On Mia’s first morning in the room, she came out of the bathroom in a towel, holding Joy’s shower basket like evidence she’d carried out of a crime scene.
“What is all this?”
Joy was lying on the couch-bed with a bowl of cereal balanced on her stomach, watching a macroeconomics lecture at double speed. She looked over.
“My shower stuff.”
“It barely all fits in your basket!” Mia held one of the bottles up as if to illustrate. “Shampoo. Conditioner. A different conditioner. A hair mask, and I don’t even know why hair would need a mask. A leave-in something.” She held up the last one and gave Joy a look. “Pineapple body wash!”
“Hey, that’s half of the piña colada!”
“You washed your hair with dish soap for a month once.”
“I forgot to ask Mom to get shampoo.”
“For a month!”
“Say what you will, I did need to scrub less.”
Mia set the basket down on Nate’s desk, took a second towel off the hook, and started scrubbing her head with it, hard, like she was trying to sand something down.
Joy sat up so fast she nearly lost the cereal.
“Whoa! No no no!”
“What?”
“You’re rubbing it!”
“That’s how you dry hair,” Mia said, as if talking to a child who hadn’t quite grasped what not to do with a hot stove.
“That’s how you get frizz.” Joy put the bowl on the floor, dug an old track shirt out of her drawer, and tossed it to her. “Squeeze it. Don’t rub. Like you’re wringing out a sponge, but nicely.”
Mia looked at the shirt, and then at Joy, and then, with a dubious look on her face, slowly began to squeeze.
“Now sit.”
Mia sat on the end of the couch-bed. Joy got behind her with a wide-tooth comb and the leave-in and started working through the bottom few inches.
“Ow.”
“That’s because you brush it wet. With a paddle brush. Every day.”
Mia twisted around. “How do you know what kind of brush I use?”
“Because you flinch like somebody who uses a paddle brush.” Joy turned her head back around and kept going, one small section at a time. “You start at the ends and work your way up. Never start at the top. Conditioner goes on the ends, not your scalp. Rinse it out cold. And quit washing it every day, you’re stripping it.”
“Since when do you know any of this?”
“Since I had two feet of hair to manage. Tiffany saw what my hair looked like after the first week, cornered me in her room and gave me an education. She actually gave me a quiz.”
“Did you pass?”
“I don’t think I’d have made it out of there if I hadn’t.”
Mia was quiet while Joy worked her way up. Joy could feel her thinking through the back of her head. She’d always been able to do that with Mia, even back when Mia’s head had come up to about Daniel’s elbow.
“That’s why you have a silk pillowcase,” Mia said. It wasn’t a question. She didn’t miss anything, and probably had the whole room inventoried in her head.
“Tiffany got it for me. Your hair doesn’t tangle while you sleep.”
“Tiffany gets you a lot of stuff.”
“Some people love cats, some people love dogs, Tiffany loves hair.”
Joy finished the last section and started back down to check for knots she’d missed. Mia had stopped flinching.
“Mom called me last night,” Mia said.
The comb stopped.
“What’d you tell her?”
“That you were at the library.”
“Thanks.”
“She didn’t buy it.” Mia picked at the edge of the towel. “She asked if you were eating. I said yes. At least that part was true.”
Joy looked guiltily at the cereal, which had been a larger part of her diet lately than it probably should have been, and waited for the rest of it, but there wasn’t any. Mia just sat there and let her finish. Somehow that was worse.
When her hair had dried, Mia went and stood in front of the mirror on the back of the bathroom door and didn’t say anything for a while. It hung down her back smooth and soft, without any of the frizz it usually had by lunchtime.
“I hate this,” she said.
“It looks great.”
“That’s why I hate it.”
It turned out Mia did not know how to sit still for three weeks.
By Wednesday there was an espresso machine in pieces all over Nate’s desk. She’d found it on Craigslist in Koreatown for forty dollars and driven it back with the seatbelt buckled around it. She spent two evenings on it with a YouTube video, a multimeter, and an eleven-dollar part, and on Friday she sold it to a grad student in Westwood for three hundred and fifty.
Mia also noticed things. She always had. On Tuesday the vending machine at the end of the hall dropped two Cokes when Joy paid for one, and Mia stared at the second Coke for a long time. On Thursday Joy put on a hoodie she’d owned since tenth grade and found a twenty-dollar bill in the pocket that she was sure had never been there before, and Mia looked at that too. On Friday morning every dryer in the basement was full except the one Joy walked up to.
Mia didn’t say anything about any of it. Joy had spent her whole life noticing when people weren’t saying something, and Mia was not saying something very loudly.
On Saturday they drove to San Diego.
