Joy’s first real practice with the spirit squad was on Monday afternoon, and there she learned two things.
The first was that she really could fly.
“Okay, Lockheed, load in.” Bree, the tall one who’d talked her through her first stunt at tryouts, set both hands on Joy’s waist from behind. In front of her, her two bases crouched facing each other with their hands cupped at their knees. One of them was Tasha. The other was either Lauren or Laura, and Joy had now been told which twice and lost it both times. “Hands on their shoulders. Step in, stand up, lock your legs, and stay tight. We do the rest. Five, six…”
Joy put a foot in each pair of hands and stood up.
The bases stood up with her. For a second that was all it was: her shoes cupped at their collarbones, Bree’s grip sliding from her waist down to her ankles, and Joy balanced at shoulder height.
“That’s a prep,” said Bree, from somewhere behind her knees. “Stay tight. Going up!”
Joy felt the surge as both bases pressed their arms out straight over their heads, and she rode up with them until her feet were higher than anybody’s head, arms up in a V, body locked straight as a flagpole.
It wasn’t flying. Nobody had thrown her anywhere, and she was only standing, very high up, on four hands. But being this high up had a thrill all its own, the same one she’d felt at tryouts, with the whole world getting quiet. She’d have thought balancing would be hard, but she actually felt pretty comfortable, and surveyed the gym from her new vantage point.
“Hold,” said Bree. “Hold. Hold. Okay, she’s good. She’s actually good! Cradle on two. One, two.”
Getting down turned out to be the best part. The bases dipped and popped her straight up off their hands, and for half a second she really was in the air, weightless, with nothing under her shoes. Then she sat back into empty space and three people caught her.
Joy, lying across four forearms like a rolled-up carpet with Bree’s hands under her shoulders, grinned at the ceiling.
“Again!” she said.
“She always says that!” Keiko called from across the mat, delighted. “She said it at tryouts too!”
“You heard her,” Bree agreed. “Five, six.”
They did it again. Then they did it on one foot, which was called a liberty: both bases holding her one shoe over their heads while she pulled her other knee up beside it. She held it. Then a heel stretch, where she took her free leg by the heel and pulled it straight up beside her ear, and she held that too, and her fingers didn’t even shake. Somewhere across the gym, somebody whistled.
The shoes helped. Keiko had shown up at her door that morning with a pair in a box, white and impossibly light, with grooves cut right into the soles under the arch.
“What are those for?”
“Finger grips,” Keiko had said. “So your bases can hold on to you.”
“They make shoes specifically for being held?”
“Yeah! They’re like climbing gloves for your feet!” Keiko had pushed the box into her hands. “They’re Mandy’s old ones. She says good luck, by the way, and don’t break anything. She says she’s got that covered.”
They fit perfectly, which Joy had stopped finding strange.
The second thing she learned was that everything she did on the ground was a disaster.
It turned out that cheerleading was not mostly flying. Mostly it was standing on the floor in a row with everyone else and making your arms do very specific things in a very specific order, very sharply, on very specific counts, while smiling.
Joy, on the other hand, couldn’t even keep a basic rhythm tapping a pen while studying, which she was pretty sure was what had prompted Nate to get his noise-canceling headphones.
“High V,” said Keiko, demonstrating. Her arms shot up and out in a perfect, crisp V, fists clenched. “Low V. T. Broken T. Touchdown. Punch. See? Sharp. Like you’re hitting something.”
Joy tried. Her arms went up. They went out. They went somewhere.
“That’s… a good start,” Keiko said generously.
“It’s a V!”
“It’s a sad V. You’ve got soft wrists. Make fists. Snap it. Punch that air, Joy! Punch it!”
They ran the sideline routine. It was thirty-two counts long and Joy was a full count behind the entire time, which meant every time the line of girls in front of her snapped into a T, Joy was still finishing her low V, like somebody at a wedding trying to do the Macarena by watching the people next to her. Halfway through she lost track of the count entirely and did the punch on her own, alone, like a single firework going off in an empty sky.
Somebody in the line laughed. It wasn’t a mean laugh, and Joy wound up laughing too.
At the water break she sat against the wall with her legs out and listened to two of the girls argue about whether a third girl, who wasn’t there to defend herself, should send her pictures in to some magazine’s cover-girl search, which apparently paid actual money.
