The email from Facilities came Wednesday morning, and had nine people CCed on it. Its subject was: RE: RE: RE: Oak (Sculpture Garden Lawn): Status.
Joy read it three times on the couch-bed as the cup of coffee she was holding went cold in her hand. Nate pretended not to watch her read it.
It was polite in the same way an email that starts with “Due to unforeseen economic circumstances” that shows up in your company inbox at 8 a.m. is polite. It said that due to “unanticipated growth activity” and “an incident involving University property,” the tree would no longer be evaluated for health at Friday’s review. It would be evaluated for safety. It said that the University required a written assessment and sign-off from an ISA-certified arborist, including subsurface root inspection and any mitigation the arborist deemed necessary, prior to the review. It said that in the absence of such sign-off, the tree would be removed Friday afternoon “in the interest of public safety.”
It said, at the bottom, Please advise the project consultant.
Joy leaned her head back, made a noise that sounded like her soul escaping her body, and downed her cold coffee in one bitter gulp.
“That bad, huh?” Nate asked.
Joy handed over her phone, not looking up.
Nate read it. He read it quietly, probably more than once given how long he took, then handed the phone back.
“How much is an arborist?”
An arborist, it turned out, was a woman named Renata who drove a truck with a cherry picker on the back and a sticker on the bumper that said Tree’s Company! She arrived at the lawn Wednesday afternoon and gave an impressed whistle when she saw the tree, which was nearly five stories tall now.
“Oh yeah, somebody totally mixed their blessings!” she said to Joy.
Then she got to work. She measured things. She tapped things. She went up in the cherry picker and came down again looking thoughtful. She knelt by the root in the path and put her hand flat on it, exactly the way Yin did, and Joy watched her pull her hand back like the root had been warmer than she’d expected.
“Okay,” Renata said finally, peeling off her gloves. “Good news first. This tree is healthy. Like, aggressively healthy. I’ve seen some weird trees, but yours is the weirdest! Congratulations!”
Joy didn’t feel like celebrating.
“Bad news. It’s growing fast. I mean real fast. I’m going to have to get a full image of what the root system is doing, because for a tree this big,” she spread her hands wide for emphasis, “there’s no telling just what’s going on down there. Honestly, you’re lucky the buildings around here are still standing. And that’s before we figure out how big this baby is going to get, how susceptible it is to wind damage, golf cart removal, collapse risk…”
“How much?” Joy asked, seeing where this was going.
Renata told her.
It was five thousand, eight hundred dollars.
Joy just nodded with the numb dumbness of somebody who had just been told they had an incurable illness.
“Terrific,” she said, deciding to change the subject before she had a panic attack. “Totally unrelated, but do you know what a genius loci is?”
Renata tilted her head, giving Joy a dubious look.
“Never mind,” Joy said.
She did the math on the walk back to the dorm, the way she did the math at the card table.
The grant had two thousand dollars in it. Yin had spent fifteen on the soil. Joy had taken a thousand for consulting, which left nine hundred and eighty-five dollars. She doubted Renata would so much as water the flower bed for that.
If she gave back the consulting fee, the grant had one thousand, nine hundred and eighty-five. That left three thousand, eight hundred and fifteen dollars that nobody had.
Nobody except her.
Joy stopped walking on the bridge over the road and pulled her phone out and looked at her bank balance for a long time. Some of Ray’s money had gone to clothes, including the beaver tank top she still thought was funny. Most of it was still sitting there, the first real step she’d been able to take toward her debt.
She thought about the hundred thousand dollars due in June.
She thought about the tree coming down Friday afternoon with Yin standing next to it.
She thought about the bag of fertilizer, and the shed, and a friend recommended it.
She put the phone back in her pocket and kept walking. She didn’t decide anything. She just kept walking.
“Well?” Nate said, when she came in.
Joy sat down on the couch-bed and looked at the floor.
“Fifty-eight hundred.”
Nate gave a sharp intake of breath through his teeth.
