The young man in the polo shirt had a clipboard, a radio, and a lanyard that said COMMUNITY SERVICE OFFICER, and he was, Joy had to admit, correct about every single thing he was saying. He’d had time to figure out how he was going to chew her and Cole out on the way up there, and now they were getting both barrels of it.
"There was a tour group! Prospective students. Families. People who are deciding whether to come here."
"There was," Joy agreed, “They got to see the UCLA athletics program close up!”
“People could have gotten hurt!”
"Sorry." Cole said, looking off in the distance from the grass behind her, bored.
"And a woman with a stroller. You…jumped over it! Do you know what could have happened if you’d hit it?"
"No," Joy said. "Tell me!"
She was, she was aware, having an excellent time.
Part of it was that her ankle hurt. Part of it was the adrenaline from the race still in her system. Part of it was that this kid was nineteen and had driven a golf cart the entire way around campus at eleven miles an hour with his light bar going, and was now having what Joy and Cole silently agreed was a pretty sad power trip. He had the uptight dignity of a person who has been given a small amount of authority and was determined to make the most of it.
He was also completely right, which was the part that made it fun. She hadn't had to lie once.
"It's a liability thing," he said. "It's not about me. It's about..."
"It's about the stroller."
"It's about the stroller, yes..."
"No, you're right. We’re a pair of dastardly villains who seek only to bring chaos to the campus," Joy nodded slowly, with her whole face. "The student body is lucky to have heroic guardians like you to stop us!"
Cole groaned, "Joy, not helping."
The CSO had stopped talking. He was looking at her with his pen still on the clipboard, and something had gone slightly still behind his eyes, the look of a nineteen-year-old arriving at the conclusion that his miniscule authority was not being respected. Joy could see the next thirty seconds very clearly. She could see the report getting longer.
She turned around to look at Cole.
He was still on the grass, elbows on his knees, the color of a brick, and he was not doing a bit. He was looking at her the way he'd looked at her in the plaza on Friday, right before you're handling me, except there was nothing angry left in it. It was just tired, and it said stop.
The guy who'd spent eleven days telling people she'd wished her way out was the one telling her to stop. She had about a second to decide how much she disliked that. Then she stopped.
She turned back to the CSO and gave him her name, and her student ID, and her building and floor, without a single flourish, and it was the least fun she'd had all day.
"Cole Vandermeer," Cole said, from the grass.
The CSO wrote it all down. He looked faintly thrown by the change in weather.
"This goes to Housing," he said. "And probably Student Conduct, because of the tour..."
"Hey, man."
Everybody turned around.
Zane was standing about four feet behind the cart.
Joy had last seen him sitting on a planter at the start line in Dogwood plaza, a kilometer and eighty-seven stairs ago, staring at a pelican. The crowd hadn't made it up yet. Nobody had passed her on the steps. If Joy was any judge, he was in even more of an altered state than usual too.
Nobody else seemed to find this remarkable, so Joy decided not to either.
"Uh," said the CSO. "Hi."
"How about I take care of this," Zane said.
He said it the way you'd offer to get a door. There was nothing in it. No authority, no pressure, no relationship being invoked. He didn't say who he was. He didn't ask what had happened. He stood there holding a thermos and offered, mildly, to take care of it, and then waited with the patience of a man who had nowhere else to be for the rest of his life.
The CSO looked at him. He looked at the clipboard. He looked back at Zane. He looked at Joy who was giving him a look daring him to give her a chance to make fun of him some more.
Joy watched him do a piece of arithmetic that had nothing to do with anything on the page.
"Okay," he said. "But they need to understand..."
"Yeah man, for sure."
"...that this was genuinely dangerous."
"Totally." Zane nodded.
The CSO looked at the two of them. Something in his shoulders suggested he'd been privately unsure what a report to Housing was going to accomplish, and knew exactly what continuing to lecture the blonde woman in front of him was going to result in.
It took three attempts to get the cart pointed the right way. He did it with great care. He put a hand up as he went, but Zane had already found something new to stare at and didn’t notice him go. He simply took the top off of his thermos, took a drink of whatever was inside, and continued to stare at something which may or may not have been there.
Cole, from the grass, watched in puzzled confusion.
"Do you think he even knows we're here?"
Joy shook her head. She’d known Zane for two years, and between her and Nate, they had figured out next to nothing about the man.
"No idea," she said.
The crowd arrived in pieces over the next ten minutes, in descending order of fitness. Marcus first, on foot, having abandoned the bike at the bottom of the steps with an expression of personal betrayal, and then the cheer girls, and then the floor, and then Keiko, who came up the last flight yelling before anyone could see her.
"...the WALL, Joy, you got on a WALL! You jumped a stroller!"
"It was in the way."
"It was AWESOME!"
Money changed hands. Joy sat on the edge of a planter with her shoe off and her ankle already going interesting colors and watched it happen: two guys from the fourth floor arguing about whether a wall counted, the tour group's actual tour guide walking past and refusing to make eye contact with anybody, Derek discovering that he had in fact bet forty dollars he did not possess.
