by F. C. Yee
I couldn’t believe how much attitude he was giving me. “You’re not coming?”
Quentin responded by leaning back and floating on top of the water, arms crossed behind his head like he was relaxing in a lounge chair. The tide began carrying him slowly out to sea.
“Fine!” I waded back to shore by myself. My clothes were soaked through and the wind made me shiver down to the bone. If I was magically resistant to cold, it was only to the point of not letting me collapse of hypothermia.
There were no gods on the beach, which meant I had to continue up the low cliff using a sandy ramp that gave way under my steps. Grit got into my shoes. Probably dog poop as well.
Once I got to the top, I saw a lone figure standing by the roadside. It was Erlang Shen, sans Guanyin. He eyed my wet, bedraggled state.
If he had said one smartass sentence, even something as innocuous as “Rough day, huh?” then I might have committed deicide on the spot. Instead he silently raised his hand and made a “come hither” gesture.
It wasn’t me he was speaking to. It was the water. The dampness in my clothes wicked away, flying off my body and gathering into a sphere of liquid that hovered in the air before me. It grew and grew until I was completely dry. Not even the salt remained on my skin.
Erlang Shen flung the skinless water balloon back toward the ocean. Then he said the magic words that made me want to marry him right then and there.
“Let’s get you some coffee.”
“Hold on, hold on,” he said, trying to keep his laughter contained. “You destroyed the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord, the Guardian of Thousand Flowers Cave at Purple Clouds Mountain, by chucking horseshoes at him?”
“What can I say.” I gulped from my cup of burnt water. Non-dairy creamer had never tasted so good. “I was out of lawn darts.”
It would have been generous to call the shack we were sitting in a diner. The surly, rotund man behind the counter had a hot plate to cook on but nothing else. This particular eating establishment was more of a hedge maze made out of single-serving potato chip bags.
Our conversation, if anyone could even hear beyond the sports radio blaring the scores, probably sounded like we were talking about a video game.
“It sounds like you could have also grown to giant proportions and swatted him down,” Erlang Shen said.
“I still haven’t figured that one out. I must have some kind of mental block against it.”
“Like I said before, it’s nifty but not essential.” Erlang Shen leaned back in his chair and gave me an appraising look up and down. “Is there something else you want to talk about? I don’t need true sight to see that something’s bothering you.”
My fingers trembled around my paper cup.
“Yeah, there is actually,” I said. “So we beat the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord, right?”
“Yes. A while ago, if I followed your story correctly.”
“You did. And since then we’ve also taken down the Yellow Brows Great King, Tuolong, the Pipa Scorpion, Jiutouchong, and some generic-looking guy with bells whose name I didn’t catch. Today out there in the ocean was the King of Spiritual Touch. What kind of name is that for an aquatic fish-demon?”
“An unfortunate one.”
If I wasn’t so tired I would have laughed. “And then there’s Baigujing. Also the two others from before you and I met. Eight if you count Tawny Lion’s brothers.”
Erlang Shen nodded. “You’ve been productive to say the least. I know the faceless man still hasn’t been found, but other than that your success rate has been flawless. Heaven has no problem with the pace you’ve been keeping recently.”
“Yeah but what if I do?”
I was a little louder then I meant to be. Another customer glanced over at us before tilting the rest of his corn chips into his mouth and walking out the door.
The last three weeks had taught me that I wasn’t a machine, as much as I liked to pretend I was when it came to doing work. Trying to act like a heroic yaoguai-slayer of old had left me with my gears bruised and my fuel tank bleeding.
“This is hard,” I said to Erlang Shen. “This is really hard. I know that’s an idiotic thing to say, but it’s hard in a way I wasn’t expecting. The demons keep popping up here and there and everywhere. They don’t stop coming. It’s a giant game of whack-a-mole.”
My carnival game analogy may have been a little bit off. The pace of the demon incursions reminded me more of wind sprints, where Coach D would have us run end-to-end on the volleyball court until she decided we were done. It was supposed to improve our cardio, but without knowing when the whole thing would be over, it felt like pointless punishment.
“I don’t feel like we’re making any progress,” I said. “None of the other demons will give up Red Boy’s whereabouts, even under pain of death. Stamping them out while we wait for him is like having a sword hanging over our heads while we rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic.”
I was mixing my references but Erlang Shen appeared to follow well enough.
“We’ve only found sixteen so far, and already the grind is getting to me,” I said. “I can hardly believe it. What has happened to me since meeting Quentin and you and Guanyin has been the wildest mindbender imaginable and yet it still somehow turned into a grind like every other part of my life. At the current rate we’re pushing, I’m going to break down long before we catch the other eighty-two demons.”
“Ninety-two,” Erlang Shen corrected.
“See? I’m so burned out I can’t do basic math in my head. If you knew me, that would be a really worrying sign.”
I put my face in my hands. It stayed there long enough to trouble him.
“Genie?” he said tentatively.
“I haven’t talked to my best friend in a long time.”
It was the safety of my rabbit hollow that let me finally talk about what was truly wrong with this whole deal.