“Grant covers about two. If I give back my fee.”
“Are you going to?”
“Yeah.”
“And the rest?”
Joy didn’t say anything.
Nate looked at her. He looked at her long enough that she knew he’d done the same math she had, and come to the same number, and knew exactly what that meant. He had a way of looking at you that made you hear everything he wasn’t saying, and for once he wasn’t saying don’t.
“It’s a lot of money,” he said finally.
“I’m aware,” she said sullenly.
“It’s the first money you’ve had.”
“Thanks for rubbing it in.”
“And June’s still June.”
“Yes, Nate,” Joy said through gritted teeth.
He nodded slowly. Then he went back to his laptop, and after a minute, without turning around, he said, “For what it’s worth, I’d do it too.”
“Right. Remind me what you told Derek after he paid you to overclock his laptop?”
“At least you’ll probably still be able to have kids?”
“I was thinking more ‘Tough shit, I warned you it might melt,’ but yeah, same idea.”
Nate turned the chair around and looked right at Joy.
“Yeah, but that’s because I’m an asshole. You’re not.” He paused, as if something else had crossed his mind. “Especially lately.”
Joy paused as she processed that, decided she had enough on her mind, and launched a pillow at Nate’s face instead.
That night she transferred three thousand, eight hundred and fifteen dollars into the project account Marisol had set up, along with the thousand from her consulting fee. In the memo line she typed the tree fairy. She looked at the screen for a long time, and then, with the sort of pained hesitation that precedes pulling out one of your own teeth, she hit send.
Joy pulled out her phone as she left AI and Automation, her only night class, and saw she had missed almost half a dozen calls while her phone was set to silent. They were all from a number she didn’t recognize. She went to swipe it away and mark it as spam, but then noticed it was from an 820 area code. That was Santa Barbara, but she already had Yin’s number in her contacts. Curious, she tapped it and called the number back.
It picked up immediately.
“Get over here.” Sophie’s voice assailed her from the other end. She sounded angrier than usual.
Joy grinned and tossed back her head.
“Who is this?” she said playfully. “Do I have a secret admirer?”
“Joy, you dumb bitch, get the hell over here! The tree is hurting Yin!”
She could hear the tinge of panic in Sophie’s voice.
Joy ran.
Apparently it was one of the few things she could still do right, because she absolutely flew across campus, arriving at the Sculpture Garden lawn in minutes.
The tree was moving.
Not the branches. The whole tree. It wasn’t swaying in the wind; there wasn’t any wind. It was moving the way something alive moves when it’s breathing, a slow swell and settle that she could see in the crown and hear in the trunk, a deep wooden creaking like a ship. The runestones around the base were blazing green. And in the flower bed at the foot of the trunk, sitting in the dirt with roots curled up around her like a nest, was Yin.
She was smiling. Her eyes were closed. A root as thick as Joy’s arm had wound once around her waist, gently, the way you’d put your arm around someone on a cold night, and two more were curled over her shins. Her hands were flat on the trunk. And she was sinking. Slowly, inch by inch, into the soil, the way you sink into a warm bath.
Sophie was standing at the wall with both hands in her hair.
“She sat down to say goodnight or some bullshit like that,” Sophie said, her eyes wide with panic. “Then it… just grabbed her! I tried to pull her away, but…”
She pulled up the side of her shirt, showing a long red stripe along her side where something long and hard had hit her. It was already changing color into what Joy knew from experience was going to be one ugly bruise.
“Yin!” Joy shouted.
Yin opened her eyes. They were glowing faintly purple.
“Joy! Hi!” She sounded completely, blissfully content. “It’s okay! It’s just happy. It just wants to keep me.”
“It’s pulling you into the ground,” Joy said, and as an afterthought jerked a thumb at Sophie. “And I guess it attacked Ms. Congeniality over here too.”
Joy heard the word “cheerleader” mixed in with Sophie’s expletive-laden retort.
Yin looked down at herself, at the roots around her middle and the soil up to her hips, with mild interest.