“Those things actually pay?” Joy asked, butting in. “I figured they just paid in sashes and tiaras.”
“Yeah, this one is pretty good,” one of them said, handing Joy her phone. Joy looked at the prizes and whistled.
“Is this the one where you have to wrestle other girls in jello, or the one where you smile for four hours straight and tell everybody that if you were in charge you’d save all the dolphins?”
“Lockheed!” Coach Pike called from across the gym, without looking up from her clipboard. “Back handspring. Let’s see where we are.”
Joy handed back the phone and ambled over, looking at the mat. She thought about Thursday night, about diving backward away from a tree trying to turn her into fertilizer and landing a perfect back handspring without even thinking about it.
She had been looking forward to this.
She took a breath, swung her arms, threw herself backward, reached for the mat behind her head, and landed flat on her back with an enormous, resonant whump that echoed off every wall in the gym.
She lay there for a while, looking up at the rafters.
Apparently motivation was the issue.
“Okay,” said Pike, writing something down. “Flying’s fine.” She pointed her pen at Keiko. “You brought her. You fix everything else.”
“Yes, Coach!” said Keiko gleefully, and looked down at Joy with an expression that told her she had just become a project.
The vending machine outside the gym gave Joy two Gatorades for the price of one. She handed the second to Keiko without comment, and they walked back up the Hill with their bags over their shoulders and the evening going purple over Westwood.
“So,” Keiko said. She had her phone out and was thumbing at it as she walked, the way she did everything, at full speed and without looking where she was going. “Did you figure out your mahjong thing yet?”
“I watched four videos last night.”
“And?”
“One of them was in Cantonese. Two of them were about completely different games that were also called mahjong. And the fourth was an old lady in Ohio who said the most important thing was to have fun, and then spent forty minutes explaining something called the Charleston.”
“Oh, I know that!” Keiko said.
“Really?”
“Yeah! Tiffany showed me once. It’s like this!”
Keiko dropped her bag, tucked her elbows in at her sides, raised her wrists, and did a strange dance that mostly involved kicking out to either side. Joy wasn’t sure what it was supposed to look like, but Keiko made it look like she’d been tied up with rope and was being lowered into a tank full of sharks.
Joy groaned and dragged both hands down her face.
“You know what you should do,” Keiko said brightly, scooping her bag back up and going right back to her phone, “is just go, and lose, and watch how they do it. That’s how my grandma learned. She said she lost her whole allowance for a year.”
“I’m not playing for allowance.”
“How much are you playing for?”
Joy thought about it.
“All of it,” she said.
Keiko looked up from her phone for that. She looked at Joy for a second, opened her mouth, then closed it again as she decided not to say whatever she’d been about to say. Then her phone made a sound like a wind chime being dropped down a flight of stairs, and the screen lit up gold, and then rainbow.
“Oh, hey,” Keiko said, glancing down. “I got the fox lady.”
Joy stopped walking.
“You what?”
“On my daily.” Keiko turned the phone around. There she was, Tsukiko, the Golden Fox, smiling her sly sideways smile over the top of her fan, with five little stars twinkling under her name. “Huh. I was hoping for the guy with the scar.”
Joy stared at the screen. She had done every daily quest for three weeks. She had ground out two entire events. She had saved two thousand stardust and blown it all in one shot yesterday morning and gotten spear guy twice.
“On your daily,” she said.
“Yeah, the free one.” Keiko was already scrolling past her. “Do you want to see her victory pose? It’s really cute. Joy? Why are you making that face?”
On Tuesday afternoon she met Marco at Drake Stadium.
She went over the fence again. The gate still stuck unless you hit it with your hip, and she still wasn’t ready for that. Somebody had zip-tied a flyer to the chain link right where she put her hands: LOS ANGELES MARATHON. REGISTRATION NOW OPEN. She read it on her way over the top.
“Don’t,” said Marco, from the curb.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were reading it. Sprinters don’t do marathons. It’s twenty-six miles.”
“I was just reading it!”
“You weren’t making an ‘I was just reading it’ face.”
“What face?” Joy asked, feigning offense, and then realized she was doing it again, pushing her lower lip up into her upper lip. Apparently she’d been doing it often enough that people were starting to figure out it meant she was thinking about something that was going to amuse her and probably annoy everybody else.
