Frankly in Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

Korean manhwa.
    “You marry Korean girl,” says Mom. “Make everything easier.”
    I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Easier for you.” I want to add, I could care less if she were Korean, but we’ve beat this horse before and it’s an incredibly durable creature.
    “Not just us,” says Mom. She’s indignant. “Easier for everybody. Korean girl, we gathering with her parents, we speak Korean together. More comfortable, more better. We eating Korean food all together, going to Korean church together, more better.”
    “So, more better for you.”
    “No,” says Mom, louder. “You will understand when you have baby. Okay: pretend you have mix baby, okay? People say, ‘Oh, what nationality this baby?’ Too headache for baby. For you too! Where baby belong? You think about baby.”
    So I think about baby. Not my baby, but specifically the future baby of Hanna and Miles. I’ve seen mixed babies before, and like all babies ever born, they’re adorable. Who could be so cruel as to reject a mixed baby?
    What the hell am I talking about? I hate that word, mixed . Just a couple generations ago people called French-Russian babies mixed . Now those babies are just called white . This word mixed is just brainlock messing with my head.
    I give up. “Okay, Mom.”
    “Anyway,” says Mom, calm again. “I know lot of nice girls.”
    I massage my temples. I’ve reached the end of the discussion, where there’s nothing left to do but say Okay, Mom.
    “Okay, Mom,” I say.

chapter 4
just bad enough
    I don’t really like calculus.
    But Calculus class? That’s a different story.
    Calculus class takes place at the ungodly hour of seven o’clock, before the rest of humanity is even conscious. It’s unreasonable. Mr. Soft knows this. That’s why he has a box of coffee ready, and a dozen donuts, two for each of us.
    Mr. Soft has the lights dimmed. He has quiet jazz playing on a sweet vintage boombox. Mr. Soft is one of the gentlest human beings I know.
    Mr. Soft’s full name is Berry Soft.
    “You want a little something special this morning, Frank?” says Mr. Berry Soft, very softly. “I brought my espresso machine today. More than happy to make you a cappuccino.”
    Our desks are arranged in a rough circle, with Mr. Soft tailor-sitting atop a stool, his glowing face underlit by an antique overhead projector literally from the year 1969 that helikes to draw on with wet-erase pens. No laptops, no phones. Just concepts and principles and longhand problem solving.
    “Just look for the stuff in common between the nominators and denominators,” says Mr. Soft, drawing by hand. “See what cancels out. Chop chop, flip these guys here, chop, and we’re left with the answer.”
    “What is the answer?” says Brit Means, who sits next to me.
    “I mean, it’s thirteen over five,” says Mr. Soft. “But that doesn’t really matter. What matters is the process.”
    Brit Means glows in the light of his wisdom. “The process,” she says. Then I realize she is nodding at me through narrowed eyes. I nod back without quite knowing what we’re nodding about.
    Like most of the other Apey boys, I find Brit Means a little weird and a little intense, and can’t help but be fascinated by her. She walks the halls like a time traveler noticing small differences created by minute shifts in quantum chaos. She can sometimes seem like a beautiful foreign exchange student from a country no one’s ever seen.
    Once, I found myself sharing the shade of a tree with her on a hot day just after school. I was waiting for Q; she was waiting for her ride home.
    “Most human structures are made out of wood,” she said to the tree. “Wood is trees is plants. Human clothes are cotton: plants again. We live in nature every day without realizing it. We live inside plants.”
    “Huh,” I said, secretly marveling at a sudden acute impulse to kiss her.
    Back in Calculus, Q passes the box of donuts around. Brit leans over to choose one,