Joy gave the ear an experimental tug.
A jolt of pain ran down her head and she winced, letting go, and began probing around it for the headband. Instead all she found was warm fur and scalp, and all the while the ear was twitching as it was poked and prodded.
“Danny,” said Mia, who had turned more pale than her computer monitor tan had already made her.
“Yeah, Mia, I noticed.”
“No, Danny, your tail. It’s moving.”
“Yeah, I know, I can feel it.”
Joy stopped. That wasn’t right.
Both her ears rotated back as if they might be some help in this situation and Joy looked over her shoulder to confirm what her own senses were telling her with sickening certainty. Behind her, the once clip-on tail seemed to have increased in volume substantially, and the white tip was lashing back and forth as if it wasn’t a fan of this whole situation either. Joy could feel the whole weight of the thing hanging from her now, and that revelation seemed to only agitate her tail further.
For a brief moment Joy was more scared than she’d been in the basement under Mr. Lo’s. That had been a game. She had known the rules, well, rules at any rate, and the worst thing that could happen had been written down in red ink. She was steering her own fate, even if where she steered it to potentially involved an eager man in surgical scrubs carrying an ice chest.
Then the moment passed, and good wholesome anger returned.
For a moment her new ears plastered themselves against her head, but every sound, and Joy realized there was a lot more sound than there had been previously, caused them to perk up and rotate towards it. She could hear everything. The bass from three different houses, all out of sync. A girl on the next porch telling her friend that the boy she had come with wasn’t worth the mascara she’d put on. Somebody throwing up behind a hedge. And, quite clearly, over at the drinks table on the lawn across the street, Ketchup asking the guy pouring what a girl like that would want to drink.
She looked over at the porch. Makoto was still on the railing. He raised his cup to her.
“Okay,” said Joy. “Okay. We need Keiko.”
“Seriously?” Mia said. “Aren’t you in enough trouble without bringing her tarot cards into this?”
“No, I mean she’s into all this mystical stuff,” Joy said, giving her ear another tug to see if it’d changed its mind and instantly regretting it. “She knows more about it than anybody I know.”
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?”
“I’m starting to lean that way, yeah.”
Ketchup came back through the crowd holding two red cups up over his head like he was carrying them out of a flood. He saw Joy and lit up. Then he saw her ears move, and lit up even more.
“Whoa! Are those on a remote?”
“Yeah, let’s go with that.” Joy took both cups and shotgunned one after the other. If she ever needed a drink, it was right now. “I’m so sorry, I have to go deal with a thing. A bit of a matrimonial emergency.”
“Wha…” His face fell as he realized that he was getting ditched for the second time, but then he rallied. “Rain check?”
Joy looked at him and in spite of all her current issues, found she did feel bad about this.
“I owe you a mustard!” she shouted, and ran.
She made it about twenty feet before a guy in an inflatable T. rex costume turned around without looking and his giant dinosaur tail knocked her sideways into a hedge. She came out of it with leaves in her hair and a stick caught in her obi. Then her phone buzzed with a low-battery warning and died in her hand.
“Ten five-stars,” Joy groaned as Mia helped her up. Then she groaned again as she saw Mia’s jaw go slack. “Oh god, what now?”
“Hair.”
Joy reached up and pulled a strand forward. It was no longer her normal strawberry blonde, but now a deep orange very similar to Makoto’s own hair.
“Fantastic.” Joy sighed.
The Mysterious Madame Keiko was in the middle of reading the future of a guy dressed as a banana. She seemed to still have the chair of pain Joy had sat in months ago at her own tarot reading and between that and trying to sit in it dressed like a banana, the guy looked like he’d drawn the Tower instead.
“…and the Nine of Cups means your wish will be granted,” she was saying, “so whatever it is, I’d go for it…”
She looked up. She saw Joy. Her eyes went to Joy’s ears, which were pointed straight at her, then the hair, and then to the tail, which was doing something agitated behind Joy’s back.
Keiko stood up so fast her turban slipped. She reached into her deck and pulled out a card. It showed a man lying on a slab, framed by four swords.
“Ah, will you look at that, the Four of Swords! That means the Mysterious Madame Keiko is taking a break.” As the banana struggled to get out of the chair, she put a hand on her turban and rushed over to Joy.
“Ok, you can’t blame me for this one!”
