Tiffany knocked on the door while Joy was still standing on one foot in the middle of the room, trying to get a sock over a very swollen ankle.
“It’s open,” She said, trying to dress herself while not falling over and not doing an admirable job at either.
Tiffany came in with a folder. At first Joy was dismayed that she had a whole folder just for her recovery, then she saw it had tabs, and one of the tabs said JOY in Tiffany’s small, pressurized handwriting along with names of numerous other people on the floor. Somehow that was even worse.
“You’re not dressed yet!”
“I’m working on it.”
Tiffany looked from Joy’s pathetic acrobatics to the ankle, which had spent the night going from just bruised looking to now starting to look like one of Zane’s shirts, and made a small noise in her throat. “Did you elevate it?”
“I put it on a pillow.”
“Above your heart?”
Joy looked at the couch-bed which she’d had to use for its actual intended purpose last night after nearly breaking her neck trying to get into her usual bed with one leg. The only pillow currently on it still had the indentation from her head on it.
“Kinda?”
“Nate?” Tiffany said to Nate’s turned back with a voice that caused him to flinch.
From his desk, without turning around, Nate said, “She slept with it on the floor for about three hours.”
“Traitor,” Joy said.
“Hey, I’m not going to fight your battles,” Nate said, and went back to what he’d been working on.
Tiffany gave Joy a look that could charitably be called ‘unimpressed’. She tossed a compression wrap at Joy.
“Shoe. The wrap goes under the sock, not over. We’re leaving in four minutes.”
The walk down to the Ashe Center was more like a limp down to the Ashe Center. It took twenty-two minutes, which was about sixteen more than it would have taken Joy on a normal day. Tiffany spent most of it half a step behind her on the injured side, shooting continued nervous looks at her leg and ankle like some kind of service dog.
“I’m not going to fall over,” Joy groaned.
“Joy, your foot looks like it’s attached to your shin by an easter egg.”
“So, it’s festive!”
“It’s fall, which coincidentally is exactly the thing we’re trying to avoid.”
It was a clear morning, the first one in a while that felt like autumn rather than summer and winter having a brawl, and campus was staggering back to life following the weekend: people with coffee, people without coffee who wished they had coffee, a guy on a longboard taking the downhill with the serene confidence of someone who had never once been cut off by a delivery cart. Joy watched the crash and felt her ankle throb in sympathy.
Her phone buzzed on the second flight of stairs.
did anyone actually look at that or are you letting tiffany diagnose you
“Who is it?” Tiffany said.
“Cole.”
Tiffany did something complicated with her eyebrows. At some point in the last twelve hours she had clearly been briefed on who Cole was, and what he’d done, and what he’d said at the top of Janss, and she had not yet decided what she felt about any of it.
Joy typed: both
The reply came before she’d put the phone away. It was a thumbs up.
She realized she was smiling, then looked over and noticed Tiffany had seen it too. Joy stuck her tongue out at her.
The Ashe Center had a waiting room like every waiting room: chairs bolted together in rows, a television showing a cooking program with the sound off, and a rack of pamphlets that ran from Why do I Hurt? Pain by the Numbers! to one Joy had never seen before. It was lavender, with a stock photo of a smiling young woman looking thoughtfully out a window.
So You’ve Been Changed, it said. A Guide for Students and Families.
Joy took one. She seemed like the target audience.
At the desk, a woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain took her student ID, typed for a while, frowned at the screen, typed some more, and then said, “Oh. Okay,” in the voice of someone whose screen had just explained something.
“You’re a Section Four.”
“Sure am.”
“When did that go through?”
“About two weeks ago.”
The woman nodded as though Joy had told her her date of birth or student ID number. She reached under the desk, produced a clipboard that already had papers on it, looked at it, and added four more from a separate tray.
Joy had a flashback of her ordeal at the Registrar’s office and cringed.
“Your old intake’s still in the system, but it’s,” she paused, looking for the word, “out of date. These are the supplementals. Fill in what you can and don’t worry about what you can’t.”
“What happens with what I can’t?”
“Somebody asks you about it in a small room,” the woman said kindly, and turned to the next person in line. Joy pictured a dark room with a steel table lit only by a single hanging lightbulb.
Joy sat. Tiffany sat next to her, opened the blue folder, and took out a pen, which she held in a way that made clear the pen was hers and not Joy’s, but would be made available as needed.
The first pages were the same ones Daniel had filled in when he’d first arrived on campus: name, date of birth, emergency contact, allergies, medications. The name was new. Everything else was the same, which was somehow stranger than if all of it had been different. Same birthday. Same allergy to penicillin. Same emergency contact, who was going to be very confused if anyone ever called and asked about Joy. She groaned as she though about that conversation in her near future.