Marco had his stopwatch, and now that she was here he looked like he was letting go of a fair bit of anxiety, as if he’d been worried she wouldn’t show. He seemed relieved to be wrong.
She’d brought riddles last Thursday, as threatened. He’d hated them so much that she’d gone out and bought a bunch of candy that had even worse ones on the wrappers.
The plan was the same as it had been last week. Four 400s. Joy would run on his shoulder, breaking new ground in the science of annoying him, and Marco’s whole job was to not go. Not at 200, where his legs wanted to. Not at 300, where he’d always gone, and then died with fifty left and nothing in the tank. He was supposed to hold, and hold, and hold, and only go when she said so.
“What has keys but can’t open locks?” Joy said, as they came into the first turn.
“A piano,” Marco said, breathing evenly.
“What gets wetter the more it dries?”
“A towel.” They came off the turn. Two hundred went by. She felt him start to lean, just a little, and clicked her tongue at him, and he settled. “These are terrible.”
“Yeah, the candy was too. What can you catch but not throw?”
“A cold.”
Two-eighty. She could feel him thinking about it. His whole body was thinking about it.
“What’s always in front of you,” she said, “but can’t be seen?”
Marco frowned. They hit three hundred. It came off him like heat, the old itch, the one that had been costing him races. He didn’t go. He was still frowning.
“The future,” Joy said, at three-fifty. “Now!”
He went.
He went like somebody had cut a rope, and she let him go and watched him pull away down the straight with his arms driving and his form, for once, still in one piece at the line. He stood with his hands on his knees, and when she jogged up he looked at the stopwatch for a long moment and then put it down by his side without telling her what it said.
“The future,” he said, between breaths. “Okay. That one’s good.”
“Candy wisdom!”
They did three more. On the last one she didn’t have to click her tongue at him once.
Afterward they sat on the edge of the track with their water bottles while the sun went down behind the bleachers. Marco didn’t say anything for a while. Then he got up, went over to the equipment shed, and came back dragging a set of starting blocks.
“What’s that for?”
“You,” Marco said.
“I’m not on the team, Marco.”
“I know.” He set the blocks down at the top of the straight and started adjusting the pedals. “Coach leaves the timing gates up on Tuesdays. Nobody’s using them. I want to see something.”
“See what?”
He didn’t answer. He walked down to the finish, did something to the little laser gates on their tripods, came back, and pointed at the blocks.
Joy looked at them. She hadn’t been in a set of blocks since before. She’d run plenty since then, on a plaza, up Janss Steps, across a lawn with a chainsaw, but never out of blocks.
She got down into them. Her hands found the line by themselves. Her feet found the pedals. Her center of gravity had filed a change of address since the last time she’d done this, and she had to shift twice before she found where everything went.
Then it felt exactly right, and something washed over Joy like getting into your own bed after a long time away.
“On your marks,” said Marco. “Set.”
He clapped.
She went.
It was over almost before she knew it had started. The track blurred and the line came at her and went past, and she was out the other side, slowing, with her ponytail bouncing between her shoulder blades and her heart going like a drum roll. She turned around and jogged back.
Marco was standing next to the little display on the gate. He wasn’t saying anything. He was just looking at it.
“Well?”
He didn’t answer. Joy came around and looked over his shoulder.
The display said 11.06.
She looked at it for a while. She knew what that number was. Every sprinter knew what that number was. It was a number that got you scholarships. It was a number that got you into finals. It was a number that the women’s team at UCLA, which was a very good women’s team, would very much like to have on its roster.
“Wow!” Joy said.
“That’s off a clap,” Marco said, as if he were apologizing for it. “It’s not official. The start’s generous.” He took his phone out and took a picture of the display.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” said Marco, and put the phone away, and went to put the blocks back.
Coach Renner called on Wednesday.
Joy was in the middle of Microeconomics when her phone buzzed in her bag. She didn’t know the number, so she let it go to voicemail and looked forward to hearing how the car she didn’t have was about to be impounded. She listened to the message on the walk back, standing on the corner of Gayley and Strathmore while the light changed twice without her noticing.
The voice was crisp and fast and didn’t waste a word. Renner had seen a time. Renner was aware that the time was unofficial, and hand-started, and from a Tuesday afternoon. Renner had also seen a certain video, which had been going around the athletic department for a couple of weeks now, and had watched it more than once. There was no roster spot this year and nothing in the budget, and Renner wanted to be honest about that. But open tryouts were in April, and Renner would very much like to see her there.