“I screwed things up with her really badly because of this demon business,” I said. “And I can’t even tell her why. She’ll never know what I’ve been doing, running around without her.”
Erlang Shen tiptoed around the cracks appearing in my voice, an arctic explorer suddenly finding himself on thin ice. “If she’s your friend, she’ll forgive you, no?”
“I don’t want her to forgive me. I’d rather she be angry at me forever.”
An outside observer would have assumed I was being illogical. And overdramatic. They’d tell me that Yunie and I could hash things out easily. Such a close friend would understand that I had good reasons for shutting her out recently and might even be okay with me not explaining them fully. She’d trust me when I told her I hadn’t ditched her for a boy.
Of course that was the case. I didn’t actually believe our eight-year relationship was completely over because of a single spate of neglectfulness on my part.
But that wasn’t the point. The looming monster here was the future, bearing down and unstoppable. Yunie and I were destined for different colleges, her to a specialized music program and me to any snob-factory that would have me. We knew this even before we entered high school.
We didn’t have much time left together. Our little routines were precious to me, and our big events even more so. The day when the two of us would have to buckle up and accept our inevitable drift apart was coming, and I didn’t want it to happen prematurely.
Reckoning with Yunie would be pulling up the anchor just a little bit farther. That was probably why I’d put it off for so long.
Erlang Shen, perhaps using some magical water-detecting sense, pushed the stack of flimsy brown napkins on the table over to me. I snatched them up and wadded them against my nose and eyes so that he couldn’t see my face.
Great, now I was blubbering in front of a god. Go me.
“I think of my family when things get rough,” Erlang Shen said. “When my resolve wavers.”
“The situation with them is even worse,” I said, muffled by the scratchy paper. “My parents think I
’m a hot mess right now.”
“Not my point. What I’m trying to say is that the people we care about make the grind worthwhile. Even if the two never meet.”
He stared out the window, his fingers playing lightly against the table.
“The Jade Emperor doesn’t know about half of what I do in Heaven on his behalf,” Erlang Shen said. “And yet I put up with his incompetence, his passivity, his constant rejection. Because one day he’ll see me for my abilities. I want to show my uncle what I’m capable of more than anything else in the universe. Your friend. She means a lot to you?”
“I’d do anything for her.”
I surprised myself how easily and without embarrassment I said those words. Heartfelt declarations weren’t my strong suit.
“Then keep up the good fight, for her sake.” Erlang Shen smiled at me. “You know, when I originally fought back the waters of the Great Flood, I was trying to impress my uncle and the rest of the celestial pantheon. Not invent agriculture.”
I laughed in spite of myself.
“Genie,” Erlang Shen said. “I’ll talk to the Jade Emperor and convince him to let me help you.”
“I wasn’t trying to guilt you into—”
“No.” He shook his head. “I should have been right beside you from the start. It was a mistake not to be more hands-on.”
The weight in my chest lifted significantly. Sure, none of my problems had gone away. But given how few people with the full story were actively assisting me, my support network had risen by fifty percent.
“Thank you,” I said. “I really mean it. Thank you.”
The god shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. In the meantime, remember that Red Boy’s plan to keep you distracted has a chance to backfire on him. Each time you catch a lesser demon, you’re training your true sight muscle, not to mention your combat skills. Eventually you’ll get to the point where he can’t hide from you anymore, in this world or the next. When that happens, I’ll be right there with you for the showdown.”
“Red Boy wouldn’t stand a chance with you in our corner,” I said. “He’s a fire-type, right? If you’re the master of water, you can just put him out.”
Erlang Shen laughed as he got up and pushed in his chair. “It doesn’t work exactly like that.” Then he cocked his head, pursing his lips. “It works a little like that?”
I let the divine being leave first and gave him a few minutes to do whatever it was he needed to do to get back to Heaven. It seemed polite, though I’d only made that rule up in my head.
When I stepped out of the shack, Quentin was there by the roadside, waiting for me.
“Have a nice chat?”
I knew his peevish tone was his usual allergic reaction to Erlang Shen, but for some reason I didn’t field it well today.
“Yeah, we really connected on an emotional level,” I snapped. “I promised to turn into a stick for him.”
That was perhaps the weirdest, most hyper-targeted dig I’d ever leveled at someone, but boy did it work. Quentin looked like I’d broken him in half and left him on the curb for pickup. He was completely silent the entire trip back to civilization.
He didn’t call or text me that night either. It had become a little ritual for us to debrief and unwind over the phone after every yaoguai hunt ever since Baigujing but instead, radio silence.
While I could have reached out first to tell him I was extremely sorry he was being such a baby about this particular subject, I figured I had time to do it when I saw him at school. So I went to bed and thought little of it.
But I was wrong. Quentin wasn’t the type to stew in anger by his lonesome. He preferred action to waiting.
Which was likely why the very next day at school, I came upon him in the hallway making out with Rachel Li.
31
Well, this certainly escalated more than I was expecting.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. He and Rachel pulled away from each other, but not very far.
“Is this important?” she asked, her lips still wet.
“It is, or I wouldn’t be interrupting.”
