Joy woke up with a start as something loud buffeted her and Nate’s window. Her first thought as she sat bolt upright in bed was that the tree was back for revenge. But then she heard the wind howling outside, and saw Nate sitting at his desk working on something, headphones on and not looking like somebody who was being subjected to nature’s wrath.
She gave a deep sigh of relief and put a hand to the side of her head as the receding adrenaline revealed a pounding headache lurking beneath. Whatever had been in that punch Psi Zeta Kappa made, Joy had definitely had too much of it, as it’d given her a night of dreams about being chased by angry trees, and now an unpleasant hangover. She’d apparently made it back here, though, which was a plus, even if it tasted like a bag of Skittles had gone bad in her mouth.
She groped around her bed for a moment, found last night’s hair tie, and expertly shot Nate in the back of the head with it. He flinched, turning to face her as he removed the headphones, and didn’t look nearly as annoyed as Joy assumed he would.
“Well look at that, Sleeping Beauty has awoken,” he said.
Joy peeled the hair she’d been sleeping on off the side of her face.
“Good morning,” she groaned.
Nate glanced at the window and the bright light streaming through it.
“Afternoon, actually. Almost twelve thirty.”
Joy squinted at the window, the light only making her headache worse. Her mouth tasted like a bag of Skittles had gone bad in it.
“What the hell is going on out there?”
“Santa Ana,” Nate said. He had a fan pointed directly at his face. “You really never watch the news, do you? They’ve been forecasting it for a week.”
“Not since they replaced that cute weathergirl after she got arrested for shoplifting all those scented candles.”
“Yeah, well, at any rate, it’s over ninety out there today. Apparently feels like summer.”
Joy looked at him, in a T-shirt and boxers, as she hung her legs over the edge of the bed and started brushing her hair.
“Uh huh. And you’d know this how?”
Nate didn’t answer, instead moving to the side to reveal what he’d been working on. It was a very large pauldron, a word she only knew thanks to Nate. She knew it wasn’t metal, none of the costume stuff he worked on was, but from where she was sitting she couldn’t tell. It had a stylized sword with wings on it, and a scroll below it with something written in Latin. Joy had no idea what it said, but like most things written in Latin, it sounded very grave.
She’d never seen one of his finished costumes, but she’d seen bits and pieces of all of them, and at least to her eye, Nate was very good at what he did.
“Oh yeah,” Joy said, having seen what she assumed were other pieces of the costume over the past few months. “How’s that coming along?”
“Pretty much done,” Nate said. “Just got the helmet after this, then it’s all about final fitting and adjustment.”
“That the last one for the year?”
“Yup. Don’t like working over the holidays, so this is the last one that’ll be ready for Comic Con.”
Nate had told Joy how much people paid for his costumes and she’d almost choked. He insisted that if you broke it down per hour it wasn’t nearly so impressive, but between this and his repair business, he was paying for whatever his scholarships didn’t cover.
She gave a frustrated grunt as she hit an especially stubborn tangle.
Back in September she could have just put a hat on and gone out, but her hair had been growing surprisingly quickly and was now down past her shoulders. She’d learned the hard way that if she didn’t take care of it, she’d wind up with a knot that even Tiffany couldn’t work out. In the end, Tiffany had given up and told Joy she was just going to have to cut it. Joy played it off like it was no big deal, but found it bothered her more than she expected. After that, Tiffany had given her a long lecture on detangling, conditioner, drying, and generally introduced her to a whole world of hair maintenance she’d been vaguely aware of but had never been inducted into.
To both her and Tiffany’s surprise, she seemed to take the lesson to heart. Her shower basket had grown from just whatever shampoo was cheapest on Amazon and a bar of soap to a gentle sulfate-free coconut-scented shampoo, purple shampoo, conditioner, deep conditioner, clarifying shampoo, and a scalp scrub. This was in addition to pineapple-scented body wash, a sugar scrub, a face cleanser, an exfoliating face wash, and some poofy thing that Keiko had given her after being horrified to find out Joy still used a normal washcloth. The result was hair that practically glowed, and Joy needing her calendar app to keep track of which piece of her hygiene panoply got used when.
