by F. C. Yee
Somewhere along the line he’d picked up the habit of talking about routine things while gently kissing me, and it drove me wild like nothing else. Despite my frustration with him, I gave in to temptation and ran my hands down his back, using both of them to seize his perfect, wondrous—
“Ahem.”
We looked over to the corner of my room.
Where Yunie had been sitting in my desk chair the whole time.
Quentin and I scrambled in front of her gaze. He found one of my hoodies on the floor and pulled it over his head. It was too big for him and he’d put it on backward, but at least he was covered up.
Even though he was the more naked one, I patted myself down to make sure I wasn’t exposed. I looked like I was searching for missing keys. My friend was enjoying our tango of embarrassment immensely.
“Your mom let me in,” she said. “Plus I texted you a bunch.”
She didn’t need an excuse to be here alone. Yunie and I had an open-door policy between our houses and parents. She’d waited in my room for me tons of times before.
A casual observer might have thought I was mortified that my best friend nearly saw me make out with my boyfriend like a couple of lake boaters during Spring Break. They would have been right, but it was more about the fact that I’d test-driven a power right in front of her. One was awkward, the other was dangerous.
Ever since I’d confessed to Yunie about my . . . situation, I’d kept the supernatural as far away from her as possible. Zero tolerance quarantine. No contamination.
I had a reason for my paranoia. Back when the original jailbreak from Diyu occurred, a particularly dangerous yaoguai named the Six-Eared Macaque had kidnapped her to use against me. Yunie didn’t remember it, but for me it was the worst moment of my life. The mere thought of the yaoguai laying its hands on her was enough to make my teeth crack.
Afterward, I’d made Quentin and Guanyin swear to keep a mundane dead zone around her. No magic, no demons, and no powers near Yunie. The possibility of our dealings causing her harm made me sick. So I was extra-peeved at Quentin now, for the way we’d made our entrance. We could have taken out her eye or something in our tiny state—two superpowered pellets from a BB gun.
Yunie tilted her head. “You can shrink?” she said. “It doesn’t look anything like it does in the movies. It’s got like a . . . you’re receding into the distance very fast quality, only you’re not going farther away.”
“That was the first time,” I said. I gave Quentin a glower. “It’s not happening that way again.”
“You know, if you’d just stayed small, you two could have finished your business without me even knowing,” she said with a giggle. “How’s Guanyin?”
The two of them had never met. But once Yunie realized how much I flipped out over her proximity to the supernatural, she started using it to intentionally push my buttons. She was too smart and too good of a friend to insist on getting personally involved with the supernatural; she’d told me as much that day in her basement. But she was also too good of a friend to pass on riling me up by making statements of sly curiosity, probing closer and closer to the worlds beyond Earth. Which I should have expected from her, the little troll.
“Guanyin’s fine,” I said.
Yunie chuckled. She’d successfully poked the bear; no need to be cruel about it. “I came over to talk plans for the weekend trip, but it’s getting kind of late. I don’t think we really need a plan. We’ll just follow my cousin around and figure things out on our own if she’s busy.”
This older cousin of hers was the reason why we were allowed to go on this campus visit over the long weekend without adult supervision in the first place. To hear it, Ji-Hyun Park was a super-woman, currently slicing her way through pre-med at the most prestigious college in our state like a hot knife through butter. Yunie had spotted an opportunity in her aunt’s relentless bragging about the next soon-to-be doctor in the family.
Some weeks ago, my friend had floated the idea to our parents that combining a girls-only campus tour with a stay in Ji-Hyun’s apartment over a four-day weekend would help us learn about the school. The experience would improve our characters as we got to witness an upstanding older woman in the real world ignoring the temptations of college life while adhering strictly to a high-status academic path.
That was the surface story. My parents had bought into it hook, line, and sinker. But my alarm bells went off based on the rack of new going-out tops I’d spotted in Yunie’s closet afterward.
“A college party’s not going to kill you,” she’d said when I’d confronted her about our true plans. “If anything, this is a good opportunity to blow off steam. No demons or magic or any of that. I told you a while ago that I hated seeing you so stressed out, and instead of relaxing you got wound up even tighter. And we are going for an important campus tour. During the day. That’s not a lie.”
I knew why Yunie was leaning so hard on this. It was our chance for one last adventure, the two of us. She knew I couldn’t afford to go traveling any great distance with her. Grand tours of Europe or South America like the ones some of our classmates took were out of my reach. And the resource disparity between our families always made Yunie more uncomfortable than it did me. So in her mind, she saw this as the perfect way we could both explore new territory, hand in hand.
That was how she’d sold me on a vacation, albeit one that was still focused on college. You could take the girl out of the high school, but you couldn’t take the dork out of the girl.
I was still both wary and guilty about the trip, though, to the extent that I’d told Quentin and Guanyin the same version that my parents got. We were going for academics only. No one else but Yunie knew about the partying we’d likely do at night.
“How long did we keep you waiting?” I said.
