The moment Joy’s eyes met the eyes of the pointy eared girl, two things struck her. First were the eyes themselves. They were a bright amethyst purple, and shone like Joy’s own sapphire blue ones. Second was a spark of recognition, though Joy was certain she’d have remembered meeting somebody who looked like this. For her part, the girl seemed equally surprised, though it did little to put a damper on her sanguine happiness.
Joy realized she should probably say something witty to cut the tension.
“Huh,” Joy said.
It wasn’t her finest hour. There had been a fair amount of huh in her life lately though, and she could huh with the best of them.
The girl with the ears and amethyst eyes stood and wiped her hands on the front of the white dress, which was a crime against a white dress, and beamed up at Joy like they were old friends reuniting after a long absence.
“I’m Sun Yin,” she said. “I feel like I know you from somewhere!”
“Probably the video,” the girl on the wall said sourly.
“Oh, and that’s Sophie! She’s really nice.”
“No I’m not,” said Sophie, from the wall.
Yin leaned conspiratorially in with the back of her hand to her mouth, “She’s really sweet once you get to know her.”
“I heard that.”
Sophie took a long drag on the cigarette and let it out slowly, in Joy’s general direction, which was about as nice as Joy suspected Sophie got.
“Yeah you’re her alright,” Sophie said, “I don’t think anybody else in California has hair like that.”
“Thanks!”
“Wasn’t a compliment. ”
“The baby I jumped over seemed to like it.”
Yin gasped. It was a real gasp, the whole-body kind, and her ears went straight up in alarm. “You jumped over a baby? Was the baby okay?”
“Yeah, he smiled at me!”
“Oh, good.” Yin pressed a dirty hand to her chest as she gave a sigh of relief, and left a handprint on the dress, and didn’t seem to notice that either. “I’d have been so worried. Babies are so small.”
Sophie looked at Joy over the cigarette in a way that said this was going to be the whole night now, and that it was Joy’s fault.
“She’s not going to break into song is she?” Joy asked Sophie.
With no musical number forthcoming, Yin explained what the two of them were really up to out here in the dark.
The tree’s days were numbered.
“They were going to take it out in September,” Yin said. She had gone back to the soil and was working it again while she talked, gently, a handful at a time, the way you’d knead bread you were fond of. “The poor thing is sick…”
“Root fungus,” Sophie offered by way of an actual explanation.
“...and I went to the office and asked if I could try and heal it!”
“Wow and they said yes?”
“They said no,” Sophie said.
“They said no,” Yin agreed cheerfully, “and then I went back.”
“So she just kept going back every day.”
“Nine times! And finally they said yes.” Yin sat back on her heels. “There’s a review a week from Friday. If it looks better, it stays. If it doesn’t,” her ears drooped about fifteen degrees, which Joy was beginning to understand was a lot, “it doesn’t.”
Joy looked up at the tree. It was very large and very old, and even in the dark she could see the dead half of it, the brittle paper-bag leaves on the east side hanging on out of nothing but habit.
“A week and a half,” she said.
“Right!”
“For all that.”
“It’s a wonderful old tree,” Yin said warmly, like she was talking about a cherished classic car.
She put her palm flat on one of the big surface roots and closed her eyes.
Joy didn’t know what she expected. The last few weeks had seriously diminished her ability to be surprised. What she didn’t expect was how small it was. Yin laid her hand on a sickly root and under her palm there was a soft green glow. It was hard to tell in the fading light, but as Joy leaned in to look, she saw the bark darken, and then to her amazement, a small shoot rise up from it and sprout a couple of buds before Yin withdrew her hand.
“I’m not very good at this yet,” she said. “I can keep it company. I can help a little, but this poor tree needs so much help.”
“Keep it company?” Joy repeated.
“Trees get lonely,” Yin said, as though this were widely known, and went back to massaging the soil. Almost immediately she stopped, bent down close to the soil, and said, very politely, “Oh! Sorry. Sorry, excuse me,” to something Joy couldn’t see, and moved her hand three inches to the left.
“Worm,” Sophie said, without looking up from her phone.
“Ah,” Joy said.
“She apologizes to all of them.”
“It’s his home too!” Yin said.
Joy watched Yin work in silence for a few minutes until suddenly Yin’s ears perked up and she turned to Joy with a surprised look, like she’d just realized she’d left her oven on.
“Your eyes!”