She decided her hair had gotten all the attention it was going to get this morning, dropped to the floor, picked her phone off her desk, where somebody who was most likely not her had considerately plugged it into its charger last night, and flopped onto the couch-bed.
She began reading through her texts, and her headache intensified.
The first was from a guy she vaguely remembered, asking if she had any plans for the Halloween party later in the month.
The next was a bunch of pictures from last night that Keiko had sent her, each of which made her cringe progressively harder. She got as far as one of her doing a handstand while somebody just out of frame emptied boxed wine into her mouth. There were more, but Joy decided she couldn’t deal with them this morning.
Another text from a guy, this one she didn’t remember at all, asking if she wanted to grab lunch sometime.
She was about to decide that was enough texts for the day when she noticed the next one was from Dana. She didn’t remember giving her her number. Maybe Theo had?
Want to try swimming with the big fishes? Next Saturday. 11pm. An address in San Gabriel. And underneath it: Bring more than a thousand this time. -D
Underneath that was a new one, from nine this morning.
Forgot to mention. It’s mahjong.
Joy squinted at the phone.
She knew what mahjong was. It was the one with the tiles, like dominoes. She technically knew how to play that. Back home in Seattle, he’d gotten invited to his friend Chad’s family cookouts, and between Chad’s mom bringing him plate after plate of Southern barbecue, Chad’s grandpa would kick Daniel’s ass at dominoes. He didn’t mind, because the food was amazing and Chad’s grandpa told stories the whole time about growing up in the Bronx in the sixties that beggared belief.
But Joy was pretty sure her knowledge of dominoes wasn’t going to transfer to mahjong.
She thought about it for about five seconds. Then she opened her texts and found Yin.
Hey! Random question. Do you know how to play mahjong?
She’d barely hit send when her phone buzzed again, this time with a notification that made her sit straight up so fast the brush got stuck in her hair.
BLAZING STAR: Limited Banner NOW LIVE! Tsukiko, the Golden Fox, descends!
Joy made a sound of delight that made Nate turn around.
“What?”
“New Blazing Star banner!” Joy turned the phone around and held it up across the room so he could see. On the screen was a girl in an impossibly styled kimono, with long hair, fox ears, and a long fluffy tail, all a matching golden blonde. She was smiling a sly, sideways smile over the top of a folding fan. “Tsukiko!”
Nate gave her a look that told her that meant nothing to him and he was debating whether he even cared.
“Is that the gacha thing?”
“Yeah!”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.” Nate went back to his screen. “It’s less a game and more a funnel some billion-dollar company uses to extract money from lonely women.”
“Joke’s on them. I don’t have any money to extract!”
“Also, since when do you play that? I didn’t think you even really played games.”
“Keiko got me into it.”
Nate gave her an unimpressed look, which honestly wasn’t at all uncommon among the looks he gave people.
“So you decided your entry into gaming was gacha trash?”
“Oh, it’s trash.” Joy turned the phone back around and looked at Tsukiko with real affection. “But the rush I get when I do a pull makes it all worth it.”
Nate took the other side of his headphones off, which meant he was actually interested, which almost never happened.
“You know that’s exactly what a gambling addict would say.”
“Gambling addicts pay. I’ve never put a dollar into it.”
“Why not?”
“First, because I can’t afford it. Second, because then it’d just be shopping.” Joy turned the phone around and hit the app’s icon. “If I pay for it, I’m just a girl buying a fox. But I put the work in, I grind out the events, do my dailies, save up my stardust, and then blow every single bit of it in one shot! That’s a bet.”
“And if you lose?”
“Then I lose, and I start grinding again.” She shrugged. “Winning is nice too, but the fun part is the proverbial coin toss, when you’ve just wagered everything you’ve worked for and that coin is in the air and could come down either way.”
Nate studied her with an expression that straddled curiosity and concern.
“You used to make fun of me,” he said, “for playing anything with anime girls in it.”
“And I still can and will!”
“And now you’ve got a favorite fox girl.”
Joy paused with her thumb over the screen. It was a fair point. She’d never meant to start playing. Keiko had shown it to her back when she was still Daniel, gushing about all the cute boys she was collecting, and when he found out how much she’d spent on what was essentially a slot machine that never paid out, he’d walked away thinking it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard of.
