It started with the leaves Joy was looking at, and then it didn’t stop.
The green went out along the branch like a fuse burning, leaf after leaf uncurling in a long rippling line, and then it jumped to the next branch, and the next, and then it was everywhere at once. The whole dead east side of the tree came alive in a wave, rustling, though there wasn’t a breath of wind, a sound like a crowd standing up.
The branches moved. Not in the wind. They lifted, slowly, all of them together, the way Joy would stretch when warming up for a run. The trunk made a deep, groaning creak that Joy felt in her teeth. Bark shifted and smoothed and seemed to swell with newfound vitality.
Something pattered on the grass around them, and then on Joy’s head.
She reached up and pulled something out of her ponytail. Acorns. Dozens of them, raining down out of the dark, bouncing off the wall and the flower bed and Yin’s hat. This seemed to delight Yin, who stretched her arms out and spun in a slow circle like she had been caught in a rain shower on a hot day.
The runestones flared bright green all at once, every one of them, and then went out.
And then it was quiet.
The three of them stood there under it. The tree was bigger than it had been. Joy couldn’t have said how much, or how she knew, only that the canopy over their heads seemed to go up further than it had ten minutes ago, and it was so dense that it blocked out the night sky that had previously been visible through the bare branches.
Yin started to laugh. It was a small, delighted, disbelieving sound, and it went on for a while.
Sophie looked at the tree, and at the wall she’d been sitting on, which now had a long, fresh crack running through it from top to bottom.
She and Joy exchanged a look. Neither seemed to be as euphoric about this as Yin was.
By Saturday morning there was a crowd at the tree.
It wasn’t a big crowd yet, but word was getting around and the gawking had begun. A couple of joggers who’d stopped mid-run. A dad with a toddler on his shoulders. Two girls from the dorm next door in pajama pants, holding coffee and filming.
Joy came around the corner of the Sculpture Garden with a breakfast burrito in one hand and stopped walking.
The tree had grown, and not a little either. It was maybe half again as tall as it had been last night, and the canopy now spanned half the lawn. A small group had gathered under it and were busy gathering what had become a thick carpet of acorns, one of them occasionally flinching as one landed on their head or went down the back of their shirt.
The orange tag was still stapled to the trunk. It looked embarrassed.
In the middle of it all, sitting cross-legged in the flower bed with her straw hat in her lap and her ears straight up, Yin was crying. Happily, steadily, the way a faucet runs.
“Joy!” she said, when she saw her. “Joy, look.”
“I’m looking,” Joy said, her eyes drifting to the wall that had cracked last night. It now had a conspicuous bulge in it.
The reporter from the Daily Bruin showed up at nine.
Joy was first alerted to her presence when the reporter put an SLR in Joy’s face and took a flash photo, temporarily blinding her. She was grinning ear to ear; she had herself a hot scoop and she knew it. She took about two hundred pictures of the tree, several more of Joy, then about fifty of Yin, who kept hugging the trunk with her eyes closed and was therefore not much use for an interview.
So she turned to Joy.
“Are you involved with the project?”
And Joy, who was trying to eat her breakfast, absentmindedly said, “I’m the consultant.”
It wasn’t a lie. It was official. Marisol had approved it, it was even in that stupid spreadsheet now. Joy was, in a completely technical sense, the consultant on this project. The reporter wrote it down, and then she asked Joy a question about soil amendments, and Joy stopped chewing.
She answered it pretty well, actually. She said things about organic inputs and root health and a holistic approach, things she’d absorbed from the posters in Marisol’s hallway and a few rare lucid evenings from Zane. She watched the reporter write them down, and she felt the specific warm hum of a room going her way, the same one she got at a card table when a bluff landed.
It wasn’t the luck hum. It was the other one. The ordinary one. The one everybody gets when people are looking at them like they did something.
She liked it a lot.
By noon it was on the Daily Bruin’s website. CAMPUS OAK MAKES MIRACULOUS RECOVERY, it said, and under the picture of the tree there was a picture of Joy, mid-sentence, gesturing at a root with her burrito. The caption said Project consultant Joy Lockheed, a junior, credits a natural approach.
