Super Fake Love Song

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Super Fake Love Song Page 26

by David Yoon


  School was school.

  What was there to say about school?

  Lockers. Class bells. The pantheon of student archetypes.

  There were old friends, like Jamal and Milo.

  There were new ones, like Gunner and August. They joined the SuJaMi guild, forming what I supposed was the SuJaMiAuGu crew now. It was actually kind of nice. Also inevitable, really, since we all shared a ludicrous history that stuck us together like wet gummy bears.

  Gunner still bullied me, but now with body slams and bone-crushing high fives. I went to his games now and then, when they didn’t stir up too many memories. He came to my parties (bearing dice), and I went to his (bearing beer).

  Was he the Bully anymore?

  Was I the Nerd?

  Maybe forget that pantheon.

  I walked the halls, dressed neither in extinct dot-com swag nor Mortals-era black. I wore a plain tee shirt and plain jeans. My style had no name, because I was still figuring it out.

  Wherever I walked, I caught the Look.

  It was a different Look now, of course, always accompanied by whispers. I was sure everyone had some version of what they imagined had happened the night of the talent show. It didn’t matter. Interest would fade, like interest tends to do at school. The rumors would dry up. The Looks would cease. And I would slide back into obscurity from whence I had come.

  I would just be a guy named Sunny.

  There was Hot Girl Artemis, still at the locker next to mine.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” said Artemis.

  She’d been typing something on her phone. I stared at it, wondering if I could ask about her friend and fellow incompetent trackmate. Wondering if I even had the right to ask.

  “You, ah, ever hear from . . . ?”

  “Cirrus is fine,” said Artemis, bound by loyalty to never betray any report beyond the most trivial minutiae. “She says China is really pretty.”

  I pictured Cirrus’s mouth forming the words of that anodyne statement:

  China is really pretty.

  “This is on that AlloAllo thing?” I said.

  Artemis answered only with a nod. She knew she couldn’t give me Cirrus’s handle, and I knew I was in no position to ask for it.

  Gunner shattered the awkward moment by giving me a backslap strong enough to loosen phlegm from my lungs.

  “Hey, Gun,” I said.

  “Hey, Sun,” said Gun.

  He turned to Artemis for a slower, more sincere “Hey.” He ran a hand through his hair, clearly to see if she would notice, and was thrilled when she actually did.

  “Your fantasy football post was funny,” said Artemis.

  Gunner whipped forth twin finger pistols. “It’s just D&D for jocks, loll.”

  And Artemis laughed!

  Before I left, I reminded Gunner: “Livestream tonight.”

  Gunner knew I meant DIY Fantasy FX, and nodded. As I walked away, I saw him murmur to Artemis, “We broke a thousand followers this week—it’s pretty cool.”

  It was pretty cool. It might not be the kind of cool that other people would readily understand, and I was fine with that. It felt cool to me.

  The vice principal called out, “Brain train’s leaving Grand Mental Station, all aboard.”

  Mr. Tweed very gently encouraged me to take sanctuary in the music room to develop what he perceived to be true musical talents hidden amidst all the fakery, but I wasn’t ready to reenter that room yet.

  I needed a reason to make music, and my reason had flown away first class.

  * * *

  —

  At track, I stared wistfully at the girls’ team, willing Cirrus to appear alongside Artemis, then stared down at the clover. I flipped off the poor little plants with one finger, two, one, two.

  “Let’s go,” said Coach Oldtimer.

  “Yes sir,” I said, rising.

  “We’re hopping bleachers today,” said Coach Oldtimer.

  “Yes sir,” said Jamal.

  The three of us rose like old men on a cloudy day.

  Out of sheer boredom I found myself actually trying.

  I ran my long jumps and averaged five meters, a new personal best.

  Milo threw the shot put an incredible twenty-two meters, which nobody noticed because still nobody cared about shot put.

  Jamal got the high bar stuck between his legs while midair and abraded the groin muscle next to his right testicle.