Then one night when she couldn’t sleep, she remembered it, and lying in bed staring at the ceiling, she downloaded it. She was immediately treated to anime graphics so bright that she made a sound of distress and blindly groped to turn the brightness on her phone down. The game continued to deliver with a story that made no sense, characters who talked like the writer had been paid by the word and had never actually spoken to another human being, and some really dull combat.
Then the game informed her she had enough free stardust to “Summon a Star Spirit,” and seemed determined not to let her do anything else until she did. She watched a robe-clad priestess with a body that put hers to shame touch a pool of water with her staff, and a ball of light rose out of it and resolved into a goofy-looking little fat man wearing a spiky turtle shell on his head and wielding a club.
His name was Chubbins, and he had three stars next to his name. Joy grinned. He was funny looking.
She went to close the app and give sleep another shot, but the game informed her it was Blazing Star’s first anniversary and she was getting fifty pulls for free.
“Eh, what the hell,” she muttered, glanced over to make sure Nate was still asleep, and hit the ten-pull button.
Ten balls of light rose out of the pool, and Joy realized she was holding her breath. A fiery boy with a sword she immediately dubbed “Anime bullshit boy” without bothering to read his name. A woman in a purple gown who reminded her a little of Dana, if Dana fought with a pair of snakes. What she assumed was a gopher dressed as a martial artist. Yet another Chubbins.
She had no idea if any of it was good, and she realized she didn’t care. Her heart was beating fast, the way it did when she made a high-risk play at the poker table. She did another ten-pull, and another, and when the priestess and her pool finally disappeared into the mist, she was shocked to find that she was having fun.
Keiko had lost her mind when she found out. It turned out Tiffany played too, and so did most of the girls on the floor, and one night Joy found herself in her pajamas in their room, watching the Blazing Star anime and actually getting into it.
And then in one episode she saw her. A beautiful blonde woman with fox ears and a tail. Keiko explained that she was Tsukiko, and that she wasn’t in the game yet but would be in a couple of weeks. Something about her captured Joy’s imagination. She was cool and clever, and she defeated her enemies with charm and trickery, which Joy loved. She was also hot as hell, but Joy insisted that it was more the former than the latter. She liked the other characters well enough, especially Chubbins, but she had to have Tsukiko, and because of that, she knew the pulls for her were going to feel amazing. She’d been saving up stardust for weeks, and the day had finally arrived.
Joy ignored Nate’s “favorite fox girl” comment.
“Check this out.”
To her mild amazement, he did. Nate, with a little reluctance, got up, came over, and sat on the end of the couch-bed, and Joy held the phone between them like they were watching a horse race.
She had two thousand stardust. Exactly enough for one ten-pull. She held her thumb over the big gold button that said SUMMON x10 for a long, delicious second, feeling the moment before the card flipped stretch out like taffy.
Then she pressed it.
The screen went black. A shooting star streaked across it. It was white.
“White’s bad,” Joy said. “Gold’s good. Rainbow’s really good. White is…”
“Bad,” said Nate. “I got it.”
Ten glowing spheres emerged from the pool. A guy with a spear who looked like he had to pee. A girl with a book, summoning a ghost from it. Spear guy again. A training dummy, which had apparently come to life. A different girl with a different book. Another Chubbins. And more chaff that Joy knew was trash.
Nothing gold. Nothing rainbow. Nothing with the right sort of tail.
The two of them looked at the screen in silence. Nate opened his mouth as if to console her.
“I won seven thousand dollars at a poker table last week,” Joy said.
“I know.”
“I threatened a tree with a chainsaw and it backed down.”
“You did.”
“And I cannot get this game to give me one fox.”
“It’s almost like they want you to get your credit card out,” Nate said, and got up and went back to his desk.
Her phone buzzed. Yin.
I don’t!! My grandma plays every Sunday but I always just ate the snacks!! 🀄😅 Why??
Joy looked at that for a while, then at Chubbins, and then sighed and went to go see if Tiffany and Keiko had had better luck.