Yin was in the article twice. Once as “the student who led the effort,” and once in a quote that just said “I love it so much.”
Marisol emailed. The subject line was all exclamation points. Somebody from Facilities emailed, cc’ing four other people, asking whether “the consultant” would be available to brief them before the review. Keiko sent Joy the link eleven times.
Her phone rang while she was reading the comments.
Mom.
Joy looked at it the same way somebody crossing a rail bridge looks at an oncoming train.
She looked at it for long enough that it stopped ringing on its own, which was easier than deciding. Then she typed in the library! call you later and sent it. She then closed her eyes and groaned.
She hadn’t spoken with her family since her transformation. It wasn’t exactly that she’d been avoiding it, just that things had gotten a little crazy since then. Apparently her silence had been noticed. She hadn’t even started thinking about how she was going to approach that conversation.
As with so many things these past few weeks, it would have to get in line with her other problems.
Delgado cleared her on Monday at nine-fifteen.
“Wow, you heal quick,” she said, turning the ankle a quarter inch left and a quarter inch right and getting nothing out of Joy but a very smug face. “Ease into it. No heroics for another week. You know full well your friend will tell me if you do.”
“Define heroics.”
Delgado looked at her over her glasses.
“I’ve seen the video,” she said.
“I think half of Southern California has seen the video,” Joy said, thinking back to Ray’s comment at the poker game a few nights ago.
Cheer tryouts were in a gym in the Wooden Center. They were joined by a construction crew that provided them with a soundtrack of power tools as they worked on some seismic retrofitting project Joy vaguely remembered hearing about.
There were six other girls trying out, all of whom had clearly done this before. They were stretching in a totally different way from Joy, who was just doing her pre-race stretches for lack of a better idea. One was doing a full split on the mat and texting at the same time. Joy wondered if she could do that and decided this would be the wrong venue to find out she couldn’t.
They all had outfits that suggested they’d put a lot of thought into them. Matching tops and miniskirts, ribbons in their hair, full makeup, and they were all wearing what Joy would later learn were cheer shoes.
Joy, conversely, had used some of her poker winnings to expand her wardrobe up from the one outfit. She was there in a new pair of shorts, a tank top with a cartoon beaver wielding an axe on it, which she had thought was funny, and her normal running shoes. Her ponytail was tied with a rubber band she’d stolen off of Nate’s desk when she couldn’t find her hair ties. The closest thing to makeup she owned was soap. Looking at her competition, she was beginning to suspect she was a bit underdressed.
Keiko waved at her from the sideline with both hands, the castaway-sighting-an-airplane wave, and then made a heart with her fingers.
Coach Pike was a small woman with a whistle, a clipboard, and a voice that could strip paint. She looked at the line of girls once, end to end, and stopped on Joy.
“You’re the wall girl.”
Joy hadn’t heard that nickname before.
“I guess I am now!”
“Can you tumble?”
“I fell down a flight of stairs at the dorm freshman year and didn’t break anything.”
Pike stared at her. Keiko, on the sideline, put her face in her hands.
“Back handspring,” Pike said. “Can you do one?”
Joy gave her a blank look that told Pike she didn’t even know what one was.
“Ah ha. Let’s find out.”
Joy could not do a back handspring.
This became clear very quickly and in front of everyone. She got the idea of it, which was to throw yourself backward with total commitment and trust your hands to arrive in time. The problem was that every bit of muscle memory she’d developed doing track had revolved around propelling her forward with as much speed and, if need be, agility as possible. Going backwards had never been a concern. She tried it three times. The third time, she actually landed on top of her head, and heard an audible groan from everyone watching.
Now lying on her back, and after deciding she hadn’t in fact broken her neck, she waited for the embarrassment to come. She’d just made a fool of herself in front of Keiko, Keiko’s friends, Pike, and everybody else assembled there.
Instead she felt her lips purse as she tried, then failed, to staunch a wave of laughter, and then she was lying there with an arm over her eyes, wracked with it. When she removed it, Pike was staring down at her.
“Well, if you’re laughing you’re probably not hurt.” She sighed, from both relief and disappointment in Joy’s performance, Joy reasoned. “Let’s try something else. Toe touch.”