“I bet I could if I tried hard enough,” Joy said, the evening making her a bit surlier than usual.
“What happened?” she said, reaching up to touch an ear, which flicked in annoyance. “I don’t even think we’ve been here half an hour.”
Joy told her. Keiko didn’t laugh, which was not a good sign coming from Keiko.
“You bet your hand,” she said. “To a fox. You know what that means, right?”
“I do now.”
Keiko reached down to touch her tail. It flicked her fingers away on its own.
“Wow,” she said faintly. “That’d be really cool if it wasn’t for the whole having to be the wife of some fox demon.”
“What if we take it off?” said Mia. “The costume, I mean. If it started with the costume, maybe if she takes it off…”
Joy was willing to try anything. She found the knot at the back of the obi and pulled to no avail. Keiko and Mia both got back there to try and found similar success. That morning Nate had tied it with his knee in her back, and Joy figured it probably wasn’t coming undone without his expertise either.
“I think we’re going to need the jaws of life to get me out of this,” said Joy.
“Well, it probably wouldn’t matter,” said Keiko. “Even if we did get this off, whatever that fox did to you, it’s transforming you, not the costume.”
Mia pushed the sheet back over her head so she could see her phone. It was pink, in a case covered in little rubber animals, and she was already typing.
“Okay,” Keiko said. She straightened her turban as if it would help her better plumb the depths of the arcane. “Okay. Okay. My grandma used to tell me fox stories when I was little. Like, all the time. Mostly to scare me when I wouldn’t go to bed.”
“Great. What do they say?”
“Rule number one! Never trust a fox, they’re tricky bastards. Her words, not mine.”
“Good to know,” Joy said, rubbing the bridge of her nose.
“Rule number two! Never make a deal with a fox. See above regarding them being tricky bastards.”
“Got any other timely advice?”
Keiko thought about it.
“Oh, here’s one the ship hasn’t sailed on yet. There’s a thing called a fox’s wedding. When it rains while the sun’s out. It happens when foxes are having a wedding procession, and if you see it you’re supposed to look away, or they’ll take you along.”
“Great,” said Joy. “Not only am I getting married to a fox monster, it’s going to be raining when I do it.”
“Hey, guys, I think I found something,” Mia said, still looking at her phone. “The Federal Council on the Occult has a bunch of Halloween tips on their website, and one of them says that the veil between our world and the spirit world is very thin on All Hallows’ Eve, and that they highly discourage dressing as supernatural predators as it may attract them. Oooh, they’ve even got a song about it.”
She hit play on the video and then the three of them stood there in silence while what looked to be a middle-aged office worker dressed in a bad Dracula costume did a terrible rap about warding yourself against the supernatural.
Joy decided to think about literally anything else. For a moment, from across the street, I thought you were one of us, Makoto had said.
“So I dressed up as a fox,” she said slowly, “and managed to attract an ancient Japanese fox demon.”
Despite her best effort, one of her ears turned towards Mia’s phone as the horrible rap continued under their conversation.
Yo! The clock’s tickin’ down and the night’s gettin’ late,
The veil’s gettin’ thin, so you better watch your date!
Spirit world, real world, mixin’ on the street,
By the stroke of twelve, it’s a two-world treat! (Word up!)
“So the closer we get to midnight…”
“The more of a fox I become,” Joy said, cringing.
She could feel the two of them staring, and didn’t even ask. Her tongue was on the case and had discovered her canine teeth had grown into short, sharp fangs.
“That’s not all,” Keiko said. She pulled her phone out, switched it to the front-facing camera, and held it up so Joy could see herself. There were faint lines on her cheeks, three on each side, thin and red, right where Makoto’s were. They hadn’t been there at the start of the night. They didn’t look like makeup. They looked like they had always been there and Joy had just never noticed.
“What time is it?” said Joy.
“Ten forty-one,” said Mia.
“Okay,” said Joy, taking a deep breath. “So I have an hour and nineteen minutes.”
“To do what exactly?” Keiko asked.
“Figure out how to stay human and single,” said Joy.
Mia had put down her phone and dropped the sheet again so Joy could only see her big worried eyes.
“Danny,” she said quietly. “If this doesn’t work. What do I tell Mom and Dad? ‘Hi, Mom and Dad! Saw Danny, he’s doing great! He’s now a girl and married a fox spirit. He can’t wait to introduce you to your fox grandkids!’”
