by F. C. Yee
With nothing better to do in between sweeps, I worked on my college application essays. If guilt and fear weren’t going to let me sleep, I could at least be productive.
I wrote in a pensive, dreamlike state in the wee hours of the night. Hopefully that introduced a touch of whatever magic was missing, because I sure as hell didn’t know how to add it on purpose.
I made so many revisions I might have created a wormhole in space-time. On the advice of some admissions blog, I interviewed myself in my head, using posh Oxbridge voices reserved for world leaders. I even tried staring at the page with true sight, and I felt pretty dumb when all it did was show me the raccoons eating our garbage in the yard.
The sheer amount of effort I was putting into these essays had to add up to something. It would be a violation of thermodynamics if it didn’t.
The end of the month arrived. I bounded down the stairs to make my pilgrimage to Anna’s.
“Wait.” Mom pounced as I passed her. “You’re going to let her see you wearing those?”
I patted myself down, confused. My clothes should have been fine. She’d never objected to how I looked on any of my city trips before.
Then it hit me. I hadn’t seen Quentin in a while, which meant the spell that kept my (ugh) golden eyes hidden was long expired. I’d been going out every day “wearing contacts,” often right in front of my mother.
“I’ll, uh, take them out,” I said. “Why didn’t you say anything about them earlier?”
“You’re at that age.” She made a face of intense bitterness where another woman might have been pleasantly wistful. “I can’t stop you from doing everything. Even if you want to look like a cheap Internet girl.”
I stared at my mother for a second, and then I wrapped her in a big hug.
“But if you dye your hair I swear I’ll throw you out of this house,” she muttered into my shoulder.
My knee was bouncing up and down so much, I was afraid Anna could feel it all the way through her thick, solid floors. I couldn’t stop it. I was too nervous.
She had already blown past the amount of time she’d ever spent reading my essays before. A new PR. K-Song would have been proud.
Anna opened her mouth. I hitched in anticipation, fearing the worst.
Then she chuckled.
“Genie, this is a hoot,” she said. “I had no idea you could be this funny.”
Huh. My hope sprouted like the first daisy of spring. Ready to be obliterated by the slightest breeze, but present regardless.
“I, um, did what you said and focused on my own thoughts. I wasn’t too familiar in my tone?”
“Not at all. I can’t get enough of this bit about your parents. This is a major improvement in your writing, by leaps and bounds. Any reader would be happy to get this in their pile.”
My god.
I’d done it. I’d gotten past the barrier of “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.” I was seeing the inside of their secret club, even if they’d only let me in through a case of mistaken identity.
I resisted the urge to run into the street and fist-bump the oncoming traffic in celebration. “Thank you,” I said. “I guess once I get to Harvard I’ll go out for the Lampoon.”
My joke fell flat with Anna. She looked disappointed, like she wanted to stay in the happy place a little longer.
“We . . . should talk about that,” she said, putting my papers to the side.
I didn’t like how far she’d put them to the side. Had she kept them a little closer to her elbow, I could have pretended all was well.
“Genie, I played a little loose with the rules the other day. I called up a contact at . . . I won’t say where exactly, but I talked to a relevant decision maker, let’s put it.”
Oh damn. She’d gone to bat for me. She’d gone. To bat. She really did have guanxi. And here I was thinking all I’d get from her was advice on how to articulate my inner nature.
“Now I didn’t mention you or anyone else specifically,” she said, “but I was able to talk about your scenario in a fair amount of detail because it applies to many applicants. And therein lies the problem. Based on how the conversation went, I think we need to adjust our expectations.”
She was pulling a reality show host move. There would be dramatic music leading to a commercial break, after which she would complete her sentence. Higher! she’d say brightly. We need to be aiming even higher, with how strong you are! There’s a secret exclusive university on the moon!
“I—I don’t understand. What problem are we talking about? My grades? I have perfect grades.”
“You do,” she said. “But so do a huge number of students, from great schools just like yours. Your writing is great, and so is theirs. This is the point I’m trying to make, Genie. The very reason why I could get away with talking about you anonymously is the fact that there are a lot of applicants with your exact candidacy profile.”
I could feel the floor spinning away from me. I was being ensorcelled.
“Colleges care about geographic diversity as much as any other kind, and right now you’re swimming in one of the biggest, most competitive pools,” Anna said. “That’s going to have a material effect on your application experience.”
“I think I get it,” I said. “Your contacts told you there’s only so many Bay Area Chinese they’re willing to take.”
Anna looked pained. “Genie, that’s not what I’m saying.”
Yes it was, even if she didn’t know it.
I didn’t blame Anna. Hell, I didn’t even blame the colleges. SF Prep was full of people like me. Grasping, thirsting, dying to get ahead. We were like roaches, and only multiplying by the day. I didn’t want to be around my kind any more than the admissions boards did.
I had done everything I could to declare myself a real person. But it didn’t matter. It still boiled down to a numbers game, and not one that tilted in my favor.
