Nate showed up at ten on Halloween morning with a pincushion strapped to his wrist and the sort of gray-faced sleep deprivation that even coffee wasn’t going to put a dent in.
“Ok,” he said, before he’d even put his bag down. “Let’s do this.”
He opened the garment bag and pulled out a brilliant violet kimono. Joy and Mia’s eyes both went wide.
“Arms up,” he said, gesturing to Joy with a pin.
To Nate’s credit, even a Japanese grandmother would have been impressed with the skill and speed with which he got Joy’s costume on. It still took forty minutes to get Joy into it. There was an under-robe, and the kimono over that, and then the obi, which Nate wrapped around her twice. Then, to her surprise, he planted a knee in her back and cinched it so hard she made a noise like a dog toy. The sleeves were four layers deep, red and gold and violet, and hung almost to her knees. The ears went on a headband that, after a little teasing, disappeared into her hair. The tail clipped onto a belt under the obi, and when she turned, it swung out behind her and came back on its own, slow and heavy.
Mia sat on the couch-bed and watched the whole thing with her chin on her knees.
“That’s not fair,” she said at last.
“What?” Joy asked as Nate did something complicated to one sleeve, an array of pins held in his mouth.
“You know what’s not fair.” Mia pouted.
Joy went and stood in front of the mirror on the back of the bathroom door.
In the game, Tsukiko’s hair was a slightly different blonde, but Nate had taken one look at Joy’s hair and decided a wig was a lost cause. He’d simply adjusted the fur to match. The strawberry-blonde ran straight down into the gold of the ears like they’d grown there. The kimono sat exactly right on her shoulders and narrowed in at the obi, and the sleeves moved when she moved, a half second behind, the way they did in the game when Tsukiko flicked open her fan. Joy flicked open the fan. The sleeves did it perfectly.
“Huh,” she said. “It’s pretty good.”
Behind her, Nate went very still with a pin halfway to his mouth. The look he was giving her suggested she might want to reconsider that assessment.
“I mean it’s really good. Like, really really good.” She took off the ears to look at them, then looked down. “Too bad I couldn’t figure out a way to pull a sword out of my…”
Somebody kicked the door open hard enough to bounce it off the wall.
Keiko was standing in the hall in pajama pants and a UCLA sweatshirt, with her hair still wet and her phone already up. The flash went off. Joy, who had been halfway through turning around with her eyes as wide as they went and her lips parted in surprise, froze exactly like that.
Keiko looked down at her phone. She studied whatever was on the screen for a long second. Then a slow grin spread across her face, the most evil grin Joy had ever seen on her.
“What the hell, Keiko?” said Joy, still seeing spots.
The grin got wider.
“You’ll seeee~”
The door shut.
Joy turned around to look at Mia. Mia turned to look at Nate. Given his current state, Joy wondered if the last ten seconds had even registered with him. As if in response, Nate took a pin out of his mouth.
“Hold still,” he said. “The left sleeve’s pulling.”
The sheet was one of Joy’s old twin flat sheets from freshman year, which had once been navy and was now a sort of exhausted gray-blue. She spread it out on the floor of the room that afternoon and sat over it cross-legged with a pair of scissors, a Sharpie, and a seriousness she normally reserved for hands she was about to bet on.
“It’s a sheet,” said Mia, from the couch-bed. “You cut two holes in it.”
“Two holes in the right place.” Joy marked a dot, looked at it, and moved it a quarter inch. “Too big, and you’re just a guy in a sheet. Too small, you walk into a pole. Too close together and you look surprised the whole night. You want them a little far apart and a little uneven. Then you look like you’re thinking about something.”
“Thinking about what?”
“I dunno, ghost stuff? Lurking, moaning…”
Mia stared at her. “You did this every year.”
“Every year from first grade on,” said Joy, and cut.
Her phone went off on the floor beside her. It was a notification from Blazing Star, which didn’t usually send her anything except reminders that she’d been ignoring her stamina. She almost ignored it. Then she saw the word Halloween and the word free, and she put the scissors down. That last one was a word she didn’t seem to run into much lately.