Keiko and Tiffany’s room was at the other end of the hall. Joy knocked, and after a long time the door opened and Tiffany looked out at her.
She looked terrible. Tiffany was the most put-together girl Joy knew, and looked like she ran through the sort of preflight checklist a fighter pilot does before leaving her room. She was still in yesterday’s bike shorts and an oversized gray zip-up hoodie, which was an insane thing to be wearing in this heat, and her long hair was a mess, one of the few times Joy had seen it that way. There was a white paper sticker on the front of the hoodie, the kind they slap on you at a front desk, with a date printed on it and the word VISITOR. She didn’t seem to know it was there. But her eyes told the real story. She looked like she hadn’t slept, and looked at Joy with an unfocused stare that suggested even keeping them open was difficult.
“Hi, Joy,” she said. “Keiko said you two had fun last night.”
“Well, she did. You do your pulls in Blazing Star yet?”
“Oh, no, been busy,” she said, and Joy got the distinct impression she didn’t want to elaborate.
“All good. How about Keiko?”
“Not sure, haven’t seen her since I got back. We talked earlier and she said she had to do something with her car.” Tiffany blinked slowly, as if a thought was trudging through tar to get to the front of her mind. “Actually, if you’re going to see her, would you take her lunch? I picked something up for her on the way back.” She disappeared without waiting for a response and came back with a paper bag from the deli on Gayley. Then she looked at Joy properly, and her face changed. “Oh. Your hair looks good.”
She then sniffed.
"And you smell kinda like a pina colada."
“Thanks?” Joy didn’t know Tiffany to be sarcastic, but Tiffany was also the queen of hair care on the floor, and having her say your hair looked good was like Michelangelo telling you your sculptures were nice.
“No, it really does. You’re actually brushing it. From the ends.” Tiffany reached out and ran a lock of it between two fingers like she was checking fabric. “See? Didn’t I tell you?”
“You threatened me.”
“And it worked.” Tiffany looked pleased for about one second, and then just tired again. She leaned against the doorframe. “Sorry. Long night.”
Joy looked at the sticker on her hoodie. She thought about asking. Then she looked at Tiffany’s face and decided this wasn’t the moment, and that Tiffany would tell her if she wanted her to know. Joy was good at a lot of things, and lately one of them was knowing which doors not to knock on.
“Random question,” she said instead. “Do you know how to play mahjong?”
Tiffany bit her lower lip and shook her head.
“Yeah, me neither.”
Keiko was surprisingly easy to find. The parking structure was huge, but Joy could hear pop music and a girl’s voice singing along with it, and reasoned that would be a good starting point. Keiko was in shorts, a GARDENA HIGH VARSITY CHEER tank top that had clearly been well loved, and a pair of enormous sunglasses, and she was waxing a car. The car’s speakers were turned all the way up, and Keiko was matching them in volume as she lovingly and enthusiastically worked the wax in.
Joy stopped walking.
She’d never seen Keiko’s car. She knew offhand that she had one, but if Joy really needed to get somewhere she got Nate to drive. She hadn’t given much thought to what kind of car Keiko would have.
It was a Cobra. A deep, glossy blue Cobra with two broad white stripes running from nose to tail. It didn’t have a roof. It barely had doors. It was mostly hood, and it sat so low in its parking space that it looked like it was crouching, and parked between a Prius and a Corolla with a dented bumper, it looked like a shark that had wandered into a koi pond.
“No way,” Joy said.
Keiko looked up and beamed. “Yes way!”
“That’s yours?”
“Sure is!” Keiko stood back and admired it with her rag in her hand. “It’s a replica. A real one costs more than my parents’ house. Me and Grandpa built this one in his garage.” She saw the paper bag. “Is that my lunch? Tiffany’s an angel.”
She took the bag, unwrapped the sandwich, and took a huge bite. She chewed a few times, then her eyes bulged, and only Joy’s lightning reflexes saved her from getting hit square in the chest by a mouthful of chewed-up sandwich. Keiko was half coughing, half gagging, and desperately groped for something on the car’s driver’s seat. She pulled out her water bottle, and rather than drink any of it, she swished it around in her mouth one bulging cheek at a time, then spat the water out.