“I wish I had better news,” Anna said. “I called my old office up because I can see how hungry you are. But my duty as your advisor is to help you make the right call in the long term, not just that one moment when you tear open the envelope. Your financial aid needs—they’re not trivial. None of your top choices give athletic or merit-based scholarships. We have to consider what to do if they end up out of reach.”
I closed my eyes.
“Out of reach,” I said. “That’s ironic, given that I’ve made my arms longer than this room.”
“This room’s not very big,” she responded.
I stood up from my chair. “Colleges like well-traveled applicants, right? I’m well-traveled. I went from Chang’an to Vulture Peak to recover the sutras. It only took me a couple of years.”
“That was a long time ago. A million tourists have completed the same trip since then. With selfies.”
“Let’s talk about volunteer work then!” I leaped onto Anna’s desk and thumped my chest with my fists. “I’ve fought pure evil! Do you understand? Cannibalistic boogeymen! Nearly twenty and counting!”
Anna looked up at me and sucked in air through her teeth. “I’m sorry. The minimum requirement for a Van Helsing Grant is thirty demons.”
It took me a while to come back. I opened my eyes.
Once I did, I was treated to the sight of Anna reaching across her desk and patting my hand in sympathy.
“I know it’s hard to hear, but we should talk about what to do if we need to pivot. Consider local schools, maybe lean more on sports. There are plenty of colleges that could be a great fit. Many of them right here in the Bay.”
Have a life just like the one I had right now. Stop all forward movement. Be pinned under the Milky Way.
“I could live at home instead of a dorm,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’d save on boarding fees with my mother as my roommate.”
Anna nearly said “that’s the spirit” before she saw my eyes. She squeezed my hand. I couldn’t believe how wrong I was about her before—how utterly kind she was underneath her imposi
ng exterior.
“I think I should go for today,” I said, suddenly short of breath. “Even if the session’s not over. I have a . . . thing.”
“Of course, hon. We’ll prorate the time and I’ll clear up an extra half-hour next month to make up for it.”
I nodded and stumbled out her door.
Hon. That’s how pathetic I was. I was a hon.
Quentin was outside Anna’s office, waiting for me. I hadn’t asked him to come, but here he was. People passed around us on the busy sidewalk like we were stones in a river.
“Back when I was storming Heaven,” he said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to start a sentence like that, “when you were in my hands, and together we were smashing the door to the throne room of the Thunder Palace—the most powerful barrier in the known universe, turning bit by bit to splinters and dust—a funny thought occurred to me then.”
A funny thing happened on the way to the Dragon Throne. There was an epic punch line coming.
“Gatekeepers decide within a few seconds whether or not they’re going to open the gate for you,” he said. “And then once they decide to keep you out, you’re out forever. All it takes is a few seconds.
“Once they make their snap judgment, they can’t be swayed. They will never open the gate. You could be on fire and they could have water and they won’t open the gate. They could be starving and you could be made of food, and they still won’t open the gate.”
Quentin scratched the back of his head, embarrassed to reveal he wasn’t the insensate berserker the story made him out to be.
“I stopped swinging, one blow away from breaking through the doors to the other side and becoming King of Heaven,” he said. “I sat down on the floor and waited for the Buddha to show up. I patiently waited for a very long time. Then once he arrived, I climbed into his hand, and he did his whole thing with the mountain.”
It was a good story. But I wanted a different one right now.
“How did I die?” I said.
“Huh?”
“How did I die? When I was the Ruyi Jingu Bang?”
Quentin hadn’t been willing to tell me before, but he knew better than to deny me now. He took a deep breath, as if he were the one who needed steadying.
“You didn’t die,” he said. “You moved on. I woke up one day and you were gone from my side. You’d taken all the karma you’d earned from hundreds of years of fighting evil and saving lives and expended it in one risky attempt to become human.
“I can’t tell you how because I don’t know. There was no guarantee it would work. You could have stepped into the Void and ended up in Hell, or worse. You could have disappeared entirely. But that’s how badly you wanted to keep moving forward. That’s how much you hated being told to stay in your place.”
I felt my eyes burn in a way that they wouldn’t for anyone else in the world. I’d let the old me down, more than I ever thought possible. After epic toil and hardship, the Ruyi Jingu Bang had erased herself from existence to become something new, and I’d failed her by hitting the wall within one lifetime.
“You should go back to Heaven,” I said to Quentin.
“Why?”
“To sit there and wait eighty, ninety days.”
“But if I did that you’d—”
“I know. If you did that, I would age out and die. For every day in Heaven, a year passes on Earth, right? So wait three months in Heaven. A fiscal quarter. After I pass away as a human being, maybe I’ll come back as a stick.”
“That should have been your plan all along,” I continued. “You should never have come to Earth in the first place. The two of us are demon magnets, and being together makes it worse. Get out of here and let me run out my life span.”
I knew exactly how much hurt would be in Quentin’s eyes when I said it. So all the worse on me for letting him walk away without a word.