The thing about a pool, it turned out, was that if twenty-two people put money in and twenty-one of them are wrong, the twenty-second person does very well.
Keiko counted it twice. Then she counted it a third time, with her mouth slightly open, and then she walked over to the bench.
"Zane."
Zane did not respond.
"Zane. Hey. You won." She held the money out. It was a considerable amount of money and it was not folded, because there was too much of it to fold. "Zane."
He took another sip from his thermos.
Keiko moved the cash sideways a little, in case it was a matter of angle. Then she waved her free hand slowly back and forth in front of his face, twice, with the professional detachment of a person checking whether a machine is plugged in.
Zane's gaze remained on something in the general direction of Royce Hall.
Keiko looked at Joy. Joy shrugged. Keiko looked back at Zane, exhaled through her nose, folded the whole stack in half by main force, and put it in his shirt pocket.
Then she came and sat on the planter.
"He put five dollars on you," she said.
"I know."
"He was the only one."
"I know."
Behind them, some minutes later, Zane said "cool" to nobody in particular.
Marco got there somewhere in the middle of all that.
He had jogged up at a leisurely pace, stopwatch still in his hand, and he stopped about ten feet away and looked at the line, and then at the stone, and then at Joy on the planter with her shoe off. He had a quick word with Tiffany then headed over to her.
"Four minutes eleven," he said.
"Is that good?"
"For a kilometer with eighty-seven stairs in it, on a Sunday, through a crowd, after you jumped a wall." Marco put the stopwatch in his pocket. "Yeah, Joy. That's good."
He didn't say anything else. He went and sat down on the steps about halfway up, on his own, and looked at nothing in particular.
Tiffany arrived with a bag of ice from somewhere, which nobody had asked her to get and which she had clearly obtained through a combination of speed and pure anxious energy. She knelt, took Joy's ankle without asking permission, and looked at it for a long, silent moment with an expression Joy had last seen pointed at a bra strap.
"That's a sprain."
"It sure hurts like one."
"Grade one. Probably. Probably." Tiffany turned it a quarter inch left and stopped the instant Joy inhaled. "And don’t tell me it’s not a big deal. Don’t tell me people walk around on grade ones for days. That's how they turn into grade twos." She put the ice on. "Twenty minutes on, twenty off. Elevated. Above your heart, not near it. Compression. I have a wrap in my room. Ashe Center tomorrow at nine."
"Wait what?"
"I made the appointment." Tiffany held up her phone. "While I was getting the ice. You're a Section Four now, so we’re going to need to fill outt new intake forms.”
Joy shuddered at the thought of more paperwork.
“What’s wrong with my old ones?”
Tiffany gave her a look and slowed down her explanation like she was talking to an idiot.
“You’ve got a new body, Joy, and some new…” She fished for the words, “New medical needs that come with it.”
She let that sink in as Joy’s brain connected the dots, then her shoulders slumped and she gave a long exhausted groan.
"Wonderful, and what’s this ‘we’ business?"
"You're not going to fill out the iron pages right," Tiffany said, and moved the ice half an inch, which was apparently important. "No running until they clear you. They'll say a week. You're not going to be good, so two."
The track team had come up the steps too.
Joy had been aware of them at the edge of the crowd for a few minutes: eight guys in sweats, standing in the same loose group they'd stood in at the bottom, not talking to anybody. They'd watched the money get counted. One of them had laughed at Derek. But they hadn't moved.
Cole was still on the grass.
Then he got up.
He did it badly, in stages, and his quads had started to seize, and he stood there for a second with his hands on his hips trying to find his balance on shaking legs. Then he walked over to them, and Joy worked out what was happening about half a second before it happened and had no time at all to decide how she felt about it.
"Hey," Cole said. "Everybody here?"
Somebody said something. He didn't answer it.
"So a couple weeks ago I put a thing in the chat," Cole said. "About Daniel. The genie thing. The kid back east."
Nobody said anything. Joy had gone very still. Tiffany had stopped moving the ice.
"It's garbage. I…made some bad assumptions." Cole's voice was still wrecked from the race, which made it flatter than usual, which somehow made it worse. "There wasn't a wish. There wasn't a deal. It was just some normal supernatural bullshit, and it's a whole thing with the registrar, and I knew all that and I said it anyway, because he wasn't answering his phone and I wanted it to be somebody's fault." He was looking somewhere around their shoes. "And she told me she’d give it all back tomorrow if she could."
He stopped.
"That's it. I'm not telling it again."
The pause went on a beat too long.
Then Tyler, the freshman, who was eighteen and had been standing at the back and had clearly not understood that he was going to be present for anything, said:
"Really?"
"Oh, ok." said somebody else.
And that was apparently it, because a second later two of them were arguing about whether the wall had been legal, and Marcus had inserted himself into that conversation uninvited, and the group had come apart into people.
One of them peeled off. Ade: enormous, a thrower, one thumbs up in eleven days. He came over to the planter and looked at the ice.
"You good?"
"Tiffany says a week."
"Then it's a week." He nodded at the steps. "That was stupid, by the way. The wall."
"Yeah."
"It was also awesome." He said, extending his hand for a fist bump. Joy returned it.
