Joy had never really been one who was at a loss for words, and especially lately she’d had a way with words that had impressed even herself. She still fondly remembered turning a whole mahjong table against a man who could magically manipulate everybody around him with just a few cutting remarks. She opened her mouth now fully confident that something good would come out.
“Uhhh,” she said.
Mia looked up at her with her big dark eyes, obviously expecting a better answer.
“He’s at the library.”
Mia frowned as she considered this. She had a look on her face Joy knew all too well. It was the look that she’d spotted a thread out of place on Joy’s tapestry of lies and was about to start pulling. It was a look Joy had worn on her own face, both as Daniel and now as Joy.
Then she did something that really worried Joy. She smiled. It was a small smile, but unusual in that she pushed her lower lip up into her upper lip as she did it. Joy knew that look all too well.
“Uh huh.” She said, “He really seems to like it there. Seems every time my Mom tries calling him he’s stuck there for something.”
“Well, you know Daniel, he really loves to study.” Joy said, grasping for some handhold in this conversation and finding none.
“Yeah, funny thing, I remember him telling me that he hated libraries and that they were just places homeless people went to take baths.”
“People change?” said Joy, which was the most honest thing she’d said in a while. She was getting backed into a corner here and both she and Mia knew it.
Mia leaned around Joy to look at Nate. Nate ignored the both of them with studied effort. She then looked back up at Joy, and the raised-lip smile widened. She hadn’t figured out what was going on yet, but she was having fun figuring out why she was making this strange blonde girl sweat bullets.
“Ah…well you must be Nate, which would make you…”
Joy froze.
“Nate’s girlfriend!”
Joy just about choked. Nate snapped the pencil he was holding in half. Naturally none of this was lost on Mia.
She reached out and took Joy’s hand in both of hers, shaking it.
“I’m Mia, Danny’s sister! What’s your name?”
“I’m Joy,” Joy said, her brain now scrambling for any way out of this. She knew Mia too well. Mia was going to tease this apart bit by bit and have a blast doing it. She needed a different strategy, and suddenly it came to her. In at least a figurative sense, she was still Mia’s big brother, and if there was one skill she’d honed in a long career as a big brother, it was teasing his little sister, “I’m an evil witch who has cursed Daniel to toil away in the library until a brave heroine can arrive and break my enchantment over him!”
It wasn’t her best work, that had usually involved getting something slimy out of the pond in their back yard. Still, she was starting to enjoy herself. A month ago she’d have hated getting caught in her own web of deceit. Now some part of her was sitting back with a bowl of popcorn to see how long she could keep it in the air.
Mia had stopped listening. She wasn’t smiling anymore and was staring at Joy’s mouth.
“Do that again,” she said.
“Do what?”
“The thing. With your lip.”
Joy realized her own lower lip was pushed up into her upper one, just like Mia’s had. She flattened it out but knew with grim certainty that she’d just overplayed her hand.
Mia’s eyes went from the lip to Joy’s eyes, and back to the lip, and then down to the hoodie, and then to the room behind her: Nate at his desk, and the couch-bed with Daniel’s old Seahawks blanket on it.
“Danny?” she said.
At his desk, without looking up from his drawing tablet, Nate said, “Busted.”
There were a number of ways Joy had imagined this going, back when she’d let herself imagine it, which wasn’t often. In most of them somebody screamed. In one of them her mom fainted, which was ridiculous, because her mom had once removed a fishhook from her own thumb with pliers and then gone back to fishing.
None of them had involved her little sister walking into the room, dropping her duffel bag on the floor, and slowly circling her like a used car she was thinking about buying.
“Turn around,” said Mia.
“Mia.”
“Come on, do it!”
Joy turned around.
“Your hair is so long.”
“It grows really fast. It’s a whole thing.”
“Your eyes are blue!” She craned her neck to get a closer look, “Like bright blue!”
“Yeah.”
Mia came back around to the front and stood there with her arms crossed, and for a second she looked so much like their mother that Joy had to fight the urge to apologize for something.
“How is it that out of the two of us, you wound up being the pretty one?”
The irony wasn’t lost on Joy either.
“How long?” said Mia.
“About a month.”