“Oh. My. God.”
“What?”
Joy’s eyes lit up as she read the screen.
“Halloween event. Everybody gets a free ten-pull.” Joy was already opening it. “Ten. Free. Pulls.”
Mia came down off the couch-bed and sat next to her on the sheet. Joy took a breath, and then held it, and then pressed the button.
The screen went dark. Then it burst into a rainbow of colors.
The first card spun and landed and was a five-star, a swordswoman Joy had never managed to get, and she yelled. The second card was rainbow too. So was the third. Mia had stopped asking who any of them were by the fifth, and Joy had stopped yelling by the seventh and was just sort of vibrating with manic excitement. Eight. Nine.
The tenth card was a rainbow, and spun, and landed, and there she was. The fan. The ears. The long golden tail. The sly sideways smile.
Joy dropped the phone and lay down flat on her back on the sheet with both hands over her face.
“Tsukiko,” she said through her fingers. “I have Tsukiko.”
“Danny.”
“Two months. Every single day. I have her.”
“Danny, how many of those were good?”
Joy took her hands off her face.
“All of them,” she said.
They both looked at the phone. On the screen, Tsukiko was doing her victory pose, the one Nate had needed for the back of the costume, and then she winked.
“Ten,” said Mia. “You said one good pull meant you might be in big trouble…”
They both stared at the screen for a moment in silence.
“Eh, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“Danny, it’s Halloween. You sure tonight is the night you want to find out if your whole…thing gives you bad luck too?”
“It’s fine!” Joy said, getting up and waving for Mia to follow. “Watch, I’ll show you.”
They walked down the hall to the vending machine that had been reliably giving Joy two-for-one deals and put a dollar in.
“See, watch the master at work!”
She pressed the button for a diet cola. The machine made a noise like a robot trying to pass a kidney stone. No diet cola was forthcoming. Joy pounded on the machine a few times, trying to get whatever had just happened internally unstuck, but to no avail.
Mia was giving her the “I told you so” look that, as a little sister, she’d long since perfected.
“Ok, I’m chalking that up to a fluke,” Joy said, pulling out another bill.
She inserted it and hit the diet cola button again. There was another groan from inside the machine, then a sharp pop and the entire machine went dark and silent with a faint whiff of ozone to announce it had just gone to vending machine heaven.
Both of them stared at it in shocked disbelief.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Joy said, though she had a bit less conviction in her voice than the first time she’d said it.
“You also put a twenty in there the second time,” Mia added.
Joy said something unladylike loud enough that the whole floor heard it.
Mia did her makeup.
It had been Mia’s idea. She’d found a Tsukiko tutorial on YouTube, watched it twice through with her phone propped against Nate’s monitor, and laid out everything on the desk in the order it would be needed: foundation, a palette of reds borrowed from a girl down the hall, black liquid liner, red liquid liner, a lipstick called Fox Fire. She did not normally wear makeup. She had said this several times, in a voice that made it clear she did not see why that mattered.
This gave Joy the same comfort you’d get walking onto a plane and hearing the pilot cheerfully announce that he didn’t normally fly. But in the end she’d decided that indulging her sister was the right call.
“Close your eyes.”
Joy closed her eyes. It was the first time in her life anybody had come at her face with a brush, and she found she didn’t mind it. It was a little like getting her hair cut. It tickled. Somebody was paying attention to her face very carefully, and all she had to do was sit there.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Mia said, partway through the second eye.
“I know.”
The brush kept going. It went along the edge of her eyelid, and out, and up, and stopped.
“You know what I’m going to say,” said Mia.
“Yeah.”
“So I’m not going to say it.”
She didn’t. She did the other eye instead, and then the red, and then the lips, and then she stepped back with the liner still in her hand and looked at Joy with real pride.
Joy got up and went to the mirror.
She was honestly not sure what she was looking at. There was a lot of red. The black wings went up toward her temples like they were trying to leave. Her face was a slightly different color than her neck. But she’d never seen herself in makeup before, and she had nothing to compare it to, and Mia looked so pleased with herself that it seemed rude to have an opinion.