  One evening, I suited up for a ride. Gray poked his head up from his basement staircase and asked if he could come, too, and of course I said yes.

  So Gray and I hit the streets together.

  “So, I start tomorrow,” said Gray.

  “The new job?” I said.

  Gray ratcheted his pedals backward a full revolution. “That’s next Monday. Tomorrow’s recording.”

  “Recording,” I said.

  “I’ve been talking with this married musician couple on Stalker Classifieds,” said Gray. “Legit veterans looking to experiment and create a new sound. They liked my reel.”

  “You have a reel?” I said.

  “It’s just one song,” said Gray.

  I wanted to jump a curb with joy. There was as yet no such thing as an elliptical stunt league, which was a baffling mystery to me. Maybe I would create one—everyone would find elliptical tricks extremely cool, perhaps at something like the X Games.

  We zipped past Cirrus’s condo, now her old condo. The vestibule had a little log-pile of forsaken newspapers.

  We reached Jamal’s house and made our way to the back garage, where Jamal, Milo, Gunner, and August already were.

  We parked our bikes, said hi, and toasted with Ramune sodas. Gray was immediately entranced by Jamal’s music workstation. The two of them began geeking out over crafting beats and patterns, then stringing those patterns together to make the epic, ever-evolving soundtrack of our evening in real time.

  Milo showed Gunner all the props we’d made. After asking dozens of technical questions, he enveloped an unsuspecting August in the bright green bolts of Raiden’s Spark. August retaliated with a shot from the Crucifix Slayer—an electroplated PVC crossbow able to launch marshmallows up to ten meters. And before we knew it, the four of us were having a battle in the herringbone courtyard.

  Jamal had a collection of fancy hats, so we wore fancy hats. As Dungeon Master, I dictated the parameters of the current sticky situation, and then we would work together—or not—to solve it.

  We were LARPing again.

  * * *

  —

  We were finally here.

  Fantastic Faire, where the Delgado Beach and Glass Harbor freeways meet, take Exit 28b toward Hardware Gloryhole Parkway.

  We crossed under a wrought-iron gate into a dusty canyon of hay bales on a sawdust floor. There was quite a queue to get in—people young and old, dressed as elves, orcs, Stormtroopers, Doras, SpongeBobs, anything and everything. We walked right by them all.

  “There’s a woman in a chain-mail bikini,” murmured Gray in awe.

  “Yap,” I said, striding.

  “That green guy is totally naked,” said Gunner with wonderment.

  “Nekkid!” said Oggy, his eyes so big the balls nearly ejected.

  Gray, Gunner, and Oggy had all agreed to come—and even dress up—to support me as duty-bound friends. They had no idea how marvelous this nerd prom actually was, or how much celebrity they would receive.

  I beamed with hometown pride, bless-this-mess. “Welcome to Fantastic Faire,” I said.

  We turned right, flashed our EXHIBITOR badges at a cigarette-smoking knight standing before a velvet rope, and—boom—passed right on through.

  Then we emerged into the Faire proper: a vast village of buildings from every style and e
ra—as long as those styles and eras never actually existed in reality—all under a canopy of crisscrossed lines of colorful antiqued bunting.

  I was a paladin in chrome craft foam, wielding a steam sword hissing mist*.

  Jamal was a wizard in a sand nomad’s robe covered in runes glowing green and able to shoot lightning from his fingertips*.

  Gunner was a crusty, leathery orc with an explosive mace in his green hand*.

  Gray was in an ornate suit of fabric armor, which he thought looked cool but actually meant he was a ranger, one of the most useless character types in modern gameplay*.

  Milo was a Spartan halberd soldier in nothing but a steel codpiece, fire-red cloak, and rock-hard exposed abs*.

  Oggy was medieval Oggy*.

  “Step back,” cried Jamal to the smiling crowd. He shot lightning at them, then retracted the wires to shoot again. “Make way!”

  Gunner played his part with surprising élan, snapping and cracking his mace at happily shrieking kids and Faire-goers shooting video.