“A month?” Mia’s voice cracked upward. “You’ve been texting me thumbs-up emojis for a month! I sent you a picture of the car with the new rims and you sent me a thumbs-up! I thought you were mad at me!”
“I wasn’t mad at you. I’ve had some…stuff going on.”
“I was worried! I didn’t know if something was wrong, if I’d made you mad! You wouldn’t call or talk to any of us!”
“I’m not mad at you, I’m…” Joy waved a hand at herself, top to bottom. “This.”
Mia looked at this for a while. Then she hit Joy in the shoulder, hard, the way she had been hitting Daniel in the shoulder since she was six, and then she grabbed her and hugged her. It wasn’t a small hug either. It was letting go of a month of anxiety as she buried her face into Joy’s chest and clung on for dear life.
Joy hugged her back. Over Mia’s shoulder she could see Nate, who had finally turned his chair around and was watching this with the expression of a man who had been told there would be no emotional scenes in this room and was now seeing his second one in two days.
“Okay,” Mia said looking up, eyes wet. “Okay. Okay. What happened?”
Joy didn’t have any more deception left in her today.
“Tarot card.”
Mia let go and stepped back.
“What?”
“My friend Keiko gave me a tarot card reading, had some weird magic card in her deck, I took one look at it and suddenly none of my clothes fit and my hair takes an hour to dry.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Mia looked at her trying to figure out if she was still messing with her.
“I wasn’t there for it, but that’s what she and Keiko told me too.” Nate said, hoping to forestall any additional drama.
Mia sat down on the couch-bed, slowly, like her knees had decided it for her. She looked at Joy for another long moment. Then her eyes settled on something else that was out of place. Mia had always been like that. Daniel could walk into a room and tell you who was mad at who. Mia could walk into the same room and tell you somebody had moved the lamp.
“What’s in your pocket?”
“What?”
“Your hoodie. The front pocket. Daniel could never keep his hands off something he didn’t want people to see.”
Joy considered lying, and then considered how well that had gone so far. She pulled out the two bank stacks and set them on the desk next to Nate’s tablet.
Mia stared at them.
“Is that real?”
“Yep.”
“How much is that?”
“Twenty thousand dollars.”
Mia looked from the money to Joy, and then to Nate, who as usual was the most grounded thing in the room.
“Are you selling drugs?”
“I won it.”
“At what?”
“Mahjong.”
“You don’t know how to play mahjong.”
“I didn’t! That was kind of the problem.” Joy sat down on Nate’s bed across from her. “It’s a whole story. There was a basement under a Taco Bell, except it’s not a Taco Bell anymore. And a sorcerer. He was actually really nice. Made us dinner.”
“There was a kidney,” said Nate.
Mia turned to him very slowly.
“There was a what?”
“She bet a kidney,” Nate said. “The left one. She won.” He turned back to his tablet. “I’d like to never talk about it again.”
Mia made a noise that started as a word and didn’t finish.
“I won, I got to keep the kidney.”
“Danny, why would you need twenty thousand dollars so badly that you’d bet a kidney for it?”
That one landed somewhere Joy hadn’t braced for. She’d forgotten how Mia did that. You’d be doing fine, dodging everything, and then she’d come at you with the one question that was actually load-bearing.
“Track,” Joy said.
Mia’s face changed. She’d been at every home meet of Daniel’s senior year. She’d made a sign once, with glitter, that said DON’T SUCK with a little heart next to it, which had embarrassed Daniel so badly he’d run a personal best getting away from it.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, the scholarship.”
“Men’s team, men’s scholarship. They were actually really nice about it.”
She paused.
“Well actually they were huge assholes about it but I got that cleared up. But yeah, I need to repay what I owe for this year, and somehow find money for next year too.”
“So how much do you need?”
“Don’t worry about it.” Joy said, giving Mia a grin that was far more confident than she felt, and running her finger over one of the stacks with a theatrical flourish, “I’ve got it all sorted out.”
“Danny.”
Joy sighed. “A hundred and five thousand dollars by June.”