“Huh,” she said. “It is, isn’t it. Is that bad?”
Joy didn’t answer; she just ran up to Yin, grabbed one of the roots, and started to pull, keeping one eye on the rest of the mass, visions of Sophie’s bruised ribs fresh in her mind.
“Um, Joy, I don’t think the tree likes that,” Yin said, with a touch of concern, and it was only because Joy looked up from prying at the roots to tell Yin what she thought of the tree and what it liked and disliked that she saw what was coming.
It only registered as movement at the very top of her vision, but Joy’s reflexes were as fast as the rest of her. She dove backwards, landing on her hands and then springing back off of them as a colossal branch slammed down into the spot where she’d just been standing. She landed on her feet. A perfect back handspring.
“Oh, now I can do one!” Joy yelled, only to have to dive out of the way again moments later as another branch left a foot-deep trench in the spot she’d landed in.
She scrambled across the wet lawn on all fours for a moment before managing to get her feet under her, dashing out from under the canopy as branch after branch tried to squash her flat.
She stood with her hands on her knees at what she thought was a safe distance, trying to catch her breath. Looking up, she could only see Yin from the waist up now, and she was giving the tree a reproachful look.
“Aw, don’t be like that, we can all be friends!”
Joy had no idea what to do. The fact that she’d nearly died hadn’t even settled in her mind yet. This was all her fault. Back when she was still Daniel, she’d have seen two weird girls communing with nature and just left them alone. The tree would have been cut down, Yin would have found a dozen new projects, Sophie would have kept being a pain in the ass, and life would have gone on.
But no, something in her had changed and she’d had to get involved. Had to make it about her, like Sophie had said. And she had made it so much worse. Yin was about to die, who knew how much damage the tree was going to cause to the campus before they had to call in the National Guard or whatever, and it was her fault.
Joy gritted her teeth and felt tears of helpless frustration well up in her eyes.
And it wasn’t just that. It was what Keiko’s damn cards had done to her. It was losing her scholarship. It was the anxiety about how her parents would react to everything. She’d tried not to think about any of that, to put off processing it until things calmed down a little, but now it all came boiling up, and she could feel the dam about to break inside of her.
Then the tree threw a golf cart at her.
She only saw it because she blinked away the tears just in time to see something large and white flying towards her at high speed, and she hit the ground right as it sailed over her, missing her by less than a foot and exploding against a retaining wall behind her.
For a moment, everything was silent.
Yin, Sophie, and it seemed even the tree were all staring at Joy.
She got to her feet and stood there for a moment.
Then she snapped.
There was no drama, no paroxysm of fury, no screaming. But the evening suddenly seemed to get colder.
Joy nodded at the tree, almost as if to say, Fair enough.
“Ok,” Joy said, calmly. There was so much menace in those two letters that Sophie backed off a step and Yin stopped smiling.
“Yin… that’s the look,” Sophie said, suddenly looking like she was more afraid of Joy than the tree.
“That’s Dad’s look,” Yin said, a note of real concern in her voice now. “Uh, Mr. Tree, I think you need to say sorry.”
“No, no, it’s all good,” Joy said, turning to walk away. “You tell Mr. Tree to stay put. I’m going to be right back.”
“Joy?”
Joy turned her head and gave the three of them a look that even made the tree recoil.
“It gave me a present. Now I’m going to give it one.”
The padlock on the shed was locked this time.
Joy didn’t even bother with it. She leaned back and kicked the door down, barely slowing down to do so.
She stormed in and, without even looking, slammed a fist against the section of wall she’d accidentally hit the last time she was in here, and stood impassively as, once again, the chainsaw swung down from its hook. She grabbed it and yanked it free. The blade caught the light for a moment, and illuminated a grave face staring straight at her.
He was older and weathered, in a canvas jacket, and stitched over the pocket in red thread was the word HOLLIS. He was holding a shovel in one hand and two folded twenty-dollar bills in the other, and he was looking at her with wide eyes that suggested either surprise or complete manic insanity. The eyes looked down to the chainsaw, and then back up at her again.
