The Iron Will of Genie Lo

by F. C. Yee

  “You’d better let us catch up,” Dad said.

  It was good that he was here to sub in for me. A few more minutes and I would have blown up at her and caused the scene she was so afraid of. But I let Quentin pull me away by the elbow so that Mom could see that it was taking their combined efforts to keep me from arguing with her.

  Quentin and I went into the hallway. It needed maintenance. The glow of a Coke machine provided the majority of the light, and the water fountain push bar was pushed in and stuck, causing a wasteful, continuous drip. I had the feeling if I walked down the hall, the surroundings would scroll by me infinitely like an old cartoon with no budget.

  “Your dad’s going to think I’m bad luck,” Quentin muttered, semi-seriously. “I don’t see him that much, and then all of a sudden I’m telling him your mom’s in the hospital.”

  Unlikely. On the day I introduced them, at a nice cafe in the city, Quentin had charmed my dad as much as he had my mom. Over shots of espresso and six-dollar slices of hazelnut toast, the two had a raucous conversation in Chinese that was so loud you would have thought they were old army comrades. I had to remind them repeatedly to keep it down, and by the end of the afternoon, Dad was already dreaming about playing catch with his grandkids.

  “You did fine,” I said. “You passed.”

  Quentin blinked. “Passed what?”

  The Test. Being There. Seeing the worst, weakest part of me and not flinching. Wasn’t that supposed to be the ultimate boyfriend move? Being a rock-solid presence in an emergency? I didn’t know, really. I had very little to go on.

  His puzzled face was as cute as a dog tilting its head. Despite how inappropriate the timing was, or maybe because of it, I wanted nothing more than to shove him into the dusty recess next to the hand sanitizer dispenser and finish what we started in my room before Yunie caught us. If there wasn’t enough space, maybe we could shrink, him and me together again. I wouldn’t have to think about the bigger world.

  Luckily for my dignity, we were interrupted by another presence, warm and comforting, that pushed away the medicinal sterility of the hospital.

  Guanyin was here. All would be well.

  The washed-out lighting only made her look more angelic. She reached out and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “You acted pretty quick,” I said, smiling.

  “I keep an extra eye out for the people close to you,” the goddess said. “I know your priorities.”

  “So she’s going to be okay.” I slumped against the wall in relief. “Thank you for fixing her.”

  The silence that came from Guanyin didn’t feel like an acknowledgment. It wasn’t a good enough silence. I straightened back up.

  “You didn’t fix her?” I said. “You didn’t make her okay?”

  “Genie . . .” Guanyin searched for the right way to put something that would never be right by me. “I can’t make her okay. Sure, I healed her wrist on the way over. And I stabilized her heart. This time. But if you’re asking me to make sure this kind of incident never happens again, I can’t do that.”

  “Bullshit!”

  My curse rolled down the hallway like a boulder chasing an interloper through a temple. It had so much heft to it that it made my throat sore as it came out.

  There were probably repercussions for swearing in front of a goddess, but that didn’t stop me. “You can do anything!” I yelled, keeping it under my breath this time. “You can step between planes! You can bend the laws of physics! You fixed Androu, didn’t you!?”

  I was referring to the past incident where the Six-Eared Macaque had infiltrated my school and kidnapped another of my classmates alongside Yunie. Poor Androu had suffered very real injuries. And Guanyin had fixed him.

  “Androu was a healthy young person,” Guanyin said. “I undid some damage that never should have happened in the first place and sent him on his way. Your mother can’t be ‘fixed.’ She has a bad case of having lived life.”

  There was hardly any arguing with that. My parents were older than most of my classmates’. Mom had always been pretty upfront about the fact that they’d had a hard time having children; I’d snuck in under the deadline.

  But Guanyin’s statement was true in a different, more punishing way. For some people, living meant growth, becoming stronger, happier, fuller over time. In my mother’s and father’s cases, life had stripped their flesh down to the bone. The addition of health problems was like putting away the carving knife and bringing out the grinder.