Mia didn’t say anything. She looked at the twenty thousand dollars, and then she looked at Joy, and Joy could see her doing the math. Mia had spent the past year buying broken espresso machines off Craigslist, fixing them with YouTube videos, and reselling them to people in Ballard with more money than sense, and she’d bought a car with it. She knew exactly what a hundred thousand dollars was. She knew it a lot better than Daniel ever had.
“Do Mom and Dad know about this part?”
“They don’t know about any of the parts.”
Mia put her face in her hands. She stayed like that for a while. When she came back out of them, she had the look she got when she’d decided something, and Joy’s stomach dropped a little, because that look had never once in eighteen years ended with Mia changing her mind.
“Okay,” Mia said. “So I was going to drive to San Diego tomorrow. UCSD has a tour Tuesday. And the zoo has a new baby okapi. You know what an okapi is?”
“Would you believe me if I said yes?”
“It’s like a giraffe, actually, it’s related to the giraffe, it’s…” Mia waved this away. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not going.”
“Mia, go. Go see your weird giraffe thing.”
“No.” Mia got up and picked her duffel bag back up off the floor and set it, with great finality, on the couch-bed. “I need to make sure my big brother is okay.”
“I’m okay!”
Mia shot a hand out and jabbed Joy in the chest with an accusatory finger.
“You’re not okay. Nobody would be okay with all this. You’re doing the thing where you handle everything by yourself so nobody else has to worry about it.”
“I’m handling it great!” Joy held up one of the stacks of bills. “Look how great I’m handling it.”
Mia looked at the money, and then at her, for a long moment.
“Fine,” she said, in a voice that made it very clear it wasn’t.
Nate left at some point, grumbling that he couldn’t breathe with all the estrogen in the air, leaving Joy and Mia alone.
“I’ll stay a couple weeks. Three, tops. I’ve got money. I can sleep on this.” She patted the couch-bed. “Is this where you sleep?”
“Nope, that’s the couch-bed. It’s practically an institution in this room at this point.”
She slapped the bunk above her.
“I sleep up here.”
“Oh, well that works!” Mia said. “I’ve slept on worse.”
Joy frowned.
“Well…there’s another problem.”
Mia’s eyes followed hers to Nate’s vacant desk.
“So? He lives with you doesn’t he?”
“Yeah but that’s different, we’re…”
The face Mia made horrified Joy.
“No! Oh god no! What I mean is Nate and I are bros.”
Mia looked down at Joy’s chest then back up to her, awaiting a rebuttal.
“Look I’m not saying it makes sense, that’s just how it is. Nate and I are cool like that.”
“Are you suuuuuure?” Mia said, a shit-eating grin spreading on her face.
“Oh my god Mia.” Joy said, covering her face with her hands.
“Yeah, I get it though,” Mia said. “Guess I can find a motel around here.”
Joy grimaced. Sending her sister away just did not sit right with her, but she couldn’t think of another option. She could ask around on the floor if any of the girls had somebody that happened to be out and could put her up, but that seemed vanishingly unlikely. As she agonized over this, she felt her phone buzz.
It was a text from Nate.
If your sister is going to be here for a bit, how about she takes my bed?
where are you going to sleep then?
I’ll go home for a couple of weeks, the commute here isn’t that bad.
you hate going home. Your brothers stole your bed the second you left for school. You’ll be sleeping on an air mattress in the garage.
It’ll be fine, if Mom goes too long without seeing me, she gets convinced that I’ve joined a gang or gotten lured into the sea by those sirens over in the Channel Islands.
He then added.
Besides, it’d be weird with the three of us.
“It’s already weird,” Mia said, staring over Joy’s shoulder, earning her an elbow from her.
thanks man, I owe you one
Speaking of stuff you owe me, I need to get your measurements before I go for your costume.
“Costume?” Mia asked, and Joy’s shoulders sagged. Somehow she was looking forward to explaining this even less than everything else today.
The door banged open before Joy could answer.
“Is it true,” said Keiko, coming in at full speed, “that there’s a girl walking up and down the hall asking for Daniel? Because Brianna from the third floor said there was a girl with a duffel bag asking everybody where Daniel Lockheed lives, and I said, oh no, oh no no no, because who else would be asking for Daniel…”
She saw Mia, and stopped so suddenly that Tiffany ran into the back of her and nearly lost her glasses.