“Miss, what are you doing with my chainsaw?” he asked, eyes still bulging.
Joy considered this.
“About to give something that’s throwing a temper tantrum a spanking,” she said.
Then she ran. Behind her she heard Hollis say something she didn’t catch, and then she heard him start running too, much more slowly, with the steady pace of a man who’d been doing this job a very long time and knew exactly where she was going.
Yin, Sophie, and the tree saw Joy coming. She was charging across the lawn, bright orange chainsaw in hand and a look of savage ferocity on her face that wouldn’t have been out of place on an ancient warrior charging into battle.
Zane might have been right about plants feeling vibes, because the tree apparently didn’t want Joy anywhere near it. A branch the size of a telephone pole came down out of the dark and swept the grass where she’d been standing half a second earlier. She’d seen it coming the way she saw a defender’s hip turn on a football field, and she’d already been moving left.
The second one came from the right, lower. She went over it.
The third came straight down. She went under it, flat on her stomach in the acorns, with the chainsaw cradled against her chest like a baby, and got up running as the tree began flailing more wildly.
It might not have known what Joy was carrying or what it would do, but it seemed to know that if Joy reached it, it was going to have a very, very bad day.
She sprinted as the ground behind her turned into a constant explosion of leaves, wood, and grass, and then she was at the trunk. She leaned back, planted one foot on the trunk, and gave the cord on the chainsaw a fierce pull.
Nothing.
A branch came sweeping in low across the grass. She jumped it, landed, and pulled again.
A sputter. Nothing.
“Oh, come on!”
The next branch didn’t sweep. It scooped. It came under her from behind, caught her across the back of the legs, and threw her.
For one long second Joy was going up into the dark with nothing under her, the lawn and the lights and Sophie’s upturned face falling away below. Every part of her that had grown up on a track screamed that this was wrong.
And every part of her that had spent Monday afternoon in the Wooden Center went tight.
Arms in. Body straight as a pin. Don’t reach for anything.
She even managed to account for the chainsaw, which she was pretty sure was something you didn’t see used much in cheer. She effortlessly righted herself, began her descent, and landed as lightly as a cat in the grass. Then, like a cat, she gave a hiss of frustration and began trying to start the chainsaw again.
She pulled again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. She could hear herself breathing hard and fast. Only Yin’s head was visible now, and starting to panic, Joy pulled until her shoulder burned and the saw did nothing but sputter at her. She was out of time, and even if she could think of a backup plan, it was too late.
Then somebody grabbed the saw.
Joy looked back to see Sophie, who had seized the back of the saw and was rhythmically pushing on a small rubber bubble near its back that Joy hadn’t seen.
“You didn’t prime it,” Sophie said.
“I didn’t what?”
“Pull!” Sophie screamed.
Joy pulled.
The chainsaw roared.
The sound of mechanized deforestation was the sweetest sound Joy had ever heard. It filled the lawn and the dark and the whole inside of her skull. The chain blurred, and the smell of gas and two-stroke smoke came up into the leaves, and the whole tree went still.
Joy raised it above her head like a horror movie villain.
“Zane says you plants respond to vibes. Well, here’s a vibe for you. You let Yin go, you behave like a normal tree! You don’t throw fucking golf carts at people! Or so help me, I’m going to turn you into so much sawdust people are going to be eating you as filler in cheap processed food for years!”
She began lowering the blade towards the trunk. Something in the back of her mind reminded her she didn’t even know how to start a chainsaw, and that if it could go through this dense old wood, it wouldn’t have any trouble with a human limb either.
She was way too angry to care.
“No!”
Joy’s eyes went wide with surprise as she looked over and saw that the roots around Yin had come mostly undone and she was scrambling out of the hole with a look of desperation on her face.
“Don’t hurt it!”
She clung to Joy’s sleeve, eyes wide and pleading.
“This thing almost buried you alive! It tried to kill me!”
