Super Fake Love Song

by David Yoon

We signed away our souls as well as those of our unborn.

  “I recommend helping each other get strapped in,” said the operator. “Many couples find it a very intimate experience.”

  I held the harness open as Cirrus stepped into it. I tightened the straps around her thighs, her waist, her shoulders. I had never been this close to any girl before Cirrus. Cirrus was my first. The best first any boy could ever hope for.

  “Your turn,” said Cirrus.

  Cirrus put my harness on for me, and the operator was right. It was an extremely intimate experience.

  Finally we clipped our carabiners and held each other tight.

  “One,” said Cirrus. She had her arm around my shoulder.

  “Two,” I said. I had mine around hers.

  “Three!”

  We shoved off.

  Far below, the party bounced and screamed and vibrated. But up here it was strangely quiet. This situation probably demanded that we demonstrate our thrill with requisite performative screams and yelps, similar to when you ride a roller coaster.

  I discovered long ago, however, that roller coasters were more fun—contemplative, even—when I didn’t scream. A silent roller coaster ride gave me the illusion that I was a veteran dragon pilot expertly chaining together updrafts for speed. Aerial warlocks did not yell and whoop as they rode. The skies were simply theirs.

  Sunny, the Ultraviolet King.

  Cirrus, the Queen of Clouds.

  “You are so beautiful,” I said.

  “You are,” said Cirrus.

  Did she really truly believe such a thing? That we could be beautiful together? It was hard for me to tell all that was in those eyes of hers. Too much, flashing by all too quickly as we glided through the air: admiration and affection and wonder.

  And trust.

  I wanted every bit of her trust. Having her trust, I knew, was the highest honor.

  The cable vanished and we unfurled wings of milky translucence. Far ahead I spied a forest silent and dark but for a single will-o’-the-wisp promising to guide us through. To where?

  The party grew louder; the foam crash pit was coming at us fast. That gave us a reason to finally start screaming.

  “Whoaaaaa!” I said.

  “Kah ha ha ha!” said Cirrus.

  Without thinking we clasped each other tight. The impact smacked my helmet into Cirrus’s, close enough to inhale her every exhale as we drowned in blue cubes.

  Milo was right—this was not safe at all.

  The moment I helped Cirrus out of the pit, someone body-slammed me to a padded column.

  “So glad you’re here,” said Gunner with breath so strong a single stray spark could have lit it into a cone of blue flame.

  “I’m glad you’re here, too,” I said, coughing.

  Cirrus leaned in to join the scrum. “Thanks for getting the whole school to come.”

  “Snuthing,” said Gunner. He looked around, spotted Artemis, glanced at me and Cirrus, and sighed a melancholy sigh. “Snuthing at all.”

  “Your apron is so cute!” Artemis screamed, and led a perplexed Cirrus away.

  Cirrus glanced at me: I guess I’m going now?

  I shrugged back: You made a friend!

  I was chuckling, but stopped when I saw Gunner thumb his wet nose and wet red eyes over and over again. He fought away his look of open longing and palmed my shoulder. “You wanna drink, man?”

  Normally I would’ve responded with Alcohol is for victims, but now was not the time. “Why not,” I said.

  Gunner snapped his fingers in a tight boogie. “Drinking with my homie,” he sang, even though we were not actually drinking together.

  A vee of footballers went lumbering by, and Gunner called out to them:

  “Sss my homie Sunny!”

  The jocks instinctively heard this call, noted Gunner’s hierarchical supremacy, and drew close in order of rank. Normally Gunner would’ve had his henchmen pin me to a wall of lockers and pull my limbs off while his sidekick snapped selfies, but instead they began spontaneously supplicating.

  “What’s up, Sunny.”

  “I heard you rock the house.”

  “Yo, tell your girl Cirrus she knows how to throw a party.”

  “Sunny Dae.”

  They formed a ring and walked me back to the house, the Secret Service escort to my new presidency. Surrounding revelers witnessed our procession, recognized the shift in the social order, and adjusted their psychological models of the world.