Joy listened to it twice. Then she put the phone in her pocket and stood on the corner for a while.
She hadn’t let herself think about it. Somewhere in the last month, between the poker and the tree and the cheer squad, she’d put the track in a box at the back of her head and had very carefully not opened it. She’d raced Cole and won. She’d run every chance she got, and every single time it had felt good, but she’d just been doing it because she enjoyed it. There hadn’t been any serious thoughts about training, and especially not about a team. She had more immediate problems to solve.
But April, though.
She texted Marco: did you send my time to Renner??
The reply came a minute later.
no
Joy sent him a meme of a surly 1940s detective giving the camera a skeptical look.
And a minute after that:
maybe
Joy laughed out loud on the corner of Gayley and Strathmore, by herself, and a guy going past on a skateboard gave her a wide berth.
By Wednesday night she was in real trouble.
She had three days. She had now watched eleven videos, read two websites, and even joined a Discord for the game, which she’d left very quickly once she saw what the community there was like. She had learned that a mahjong set had a hundred and forty-four tiles, except when it had a hundred and thirty-six, or a hundred and fifty-two. She had learned that there were dots and bamboos and characters and winds and dragons, and sometimes flowers, and sometimes seasons, and sometimes jokers, depending on who you asked. She had learned what a pung was, and a chow, and a kong, and then found out that half the internet called them something else.
She had learned exactly one thing for certain, which was that she did not know how to play mahjong.
She was lying face down on the couch-bed with her phone propped against a shoe, watching two old men argue about something called a dead wall, when Nate took his headphones off.
“Is that mahjong?”
“I don’t know anymore,” Joy sobbed into the cushion.
“Oh, cool. It’s really fun.”
Joy lifted her head.
“What?”
“Mahjong.” He was still typing. “I’ve been playing it for a while.”
“Since when?”
“Since my MMO added it as a minigame a couple of years ago.” He hit one last key and swiveled his chair around. “I’ve played maybe four thousand hands. Got all the achievements for it.”
Joy stared at him.
“I’m ranked,” Nate added.
“I’ve been doing this since Sunday! Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I figured you had it covered. You asked Yin. You asked Keiko. You asked about Keiko’s grandmother in Osaka.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Keiko told the whole floor.” Nate shrugged. “I figured you’d find somebody.”
Joy rolled off the couch-bed, crossed the room in three strides, and took him by both shoulders.
“Teach me.”
Nate looked at the hands on his shoulders, and then up at Joy’s face.
“Okay,” said Nate.
He was a good teacher. Joy hadn’t expected that. He taught the way he did everything, flat and precise, with no wasted words and no visible enthusiasm, and he never explained anything twice unless she asked.
He sat her down at his desk in front of his laptop. On the screen, his character, a cat-girl with a giant sword, was standing in a casino with the game’s practice table open in front of her. Nate stood behind Joy with his arms crossed.
“Four players. Thirteen tiles each. You draw one, you throw one away. You’re trying to make four sets and a pair.” He pointed. “A set is three of a kind, or three in a row in the same suit. Four sets and a pair, you win.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s the short version.” He pointed again. “You can’t win with just any hand, though. You need at least one scoring pattern. It’s called a yaku. No yaku, no win. Doesn’t matter how pretty your tiles are.”
“Got it.”
“When you’re one tile away, and you haven’t picked up anybody else’s discard, you can declare riichi.” He reached past her and tapped a button, and a little white stick slid out onto the table. “You put up a thousand points and you lock your hand. Can’t change anything after that. You’re stuck with it. But it’s worth more if you win.”
Joy’s eyes lit up.
“You bet on yourself,” she said.
“You bet on yourself,” Nate admitted, with the resignation of a man who could see exactly where this was going.
“I love riichi.”
“I know. That’s what worries me. Don’t riichi every hand.” He tapped the screen again. “This tile. That’s the dora. Bonus tile. If you’re holding it, your hand’s worth more.”
“Why?”
“Because the game says so.”
“Fair.”