  “Your mother will always be vulnerable, Genie,” Guanyin said softly. “Neither you nor I can change that.”

  I wondered how much of an atrocity it would be considered if I leveled this hospital around us.

  “Genie,” Quentin said, prodding my arm as I imagined air raid sirens and the National Guard rolling up to stop my rampage. “Your parents are calling for us.”

  Neither Mom nor Dad had met Guanyin, and they weren’t going to. It had always seemed strategic to hold back that introduction, plus her general maturity made it harder to come up with cover stories. She could pass as my what, really? Teacher? Guidance counselor? Supermodel I befriended at the train station?

  Quentin and I left her and went back to the lobby. Mom hadn’t moved from her chair, and the way Dad stood off to the side made her seem like an empress on her throne. It was so typical of her. She wouldn’t admit that she was sick, but she was willing to milk the moment for everything it was worth.

  What I wouldn’t admit was how painful it was to see my mom and dad as a unit. It was always accidents or impending doom that brought them in close proximity, as if their very existences were like naked wires. When they crossed, bad things happened.

  The two of them deserved better. They should have been allowed to look at their daughter’s face at the same time, in the same room, and be happy. Would it be such a friggin’ problem for the Universe to let them be carefree together for once?

  “Genie,” Mom said. “I have something I need to tell you.”

  I tried to banish my gloomy thoughts and failed. “What, that you’re fine?” I snapped.

  “No. Something else. Promise me you’ll listen, won’t you?”

  Huh. Hold on. There was a faintness in her voice that said for once, she’d dropped the act. She was letting herself be tired. Maybe she’d accepted the facts. This close call had pierced the reality distortion bubble that she normally generated around herself.

  I always had the fantasy that one day my mother and I would lay bare our souls and finally say everything we meant to each other, with perfect understanding and ultimate sincerity. But not like this. I didn’t want to buy a moment of revelation from her with a health scare.

  “Genie . . .”

  I steeled myself as best I could. I wasn’t ready for this.

  “Genie, I want you to go on your trip this weekend.”

  “. . . WHAT!?” I shrieked.

  “Keep it down,” she muttered. “I don’t want you to cancel it on my account. And don’t you dare tell Yunie about this. She’ll be worried sick.”

  A fake-out. I thought this was going to be her epiphany. That things had the infinitesimal chance of changing between us. Instead, surprise! There was another mask under the first mask the whole time!

  “The trip is the last thing that should be on anyone’s mind! How could you even say that to me right now?”

  “Genie, just . . .” my dad said, a veteran soldier scarred by more battles than I, the newbie, could ever imagine. “I’m going to take a few days off to look after her.”

  “Even though I’m fine,” Mom said.

  “Yes,” Dad said, playing both sides. “Even though she’s fine. While you’re visiting the school, there’ll be someone at home.”

  I was skeptical. “Work’ll let you do that?”

  “I get vacation days,” Dad said. “What am I going to do with them, go to Maui?”

  I looked back and forth at my parents, before settling on my mother. You think
you’re so clever, don’t you? I mentally seethed at her. That this’ll get me to shut up? Dad looking after her wasn’t going to help. For Christ’s sake, he was the one who’d wrecked her blood pressure in the first place.

  The very fact that they were resorting to this meant that she was bad enough to need proper medical supervision. She needed to stay at the hospital. Recuperating at home was a terrible idea.

  “This is a great plan,” Quentin declared.

  I’d forgotten he was there. You could hear my neck screeching like a rusty hinge as I turned to look at him, the whites of my eyes showing like high beams.

  “Hospitals aren’t good places to be around,” he said obliviously. “Bad feng shui. Better to rest at home and be comfortable.”

  I’d gone back in time. Everyone around me had reverted to the Dark Ages. What was next, a prescription of leeches?