“Looks great,” said Joy.
They made it eleven steps down the hall.
Keiko’s door was open, and Keiko was inside it in her costume, which included, among other things, a turban set with a giant gem holding up a peacock feather. She looked up as Joy passed. As usual with Keiko, her mouth was tearing down the road before her brain had started shifting into gear.
“Joy, you look so…” She trailed off as her mouth seemed to catch her brain waving desperately in its rearview mirror. Her eyes went wide as she and her peacock feather went rigid in alarm.
Then she grabbed Joy by the wrist and pulled her inside.
“Sit down,” she said as she pushed Joy down into her desk chair. The bubbly excitement that seemed to be her one mode of being was gone. Keiko was looking at her face with the grave seriousness of a trauma surgeon inspecting a patient who had just been wheeled in.
“Keiko, what…”
“Ok,” Keiko said. “It’s not that bad, if we…”
She gritted her teeth then backed off, pacing with both hands up to her mouth.
“Oh God, oh God.” She took one of those deep breaths she’d had increasing need for lately. “Joy, you’re supposed to use a mirror when you do makeup! And I know this was your first time doing it, but…”
From the doorway, there was a not-so-polite cough.
Keiko turned around. Mia was standing in the hall with her ghost sheet over one arm, looking hurt, and Keiko’s whole face changed.
“Oh,” she said, and Joy could see her desperately trying to find a way out of the mess she’d just stepped in. “Crap.”
“I tried! I watched a tutorial and everything.”
“I can tell, and I’m sorry,” Keiko said, giving Mia a genuinely contrite look. She was already pulling makeup wipes out of a drawer with the speed of a woman defusing a bomb. She turned to Joy. “Tiffany and I agreed we weren’t going to push any of this on you, with everything else you were adjusting to. We were going to wait until you asked.”
“So?”
“So this is an emergency.” Keiko wiped the first eye clean in one long stroke. “Come here, Mia, we’re going to tag-team this!”
It took them twenty minutes. Joy sat with her eyes closed while Keiko and Mia worked. It was mostly Keiko at the helm, but she explained the whole process to Mia as she went, and occasionally handed the tools over to Mia to try. Keiko’s strokes felt like a painter working on a canvas, while Mia’s felt like somebody shaking a broom at a cat, and Joy was pretty sure Keiko was reworking most of it afterward.
“What do you think?” Keiko asked Mia at last as both of them stepped back.
“Wow,” Mia gasped. “How’d you get so good?”
Keiko didn’t answer, instead shoving something into Joy’s hands.
“Okay,” Keiko said finally. “Look.”
Joy looked.
The red was still there, but now it was a thin flick at the outer corner of each eye that went up and out and made her look like she knew something you didn’t. Her skin looked unchanged at first, until she turned a bit and saw whatever Keiko had done had kept the color exactly the same but given it a porcelain-like smoothness and gloss that she could only call “delicate.” Her lips were the same red as the inside of the sleeves and now looked like they curved out more than they naturally did to give her a pronounced pout. She looked exactly like Tsukiko done by an artist in an LA dorm instead of an artist in a Shanghai office.
“Holy crap,” was all she could offer by way of a response.
“Right? Mia and I make a great team!”
Mia bristled briefly, suspecting Keiko was patronizing her, but decided to just accept the compliment.
“Can you teach me how to do that?” Mia asked.
“I’d love to!” She looked back at Joy and gave her an evil smile. “And we’ve got the perfect test subject, too.”
Suddenly a small part of Joy was relieved that Mia was leaving tomorrow.
They closed Gayley Avenue for Halloween. Every house on it, all the way up the hill, had its doors open and music coming out, and the street between them was a river of people in costumes moving slowly in both directions at once or simply milling around.
Daniel had somehow lived through two Halloweens a few blocks from this without ever finding out it existed. He’d probably been asleep or at work. Joy stopped at the top of the street and took it in: the zombie nurses, the inflatable dinosaurs, a group of guys dressed like cops that Joy realized too late were actually cops.