“If you win off a tile somebody else threw, you say ron. If you draw it yourself, you say tsumo. And if you’ve already thrown away a tile that would have won you the hand, you can’t win off anybody else’s discard. That’s furiten.” He looked down at her over his glasses. “People forget furiten all the time. Don’t forget furiten.”
“Forget what?”
“Now play,” Nate said, ignoring her.
She played.
She lost.
She played again and lost again, and she kept playing until two in the morning, and by the end of it she’d stopped losing quite so badly. She learned what a good hand looked like. She learned which tiles were safe to throw and which ones made the computer pounce. She learned to riichi, and when not to riichi, and she riichied far more often than Nate thought she should and won about half of them, which Nate said was statistically insane, in the same voice he used for everything.
What she couldn’t do was read the bots.
That was the strange part. At a poker table the cards had never really been the point. The people were the point. There was always a moment, a little hitch, a breath, a thumb moving when it shouldn’t, where she could see what somebody was holding as clearly as if they’d turned it over. But the three little cartoon players on Nate’s screen didn’t breathe. They didn’t have thumbs. They threw tiles at her with a soft electronic click, at exactly the same speed every time, and beat her.
“I hate them,” she said around one-thirty, as the bot across from her declared tsumo and took a third of her points.
“They’re bots.”
“I hate them. There’s nothing to read. It’s like playing cards against a toaster.”
“That’s sort of the idea.”
“Well, Saturday’s going to be people.”
Nate didn’t say anything to that. He watched her lose another hand.
By Friday night she could play.
Not well. Not the way she played poker, where she could feel the shape of a table in her stomach before the first card came down. But she knew the tiles on sight now. She knew what she was building. She knew to watch her discards and never throw anybody their winning tile, and she knew about riichi, and dora, and furiten. She’d beaten the bots four games running on Thursday, and on Friday Nate had put her on the hard table and she’d only lost three out of five.
She closed the laptop a little after eleven. Somewhere in there she’d also wound up running a dungeon when a few of Nate’s friends needed help, and been asked why he was playing so terribly. She was pretty sure she wasn’t cut out to be a gamer.
She sat down on the couch-bed and got out the envelope.
It was a plain bank envelope, and everything she had was in it. She’d taken it out in twenties that afternoon, standing at the ATM outside the student store while the machine counted it out with a sound like a deck being shuffled and the person behind her looked on with great interest, and she’d practically skipped back to the dorm with it. Dana had said to bring more than a thousand, and Joy had never been any good at bringing half of anything. She counted it out on the blanket in neat little stacks of five.
One thousand, eight hundred and eighty dollars.
It was the tree fairy’s change. It was what was left of Ray’s game after an arborist and a shopping trip and a tank top with a beaver on it. It was the first real money she’d ever had, and it was all of it, and tomorrow night she was going to carry it into a restaurant in San Gabriel and put it on a table in front of strangers, to play a game she’d learned three days ago off a laptop.
She thought about that for a second. Her heart started beating faster and she felt a warmth in her stomach. Then she felt the corner of her mouth start to go up.
She put the money back in the envelope, lay down, and stuck the envelope under her pillow, which was stupid, and she knew it was stupid, and she did it anyway.
Then she opened Blazing Star, did her free daily pull, and got another Chubbins.
“Looks like it’s just you and me, buddy,” she told the little fat man. Chubbins beamed up at her from his little card, delighted to see her, as always.
Across the room, Nate set down the controller he’d spent the evening repairing. He sat there for a moment, the way he did when he was deciding whether or not to say something.
“What time are we leaving tomorrow?”
Joy propped herself up on one elbow.
“We?”
“It’s San Gabriel. That’s forty minutes without traffic, and you don’t have a car.” He stood, plugged in his phone, and reached for the lamp. “And you’re not walking into some place you’ve never been at eleven at night with two grand in an envelope.”
“You’re doing the thing again.”
“What thing?”
“The bodyguard thing.”
“I’m doing the driving thing.”
“Nate, it’s a restaurant. It’s probably just some Chinese place.”
“Then it’ll be a short night,” said Nate. “And if I’m lucky, they’ll have chow fun.”
He turned off the lamp. The room went dark except for the streetlight coming through the blinds. He got into bed and turned over to face the wall, and that was the end of that.
Joy lay back with her hand on the envelope under her pillow, listening to the last of the wind worry at the window, and smiled at the ceiling for a long time before she fell asleep.