Frankly in Love

by David Yoon

  A tough old yearbook from Mom’s high school. I open it to her picture—I’ve dog-eared the page—and see her at my age. She’s pretty. She’s in a uniform. All the kids are in uniform. Everything’s in Korean. There are no autographs, because I guess back then in the Korean countryside no one did stuff like that to such an expensive item.

  Three marble signature stamps and a lacquered black compact that unscrews to reveal a vermillion-red ink pad

  Everything about this spy suitcase makes me want to cry, and I know why. Because it’s such a small, light case—luggage was smaller back then—and yet it contains all there is.

  Dad will be gone soon.

  One day Mom will be gone, too.

  Maybe I’ll have kids one day. They’ll ask me all about my life. It’ll be easy to give them answers. We will speak the same English. We will be able to look up all my shit on the Internet, if we’re still calling it the Internet. We’ll talk about my hopes and dreams and fears and how they compare with their hopes and dreams and fears. Then we’ll openly say I love you and hug, because Americans are huggers, dammit.

  Then they’ll ask me about all the stuff in this suitcase, and I won’t be able to explain half of it. Not even close. This small, light suitcase will be to them what it is to me.

  A wunderkammer.

  Buzz-buzz. I parked down the street, says Joy. Coast clear?

  I wipe my eyes and stand.

  I’ll be at the front door, I say.

  When I open it, there stands Joy in the outside heat in all her summer dress glory.

  “Hi,” I say.

  Joy grabs my head and kisses it, and for a moment it’s the only sound in the whole house.

  “What’s wrong?” she says, because Joy can tell when she’s kissing a statue.

  I want to tell her. But not here. I will for-sure cry. I will become dizzy with tears and fall, and my head will strike the nearby bronze figurine of a bronco bucking an astonished infant cowboy and inflict a debilitating concussion. So I say, “Wanna see some cool old stuff?” and lead her to the spy suitcase.

  “Are you okay?” says Joy.

  “Yes,” I say, walking. “No.”

  “Last night was a shit show.”

  I sit her down on the soft, nonconcussive carpet before the suitcase.

  “Huh,” says Joy. “Is this all your mom-n-dad’s old stuff?”

  I nod. One small suitcase. My eyes sting with tears, so I lie down and let them pool as if I were catching raindrops.

  “Hey,” says Joy. She leans over me and caresses my cheek. “Hey, hey, hey.”

  I sniff. I have the crazy urge to lay into her dad, right here in front of Joy, for talking shit about me. But I keep it cool. “What did your mom-n-dad say about last night?”

  Joy jets her hair again. “Something about your dad not having a sense of humor. Dad implied it’s because your mom-n-dad are from the sticks. Are they?”

  I blink away the raindrops. “Apparently they are.”

  “From the sticks.”

  “And apparently, your mom-n-dad have been making fun of my mom-n-dad basically for their entire friendship.”

  Joy recoils at this news. “So my mom-n-dad are king dicks?”

  King dick is an old joke of ours, because king is wang in Korean and wang is dick in Casual English Vulgar, and you could therefore say it wang wang if you wanted to. Even now, even in the state I’m in, I just have to laugh a tiny laugh.

  That’s Joy for you.

  “Either that,” I say, “or my dad’s a psycho with an inferiority complex.”

  “What the fuck,” says Joy.

  “Or both,” I say.

  “These are our parents?” says Joy.

  “Apparently,” I say, and latch the spy suitcase shut. I push it away into the crawl-in and close the closet.

  Joy stares at the flattened rectangle of carpet where the case had lain. “I hate them right now.”

  “Someone once told me you have to hate your parents in order to leave them,” I say.

  “That makes absolutely no sense,” says Joy. “I’m just saying I hate them right at this moment, not forever, because hopefully they’ll figure it out and quit being dicks.”

  She has on this defiant look. She can do this because she doesn’t know the whole story. I wish I could be defiant, too. It would be simpler.

