When they turned back around, there was a woman sitting on the hood of Nate’s Corolla.
Nate made a sound of constipated indignation. He may not have given it the loving attention Keiko gave her Cobra, but you didn’t eat in the Corolla and you certainly didn’t sit on it.
It was Dana. She had her long coat wrapped around her and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and she was watching the dark front of the restaurant with what appeared to be rapidly waning patience. When she saw them she slid down off the hood. Her eyes met Joy’s, and there was the spark, faint as ever.
“You’ve been in there two and a half hours,” she said, her voice dripping with annoyance much like Mr. Lo’s Cantonese BBQ Duck dripped with his special duck sauce.
“Mr. Lo fed us,” said Joy, shaking the bags for emphasis, “To celebrate…um…”
She looked at Nate who looked as lost on this issue as she was.
“To celebrate the continued integrity of my kidney?”
Dana looked at the bags. She looked at Nate, who was holding one that was entirely chow fun.
“Lo cooked for you.”
“Eleven courses! Three kinds of Cantonese BBQ, ancient family secret!”
Dana was quiet for a moment. “I’ve been coming to this place for eleven years,” she said, “and I have never once seen him cook for anybody.”
“Do you want some? We’re going to have leftovers for days.” Joy was already working at the knot on one of the bags. “There’s this eggplant thing, with the…”
“No. I’m not…” Dana stopped, and seemed to change her mind about how she wanted to start. She put her hands in her coat pockets. “I’ve never seen anybody do that to him.”
“I mean once you get over him being some sort of 8’ tall necromancer, he’s a pretty nice guy!”
“No, not him, Adrian.”
She paused, realizing the two were staring at him blankly.
“The man with the green eyes you were playing against.”
“Oooh,” Joy said. “The asshole! Is that his name?”
“You’ve never seen anybody beat him?” Nate asked.
“People beat him. It’s gambling, it happens. He loses gracefully. It’s part of the act.” She shook her head. “Nobody, and I mean nobody laughs at him. You had Mrs. Cheung laughing at him. Mrs. Cheung brings him almond cookies.”
“She seemed nice!”
“Mrs. Cheung is many things but nice is not one of them.”
Joy gave up on the knot. “You told him I bluff.”
“You do bluff,” Dana said.
“Not with that smile. You knew what that smile meant.”
Dana looked away, across the empty lot at the street.
“He asked me a question,” she said, “and I answered it. Don’t thank me. I’m the one who invited you.”
Joy waited. Waiting was something she’d been getting better at lately.
“I owe him,” Dana said. “I have for a long time. He told me there was a girl at a house game in Culver City he’d like to meet, and that it would be a very nice gesture on my part if she turned up here with everything she had. So I sat across from you at Ray’s and worked out what would bring you, and it took one text.” She took her glasses out of her hair, looked at them, and put them back. “I tried to turn you around at the door. I told you it would be dangerous. I’d like that on the record. It isn’t much.”
“Oh come on, that’s like putting a sign saying DANGER: DO NOT OPEN on something. Of course I’m going to look.”
“And you asked me if they’d tell you that you had a sweet ass.”
“And they didn’t! It was great!”
Something happened at the corner of Dana’s mouth. It didn’t quite make it all the way to a laugh.
“What did he even want me for?” Joy said. “He may have been a dick, but I somehow doubt he gets his jollies by luring broke college girls into weird casinos so he can swindle them for chump change.”
“He didn’t want your money. He wanted you to owe him. That’s all a marker is. It’s never about the chips.” Dana looked at her then, straight on, right into her eyes. “You really don’t know what you’ve got, do you?”
“Great hair?”
“For the love of…no, remember I told you once that you were lucky?”
“You said it feels like being good.” Joy remembered the rest of it, too. Don’t let it make your decisions for you. She decided not to bring that part up, given the night she’d had.
“It does feel like that. I’d know.” Dana’s eyes were brown, and ordinary, and very tired. “I had it before you did. I borrowed against it, from him, because I was sure I couldn’t lose. Then I couldn’t pay. And then I didn’t have it anymore.” Something crossed her face that wasn’t quite a smile. “He didn’t get to keep it either, if that helps. I’d have paid real money to see his face.”