She explained it. Joy nodded. Joy jumped, kicked both legs out, and touched her toes.
She didn’t just touch them. She went up, and kept going up, and touched her toes at a height that made one of the girls with matching bows say “Whoa” out loud, and came down light and easy on the newly cleared ankle, which didn’t say a single word about it.
Pike stared at her.
“Again.”
Joy did it again. Now confident she wasn’t going to kill herself like the last move, she went all in and managed to nearly clear three feet.
Pike blinked a few times as she tried to process what she’d just seen, then turned to the sideline.
“Okafor’s group,” she said. “Get over here.”
What followed was the most confusing ten minutes of Joy’s life, and that had some tough competition lately.
Four girls came over. Three of them were solid and compact, and one was tall and skinny. They arranged themselves around Joy with the businesslike efficiency of a pit crew. Somebody took her hands and put them on two sets of shoulders. Somebody else crouched behind her.
“Okay,” said the tall one, kindly. “Feet here. When we dip, you dip. When we go, you stay tight. Arms up at the top. Don’t reach for anything. Just stay tight.”
“Right!” Joy said, not really following, but pressing her lower lip up into her playful smile, reciting in a sing-song voice, “So you put your hand on my hip. And when I dip, you dip we…AAAAAH!”
For about a second she was going straight up toward the gym ceiling with absolutely nothing under her. This was a lot different than jumping. With that you just aimed yourself like an arrow, and if you knew your own strength, which Joy was increasingly getting back in tune with, it was pretty easy to know where you’d go and where you’d land.
This was totally different. Propelled straight up by four strangers, her body had no idea what was happening, and she stared with huge eyes as the gym floor pulled away with shocking speed. She’d seen people at sporting events get thrown like this to celebrate an amazing play or an important win. It had always looked fun.
She didn’t think so anymore.
Then the ascent slowed, then stopped. For a single breathless moment, she was floating mid-air as gravity cracked its knuckles and got ready to show her what happens when you defy it.
It was the wall again. That half-second at the top of the arc, when the going-up stopped and the coming-down hadn’t started, and she weighed nothing at all. She’d thought about that moment a lot since Sunday. She’d thought she’d gotten lucky.
She hadn’t. Her body just knew how to do this. It knew how to be in the air. She came up through the top of the toss with her arms up and her body straight as a pin, and she felt herself hang there, and she laughed again. This time it was a laugh of pure joy. She was having more fun than she thought she had ever had in her life.
Then she came down, and four sets of arms caught her in a cradle, as neatly as catching a pillow.
They set her on her feet. Joy wiped the tears of laughter from her eyes and looked at the quartet.
“Again!” she exclaimed.
The tall girl was looking at her with an expression Joy recognized. It was the one Marco had worn on the plaza, watching her do her twelfth sprint.
“You’ve done that before,” the tall girl said.
“Nope! Mom never even let me have a trampoline as a kid. Said she and Dad put too much money into my teeth for me to bust them on the side of it.”
On the sideline, Pike seemed to have forgotten the clipboard entirely, and looked from Joy to Keiko, who seemed similarly stunned.
That hadn’t been the end of the tryouts. They demonstrated all sorts of other moves Joy hadn’t seen outside the time her sister had made her watch some awful movie about cheerleading that had come out before either of them were born. She was varying degrees of awful at all of them.
On the other hand, the other girls trying out were good. Joy didn’t have much to base that on, but she knew when somebody, and more importantly their body, knew what they were doing, and these girls had the sort of natural agility and coordination that you only get through practice and experience.
As she was getting up from face-planting while trying to do a cartwheel, she watched one of the other girls do a backflip, do a full corkscrew mid-flip, then stick the landing.
At that point, Joy knew this was as good as over.
She didn’t wait for the results. By the end she was sore and tired, and the initial novelty of failing to pull off basic moves had worn off. She saw Keiko and a number of her teammates in a huddle with Pike and decided not to stick around. She grabbed her stuff and quietly snuck out.
“Really?” Nate said, leaning back in his chair. “Even I can do a cartwheel.”