  “My dad, he’s . . . ” I begin, and the tears creep back.

  Joy holds me still. “Hey. Their relationship is their relationship, and it has nothing to do with ours. Okay?”

  She’s right, but this is not the problem really, not really at all, but she doesn’t know that, and I don’t want to talk right now. I can’t bear the thought of talking right now.

  So I kiss her. The kiss astonishes us both so much that we must kiss again to make sure we both felt the same thing, and then again and again. Each kiss washes warm water over my racing mind. Calming it.

  I let her lay me down. I let things happen, as slow as they need to. There is no rush. There is no expectation. I let myself drift from sensation to sensation.

  And afterward, as we both lie in a parallelogram of dusty light, I cling to her because it turns out this is what I need right now: to be naked and vulnerable but safe in her arms at the same time. We take long breaths. Before me I see the bright corona of her eyes, the wispy baby hairs at her temple, a little mole on her chest. The air in the room seems to attenuate to the rising and falling of our chests.

  “So listen,” I say finally. “My dad has cancer.”

  “What?”

  “The doctor said six to twelve months.”

  “What?”

  “. . .”

  “Oh no,” says Joy again and again. “Oh no, oh no.”

  She asks what kind it is, when he found out, all that. I tell her. She says she gets it now—she gets why Dad would freak out at the party like he did. Anyone under that kind of stress would be ready to snap. She understands this quickly, because she is Joy.

  “I have to tell Mom-n-Dad,” says Joy.

  “Don’t do that,” I say.

  “But then they’d understand why your dad got so mad.”

  “My mom doesn’t want anyone to know. She says it’ll cause all kinds of stress.”

  “But—if I had cancer, the first thing I’d do is tell my close friends.”

  “She’s afraid of burdening people with heavy news,” I say. “She says she wants to wait till Dad gets better to tell everyone.”

  Joy’s face unfolds. “But yubs . . .”

  “I know.”

  “Your dad isn’t gonna get better.”

  “I know,” I cry, and bury my face in her neck.

  “Shh,” is all Joy will say, because what else is there to say? She holds my head and rocks it for a long time. For a long moment I feel like I’ll fall asleep. Joy says “Shh” and “Shh,” again and again, and I never want her to stop.

  Joy takes a breath as she realizes something. “I guess we should lie low for a while, huh.”

  Joy is right. Because imagine Dad coming home to find his ex–best friend’s daughter here. He wouldn’t yell, or kick Joy out, or accuse me of betrayal. Nothing as dramatic as that.

  Instead, he would just get really sad. And cancer feasts upon sad. Cancer is uniquely evil in that way.

  “Yeah, we should,” I say.

  “Just when we were done with the fake dating,” says Joy.

  “Hi, irony,” I say.

  “Should we fire up the shared calendar again?”

  “Nah,” I say. “We’re pros by now.”

  Joy gives me a weak laugh. Then her face falls. It’s a sad, miserable little joke.

  “We’ll just take it as it comes,” I say. “We still have the rest of the year.”

  “T
he rest of the year,” says Joy.

  A whisper in my head says, I just want to walk away from it all. I don’t exactly know what this means. But I don’t dare say it out loud. Not while Joy and I lie here under this warm felled sunbeam. I just want to walk away from it all makes it sound like Joy is part of the problem. I just want to walk away from it all makes it sound like I want to break up with her, which I do not.

  But it would make things simpler, though, wouldn’t it, says the whisper.

  Sure, I say back. Just like living alone in a desert bunker would make things simpler.

  Joy is part of the problem just like I’m part of the problem just like Mom-n-Dad are part of the problem and so on. We’re all part of it whether we want to be or not. Everyone is part of the problem, and everyone is part of the solution, and that’s what makes everything so infuriating.

  I think all I really want to say is I wish things were simpler. But I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot lately. It hurts a little more each time.

  Summer will come and go. Dad will most likely pass on. In Korean, to pass on is doragada, which means to go back.

