“Okay,” Nate said, adjusting his glasses. “Let’s go through it.”
He had turned his chair all the way around, which he only did for things he considered important. What Nate considered important could come off as unusual to some people, but he had his own way about things. He had a pen. He did not have paper. Joy eyed it warily; she knew if she wasn’t careful he’d give her a good waggling-at with it.
“We don’t need to go through it,” she said, leaning forward on the couch-bed.
“You have tryouts Monday.”
“Yup.”
“For a sport you’ve never done, on an ankle that’s cleared the same morning.”
“Mmhmm.”
“You have a tree.” He ticked it off in the air with the pen. “The tree has a review a week from Friday. Which requires a report. Which nobody has started.”
He looked down his glasses at Joy.
“I’m starting the report!”
“You have Marco on Tuesday after next. You have Tiffany, who has taken it upon herself to be your health’s parole officer.” Nate paused for emphasis. “You have a card game on Thursday that you need at least two hundred dollars for, and you have sixty-one.”
“Yeah…” Joy groaned.
“And you have classes,” Nate said. “I assume. I haven’t seen you go to one since the wall.”
Joy opened her mouth, and then closed it, and thought about it honestly.
“I went to one Friday.”
“Friday before the race?”
“It counts.”
Nate looked at her for a long moment, pen poised to waggle. He did not say anything. He had a way of not saying anything that made you hear everything he wasn’t saying in your own voice. It was a talent Joy had only ever seen him and one extremely disappointed high school chemistry teacher use.
“What are you doing today?” he said finally.
“Finding out how to fix a tree.”
“From who?”
Joy gave him her widest grin.
“Oh no,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Zane was on the lawn behind the dorm, lying flat on his back in the grass with his thermos balanced on his chest, watching a cloud.
Joy had known Zane for two years. She and Nate had spent a meaningful portion of those two years trying to work him out, and had between them established the following facts: he was the RA, he was a botany major, and despite never having seen him lift a finger, he somehow kept the floor in pretty good working order.
That was the whole file.
She stood over him so her shadow fell across his face.
“Hi Zane. How’re the…” She looked up, trying to see what he was staring at. “Clouds?”
Zane continued to watch the cloud. At least Joy assumed that’s what he was seeing.
“Zane. I need to ask you something about plants.”
This produced a result. Not a large one. His eyes moved from the cloud to her, slowly, the way a tortoise’s eyes move toward something it has decided might be lettuce.
“Yeah man,” he said. “What’s up?”
“There’s an oak tree. The big one on the lawn past the Sculpture Garden. It’s sick. Root fungus. Half of it’s dead and they want to cut it down, and I’ve got about ten days to make it look better. What do I do?”
Zane considered this.
He considered it for a long time. Long enough that Joy began to wonder if the question had gone somewhere else entirely, possibly the cloud. He unscrewed the top of his thermos and drank from it, and screwed it back on, and put it back on his chest, and watched it rise and fall with his breathing for a while.
“Soil,” he said.
Joy stood there, nodding, waiting for him to elaborate on this sage advice. No elaboration seemed to be forthcoming.
“Okay,” she said. “What about the soil?”
Another sip.
“Feed it.”
“With what?”
“Fertilizer.”
Joy rubbed her chin. Whatever planet Zane was on, it seemed to be short on botanical advice.
“Zane, I’m going to need a little more than…”
“Good stuff,” Zane said, and his voice took on something she had never heard in it before, which was an opinion. “Natural. Mother Earth’s finest. None of that cheap synthetic crap.” He frowned at the sky, which for Zane was the equivalent of pounding a table. “That stuff’s terrible. Burns the roots. You want the real thing.”
“The real thing,” Joy repeated.
“Mm.”
“Where do I get the real thing?”
But the cloud had moved on, and Zane’s attention had gone with it, and after another minute of standing there Joy understood that the consultation was over.
“Thanks, Zane! Have fun with…” She looked up again, then shrugged and left.
“Cool,” said Zane, a long time after she’d left.
The Sustainable Futures office was on the second floor of a building Joy had never been inside, at the end of a hallway lined with posters about compost, the water cycle, and a really cute one with a raccoon washing its hands in a river. It was run by a woman named Marisol, who had a nose ring, a water bottle covered in stickers, and the look of someone who had spent the weekend picking flyers out of hedges.
She recognized Joy about a second and a half after Joy walked in.
Joy watched it happen. It started in the eyes, the way it always did, then went down into the jaw, and finished in the shoulders, which came up about an inch and stayed there.
Joy could already tell they were off to a great start.
“You’re the girl,” Marisol said.