“Yeah I’d been meaning to ask you about yours too.”
Yin stood and with surprising speed crossed the distance between them and had her face inches from Joy’s. Joy looked down at her and smiled awkwardly. Looking into her eyes, again amethyst purple came to mind.
“So um…is that a normal eye color where you’re from?” Joy asked conversationally.
“We’re from Santa Barbara,” Sophie said from behind Yin’s head.
Joy leaned her head to the side so she could see around Yin.
“Wait, then what’s with the…” She tapped the tops of her ears for emphasis.
Sophie looked back down at her phone. “That’s your story Yin, you tell her.”
Yin took a step back, clasping her hands together.
“Oh! So during the summer, Sophie and I were at a garage sale looking for things to wear for one of our shows. I was going through some shirts when I found one I loooooved! It had this card on the front of it, a lady with purple eyes in a garden with a crown of stars and a big field of wheat. It was so pretty! I turned around to show Sophie and…”
“I look up to see her ears have grown six inches, her hair has grown three feet, and she’s got eyes even contacts couldn’t replicate,” Sophie said, not looking up.
Joy blinked.
“Wait, you mean like a tarot card.”
“Yup, The Empress,” Sophie said.
“Well…” Joy said, puffing out her cheeks, “Want to hear something crazy?”
Daniel felt his phone buzz in his pocket and groaned.
He pulled it out, opened up the group chat, saw one of his team mates telling everybody there was a party happening over on Gayley and about half of the team saying they’d be there. He wasn’t, and he pocketed the phone.
It was already late, his legs were still sore from practice, they were going to be even more sore tomorrow when he had to go to work and move somebody into a fifth story apartment in Malibu, and a late night and binge drinking weren’t going to help. He had hours of studying to do tonight too, he wasn’t leaving anything to chance for the first finance exam of the year.
On the day he left for his freshman year, his parents had told him that college was going to be some of the best years of his life. But he wondered what had really changed from high school. Back then, he worked, he ran, and he studied so he could get into a good school and pay for it. Now that he’d done that, he worked, he ran and he studied.
It didn’t bother him too much. His parents had worked so hard for him and his sister, and now he was determined to make them proud.
He was so lost in thought that he almost didn’t notice all the activity in Bruin Plaza until he was right in the thick of it.
They were having a night market tonight. Daniel had never paid attention to the schedule so they were always a bit of a surprise.
Food trucks and booths were parked all around the plaza with lights strung between them, and a thumping bassline and little else audible was coming from a large speaker somewhere and competing with the noise of hundreds of people enjoying the festivities.
He began working his way through the crowd as he headed towards the dorms when he heard a familiar voice calling his name through the clamour.
“Daniel! Heeeey! Over here!”
He looked around, not being able to place the source of the voice until a rapidly waving hand caught his attention and he saw Keiko seated at one of the booths. She was waving with both hands with the enthusiasm of a castaway who has just seen an airplane flying overhead.
He did not have the energy to match Keiko’s tonight. To be fair at his best he still didn’t, but right now he really just wanted some peace and quiet. If peace and quiet had an opposite, it was Keiko.
It was too late though, she’d seen that he’d seen her and was waving him over with great aplomb.
He made his way over. Keiko’s booth said, “Madame Keiko the Divine Diviner” in sparkly purple letters across the top.
“Daniel! I didn’t think I’d see you here!” Keiko said, leaning over the table and giving him a hug, “You never come to these!”
“Yeah sorry, you know how it is.”
It wasn’t much of an excuse, but it didn’t seem to deter Keiko.
“Well you’re here now! Sit down, I’m going to tell you your fortune!”
Daniel looked down at the most uncomfortable wire frame chair he’d ever seen. His legs already felt like once they sat down they weren’t getting back up again, and the chair promised he was going to wish he could.
“Ah, I’m going to pass, not really my thing.”
“Oh come on! It’ll be fun!”
Daniel doubted that but Keiko grabbed his wrist and with surprising strength for her tiny frame, pulled him down into the seat. It was every bit as bad as he had imagined.
“Ok! Let’s do this!” Keiko said, cracking her knuckles. Daniel was pretty sure he felt something in him crack too as his weight settled into the chair.
She moved a deck of cards to the center of the table.
“Ever done a tarot reading before?”
“Me and my cousins played with a Ouija Board when we were like 13. Jason spilled his coke on it then wet the bed that night. Is it like that?”
