Not SHAME, but

COURAGE

I paced the room now, clearing a white plastic storage container at every eighth step.

Why have I lived in fear for so long? Why have I never