Joy had to admit, she’d dug herself one hell of a hole. Somewhere in Seattle, their mom was probably asleep with her phone on the nightstand, turned all the way up, the way she always kept it when one of her kids was out of the house. She had no idea her son was a daughter now, let alone that by midnight she might be a fox and married.
“Mia, I know things look real bad right now, but this isn’t my first time tangling with the supernatural.” The words came out, and Joy was rather shocked both because they were true and because she kinda believed them, “If I can beat a ten-story-tall tree I can beat this asshole too.”
Mia looked dubious about this, and then went back to scrolling. “There’s a lot of stuff about foxes. Some of it’s folklore, some of it’s fan fiction, I can’t always tell.”
Then Joy saw Mia’s eyes go wide and could feel her blush under the sheet.
“Ok, that one is definitely fan fiction. But it keeps saying the same thing, in like every version. Foxes keep their word. All of them. A fox that makes a promise has to keep it, same as whoever he made it with.”
“That’s the problem,” said Joy. “He’s keeping his word. I’m what he won. He just needs to wait out the clock now and he wins.”
“No, listen. It goes both ways.” Mia looked up. “If he’s bound by what he says, then whatever he says at the wedding binds him too. He has to say vows, right? Keiko, you’re Japanese, how’s a Japanese wedding work?”
“I don’t know!” Keiko said, feeling put on the spot. “I grew up in the Bay Area. Only times I’ve been to Japan is when we’d go visit my grandma in Osaka. Besides, right now Joy has the most experience here with weddings.”
She stopped and thought for a second as Joy gave her a dirty look.
“But probably though, I mean that’s the whole point of a wedding right? To bind two people together?”
But then an idea formed in Joy’s mind as she thought about what Mia had said. She had always done this even when they were little. Daniel would be halfway through a problem, banging at it with whatever was nearest, and Mia would come in from the side with something she’d read, something nobody else would have thought to look up, and it would turn out to be the one thing that mattered.
“Mia,” said Joy. “That weird government site. It said you dress up as something, and the spirits think you’re it.”
“Right?”
“So tonight, if you’re dressed as a thing, as far as they’re concerned you are the thing.”
Keiko’s eyes lit up and she fanned out her tarot deck like a circus knife thrower brandishing her tools.
“The Mysterious Madame Keiko will tarot him to death!”
Joy and Mia ignored her. They had both come to the same conclusion.
“Danny,” Mia said. “Nate married those two people.”
“And I wasn’t invited?” Keiko said, a little hurt.
“Bonnie and Clyde,” said Joy. “On the sidewalk. In Latin. I think.”
Keiko’s hand went to her mouth. “Aw.”
Joy wasn’t listening anymore. She was thinking about the porch. About a face that gave her nothing, no matter where she looked. Except it hadn’t been nothing, not the whole time. When she’d called his game rock, paper, scissors with extra steps, he’d answered her a little stiffly. When she’d hung off Ketchup’s arm, his ears had gone flat against his head. That was twice. Both times, it was because she’d poked at something he thought was beneath him.
Theo was right. Everybody had a tell. Makoto’s was that he was proud. But he had one other weakness.
“Keiko, your grandma said foxes were tricky bastards? Her words.”
“Yeah, Grandma had a mouth on her.”
“No, I mean, they love playing tricks right?”
“Yeah, that’s kinda their thing.”
“So what if we set him up for one more trick?”
She felt her lower lip start to push up, and she let it.
“Oh no,” said Mia, who knew that face better than anyone else.
“I’m going to marry him,” said Joy.
“What?” said Mia and Keiko in unison.
“And Nate’s going to do the ceremony.”
Nate and Yin were exactly where she’d left them, on the steps of the house next door, except that at some point Yin had taken out a pen and was drawing something on the back of her Galois letter, and Nate had taken off his sunglasses to look at it. Sophie was two steps up with her toque on her knees, eating a hot dog and watching the two of them with the expression of someone at a nature documentary.
Joy couldn’t help but notice Yin had scooted a bit closer to Nate from when she’d last left them.
“…and then the multiplication is just polynomials mod the irreducible one,” Yin was saying, “which is the prettiest part…”
“It’s the only part I ever liked,” said Nate. “In the class. Everybody else hated it.”
