“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she hopes you don’t so that she’ll be able to tempt you with her raw and unappetizing sexuality.”
Oriana glared at her brother. “I loathe you.”
“Because of my brutal honesty or because you have no friends and are forced to hang out with us?”
Shen snorted. “Throwing stones from that glass house, aren’t ya, kid?”
Insulted, Kyle looked around his sister. “What does that mean?”
“You don’t have any friends either.”
“I do too.” He pointed at the pitch. “Her. Stevie. She likes me.”
“I think she feels sorry for you. But what I mean is, you don’t have any friends your own age.”
“People my own age are beneath me. They consider stupid things fun. They don’t understand life and art and true beauty.”
“Plus, they keep hitting him,” Oriana tossed in. “That’s why my sister hired you.”
“Maybe if you stopped saying they were beneath you,” he pointed out to Kyle, “they wouldn’t beat the crap out of you.”
“I don’t say it to them. I merely point out how inadequate—”
“Nope,” Shen cut in. “Just nope.”
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“Are you going to say that the school system lets down this nation’s children?”
“No.”
“Then stop talking.”
“Don’t blame him,” Oriana said, looking at her own phone, and quickly typing a response to someone. “When Kyle was ten, he went through a very strange Ayn Rand period. It was not pretty. My father has been trying to pull him back from the edge ever since.”
“Oh, please,” Kyle huffed. “That phase only lasted six months. And at least I didn’t go through that weird Russian literature phase like you. She wore black for a year and kept saying everyone’s entire name when she talked to them or about them.”
“You weren’t even born yet,” Oriana shot back.
“Mom told me all about it.”
Shen knew that Kyle and Oriana were only four years apart...
“You went through a Russian literature phase when you were four?”
The siblings gazed at him.
“What age were you when you started reading Russian literature?” Oriana asked.
“That would be the age of never. I have never read Russian. . . anything. And, before you pity me, I am totally okay with that. Not having read Russian anything.”
“So you’re more into great Chinese literature?”
Shen shrugged. “I like Run Run Shaw movies.”
“Run Run Shaw?”
“The Shaw Brothers. They made my favorite martial arts movies. From the seventies.” The siblings stared at him but didn’t say anything, so Shen added, “And I read the Tao of Pooh.”
“When you were four?” Kyle asked.
“No, last year.”
Oriana’s head dipped low and she muttered, “Oh, wow.”
Fed up, Shen informed the pair, “You do understand that most children don’t read ancient philosophies when they’re four. In fact . . . most adults don’t read ancient philosophies. That’s just your family. You are, to be quite blunt, a bunch of freaks. Good freaks,” he added. “Talented freaks. But freaks nonetheless.”
Oriana placed her hand on Shen’s forearm and he had no idea why.
“I’m just concerned,” she slowly explained to him, “that you won’t be interesting enough for Stevie.”
“Why would I need to be?”
“Because you’re dating her.”
Shen closed his eyes. “What is happening?”
“That’s what Max told me last night.”
“Your first mistake is you’re talking to Max.”
“Don’t you want to date Stevie? Is it her lack of muscle tone?”
“Look, Stevie is really sweet, but she’s . . . young.”
“Oh, my God,” Oriana whispered. “Are you really old? Like . . . are you ninety?”
Shen growled a little and looked off.
“I’m just kidding.” Oriana pushed her shoulder against Shen’s arm. “I know you’re way younger than that. Like forty, right?”
“I am not—” Shen stopped when he realized he was yelling.
“What you need to understand about us—prodigies, I mean; at least the women—is that guys our age do not usually work out for us. They’re usually stupid, grabby, and you have to forcefully tell them what no means. To the point where some permanent damage might be caused and their mother calls you a vile bitch beast. So, if you’re a few years older than her, it’s not a big deal. In fact, you could wisely use these early days when you’re rolling around in the sheets to read a book . . . or two.”
“I read books. I read!”
Oriana raised an eyebrow. “What are you reading right now? ”
Shen cleared his throat. “A book about the Pittsburgh Steelers.”
Her raised eyebrow turned down with the other one into a dramatic frown. “Is that about the steel industry in Pittsburgh?”
Kyle burst out laughing and Shen twisted his mouth so that he didn’t follow suit.
“Something like that,” Shen finally managed to get out.
Stevie, now in matching shorts and jersey and wearing black and white cleats, walked over to them. “What do you guys think? Do I look stupid?”
“Not at all,” Oriana replied. “You just look weak . . . and very thin. Like you’ve been trapped on a boat at sea.”
Shen pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes. “What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing. Why?”
He dropped his hands into his lap. “Why would you say that to her?”
“Because I’m being honest.” Oriana looked at Stevie. “Do you not want me to be honest? I can be one of those girls who lies to you. I’m not good at it, but I can do it.”
“No,” Stevie said lightly. “I prefer honesty. I mean, I’d feel bad if I’d been working on my body for years . . . but I haven’t. So, yeah, honesty’s fine.”