  “My parents could drop by,” Quentin said. “You know. Mr. and Mrs. Sun?” He nudged me as if I’d forgotten whom he was talking about.

  “Oh, that would be lovely!” Mom straightened up so fast she probably gave herself a head rush. “See, Genie? This is a fine plan. Quentin agrees.”

  “Quentin is not the last word in this household!”

  Mom scoffed. “And you are?”

  Oof. That was more than I could take. I was used to Mom stalemating me in arguments through sheer bull-headedness, but turning words on me like that was a low blow as far as I was concerned. I stormed out of the lobby.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  Outside was too warm and humid for the air to be considered fresh. The designers of this hospital had the nerve to put a little patio by the doors with wrought metal chairs, as if people wanted to spend time here drinking in the ambience. I would have preferred a barber’s pole with bloody bandages to serve as a warning: If you are here, you are not well, and you need help.

  Quentin found me within a minute. “What’s wrong?”

  Where to begin. “Your parents?” I said. “Your parents?”

  The deal with Quentin’s parents, which took some getting used to even for me, was that they were shapeshifted clones of himself, formed from his own magical hairs. They had the appearances and personalities of two very polite businesspeople from overseas who were always traveling and completely neglectful of their son in that charming British boarding school way.

  Quentin trotted them out whenever he needed to show he had a family. My parents adored his parents. If they had to choose two out of three among Quentin, his parents, and me, they would have pinned a note to my chest and tossed me to the curb.

  I knocked my head against a brick column that supported an awning over the patio. “You’re going to have your stupid walking magic tricks pop in to look after my mother?”

  Quentin looked hurt. “I thought you liked them. You’ve asked me to have them keep your mom company lots of times.”

  “That was when she was healthy! She’s going to try and entertain them! You know how much effort she puts into for guests! What do you think she was doing today when she collapsed?”

  Quentin’s lips parted as he realized what he’d done. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was trying to make her happy.”

  “Why did you butt in to begin with? She should be under medical supervision, not puttering around the kitchen!”

  “I thought being involved was part of being a good boyfriend!”

  Being involved silently, maybe. “You sided with my mother over me in an argument. You just took all your boyfriend points, set them on fire, and buried them in a dumpster under the floor of the ocean.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I didn’t mean to make things worse. You know I’d do anything for this family and—”

  “Quentin, you are NOT part of this family!”

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  Ooh. Yup. Scientists and historians would look back to that moment and identify it as Peak Genie, where she had to be her usual hurtful, spiteful self, thinking she could emit her awfulness into the atmosphere the same as always without repercussions. Instead she’d barreled straight past the tipping point, sending the feedback loop spinning off its axis. She’d ignored the warning signs, and now the world was nothing but jellyfish and alkaline wastes.

  Quentin pulled some kind of innate cool guy maneuver, taking a step back so that the shadow of the building fell across his face. I couldn’t see his eyes as he spoke.

  “You’re right,” he said, his voice flat and dull. “Sure. I’m going to leave before I do any more harm.”

  He walked away with his hands in his pockets and disappeared into the air using the most half-hearted Cloud-Leaping Somersault I’d ever seen him do. It was mostly calves.

  I wanted to call out to him, but I was too dumbfounded by my own cruelty to speak. A flash storm had swept in and left recognizable debris pooling around my knees. A moment ago, my life had been relatively orderly. Now it was . . . this. I stared into the dark sky, wishing for a do-over that would never come.

  Then I went back inside. I had to go check on my mom.

  8

  I was scrunched up in a fetal position. My legs scraped the back of the train seat in front of me. Someone had scratch-graffitied “Richard sux” into the plastic and the “sux” was rubbing my shin and making it itch.

  I had a view from behind of a lady eating pad Thai, or something that smelled very much like it. Elsewhere in the car, a man in a fleece vest made loud guarantees on his phone that as the chief marketing officer of his company, he could order, nay, force his team to toughen up and deal with the unpaid overtime.