She wrote it all down and turned to the new pages.
The new pages were headed SUPPLEMENTAL INTAKE: SECTION 4 (ALTERED STATUS), and the first question was:
Please describe the nature of your alteration.
There was a box underneath about the size of a postcard.
Joy looked at it for a while.
“What do I put?”
“What happened,” Tiffany said.
“Magic tarot cards?”
“Then put that.”
Joy wrote: Tarot card. X - Fortune. Lady with very bright blue eyes and then…. Then, after some thought, she crossed it out, wanting to get her ankle fixed, not get even more questions in the small room and just wrote Keiko and her stupid cursed tarot cards.
The next page asked about her height, then and now, and her weight, then and now, and whether she had experienced changes to her balance, sense of smell, appetite, sleep, vision, hearing, or “other,” with a line after other long enough to write a novel on. Joy checked balance and appetite. Then she thought about the running, about the stride that had been totally different from her old body, and the lean that arrived somewhere it never used to, and wrote on the line: yes. For about a week that had seemed like the biggest thing that had changed about her. Now she mostly didn’t notice it.
Then she turned the page and found the iron.
It wasn’t only iron. It was an entire page of questions that had very clearly been written for women, years ago, and simply pulled out of the regular intake and dropped into this one as a set. Iron. Anemia. Fatigue. There was a whole section labeled FEMALE ATHLETES ONLY asking all sorts of questions about her bones she couldn’t answer. Then she got to the next questions.
Are you, or have you ever been, pregnant?
Joy grimaced and circled no, moving on to the next form before the questions got even more personal.
Are you, or have you ever been, a species other than human?
“What the f-”
“Joy!” Tiffany scolded.
On a scale of 1-10, please rate your morphic stability.
Joy looked at Tiffany who seemed just as lost as she was on that one.
“You know, I think I’m just going to take my chances with the questions in the small room.”
She set the clipboard down and sighed.
“You okay?” Tiffany said.
“Yeah.” She was. “Just thinking how much fun paperwork is.”
The small room turned out to be medium-sized, brightly lit, and belonged to a nurse practitioner named Delgado, who was about fifty and if Joy was any judge, Joy could walk through the door having grown a second head and not gotten as much as a raised eyebrow from her.
“Section Four, huh?” she said, reading the clipboard. “How’s that going?”
“Pretty good, actually!” Joy said, and realized she meant it.
“Yeah?” Delgado looked up. Seemingly that had surprised her.
“Yeah, is that weird?”
“Kind of. You’d be amazed how many people tell me it’s fine in a voice that says it’s not.” She set the clipboard down. “We get about one a month, you know. Sometimes two. Last spring we had a kid who turned into a very large dog for a semester and came in wanting his vaccine records updated.”
Suddenly at least one of the questions on the form made more sense.
“Did you?”
“Rabies and distemper,” Delgado said. “Let’s see the ankle.”
She unwrapped it, turned it a quarter inch left and a quarter inch right, and pressed in two places that made Joy say words she did not generally say in front of medical professionals. Then she sat back.
“Who wrapped this?”
Tiffany, in the chair by the door, sat up very straight.
“I did.”
“You did a good job,” Delgado said, giving Tiffany a thumbs up while still inspecting the ankle. “And whoever iced this last night did the right thing, and whoever told you to stay off it was right too. Grade one sprain. Mild. You’re going to be fine.”
Joy did not look at Tiffany. She did not have to look at Tiffany. She could feel Tiffany from across the room, radiating the smug satisfaction of a person whose worst-case scenario had been prepared for, rehearsed, and then confirmed by a licensed professional as merely a moderate scenario, which for Tiffany was very nearly as good as being right.
“A week off running,” Delgado said. “No jumping, no cutting, nothing lateral. Walk as much as you like, as long as it doesn’t hurt. Come back next Monday and I’ll clear you if it looks the way it should.”
“Ugh, a week?” Joy whined.
“A week,” Delgado said. “Which I understand, from the way your friend just exhaled, means you were planning to try it in four days.”
“Three,” Tiffany said.
“Three,” Delgado agreed, and wrote something down.
She finished the exam: heart, lungs, reflexes, all the ordinary things done in the ordinary way. At one point she had Joy stand up straight so she could check her posture, and Joy caught herself in the mirror on the back of the door.
She had stopped being surprised by mirrors about a week ago. Somewhere in there, without mentioning it to anybody, she’d started enjoying them instead. Mirrors had become a lot more fun lately.