“I am a girl,” Joy agreed.
“You went through our banner!”
“Most of me made it under it.”
“You knocked over three hundred flyers! I saw a bird using one to make a nest in the tree outside my office!”
Joy was about to protest, but glanced out of the window behind Marisol just in time to see a sparrow land on the tree with half of the Sustainable Futures logo in its beak.
“And look,” said Yin, who had come in behind Joy wearing the straw hat and a sweater with a cartoon mushroom on it, “now she’s here to help another tree! Isn’t that nice?”
Marisol looked at Yin, and something in her softened. Yin seemed to have that effect on people. Joy had watched things soften around her for three days now. She seemed to radiate an aura of tranquility. Joy had started to wonder if that might be literal after seeing her powers firsthand.
Marisol’s shoulders came down half the inch they’d gone up. It was a good opening, and Joy took it.
“I’m really sorry about the flyers!” she said, and meant it, which was the trick. “I was racing, it was stupid, and I’ve been feeling bad about it all week. If you ever need somebody to help put that banner back up, I’m your girl. You’ve seen how high I can jump!”
Marisol studied her for a long moment. Then she sighed, and after a few clicks turned her monitor around. There was a spreadsheet on it.
It wasn’t much fun, even by spreadsheet standards.
It had eleven categories, and none of them made sense on their own. But Joy had a secret weapon with which to make sense of it: half a Business Economics degree. She’d spent two years learning to speak the brand of corporate bullshit these things were inevitably written in. In this case, Soil Amendments. Equipment. Labor (Volunteer). Labor (Paid). Documentation. Consultant Services. Contingency.
Yin looked at the screen the way a cat looks at a television.
Joy looked at it with the drained look anybody who has to spend any amount of time reading a spreadsheet tends to get.
“Consultant Services,” she said. “What’s that for?”
“Expert guidance,” Marisol said. “Most projects bring in someone with relevant experience to advise on the approach and help prepare the final report.”
“How much is budgeted?”
Marisol checked. “Up to half the award.”
“And it’s unfilled.”
“Yin didn’t want one.”
“I don’t want a consultant,” Yin said, with the same small venom she’d had on the lawn.
“What if the consultant,” Joy said, “was somebody who was already doing the work?”
Marisol looked up from the screen.
Joy had the whole thing in her head already. She’d had it since the word consultant had come up on the lawn, and she’d spent some of the walk over here feeling slightly bad about having it, the same way you’d feel carrying a bag of garbage around with you.
She laid it out: the grant required a report she was writing, a timeline she was managing, a budget she was reconciling, and documentation she was producing, all of which were listed under Consultant Services in Marisol’s own spreadsheet. She was doing the job. The job had a line. The line had money on it.
“That’s half the grant,” Marisol said.
“It’s up to half. You said so yourself.”
“For an undergrad.”
“For the only person in this room who’s read your spreadsheet,” Joy said, and smiled at her, and watched it land.
There was a long pause.
“You’d have to submit a scope of work,” Marisol said slowly. “And deliverables. And the report is due to Facilities by the review, not to us, and if it isn’t done…”
“It’ll be done.”
“…then I’m the one who approved it.”
“It’ll be done,” Joy said again, but this time she leaned in with a conspiratorial grin. “Let me let you in on a little secret…”
She told Marisol about the race that had destroyed her booth. About how she’d planned it, how she’d applied measurements, metrics, research on her opponent, and even research into her own capabilities. She presented it as an organized, well-thought-out plan, not the borderline cheating it had actually been.
Marisol approved her consultation.
On the walk back across campus Yin pulled out her phone, tapped at it for about three seconds, and put it away, humming.
Joy’s phone buzzed.
It was a payment. For a thousand dollars. With a note that said thank you for helping my tree!!! and three flower emojis.
Joy stopped walking. She was pretty sure she stopped breathing too.
“Yin. You can’t just… there’s a process. There’s supposed to be an invoice, and…”
“But you’re doing the work,” Yin said, puzzled. “So you should have it now. Right?”
Joy looked at the number on her phone for a long moment.
She had done the math on this. She’d done it several times. It was legitimate. It was on the spreadsheet. She was going to earn every dollar of it, probably twice. And she was aware, in some quiet back room of herself, that none of those were the reason her stomach had done a small flip when the number came up.
“Right,” she said. “Thanks, Yin.”
Yin beamed, hugged her, and went off to say hello to a squirrel.
Ray’s house was in Culver City, on a street of small tidy houses with small tidy lawns, and it smelled, as it had the first time, like garlic and old carpet and the specific dark-wood smell of a dining room that got used once a month for exactly one thing.