“Uh, you good?” Joy asked, understandably alarmed.
“They put mayo on it!” Keiko moaned, washing her mouth out again.
“And let me guess, not a fan?”
“Joy, you know me, I like everything. But not mayo. I hate mayo.” Keiko rewrapped the sandwich and dropped it back in the bag so she didn’t have to look at it. “Tiffany knows that, she never forgets. She must be wrecked.” She looked at Joy over her sunglasses. “Have you eaten?”
“I just got up.”
Keiko laughed out loud, seeming to have recovered from her ordeal. “Yeah, you were pretty drunk last night. Did you see the picture with the handstand?”
“Yeah,” Joy groaned.
“Classic!” She was already pulling her keys out of her pocket. “Okay. Lunch, I’m buying. Want to go for a ride?”
Joy looked at the car. She looked at Keiko. She remembered Nate saying, in a voice of deep and sincere warning, sometime last year, Never get in a car with Keiko. She’s everything those videos in driver’s ed warned you about.
“Against my better judgment, yes.”
The seat was so low Joy’s knees were nearly at the dash. She may have been tall for a woman, but she was sure that she absolutely wouldn’t have fit back when she was still a man. The dash was a row of round chrome gauges with real needles. Between the seats was a stubby gearshift with a heavy, polished brass knob, slightly lopsided, with a single letter stamped into the top. K.
“Did he make that?”
“On his lathe,” Keiko said. “When I was thirteen. He said the car was going to be mine someday, so I should get used to having my hand on it.” She put her hand on it. “Kind of a weird thing to tell a thirteen-year-old, now that I think about it.”
Then she turned the key, and Joy stopped thinking about anything.
She’d heard loud things before. She’d stood next to a starting pistol. She had, as of Thursday, held a running chainsaw over her head and threatened a tree with it. None of it came close. The sound came up through the seat and the floor and the soles of her feet and settled in her chest like a lion clearing its throat inside a concrete tunnel. A car alarm went off two rows down in sympathy. A guy getting into his Prius stopped with the door open and just stared.
Keiko grinned at her with every tooth she had.
“Seatbelt,” she said.
Keiko drove like she was in a police chase, at high speed, weaving in and out of lanes to get around anybody slower than her. That was everybody.
She took Sunset so fast that Joy thought they might catch air. She took the curves through the Palisades one-handed, with her elbow on the door and her other hand on the brass knob, shifting in quick, sharp little snaps that made the engine bark at every corner. She passed a Ferrari whose owner apparently wasn’t brave enough to try to keep up. She waved at a cop, and the cop, astonishingly, waved back.
And every single light was green.
Joy noticed it around the fourth one. By the eighth she’d stopped counting. Sunset Boulevard was famous for its traffic lights, and they went through every one of them like the whole city had seen them coming and gotten out of the way. Keiko didn’t notice at all. Keiko was singing as loud as her tiny lungs could manage.
Then they came around the last curve and the entire Pacific opened up in front of them, flat and blue and glittering all the way to the edge of the world. Keiko took the turn onto the Coast Highway, turned and gave Joy a grin that had trouble written all over it, then floored it. Joy was pinned to her seat, and Keiko’s tiny but mighty car shot off down the highway faster than anything Joy had ever ridden in. It just kept getting faster with every one of Keiko’s gear shifts. She glanced over at the speedometer and couldn’t quite read it from her angle, but saw the needle was past 100. Joy sat up in her seat, threw both arms straight up in the air, and screamed.
It wasn’t a scared scream. It just came out of her, loud and pure and delighted, and the wind ripped it away behind them along with her ponytail, which was standing straight out behind her head like a flag. All of Tiffany’s careful brushing was being undone at felonious speeds, and she could not have cared less.
Keiko looked over at her, astonished, then raised an arm and screamed too.
They ended up at a shack on the highway north of Malibu with a deck full of bikers and a line out the door. Keiko parked the Cobra across two spaces at the far end of the lot, nose out, and they ate fried shrimp out of paper boats sitting on the low wall above the beach. The hot wind came down off the hills behind them and the cool air came in off the water in front of them, and the two kept fighting over Joy’s face, so that one cheek was warm and the other was cold.