“Everybody always hates it!” Yin’s eyes were sparkling as she looked at Nate. One didn’t have to be a master at reading people like Joy to know what that meant.
Joy could hear every word from forty feet away. She had to admit it was handy, but taking care of her hair was hard enough. Add fur to the mix, and she’d be spending half the day on hair care.
Yin looked up first. Her ears went straight up, this time for reasons that had nothing to do with Nate. Joy’s ears swiveled towards Yin like the two sets were having their own private conversation.
“Joy! You’ve got real fox ears now!”
“Yeah, among other things.”
“They’re so cute! Can I…?” Yin was in her face with the alarming speed she seemed to be capable of and was already reaching. Then she stopped and sniffed the air, like she’d caught something on the wind. “You smell like a fox. A real one. Like the forest.” Her face changed. “Joy, are you okay?”
“And somehow Cheerleader gets even weirder,” said Sophie, and kept eating her hot dog.
Joy realized she was staring at Sophie’s hot dog, and had no idea how long she’d been doing it. Her nose had found it before the rest of her had, and some part of her that she didn’t recognize was very interested in it.
Sophie followed her gaze and glowered at her. “You know the rules, don’t feed the animals.”
Nate put his sunglasses back on. He looked at the ears. He took in a Joy who was very different from the one he’d left, and looked unimpressed.
“What did you do.”
“I may have lost a bet,” said Joy gingerly.
“To who?”
“A kitsune. A real one. On that porch.” She pointed. Makoto, still on the railing, waved. Joy ignored him. “I bet my hand. I meant hold my hand. He meant the other thing. So now I’m transforming into his fox bride so we can get married at midnight.”
The group was silent for a moment. Then the silence was broken by a splutter, and then uncontrolled laughter. They all turned to look at Sophie who was nearly doubled over laughing. Yin gave Joy an apologetic look.
Nate didn’t say anything for a while.
“You bet your hand,” he said finally.
“I can explain!”
Nate stared at her.
“No, I can’t,” Joy admitted. “But look, I’ve got a plan! I need a priest.”
Nate looked down at his cassock. He looked at the gunbelt and its oversized rosaries. He looked back up at her, and Joy watched him put it all together, the way she’d watched him put together the stairs and the tiles and the odds of Thirteen Orphans. He didn’t look happy about where it ended up.
“No,” he said, taking a step back.
“Nate.”
“Absolutely not. If I marry you off to a fox spirit, I’m going to have to tell your mom that. Then I’m going to need a priest.”
Joy grinned. It was a trickster’s grin, and maybe a little wider than it probably ought to have been. She leaned in and put her mouth next to his ear and talked, low and fast. Her own ears were tipped forward, the whole time, toward the porch, listening to make sure nobody up there was listening.
When she was done, Nate’s eyebrows had come up over the top of his sunglasses and stayed there.
“In Latin,” he said.
“Can you?”
“My mom had me in the church choir for ten years. I’ve sung at about a hundred weddings. I know the whole thing by heart. But you’re saying…”
“I’m saying we make an adjustment or two.”
Nate thought about it, then he leaned in towards Joy and whispered to her. Joy nodded a few times, then her grin spread even wider.
“No shit? That’s really how it works?”
“Yup, they’re more similar than you’d think. But he has to repeat it.”
“Every word,” agreed Joy. “I’ll handle that part.”
Nate was quiet. Joy waited. She’d learned to give him the time.
On the step beside him, Yin was watching Nate too. She had been since Joy started talking, and she didn’t seem to know she was doing it. Her eyes hadn’t stopped sparkling.
“If this doesn’t work,” said Nate.
“Then I suggest you get a really good head start before my mom finds out.”
Nate took off his sunglasses and cleaned them on the edge of his cassock, which was what he did when he was about to agree to something he was going to complain about later.
“Fine,” he said. “But I’m going to need a minute to work out the wording. And for the record, this is nuts. I think this might be even crazier than the kidney. And you owe me for this.”
Joy glanced at Yin again for a moment and figured she was probably going to be able to make good on that sooner rather than later.
“Deal.”
Yin made a small sound, and they both looked at her. She had both hands pressed over her mouth, and even her ear tips had turned pink.
“I’m sorry,” she said through her fingers as she stared at Nate. “It’s just. You’re going to ride in like her knight in shining armor and save her!”
Nate looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at Joy, a little helplessly, like he wasn’t sure what had just happened.