Joy opened her mouth to explain that there had been some kind of mix-up. She hadn’t gotten anything. She’d gotten turned into a girl at a night market, and that while she’d gotten stiffed on magical powers like Yin and the douchebag whose name she’d already forgotten had, it hadn’t been all that terrible so far either.
Then she thought about every light on Wilshire turning green. She thought about a pot in Culver City she’d had no business being in, and eleven orphans in a single deal. She thought about a thrown coffee cup, an evil tree. She thought about the moment right after, when she’d been laughing like a supervillain, and something a very long way off had seemed to be pleased with her.
There was a conclusion within reach there, and Joy desperately did not want to touch it.
“He can’t just take it,” Dana said. “You’d have to put it on the table yourself. People who owe him end up putting all kinds of things on the table.” She glanced back at the dark restaurant. “So don’t. That’s the only advice I’ve got that’s worth anything. Never take something from him you didn’t win.”
“I don’t do markers,” said Joy. “I do bets.”
It came out a lot better without “I don’t think” in front of it.
“Good. Keep it that way.” Dana pulled a set of keys out of her pocket. “And you should know he was watching you afterward. The whole time. He doesn’t forget things.”
“Damn,” said Joy. “If I’d known that, I’d have flipped him the bird.”
Dana looked at her a second longer, like she was trying to decide whether that was the bravest thing or the dumbest thing she’d ever heard, and seemed to come down on both.
“Go home, Joy. Put that money in a bank.”
She got about four steps.
“The eggplant,” she said, without turning around. “Is that the one you were offering?”
Joy finally got the knot undone and ran it over. Dana took the container, tucked it under her arm like a clutch purse, and walked off toward the street.
Nate waited until she was gone.
“That’s the woman who got you into this,” he said.
“Yep.”
“And you gave her our eggplant.”
“She waited two and a half hours!”
Nate walked around to the front of the Corolla and inspected the hood for some time. Then he unlocked the car.
The 10 was empty going west, too.
Nate drove with both hands on the wheel at exactly ten and two, like a man taking a driving test he expected to fail. He didn’t say anything through Alhambra. He didn’t say anything when downtown came up on the right, and its lights lit up the empty freeway. The bags sat knotted on the back seat in open violation of everything the Corolla stood for, and he didn’t say anything about that either, which was how Joy knew it was bad.
She let him get as far as the 110 interchange.
“Okay. What,” she said, turning to look at him.
“Nothing.” Nate kept his eyes on the road.
“You’ve checked that mirror nine times and there’s nobody back there.”
His hands moved on the wheel. It took him another half mile.
“You put your thumb in red ink,” he said. “There was a guy with a cooler. He nodded at you. I keep thinking about the nod.” He shook his head at the windshield. “I taught you for a week. I was smug about it. I made you drill furiten.”
“And I am the furiten master!”
“It doesn’t exist! I sent you into a basement with a rule that doesn’t exist!” He breathed out hard through his nose. “If you’d drawn one different tile on that last hand, we’d be having this conversation with you in a bathtub full of ice. And it would be because I never looked at what the game was called.”
Joy turned sideways in her seat so she was fully facing him now.
“Can I say something? As a woman?”
Nate made a face.
“That still sounds weird coming from you. It’s only been like a month.”
“And in that month I have been hugged by Keiko, Tiffany, Yin, and most of the spirit squad. So I’ve got a pretty good sample size.” She held up one finger. “One arm, Nate. One. And Auntie Lau had to tell you.”
This seemed to completely derail Nate’s train of thought.
“Wha…I didn’t know what you wanted me to do!”
“The evil tree knew how to give better hugs. It was doing it with one branch to that golf cart before it threw it at me.” Joy said, a grin starting to spread across her face.
“You got snot on my shirt.”
“That shirt’s had worse things on it.” Joy countered.
“You were laughing and crying at the same time. I thought you were having a stroke.”
“And you still went in with the one arm. Very brave.” She gave him a soft punch in his shoulder. “It’s sweet, though. You drove all the way out to San Gabriel to protect me. My hero.”
Nate rolled his eyes, but he was smiling now too.
“Mr. Lo stood over me while I ate,” Nate said, after a pause. “He’d have been so polite about the kidney. That’s what gets me. He’d have thanked you.”