“Exactly, except minus all of that. So here’s what we do. First you have to ask a question for the tarot to divine.”
“How about ‘How much marble am I going to have to haul up five flights of stairs tomorrow’”
“No, you have to ask it a good question! Like will you find true love, will you become rich and famous, you know exciting stuff!”
Daniel knew she wasn’t going to let this go. Exciting stuff? He reflected on his thoughts from earlier. He worked, he ran, he studied. It was the opposite of exciting. Even the running, which he really did love wasn’t exactly exciting. Somebody fired a pistol, you ran as fast as you could, then you won or lost. He thought about tomorrow’s backbreaking job, he thought about his friends over on Gayley right now trying to drink beer upside down.
“Ok,” he said, “Is anything exciting ever going to happen to me?”
“Yeah way better!” Keiko beamed, “Hold that thought!”
She pressed two fingers to her forehead while in a surprising feat of manual dexterity she shuffled the cards with a single hand. She then began chanting in an imperious voice:
“Oh mystic and mighty tarot! I am the great Seer Keiko!”
“I thought you were the Divine Diviner.”
“Shut up! Anyhow,” She resumed her bit, “Help this poor lost soul understand the destiny the stars have placed upon him!”
She finished her shuffle then pushed the deck towards Daniel.
“Now take the deck and split it into three piles."
Daniel did as he was told, and Keiko deftly re-stacked them. Then she drew three cards and placed them in front of Daniel.
“These cards represent your past, your present, and your future! So first…”
She flipped over the leftmost card. On it was a drawing that looked like something you’d see on a wood carving from the middle ages. The roman numeral for eight was printed at the top, and it depicted a man sitting on a bench hammering stars into eight large coins.
“This is your past!” Keiko said, tapping the card for emphasis, “The eight of pentacles. It means diligence, hard work and training.”
Daniel raised an eyebrow. That was pretty good.
“Next, your present!”
She flipped the center card. This one had a roman four on the top and depicted a man sitting under a tree, while three golden chalices sat on the ground next to him, and it appeared that a cloud next to him was offering him a fourth. The man however was sitting there with his arms crossed, ignoring all of them.
“That’s the four of cups. It represents missing or ignoring what’s right in front of you. Or apathy towards opportunities presented to you.”
He frowned at that, that one hit a little too close to home.
“And finally,” Keiko said, placing a hand on the final card, “Your future!”
She flipped it.
This one was different. It had a roman ten on the top and “Wheel of Fortune” written across the bottom, and showed a beautiful blonde woman in a red dress with piercing blue eyes standing in front of a huge wheel decorated with strange writing he didn’t recognize. Strangely though, it didn’t have that old medieval look of the other two cards. The colors were too vivid, the style seemed much more modern.
But there was something else about it. Daniel’s eyes fixed on the bright blue eyes of the woman on the card.
“Oh! That’s the Wheel of Fortune!” Keiko exclaimed, “It means…”
She stopped, tilting her head, confused.
“Wait, that’s not one of my cards.”
The eyes seemed to fill Daniel’s whole vision growing larger and larger until all he could see was their sapphire blue. He could hear Keiko shouting something, but she seemed muffled and distant like he was underwater. Then suddenly the blue was torn away from his sight and he blinked as he refocused on Keiko who had snatched it away from him with one hand and had grabbed him by his hoodie and was shaking him with the other.
She was looking at the card with a highly concerned look, but then looked back to Daniel and her eyes went wide.
“Daniel! Your eyes!”
Still a little stunned, Daniel reflexively reached up to see what was wrong. The hand that came in front of his face was wrong. It wasn’t his hand. It was too small, the fingers too delicate. Through them, he saw Keiko’s eyes go even wider and she covered her mouth with both hands with a horrified expression. Before he could ask what was wrong, a long, wavy lock of strawberry blonde hair dropped in front of his eyes.
“And then what?” Sophie asked. She hadn’t looked at her phone through the whole story.
Joy waved a hand over her body.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” Yin said, clasping her hands together, “You got a blessing too!”
Sophie gave an angry puff of her cigarette at that.
“Well it cost me my scholarship, I’ve had to figure out how to run again, I barely have any clothes that fit anymore…”
“And isn’t it wonderful?” Yin said. She said it with her whole face, sitting back in the dirt in her ruined dress with her ears up, and it wasn’t a question she was really asking. It was the kind of question people asked when they already knew the answer was yes and wanted company in it.