“Bullshit,” Joy said, squinting at her fork in deep concentration as she struggled to keep the spaghetti she’d brought back from Bruin Plate on it. “I’ve never seen you so much as jog.”
“I’ve got two older sisters,” Nate said, grimacing a little. “Trust me, they made sure I knew how to do a cartwheel.”
“My sister never made me do them.”
“She’s your little sister. Totally different dynamic.”
Joy shrugged.
“At any rate, it wasn’t a total disaster. The part where they threw me was really fun. But I think Keiko underestimated how bad I was going to be.”
“Well, that’s one less thing you need to do, right?”
Joy leaned back on the couch-bed and prodded a meatball with her fork. She was thinking about that moment mid-air again. She wasn’t sure she’d stopped thinking about it all evening.
“Yeah, no big deal,” she said, finally putting the meatball out of its misery.
Both of them looked towards the door as they heard a loud noise from outside. It was hard to tell, because it was through a closed door and sounded like it was coming from down the hall, but it sounded like a girl screaming, and it was coming closer.
Joy set down her spaghetti.
Nate raised his eyebrows and looked at Joy.
“Oh man, just how badly did you screw up?”
Their door burst open with even more violence than usual as a breathless Keiko stumbled into their room with an unhinged look on her face and then lunged at Joy. Joy was too shocked to defend herself and managed half a gasp before Keiko was on top of her, screaming.
Joy waited for the end to come.
“You made the team!” Keiko shrieked, throwing her arms around Joy. “You made the team! You made the team!”
Nate was up from his chair, unsure what to do, and Joy was staring at him with a mix of surprise and terror on her face. Realizing she wasn’t about to be murdered, she slowly put her arms around Keiko as her brain tried desperately to shift gears from self-preservation to processing what Keiko had just said.
“What?” was the best she could manage.
Keiko pushed herself up, her eyes streaming and a look of happiness on her face that could have given Yin’s look at the tree that Saturday a run for its money.
“You made the team!” Keiko sobbed again, seeming to feel that no more information was necessary.
“How? I was terrible!” Joy said, baffled. “That one girl did… I don’t even know what it was. Some ninja move.”
Joy carefully handed her spaghetti to Nate, then rolled Keiko off of her to sit next to her on the couch-bed.
“You’re going to be our flyer!” Keiko said. “Coach Pike says conditional flyer, but you should have seen yourself, Joy, you were perfect!”
“Conditional on what?” Joy said.
“On you learning literally everything else,” said Keiko, as if that wasn’t a big deal. “But Joy, flyer! You’re a flyer! Do you know how many people want to be a flyer?”
“What’s a flyer?”
Keiko stared at her.
“Joy,” she said slowly. “What do you think you did earlier?”
It did seem a bit obvious once Joy thought about it.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, the flyer is the one who…”
“Yes.”
“…goes up.”
“Yes.”
“Huh,” said Joy. In the history of terrible ideas, getting thrown at a ceiling by four strangers several times a week was one she was apparently fully on board with. It took her a moment to realize she was smiling again.
Nate sat down and gave Joy a look of smug satisfaction.
“Told ya.”
Marco was at the track at four on Tuesday, exactly where he’d said he’d be, sitting on the curb with a stopwatch.
Joy didn’t go through the gate. She went over the fence next to it, because the gate stuck unless you hit it with your hip, and some things she wasn’t ready for yet.
“You came,” Marco said.
“And miss a chance to be extremely annoying at you for an hour? Never.”
“Well, I can see this is going to be a treat.”
“Naturally,” Joy said, and dropped her bag next to his. “Three-fifty?”
“Three-fifty.”
So they did four hundreds.
Joy ran on his shoulder. Not ahead, not behind. Right there in his peripheral vision, close enough that he could hear her breathing and she could hear his. As promised, she was extremely annoying. Around the second turn of the first set, she started humming. Around the third turn of the second, she started making small talk.
Marco ran the first one exactly the way he’d said he always ran them. Three hundred meters in, the second she pulled level, he went. He chased. And with a hundred left, she watched it run out of him like water out of a cup.
Joy clicked her tongue at him disapprovingly.
“Again,” she said.
The second time he went at three-twenty.
The third time, three-forty.