Joy laughed, and after a second, in spite of himself, so did he. It wasn’t much of a laugh. It was the first one she’d gotten out of him since the stairs.
She let it sit for a mile.
“Hey,” she said, in her regular voice. “I walked into that place with eighteen hundred and eighty dollars. I’m walking out with twenty thousand, both kidneys, and most of a duck. Show me the part where you screwed up.”
“The part where it was the wrong game.”
“You taught me to watch what everybody throws. You taught me that hand. I’d have thrown it back in if I hadn’t seen that little gold icon on your laptop.” She shrugged. “And you sat on a stool for two hours getting yelled at by Auntie Lau and then you told me to kick his ass. I’d have lost without you. I’m serious.”
Nate didn’t answer. But after a while his hands came down off ten and two, and one of them went to the bottom of the wheel, which was where he kept it when he was driving like a normal person.
His phone was lying face down in the cup holder. Joy turned it over. Four percent. She found the cable hanging out of the dash, plugged it in, and set the phone back face down exactly the way it had been.
Nate glanced at it.
“Did you just…”
Joy had pointedly turned her head away from him.
He looked at the road. She looked out the window. The cable ran between them, doing its job.
A green sign went by on the right.
“That’s my parents’ exit,” Nate said, to nobody in particular.
“Do they know you were out betting your roommate’s organs?”
“My mom thinks I do nothing but take orphans to the park and sing in choirs.”
“At three in the morning?”
“I think there might be fewer crackheads there at night.”
Joy grinned and turned back around and put her feet up on the dash, until he looked at them, and then she took them down.
She owed him. Not the burger, although she owed him that too. She owed him something real, and it couldn’t be money. Money was nice, she certainly could attest to that, but that’s not the kind of thing you gave somebody like Nate. He didn’t let people pay him back. He plugged in your phone and denied it.
So it would have to be something he couldn’t hand back. She didn’t know what yet. She had a feeling she’d know it when she saw it.
“Don’t,” said Nate.
“I’m not doing anything!”
“You’re thinking about doing something. You’ve got a face again.”
“I always have a face,” said Joy, and kept it.
“…and then he made us duck,” said Joy.
Yin and Sophie stared at her.
It was a little after one on Sunday, and the three of them were under Yin’s oak, which had not tried to kill anybody in a couple of weeks and looked very pleased with itself about its good behavior. Joy had slept for about four hours. She had lain on the couch-bed until seven with her eyes open and her fingertips buzzing, and then gone out like somebody had pulled her plug, and when she woke up she had checked the hoodie pocket before she checked her phone. It had all still been there. She wasn’t sure what you did with a wrapped stack of hundred dollar bills. Until now she hadn’t known they were a real thing and not just something that existed as a movie prop. The banks didn’t open until Monday, so the money had come to lunch.
Sunday lunch under the oak was a thing Sophie did. Joy had found this out the week before, when she’d wandered past and been flagged down by Yin. Today it was pork belly buns that Sophie had steamed in the dorm kitchen at seven in the morning, and a cucumber salad. Joy had brought Mr. Lo’s leftovers, which were most of a duck and a lot of noodles, and had felt pretty good about her contribution right up until she’d seen the buns.
Sophie was up on the wall, as usual, with a container balanced on one knee. She had stopped chewing at about the part with the cooler.
“You bet a kidney,” she said.
“The left one.”
“You bet a kidney, on a game you learned off a laptop, against a guy with glowing eyes.”
“It was the wrong game, too,” Joy said helpfully. “Nate taught me the Japanese one.”
“And you won.”
“Thirteen Orphans!”
Yin had been sitting cross-legged in the grass in her straw hat with a pair of chopsticks stopped halfway to her mouth. Both her ears perked up so fast it knocked her hat off and she raised a hand to her mouth with the most polite and innocent gasp Joy had ever heard.
“Thirteen Orphans? I don’t even play and I know that one! My grandma got it once, in nineteen ninety-four. There’s a picture. It’s framed. It’s in the hallway, next to my cousin’s wedding!”
“The guy I was playing said it was the stupidest play he’d ever seen. He called it one in a million.” Joy fished a piece of duck out of the container. “And Nate’s on a stool behind me, right, he’s white as a sheet, I’m pretty sure he’s forgotten how breathing works, and he goes, ‘One in twenty-five hundred.’”