  Out of all the onlookers, no one looked more amazed than three specific people:

  Milo, Jamal, and Oggy the sidekick.

  Together they stood in unlikely audience. I shrugged at them. Milo gave a little blank wave. Jamal’s face was frozen with disgusted admiration. Oggy folded tight little arms and whipped a dandelion to bits with his tail.

  At the house, Gunner led his squad through the obediently parting crowd to the drink table. I hung back to swing an arm out and steal Cirrus away from Artemis and four other girls, all of whom eyed me with this strange new cartoon-like desire.

  “What is happening?” I said once we were alone.

  Cirrus looked around her with amazement. “The party is running itself,” she breathed.

  “You did it,” I said.

  “We did it,” said Cirrus. “I just made friends. I didn’t even have to try.”

  We pressed ourselves together as more people arrived to flood the doorway.

  “Can you come see something?” I said. My chest pistoned with mischief and desire. “There was an incident.”

  Cirrus grimaced. “Oh god, what happened?”

  “Just hurry,” I said.

  I hustled her upstairs. Past the master bedroom—still empty—down the hall, and into her bare bedroom. I pressed the door shut behind us.

  “Sun, is everything okay?” said Cirrus, right before I kissed her.

  Instantly, her hands were in my shirt, searching for my heart. They found it. They gripped me hard enough for both of us to lose balance and fall just short of the bed with a glancing blow. Her elbow landed between my anterior ribs number four and number five.

  “Ow,” I said, and slammed her face down onto mine for another kiss.

  “Arr,” growled Cirrus. She held my head with vise-like hands to taste my tongue with hers. “Harr.”

  Our nostrils whistled with exertion and our teeth clacked as we feverishly ate each other up with bottomless appetite. I could do this all day and it would never be enough. At the same time, it was more than I could have ever imagined. How could that possibly be?

  I gasped. “I belong to you, Cirrus Soh. Okay?”

  Cirrus glowed with dark wondrous light. It was as if she’d been waiting for me to say those words for a long time. “I belong to you, too, Sunny Dae.”

  We kissed again—slower—to permanently etch this mark in time.

  A deep thud from below gave us pause. There was a cloud of laughter as the party resumed.

  “Your house is gonna get trashed,” I said.

  “You can’t trash an empty house,” said Cirrus.

  “Should we head back down?” I said.

  “Do we have to?” said Cirrus, and kissed me again. I found my lips traveling across her cheek, down under her hair to reach the nape of her neck, then circumnavigating her torso so that I could reach the rippled plains of her shoulder blade and back. I paused to breathe. I opened my eyes.

  I had tugged the scoop neck of her shirt down to reveal what to the untrained eye might seem like a very small, very symmetrical circular maze.

  “You have a little tattoo,” I said.

  “Oh my god, that,” said Cirrus, suddenly bashful. “I got it a long time ago, ha.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, in awe.

  Cirrus laughe
d against the back of her hand. “Take one guess as to what it is.”

  I could’ve said I don’t know. But I did know. I knew exactly.

  It was the labyrinth set into the floor of the Chartres Cathedral, in France. I knew about it from an adventure module I ran with Milo and Jamal back in our youth, titled the Curse of the Minotaur Gothique. The entire campaign dungeon was in the form of this ornate symbol; I had spent many hours mapping its every turn and straightaway by hand.

  A frisson of ecstasy vibrated all the way to my kidneys. I ran my thumb over the ink in her skin. I wanted not only to tell her what her tattoo was, but how I knew what it was. But there was no way I could do that.

  There was a whole side of me—the real side—that I now realized wanted out of the lockbox I’d made for it.

  “It’s the labyrinth from the Chartres Cathedral in France,” I said.

  Cirrus burst with joyful surprise. “Have you been? Isn’t it a-maze-ing?”

  My temples flooded with blood. I thought fast.

  “I just saw it in a library book once,” I said.