Joy opened her mouth to say something funny, and found she didn’t have anything. She took a second to really think about it. The shoes. The new kind of speed she had. The mirror in the exam room. The wall, and the half second at the top of the arc when she’d weighed nothing at all. Suddenly feeling like she had the right words on the tip of her tongue.
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess it’s not bad.”
Yin beamed at her.
It was a spectacular smile, and Joy felt it land, and for a second it felt like the sun had risen early. Then Yin turned the same smile on the tree, and the worm, and a moth that had come down to investigate the dress, in about that order and with exactly the same wattage, and the brightness returned to normal levels.
She filed that away somewhere, and didn’t look at it.
“She’s got other projects,” Sophie said, later. “You should know that before you get attached.”
“Projects?”
“There’s the tree. There’s a vacant lot she’s determined to turn into a garden.” Sophie ticked them off with the hand that didn’t have the cigarette in it. “There’s a lady at the Ackerman coffee cart whose kid is applying to colleges, and Yin’s helping with the essays. There’s a bird.”
“The bird’s fine now,” Yin called, from the far side of the trunk.
“There was a bird,” Sophie corrected.
Joy looked over at Yin, who had found a watering can from somewhere and was giving the roots on the north side a slow, careful drink, murmuring something encouraging to the bark. She was pretty sure it wasn’t in any language she’d ever heard.
“And you want to do all this?” Joy asked.
Yin stopped pouring.
And she thought about it. She thought about it longer than she’d thought about anything else all night, and the delight went off her face for the first time, and what replaced it wasn’t distress. It was a kind of pleasant, untroubled puzzlement, as if Joy had asked her whether she wanted to have a pulse.
“I don’t really get a choice,” she said. “But I like them. So it’s ok!”
And she went back to the watering can.
On the wall, Sophie put her phone away in her pocket.
“You should know,” Sophie said, when Yin had wandered off to the far side of the lawn to say goodnight to something in the grass, “she used to be a completely different person.”
“Yeah?”
“She’s the vocalist for a metal band.” Sophie was looking at the tree and not at Joy. “We’ve got a show in November. Metal. The real kind.”
Joy looked across the lawn at the girl in the white sundress and the straw hat, who was crouched in the grass having what appeared to be a quiet and respectful conversation with a snail.
“Yeah I can see it,” Joy said.
Sophie sighed, “Nah man, you don’t get it. Yin is…was hardcore. Let’s just say her Dad has a very exciting line of work, and Yin took after him. That girl put up with zero shit. Back in high school there was this total bitch named Maria, classic mean girl, she turned bullying other girls into eating disorders into an art. She decides to make Yin her target one day and you know what Yin does, she takes Maria’s hand, opens it up, then straight up tore one of Maria’s earrings off, puts it in her hand, closes it and walks off. Didn’t say a word.”
“Holy shit. What’s her Dad do? Drug kingpin?”
“He’s a chef!” Sophie said, her eyes lighting up for the first time that evening.
“Oh, I guess that explains it,” Joy said, a little let down.
“Yeah, she taught me the right way to break a beer bottle. We were 14.”
“There’s a right way?”
“That’s what I said,” Sophie said. She tapped ash off the end onto the grass, carefully, away from the roots. “Now she’s a Disney Princess. It’s great. Everybody loves her. Songbirds land on her. She’s never been happier in her whole life.”
She said it completely flat. And Joy, who apparently read people for a living now, heard all of it. Every single layer. And understood at once that if she said one word about any of it, Sophie would show her the beer bottle trick first hand.
“Jeez,” Joy said instead, “And I thought I had it rough.”
“Mm.”
They watched Yin for a while. She had moved on from the snail to a sprinkler head, which she was also talking to.
“You come out here every night?” Joy said.
“Every night.”
“And sit on the wall.”
“And sit on the wall.”
“You don’t help with the tree.”
Sophie turned and looked at her for the first time since the video, and Joy got the sense she wasn’t any more impressed with her than she thought she’d be.
“I’m here,” Sophie said.
Joy had heard that exact sentence before, from Marco, in a plaza, meaning something she hadn’t wanted to look at. She didn’t look at it now either.
“The tree’s her business,” Sophie said, and went back to her phone. And that was clearly the end of that.