The fourth time, she sat on his shoulder through three hundred and he didn’t go, and she could see it, the whole fight of it, every muscle in his face wanting to and him fighting it at every step. Three-twenty. Three-thirty. Three-forty.
At three-fifty she yelled, “Now!” and he went.
He came through the line and kept going for twenty meters, slowing, and then stopped and put his hands on his knees and looked at the stopwatch for a long time.
He didn’t tell her the number. She didn’t ask. He just looked at the watch, and then at her, and then back at the watch, with the same expression Joy had made when she’d shown up for the wrong class back in her first semester.
“Thursday,” he said finally.
Joy grinned.
“I’m bringing riddles for that one.”
By Tuesday evening, the tree had started to be a problem.
It wasn’t sudden. That was what made it hard to see. Saturday it had been a miracle. Sunday it had been a slightly bigger miracle, with new branches nobody remembered being there. By Monday, the path that ran past it on the south side had developed a hump. It was just a gentle rise in the concrete, the kind you’d step over without noticing, except that it hadn’t been there on Friday.
By Tuesday afternoon, the hump was a crack, and the crack was a ridge, and the ridge was a root. It was as thick as Joy’s thigh, shouldering up out of the path like something surfacing in deep water.
The canopy had become huge, spanning the entire green now and starting to encroach on the surrounding buildings. It was the biggest tree Joy had ever seen, and Nate mentioned that KTLA had even come to campus and done a story on it.
And there was the golf cart.
Joy was out for an evening jog and found the same young CSO from the race standing at the edge of the lawn in his polo shirt with his clipboard. He was staring up into the tree, where, about nine feet off the ground, his golf cart was resting in a crook between two branches.
It was resting quite gently. The light bar was still on. It turned slowly, painting the leaves red and white, red and white.
“Wow, nice parking job!” Joy said, stopping next to him and staring up with him.
“I parked it,” the CSO said, his voice thick with disbelief. “I parked it right there.” He pointed at the grass at the base of the tree. “I went to write a ticket. I was gone for four minutes.”
He turned and saw Joy, and his face said that against all odds, his day had gotten even worse.
“Oh no, not you,” he groaned.
“In my defense,” Joy said, “I didn’t do this.”
She wasn’t actually sure that was true. She was getting less sure by the second.
Behind the CSO, two men from Facilities were walking slowly around the tree with a measuring wheel, looking at the root in the path the way you’d look at a car that had been in a flood. A third man stood a little apart from them. He was older, weathered, in a canvas jacket with a name stitched over the pocket that Joy couldn’t read from here, and he was staring at the tree with an expression she couldn’t place.
He wasn’t confused like the others. He had a calculating look on his face that just added to Joy’s unease.
She backed away, very casually, around the hedge, and went to find Zane.
Zane was in his room, playing a guitar for an audience of plants. He was singing too, but mumbling the lyrics so badly Joy had no idea what the song was.
“Zane. I need you to come look at something.”
“Mm?” The guitar stopped.
“It’s the tree.”
He followed her across campus at his own pace, which was slower even than Nate’s, and an order of magnitude slower than Joy’s. A couple of times she realized she’d lost him and had to go back for him. When they came around the hedge, the Facilities men had gone, the CSO had gone, and the golf cart was still up in the tree, light bar spinning.
Zane stopped at the edge of the lawn.
He looked at the root in the path. He watched a branch scratch the window of a nearby building as the wind gently blew it. He looked at the cart. He looked, for a long time, up into the crown, where the newest growth was coming in so fast Joy could have sworn she could see it.
Then he looked down at the ring of soil around the base of the trunk, still dark where they’d turned it Friday night, with Yin’s runestones glowing faintly green around it in a circle.
“Oh man,” Zane said. “Somebody mixed blessings, didn’t they?”
Joy went cold all the way down.
“What?”
“Mixed blessings.” He gestured at the tree. “Somebody blessed something that was already blessed. You don’t do that, man… it’s like…” He thought about it. “That’s like adding an extra chlorine atom to indole-3-acetic acid, man. You’re just asking for trouble.”
Joy stared at him. She had no idea what he’d just told her, but she was pretty sure it was the most intelligent thing she’d ever heard him say, and also that he was telling her she’d screwed up.