“Keiko, rude! You can’t just barge into people’s rooms,” Tiffany was saying, “you have to knock, it’s a basic…”
Then she saw Mia too.
There was a silence. Keiko looked at Mia. Mia looked at Keiko. Joy, who had seen Keiko kick a man twice her size in the chest at the campus rec center, watched her slowly shrink about two inches.
“Hi,” Keiko said, very small. “Are you… are you Daniel’s…?”
“Sister,” said Mia. “Mia.”
The room was silent for a brief moment, and Joy braced herself.
Keiko and Tiffany shrieked with delight as they double-teamed a shocked Mia with hugs.
“Oh my god you are so cute!” Keiko said, rubbing her head against Mia’s.
“Joy said she had an adorable little sister, but I can’t even!” said Tiffany whose glasses had lost the battle and were wedged somewhere between them.
Mia was able to turn her head just enough to give Joy a look that clearly asked “What the hell?”
“Mia,” said Joy, “this is Keiko and Tiffany. They live down the hall.”
Mia’s face lit up with recognition. “Oh! You’re Kiki!”
Keiko turned to look at Joy, slowly, the way a person turns to look at a dog that has just eaten something important.
“That’s on me,” said Joy. “For about six months.”
“It’s Keiko,” said Keiko, to Mia, and then her face crumpled, and the whole thing came out at once. “And I am so, so sorry, it was my booth, I swear it wasn’t even my card, I’ve had that deck since I was twelve and I’ve never seen that card before in my life, and I’ve been trying to make it up to her, I got her onto the cheer squad, I gave her a loofah, I…”
“Wait.” Mia held up a hand. “You’re the one with the tarot cards who turned Danny from a dumb boy into a dumb blonde?”
Keiko braced herself.
“You do tarot readings?” said Mia, and her eyes had gone wide and shiny. “Can you do me?”
“NO,” said Joy, Keiko, and Tiffany, all at once.
Mia blinked at them.
“Okay,” she said. “Jeez.”
Tiffany had recovered first, mostly because Tiffany had a deep need for the things in front of her to make sense, and when they didn’t, she made them. She took both of Mia’s hands in hers.
“It is so nice to meet you,” she said, with tremendous sincerity. “Your sister is doing amazing. All things considered. She’s doing really, really amazing, considering.”
“Thanks,” said Mia, a little dazed. “She seems… good. All things considered.”
“She has a system for her hair now,” said Tiffany. “You should have seen it in September. It looked like a bird lived in it.”
“It landed in it, it didn’t live in it,” Joy said.
“I’m complimenting you.”
Nate poked his head in through the open door at the scene and gave the most exhausted sigh Joy had ever heard. He walked past the now dangerously overloaded couch-bed and pulled a long yellow cloth measuring tape out of a drawer.
“Ok, let’s do this before this room turns into a Lifetime special.” he said, motioning for Joy to stand, which she did after some squirming, “Arms up,”
Joy put her arms up.
Keiko’s head snapped around. “Wait, what is he doing?”
“Measurements,” said Nate. “For her costume.”
“He’s not… you’re not going to let him…”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s a boy!” said Tiffany, scandalized on Joy’s behalf. “You can’t just stand there and let a boy measure you!”
Nate ran the tape around Joy’s shoulders, read it, and wrote the number on the inside of his forearm with a ballpoint pen. Then he did it around her chest. There were three sharp intakes of breath from the couch. He had the same expression he had when he was soldering something.
“I’ve measured probably forty women for commissions,” he said, not looking up. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It’s really not,” Joy agreed, turning so he could get her waist. “He sees me in a towel every morning.”
Keiko made a sound like a teakettle that had been stepped on.
“Not on purpose,” said Joy. “The bathroom’s right there. We’ve got a system. I come out, he looks at the wall, it works great. We’ve been living like this for a month now, what did you think we did?”
“Uh…” Tiffany said, bright red now, “Something with screens and…”
“It works fine,” said Nate.
“Yeah we’re bros.” Joy said and the two bumped fists without even looking as Nate got her hips measured.
Tiffany looked from Joy, standing in the middle of the room with her arms up, to Nate, kneeling at her hip with a tape measure and an expression of total professional boredom, and back again.
