Daniel’s closet, it turned out, was a museum of things that no longer applied to him.
Nate had the door open and was going through it hanger by hanger, holding each thing up for about a second and then moving on, like a man flipping through a rack he’d already decided against. He’d put his glasses on for the occasion. He only wore them for close-up work, study, his laptop, and apparently now this. They they made him look like he was grading her wardrobe, which he was.
“No.”
“That’s my good shirt.”
“It was your good shirt.” He moved on. “No. No. What is this.”
“It’s a jacket.”
“It’s a tent.” He held it against her. The shoulders came down to her elbows. “You’d look like a kid wearing her dad’s coat to a funeral.”
“Thanks.”
“You wanted me to look at this stuff for you.” He tossed it onto the pile and moved on again. “No.”
Joy sat on the couch-bed with her knees up and watched her entire wardrobe get vetoed in real time. It wasn’t that she disagreed. It was that she’d owned some of those clothes since high school and it felt like they deserved a little more consideration than a second each.
“Keiko’s been a lot nicer to you since…” Nate said as he kept rummaging, making another gesture at all of her.
“Maybe I’m just one of the girls now,” Joy said sourly, burying her face between her knees.
“I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with those apparently-cursed tarot cards she subjected you to.”
Joy responded by burying her face further into her knees.
“No,” he said to a final pair of jeans, then stood back to take stock of his work. “Okay. You have three shirts that sort of work and two pairs of pants that only stay up because of our belt mod. That’s the inventory.”
“And the shoes.”
“You know better than I do how badly those fit.” He shut the closet. “What time is it?”
“6:40.”
“Keiko says Kevin deals at 7, and you’re in.”
Joy eyed the rejected pile. “Then I have twenty minutes.”
“That’s a Keiko problem.”
Keiko showed up at 6:50 with an armful of clothes and kicked the door shut behind her.
She was five four on a good day, with a pixie cut she’d told everyone she copied off some manga character she liked and a way of entering rooms that typically had a blast radius.
“Hi Joy! Hi Nate! I come bearing gifts.”
“What’d you bring me?” Nate asked.
Keiko shifted her burden to one arm, fished around in her hoodie’s pocket before producing the wrapper to the candy she was eating and placed it in Nate’s hand like she was granting a boon to a departing her. She then dumped the pile on the couch-bed next to Joy, sorted it into two smaller piles, and pointed at the one on the left.
“Okay! Those are the best bets for what I’ve got that might fit you. Shorts and the white shirt first. Go!”
Joy held up the shorts. They looked like they’d fit a child. “Keiko.”
Keiko shot back a look that brooked no argument.
“Oh, quit being a baby. Go!”
Nate had gone back to his desk and was making a studied effort not to look up. Joy retreated into the bathroom under Keiko’s glare.
It took a while. The shirt went on easily enough, but every time Joy raised her arms it rode dangerously high. She wrestled the shorts up with considerably more effort, only to discover that either the denim or her hips would give before she got the button closed.
Keiko was sitting on the couch-bed with her feet tucked under her as Joy emerged. Nate still had not looked up. Both of them waited while Joy turned in a slow circle.
“Well?” Keiko said. “How do they fit?”
Joy considered the question seriously, the way she’d have considered a question about a new pair of spikes.
“This is a crop top.”
“That is not a crop top.”
“It is now. It’s tight across the chest, so it rides up.” She gave the shorts an inward tug at the button for emphasis. “And I think getting these closed on me is going to be a lost cause.”
There was a short silence.
Keiko opened her mouth, closed it, and appeared to be doing something she’d read about in a book: in through the nose, out through the mouth, hands flat on her knees. When she spoke again it was in a much more measured voice.
“Joy. I want you to know that I’m choosing not to hit you.”
“Noted.”
“My mother would be so proud right now.”
“Can I have the leggings?”
Keiko threw the leggings at her head.
Round two took less time. The leggings went on the way leggings go on, which was to say with a certain amount of hopping, and then Joy stood in the bathroom doorway and looked down at herself.
And then, because it had been a week since anything she’d put on had let her move, she moved.
It wasn’t a decision. She dropped, and came up, and went up, off both feet, from standing, in a dorm room with a nine foot ceiling, and got a hand flat on the ceiling tile above the couch-bed, and came down on the balls of her feet without any sound at all.
The tile went pok and settled back into its frame.
Nate did not look up.
Keiko had come about six inches off the couch-bed and was holding a cushion in front of herself like a shield.
“What,” she asked, “was that?”
“They work.”
“You jumped.”
“I wanted to see if I could jump.” Joy did a squat, went up on her toes, and rolled through both ankles, checking. “I can jump.”
“Isn’t that more of an…outside thing?”
Joy ignored her.
“These stop halfway down my calf.”
“They’re called capris” Nate offered without turning
“They’re not capris!” Keiko wailed, “They go to my shoes!”
“Keiko, you are five foot four.”
“I am five foot four and a half-”
There was a silence. Keiko did the breathing again.
“You know what,” Keiko said, in a measured voice, “I think they look great!”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. Very sporty. Sit down, I’m doing your hair.”
Joy obeyed. Keiko got up on her knees on the couch-bed behind her and gathered up the whole mass of it in two hands, with a small grunt of effort.
“Jesus, Joy. How do you brush this?” Keiko asked, tugging Joy’s head back slightly as she tried to apply some semblance of order to it. “I can barely get a finger through it.”
“I… don’t?” Joy said, seeing yet another ordeal in her near future.
“There’s so much.” Keiko produced an elastic band from a pocket. “Okay. Ponytail. That’s what we’re doing. Don’t touch it.”