“You said natural fertilizer,” Joy said. Her voice came out a little higher than she meant it to. “You said good stuff! This stuff was blessed by Dru…”
She paused, a pang of dread rising in her stomach.
“Oh crap.”
Zane looked up at the tree for a while. Then he nodded slowly, the way you nod at something you’ve been told by a friend and agree with completely.
“Yeah, man,” he said. “I think it might be too natural now.”
The burlap bag was in the recycling bin behind the dorm, where Joy had dumped it as soon as they’d finished with it that evening.
She dug it out from under several days of other refuse and turned it over in the light from the back door.
She’d read the front twice in the shed. PREMIUM ORGANIC SOIL AMENDMENT. Small batch. Hand-harvested. Blessed by real Celtic Druids! With the little smiling man in the hood.
She had not read the back.
The back had a label too. Smaller. Printed in the same looping green script, in a much more serious font size.
APPLICATION: One quarter cup per acre.
Joy wasn’t sure how big an acre was off the top of her head, but she looked at the size of the bag, did the math, and cringed when she realized that the area the tree was on was probably not a thousand-plus acres.
CAUTION: Pre-blessed. Do not combine with additional blessings, enchantments, wards, rites, prayers, or other workings of a botanical nature. KEEP AWAY FROM ELVEN NATURE MAGIC AND RUNESTONES. The manufacturer accepts no liability for results, outcomes, or genius loci resulting from misuse of this product.
Joy shut her eyes as she thought of Yin’s long ears, glowing hands, and strangely scripted stones. It was beginning to occur to her that she had not been a very good consultant.
When she came back around to the front, Zane was still sitting on the dorm steps where she’d left him, smoking something that smelled like something Joy had run over back when she had learned how to drive.
“Plants listen to people, man,” he said, to no one in particular. “That’s why I play for my little buddies.”
Joy sat down next to him and put her head on her knees.
“Helps them grow?”
“Nah, man, because it makes them happy. Plants don’t hear or see things, but they get vibes better than people do.”
Joy had no idea what that meant. She filed it away as she desperately wracked her brain for how she was going to fix this.
“Hey, Zane?”
“Yeah, man?”
“Do you think creating a giant tree that destroys part of the campus would be considered eco-terrorism?”
Zane took a puff of his foul-smelling roll-up as he thought about it.
“Probably, man.”
“Terrific.”
Sophie was on the wall.
Joy saw her before she saw Yin, sitting with her knees drawn up, as far from the trunk as the wall went, which wasn’t very far anymore. The root that had come up through the path had also come up under the far side of the wall, and a section of it was tilted at a slight angle now, the stones shifted out of true. Sophie was sitting on the part that was still level.
She wasn’t on her phone.
On the far side of the lawn, Yin was talking to the Facilities men, who had come back with a third man, and a fourth, and somebody with a hard hat. Yin was smiling. Joy could see from here that it wasn’t her real smile. It was the one she used on offices, and it wasn’t working.
Joy walked over and stood in front of the wall.
“Hey,” she said.
Sophie didn’t look at her for a while. Then she did.
“Saw the article,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Nice picture.” Sophie’s voice was completely flat. “You and the burrito.”
“Sophie…”
“Project consultant Joy Lockheed credits a natural approach.” Sophie said it like she was reading it off the inside of her eyelids. “She’s been out here every night since August. Every single night. She’s talked to that tree more than she’s talked to her own dad. And they put her in the article twice, and one of them was I love it so much.”
“I didn’t write the article.”
“No,” Sophie agreed. “You just showed up for the photo op.”
Joy opened her mouth. Nothing came.
Across the lawn, one of the Facilities men said something to Yin, and gestured at the tree with a clipboard, and Joy didn’t need to hear it to know what it was. Yin’s ears went down. All the way down, flat against her hair, for the first time since Joy had met her.
Sophie watched it happen. Then she got down off the wall, and dusted off her jeans, and looked at Joy one more time.
“I asked you what was in it for you,” she said. “Guess we didn’t need a month, did we?”
And she walked across the lawn to stand next to Yin, and didn’t look back.