Yin put her chopsticks down.
“He corrected the odds?”
“Yeah, numbers are kinda his thing. And anime. He counted the stairs on the way down.”
“How many were there?”
“Ninety-four.”
“Ninety-four,” Yin repeated. She smiled softly and one of her ears twitched.
Sophie, meanwhile, had reached over and taken a piece of the duck. She did it the way people take a piece of somebody else’s food to be polite. Then she stopped chewing again and looked down at the container as though it had said something to her.
“Who made this?”
“Giant Chinese sorcerer.”
“Makes sense, this is magical.”
“He’s really nice, he even gave me two fortune cookies!”
Sophie ate another piece, slower. She had the face of somebody doing math she didn’t like the answer to. Beside her on the wall, her own buns sat in their container, untouched since the duck had come out.
“She gets like this,” Yin told Joy, in the low, kind voice of somebody explaining a medical condition. Then, loyally: “It’s almost as good as my dad’s.”
“I need to know what’s in this,” said Sophie. “I need to meet this man.”
“Are your kidneys in good condition?”
Joy’s phone buzzed in the hoodie pocket that didn’t have twenty thousand dollars in it.
It was a number she didn’t know. I don’t usually text first. Consider it a compliment. Dinner, this week. I’ll choose the place. And under that, a name: Adrian.
Joy read it twice. The name Adrian rang a bell but she couldn’t remember from where. She was almost sure she didn’t know an Adrian. It was a good name, the kind she’d have remembered if she ever remembered names, which she didn’t, so he could have been anybody. He could have been any of the guys Keiko had been handing her number out to at parties, like coupons.
Her face must have been doing something, because Yin said, “Who was that?”
“I dunno.” Joy was already typing. If Keiko gave you my number, tell her to set you up with somebody else. She hit send, then block, and put the phone face down in the grass. “Just another guy trying to get with me.”
“Another one?” said Sophie. “How many are there?”
Joy flipped the phone back over and scrolled. “There’s one who wants to know what I’m doing for the Halloween party. There’s one who wants to get lunch. And I think there’s a third guy, but he might be the first guy.”
“And what did you tell them?”
Joy looked at the phone.
“I was going to get back to them.”
“Joy!” Yin said, with real distress. “They’re probably so sad!”
“I’m guessing they’ll get over it.”
Sophie gestured at Joy with a pair of chopsticks.
“So who are you actually seeing?”
“Nobody.” Joy said absently as her cucumber salad evaded capture by her chopsticks.
There was a silence. Yin and Sophie looked at each other and an entire silent conversation took place. It was the kind of look two people can only do properly when they’ve known each other since they were still drinking juice from tippy-cups.
“You’re not dating,” said Sophie. “At all.”
“I’ve been busy!”
“You look like that,” said Sophie, waving her chopsticks up and down at her, “and you’re just walking around? Single?”
She said that last part as if Joy had committed some sort of cardinal sin.
“I know,” said Joy, rolling her eyes, “It’s a waste.”
“Do you even like guys? Now, I mean.”
Joy thought about it honestly, which was more than she’d done so far.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t checked.” She considered that warm feeling she got looking at the guy whose name she couldn’t remember at last night’s game. She was pretty sure that didn’t count, that was obviously magic.
“You haven’t checked.”
Sophie let it go, in a way that made it clear she was only letting it go for now. “Okay. How about women?”
She asked it flatly, like trying to find something a picky child would eat.
“I tried,” Joy admitted. “Last week, at practice. There was a girl on the squad, and I went over, and I was smooth. I had a whole thing ready. It was a good thing. I used to use it.”
“And?”
“She asked me what conditioner I use.”
“Ooh,” said Yin. “What do you use?”
Joy pointed her chopsticks at her. “See? That. That’s what happens now. Its like guys who get all buff in the gym to get women, but then it turns out only other buff men care.”
“So you don’t know,” said Sophie.
“I don’t know,” Joy admitted.
“Then go find out!” Yin said, clasping her hands excitedly, “I know true love awaits you out there somewhere!”
“Since when are you two the experts?” Joy asked, eying the pair dubiously.
“She’s had the same boyfriend since tenth grade,” said Yin.