  And I also spent two months in Milo’s garage exploring all of its secrets and dangers.

  “Once upon a time I had these two friends,” said Cirrus. “This was in Paris. Their French was only slightly better than mine, which was caveman-rudimentary. Their parents moved around just as much as mine. None of us could see the point in immersing ourselves in a culture we were gonna ghost on anyway. Out of all my schools, those two friends were my favorite. Except you, of course.”

  I smiled.

  “We went on a field trip to the cathedral,” said Cirrus. “And we ditched the rest of the class and spent hours just walking the labyrinth. It was so beautiful and meditative. There apparently used to be a Minotaur in the middle.”

  I was bursting to tell her that most labyrinths from that period featured Minotaurs, and that although a Minotaur was a tough bastard with a default melee bonus of +6 for both greataxe and goring attacks, it could be defeated by going heavy on spells such as Psychic Scream or Mind Sliver that would exploit the creature’s weak intelligence score.

  But I held everything in. I realized I hated that I had to do this, and would keep having to.

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. I pushed my insistent heart back into place with a hard swallow.

  “Well, now you do,” said Cirrus.

  * * *

  —

  We cleaned up in the party’s aftermath later that evening. Milo and Jamal and Gunner stayed, too.

  Gunner did most of the cleaning. Gunner, it turned out, was a neat freak. Only I knew where such obsessiveness came from: his spotless, dark house, his sneering father. I stepped aside and high-fived him as he moved from room to room with still-drunk determination while his sidekick slept oblivious in a corner.

  Good job, Gunner.

  A house with no furniture was remarkably easy to reset, even after a party, and made me want to live in a blank space like one of those minimalist enthusiasts in Tokyo.

  I thought about the white plastic containers in my room. Didn’t they form a minimal space of sorts?

  So maybe not with the minimalism.

  Milo and Jamal helped pack up the kitchen. Milo whistled maniacally—the chorus of “Beauty Is Truth”—as he wrapped leftovers, and after two straight minutes Jamal loudly ripped a sheet of aluminum foil and begged him to stop.

  “Was I whistling?” said Milo.

  “Yes,” Cirrus and I yelled with a laugh.

  Cirrus looked at me, then gently touched her gaze upon Jamal, then Milo, before wrinkling her nose: Isn’t all this great?

  I smiled back. It really is.

  Soon the house and outside lawn were clean, the rental guys were sent off with generous tips, and it was time to head home. Milo and Jamal vanished on their bikes; I put my own ten-speed into Gunner’s trunk and got ready to drive his incapacitated self home.

  Cirrus mewled with joyful frustration. “Why does the night have to end?”

  “Astrophysics,” I said.

  She didn’t blow me a kiss—Cirrus wasn’t that person—but she did walk backward with her eyes locked on mine long enough to fall butt-first into a plant, which was better than any blown kiss.

  “Careful,” said a voice. Her insomniac neighbor, staring with eyes gone white.

  “Nyang,” said Cirrus, creeped out. She fled behind her front door.

  I drove Gunner home. Before he left, he leaned his big meaty elbow on my shoulder, causing my bicycle wheels to buckle beneath me. His eyes were slits at this point. “You are awesome,” he said. “Cirrus is awesome. You guys are awesome together.”

  “We are, huh,” I said.

  “Why’d you think you had to pretend?” he said with a petulant growl. “You din’t have to pretend, silly.”

  I freshened my grip on the handlebars. “Because I’m stupid, Gunner.”

  “In that case,” said Gunner, heaving himself off, “I wish I was as stupid as you.”

  * * *

  —

  In the night shadows of the junipers I changed into my civvies. They felt cold and baggy and uninspired. I missed Gray’s clothes. This was a silly exercise, because I’d just change into my pajamas in a matter of minutes anyway, but I still did it just in case I ran into Mom and/or Dad. An ounce of prevention!