Beside her, Mia’s sheet turned left and right. The eyeholes were perfect. She looked like she was thinking about something.
Nate came up behind them dressed in something so black that he sort of emerged out of the shadows and was walking alongside them before anybody noticed he was there. Joy saw it was a stylized priest’s cassock, accented with sunglasses and a gunbelt that appeared to have giant rosaries tucked into it.
“Who are you supposed to be?” said Joy.
Nate opened his mouth to explain, then looked at Joy and narrowed his eyes over his sunglasses.
“If I said ‘anime gunslinger priest,’ would that be about how far your interest extends?”
“Nailed it!” Joy beamed.
Nate continued staring.
“That’s some incredible makeup.”
“Mia and I did it!” Keiko said.
“OoooOOOOooooOOOoo,” Mia added.
They hadn’t made it two houses before a guy dressed as a hot dog came up and asked Nate to hear his confession. Then a girl in a cow costume asked him to bless her beer. Then a couple dressed as Bonnie and Clyde asked him to marry them, right there on the sidewalk. Nate did all three, in what was, if not accurate Latin, then very confident Latin.
“I’m going to get asked this all night,” said Nate, who seemed to be regretting his handiwork.
“That’s what you get for being so convincing,” said Joy.
“Man, Padre Bullet doesn’t go around marrying people, he…” He stopped, seeing Joy’s push-lipped smile. “Ugh, never mind.”
Keiko split off to set up her fortune-telling booth, promising she’d brought a new deck this time and was reasonably sure everybody would leave her booth in the same shape they’d arrived in.
Yin and Sophie were waiting for them on the steps of the house next door.
Sophie was wearing chef’s whites, a toque about a foot and a half tall, a huge white mustache, and a large medal on a red ribbon around her neck. She was holding a red cup and radiating the good cheer that Joy had come to associate with her, so much in fact that people seemed to be keeping at least five feet between themselves and her on the crowded street.
Yin was wearing a long dark coat with a high collar, a big floppy cravat, and a pair of tall black boots, and she’d done something to her hair that made it stand up in wild black curls. In one hand she was carrying a letter, sealed with red wax. Her ears stuck out through the curls on either side, very pleased with themselves.
“Who are you?” said Joy.
“Guess!”
“Napoleon?”
“That’s what everybody says,” said Sophie.
A guy dressed as a pirate walked past the steps, stopped, and pointed at Sophie with real delight.
“Chef Boyardee!”
The red cup crinkled in Sophie’s grip.
“I’m not Chef Boyardee, god dammit!” said Sophie, and the pirate fled.
Joy turned around and pulled Nate up next to her before he could find somewhere to stand in the back.
“Guys, this is Yin,” Joy said, gesturing to the smiling elf. “She’s got weird tarot issues like me.”
“And this is Chef Boyardee,” she said, gesturing to Sophie. “Beloved purveyor of cheap canned pasta.”
Joy had to hand it to Nate. As complicated as the costume was, she could still dodge a thrown cup in it.
“And this is Mia, my sister who’s visiting, and Nate, my roommate.”
Nate looked at Yin. He looked at the coat, and the curls, and the letter with the red wax seal on it. Something changed behind his sunglasses.
“Galois?” he said. “Like the field?”
Yin’s already large eyes went huge and her ears went straight up and stayed there.
“You know Galois?” she said breathlessly.
“I’m in CS. We use them for error correction. QR codes. Half of encryption, if you go far enough down.” He pointed at the letter. “Is that the one he wrote the night before the duel?”
“Yes!” Yin was holding the letter with both hands now and looked like she was about to start hopping up and down in excitement. “Nobody ever gets it! I keep needing to remind Sophie who I am!”
“I’ve already forgotten again,” said Sophie.
Yin looked at Nate a little more closely. “Wait. Are you the one who counted the stairs when Joy went to play mahjong?”
Joy’s eyes darted between the two, and once again her lower lip pushed up into her smile. She grabbed Mia by the sheet and started pulling her away.
“OoooOOoOOOooO!!” Mia protested.