Joy just about choked on her salad.
Sophie was wearing a shirt with the sleeves cut off and an old black and white photograph of some men most decidedly not having a good time. In the time Joy had known her, she had mostly sat on walls hating anything that walked within range. Joy had honestly assumed she slept hanging upside down.
“You have a boyfriend?”
“Four years in March.”
“Owen,” Yin said happily. “He’s so nice. He’s an education major. He does his classroom hours with second graders, and he makes her soup when she’s sick, and sometimes she goes in with him and they all just climb on her.”
“He’s fine, I guess,” said Sophie. She went slightly pink and looked at the tree.
“You like little kids?” Joy said, now looking at her incredulously, “Yin I would get, but you?”
“Kids are great,” said Sophie. “They’re not full of shit like most teenagers and adults.”
“You’re nineteen,” said Yin.
“And full of shit, so I know what I’m talking about.” Sophie pointed her chopsticks at Joy. “One date. Pick the least annoying one and go on one date. You’ll get a free dinner and a story out of it. If it’s bad, it’s a better story.”
Joy stopped with a piece of duck halfway to her mouth. She hadn’t considered that.
“Wait. They pay? I assumed guys down here were too…” She gestured trying to find the word, but failed.
“Usually.”
“Man, with the prices here in LA, that’s a pretty good deal.”
“So that’s a yes.”
“That’s an ‘I’m thinking about it,’” said Joy, and did not text anybody back.
Sophie turned the chopsticks on Yin. “And don’t you start. When was your last one? Senior year?”
“I’ve tried!” Yin’s ears dropped a full inch. “I have. There was the boy from my analysis class, and he was so smart, and he was mean to the waiter. And then there was the one who was really sweet and brought me flowers, and I tried to show him a proof I liked, a really pretty one, and he said, ‘That’s neat,’ and asked if I wanted to watch him play a video game.”
“So what, he isn’t into math like you are,” Sophie said. “I’m not into math and you hang out with me.”
“I just don’t think it’s that much to ask,” Yin said. looking off into the distance wistfully, “Somebody kind. A little bit sensitive. Who gets excited about an elegant proof. They have to be out there. My own prince charming.”
Joy and Sophie tensed, sure that she was about to break into song. Instead she sighed, and ate some cucumber, and looked up at her tree.
Joy had stopped chewing.
She was thinking about a guy who’d counted ninety-four stairs on the way down to the worst place he’d ever been. She was thinking about one in twenty-five hundred, said out loud to the scariest man in the room because the number had been wrong. She was thinking about a phone charger, and the word please, and one extremely careful arm.
She’d know it when she saw it.
“What’s that?” said Sophie.
“What’s what?” Joy said, taken off guard.
“That. With your mouth.”
“Nothing!” Joy got her lower lip back under control. “So what’s this Halloween party?”
They both looked at her again.
“The one in the text you just read us,” said Sophie.
“Yeah. What is it?”
“It’s the Halloween party. Every house on Gayley throws one the same night. They close the whole street. Everybody goes.”
“There’s a costume contest,” said Yin. “With a prize!”
“How much?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
Sophie gave her a look. “Why do you care? You just made twenty grand.”
“Yeah,” said Joy, “and I’ve got another hundred thousand to go.”
Sophie shrugged, conceding the point.
“You should come!” Yin said, “It’s so much fun!”
“I don’t have a costume, I barely have normal clothes that fit.” Joy said, “Besides, I don’t even know what I’d dress up as. Pretty sure sheet ghost isn’t going to impress anybody.”
“That’s the fun part!” Yin said, clapping her hands together with joy causing flowers to bloom around where she was sitting, “You can be whoever you want.”
“Yeah and which Disney Princess are you going to be?”
This got a laugh from Yin.
“None! You’ll never guess who I’m going to be.”
“She’s not kidding,” Sophie said and she started to gather up her containers, “She’s told me three times and I still don’t know who she’s going to be.”
“But what about you?” Yin asked Joy, “If you could dress up as anybody for one night, who would you be?”
Joy thought about it. She’d never really had any heroes or role models, and there’d never been any shows or games she’d been into enough to…
She looked up with a start and both Yin and Sophie leaned in to hear what she’d chosen.