“Excellent. Now, I was also screening this one”—she motioned to Shen with a wave of her hand—“to be your boyfriend but I don’t think that’s going to work out.”
“No,” Stevie replied, gaze gliding over to his. “He’s working out just fine.”
Shen wanted to know why he wouldn’t work out as a boyfriend, but he became immediately distracted by the fact that Stevie seemed to think he was already her boyfriend.
Seriously . . . what is happening?
“I’m not your boyfriend!”
Stevie’s smile was small but very powerful. “Do you want to be?”
Shen’s entire body became tight and he was having very dangerous thoughts at the moment. Extremely dangerous.
He decided to focus on something else . . . anything else
Shen turned to Oriana. “Why couldn’t I be a boyfriend?”
“Not a boyfriend,” Oriana clarified. “Stevie’s boyfriend specifically. You could absolutely be”—she looked around the stadium, finally pointing at a long-legged cheetah, sitting on the barrier and reading a magazine—“her boyfriend.”
“Why her?”
“Look at her. She’s attractive. She’s a cheetah, so I’m sure she’s astounding in bed. Plus, she’s reading Vogue magazine.”
“So?”
“She’s probably more your speed. Intellectually.”
Kyle threw his head back, his laughter ringing out over the stadium.
Shen guessed, “You think I’m too stupid.”
Stevie’s eyes grew wide. “What? Why would you think that, Oriana?”
“Because I’ve never read Russian literature,” Shen told her.
“What does that have to do with anything? My sisters have never read any literature ever, and if you think you’re smarter than either of them,” she said directly to Oriana, “you’re only going to get your feelings hurt. Unless we’re talking a
bout Max. Then you’ll just get hurt physically.”
Oriana rolled her eyes. “I’m just trying to find you someone a little more up to your . . .” she glanced at Shen and back at Stevie before whispering, “level.”
“I can hear you,” Shen reminded her. “I’m sitting right next to you.”
“As a fellow former child prodigy, all I have to say to you, Oriana Jean-Louis Parker,” Stevie said as she reached across the barrier and grabbed Shen’s hand, “is it’s wrong to look down on and mock normal people. There’s nothing wrong with average. With the every day. With the common.”
Kyle, at that point, was down on the floor, on his back, laughing hysterically. Shen couldn’t even be mad. He didn’t blame him at all. But if either female noticed him, they didn’t show it.
“It’s average, everyday people,” Stevie proudly continued, “with no special skills or the ability to change the world that make this country great.”
Then with a good yank, she pulled Shen out of the seat and over the barrier so that she could drag him across the field to the team bench.
“I’m so sorry about that,” she said when they were near the other players. “I hate when people are snobby like that.”
Shen nodded. “Snobby people are the worst, right?”
“Oh, my God, Shen . . . I know!”
* * *
“Does Aunt Irene ever text you? She says the wild dogs are giving Mom a hard time about the house. Like I can do anything about it.” Oriana waited for an answer from her brother, but when she didn’t get one, she looked down at him and ordered, “Dude, get off the ground.”
Wiping tears from his eyes, her brother climbed into the seat next to her and let out a breath. “That was great.”
“What was?” she asked, texting back her mother’s best friend.
“The way you tortured Shen, No wonder you are getting kicked out of your little dance troupe—”
“I wasn’t kicked out. It’s just a break.”
“You’re making giant pandas feel bad about themselves.”
“That’s not what I was—”
“I think I might be starting to like you. Wait. Like is too strong. Let’s just say, I’m starting not to mind your existence on my planet.”
“That’s big of you, Kyle.”
“I know.”
Oriana rolled her eyes. She was used to her brother. “Just so we’re clear . . . I wasn’t questioning the panda just to be a dick.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really. I was trying to get your friend laid.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Nothing better to do. And she looks like one of those . . . caring people. I knew she’d be all insulted for him.”
“That’s really sweet of you.”
“I’m really sweet.” She thought a moment, added, “When I’ve got nothing better to do.”
“You know, it’s funny,” Kyle said, putting his long legs up on the rail in front of him, “I never have that little to do . . .”
* * *
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
Stevie shrugged. “I might as well. I’m out here. I’m wearing the outfit.” She glanced at Shen. “Or are you saying that because you don’t want to give me the ball?”
Shen pulled the ball tighter into his chest. “I wanna play with the ball.”
She fought a smile and tried to sound stern. “Put the ball on the ground.”
“The other pandas will play with me.”
“Shen!” Then, despite herself, she laughed.
Stevie had to admit . . . she’d thought she’d be helping Shen deal with the psychological fallout of Oriana’s bitchiness. But he didn’t seem to care. Instead, he was trying to make her comfortable in this strange, new environment.
She knew this because it’s what her sisters always did. Charlie by talking to her and Max by irritating the shit out of her so that she was distracted. Shen was using the “teasing” distraction. A type of distraction she’d never favored . . . until now.
“Can we get moving on this?” the team captain called out from the other end of the pitch. A cheetah who worked in software engineering. A field Stevie dabbled in herself when she was bored.