It had been Joy’s idea. Mia had argued against it for most of Thursday night, on the grounds that she had come down here to keep an eye on her big brother, not to look at animals. Joy pointed out that she could do both at once. When that didn’t work, Joy said fine, she’d go see the okapi by herself and send pictures and would keep calling it “that weird giraffe thing,” and Mia had stared at her in naked betrayal and gone to bed. In the morning Mia’s car keys were sitting on top of Joy’s shoes.
Mia drove. Nobody else had ever driven Mia’s car, and as far as Joy could tell, nobody else ever would. The red panda, the otter, and the gray thing that might have been a seal swung from the ignition all the way down the 5.
“They’re the only living relative of the giraffe,” Mia said, somewhere around Irvine. “People thought they were made up for, like, a hundred years.”
“Like unicorns?”
“No, only morons who spend too much time online think those aren’t real. The calf was born in August. The zoo’s posted a couple of videos, but she’s still nesting, so she mostly stays in the back and you can’t count on seeing her.” She changed lanes. “Also they don’t poop for the first month.”
Joy turned her head slowly.
“Oh, like that time when I was eight and found the two-pound bag of gummy bears under the sink?”
“Ew!” Mia said, punching Joy in the arm playfully, “Mom said they had to take you to the hospital for that! No, it’s so predators can’t smell them!”
“And I kinda want gummy bears now.”
“The keeper talk at the okapi yard is at eleven-thirty. If we’re in by ten, we can do the bus tour first so you get an overview, and then we’ll still have time to get a good spot.”
“Or we could just walk around and look at stuff.”
Mia looked at her like she’d suggested taking off her seatbelt to get more comfortable.
“UCSD’s right up the road, too,” Joy said, as the exit signs started saying La Jolla. “We could swing by.”
“No.”
“You were going to do the tour anyway.”
“I’m on vacation,” said Mia, in the voice that meant the subject was closed, and it was.
The zoo parking lot was a sea of minivans. They had been circling it for about two minutes when an SUV in the very front row, directly across from the entrance, backed out right in front of them as if it had been waiting. Mia pulled in, turned off the car, and sat there with both hands on the wheel.
“Suck it, parking lot,” said Joy, already unbuckling.
Mia didn’t say anything.
The line for the bus tour wrapped around the side of the gift shop. Mia checked her phone, then the line, then her phone again, and Joy could see her rearranging the whole day in her head. They had been standing there for maybe a minute when a beleaguered-looking dad walked by with a screaming and very wet toddler. Joy made a face at the kid, and while it didn’t do much in the dampness department, he stopped crying. The dad looked up at her with the sort of gratitude one usually reserved for saints healing sickness and pushed a pair of boarding passes into her hands.
“Next bus. Front row, upstairs.” He said it like he was handing off a live grenade. “I’m off to go pray I packed an extra pair of pants for him.”
The front row upstairs had the best view on the bus. Joy waved at a flamingo. Mia sat next to her, turning the boarding passes over in her hands, looking at Joy with increasing suspicion.
At eleven-thirty they were at the okapi yard in the Lost Forest, in the very front of the crowd, because Mia had run there so fast even Joy was having trouble keeping up. The yard was all ferns and shade, and right on time the mother came out for the keeper and pulled leaves off a branch with a long dark tongue, which got a big reaction from the crowd. Joy looked at it and decided her description of “weird giraffe thing” had been pretty accurate. It looked like whatever had designed it couldn’t decide what it wanted to make, then lost interest halfway through.
The keeper said the calf was still in her nesting phase and had been tucked away in the back of the yard for a few days. Everybody said aww. Then most of them wandered off toward the hippos.
Mia stayed at the rail.
“It’s fine,” she said. “That’s what they do. I knew that.”
Joy knew it wasn’t fine. Mia had driven most of the length of the West Coast to do a number of things, but at the top of that list was seeing the baby weird giraffe thing. She was trying very hard to look like she didn’t mind.
Joy turned around, leaned back against the rail, and put her sunglasses on. She stared out into space as she popped a gummy bear in her mouth.
“Hey, I’ve got nowhere to be,” said Joy.
Mia turned to her, then gave a thin smile and turned back to the enclosure.
There was a bench across the path from the yard with a good view of the back, where the ferns were thickest. Joy went and got sandwiches and two churros, and paid for them before Mia could get her wallet out, the same way she’d paid for dinner every night that week. Mia’s jaw did a small tight thing that Joy pretended not to see.
They ate. Nothing moved in the back of the yard.
Joy pulled out her phone, opened Blazing Star, and did her free daily pull. The screen flashed, the card spun, and a little fat man landed on it with a cartoon boing.