Ray met her at the door in an apron.
“Joy! You came back!” He looked genuinely delighted about it, which Joy was beginning to understand was simply how Ray looked. “Theo said you might. I saw your video, looks like you jump as well as you play poker!”
Joy’s smile turned a bit nervous.
“Has anybody not seen that video?”
Ray’s wife was in the kitchen doing a crossword. She looked up, smiled at Joy, said “Don’t let Vic yell,” and went back to it.
The table was already mostly full. Theo, who’d brought her the first time, raised a hand. Vic was there, already a beer and a half in and red around the collar, and he looked at Joy and then looked away fast. She was in just leggings and a hoodie today, so at least he had less to leer at. There were two men from Ray’s restaurant she didn’t know. And at the far end, stacking chips into small neat towers with the absent precision of a person who’d done it ten thousand times, was Dana.
She still looked like the sort of woman who would walk into a down-on-his-luck PI’s office and turn his whole world upside down. Last time she had watched Joy for about four hands, folded a winning hand to her on purpose, and afterward, on the porch, had said: I’d have folded too, if I wanted the money.
Joy had thought about that sentence more than she’d thought about most things in the past two weeks.
Dana looked up. Their eyes met.
And there it was again. The same small jolt of recognition Joy had felt on the lawn with Yin, a kind of click, like two magnets finding each other through a table. Recognition, without any reason for it.
Except Dana’s eyes were brown. Ordinary, warm, slightly tired brown. And the jolt hadn’t been as intense as it had been with Yin.
Dana looked at her a moment longer than she needed to. Then she went back to her chips.
Joy sat down, very carefully giving her a polite smile, trying to think of a way to ask “So, been cursed by any magical tarot cards lately?” that didn’t sound weird.
“Two hundred to sit,” Ray said, cheerful as a game-show host. “Rebuys are open all night.”
Joy put down a thousand dollars.
The table went quiet for exactly as long as it took everyone to count it. Vic said something under his breath. Theo’s eyebrows went up and stayed there.
Dana looked at the money, and then at Joy, and the barest smirk appeared on her face.
“Well,” she said, as Ray began to shuffle. “Somebody’s brave.”
It was a slow night for the first two hours, which was fine. Joy had learned that the first two hours were for listening.
Vic talked the whole time and bet like he talked, loud and early and without much connection to what was really happening. One of the restaurant guys was there to lose money and seemed at peace with it. The other one only played in position and only played premium hands and glared at anybody who wanted to chat. Joy liked him; he was honest about what he was.
Dana was the only one at the table who could read her, and Joy knew it, and Dana knew she knew it, and they spent most of two hours very politely not getting into a pot together.
Then, a little after ten, the hum arrived.
It came up under Joy’s sternum like a note on a cello, the way it had at Kevin’s table and the way it had on the plaza, and she felt her whole body lean toward it. Not toward a card. Toward a moment. Something in the next few minutes was going to go two ways at once, and the hum wanted her to be there when it happened.
She looked down at the cards in front of her.
Nine and ten of hearts. Could be worse, she reasoned.
Vic raised. The restaurant guy who glared folded. Dana called.
Joy called.
The flop came down: jack of hearts, eight of clubs, two of hearts.
Joy’s face did nothing, which was something she’d spent two weeks practicing in the mirror. The hum went up a full step. She had nine and ten with a jack and an eight on the board, which meant a queen or a seven would give her a straight, and any heart would give her a flush, and she was drawing to the best possible version of both. She had a lot of ways to win and not one of them had happened yet.
Vic bet big. Vic always bet big.
Dana called, without hesitation, and Joy looked at her and saw it, just for a second: not a tell, exactly. A settledness. Dana was sitting on something real. Probably the jacks. Possibly two pair.
The smart play was to call and see the next card.
The fun play was to raise.
Joy raised.
Vic said “Oh, come on,” and called, because Vic always called. Dana looked at her for a long time. Joy looked back, and let herself smile a little, the lower lip pushing up, the one that said she knew a joke nobody else had gotten yet. And the truth was she did. She was currently holding it.
Dana called.
The turn was the seven of spades.
A straight. Seven, eight, nine, ten, jack.
The hum went quiet, all at once, the way it always did once the moment had actually happened, and Joy was left sitting there in the plain ordinary silence of a dining room in Culver City holding the best hand at the table.
Everything after that was just math. She bet. Vic, who had a pair of eights and a tremendous amount of confidence, went all in, and suddenly there was a little over three thousand dollars sitting in the middle of Ray’s dining room table. Dana, who had two pair and a very clear idea of what that seven meant, thought about it for a long time, looked at Joy one more time, and folded.