Joy pulled out her phone and was already scrolling. It took her about four seconds to find the picture, and she turned the phone around so they could both see it: the kimono, the fan, the golden ears, the long golden tail, the sly sideways smile.
Yin’s eyes lit up nearly as bright as Tsukiko’s own.
“Tsukiko!” said Yin. “I love her! Did you pull her?”
“We’re not talking about that.” Joy groaned.
“Yeah that’s probably doable.” Sophie said, “You’d need to find somebody who can make something like that, but I’ve done a little costume work for the band, probably wouldn’t be the hardest costume to make.”
Joy’s lip was going again. She let it.
“I know a guy,” she said.
The guy was asleep at his desk with his cheek on his drawing tablet.
Joy let the door bang. Nate sat up, peeled himself off the tablet, looked at the clock, looked at her, and then looked at the phone she was holding six inches from his nose.
“I need that,” said Joy. “By Halloween.”
He took the phone. He looked at the picture for a while, and she watched him stop being a person who’d had three hours of sleep and start being a person who did this for money.
“This is your gacha thing.”
“Her name is Tsukiko.”
“That’s a full obi, not a pre-tied one. That’s at least four layers on the sleeves. The ears have to be wired or they’ll flop.” He zoomed in. “The tail’s going to need an armature. Does she have a back? Nobody ever draws the back.”
“She’s got a whole victory pose.”
“I’m going to need the victory pose.” He scrolled, frowned, scrolled back, and did something with his mouth that Joy had learned meant he was adding. “Three weeks.”
“Can you do it?”
Nate looked faintly offended. “Never ask me that again.”
“Great! What do I owe you?”
“Materials.”
“I’ll pay your rate. I’ve seen what you charge.”
“You’re not paying my rate.”
“I have twenty thousand dollars in my pocket!”
“Then you can afford materials.” He handed the phone back. “It’ll be polyester. Satin for the kimono, brocade for the obi, a lot of faux fur. Call it two hundred. If you want it in real silk, you’re talking thousands, and I’d want till spring.”
“Polyester’s fine.”
“What’s the prize?”
“Five hundred.”
“So you’d make three hundred.”
“Look, I’m not going to turn my nose up at money just because I had one big win.”
Nate looked at her. He had known her for two years, and he knew exactly how much three hundred dollars was to somebody with twenty thousand of them in a hoodie.
“You sure you don’t just want to dress up in a kimono?”
Joy shrugged, and looked at the picture instead of at him.
“It’s more fun, looking like this,” she said. “And I don’t know how long I get to.”
She said it lightly. She’d meant to. It came out about half as light as she’d meant.
Nate looked at the picture again for a while.
“Then it should be right,” he said. “This kind of thing doesn’t work if it’s close. I’ll need your measurements. All of them.”
“Fine. And you’re coming, by the way.”
He looked up.
“Coming where?”
“To the party.”
“Why would I go to a…”
Somebody knocked on the door.
It was a cheerful knock. It started as shave and a haircut, then whoever was doing it decided to go freestyle at the end of it. Something about it snagged on the back of Joy’s brain and stayed there. It wasn’t Keiko, who didn’t knock, or Tiffany, who knocked like the building was on fire.
“We’re not done,” Joy told Nate, and went and opened it.
There was a girl standing in the hall.
She was young, looking younger than even the freshmen here. She had a duffel bag over one shoulder and a rain jacket tied around her waist, in Los Angeles, in October. In one hand was a set of car keys with so many keychains on it that it was more keychain than key: a red panda, an otter, and something round and gray that might have been a seal. They were the keys to a car she had spent a whole year hustling various schemes to buy. Joy knew, because Daniel had heard about it every single week of that year.
She had been planning to yell surprise. Joy could tell, because her mouth was open for it and her arms were halfway up. When she saw who had opened the door, the arms came down.
“Oh! Sorry.” She leaned back to check the number on the door, then smiled at Joy, friendly and a little puzzled. “Hi. I’m looking for my brother? Daniel Lockheed? I’m pretty sure this is his room.”
For weeks now, the thing on the very top of Joy’s “deal with this later” pile had been a phone call to Seattle.
It had apparently gotten tired of waiting, and driven down.
“Is he here?” said Mia Lockheed.