“Seriously?”
Mia leaned over. “Who’s that?”
“Chubbins.”
“Is he good?”
“He’s the worst character in the game. He has one move. He sits on people.” Joy tapped over to her collection, where the game helpfully informed her she now owned fourteen of him. “My cup runneth over with Chubbins.”
Mia looked at the phone. Then she looked at Joy. Then she put down her churro, which for Mia was a serious step.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ve been waiting all week to say this.”
“Uh oh.”
“The Coke machine. The dryer. The parking spot. The guy with the bus passes. The twenty in your hoodie, which I know for a fact was never in there, because I stole that hoodie every time you came home from school and I checked the pockets every single time.” Mia counted them off on her fingers and ran out of hand. “And you won twenty thousand dollars on a hand that Nate says comes up once in twenty-five hundred games.”
“That one was pretty lucky.”
“Danny, all of it is lucky. You’re lucky. Like, unnaturally lucky.”
Joy opened her mouth to argue and found she didn’t have anything to argue with.
Outside Mr. Lo’s, Dana had looked her in the eye and asked if she really didn’t know what she had, and Joy had gotten close enough to the answer to see it and then backed away slowly, like it might go off. She’d been backing away from it for a week. Now her little sister had marched right up to it, picked it up, and was holding it in front of her face.
“Yeah,” said Joy. “I know.”
“You know?”
“I’ve been trying pretty hard not to.”
“Why?”
“Because every time I think about it, it gets weirder. And really I think my life has enough weirdness in it at the moment.”
Mia gave her a look that said that was the dumbest reason she’d ever heard, which was fair.
So Joy told her about Dana. The woman with the reading glasses, who’d sat across from her at Ray’s poker game and told her she was lucky, and who’d been waiting for her on the hood of Nate’s car after the den.
“She said she had it before me,” said Joy.
Mia had gone quiet, the way she did when she was taking something apart in her head.
“What’s the catch?”
“What?”
“There’s always a catch. What happened to her?”
“She says she borrowed against it. From this guy at the mahjong place, a real dick with green eyes. She couldn’t pay, and then she didn’t have it anymore.” Joy shrugged. “He can’t just take it, though. Dana said you’d have to put it on the table yourself.”
Mia stared at her.
“Danny. You bet a kidney.”
Joy started to answer, and then stopped.
“I’m not sure you grasp what a dick this guy was.”
Mia gave her a look that suggested Joy wasn’t winning her over.
“Besides, I don’t even know what this is. I’ve had some pretty bad luck too, just ask UCLA’s groundskeeper. It’s not like I know what I’m getting day to…” Joy looked down at the phone, where Chubbins was still beaming up at her, thrilled to be there, as always. “Huh.”
“What?”
“On the way to the kidney game I did a pull in the car and got garbage. Nate said maybe my luck was getting saved up for where we were going.” She turned the phone so Mia could see. “Everything goes my way, right? Parking spots. Coke machines. Except this. This stupid game is the only thing that never goes my way.”
“Because it’s random.”
“Because the luck is busy,” said Joy. “It’s off doing other stuff. When I pull garbage, it’s because it’s saving up for something better.”
“That’s not how random number generators work.”
“Not for you.”
Mia started to argue and then visibly ran into the same wall Joy had.
“So if you pull something good,” she said slowly.
“Then I might be in big trouble.”
“And if you pull the fox girl? The one you want so bad?”
Joy thought about it.
“I was a lot happier before you said that.”
“Danny.”
“Totally worth it, though!”
Mia let out a long breath through her nose. When she spoke again she sounded like herself, which meant she was done being amazed and had moved on to what to do about it.
“Okay. So you’re lucky. You still need eighty-five thousand dollars by June, and right now your whole plan is waiting for somebody to invite you to a basement.”
“You said it yourself, I’m lucky!”
“I’ve got about three thousand in savings,” said Mia. “And I can sell the car.”
Joy’s blood ran cold. Even more than explaining to her family that she was a girl now, this was the conversation she had wanted to avoid, and now here it was. She knew Mia would do it too. She knew her mom and dad would find money somewhere, and sacrifice more than they already had to do it. She had worked so hard to avoid any of this.
“No.”
“It’s worth like nine. Maybe ten with the rims.”
“I said no! You worked hard for that car! You love it! You wouldn’t even let me open my gummy bears in it!” Joy was shouting now.
“It’s my car! I can do whatever I want with my…”
“I heard about every single espresso machine,” said Joy. “I’m not taking it, Mia. I’ve got this handled.”
Joy watched it land on Mia’s face and knew, a second too late, that it was exactly the wrong thing to say.