“You had it?” Vic said, when Joy turned over the straight. “On the flop?”
“I had nine-ten,” Joy said. “I had hope!”
Vic stared at the cards, and then at her, and then made a sound like a tire going flat, and reached for his wallet to rebuy.
Dana didn’t say anything. She just turned her folded cards face up so Joy could see them: jack, eight. Two pair, on the flop, the best hand at the table right up until the seven.
She’d folded the second-best hand to a raise that had been nothing when it was made.
Joy looked at the cards and then at Dana, and Dana, for the first time all night, looked like she was starting to have fun too.
It went on like that. Not every hand. Not most hands. Joy lost some she should have won and folded some she’d have won. That was poker, and that was fine. But four times more before midnight the hum came up under her ribs, and four times she leaned into it, and three of those four times the table broke her way.
Vic rebought twice, and neither time for two hundred. The second time he pulled a fat envelope out of his jacket, red to the ears, and slapped it down on the table like it had personally wronged him. One of the restaurant guys rebought once and then went home with his dignity. Dana rebought once, without comment, peeling a thick fold of hundreds off a money clip without looking at it, and played the rest of the night a little tighter and a little more carefully and never once got into a big pot with Joy again.
At a quarter past one Ray’s wife came through in her bathrobe to get a glass of water, and everybody at the table said goodnight to her, by name, one after another, including Vic.
Joy counted her chips twice at the end, the way Keiko had counted the race pool. Then she counted them a third time.
Seven thousand and forty dollars.
She walked out onto Ray’s small tidy lawn under a small tidy streetlight with more money than she had ever held in her life, as Daniel or as Joy, in a thick fold in her jacket pocket, and stood there for a second not quite believing the weight of it.
The screen door creaked behind her.
Dana came down the steps, pulling on a jacket, reading glasses still on top of her head. She stopped next to Joy and looked out at the street for a while, the way Sophie looked at the tree.
“You’re lucky,” Dana said.
“You say that, but you should see how badly I get screwed on this game I just started playing on my phone.”
“No, I mean it.” Dana turned and looked at her, and there was that click again, faint, like something recognizing something. “You’re lucky. It’s a very particular thing. It feels like being good.” She pulled her keys out of her pocket. “Don’t let it make your decisions for you.”
Before Joy could think of a single thing to say to that, Dana was walking to her car.
Joy stood on the lawn, for once, lost for words.
The UCLA groundskeeper’s shed sat in an isolated corner of the campus Joy had jogged past dozens of times and never really noticed. It was a squat gray building with a sloping roof and a padlock on the door.
The padlock was open.
It was hanging on the hasp, unlocked, as if somebody had stepped away for a moment and forgotten it. From the look of it, they’d forgotten about it when she was still in middle school. Joy looked at it for a second. It was the kind of small, convenient thing that had been happening to her for two weeks, and she had stopped asking why and just rolled with it.
She’d gone to the home improvement store on the way over, flush with poker cash and Zane’s instructions in her head, and she had found fertilizer, and it had all been exactly the kind of thing Zane had described with his first and only opinion. Synthetic. Cheap. In bright plastic bags with numbers on them, full of chemicals she vaguely remembered from chemistry class, all of it stuff she was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to touch without protective gear. She’d put it all back and left.
She wasn’t sure a healthy tree would like that stuff, and Yin’s tree certainly wasn’t healthy.
Joy pulled the door to the shed open.
Inside it smelled like gasoline, cut grass, and dust. There was a workbench along the back wall, a rack of rakes and shovels, and a riding mower with a cover on it. She took a few tentative steps in. Almost immediately, she inhaled a nose full of dust and sneezed with such force that she struck the wall next to her with her elbow.
There was a sound of something overhead coming dislodged, and before she could even react a gray blur swung down from above, an inch from her face. Joy recoiled with a shriek, too surprised to be embarrassed about the fact that apparently she shrieked now, and tried to focus on what had just assaulted her in the shed’s gloom.
It was a chainsaw. And as she looked up the blade to the orange handle, she could see that it was swinging gently from a hook, which was all that was keeping it attached to the ceiling where it had been stored.
Joy glared at it, not entirely convinced it wasn’t some sadistic trap meant to cut the faces off of students seeking to rob the shed of its riches. One way or another, that’d been another stroke of luck for today.
"So that's why the blonde girl always dies first." she said as her heart rate returned to normal.
Venturing deeper into the shed, she came across a heavy shelving unit. The bags on it were exactly what she’d seen at the store: the same bright plastic, the same numbers, the same cheap synthetic crap.