Once Rachel saw I wasn’t going to back down, she peeled herself off Quentin and walked away, trailing her finger across his jaw all the way up to his earlobe as she left. He gazed at her wistfully before turning to me.
“What is it?” he asked, as if nothing different had happened.
“It’s Friday. We were going to try high-altitude training this weekend.” My voice came out like a text-to-speech simulator, devoid of human emotion and jaunty in all the wrong places. “You know, to see if that would unlock more of my powers. You never picked a mountaintop. You said the feng shui had to be just right.”
“Oh. Yeah. Whatever’s fine.” He glanced around, as if searching for more interesting people to sidle up to at a party.
“All right then, I’ll pick a spot,” I said. Focusing on logistics, appointment-keeping, the squeezing of blood through my veins would keep my roiling guts on the inside. Or so I hoped. “When I text you, you’ll be ready to go?”
“Sure.”
“Is there something you want to talk about?” I asked, on the odd chance that he wanted to explain his behavior. But he was already shoving past me, done with this conversation.
“I’ll text you,” he said, waving me off with the back of his hand.
I nearly put my fist through a locker.
Quentin didn’t make good on his promise to text me. Instead, he found me in the cafeteria at lunch.
His personality had changed from spacey to grumpy. He must have been suffering withdrawal symptoms from Rachel’s saliva.
“I forgot that the lunar cycle’s not right,” he groused. “Mountaintop meditation’s not going to be the best for this weekend. We have to shift our whole calendar around.”
“So now you want to make a plan? I thought we were winging it.”
Quentin tilted his head. “You . . . don’t want to make a plan? That’s weird. I’ve seen you write to-do lists with only one item on them. You even put a number one on them with nothing underneath.”
“Well, maybe it’s time to loosen up,” I said. “Act differently for a change. Improvise.”
Quentin reached over and put his hand on my forehead to check my temperature.
I smacked his arm away only to see Rachel watching us and laughing. She obviously wasn’t threatened by her new boyfriend flirting with someone else. She knew there was no comparison.
Quentin returned a fake smile and a wave to her. “I don’t know how I feel about that girl,” he said. “We’ve only been spending time together because I’m bored. But I think she’s imagining something that doesn’t exist.”
Okay, so that irked me to the core. Rachel was annoying, but she was genuinely into Quentin. He could at least have the decency not to use her as a stress reliever.
“Congrats on completing your assimilation into modern life,” I said. “You’ve become something that’s unique to this era.”
“What’s that?”
“A douchebag.” I got up with my tray. “When you figure out how to stop being one, you can come and talk to me. Otherwise don’t bother.”
“I’m going to kill him,” Yunie said once she found me in the library at my usual spot. “I’m going to rip his balls off and shove them in his eye sockets.”
Gossip about Quentin and Rachel’s hookup had gotten sufficiently around. Anatomical impossibilities aside, Yunie’s first words to me since the concert fiasco were bittersweet.
On one hand, we were speaking again. That was a victory I’d crawl through salt and broken glass for. On the other hand, I could see the narrative playing out in her head, and it hurt my soul.
I’d done the crazy threatening friend routine on one of Yunie’s terrible exes in the past, and the reason she could have been itching so badly to return the favor was because it was a perfect way to erase the cloud between us. There was more hopefulness than violence in her anger toward Quentin—hope that with
this show of force, I might forgive her for whatever part she played in our rift.
My friend thought she needed to earn her way back into my good graces, which utterly destroyed me. This was our version of fighting. We were incapable of getting truly angry with each other, so instead we tore our hearts out and handed them over on silver platters.
I swallowed all the things I desperately needed to tell her and responded the way I knew she wanted. Like nothing had ever happened.
“For the last time, Quentin and I are not together,” I said. Each word was leaden in my mouth, for multiple reasons. “He can do what he feels like.”
The flash of relief in Yunie’s shoulders was palpable. Once it finished circulating through her veins, it was back to business for her. Getting to cut someone for me, purely for the fun of it now.
“Of course he can,” she said airily, the last couple of weeks gone with the wind. “He just needs to accept the consequences. Which in this case is having to see through his own testicles.”
Normally I would have moved on right alongside her. Cracked a few jokes about nuts. Pushed and pulled in our familiar pattern. But this time, the burning lump of coal remained stuck in my throat. It didn’t go away.
Quentin entered the library to return a stack of books. Yunie locked on to him like a planet-destroying laser.
“The bastard didn’t even take off your earrings,” she hissed. “That’s the last straw. I’m going to get them back.”
“They don’t open. We tried once but they’re stuck.”
She grinned at me.
“Yunie, wait!”
My best friend, drunk on righteous anger, marched across the library. In her head Quentin wasn’t only a two-timer; he was also responsible for making me miss her concert. She went up and gave him a ringing slap across the face that could have knocked Baigujing’s teeth loose.
“Pbthbdth! What the hell!?” Quentin shouted.
“You creep!” Yunie roared. “Take them off or I’m going to rip them off!”
She lunged at his face and he caught her by the wrists. It gave me enough time to wrap my arms around her waist and lift her away. The good cop/bad cop routine worked better when bad cop wasn’t smaller than most freshmen.