“You’re the first person who’s ever done that,” Keiko said.
“Done what?”
“Screamed on the good part. Everybody else screams on the scary part.” She bit a shrimp in half. “Grandpa used to scream on the good part.”
Joy didn’t say anything. She ate a shrimp and waited, which was something she’d been getting better at.
“He was a mechanic,” Keiko said. “Forty years. We built that car over three summers. I mostly just handed him things at first and he told me what they were called, and by the end I was doing the brake lines. My dad hated it. He was always telling Grandpa I should be studying, not lying under a car.” She did a voice for her father, flat and tired, that sounded like it had a lot of practice. “Grandpa said I was going to be an engineer. Dad said I was going to be a doctor.”
“Who won?”
“Grandpa. Mechanical engineering.” She smiled a little. “It’s the one thing I do that my parents actually approve of.”
“And the car?”
“He left it to me when he died. My junior year.” She said it lightly, the way you say things you’ve said enough times to have sanded down. “Dad’s never ridden in it. Not once. Mom calls it the coffin.” She stared down at the shrimp she was holding, still smiling, but Joy noticed something behind that smile. “One of the many, many things we don’t see eye to eye on. Mom’s side’s even worse.”
“They’re the ones in Japan, right?”
“Yeah. I mean, I love them, but…” She gave a frustrated groan. “You want to know what my grandma told me when I turned twenty-one? She said, ‘Keiko-chan, you shouldn’t be spending all your time on silly things like cars and sports. You don’t want to become a Christmas cake, do you?’”
Joy stared at her with a shrimp tail sticking out of her mouth. Her look of complete incomprehension asked the question for her.
“Oh, it’s a Japanese thing. Everybody loves Christmas cake around Christmas, but nobody wants it after the twenty-fifth.”
It took Joy a second to figure it out. She blamed low blood sugar and the hangover.
“Oh. Oh, yeah, that’s messed up.”
“Right? She’s sweet, but she’s very…” Keiko circled a finger in the air, trying to find the word. “Traditional.”
“Does she play mahjong?”
Keiko blinked at her. “What?”
“Your grandma. In Osaka. Does she play mahjong?”
“Every week, with the neighbor ladies. Why?”
“Can she teach me in six days?” Joy said, perking up.
“Oh, she’d love to!” Keiko said with a laugh. “How’s your Japanese?”
“Oh,” Joy said, perking right back down again.
Keiko saw Joy’s face and stopped laughing. “Wait, are you serious? Why do you need to learn mahjong in six days?”
“For a thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
“High-stakes gambling of dubious legality?” she offered.
Keiko looked at her for a long moment over the top of her sunglasses.
“Okay, first of all, that’s the most you thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. “And second, Grandma’s would be no good to you anyway. That’s the Japanese kind. There’s like five different kinds and they all have different rules, and everybody who plays one of them thinks all the others are wrong.”
“Great,” Joy said. “Terrific.”
“What kind is your thing?”
“I have no idea.”
Keiko started laughing again. Joy threw a shrimp tail at her.
“You’re getting so good at the dumb blonde thing, Joy!”
Down on the beach, a guy in a wetsuit was trying to paddle out through the shore break and losing, over and over, and starting again every time. Joy watched him for a while. Then she pulled out her phone and looked at Dana’s text, and the address in San Gabriel, and the word mahjong, and the six days, and she felt the same thing she’d felt with her arms up on the Coast Highway with the wind tearing at her hair.
She typed back: I’m in.
Then she put the phone away and finished her shrimp.
Every light on Sunset was green on the way home, too.
When Keiko cut the engine in the parking structure, the silence afterward was so huge Joy’s ears rang. Keiko sat there with her hand on the brass knob for a moment.
“That was awesome!” Joy said, melting back into the seat with the sort of relaxed satisfaction she felt after a good run. “Grab me any time you want company on one of your cruises.”
Keiko’s mouth opened into a huge smile. “You mean it?”
“Totally. I haven’t had that much fun on the road since we did the hand-in-warm-water trick to Cole on the bus to regionals.”
Keiko gave a delighted shriek and lunged across the center console, hugging Joy. “It’ll be a joy-ride, then!”