  “Make way, I say!” cried Milo with a flourish of his cloak, causing women and men alike to suddenly thirst for cool water on such a sultry hot day.

  “Lady Lashblade demands our presence!” I cried, and sliced a white arc before a dad holding up a camera.

  The crowd loved us, and we loved them back.

  I was home.

  When we reached the stage, Lady Lashblade hugged us all (especially Milo, and twice). She was smaller than I thought, but no less powerful. Within minutes every wooden bench in the sunken outdoor auditorium was occupied with the most wonderful, most motley cast of characters all wearing their secret fantasies and desires quite literally on their sleeves.

  She introduced us one by one in a voice so big it needed no amplification.

  “Bless this space with your rapturous applause for the dark sorcerers of DIY Fantasy FX!” she roared.

  The crowd clapped and clapped. And then they grew quiet. Dragon pilots sat still. Death set his scythe down so people in the back could see. Daimyo parents shushed their little samurai children.

  They were waiting for the magic.

  So I threw the cover off a nearby barrel full of props. We’d spent every night perfecting all of them.

  One by one we thrilled the audience not just with fancy effects, but with instructions and expert tips on how to make their very own props that were Cheap, Readily available, Easy to assemble, Awesome in effect, Portable, and Safe.

  Magic for everyone with a little bit of money and time to spare.

  None of the props were for sale. We were here to give away knowledge, not things.

  After our presentation, we lined up for a group bow as Lady Lashblade handed out flyers with our name on it. Our name!

  “Make and believe!” chanted everybody.

  “You’re gonna get a bazillion subscribers after this, so be ready,” she crooned into my ear. “Bank some content and keep on banking it.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “When the first advertisers start coming, call me,” she said. “I’ll help you out. You guys have merch potential up the hoo-ha.”

  I wanted to cry. “Thank you so, so much, Lady Lashblade.”

  “Please,” she said. “Call me Destiny.”

  We signed flyers.

  We shook hands.

  We posed for selfie after selfie with fans old and new.

  Gunner sat at a little stump off to the side, talking excitedly about something as Oggy rested at his feet. Gunner was talking with a maiden in modern dress. The maiden was Artemis, and she looked happy. Gunner looked happy. I was happy for them both.

  Gray had doffed his regalia, declaring loudly that it was too friggin’ hot, adding god.

  After a solid hour, the crowd finally began moving on to explore the rest of the Faire. I had broken character long ago. I was a babbling little boy in a costume jumping up and down. We all were.

  “That was awesome!” I cried. “That was awesome!”

  Jamal stopped jumping abruptly and pointed. “Dude.”

  “That was awesome!” said Milo and Gray.

  “Dude,” said Jamal.

  I looked.

  In the trees beyond stood a sylph. There were lots of sylphs at the Faire, but this one was like no other.

  For she glowed.

  She glowed the purest blue.

  Light burst through from beneath her white bodice and white skirt. Behind her sprouted an impenetrable steel fan of radiating wing blades, each polished to intensify the luminescence. The wing blades were each tipped with crimson triangles of blood—this sylph had seen battle, yet not a stain marred her garment.

  The astonished crowd around her throbbed as she took a step beneath the branches of the tree and changed her hue to bright yellow, then orange. In the shade she was even more brilliant.

  I wanted to know how blinding she would be in the darkness of night. I had never wanted anything worse.

  She drew me toward her with a simple curl of outstretched fingers. I let my sword fall. I ignored the amazed cries of my compatriots.

  I went.

  “You look incandescent,” I said.

  “They’re actually LEDs,” said Cirrus. “In Yiwu you can get fifty thousand three-meter strands for a hundred bucks. I learned how to install and configure a controller on Nerdsweat.”

  “I know Nerdsweat,” I said.

  “These metal blades took forever to cut and form,” said Cirrus. “I almost chopped my fingers off. Then I almost burned them soldering on all the individual servo motors.”

  “Servo motors?” I said. “For what?”