  Yunie sat across the aisle from me, reading an honest-to-god paper book. We hadn’t been able to find space next to each other. I was glad we couldn’t talk right now. The slightest spoken word, and the story of how terrible I’d been to Quentin, would come blubbering out of my mouth and join the other assorted stains on the floor. It grew worse and worse the more I thought about it.

  I was born from a rock. Never had parents, never did.

  I’d thought Quentin had merely been explaining his origins to me that night we first had dinner at my house. I hadn’t known him long enough to understand he’d been opening up to me.

  His master Subodai had banished him. He’d first fought against, and then fought so hard for his little band with Xuanzang. If you looked at his story and considered him as a real person, then there was only one thing the Monkey King truly lacked. Family.

  And I’d . . . I’d said that to him the other night.

  The unlubricated screeching of the train and the cramped position I was in made it feel like I was sitting inside a trash compactor or a car crusher, the walls closing in around me. Each item of unfinished business thrown in here with me only hastened my demise.

  Like the deal with Great White Planet and the Mysterious Demonic Threat he had talked about. I was very far outside my usual way of doing things when it came to that. In the past, if an unresolved issue or mistake ever showed its head, my instincts were always to run over and stomp it out of existence as soon as possible. Bring my full weight to bear on the problem to the exclusion of any distractions. It was how I knocked down and aced different subjects at school. The strategy worked in my academic life.

  Not so much in my real life though. It had taken a while, but I’d realized I had to accept a certain degree of messiness in order to keep my wits about me. I’d wanted to agree with Guanyin and focus on one looming problem at a time. But this was a juggling act where I had to keep multiple balls in the air.

  And my mom had tossed me a chainsaw in the middle of my performance.

  I grit my teeth, thinking of her again. She was making me do this trip instead of staying home with her as some kind of punishment. She was screwing with me. She’d told me to enjoy myself, but she really wanted me to feel guilty about it the whole time. Or the whole thing could have been a test that I’d already failed. The right answer was ignoring her overt commands, throwing myself at her feet, and refusing to go at all.
r />   It was guesswork as to what crime I’d committed. By necessity I’d been spending more time at volleyball, with Quentin and Guanyin. Maybe she’d been feeling neglected. Maybe I’d hung out with Dad too much, or not enough. It was impossible to tell because she wouldn’t speak her goddamn mind. She wanted a psychic for a daughter. One who would cater to her every silent whim.

  I was pissed off at Dad, too, which was rare. Had he and I presented a united front, we might have done the impossible and convinced Mom to back down. The one time I needed my father not to be easygoing, and we’d let our chance slip away.

  An earsplitting metal howl made me look up. We were only a stop away from our destination. Even through the train window the surroundings already looked more collegiate. Instead of Santa Firenza’s barren lot with yellow paint marking where you should stand to avoid getting run over, this station had overgrown boughs embracing wrought-iron fences. The parking lot contained Bimmers, Lexi, Teslae. In one section, loose leaves of kale lay scattered over the asphalt like flyers, evidence that a farmers’ market had passed through here earlier. Despite what the map said, I was very far away from my home right now.

  No, I decided. Enough. I wasn’t doing this anymore. I wasn’t going to be held emotionally hostage by my mother. She expected me to crawl back through our door, hobbled with guilt, having carried her in my mind every minute of the long weekend. Like hell I’d play along.

  I stood up and banged my skull on the luggage rack overhead. It was hard and loud enough that everyone in the car but Yunie looked over and winced. I ignored them.

  I can make it four days without thinking about my mom. I’m allowed to go four days without thinking about my mom.

  A tug came at my insides, my gut reminding me of other injured parties. I pushed the feeling back down with a vengeance.

  And Quentin, too, for that matter.

  9

  I would have been more impressed by the blue, sunny skies blanketing the campus had they not been the same ones I stared at from a couple of towns over. These stingy azure bastards were causing our drought. Screw these skies.