Nate had turned around in his chair to watch this, and was now looking at Joy with the expression he got when he was about to ask a question he actually wanted the answer to.
“Hey, Keiko. You think this whole thing is going to wear off at some point?”
Keiko just shrugged.
“I’ve done a lot of tarot readings. I’ve never had one come true right there on the spot.”
She looked up from her struggle with Joy’s hair and grinned.
The possibility that she had inflicted a life-altering curse on one of her friends appeared to have increased rather than diminished her enthusiasm for tarot.
“I know how we can find out, though!”
Keiko reached into her back pocket and came out with a deck of cards, oversized, worn at the edges, held together with a hair tie.
“Mama Reyes wants him to bring a girl home,” Joy said, “not come home as one.”
“Also I like peeing standing up,” Nate said.
“You two are no fun!” Keiko said, putting the deck away.
There were still two problems, and Keiko solved the first one by marching to Nate’s closet, pulling out a pair of slides, and throwing them at her.
“Those are mine,” Nate said.
Keiko shrugged like she hadn’t just swiped his footwear right in front of him.
“It’s Kevin’s room. It’s at the far end of the hall. She’s not wearing those shoes, she’ll fall on her face, and I’m not carrying her.”
“I could just go barefoot,” Joy said.
“Ew, no! You’ve seen what’s been on that carpet!”
Keiko stopped and thought for a moment and seemed to remember something.
“Oh yeah, you heard Kevin’s upping the buy-ins on his games to 25 right?
“Since when?”
“Since Kevin printed the rules.” He kept holding it out. “You show up five dollars short, you’ve stood in a fitting room for forty minutes for nothing.”
Joy pulled the crumpled $20 that currently constituted the entirely of her savings at the moment.
“We’ve got a problem then.”
Wordlessly, Nate rummaged trough a pant pocket and emerged with a neatly folded $5 bill without looking up from what he was reading.
“You sure man?”
“It’s just five bucks. I know if I don’t get you out of here soon Keiko is going to try and do your makeup and then I’m not going to get any studying done.”
“Oooh that’s a good idea!” Keiko said, turning to Joy, “Can we?”
Joy reached out and reluctantly took the bill, then grabbed Keiko by the wrist and started hauling her towards the door.
“No time,” She turned over her shoulder as she left and added, “Thanks man, I owe you one.”
“You owe me five.” Was Nate’s reply.
The hallway was decorated.
Zane had a theme every year, and this year’s had gone up during the first week and was now, in the third week, beginning to peel. It was mushrooms. There were colorful construction paper mushrooms on every door with the residents’ names on them, a bulletin board at the end of the hall about mycelial networks that nobody had read, and a banner over the study lounge that said THE MAGIC OF MUSHROOMS. Zane had clearly cut the letters out by hand in a font Joy had only seen on the jackets of her dad’s old psychedelic rock records.
The mushroom on their door said NATE on one green cap and DANIEL on a red cap.
Keiko stopped, looked at it, reached up, and tore the second cap off in one motion. She crumpled it, put it in her pocket, and kept walking. She didn’t say anything and neither did Joy.
They passed Zane’s room on the way and waved. As usual, a combination of soft blue light and an ever-changing, indescribable botanical smell wafted from within. Zane was sitting inside, applying something to a plant on his desk with an eyedropper in one hand while eating cereal out of a box with the other.
Zane was their RA. He was twenty five and had been twenty five for what seemed like several years. He had the build of a surfer and the tan of one and the gentle demeanor of a person whose mind had been in an altered state since about 2019. He waved back with the dropper held between two fingers.
“Hey, Keiko. Hey, Joy.”
Joy stopped. “Wow, news travels fast around here.”
“Your paperwork came through this afternoon,” he said, eating another mouthful of cereal. “Housing wants me to move you. Get you roomed up with a couple of girls.”
Keiko turned around.
“Here’s what sucks, though: I totally lost the paperwork. You know how these things go.”
They didn’t, but they knew where he was going with this.
“So, sorry to say, bud, you’re going to have to put up with Nate a bit longer.”
He gave her what she supposed was meant to be a sly grin.
Joy raised her eyebrows.
“That’s, thank you.”
“All good! I’m sure I’ll lose the next copy when that shows up too. That’s just how these things go.”
Kevin’s room was at the end of the hall. The door was open, and noise spilled out of it: Five guys talking over each other and the flat plastic sound of chips.
Keiko stopped in the doorway and Joy stopped behind her.
Joy had been in Kevin’s room maybe a dozen times. She’d played in this exact game twice last spring and lost both times, cheerfully, and been invited back. His room wasn’t any larger than the one she shared with Nate, which was already cozy with two people and cramped with the intended three. There were now five people in there, four of whom Joy knew and one of whom she hadn’t met. With her and Keiko, the room was about to become something that would give the fire marshal a stroke should he happen to walk past.
Kevin took hosting seriously. A handwritten sheet labeled HOUSE RULES was taped above his desk, complete with numbered clauses and a signature line nobody had signed.
All five of them looked up.
None of them looked at Keiko.
“Kevin,” Keiko said. “This is Joy. She’s buying in.”
Kevin looked at Joy. He seemed to forget how to speak for a moment, and something in his face reorganized itself into the expression she’d been seeing all week. He stood up so fast his own chair went over backwards.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, absolutely. Take my seat!”
Joy hesitated, not about the game, but about crossing the room under five fixed stares.
Keiko planted both hands between her shoulder blades and shoved.
Joy stumbled two steps, caught herself against Kevin’s overturned chair, and shot Keiko a look over her shoulder. Keiko smiled sweetly.
Joy righted the chair and sat. She pulled the bills from her waistband, unfolded them, and put them in the middle of the table.
“Okay, boys. Deal me in.”