Super Fake Love Song - David Yoon Page 0,1

would be challenged, and each day I would likely fail.

I could not afford to cry—everywhere was now a dangerous place—so I kicked a hole in the orange earth with my heel and dropped the chunk in. I covered it over. I stomped thrice to mask the seam.

And I stepped back into the sun to survey the new realm before me.

I

Mimic octopuses change shape and hue.

When they are scared, they become something new.

Spark

I was now seventeen.

I now lived on the other side of the quad, at Rancho Ruby Senior High.

It was Monday. It was school.

What was there to say about school?

Lockers. Class bells. The pantheon of student archetypes: the introspective art girl, the loud jock, the rebel in black. Put your phones away. Will you help me cheat on the quiz. Who will sit next to me at lunch. The kind teacher. The mean teacher. The tough-as-nails vice principal with the secret soft spot.

There was the hot girl, Artemis, whose locker was next to mine, who answered every one of my Good mornings with a broadcast-quality eyeroll.

There were the nerds, who were me, Milo, and Jamal.

There could of course be no nerds without a bully—for the bully makes the nerd—and mine was and would ever be Gunner.

Gunner, the human Aryan Tales™ action figure. Gunner (orig. Gunnar, Nordic for “warrior”), now the superstar feature back of the Ruby High Ravagers, celebrated for his high-RPM piston quads and record number of berserkergang end-zone dances.

Gunner would invade my table at lunch to steal chips to feed his illiterate golem of a sidekick and tip our drink bottles and so on, like he had routinely done since the middle school era. He called it the nerd tax. By now I was able to instinctively avoid him and his sidekick, with an outward annoyance that was actually barely disguised fear.

What a cliché.

I regarded Ruby High through skeptical eyes, as if it did not really exist. It was a school like many other schools in the country, all repeating similar patterns in similar fashion, again and again throughout all ages, world without end.

Track and field—track for short—was where I could lounge with my two best-slash-only friends in the Californian golden hour, picking clovers for fifty minutes straight before performing a few minutes of burst activity: long jump (me), shot put (Milo), and high jump (Jamal).

Ruby High was a football school. Track was what donkey-brained football superstars and their sycophantic coaches did to obsessively fill every minute of every hour with training. No one gave two dungballs about track. No one came to track meets.

I loved track.

Track fulfilled the Physical Education requirement with almost no effort.

“Here comes Coach Oldtimer,” said Jamal. Coach Oldtimer’s real name was We Did Not Care What His Real Name Was. “Pretend you’re stretching.” He opened his arms and mimed shooting invisible arrows, pew, pew. Jamal (third-generation Jamaican-American) was stretched so tall and thin, he was nearly featureless.

“Oh, stretching,” I cried.

Milo (third-generation Guatemalan-American) lay flat and gently rolled side to side, flattening the grass with his muscular superhero body, which he had done nothing to achieve and did nothing to maintain. He even wore thick black prescription glasses as if he harbored a secret identity.

I, Sunny (third-generation Korean-American), bent my unremarkable physique to vigorously rub calf muscles as tender and delicate as veal, rub rub rub.

Together, we three represented 42.85714286 percent of the entire nonwhite population of Ruby High. The other four were Indian, Indian, East Asian, and nonwhite Hispanic, all girls and therefore off-limits, for Milo and Jamal and I did not possess the ability to talk to girls. At Ruby High, we were the lonely-onlies in a sea of everybodies.

“Stretching stretching,” I said.

“Go away Coach go away Coach,” said Milo under his breath.

But Coach Oldtimer did not go away. Coach, an older white man with the face of an enchanted tree scarred by the emerald fires of war, drew near. He’d been with the school since its founding six thousand years ago.

“I like this little dance you guys got going on right here,” said Coach. “Miles, you sure you don’t want to run tight end for the football team? Quick, strong guy like you?”

“It’s Milo,” said Milo.

“I’ll join football,” said Jamal.

Coach gave skinny Jamal an eyeful of pity. “It gets pretty rough,” he said.

“Toxic masculinity,” coughed Jamal into his fist.

“What?” said Coach, pouting.

“How can we help you, Coach Oldtimer?” I said.

Coach shook off his bewilderment and maintained his smile. “It’s huddle-up time to give all you boys the dope on next