this date in Animal Crossing is sponsored by Fanta

girl! invites boy. to visit her island and he does. boy. arrives to a walkway of lilies and wonders if this meant girl!’s true name is Lily. girl! anxiously waits and wonders if her fascination for lilies is mistaken for obsession and wishes she could explain that her friend is in the hospital because her friend had been having a hard time with calculus 2 lately and was feeling as if she was failing her divine purpose to carry her mom’s ambition to use mathematics to find the lost city of atlantis so she tried to do a kickflip off the gym’s bleachers to prove to herself that she was still capable of something transcendent and she broke her leg and then wondered if she could have done the integral calculations to figure out the area underneath the arc she jumped and girl! adorned the walkway with lilies so she could show it to her friend in the hospital because it was her friend’s middle name. 

girl! uses the *bashfulness*  reaction to communicate all of this. 

boy. interprets it as anxiety for the date and uses the *encouraging* reaction to express his fondness for the walkway and his excitement for the night they’re about to spend and that he had never been on a date because he once saw a post explaining that Valentine’s Day was a made up holiday to sell greeting cards and reasoned that love itself was a grand conspiracy to sell Drake albums but the few words they’ve exchanged on a twitter thread about trading turnips turned his muscles into fizzing soda (Fanta, to be specific) which he was currently drinking irl. 

girl! interprets it to mean “let’s get on with the island tour already” and runs around in a few short circles as if to say “okay let’s go” and they both do. 

The island is an aesthetic mess but earnest in an ironic sort of way. It features randomly scattered custom textures of posters girl! once had in every room she’d been sentenced to throughout her childhood and segmented areas inspired by the different cultures of every country she’d ever been in and isolated pieces of objects and furniture that call back to elaborate inside jokes with her and her friends that have all devolved into eighteen layer meta jokes that forgot their initial foundations of truth. boy. feels an intimacy he had never felt before, as if he’s within someone’s carefully constructed heart and that maybe the altar to a birdhouse is for her cockatiel named General Smile For Me, Won’t Ya? and he was all she had in the fourth grade because she was branded an outcast at her new school for taking too many skittles at the welcoming ceremony and that maybe the overwhelming reliance on purple hues was because she was there in New Zealand in 2011 when the eldritch clouds looked to consume the sky but a divine violet broke through and shone a spotlight on a single blade of grass and somehow it felt as if that blade was excalibur and the monster fled and that maybe, maybe through some magic in the hidden tethers that bound the souls of all, maybe the inexplicable single can of Fanta on the corner of the island was for him. 

boy. uses the *pleased*  reaction and girl! responds with *sheepishness*

They visit girl!’s museum; they’ve both seen everything that could ever be there but tonight they are archaeologists discovering dinosaurs for the first time. But what is tonight? They have the thought at the same time. How pathetic and lonely one must be to spend their weekend looking for love within polygons in a children’s video game. They both make wishes underneath each shooting star that passes. Love? What an aggrandized word for two people hanging off the edges of their couches while their latent schoolwork misses their deadlines. They go bug catching and girl! purposely hits boy. with the net to be playful and boy. responds with *apologetic* and girl! does the same and they go back and forth with that for a while. They don’t know each other’s names, where the other lives, whether the other prefers olives on their pizza. girl! shows boy. her room and a drawing of a cockatiel is above her bed.

They go back to the walkway of lilies and they run around in short circles for a little bit because neither knows how to begin saying goodbye. 

boy. tries to use the *happiness* reaction to communicate “hey, this has been a really fun night and I don’t really know how seriously you took all this, and maybe I’m silly to think this more than one silly night of killing time but this meant something to me and I’m not really sure what but I guess I just want to figure out what that something is so I’d really appreciate it if we could do something like this again and maybe next time I can bring lilies, am I right to assume that your name is Lily, it’s pretty, and I’m sure your name, whatever it is, must be pretty, and I really want to show you my island next but I’m a little nervous because I’ve never shown it to anyone but I’m also not nervous because I think you’ll find all the purple familiar and I have a walkway of cosmos because my name is Cosmo and it’ll actually be spring over there because I live in New Zealand but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself and I’m sorry about that but I just really wanted to say that I think my polygons feel like soda pop and I think I’ll carry that with me for a while regardless of what happens next so there’s no pressure, I’m just happy and I hope you are too” but accidentally uses the *love* reaction instead.

girl! gets a sudden craving for Fanta.