Joy and Mia had made it about halfway down the block when somebody fell into step beside them.
“You in Thursday?”
It was Theo. Joy knew it was Theo from the voice, which never went up or down, and from the eyes, which were doing what they always did over a pot she’d just raised, which was nothing at all. The rest of him took longer. He was wearing a white and blue sailor-collared school uniform, a short pleated skirt, red boots, and long white gloves, and a blonde wig with two pigtails that came out of two round buns on top of his head and hung down past his waist.
“Wow, Theo, you’re rocking that better than I could!”
“Thanks, lost a bet.”
“To who?”
“Derek. Turns out he’s a lot better at gin rummy than he is at poker.”
Mia’s sheet turned toward Joy. “OOoooOOOooOOO?”
“This is Theo. Theo, this accursed specter is my sister, Mia. He got me into that weird poker game I was telling you about with all the supervillains.” Joy turned back to him. “I wouldn’t have bothered with the costume personally. You know full well Derek wouldn’t do it if he’d lost.”
Theo looked at her for a long moment, the way he’d look at somebody who tried to take back a bet after the river.
“A bet’s a bet,” he said.
He tugged one of his gloves straight.
“So. Thursday?”
“You know it,” said Joy. “I’m in.”
Theo nodded and left. One of his pigtails caught on a passing zombie on the way, and he untangled it without breaking stride.
Mia watched him go.
“OoooOOoOOooo,” she said.
“Yeah, I like him too.”
The costume contest was being run out of a big white house in the middle of the block with a rented spotlight on the lawn. Joy signed up on a clipboard at the bottom of the porch steps, under a guy who’d written Shrek (sexy) and a girl who’d written a vibe. Judging was at the end of the night.
“You’re going to win,” said Mia, who’d tried ordering a drink and had been forced to drop her schtick. Now holding the drink under the sheet, she’d become a good deal more triangular. “Nobody here looks like you.”
“Yeah, most of the people are wearing costumes from that store that moves into the vacant building in the strip mall near here every fall.”
“The one you said people keep starting fires in when it’s empty?”
“That’s the one.”
“You’re doing it wrong,” said a voice above them.
They both looked up.
There was a young man sitting on the porch railing with one knee up, like he’d been there all night and the party had grown up around him.
He was dressed as a fox. Not a fox costume, the way Joy was in a fox costume. He wore a dark kimono and a gray haori over it, and he had fox ears, tall and red-gold, standing up out of hair that was a shade of orange that hadn’t come out of any box Joy had ever seen. There were thin red stripes painted on his cheekbones. His tail was draped over the railing beside him, long and full and white at the tip. His eyes were yellow, with long narrow pupils, and Joy decided they had to be contacts, because the alternative was something she wasn’t going to think about at a party.
He was also, she had to admit, extremely good-looking. Not in a normal way. In the way where you looked at him and some old part of your brain started quietly looking for the exits.
“Aw man, we both wore the same thing,” said Joy, grinning at him. “One of us is going to have to go home and change.”
The man dropped to the ground with a grace and silence that both Joy and Mia noticed, and was suddenly a lot closer to Joy than she wanted. He had a strange smell to him, not cologne, but something almost earthy and natural. She held up her drink between them as, she had to admit, a meager barrier.
The man reached out, and in a smooth motion pulled on the collar of her kimono with one finger. Joy heard a gasp from Mia, and wasn’t certain she hadn’t made one too.
“Your collar.” He tilted his head. “Right over left is how they dress the dead. You’re wrapped like a corpse.”
“It’s how she wears it in the game.”
“Then the game is doing it wrong.” He looked her up and down, not the way guys usually did, but more like he was reading a menu in a language he only half spoke. “For a moment, from across the street, I thought you were one of us.”
Joy processed this for a second and came up with two options for what he meant. She absolutely refused to consider one of them.
“Oh no!” she said, laughing and pushing his hand back. “I’m not a cosplayer, my friend made this for me. Speaking of which, he’d love your costume, it looks even better than mine!”
He only smiled. He had a lot of very white teeth.
