by David Yoon
At the top of the stairs I jumped, clamped my arms around the banister, slid silently down with my socks on the side trim rail. I loved this stupid grand staircase. I retracted any statements I might have made in the past—I now loved all stairs everywhere.
“Bye,” I called.
No reply. I looked. Mom and Dad ate standing up at the kitchen island, hunched over their screens without a word, work-work-working on a Saturday morning. Other parents barbecued or went to the movies or pursued their ding-dang hobbies on the weekends. I had no idea what my parents’ hobbies even were.
Did Mom and Dad still hold the magic, standing over their plates like they were now?
I could probably change into Gray’s clothes right here, and they wouldn’t even notice. But I didn’t dare risk it. The last thing I needed was questions, and then a potential offhand comment to Jane or Brandon Soh.
As soon as Sunny met Cirrus, he started wearing Gray’s clothes for attention.
Like mating plumage!
How adorable!
Et cetera. No.
I called to them again. “Bye?”
Mom glanced up with the blank awareness of a hypnosis victim hearing a bell. “Bye, sweetie.”
“Make good choices,” droned Dad without looking up.
“Already have,” I said, and left.
But have I? I thought.
Since there was no old storage shed between my house and Cirrus’s, I figured the juniper lining the side entrance of the Cernoseks’ house would do. Although there were so few cars (and even less foot traffic) on the spotless, wide streets of Rancho Ruby that I probably could have changed out in the open. I had gotten my whole switcheroo routine down to sixteen seconds (PR).
When I knocked on Cirrus’s door, I was huffing and puffing even though I had barely expended any calories on the bike ride over.
Huffing and puffing, heart pounding.
The door opened to reveal Cirrus in a professional-looking black apron, the kind you see chefs wearing on cooking shows. She had fine white dust on her perfect nose, in her perfect hair. “I just put in Brazilian pizza.”
“What’s Brazilian pizza?” I said.
“We’ll see,” said Cirrus, with a shrug. “I gotta pee. Come meet me upstairs!”
She bounded away two steps at a time with astonishing strength and speed.
I stepped into the condo, which was already perfumed with yeast and garlic. I slipped off my shoes. My feet rested on white tile. I felt compelled to line my shoes up with the other pairs impeccably arranged there.
I peered around. My eyes blipped. I don’t know what I had expected Cirrus’s house would look like, but it was not this.
I knew Cirrus had lived all over the world, so I had imagined mind-boggling knickknacks and gadgets and foodstuffs the likes of which we provincial Americans could never even think to search for with our limited bumpkin query terms.
I knew her parents were away a lot for work and were also fairly vivre-et-laisser-vivre, so I imagined Cirrus had free rein to do things like graffiti an entire wall with award-winning artwork or set up a professional DJ stack in the living room or keep a clever family of potbellied pigs in luxurious dedicated quarters.
But there was none of that. All I could see was white.
The carpet was white, the walls were white, the ceiling was white, everything white and blank but the furniture and picture frames.
Except there was no furniture or picture frames.
There was nothing.
A television sat marooned on the floor with only a sad cable modem as its companion.
I nudged open a door. There was a bathroom. Its toilet still had the factory label marketing stickers on the ceramic tank. In the sink was a hammer, a measuring tape, and a dried-out to-go cup. The shower stall was stuffed full of flattened cardboard moving boxes.
Cirrus had gone upstairs, so up I went. More white carpet. There was what looked like a master bedroom—a naked mattress atop a box spring atop the bare floor—and there was a walk-in closet full of clear boulders of discarded bubble wrap.
Finally, I came to a door with a strangely corporate-looking nameplate nailed into its surface. Si-ra-seu, read a trio of letters in Korean. Cirrus.
I knocked. The door cracked open. I quickly performed the scan that was the tradition of teenagers the world over, searching for exclusive, bedroom-only details of her personality.
But her room was as empty as the rest of the house. She didn’t even have a dresser—just stacks of folded clothes lining one wall. There was a shoebox with a tea candle melted on top. That was it.
“Hey,” said Cirrus behind me.
She had removed her apron to reveal Ruby High sweats and an old cami top, and she looked radiant. She watched me with an eager sort of look.
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” I said as goofy as I could.
“Thank you,” said Cirrus with real sincerity, letting my joke whiz by. “Come in.”
I came in. The slight change of perspective did not offer any additional visual information. But the room smelled wonderful. Vanilla and soap and stale musky air.
The place smelled like sleepyhead, and I instantly wanted to press my nose into her scalp and simply inhale.
What followed was the dumbest conversation ever had by two people, but for me it was the bestest.
“So what you got going on today?”
“Nothing.”
“Sit, sit.”
“This carpet is so soft.”
“I love Saturdays.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I could be.”
I didn’t even bother attributing who said what, because it hardly mattered. What mattered was that I was sitting in Cirrus’s white room on her white carpet, whose brand-new white fibers clung to my black joggers, causing Cirrus to fuss.
“It’s all over you,” she said, laughing. She patted my legs with her hands.
I laughed, too. “It’s like your whole house is a giant shedding pet.”
Pat pat pat. Her scalp this close to my nose.
Cirrus felt different, here in her room. She moved around more, and faster. She felt more playful. She dug her fingertip into the plush carpeting and began drawing lines.
“I was thinking of putting a dresser here, a desk there, although I always study in bed,” she said, busily drawing with her whole body. “Nightstand, hamper here, posters and art prints and photos up on the walls everywhere. What do you think?”
“I think that would be sweet,” I said, examining her lines.
Cirrus stopped moving. “I haven’t had anyone in my room for over three years.”
“You just moved here three weeks ago,” I said.
“No, but it’s the same room wherever I go,” she said. “You know?”
