Super Fake Love Song - David Yoon Page 0,88

all screamed.

“You guys are so cute,” she said, and vanished with a wink.

Jamal fetched us Ramunes, which we slammed open and raised for a toast.

“Guys,” I said, exhaling after a long pull, “I vow from this day forth to never betray you again. To never act without your consent if that consent involves all of us. I vow—”

“Whatever! Lady Lashblade!” said Jamal and Milo.

I couldn’t have agreed more.

Beautiful

Back home, evening.

I checked my phone out of the same helpless desperation of pathetic phone users all over the world.

Farewell, friend.

A cartoon version of Cirrus gave a sad smirk, blinked, smirked, blinked.

When had she sent this? What did this mean?

I watched the looping animation for a full minute. I gained no insight.

Dad came floating out from the dark. “Hey, bud,” he whispered. “We watched your internet show. You guys were great.”

“You did?” I said. “How did you even know we were on tonight?”

“You have a real broadcaster’s voice,” said Dad.

I didn’t know what to say. My family was watching? And they liked it? But they weren’t into the lifestyle. What would they even get out of it?

Just take the compliment, dummy.

“Thanks,” I said.

He paused, then added, “Cirrus’s parents told us about it.”

All sound cut out for a moment, like it did sometimes. I pictured Cirrus, just beyond the upper window of her condo, watching on her phone along with thousands of others. Had she heard about DIY Fantasy FX from someone? Gunner? Artemis?

Did she hit the heart button?

“They told me something else,” said Dad. “You’re not gonna like it.”

Farewell, friend.

“Their LA project is tied up in city hall,” said Dad. “So they’re gonna do a short gig in Yiwu.”

“Is that inland?” I said.

“It’s four hours south of Shanghai.”

“China!” I shrieked.

Mom appeared in her pajamas. “Who’s shouting?” she said, but fell quiet when she saw Dad and me.

“How short is a short gig?” I yelled.

“Just a few months,” said Dad with a one-armed shrug.

“Honey, it’s twelve,” said Mom. “With the option to renew their contract if the government likes what they’re getting.”

“I was trying to soften the blow,” said Dad.

Oops, mouthed Mom.

“A year?” I wailed.

“What’s with the shouting?” said Gray from the landing below.

“Go back to sleep,” said Mom.

“Oh, snap,” said Gray. “You told him about tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” I howled.

“Please, lower your volume,” said Dad. “They leave first thing in the morning.”

I sat right down in the foyer, among all the shoes. We Daes did not line up our shoes. Cirrus did, though. So I began lining up every last shoe, down to the millimeter.

“Sun?” said Mom.

I picked up my shoes, lined them up, and flung them both across the room. I took out my phone.

Hello? I wrote.

You’re leaving?

Just like that?

Hello?

Cirrus did not blow a single bubble back.

“She’s right down the street and I can’t even reach her,” I said.

My phone was a useless prehistoric piece of junk. I might as well have been staring at a loose bathroom tile in my hands. After tonight, Cirrus would be gone. And she would be gone forever, because Cirrus was highly skilled at being gone. She went gone every couple of years for her whole life. She was expert at it.

Cirrus had chosen to go, in fact. I changed my mind, she perhaps told her parents. I’m ready for another adventure.

And from the window she watched, no doubt, as Rancho Ruby and all of California became just another piece of vanishing landscape making way for the endless scrolling Pacific. She would chalk up this whole Sunny episode as one of her weirder duty stations, then safely detonate it from a distance like she’d had to do with all of her other memories in order to protect her heart.

And then I’d never see or hear from her again for years and years. Maybe in some inconceivable future we’d meet in some dumb shopping mall with our spouses and kids in tow, and have that awkward catching-up conversation adults seem to always be having even though all they’d rather do is sit on a couch and binge old shows until their toes became sharp roots that anchored them to the ground to draw up minerals that would soon calcify every vein in their body and render them into an anomalous state scientists would not quite be able to call death.

Mom knelt and simply put her arm around me.

“Listen,” said Dad. “This might not be what you want to hear right now, but . . . you’re young . . . and . . .”

“Dad,” said Gray. He had emerged