34
I watched my dad from outside the gym’s glass windows, whistling to himself as he sanitized the incline benches. He didn’t know I was there. A few weeks ago I would have said he was the fish in the fishbowl, but now I knew that wasn’t true.
He’d earned the right to a peaceful existence like this one. He’d taken the kind of risk that the extreme sportsmen he wiped up after would never understand. My father had given the finger to the system and sure, maybe that finger had been bitten off, but hey. The breaks. He understood thems.
And meanwhile his daughter, who’d gone to school on his meager dimes, and worn the clothes he’d put on her back, had thought she’d float into the sky and ascend gracefully into Heaven, buoyed by a cloud of rules followed and boxes checked.
I always faulted him for overconfidence. Thought I was better than him. But he’d at least put his blind faith in his own two fists instead of letting the fight go to the judges. I’d never been so brave.
For a moment, Dad looked up as if he’d sensed I was late. But a client entering the gym, a young banker type in Lycra knitwear, came over to say hi to him. The two of them, as different a pair of human beings as could possibly be, became engrossed in a conversation that involved pantomiming shoulder injuries.
I turned around and left.
I had a lot of time to kill after flaking on both Anna and Dad. I went to the park.
The weather was good, and it was packed sidewalk to sidewalk with sunbathing, wine-drinking yuppies. They formed a carpet of trim, attractive bodies over the grass that would occasionally bunch up as people rolled on their elbows to check each other out.
I sat against a tree in the back. The shade was cold and the knobs on the roots were hurting my thighs. I didn’t deserve comfort.
I felt old. Older than everyone around me, even though that wasn’t true. They came in different flavors of twenty-something. Unless they’d been trucked in from far away, they were uniformly well-to-do. Only people with large salaries could afford the rent nearby. Most of the accents I heard wafting on the breeze weren’t local.
This, if I had to be honest, was exactly what I’d been fighting for. I was after a good school and a good job, wasn’t I? Well, these people went to good schools and had good jobs. Chilling here on a sunny Saturday was what people who went to good schools and had good jobs did in these parts. Somewhere on one of these blankets was my spot. My eternal reward.
“None of you have ever fought what I’ve fought,” I said out loud. “You can’t see what I see.”
I could have said the word demons. No one was listening, and even if they were, it didn’t matter a lick.
My eye caught on a tall, starkly handsome man picking his way toward me through the crowd. He was wearing an athletic top and sandals like half the people lying on the grass, but he was in much better shape than all of them. When he got close enough he lowered his shades.
“I thought it was you,” Erlang Shen said.
The last person I was expecting. “What are you doing here?”
He produced a can wrapped in a brown bag and wiggled it. “I’m getting drunk.”
The last thing I was expecting him to say. He must have seen the confusion on my face because he laughed as he sat down next to me.
“There’s a Peach Banquet going on in Heaven,” he said. “Lots of wine flowing freely. But I can’t stand celebrations, and I don’t like indulging in front of the other gods. So in times like these I find various watering holes on Earth and drink human drinks. I was at a bar down the street but I felt your presence nearby.”
“Do you need three hundred and sixty-five human cocktails to match one Heaven serving?”
“Actually the exchange rate for alcohol is a binary logarithm, so it’s one thousand twenty-eight,” he said. “Right now I’m on six hundred thirteen.”
I snorted. He was as big of a dork as I was.
“By the way,” he said, waving the can. “I have completely failed on every promise I gave you before.”
“There was just the one promise. Your uncle won’t let you help round up the rem
aining demons?”
“Nope. He refused to entertain the subject during the celebration and told me that bringing it up further would be a sign of disrespect. That I would be displaying to the other gods a lack of filial piety.”
Erlang Shen raised his drink in a toast.
“Here’s to the delicate sensibilities of our elders,” he said. “The most important and fragile treasures in the universe. May we break our backs protecting them.”
“Hear, hear.”
We watched the newly minted adults frolic on the green. Most of them probably only called their parents once a month on average.
“I didn’t ask what you were doing here,” he said. “You don’t live in this city. And when I first saw you, your face looked like death itself.”
“Gee, thanks,” I answered. “I was gazing into my future.”
“What did you see?”
“That the only way to keep my loved ones safe forever is to self-immolate,” I said. “I have it all planned out. I’m going to sit on top of Half Dome and send a golden light into the sky like I did when I was still in Ao Guang’s treasure hoard. It’ll be a beacon for every yaoguai to come and get it. A dinner bell.”
“I’ll fight them all in one big battle,” I went on. “King-of-the-hill style. If I can’t defeat them all, I’ll take down as many as I can.”
“It’s not a bad plan. Do you know how to glow with Heavenly light?”
“Nope. I’ll have to figure that out first. And I notice you’re not trying to talk me out of it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with grand gestures sometimes. I will say this, though, if you’re planning to go down in flames . . .”
He leaned back on his elbows. “I, as an immortal with infinite eternities to enjoy, advise you, a pathetic insect whose life span is but a candle flicker, to at least have some fun before you die.”