“I don’t know.” Yunie held up her phone. “I’ve been too busy playing this game you made to notice the time. How many levels does it have?”
“They’re procedurally generated on the client, so . . . infinity?”
She shook her head. “That’s evil. People are going to waste their lives trying to beat this thing.”
The game that I’d made as coding practice wasn’t very complicated. You played as a little monkey trying to hop between clouds. If you fell, you had a limited number of special items you could use to save yourself, the most common being an iron pole that extended all the way to the pits of death below and propped you back up to safety.
Rutsuo Huang, our school’s resident CompSci wiz, had to look over my shoulder a lot while I developed it. Over the course of our hangouts in the computer labs, I got to see a new side of my quiet, unassuming classmate, the one that had utter contempt for a half-assed job. I could have made the game in much less time if he hadn’t scowled most of my early code into oblivion.
“I never fixed the randomization,” I said. “It’s too hard, and you end up dying every other round. I don’t think anyone’s actually going to play it for real.”
“Uhh, I don’t know about that,” said Yunie. “This says you’re number ninety-six out of one hundred on the app store.”
The three of us gathered around her phone. Sure enough, Monkey King Jumps to Heaven was right there on the bottom of the chart.
“You have to have a ton of users to get any rank at all,” Yunie said. “This is a pretty big deal.”
“Woo!” Quentin shouted, raising his fists into the air. “I’m going to be famous!”
“You’re already famous, you dip,” I said. “I learned who you were through one of the oldest stories still being told. You are literally legendary.”
Quentin grinned. “Yeah, but now I’m going to be New Economy famous. I’ve gone multi-platform.”
I flipped up the hood over his face.
6
Yunie couldn’t stay for dinner despite my mother’s impassioned pleas. She had a prior commitment at her aunt’s, and blood marginally won out in that scenario. But Quentin knew he h
ad to stick around. There was no way in hell that my mother was going zero-for-two on feeding her favorite people in the world.
He sat next to me at our kitchen table while Mom cooked and I brought her up to speed on what happened at school. Today had been so hectic that my promotion on the volleyball team felt like ancient history. It had already petrified. I had to dig the story out from the surrounding layers carefully for my mother, without getting any residue of gods or demons on it.
“Captain?” she said, tossing a pan of string beans into the air and catching them over the burner without looking. “What’s so good about that?”
Yes, she was doing the denigrate my child’s accomplishments compared to other people’s kids thing. But in her defense, the last time she’d heard the term used in relation to one of my sports teams was in grade school gym class, where each kid took turns being the “captain” so everyone would get a chance to feel in charge. It made very little sense on the days we did Parachute.
“It’s a big deal,” Quentin reassured her. “Varsity captain is a position with a huge amount of prestige. It looks great on college applications.” He sat next to me at the table and placed a hand on mine like we were announcing a newborn.
Such a public gesture of affection and commitment made me flinch. “Why are you talking like you’re the expert?” I said, snatching my hand away. “What were you ever captain of?”
“Nothing.” He grinned. “That’s why I was such a horrible person when I was younger.”
I thought back to the story of Sun Wukong. You could have argued that he was technically the head of Team Xuanzang on their quests to find the holy sutras, with Sandy and Pigsy as the subordinates he regularly trod underfoot. But beating the freshmen into submission wasn’t a leadership style I wanted to emulate. Despite what had happened today with the yaoguai.
“It’s going to help a lot when you’re searching for a job, too,” Quentin said. “Companies want to recruit leaders out of college. It’s the number one thing they look for.”
He’d oversold the concept a little, jumping a couple of steps. I didn’t know how he came upon that factoid. “Jobs are like . . . ugh. That’s thinking too far ahead right now.”
“You don’t need to worry about what happens after school,” Mom said over her shoulder. “If you can’t find a job, Quentin will take care of you.”
Quentin’s eyes went wide, like a boxing referee who noticed both fighters were suddenly holding knives. He waved his hands at me behind my mother’s back to show he didn’t share her opinion on the matter.
I took a breath through my nostrils so deep I could have made a wish on a birthday cake. By the time I counted to three and exhaled, the dangerous moment had passed. It was okay. Another one of my mother’s stupid, old-fashioned statements. Not worth picking a whole fight from scratch about.
I felt proud of myself. I was the embodiment of serenity and forgiveness.
“No one has considered whether or not I have time to be captain,” I said. “You know. Given my other extracurriculars?” I made a hint-hint face at Quentin.
“If it’s valuable, then make the time,” Mom said. A mouthwatering bloom of garlic and ginger filled the air as she added the aromatics to the pan. The smell would last in our cramped, unventilated kitchen until tomorrow. “You always have more time than you think, lying around in little bits. Back when your father and I were opening the furniture store, we were so busy that we used to make schedules of what we were doing in fifteen-minute . . .”
She paused. I looked away. I’d seen this before; the sentence wasn’t going to be finished.
The experience of those days, of the unmitigated disaster that was my father, and really my mother, too, going into business for themselves, had surfaced in the disguise of a wistful memory. The clash of feelings caused my mother to short-circuit.