  At home, I climbed upstairs, pulled the Ring of Baphomet off my finger, used it to crown my tiny desk knight as king. My phone played its two-chord rock riff—jhk jhk—and I found myself missing my old Elf shot the food! ringtone.

  I was all mixed up.

  I want to be with you all night, wrote Cirrus.

  Me too, I wrote. I guess there’s always school tomorrow

  Not the same, she wrote.

  Not the same at all

  Are you sleepy?

  Nope, I wrote.

  Good, she wrote.

  She blew bubbles for a moment, then sent a strange message:

  WHYSOHCIRRUS HAS INVITED YOU TO

  PANOPTICON LIVE

  I understood immediately.

  One sec, I wrote.

  I slinked downstairs without a sound. I found the headset charging on the kitchen counter. I slipped the goggles on like a hat, semaphored my way through account setup using the hand wands, and defined an invisible play space in the dark living room.

  Then my eyes

  filled

  with

  sparkles.

  Sylphs

  I find myself floating among stars. Below me there is a cluster of dark green malachite set into an infinite sheet of pure lapis lazuli: an island alone in the night sea, lit by the single white spotlight of the quarter moon.

  I float down into the forests there, where amber lights guide me. The air becomes close. Sounds of dripping rainwater and creaking wood.

  We are young sylphs, still lacking wings and earthbound. Her wrapped crown of berries and lichen glows with greenish-white bioluminescence, skin a butter-pecan cream, eyes black onyx. My own hands glow a dogwood pink fading to chartreuse at the extremities. When we approach each other, our colors blend and brighten.

  The fireflies of the forest light a path, which we follow. There is the puzzle of the hidden red rocks, which is easy enough to complete. There is the stone lock. We rotate it to reveal a tunnel leading to a cave of gems. More puzzles await within. She shows me how to solve them all.

  At the center of the island is the tree god, who blesses us with a shower of leaves, and in twin novae of scatterlight we are reborn with long vellum wings. We can do anything now.

  Sing, she says. She places me on a colossal tree stump ten thousand rings old. She multiplies herself into an audience of hundreds, each lit a different color, waiting for me to begin. I only got to hear you sing once, she says. I want to hear yo
u sing again.

  I have dozens of voices at my disposal. But I choose to be default, normal, and my voice weaves through the impenetrable forest canopy, loops a star or two, and filters its way back down. The audience glows in unison now: white and blue and green and orange.

  We kiss in that awkward way avatars do: the polygons of our faces glancing off each other, never really touching. The world powers down, stripping itself of light, then texture, then the glowing wireframe underpinning it all, finally leaving only darkness.

  90%

  Two weeks until the talent show.

  I felt light. I felt like gravity had lessened just a bit. I didn’t know how else to explain my lengthening stride as I walked. The ease with which I sped my bike toward Cirrus’s condo every morning with her daily call of Let’s ride!

  Every morning I jump-mounted my ten-speed, no doubt damaging soft tissues in the process, but I was starting to care less about things like that. I had neglected to wear my sleep cap twice already, for instance.

  Every morning I ducked behind the Cernoseks’ junipers and emerged anew, clad in, say, a torn baseball tee and plaid ska pants with chains that served no purpose other than to sparkle and clink with each step.

  I was feeling a momentum that would soon push the talent show far behind me in the past, bringing me finally into a clear future where I could be me and only me.

  My momentum rose in inverse proportion to Gray’s posture, which shrank with resignation as he accepted Dad’s nonstop mentorship in corporate client services. Gray was normalizing. He was accepting.

  In the hallways at school, I would see Gunner leading his squadron of meat-brains hither and yon, aimlessly patrolling. Where they once sniffed at me like hyenas, now they each gave me the nod, starting with Gunner and rippling down each wing of their delta formation:

  He’s cool.

  Late afternoons and evenings were the trickiest, because that’s when I would have to reject Cirrus even though every nerve in my body screamed to be with her.

  “I want to hang out and watch you guys practice,” she would say.

  “I want the show to be a surprise,” I would say.