There was also a grant.
Yin mentioned it the way she seemed to mention everything, in passing and with no apparent sense of how important it was. There was a fund for student sustainability projects. Somebody in an office had heard about the oak. There had been a form, and the form had worked, and now there were two thousand dollars.
Joy stopped with a handful of dirt halfway to the pile.
She had, at some point in the last forty minutes, ended up in the flower bed next to Yin with her sleeves pushed up, scooping soil out from around the base of the roots where Yin told her to. She didn’t remember deciding to do this. It had seemed like the thing to do, and then she’d been doing it.
“Two thousand dollars,” she said.
“Mm-hm!”
“Which fund?”
“Sustainable Futures,” Yin said happily. “They’re wonderful! You might have seen them, they had a booth in the plaza this weekend. ”
Joy thought about a folding table and a banner an inch or two lower than she’d estimated, and a stack of flyers going up behind her like pigeons, and decided that was information she could hold onto for later.
“That’s a lot of money for a tree,” she said.
“It’s not for the tree. It’s for soil amendments, and a consultant, and a report at the end for the review.” Yin wrinkled her nose, which made her ears do something complicated. “I don’t really understand any of it. I just want to help the poor tree.”
“So what have you spent?”
“Fifteen dollars. On the soil.”
“That’s it?” Joy said, stunned, “You’ve got two thousand dollars…”
“I have two thousand dollars I’m not allowed to spend on any of the things I’d like to spend it on,” Yin said, and there was the first flicker of anything other than sunshine Joy had seen out of her all night. “Every time I ask if I can get something the tree actually needs they start talking about permits, and consultants.”
There was some actual venom in that last word.
Joy knew where she was coming from. If she’d learned anything from two years in Business Economics, and especially in two weeks as a Section 4, it was how much bullshit the world ran on.
“Yin,” she said. “What’s the review looking for?”
“It says measurable improvement.” Yin said it the way you’d say a word in a language you didn’t speak. “And the report.”
“Has anyone written the report?”
“Not yet.”
“Has anyone started the report?”
Yin’s ears went down about ten degrees.
And there it was. Joy was aware, distantly, that there were several very good reasons not to say the next thing. She had sixty-one dollars. She had a Thursday she hadn’t figured out how to pay for. She had tryouts on Monday for a sport she could not do, which Nate had informed her she was definitely going to do and which Keiko would probably react violently, or at least annoyingly if she didn’t do.
She was also standing in a flower bed next to a girl with two thousand dollars, zero clues, and a dying tree, and no idea in the world which of those things to do first.
“Okay,” Joy said. “What if I took care of all the…non botanical work?”
Yin looked up.
“You’d do that?”
“I’d be great at that.” It was true, and it wasn’t the whole thing. “You want the tree and you don’t want a consultant. Fine. Somebody has to fill in all these categories and make an office happy, and that’s not a tree problem. That’s a paperwork problem. I just spent all morning doing paperwork. I’m basically an expert now.”
Yin stared at her, and then her whole face lit up, and her ears went all the way up and slightly forward.
“You’re organized,” she said, with wonder.
“I really am not,” Joy said.
From the wall, Sophie said: “What’s in it for you?”
Joy looked over.
Sophie hadn’t looked up from her phone. She didn’t need to. The question sat there in the dark between them, flat and reasonable and completely fair, and Joy went looking for the answer, and found that she didn’t have a good one. None of it added up to anything she could say out loud to Sophie.
“Ask me in a month,” she said.
Sophie considered that. Then she dropped the cigarette, ground it out very thoroughly under her boot, well away from the roots, and picked the butt back up and put it in her pocket.
“Yeah,” she said, “I will.”
It was nearly eleven when Joy finally walked the rest of the way back up the Hill, dirt up to both elbows and a list already half-built in her head. The ankle had started to complain about the kneeling, and she ignored it, imagining the lecture she was going to get from Tiffany.
Her phone buzzed on the stairs.
Theo: you in thursday?
She stopped on the landing and looked at it.
She had sixty-one dollars. She had a two-hundred-dollar-plus buy-in and a woman at Ray’s table who’d told her she’d have folded if she wanted the money. She had a tree, and a report, and tryouts, and a promise to Marco, and a bad ankle, and no plan.
She typed yes, and sent it, and went the rest of the way up the stairs with a renewed spring in her step.