She noticed the little smile on her face too, the one she’d been seeing more and more lately. Her lower lip pushed up as if she was in on a joke nobody else had caught on to yet.
“You’re in great shape,” Delgado said, following her eyes. “Whatever you were doing before, keep doing it.”
“Must be all the illicit gambling.” Joy grinned.
Joy came across Keiko waiting on the bench outside by the bike racks after Tiffany parted ways with her to go to class.
She was sitting in the aggressively casual posture of someone who had been sitting for a few minutes and had resented every twitchy second of it. She had her phone in her hand and already had something queued up on it.
“How’d it go?”
“Grade one,” Joy said. “A week.”
“A week!” Keiko said, as though this were fantastic news, which it was not, and stood up. “Okay. Perfect timing. Look at this.”
She held out the phone.
It was a video. It was the fabled race video Nate had told her about, shot from somewhere near the bottom of Bruin Walk on what was very obviously Keiko’s phone. It showed a tour group scattering, and a flurry of flyers, and a delivery cart, and a woman with a stroller, and then a blonde blur going up a retaining wall and off the end of it in one clean arc over a baby’s head.
Joy watched herself fly.
It looked different from outside. From inside it had been half a second of pure decision and a bad landing. From out here it looked like something a person would do on purpose, in a movie, on a wire.
“And she does her own stunts!” Joy beamed.
“Right? It’s got nine thousand views!” Keiko said.
“Woah, seriously?” Joy took Keiko’s phone to look and sure enough, 9128 views.
“Yeah, but that’s not the point. The point is who saw it.” Keiko took her phone back and grinned.
Joy knew that grin and frowned.
“What did you do?”
“I showed it to Pike!”
There was a moment of silence while Joy stared at Keiko waiting for her to realize she didn’t know the entire student body and faculty like Keiko apparently did.
“You know, Coach Pike, the Coach of the spirit squad.”
“Ghost hunting is a sport now?”
Keiko laughed and punched Joy in the arm.
“No, stupid, cheerleaders! You know, the team I’m on!”
Joy knew Keiko was a cheerleader, but thanks to the stream of consciousness way Keiko talked about anything that excited her, she’d learned very little about what she actually did or who she did it with.
She ignored the blank look Joy was giving her and continued, “So anyhow, I showed it to Pike, she says, ‘That girl can jump!’, and I says ‘I know right! I’ll bring her to tryouts!’”
Joy blinked as she absorbed this.
“Oh God, please tell me you didn’t.”
“I totally did! You’d be AMAZING!”
“Keiko, I can’t cheer.”
“Joy, look, you need three things to be a good cheerleader,” Keiko said, raising a finger, “One, you need to be hot, you’ve got that covered!”
“Obviously!”
“Two,” she said, raising a second finger, “You’ve got to be athletic! We know you’re good there!”
“And three.” She lowered her emphasis on the third point as she raised a third finger reluctantly, “You need to know how to cheer.”
“And I don’t know how to cheer.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’ve never done it.”
“You’d never jumped over a baby either before yesterday,” Keiko said, “and look.” She held up the phone again, paused on the frame where Joy was at the top of the arc, perfectly level, both arms out. “Mandy Okafor tore her ACL in September. We’ve been a person down all quarter and we need somebody who can actually move. Tryouts are next Monday. You get cleared next Monday.” She spread her hands like a magician revealing the card had been in Joy’s pocket the whole time. “It’s fate.”
Joy looked at the frozen frame.
It was a good frame. She’d give Keiko that.
She was also aware, standing there, of several things at once, the way she was increasingly aware of several things at once. She was aware that cheer paid nothing. She was aware that she had sixty-one dollars and a Thursday game she hadn’t figured out how to afford. She was aware that she’d promised Marco her Tuesdays and Thursdays, and that she didn’t know when the spirit squad practiced but was prepared to bet it was more than she’d have liked. She knew next to nothing about cheer, but knew enough to know those girls could be pretty hardcore.
And she was aware that right now her only qualification was that she could do a really good flying leap. They’d seen the wall. They wanted the thing that went over it.
Which was fair, up until the landing it’d been one hell of a leap.
It was also, she noticed, the second time in recent memory that a group of people had wanted her solely for her athletic prowess. The first time had been a track team that stopped answering the moment she couldn’t do it anymore.
She decided to not spoil what had until recently been a good mood and filed it away to brood over later.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
Keiko’s face did something complicated and triumphant.
“Yes! You’re going to be so great!”
“Wha…Keiko, are you even listening to me?”
Keiko was in fact not listening to her; she was busy sending a text, quietly saying to herself, “She…said…yes!”