“No,” I said, laughing.
“I just,” she said, carefully now. “For the first time in a long time, I’m psyched to decorate my room. Just go wild at Bed & Bath Vortex. I wanted to invite you over yesterday, to be honest.”
“Then why didn’t you?” I said, admiring the perfect bevel of her right eyelid.
“I know my room is not normal,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I’m not normal.”
My room is not normal either, I wanted to say, but quelled the urge.
“Normal means ‘boring’ in English,” I said.
“I’ve been ashamed of my room for so long,” said Cirrus. “It’s like a bad habit. Then I meet you. And you’re just so you. I want to be more me, too.”
By now you already know I began blushing and becoming hyperthermal. It was the nicest—and most dreadful—thing anyone had ever told me.
“So you sit at home cooking huge meals all by yourself on the weekends?” I said.
“It’s something to do,” said
Cirrus. She abruptly leaned over as if doing a leg stretch and retrieved a tall square tin.
“Anyway,” said Cirrus. She drew in a breath, held it, and exhaled. She held the tin between her open palms.
“This is me,” she said.
ROYAL VICTORIA TOP CHOICE BISCUIT
PRODUCT OF SINGAPORE • SẢN PHẨM CỦA SINGAPORE • PRODUCTO DE SINGAPUR • 新加坡产品 • 싱가포르의 제품 • PRODUK SINGAPURA
“Hi, Cirrus,” I said to the tin.
Cirrus looked nervous. She looked like she had rehearsed this tin ceremony just for me, which I found simultaneously confusing and flattering. She let out another quick breath.
She opened the tin and drew an acorn from within.
“This was from my favorite park in Japan,” she said. “I don’t remember what city or when, really, but I remember it was super humid and bugs were singing all around me, and it was the first time I had red bean ice cream.”
“Very cool,” I said, admiring the acorn. Although really, it could’ve been an acorn from this country, or most any other country with oak trees.
“And this,” she said, “is a spare nut for that big bridge in Sydney. Harbor whatever. It’s huge. That was from my first summer Christmas Down Under.”
I hefted the heavy nut. It was as big as a hockey puck.
“Here’s a feather from one of those birds in Hawaii,” she said.
I held the feather to the light. “Which bird?”
“The details are just details,” she continued. “I remember waiting for a bus. And there it was: my first double rainbow ever. Then this feather blew right into my lap.”
Soon we had a collection of objects in front of us: a key-chain light, a rock, a dried leaf, a cheap plastic car. Objects so ordinary that they could’ve come from anywhere or nowhere. A safety pin, a carved toothpick. She had arranged them in a specific order, which I quickly realized was chronological. The sight of these little trinkets made me inexplicably sad.
“These are all my firsts from everywhere I’ve ever lived,” she said, gazing at them.
I gazed at them, too. “All together they’re like this really cool museum piece.”
“I’m terrified you think this is weird,” she said, not looking at me.
“I don’t,” I said. “It’s not.”
“Nothing about me is normal,” she muttered. “My whole childhood was not normal.”
“You forget how weird human beings can get,” I said. “I don’t think your weirdness measures up to even the most basic cat hoarder or compulsive coin swallower.”
“No, but sometimes my charm box makes me happy,” she said. “Sometimes the charms just look like a pile of crap. Because it’s crap, isn’t it. It’s pathetic, isn’t it.”
I placed two fingers on her shoulder. “People fill entire houses with pathetic piles of crap to gild their lives with the illusion of meaning. Thousands of hours picking and choosing, thousands of dollars shopping. Everyone is pathetic. Everyone suspects life is meaningless, that there is nothing after death, and that all our fancy culture and history and society is just this grand illusion we choose to perpetuate every day. Your way of performing the grand illusion is just more thrifty, and space saving.”
The laugh worked. She blinked up at me with a smile.
“Even when you’re cynical, you make me feel better,” she said. “Or maybe because you’re cynical.”
“Cynical detachment is my way of dealing with the futility of the universe,” I said.
“Oh, Sunny Dae,” she said.
Her phone buzzed with three AlloAllo alerts in a row, and she dismissed them all, silenced her device, and slid it far across the carpet.
“I have four hundred friends from twenty different countries all stuffed into my phone,” said Cirrus. “But I’ve never shown any of them my charm box until you.”
I was bursting with the urge to just tell her the truth and be done with it. Sing a song of the repentant fool on a broken lyre. But the burst burst, and left only the usual fear.
“I’ve spent every day since grade school terrified of everyone and everything,” I said. “I’ve never told anyone this. Because I’ve been too terrified to.”
This was the truest thing I’d ever told Cirrus.
She tilted her head in genuine disbelief. “But why?”
“I’m not as confident as I seem,” I said.
“You got me fooled,” she said with a sly smile.
From the tin she fished out a blood-red coin. Not a coin—a guitar pick.
“I stole this from your room,” she said, and laid it down alongside her other charms. It became just another object among objects. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“It’s yours,” I said quickly.
“You don’t need it?” she said.
“I have multiple,” I said.
“Right, because when you’re up there rocking out, you might drop it and then what would you do,” said Cirrus. She gazed at me. “Duh.”
I could tell what she was doing. She was picturing me onstage.
I felt a rising bolus of dread. “Yeah,” was all I could say.
“Like at the talent show,” she said.
The bolus came back up. “The talent show,” I said.
“They put up posters,” said Cirrus. “I just assumed, since you guys have been practicing. Probably small potatoes for a band like yours, though, ha.”
She gave me the Look. It was the longest Look ever.
My eyes suddenly flooded with terror—and excitement. And lights.
Lights: beams of cyan and magenta and yellow, rising and falling. Hot air stinking of 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.
&n
bsp; 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.