Super Fake Love Song - David Yoon Page 0,50

and slid the remaining noodles down my gullet, then wiped my face clean with a footlong sticky tongue.

“Sunny!” said Mom with amazement and concern.

“Can I please be done now?” I said.

“What are you, seven?” said Mom.

I glanced at the phone and danced a pee-pee dance.

“Go,” said Mom.

I went.

“Hey, Sun,” said Mom, before I left. “It’s nice to see you coming out of your shell like this. What’s changed with you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Puberty 2.0.”

“Huh?”

Jhk jhk, went my phone. I didn’t look at it.

“Gotta go,” I said.

Mom just smiled. She had no idea I was heading out to bargain for my soul.

* * *

—

The corner of Emerald Avenue and Sapphire Street was where Gunner had suggested we meet.

But the intersection was empty. There was nothing here, really, except one big house and another big house two hundred meters away. Beyond lay a grove of palm trees and a rocky beach keeping the indifferent sea at bay. I had reached the far southwestern edge of Rancho Ruby.

Had Gunner sent me here on a wild goose chase? I imagined him texting me another location, just to troll me.

I’m here.

Immediately he (or what I assumed was him) responded: Lock your bike to the pole and go up the orange stairs.

How did he know I had my bike? I wheeled around, looking for hidden spy cameras.

I looked about and there, indeed, was a set of orange Spanish tile stairs leading up between rows of overgrown rosemary.

Gunner was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. He stood alone before a massive tiled hacienda with an artfully weathered door studded with heavy étoile nails, the kind used to crucify Jesus on the cross that he dragged for miles under the whip of the Romans. Gunner’s sidekick was not there. It was just me and him.

I stepped inside the cool dark house. I stepped into the eighteenth century. Dark wooden chests banded with black iron, coats of arms on the wall, cage sconces around every light.

Gunner had a perfectly antiqued green glass of ice water ready for me. Was it poisoned? I touched my tongue to it. It tasted lemony. I glanced around and spotted a dispenser jug full of spa water, the kind with fruit and stuff floating in it.

“Get him a coaster,” said a man in a flight suit. It looked like a flight suit. It was really sweats. The man was a dozen centimeters shorter than Gunner, but I somehow knew that didn’t matter. His voice alone was bigger than both of us. His buzz cut made him look like he had white horns for hair.

“Okay, Dad,” said Gunner immediately, and rushed to hand me an octagon of cork.

“You gonna introduce me or do I have to do that, too?” said Gunner’s dad.

“Sunny, Dad, Dad, Sunny,” said Gunner, again with an almost professional immediacy. “Sunny’s here to help me with my science homework, which I acknowledge I’m lagging behind in.”

Gunner’s dad smiled and folded his wiry arms. “Well, good. Nice to meet you, Sunny.”

I spoke with a throat suddenly gone dry. “Uh, likewise, uh.”

“No uhs in the Schwinghammer household,” said the dad.

“Affirmative?” I said.

Gunner’s dad waved a hand. “Carry on. Somebody’s gotta save this kid’s ass.”

I did not want to stay here all night. I shifted into Idea Guy overdrive mode. Time was not on our side.

“Papier-mâché takes forever and always looks like smashed-up garbage anyway,” I said. “Do you have clay or even cardboard?”

“No,” said Gunner. “I have Lego, though.”

That could work. “How much?”

“A whole Tuffy,” said Gunner.

“Then let’s do this,” I said, and gave a thumbs-up to Gunner’s dad, who seemed satisfied enough to leave us alone.

Gunner eyed the doorway until his dad was out of sight, then looked at me with those blank eyes of his. “We better get started,” he whispered.

We entered a Moorish archway and climbed stairs sunlit by narrow archer’s windows. Then down a hall lined with paintings, all oils, including a sinister, unsmiling family portrait done in a dark Flemish style.

This was not what I pictured Gunner living in. If anything, I would’ve imagined his house as a bright business hotel bar full of televisions with football on every screen. That was not this house.

This house was messed up.

Gunner entered a room so austere it reminded me of that movie where the tormented monk flagellates himself with a cat-o’-nine-tails fashioned by his own hand.

“I’m not allowed to keep the door closed,” said Gunner as I entered.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I sighed—I’d texted Milo