“The fact that you two can live together this casually,” she said, “is either a miracle or a tragedy, and I genuinely can’t tell which.”
Mia, on the couch-bed, had started laughing. She’d been trying not to. It came out of her in hiccups at first, and then all at once, and she had to put her face down on her duffel bag.
“Sorry, this is just a lot more weird than I’m used to.”
Nate finished the last measurement, rolled down his sleeve over a forearm that now looked like the prison tattoo of a criminal mathematician.
“You hang around here long enough and that’s going to change real fast.”
He was packed in about ten minutes. Nate didn’t own much that didn’t plug into something, and most of it fit in a backpack. The tablet went in last, wrapped in a hoodie like a baby.
Keiko and Tiffany had stayed, mostly to ask Mia questions. Keiko wanted to know if Daniel had always been this reckless, and Mia said yes, but he used to be a lot more boring about it. Keiko got a look in her eye like she was filing that away for later. Tiffany wanted to know whether Mia had seen Joy’s closet yet. Mia had not. Tiffany leaned in and whispered something to Mia, who nodded several times. Joy knew enough about women to know nothing good could come of that.
At the door, Nate stopped and looked back.
“Bed’s yours,” he told Mia, “The left drawer’s empty. Don’t touch the right drawer.”
“What’s in the right drawer?”
“Capacitors. Charged ones.”
“Nate,” said Mia.
He looked at her.
“Thanks,” she said. “For, you know. All of it. Not just the bed.”
Nate shrugged one shoulder.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said, and left.
Mia watched the door close behind him. Then she looked at Joy, and Joy knew exactly what she was going to say before she said it, because she’d known Mia for eighteen years too.
“He’s nice.”
“Yeah, he’s cool.”
“He drove you to the kidney place, didn’t he?”
“Yup, and a couple shady poker games.”
“Huh,” said Mia, and lay back on the couch-bed with her arms behind her head, looking very pleased with herself about something.
It was after midnight when the lights finally went out.
Joy was staring up at the ceiling, not able to sleep. Across the room she could hear Mia breathing, and Nate’s bed creaking every time she rolled over, which was a lot. Mia had never been a good sleeper. She used to come into Daniel’s room at night when she was little and stand at the end of his bed until he woke up which was the single most frightening thing that had ever happened to him, including the basement.
“Danny,” said Mia, in the dark.
“Yeah.”
“Did it hurt?”
“No. It happened pretty fast. I was looking at the card, and then Keiko was screaming, and then I looked at my hand and it was all…girly.”
“Is it permanent?”
“No idea.”
“Do you want it to be?”
Joy thought about that for long enough that Nate’s bed creaked twice.
“Not really worried about that right now.” She said at last, “Got more pressing problems to deal with.”
Mia was quiet for a while.
“Are you going to tell Mom and Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
Nate’s bed creaked. Mia had rolled over to face her. Joy couldn’t see her in the dark, but she knew exactly what face she was making.
“You’re doing the thing,” said Mia.
“What thing?”
“Where you say ‘soon’ and then a dozen other things come up and then you don’t deal with it until it’s on fire.”
“Ok, that only happened once and I put it out all by myself.”
“Mom’s going to find out. She always finds out. And it’s going to be so much worse if it’s because somebody posts a picture of you at a party and Aunt Linda sees it.”
“Aunt Linda doesn’t know what I look like.”
“Aunt Linda is the nosiest person on the planet. If she so much as catches a whiff that something is off you know she’ll get her coven friends involved too.”
Joy didn’t have an answer for that, because it was true. She stared up at a dark spot on the ceiling that she was trying to decide if it was a spider or not.
“Three weeks,” said Mia.
“What?”
“I’m here for three weeks.” Nate’s bed creaked again as she rolled back over. “I want you to talk to them before I leave. I’m very patient.”
Joy believed her. Mia had once waited out a raccoon in their backyard for four hours because she’d decided she wanted to pet it, and she had.
“Night, Mia.”
“Night, Danny.” A pause. “Also, your hair smells like a piña colada.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“It was to me,” said Joy. She rolled over and was asleep almost before she’d finished saying it.