She moved a stack of them aside out of pure stubbornness.
Behind the stack was a steel cabinet, painted the same gray as the shed. Taped to the front, in thick black marker, was a sticky note:
DO NOT TOUCH. -H.
Naturally, Joy opened it.
Inside, on a shelf by itself, sat a single bag. It was burlap, not plastic, and tied at the top with actual twine. There was a label stitched to the front, hand-lettered in a looping green script, with a little drawing of a tree inside a circle of knots.
PREMIUM ORGANIC SOIL AMENDMENT, it said. Small batch. Hand-harvested.
And underneath, in slightly larger letters, accompanied by a drawing of a smiling man in a hood:
Blessed by real Celtic Druids!
Joy read it twice.
She thought about Zane on his back in the grass, frowning at the sky. Natural. None of that cheap synthetic crap.
“Well,” she said to the empty shed. “Can’t get more natural than Druids.”
She lifted the bag out. It was heavier than it looked and slightly warm. Joy was no expert, but she knew how composting worked, and she made a face as she waddled out with the bag held tight to her chest.
The only evidence she left of her crime was a couple of twenty-dollar bills on the shelf where the bag had been.
Joy figured it could be her calling card if she ever embarked on a career as a Lady Thief.
Joy wasn’t sure what she had expected when she showed up at the tree at nine that night. What she got was Yin, still in her straw hat, on her knees in the flower bed with a trowel, digging a careful shallow ring around the base of the trunk and apologizing to every worm she met. She had also planted a ring of stones around the tree, each about the size and shape of a shoe, and each inscribed with an elegant rune that wasn’t in any language Joy had ever seen. And she could see this because each rune was glowing the same soft green that Yin’s hands had glowed the night they’d met, when she was healing the root.
Sophie was on the wall. Of course she was.
“Where’d you get that?” Sophie said, looking at the burlap bag as Joy pulled it out of the three layers of trash bags she’d put it in. Joy was determined not to have to do laundry a second time today.
“A friend recommended it.”
“What friend?”
“Zane.”
“Who’s…” she started, then went back to her phone. “Nah, actually, don’t care.”
When the ring was dug, Yin sat back on her heels, and Joy set the bag down in front of her and untied the twine.
To Joy’s horror, Yin leaned over the bag and took a long sniff of the contents.
“Oh, this is perfect! Thank you so much, Joy! This is the perfect kind of soil to imbue.”
“Wha…”
Yin then plunged both of her arms elbow deep into the bag. Both Joy and Sophie made a face.
Last time the glow had been small: a soft green under one palm, a shoot, a couple of buds. This time the light was so bright that shafts of it were coming through the burlap. Green, and then brighter green, and then a clear bright spring color that lit the underside of Yin’s hat and the bark of the trunk and, for a second, the whole lower half of the tree, every sick leaf standing out sharp against the dark like somebody had just taken a flash photo.
Yin’s eyes flew open.
“Oh!” she said. “Oh. That’s never…”
The light faded. The bag sat there looking as unpleasant as it had before.
“Never what?” Joy said.
Yin looked at her hands. Then at the bag. Then up at Joy, and her ears were all the way up and slightly forward, and her whole face was pure delight. Joy wasn’t sure if it was her eyes trying to adjust after the explosion of light, but Yin even seemed to be glowing a little.
“It liked that,” she said. “It really liked that. Where did you find this?”
“A friend recommended it,” Joy said again, and it came out a little smaller the second time.
They spread it together, by hand, in the ring Yin had dug, and covered it over with soil. Yin poured the watering can. The soil drank the water faster than Joy thought soil should, in a long soft sigh she could actually hear.
And then they stood back and waited. Nothing happened.
“So… now what?” Joy asked.
“I don’t know!” Yin said happily. “I’ve never done this before.”
Joy looked at the runestones Yin had planted, and figured there were no questions she could ask that she’d get a satisfactory answer to.
Instead she walked over to a drooping branch to see if anything was happening, and looked up at a sad, solitary leaf that seemed to be one of the few left on that branch.
It had been brown. Curled and brittle, like a crumpled paper bag, hanging on out of what Joy could only guess was pure stubbornness. As she watched, it uncurled. Slowly, like a hand opening. The brown drained out of it, and a green came up in its place, dark and waxy and healthy.
Then the leaf next to it did the same thing.
Then the one next to that.
“It’s working,” Yin whispered. “It’s working, it’s working…”
Behind them, Sophie hopped down from her perch and looked back at the wall with an accusatory glare.
“Hey,” she said. “Did the wall just move?”
Nobody answered her.
She turned and saw what the other two girls were looking at.