Sophie cleared her throat.
“And other things. It needs to learn who’s boss, or it’s going to hurt somebody else!”
She began lowering the blade. The entire tree trembled.
Joy felt Yin’s fists tighten on her sleeve and chanced a look at her before she started cutting. Yin was glaring at her with such intensity that for a moment Joy let go of the throttle on the chainsaw.
With one tiny fist still clamped onto Joy’s arm, Yin brought her other one back and punched Joy right in the face.
Joy had never been punched before. She’d never been in a fight, either as a boy or a girl; she’d always been too busy. So she couldn’t really say how good of a punch it was, but it was good enough. It caught her straight across the cheek, and her vision flashed white for a moment, and the next moment she was splayed out on the ground, little explosions of light bursting across her vision. Somewhere, seemingly far away, she heard the chainsaw slow down, then stop.
Yin was standing over her.
“You do not,” Yin said, and her eyes were blazing purple, “touch my tree!”
Joy looked at her, not sure what part of what had just happened shocked her more. She turned her head to the side to look at Sophie, who was staring open-mouthed at Yin.
A branch began reaching down from the canopy towards a helpless Joy, who was still too stunned from the blow to avoid the incoming mashing.
“And you!”
Yin pointed a finger at the tree and began to excoriate it in a language Joy had never heard, one she thought might have sounded very beautiful if not for the absolute fury radiating off of Yin now. Somehow, Joy realized, the fires of her own rage seemed to have guttered out.
The branch stopped only a few feet above Joy, and she could hear Yin’s tirade going even through the thick leaves. A squirrel was clinging to the branch, and gave her a look that indicated it wanted nothing to do with what was happening behind it.
Then Yin stopped. For a moment there was silence, then the branch and its squirrel passenger lifted back up into the canopy. In fact, the whole tree seemed to straighten up, like some punk correcting his posture after taking a ruler across the knuckles. There was a sound almost like a huge sigh, and it felt like the whole lawn sagged and relaxed a little. The bulges in the sidewalk deflated. The wall settled.
And the tree was just a tree again. An absolutely colossal tree, and what Joy had to agree was one of the weirdest trees she’d ever seen. She wasn’t sure what Yin had said to it, but apparently it had decided that just being a normal tree was better than whatever Yin had proposed otherwise.
Yin was breathing heavily, and as Joy got up on her elbows, Yin rounded on her, her eyes still blazing amethyst purple and every bit as fierce. But then she saw Joy rubbing her cheek where she’d hit her. She blinked once, as if something had snapped into place in her head, and her pale skin went even whiter. Her eyes went wide and she covered her mouth with a look of horror.
“Oh my God! Joy! I’m so sorry! I…”
Now it was her turn for her eyes to fill with tears, but as Joy got to her feet she watched as Sophie walked over and hugged Yin, pressing her head against hers.
“See, that’s the Yin I remember,” she said, and in perhaps the most shocking event of the evening from Joy’s perspective, she was not only smiling, but she was crying too. “The Yin who didn’t take shit from anybody. Not from evil trees, evil cheerleaders, nobody.”
She gave a shuddering sob and pulled Yin even closer.
“I didn’t know if you were still in there.”
Joy watched the two cry in each other’s arms and suddenly felt very, very tired. She felt a sting across one forearm and looked down to see a pair of segmented black lines running down it. Like what the greased chain from a chainsaw might leave. That is, what it might leave if its user had been lucky enough to look away for a brief moment while operating it, been surprised by a furious elf and let go of the throttle before being punched in the face, and given the chainsaw just enough time to spin down and leave a streak of grease across her arm instead of cutting straight through it.
Joy gave a brittle, nervous laugh.
“And with that, I think I’m done for tonight.” And she turned to leave Yin and Sophie to whatever it was they were doing.
And ran straight into a canvas jacket with HOLLIS stitched into it in red letters.