She told Nate at dinner, which was Nate eating a bowl of instant noodles that Joy was pretty sure he’d made in his coffee maker. Joy was eating a colossal gas station burrito with a name that sounded like something the Air Force would drop on an enemy nation. She was seated on the couch-bed with her ankle on three pillows at an elevation Tiffany had specified to the inch, with Nate sworn to tattle if she didn’t.
“Cheer?” Nate asked.
“Cheer.”
He considered her for a moment.
“Yeah, I could see it.”
“You’re not helping.”
Nate pulled a suspiciously yellow coffee filter out of his coffee maker as he thought some more.
"Please tell me that's broth and not something Zane taught you how to make."
Nate ignored her.
“Yeah, you’re going to do it,” he said as a statement, not a question and went back to his laptop.
Joy didn’t argue, partly because she’d already fought two unwinnable battles today and didn’t fancy a third, and partly because he was right, and she’d known he was right since the sidewalk outside the Ashe Center, somewhere between the frame of herself in midair and Keiko saying it’s fate.
Her phone buzzed.
Marco: tuesday?
She looked at the ankle on its three pillows.
Joy: tuesday after next. doctors orders
A pause.
Marco: Dr. Tiffany’s orders
Joy: a licensed professional agreed with her. she was insufferable about it
Marco: tuesday after next then
And a second later:
Marco: I’m holding you to it
She smiled at the phone for longer than the text deserved, and looked up to see Nate had seen her do it. She stuck her tongue out at him too.
She couldn’t run, so she walked.
It was the first night since Friday she’d been out with nowhere to be, and the ankle was fine at a walk, a dull complaint rather than a real one. She took the long way back from the late dining hall, because walking was the closest thing to running she was allowed and her legs needed a stretch badly.
The long way went past the Sculpture Garden, dark now, the big bronze shapes standing around in the grass like guests who’d stayed too late, and then out along the edge of the open lawn beyond it.
There was a tree in the middle of the lawn.
Joy had passed it a hundred times as Daniel, on training runs, and had never once really looked at it. It was an oak, enormous and old, older than any building near it, standing alone in the middle of all that grass with its branches spread low and wide, like it had been told to hold something up and never been told it could stop. A low stone wall ringed the bed at its base.
It had never looked especially healthy, but it had really taken a turn for the worse lately. Even in the dark, even to someone who knew nothing about trees, it looked sick. Half the leaves on the east side had gone the color of paper bags. A limb on the near side had been cut off at some point, and the wound had gone dark and soft. There was an orange tag stapled to the trunk at chest height.
Joy didn’t need to be an arborist to know what orange tags on trees meant. It meant the same thing as the vet showing up to tend to a sick horse with a shotgun instead of a vet bag.
There were two people there.
One was sitting on the wall with her ankles crossed and her back to the trunk, in a black hoodie with the sleeves shoved up, doing something on her phone with her thumbs. She had the look of someone who had been sitting on that wall for two hours, and had been cultivating a seething hatred of the wall for two hours.
The other one was in the dirt.
She was kneeling in the bed at the base of the trunk, wearing…Joy had to do a double take, a broad brimmed straw hat and a white sun dress. She was working the soil around the roots with her bare hands. Slowly. Gently. The way you might straighten a blanket over someone asleep. The only light illuminating the area was the glow of the cigarette the other girl was smoking.
Joy slowed down and then stopped. A few weeks ago, when she was still Daniel, she’d have just filed this as strange and moved on, but now she found her curiosity was getting the better of her.
Then she walked over and before she even realized she was doing it the little voice in her head had gotten to work.
"Okay. I've got three guesses and they're all crimes. Buried treasure, buried body, or a really committed first date?"
The girl on the wall looked up from her phone and her cigarette dipped unhappily from the corner of her mouth. She took Joy in with one long glance, from her sneakers to her ponytail, and her expression didn’t change in any way that could be described, and yet it managed to communicate a great deal, none of it friendly.
The girl in the dirt looked up and smiled.
It was the most completely open smile Joy had ever seen on a stranger. There was nothing behind it. No calculation, no caution, none of the small reflexive distance people kept from someone who’d just walked up out of the dark. Just delight, like a child who has snuck downstairs on Christmas Eve to find Santa putting presents under the tree.
“Nope! This poor thing is dying.” She said it the way you’d mention the weather, and patted the root under her hand. “But I’m working on it.”
She sat back on her heels, took off her hat and pushed her black hair off her ear with one dirt-covered hand.
Joy watched as the ear kept going and going until she finally tucked an implausible amount of hair behind it.
It was long and slender and swept back to a point well past the back of her head, and as Joy watched, it perked up as the two made eye contact.