Shen placed the ball at her feet. “Now, remember,” he said, stepping away from her. “This is just for fun. For relaxing. So no stress to succeed at all costs.”
She shook her head. “You really have been around the Jean-Louis Parker kids way too much.”
“You speak true words.”
Stevie looked at the ball, the goal at the end of the field, the goalie standing in front of it, and then back at the ball.
Thirty-seven calculations—or twelve seconds—later, she took several steps forward and kicked the ball.
It skittered past the goalie and into the net.
There was a moment of silence, then everyone turned to look at her.
Stevie shrugged and explained, “Physics.”
* * *
After ten minutes or so, Shen returned to the stands, again sitting with Oriana and Kyle. Together they watched Stevie MacKilligan tear her way around the pitch like she’d been born to it.
He wouldn’t say she was necessarily pro level. That game moved way faster and was definitely deadlier. But for an occasional weekend team, she was too good, which everyone else seemed to love.
Shen’s question, though, was how much did Stevie love it? If she loved it at all.
It was hard to tell. She was pretty expressionless out there when doing anything but focusing on the ball. And when she focused on the ball, she simply looked . . . confused.
Until she sent the ball careening into the net.
“Is that my sister?”
Shen had no idea how long Max had been sitting beside him, but he was proud that he didn’t jump out of his skin and try to disembowel her.
“That’s her,” he said when he was confident he wouldn’t yell at Max to never to do that again.
“Who knew she could do anything physical except run away? ”
“I thought you guys taught her to run away.”
“Charlie taught her that. You’d be amazed how many times someone has tried to snatch Stevie off the street. And not just because my father had sold her to Peruvian drug lords either.”
Shen looked over at Kyle and he gave a short nod. Don’t ask, he silently suggested.
But Shen had to know. “Your father sold his own daughter to drug lords?”
“Oh, he’s done lots of things. Little tip . . . if Charlie is ever on your ass about something and you want her to stop, just bring up our dad. By the time she’s finished telling those stories, she’ll have completely forgotten whatever you fucked up.”
“Good to know.”
The practice-slash-tryout ended and a panting, sweaty Stevie walked over to them. And Shen still had no idea what she was thinking.
Although she’d definitely done this longer than anything else she’d tried that morning and, most important, not once had anyone “accidentally” wacked her in the face with their elbow.
“Hey,” she said, standing on the other side of the barrier.
“Hey.” Shen leaned over the metal railing. “Well?”
She nodded and said around her panting, “I loved it.”
Shocked—he’d hoped for a “like,” maybe an “it was okay,” but “loved”?—Shen replied, “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not just saying that because I recommended it, are you?”
“Why would anybody do that?”
“To be nice?”
“I’m not really nice,” she admitted. “But next to Max, I seem nice.”
“It’s true,” Max added, her short pink hair now parted in the middle and each section pulled into two small ponytails. Different from when he’d first noticed her next to him a minute or so ago.
“Okay,” Shen said. “What do you like about it?”
“Like about it?�
�
“Yeah. The exercise? The camaraderie? How cute you look in the jersey?”
“He’s right,” Max said, and when Shen looked at Stevie’s sister again, her hair was now in a single, high pony tail, and she was fussing with the bangs. “You do look cute in that jersey.”
Stevie looked down at her shirt, then glared at her sister. “Shut up. No one’s talking to you.”
“See?” Max pointed out. “She’s not that nice.”
Not in the mood to see yet another fight between the two, Shen pushed, “So? What do you like about it?”
“The physics.”
Shen frowned. “Again with the physics?”
“Always with the physics.” And now Stevie smiled. A big, wide grin that lit up her entire face. It lit up everything. Everything around her. It was like she suddenly glowed.
“Don’t you see? It’s all physics,” she explained. “All equations and calculations that require me to solve them in seconds so that I can score or stop someone else from scoring. It’s a constant, never-ending physics party! How could I not love it?”
“Couldn’t you do all that with golf?” Max asked.
Stevie’s wide smile abruptly ended and she glowered at her older sister. “Why don’t you shut up?”
“Why don’t you make me?” Max shot back, her hair now parted on the side, a few braids hanging . . .
“How do you keep changing your hair so fast?” he asked when Max stood next to him. But she never answered his question because she was too busy leaning over the railing and screaming at her baby sister while her baby sister yelled back.
That lasted nearly ten seconds before Stevie grabbed Max by her constantly changing hair and dragged her over the railing, the pair of them rolling across the turf, battering each other.
“Such a physical family,” Oriana noted from her seat. “Jean-Louis Parkers don’t fight like that.”
“She’s right,” Kyle said. “Instead we attempt to exacerbate each other’s personality disorders until mental health professionals are forced to intervene.”
Suddenly Shen appreciated the “physical” approach to family resolutions.
chapter ELEVEN
They decided to eat in the Sports Center’s food court. Of course, this particular food court was specifically geared toward shifters, forcing Stevie to rethink her decision on sushi when she found out that most of the beautifully designed food she was looking at was, in fact, made up of whale blubber and the meat of walrus, bearded seals, and—
In a Badger Way Page 15