Hollis stared down at Joy, and Joy stared up at him. Neither spoke for a moment. His eyes looked slightly less haunted than when she’d first encountered him. She wasn’t sure what he saw in her eyes, but it was like he caught some secondhand weariness from her, and his shoulders slumped a little.
“Druid blend,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“I didn’t read the back,” Joy admitted.
“Quarter cup an acre.”
“Guess who learned that the hard way.”
Hollis nodded slowly. He looked at the two twenties in his other hand, and then at her.
“Took me three years to get that bag.”
Joy looked at the ground.
“Yeah, I’d say sorry, but this isn’t a problem sorry can fix.”
She looked back at the dirt-covered Yin, the tear-streaked Sophie, and the massive tree, which was simply making leafy sounds as the evening wind blew through it.
“Been sort of a running theme for me this past week.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he looked up into the crown, at the whole huge green bulk of it against the night sky, every leaf glossy and alive. The once sick and dying tree had become a true arboreal marvel.
“Well,” Hollis said. “It’s a hell of a tree.”
And he put the twenties in his pocket, retrieved his chainsaw, and walked off towards his shed.
The review was Friday at three.
Renata stood in front of four people from Facilities with a clipboard and a cherry picker. Joy asked if she got a discount now that the forklift was taken care of. She did not. Renata walked them around the tree. She showed them the root zone she’d air-spaded that morning, the cables in the big limbs, and the place where she’d taken weight off the crown. She told them, in technical language Joy didn’t understand, that the tree wasn’t just sound, it was the best tree she’d ever inspected.
Then she signed the form.
One of the Facilities men reached up and pulled the orange tag off the trunk. It came away with a little tearing sound, staple and all.
Yin made a noise like a steaming kettle and hugged Renata, who looked startled and then hugged her back.
Marisol was there too, watching a squirrel bound across a branch with part of one of her flyers in its mouth. She produced a printout of the revised budget, which she handed to Joy with a look that Joy chalked up to suspicion.
Joy glanced at it. The consulting line said zero. Under Other Income, there was a new line, Anonymous Contribution, with a number next to it.
She folded it in half and tucked it into her waistband.
When she looked up, Sophie was standing about four feet away. She’d been reading over Joy’s shoulder. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at Joy for a long moment, the way she’d looked at her that first night on the wall, weighing her.
“Gotta say, cheerleader, despite everything else, you proved those moves in your video weren’t a fluke.”
Joy chose to just take the compliment.
“People say you’ll never have to worry about a giant tree trying to pound you into paste, but here we are!” She paused, a question coming up in her mind. “By the way, how’d you know about that… little bubble thing on the chainsaw?”
Sophie smiled at her. An actual smile, ear to ear, showing off a perfect set of teeth. Joy hadn’t thought she had it in her.
“Find me a metal drummer who doesn’t know how to use a chainsaw.”
Joy learned about the party the way she learned about most events on campus. Nate, or Keiko, or somebody else on the floor would ask, “Are you going to the party?” and Joy would respond, “What party?”
As it turned out, there had been a party planned on the Sculpture Garden lawn for that Saturday, and as usual Joy was the last person to find out about it. This time Nate asked her, and Joy, who was actually at her desk for the first time since her transformation, trying to get caught up on coursework, waved him off and said she’d had enough excitement for one week. Besides, the last thing she wanted to see was that tree.
Nate said, “Cool,” grabbed his jacket, and for the first evening in weeks, Joy found herself alone, having a normal evening. Just studying. No crazy elves, no evil trees, no league of supervillain poker players, no magic tarot cards. Just the quiet grind she’d gotten so good at as Daniel. She gave a sigh of relief.
Then she turned her arm over, the one she’d scrubbed red trying to get the grease from the chainsaw off of. She stared at the now invisible line for a solid minute. Then she stood up so fast she knocked her chair over, pulled her hoodie over her head as her ponytail fought her every inch of the way, nearly fell slipping her shoes on, and took off running down the hall, yelling for Nate to wait up.