I might have had an American set of values to help relieve the pressure caused by the tragedy. Stuff happens. People change. TV’s too good right now to care.
But to her, what had happened to our family was a fermenting cauldron of bitterness that would only grow thicker and fouler over time. It would be there forever. Asian parents did not have the widest psychological toolset.
Quentin tried to break the silence. “You know, you could make things easier for yourself by delegating. Create an assistant captain position.”
Yeah right. He’d seen how well that worked with Guanyin. Trying to command someone who’d been passed over for your job was only a good idea on paper. The other seniors who’d been playing the sport way longer than me would looove taking my orders. And forget the young’uns. This incoming crop of sophomores and freshmen barely knew which side of the net was theirs.
And secondly, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Mom’s mood had infected me, ruining my short-lived moment of tranquility, and the two of us had regressed into the emotional state we’d spent most of the last five years in. Mother and daughter were both sullen cocoons now. Who knew when we’d emerge. It certainly wouldn’t be this evening.
Quentin made a little inward sigh when he saw my face and moved on to safe questions he already knew the answer to. “Can I help with anything?” he called out to Mom.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. She tipped the beans onto a plate and set them down in front of us, the steam wafting in front of Quentin’s face like a veil. Then she paused in front of the rice cooker.
“Forgot something?” I said.
“No, I . . .” She shook her head. I could hear her jab the paddle roughly against the insides of the chamber as she filled a large bowl.
Ugh. Now we were in angry chore mode. The sound of dishes being passive-aggressively put away, the roar of an unnecessary vacuuming, was pretty much the soundtrack of my childhood. Mom turned around and, sure enough, her face was slightly red. She stopped again halfway to the table.
But then her hands trembled. I’d never seen that before. Something was very wrong.
“I’m fine,” she said in response to a question no one had asked out loud. She tried to put the food on the nearest flat surface. The bowl tipped off the edge of the counter and crashed to the floor.
“Mom!” I knocked over my chair in my attempt to reach her before she collapsed.
“I’m fine,” she declared, this time in a loud, strong voice. But she thumped hard down on the floor, like a child refusing to walk anymore. She took the landing so hard on her wrist that I was certain she’d broken it.
Quentin was gone. I knew without needing to look that he’d vaulted over the table to get help.
I wouldn’t have seen him go anyway. My vision had tunneled. My whole world had shrunk down to the size of my mother in my arms, and it was fragile and small and shaking, and I was going to sit here and cradle it in my arms and pray to every god in existence that it would be okay.
7
“Genie, I’m fine,” mom said.
She would have looked pretty stupid saying that, had we been inside a hospital room, with her lying on an incline bed, an IV stuck in her pale, thin arm. But we weren’t. Instead, the two of us were sitting on dull tartan chairs in front of a pile of Runner’s World magazines in the lobby. We hadn’t even made it into the ER proper.
The scattered handful of other people in the waiting area held ice packs to their faces or cradled swollen ankles. Their presence made me indignant. Get up on out of here with your superficial injuries distracting the staff from my mother. You assholes aren’t related to me.
“You are not fine,” I said. “You had a hypertensive episode.”
“A likely hypertensive episode,” she said, as if that word bolstered her argument instead of mine. “You heard the EMT people.”
“That means you’re not fine! You could have had a stroke!”
“Keep your voice down.” She looked around at the other patients apologetically.
I hated that so much. The little gestures of hers that showed how warped her priorities were. How low her own well-bein
g fell on that list. I was so pissed off at her. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a checkup.
Whenever I’d pestered her about her health, the answer was always the same. I can’t afford to see a doctor. She’d let years of aches and pains build up in her body, untreated, and now an actual life-threatening issue had settled in there, claiming squatters’ rights.
Like we can afford THIS! I wanted to shout at her. She was so worried about money? How much did she think it cost to ride an ambulance to the hospital at night for an emergency? Like any amount of nickel and diming would make up for the incoming bill. My mother might have been willing to gamble with her health, but she didn’t understand the basic rules of the game.
“See?” she said, holding up her arm and flexing it. “I thought I hurt my wrist, but it’s completely fine now. And they wouldn’t put me in my own room because I had no bad signs once we arrived. This is a big fuss over nothing.”
Before I could launch into a fresh tirade, Quentin burst in through the doors, clearing a path for my father behind him. Dad was breathing heavily, and I had a brief panic that I would see both of my parents collapse this day. But he was a normal color and his posture was as upright as any of the models on the outdoor magazines laid out on the table. I reminded myself that he worked at a gym, and if anything was now fitter than most people his age.
“What happened?” he said. “Somebody tell me what happened.”
Before Quentin or I could respond, my mother cut us off. “Could you give me a moment alone with him?” she said to us.
Him. There was no emphasis on the word, and no insult behind it. My mother had the habit of continuing conversations with my father as if zero time had passed since they last spoke, whether it was hours or months. For an outsider, it would have been impossible to tell that anything had transpired between them. Which was probably the way they liked it.