“No you don’t!” It was Mia’s turn to start shouting. A family over by the rail turned around to look, along with two furry monkeys and a toucan. “You never have it handled! You did this when your dog died! You did this when Mom and Dad’s restaurant went out of business! Mom and Dad said that’s just how you deal with things, but I knew how bad it was. I could hear you through the wall, Danny!”
There were tears running down her face now, and she didn’t seem to notice them.
“And you wouldn’t talk to any of us about it, because you didn’t want us to hurt too!”
Joy didn’t have any words. She was shocked to find that her own face was wet. To the best of her memory she had cried twice in the last ten years. The first time was in private, or what he’d thought was private, when his dog died. Their parents had brought the dog home when Daniel was a baby, and it had been at his side every day of his life since. The second time was a week ago, when she’d pulled off the most daring gamble of her life in a bizarre gambling palace.
“We’re your family!” said Mia. “Let us help!”
Joy reached for a comeback and came up empty. The little voice in the back of her head was silent. What came instead were tears. She stood up, pulled Mia in, and the two of them sobbed into each other’s shoulders in front of an okapi yard.
Somewhere behind them, a little kid said, “Mommy, why are those ladies crying?”
“They must really love okapis, sweetie,” said his mother, and steered him firmly toward the hippos.
Mia made a noise into Joy’s shoulder that took Joy a second to realize was a laugh. Then Joy was laughing too, which was a lot harder to do while crying than it sounded, and they had to sit back down on the bench before they fell over.
They sat there for a while, wiping their faces on churro napkins.
Then Mia went rigid.
“Danny.” She grabbed Joy’s arm hard enough to hurt. “Danny, look.”
The ferns at the back of the yard were moving. Something small came out of them on four very long legs that were still figuring out the whole teamwork thing. It had big ears, a velvety brown face, and stripes all the way up its back legs. It walked straight across the yard, past its mother, all the way to the front rail, right in front of their bench. Then it stopped and looked at them.
Mia made a sound Joy had last heard from her on Christmas morning when she was seven.
“She’s not supposed to come out,” she whispered. “They nest. She’s not supposed to…”
Joy wiped her face on her sleeve.
“Guess she wanted to see what all the yelling was about.”
Mia didn’t take her eyes off the calf. Then she did, and turned to look at Joy instead.
“Did you do that?”
“How the hell would I have done that?”
Mia turned back to the calf. The calf looked back at her.
“Can you do it with the hippos?”
They stayed until the zoo closed. On the way home they stopped for fish tacos in Oceanside, at a place with plastic chairs and a view of the parking lot, and when the check came, Mia reached for it.
Joy let her.
By the second week, Mia knew everybody.
She had watched two of Joy’s cheer practices from the bleachers and one of Yin and Sophie’s band rehearsals from behind a pair of earplugs. Sophie had fed her. Yin had shown her a proof, and Mia had said it was pretty and actually meant it, and Yin had come very close to floating off the ground. Keiko and Tiffany had more or less adopted her.
On Thursday night the four of them were in Keiko and Tiffany’s room, which was four doors down from Joy’s and looked like it belonged to a much nicer building. Keiko was painting Mia’s nails a dark plum. Tiffany had a red carpet livestream from some premiere going on her laptop and was providing commentary.
“Ooh,” said Tiffany. “She’s here too.”
She turned the laptop around. There was a woman on the carpet in a silver dress that looked like it had been poured on, smiling for the cameras with teeth so white they defied modern dentistry.
“Oh, the LA Coven’s here,” said Tiffany.
Mia looked over. “Wow, that’s what your Coven looks like?”
“Yeah, they get invited to all the big premieres, galas, soirées, box socials…” said Keiko, without looking up from Mia’s thumb. “My mom’s friend did makeup for one of them at the Oscars. She said anything she could do would be defacing a masterpiece.”
“Three of them came to my ballet school’s spring gala,” said Tiffany. “They sat at the donor table and the champagne never ran out. I don’t mean it was a nice party. I mean I watched a waiter pour from the same bottle for forty-five minutes.”
Mia was staring at the screen.
“My aunt’s in the Seattle Coven,” she said.
“She says she is,” Joy said. “I think she’s just lonely.”
“They say they have a big stone circle out on the Olympic Peninsula somewhere,” said Mia. “And that the trees there offer them wisdom.”
Joy shuddered at that thought.
“She tried to cleanse my aura at Thanksgiving once,” said Joy. “With a bundle of something on fire. Set off the smoke alarm. She and Mom got into a big fight over that one.”
“I saw one once,” said Mia. “She had a family of birds living in her hair.”