The party was something like a potluck, but for everything involved in the event. Some people brought speakers, some people brought beer, and apparently a lot of people had brought lights, because when Joy and Nate arrived at the Sculpture Garden lawn, numerous mismatched strings of lights had been strung from the tree’s lower branches and made something of a canopy that a throng of students had gathered under.
Joy danced.
She danced with Keiko, who danced like a firework. She danced with two of the girls from Okafor’s stunt group, who after a little begging got two hands under each of her feet and launched her. Not as high as she’d gone at the tryouts, but enough that she was able to do a flip in midair and land perfectly with her arms outstretched to riotous applause. Somewhere in there she danced with a guy whose name she was fairly sure started with an E, who was tall and nice and grinned like an idiot whenever she smiled at him.
At one point, mid-song, she looked up past his shoulder at the tree.
She pointed two fingers at her own eyes. Then she pointed them at the tree.
A low branch overhead rustled, very slightly, with no wind at all.
“What was that?” said possibly-Ethan, or maybe Evan.
“Gardening,” Joy said, and kept dancing.
She found Yin later, sitting on the repaired wall, clean for the first time all week, in a new white dress and the straw hat, swinging her feet.
“Hi!” Yin said.
Joy sat down next to her. They hadn’t really talked since Thursday night.
They watched the party for a while. The tree was full of string lights, and acorns kept dropping on people, who’d stopped flinching and started cheering whenever one hit somebody.
“I’m sorry for hitting you… and yelling at you, and…”
Joy waved a hand.
“As much as it galls me to say this, Sophie is right. The whole mess really was my fault.”
Yin opened her mouth to protest, then slowly shut it.
“I’m sure your heart was in the right place,” was all she managed to come up with.
“I don’t even know right now,” Joy said, staring at the grass. “I don’t need to tell you of all people this, but ever since the tarot card, I’ve been doing weird stuff and I don’t know why. Like, I almost didn’t come tonight. The old me wouldn’t have, but…”
She thought about her arm again.
“Doors keep opening and you can’t help but see what’s inside?”
Joy’s head jerked up and she stared at Yin.
“Yes! Exactly that!”
“It’s like that for me too,” Yin said, swinging her feet and looking up into the night sky with a faraway smile on her face. “Like I don’t recognize the girl I see in the mirror anymore. Sometimes I open my mouth and say words I never learned but know anyhow, and feel things I’ve never felt before. But…”
She turned to Joy and smiled.
“It’s also been a lot of fun. I never really had any friends other than Sophie before this, and it turns out when you’re kind to people, they’re kind back. And I’d never have met you if not for this.”
She took Joy’s hand and squeezed it, and Joy felt herself blush.
“And I know you’re probably having it even harder than me, but…”
And Yin gave a sharp-toothed grin with an edge to it that made the side of Joy’s face ache.
“I bet you’re having a blast too.”
Joy stared at her, and slowly she returned the grin.
“That I can’t deny.”
They both laughed, and Yin hopped down from the wall, waving for Joy to follow her back to the party.
“Oh,” Yin said, smiling brightly at Joy, “If you ever meet the Tree Fairy, tell her thank you”
Joy got back to the room at two in the morning. She was tired and a little drunk, an acorn fell out of her hair as she let it down, and when she took her hoodie off she found a couple of tickets to a show Sophie and Yin’s band, Autarchy, was doing next month. She didn’t remember Sophie giving them to her. That told her both that she definitely couldn’t hold her booze like she used to, and that she and Sophie were probably cool now.
Nate was asleep. She didn’t turn on the light. She lay down on her bed in the dark, still smiling, and looked at her phone.
She had a little under two thousand dollars. It was more than she’d had in her life two weeks ago, and less than a third of what she’d walked out of Ray’s with. June was still June.
There were two notifications.
The first was a missed call from Mom. Joy looked at that one for a long time.
The second was a text from a number she didn’t have saved.
Want to try swimming with the big fishes? Next Saturday. 11pm. And an address in a part of town she’d never been to. And then, following that:
Bring more than a thousand this time. -Dana