  Cirrus gave me a look: You’ll see.

  “Let’s just say I watched a ton of NeoForge videos,” said Cirrus.

  “I know NeoForge,” I said.

  “You better,” said Cirrus. “Those guys follow you. Everyone follows you. Because they know no one else comes close to DIY Fantasy FX, led by one Sunny Dae.”

  I nodded with sheepish pride, because it was true. We had the most, best followers of anyone in the entire Do-It-Yourself Fantasy and Science Fiction Cosplay Special Effects Maker category. And on every video since the talent show, I was the host. The front man, you could say.

  “I’ve been exploring your strange little world,” said Cirrus. “It’s quite nerdy.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Obsessively nerdy,” said Cirrus. “The arguments people get into—Dumbledore versus Gandalf?”

  “Yap,” I said, like What can you do?

  “I wish you’d just shown me the real you when we first met,” said Cirrus.

  I paused. “Do you miss Rock Star Sunny?”

  Cirrus sucked her teeth and thought. “I mourned him. I did. One day I met him, and then one day he just went away.”

  “I’m so sorry about everything,” I said. “I am an idiot.”

  “But not all of him went away,” said Cirrus, catching my eyes with hers. “I saw him in your videos. Not Rock Star Sunny or Nerd Sunny, but a kind of pure Sunny-ness.”

  “A Sunny-ness,” I said, with a chuckle.

  “Anyway, I’m an idiot, too,” she said. “Because I’m here.”

  “I missed you.”

  “I missed you more,” said Cirrus.

  “Not as much as I missed you, though,” I said.

  “Shut up,” she said. “Listen. The Yiwu thing ended sooner than expected. Yay. I made my parents move us back here instead of some other new city.”

  I blinked with surprise. “Did they freak?”

  “Not as much as I hoped,” she said. “But I’m trying to get over that. They are who they are.”

  “You’re really back,” I said.

  “There’s that famous Californian endless summer I keep hearing about,” said
Cirrus.

  “I can show it to you,” I said.

  She took a step closer. “I liked your video. I liked it a lot.”

  I took a step, too. “Thanks.”

  “I’m not talking about Esmeralda’s Veil,” she said. “I’m talking about the other one.”

  What?

  “From my doorbell,” she said.

  Cirrus’s doorbell, with its little impassive video eye.

  She smiled, took a breath, and quietly sang.

  “You’re beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

  And I sang with her.

  “You’re beautiful, it’s true.”

  We kissed, and the beautiful nerds around us laughed and cheered.

  It was much too much attention for Cirrus, I guessed, because she activated individual servo motors to draw her wing blades down around us and shut out the crowd, creating a gleaming dark hood where she glowed and glowed, her light pinging back and forth from metal to metal.

  She closed those deadly sharp blades tight and offered no possibility of escape.

  I was doomed.

  Acknowledgments

  Greetings, adventurer! You have reached the Realm of the Acknowledgments. I hope you had a fun journey. I know I had a ton of fun creating it. For this is my fun book: my happy, goof-off, slap-silly story very intentionally designed to bring desperately needed joy and light to what was a very difficult and mind-bending year.

  Anyway, you know those people I thanked for Frankly in Love? They’re still here, and still wonderful. Our adventuring party includes:

  Jen Loja, our fearless, lawful-good level 27 warrior leader, along with her compatriot Jocelyn Schmidt.

  Jen Klonsky, a chaotic-good rogue with at least 19 charisma. I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to work with a publisher like you.

  The wise clerics Elyse Marshall and Lizzie Goodell of the publicity clan.

  All those within House Marketing: Her Benevolence Kara Brammer, the neutral-good ranger Alex Garber, the lawful-evil drow druid Felicity Vallence, and the loyal warlock apprentice James Akinaka. And we cannot forget Shannon Spann, a sorceress of unspecified level who can teleport between the worlds of TikTok and Rec-A-Reads at will.

  Felicia Frazier, lawful-good level 25 sorceress, and all her anointed wizards in sales.

 

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