Keiko looked at the screen, and then at Mia. “So, not like this.”
“Not like this,” confirmed Joy and Mia.
Mia was still looking at the woman in the silver dress. Joy watched her face. It was the same look Joy got whenever somebody said the word bet.
“How do you even get into something like that?” said Mia.
“I dunno,” said Keiko, tugging Mia’s hand back so she could finish the thumb. “Probably one of those things where if you’re born under a certain sign they send their familiar to whisk you off to witch school.”
“Yeah right,” Joy said, playing with a strand of her hair. “If you’d seen the ones up in Seattle you’d know they didn’t go to witch school. Tuition there is even worse than here.”
Mia held still for the rest of her nails, but she didn’t look away from the screen until Tiffany closed the laptop.
“Okay, Halloween,” said Tiffany, all business. “I’m out. Mom and I are going around pediatrics at her hospital giving out candy to the kids there. I’m going as a ballerina.”
“You can’t do that, you are a ballerina!” Keiko protested.
“Yeah but the kids don’t know that!”
“I’m going as a fortune teller,” said Keiko.
“So, yourself,” said Joy.
“No! I’ve got a new one!” She raised her hands theatrically, “The Mysterious Madame Keiko!”
Joy failed to see how it was much different than the old act.
They all turned to Mia.
“What are you going as?”
Mia looked from face to expectant face, and gave them the same reliable answer Joy gave when faced with a question that had caught her completely off guard.
“Uhhhhh,” said Mia.
Nate came back the day before Halloween.
Joy got back from practice to find the door to her room propped open with Nate’s backpack and voices coming out. One of them was Nate’s. The other one was Mia’s. She stopped in the hall.
There was absolutely no reason to stand out here and listen. Except that three weeks ago Mia had said he’s nice about Nate, and then huh, and then lay back on the couch-bed like she’d figured something out, and Joy still didn’t know what.
“You opened the right drawer,” Nate was saying.
“I didn’t touch the right drawer.”
There was a pause.
“I opened it,” said Mia, “And you were right, they were charged.”
“Okay.”
“Why do you have so many capacitors?”
“Why do you have so many espresso machines?”
Joy leaned around the doorframe just enough to see in. There was a garment bag hanging off the closet door, zipped to the top, and a second espresso machine in pieces on Nate’s desk. Nate was looking at it like he’d come home to find squatters.
“Can I see it?” Mia said, nodding at the garment bag.
“No.”
“Come on.”
“She should be the first one.”
“Does it have a tail?”
Nate tapped a long flat box leaning against the wall. “It has an armature.”
“A wha?”
Mia sat down on the couch-bed. Through the open bathroom door behind her, Joy could see the shower basket on the counter. It had two of everything in it now.
“Has she said anything to you?” Mia said. “About calling our parents?”
“No.”
“Would you tell me if she had?”
“No.”
Mia smiled at that, like it was the right answer.
“What are you going as tomorrow?” Nate said.
“Danny’s making me a sheet ghost.”
This elicited a groan that suggested his professional sensibilities had been offended.
“Well, ‘Danny’ is a moron. I’ve got scraps. I could make you something better than a sheet.”
“No,” said Mia. “I want the ghost. He was a sheet ghost every year from first grade until he quit trick-or-treating. She says she knows how to cut the eyeholes for maximum spookiness.”
Nate studied her for a second and didn’t push it.
Mia pulled the end of her hair over her shoulder and examined it. It was smooth and soft, and even from the hallway Joy could smell the pineapple.
“Can I tell you something weird?”
“Everything that happens in this room is weird.”
“She’s been a girl for, what, two months? I’ve been one my whole life.” Mia twisted the hair around her finger. “And she knows more about it than I do. It’s really annoying.”
Out in the hall, Joy had to bite the inside of her cheek.
Nate thought about that.
“She learned mahjong in three days,” he said.
“I heard. The kidney.”
“The kidney, the tree business. I mean, she cooked up a whole scheme to beat one of her old teammates in a race like she was planning a heist.” He reached over and straightened the garment bag on the door so it hung right. “When she decides she’s doing something, she jumps in with both feet.”
“That doesn’t really help,” Mia sulked.
“She still doesn’t know what an okapi is,” Nate offered.
“She just saw one on Saturday!”
“Do you know what an idiot savant is?”
Joy walked in.
“I do,” she said, and gave Nate a punch in the arm followed by a fist bump.
Mia whipped around. Her eyes went from Joy’s face to the gym bag still over her shoulder, then to the hallway behind her, and narrowed.
“How long were you standing out there?”
“Just got here,” Joy lied.