  Oh my god, back to where?

  Joy leaves.

  Then Mom comes home, with only a ten-minute gap in between and Mom none the wiser. We excel at running down low, me and Joy.

  Hi, irony.

  Usually Mom fusses over me when she gets home: you eating something, you go playing Q’s house, you study for SAT, and so on. But she just sits at the empty dining table, which we never use, and listens to the distant freeway traffic go shh, shh.

  “Store so hot today,” says Mom.

  “Did Dad turn on the AC?”

  “He don’t!” cries Mom. “He so stingy.”

  The urge to say, What the fuck’s he waiting for? rages, then ebbs.

  “Aigu, so tired today,” says Mom. She goes to the living room couch and rests her body there.

  Mom takes a deep breath, holds it, and sighs one big sigh. She flops her wrist across her eyes. “Mommy so tired,” she says.

  I watch her begin to slip out of consciousness.

  “So hot,” mumbles Mom, even though it’s not. “Frankie-ya, you open window?”

  I open up the house to let the breeze in. “That better?” I say.

  But Mom doesn’t answer, because she’s already still.

  The white curtains from the open windows billow back and forth without a sound. Back and forth, moved by the breathing of the warm sun-swept wind.

  chapter 29

  thins & fats

  The High School Era is slowly disintegrating into a preapocalyptic orgy of wanton dereliction. People ditch school to have lunch off-campus. The bell rings, but people ignore it to continue lying on the grass or whatever. There’s a mandatory assembly for some presentation by the Associated Student Body to show off all their accomplishments; hardly anyone shows up. Even the school president herself is absent. Five minutes in, a flock of corn tortillas go flying onto the stage from somewhere in the audience, and the vice principal literally throws his hands up and walks away.

  Mr. Soft has foreseen the coming of this proverbial tortilla storm. Mr. Soft is prepared. He hauled in his outrageous 8K projector from home—apparently he’s an avid home theater product review blogger in his spare time—and is letting us watch whatever we can bring in on disc. He even brought in a little popcorn machine. Forget calculus. It’s popcorn and movies at seven o’clock in the morning.

  “I’m so proud of you turkeys,” says Mr. Soft. “These last two months, all we’re gonna do is celebrate each and every one of you as those acceptance letters come rolling in.”

  And roll in they do.

  Naima Gupta got in to The Harvard. She found out during class and sent her laptop clattering to the floor. Extra popcorn for her.

  Did I get into The Harvard? With my email notifications muted, only the mail sitting in the Bag of Holding can say.

  Do my parents still care about The Harvard like they used to?

  Amelie Shim got into the University of Chicago. Paul Olmo, University of California at Santa Cruz. Brit Means got into the University of California at Davis, as planned. I’m happy for her. I’ll never visit her, never see her dorm room, never see her favorite spot on campus to sit and daydream. It’s strange that I once wanted these things so bad.

  Andrew Kim got into Yale, where his acting dreams will surely come true. John Lim and Ella Chang both got in to UCLA. They haven’t come out to their parents yet. Wu Tang got into USC and will join his family pantheon of strong-jawed Trojan grads.

  I force Q to ditch fourth period to tell him all about the blowup at the Gathering, and how it sent me and Joy pinwheeling skyward, and how my dad has thousands of tiny-tiny time bombs throbbing inside him. Q listens. He can only frown at the ground: the surface of the planet Earth, such an unfair place, so messy and tragic all the time.

  Then Q cries. He cries until the bottoms of his glasses fill up. I take them off, wipe the lenses clean with my tee shirt.

  “I’m sorry I’m crying like an infant with gigantism and a poopy diaper,” says Q.

  “It’s okay, abnormally huge baby,” I say, and reach out to hold his arm.

  Students walk by and glance at us, probably wondering if we’re a couple who has just broken up in the last weeks of school. That sort of thing has been happening all over campus. End of Days.