That was all. That was the entire thing.
Joy sat on the planter with a bag of ice on her ankle and eight guys in sweats arguing about course legality forty feet away, and felt something arrive in her chest that was not the hum.
The hum was the card under Kevin's hand. This was lower, and warmer, and it had turned up the moment she’d bumped fists with Ade, and it didn't seem to be in any hurry to leave.
She let it stay.
Cole came past a minute later, stiff-legged, on his way to his bag. He didn't stop. He slowed down about a quarter of a step as he went by the planter.
"Answer your texts," he said.
"What’s the magic word?" She said with an impudent grin.
He gave her the finger and kept walking.
Her grin grew even wider as she returned the gesture, and the warmth in her grew even warmer.
It was another twenty minutes before Keiko went off to find out whether Derek could legally owe money to somebody who hadn't bet, and Joy picked up the ice, ignored Tiffany completely, and went up the steps on one and a half legs.
Marco watched her come the whole way and didn't get up to help, which she appreciated.
She sat one step below him.
"You held it," he said, after a while.
"You told me to."
"I tell everybody to." He was turning the stopwatch over in his hands. "He figured you out. Bottom of Bruin Walk. I watched him do it from way back. He slowed down, he quit giving it to you. You were losing, and you knew you were losing, and you held it anyway." He shook his head. "I've never done that. Not once. Every four hundred I've ever run, I get to three hundred and somebody's on my shoulder and I go. I chase. And then there's a hundred left and nothing to run it with, and I run forty-seven three."
Joy didn't say anything.
"I've been looking for those three tenths in my legs since March," Marco said. "They're not in my legs."
Joy looked at him for a moment. The same part of her that had found the words for Vic across Ray's table found some now, and this time they were pointed somewhere better. She pressed her lower lip up in an amused smile.
"You know what you look like right now?"
Marco looked at her.
"You're sitting alone on a staircase at sunset holding a stopwatch. You look like the last shot of a sports movie where the guy doesn't win."
"Shut up."
"I'm just saying. It's a good look. Would totally go on the movie poster."
Marco stared at her open mouthed for a moment then the two burst out laughing.
"Dr. Tiffany says two weeks on the ankle," she said, wiping a tear from her eye. "Which means I'm giving it one. And after that I've got Tuesday and Thursday afternoons with nothing in them."
Marco looked at her.
"Four hundreds," Joy said. "I sit on your shoulder. The whole way. Being extremely annoying about it. And you don't go until three-fifty."
"Three-fifty."
"Or wherever. You pick the number."
"And I just... don't go."
"Yup. And somebody has to stand there and shout slogans at you." Joy said.
He stared at the ground for a second, then Marco laughed again and put the stopwatch away. He looked more at ease now than she’d seen in a long time.
"Tuesday," he said.
She got back to the room at 6:30 with the ice bag in one hand and her shoe in the other.
Nate had apparently skipped the whole afterparty and was already back at his desk. He looked up. He took in the ankle, and the ice, and the shoe, and the fact that she'd come up three flights rather than wait for the elevator.
"Tiffany says two weeks," Joy said.
"Good luck with that."
"She said I wouldn't be good."
"She's met you." He turned his chair around. "How much did you win?"
Joy sat down on the couch-bed and put the ice back on and sighed wistfully.
"Nothing," she said.
"Right."
"Zane won everything."
"How…" Nate asked, then realized this was Zane they were talking about.
"He was the only person who bet on me. Keiko had to put it in his pocket." She adjusted the ice. "Derek owes forty dollars to four separate people."
"And you."
"I think I’m back in the team’s good graces." She said it lightly and it came out sounding like something else. "Cole told them. In front of everybody. He did it right there at the top of the steps, trying to stand as shaky as a newborn colt."
Nate nodded.
“One of them gave me a fist bump.”
"Sounds like you did pretty well for yourself regardless then," he said.
"Yeah, money would have been nice, but I’m pretty happy with this too."
"Sure." Nate said, going back to what he was working on.
Joy leaned back on the couch-bed, her mind drifting to another more practical problem she still had to solve.
Sixty-one dollars.
Thursday at Ray's, two hundred to sit down, and Ray had told her to bring more than that. She had sixty-one dollars, a limp for the next week, and no plan whatsoever, and in four days there was going to be a room in Culver City with a woman in it she realized she desperately wanted a rematch against.
She got her phone out. The thread with Cole was still sitting near the top, and at the head of it, from two in the morning on the first night, were her own four sentences. I'll explain when I can. Under that, fourteen messages she'd read every word of and never answered, the last one from day nine, just a question mark.
She took a picture of her ankle, typed in ‘Want to see something gross?’ and sent the picture. It went to read almost immediately, followed by a puke emoji a minute later. She suppressed a giggle then looked at her other messages as other replies followed.
She still hadn’t answered Theo’s text from Saturday.
you in thursday
"Nate."
"Yeah."
"How fast do you think a person could make two hundred dollars?"
Nate put his coffee down very slowly and did not turn around.
"Oh no."
"Hypothetically."
"It's never hypothetically with you," Nate said.