Joy looked at him the way she looked at everybody: the hands, the shoulders, the corners of the mouth, all the little places people kept what they were actually thinking. Nate had a tell when he was adding in his head. Mia had the lip. Even the emerald-eyed man had pushed back when she got under his skin, which was a tell of its own.
This guy had nothing. It was like trying to read a face on a coin.
“Do you know kitsune-ken?” he asked.
“Like I said, I’m not really in your little…” Joy traced a loop in the air. “Circle, I guess. Maybe Nate knows him, though.”
“It’s a game,” he said, and Joy wasn’t sure he was listening to her. “Like rock, paper, scissors. There’s the fox.” He put his hands up beside his head like ears. “There’s the village headman.” He put his hands on his knees. “And there’s the hunter.” He mimed holding a rifle. “Fox tricks the headman. The headman gives orders to the hunter. The hunter shoots the fox.”
Joy gave Mia a side-eye and Mia’s eyes stared back huge and dark from under the sheet.
“So it’s rock, paper, scissors with extra steps.”
“It’s much older than rock, paper, scissors,” he said, a little stiffly. “Play me.”
“For what?”
“If you win, name your price.”
Joy was already getting tired of this, and had been on the lookout for the restroom before his intrusion. She figured this might be the fastest way to get rid of him. “I dunno, a thousand bucks.”
He reached into his sleeve and came out with ten hundred-dollar bills, crisp and new, and fanned them out like a hand of cards. Joy boggled at them. That was a damn sight more impressive than pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
“And if I win,” he said, “your hand.”
Joy looked at him. So he was one of the weird ones. Not that any of what she’d seen so far didn’t support that. But the daredevil tingle was back, and if he was as good as his word she’d come out of tonight ahead even if she didn’t win the contest.
“Oh, what the hell,” she said. “Sure. You can hold it for one whole song. I’ll even let you pick which one.”
“Danny.” Mia’s sheet had moved very close to her shoulder. Her voice came out of it low and flat. “Ten.”
“It’s not a luck game,” Joy said, out of the side of her mouth. “It’s a people game.”
“Danny, he’s not…”
“Two out of three,” Joy said over her and turned back to him. “You’re on.”
His smile got wider. “Done.”
He showed her the chant once, three beats and then the throw, and then they played.
On the first throw, Joy figured a guy dressed as a fox would want to throw the fox. Nobody could resist their own costume. She threw the hunter. He threw the headman, hands neatly on his knees, and tutted at her like a disappointed teacher.
“One,” he said.
On the second throw, Joy figured he’d figured she’d figured, and she went over it in her head twice, and looked at his face for anything at all, and found nothing, and threw the fox, because at least it was fun.
He threw the hunter. He even closed one eye to aim.
“Two,” he said, and pulled the trigger.
Joy stood there on the porch steps with her hands still up beside her head like a pair of ears. She had lost plenty since September, but there had always been another hand coming. There was another hand coming all right, but this time it was going to be his. She braced herself like when she’d had to reach into the garbage disposal to fish something out.
He tucked the bills back into his sleeve. Then he took her hand.
His was warm and dry and very light, like holding a bird. He turned her hand over and pressed the back of her wrist to his mouth, which nobody had ever done to her before, and something went up her arm, quick and cold, like a key turning in a lock.
“Makoto,” he said. “Since you’ll be needing to know it.”
“Joy,” she said, showing none of it.
“I know.” He let go of her hand. “I’ll come for my bride at midnight.”
Joy laughed. It came out a little higher than she’d meant. “Your what?”
“You bet me your hand. I won it.” He started back up the porch steps and swung himself onto the railing in one easy movement. “Wear what you have on. It’s very nearly right.”
“I meant hold my hand! Like for a song!”
“I know what you meant.” He settled back, crossed his ankles, and arranged his tail on the railing beside him. “I’m going to hold you to what you said.”
“And here I thought sexy Shrek was going to be the creepiest guy here tonight.” Joy said, pulling her hand away from him.
Makoto simply smiled at her.
At the bottom of the steps, Theo was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his pigtails over his shoulders. Joy had no idea how long he’d been there.