  “No,” says Q. “I mean I’m sorry I’m giving you yet another problem to deal with. You’ve got enough crying of your own. Last thing you need is me piling on more.”

  “Pile away, old bean,” I say. “There’s room.”

  “I just,” says Q with a mighty sniff, “what the fuck does any of this mean? You live, you work, you die? One day you fight with your friends from forever and then the next day you’re just strangers again? Is that what the universe is telling us here?”

  “I know, right?”

  Q pretends to push up his glasses, but I know he’s hiding his eyes with his hand. “Is that gonna happen to us?”

  “Hey,” I bark. “No way. Stop that noise.”

  Q blinks at the lockers, the shiny linoleum floor, the doors. “I’m gonna miss this infernal asylum,” he says. “My mom said the last of the envelopes arrived today.”

  “Mine too. She’s putting them in the Bag of Holding, yeah?”

  Q shoots me a look. “Is your mom?”

  “Of course.”

  “And Joy’s?”

  I nod. “I guess our bags are finally complete.”

  “And you haven’t peeked.”

  “My boy, none of us know shit.”

  Q lets his head fall on my shoulder. “I love you, man.”

  “And I love you too, top chap.”

  “I’m so, so sorry about your dad—”

  I raise a hand to stop Q. Enough of this sobbing. “What did the nut say to the other nut it was chasing?” I say.

  “Huh?”

  “I’m a cashew.”

  “What?”

  I look straight into Q’s eyes. “What did one nut say to the other nut it was chasing?”

  Q meets my gaze. His irises are so dark his pupils vanish into them.

  “I’m a cash—” I say.

  “Puhahahahahaha,” says Q. “Geehahahahakekekekek.”

  “Say it,” I say. “Don’t spray it.”

  * * *

  • • •

  An hour before school ends, me and Joy conspire to get to the somnolent Consta early to see how many kisses we can fit in before Q arrives to ride with us.

  “Let’s go out to Mouse World Theme Park this Saturday,” I blurt.

  Joy smiles, but gets cut short. “I can’t. I have a Gathering.”

  I elevate my eyebrows as far as they will go: Huh.

  She gives a sad shrug. “Just
the Kims and the Changs.”

  “So it’s true,” I say. “Everyone’s chosen sides.”

  Now it’s Joy’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

  “I have a Gathering on Sunday,” I say. “Just the Lims.”

  “Wow,” says Joy with dismay.

  “Whatever,” I say, and reel my beautiful girlfriend Joy in for a kiss. But it’s like kissing a ham.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  “I don’t know,” says Joy.

  I look at her.

  Joy draws a circle on her thigh. “Here’s us. Kissy-kissy. But outside the circle is all this endless bullshit. And it just sucks. It makes me feel icky and tainted.”

  “Like a forest covered in tar,” I mutter.

  “Huh?”

  “I said, ‘Me too.’”

  I cover the circle with my palm, then place her hand atop mine.

  “Can we agree not to let the endless bullshit get to us?” I say.

  “Can you agree that it sometimes will, though?” says Joy. “I mean, I can’t believe I have a king dick for a dad. I’m so ashamed of him. His pride. Fucking with our lives.”

  I raise the armrest and pull Joy closer. A brown leaf blows in from outside and lands on my thigh. The leaf’s cells have dried out and turned it into lace.

  How long do our parents hold power over us? I wonder. Is it only as long as we let them?

  As if in answer, Hanna finally texts back on my fartphone.

  You can have anything you want in my room, she says. Are you wearing my clothes too? Bad joke, I would totally support you if you had gender issues to work out

  Maybe the answer is forever: our parents hold power over us until they die and beyond.

  I promise myself to call Hanna soon.

  “Compose thine garmenture,” says a voice. “For here approacheth anon your humble servant Q with such light step that the snowflake herself wouldst grow heavy with envy at missing—”

  “Ask him who he likes,” I say to Joy. “Blindside him.”

  Joy pops her head out the window.

  “Who do you like?” she yells.