“He didn’t have a tell,” said Theo.
“Thank you, Theo,” Joy said flatly, holding her hand like something had just bitten it.
Theo looked up at the railing, where Makoto was smoothing the fur on the end of his tail.
“Everybody has a tell,” he said, and got up, and went somewhere else.
Joy took Mia by the sheet and walked her out to the middle of the street, where it was loud enough to think.
“Who the hell does that guy think he is?”
“His tail doesn’t have a seam,” said Mia.
“What?”
“Your tail has a seam. Right at the top, where it clips on. It’s a really good seam, you can barely see it, but it’s there. His doesn’t.” The sheet turned toward the porch and back. “And he smelled like fur.”
Joy had to admit that was probably what she’d smelled too. She hadn’t gotten a good look at his kimono. Maybe it was even fancier than she’d noticed. In the back of her mind, one of the possibilities that she’d discounted earlier was screaming for attention.
“Look, even Nate admits some people in the cosplay scene can be a little weird. If he bothers us again, you just scream and he’s going to get…”
“Danny.”
“Mia, he’s not the first well-dressed loser I’ve dealt with. It’ll be fine.”
Across the street, Makoto was still on the railing, watching them. He lifted a hand and gave her a little wave.
Joy gave him a gesture back and decided right then that she was going to ruin his whole night.
“Joy!”
She turned around. Coming toward her through the crowd, grinning like he couldn’t believe his luck, was a tall guy with a nice jaw and a giant red plastic ketchup bottle around his torso. His face stuck out of a hole near the top. There was a white cap on his head that said HEINZ.
“Hey! I texted you,” he said. “About tonight. You never texted me back.”
Joy had absolutely no idea who he was. She was still worked up and was about to tell him where he could shove his bottle when she remembered her phone at lunch under the oak. This must have been the guy who’d wanted to know what she was doing for the Halloween party, something about a couples costume.
“Sorry, I was going to get back to you,” she lied.
“No, totally, it’s cool. It’s…” He said his name, and it went in one ear and out the other. “I just figured, if you didn’t have a costume yet…” He gestured down at himself.
Joy looked at the ketchup bottle.
“Where’s your mustard?” she said.
He went a little pink around the hole in the bottle.
“I was kind of hoping that’d be you.”
Over his shoulder, Makoto had stopped smiling.
Joy gave Makoto a grin that told him she’d seen.
She then leaned in and wrapped both arms around one of Ketchup’s, which proved harder than she expected with the wide kimono sleeves, and looked up at him with a wide-eyed smile.
“I’ll be your mustard,” she said, lifting her voice an octave and running a hand down his arm. From behind her she could hear Mia gasp and feel the indignation radiating off of Makoto.
She laughed at the next thing he said, which was about how hard it was to sit down in a condiment, and she laughed at the thing after that, which was about his roommate going as a pickle and getting thrown out of three houses. She tilted her head. She played with one of her forelocks. She was pretty sure this was all stuff she’d seen other girls do when they wanted to show a guy they liked him, and just ad-libbed as best she could to get maximum outrage from Makoto. It was working.
Somewhere around the pickle story she realized she was laughing for real. He was funny for a ketchup bottle. He actually made a few clever jokes, and he didn’t once look at her chest, which made him practically unique tonight.
She looked past him at the porch.
Makoto’s ears had gone flat back against his head. She gave him the hand gesture with both hands before turning back to Ketchup.
“I’m going to get us drinks,” he said. “What do you want?”
“Surprise me,” she said in a light, breathy voice that even impressed her.
She’d never seen a ketchup bottle skip, but tonight was turning out to be an unusual night.
Joy turned back around to Mia with the biggest grin she’d had all night.
“That,” she said, “is how you do it.”
“Danny.” Mia’s sheet was facing the porch. “His ears moved.”
“What? No, they didn’t. They’re a headband just like mine.”
She reached up to pull hers off to show Mia and felt her fingers close over one ear.
That wasn’t right.
It was warm.
And under her fingers, all on its own, it twitched.