Joy knew exactly what had just happened. Her lower lip pushed up as she looked over at Yin.
“Yin, want to be my bridesmaid?”
Yin’s hands came down. “Yes!”
“Sophie?”
“I’m not touching this train wreck,” said Sophie.
“Come on, Sophie!” Yin pleaded, “We both used to play prentend bridesmaids when we were little!”
"Oh my god Yin, not in front of everybody!" Sophie said, glaring at the group challenging anybody to say anything about it, “Fine. If this gets weird, I’m out though.”
“What part of this isn’t weird?” Joy asked.
“I mean weird for what goes on around you, Cheerleader,” Sophie said, finishing her hot dog and hopping down to join them.
Somebody on the lawn had a bullhorn and was announcing that costume judging would be just after midnight, and that the judges were very drunk, so everybody had a shot.
“If I’m a fox by then,” said Joy, “I’m definitely winning.”
Nobody laughed.
It was just past eleven when Joy walked up the porch steps of the white house with her friends in tow like the world’s least intimidating posse.
Her hair had grown long and lost its waviness, hanging down to her hips in a single silky sheet. The lines on her face had intensified to the same bright red as Makoto’s. The tail had grown heavier, and Joy had decided she wasn’t going to look at it or think about it anymore.
Makoto was waiting for them. He was standing now, instead of sitting on the railing, and he looked pleased. More than pleased. He looked like a man whose pizza had arrived early.
“My bride,” he said, and bowed. “You look radiant. We’ll be the envy of the spirit world.”
“I’m here to negotiate,” Joy said, ignoring him.
“But why?” He tilted his head at her, interested. “You’ll like it, you know. Being one of us. I’ll show you places and experiences your kind only dream about. And through it all our love will span countless mortal eras. Doesn’t that sound better than the daily struggles with your mortal needs and obligations?”
For half a second, Joy had to admit not having to worry about tuition did sound pretty nice.
“Is there anything actually fun to do in the spirit world?” she asked.
“Oh, so many things! Moon-viewings, composing poetry as you contemplate a single leaf, feasting with Lord Inari on…”
“Yeah, didn’t think so.” Joy took a deep breath. It was time to double down. “So look, a bet’s a bet.” Joy could feel her own ears tipping forward toward him, and she let them. “So here’s the deal. I promised I’d marry you, and yeah I can’t get out of that, but I didn’t promise I wouldn’t make your life a living hell before, during and after.”
Makoto threw up his arms helplessly.
“True enough! But at the stroke of midnight you’ll be a fox regardless of your feelings on the matter, and you’ll have all of your immortal existence in the spirit world to come around on the idea.”
“Maybe, but what if I made you another promise?”
Makoto’s eyebrows raised.
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” Joy said, smiling. “What if I promise that once we’re married, you’ll have my undying love and devotion, a wife that will be the envy of…”
Joy stopped and turned to Nate, who shrugged.
“Whatever lives in the spirit world with you. I just have one condition.”
His smile thinned, very slightly. “Which is?”
“I pick the priest.”
Makoto studied her. Then he looked past her at Nate, at the black cassock, the sunglasses, and the gunbelt full of rosaries, and he laughed. It was a real laugh, and it sounded surprised to be coming out of him.
“You mean to play a trick on me!” he said, and his voice was as rich with delight as Joy’s own was when she was about to take an insane chance. Which, she reflected, she absolutely was. “Oh, my bride-to-be, I have chosen well! You and I are truly kindred spirits. I don’t know what your game is, but I’ll play it. Just remember, we spirits are bound to our word.”
“You are, aren’t you,” Joy said sweetly.
“And tell me my beautiful vixen, who shall it be that weds us?”
Joy jerked a thumb at Nate.
“He’s ordained,” said Joy. “Tonight, anyway. He’s already married two people.”
Makoto walked around Nate in a slow circle, the way Mia had walked around Joy the first night in the dorm. Nate stood there and let him, completely deadpan, because Nate had once sat on a stool for two hours getting yelled at by Auntie Lau, and in the balance of things, that was much scarier.
“Well, Father?” said Makoto. “Will you marry us?”
Nate gave a polite little bow. Then he said something, in smooth, rolling Latin, with a perfectly pleasant smile on his face. It went on for a while.
Joy didn’t watch Nate. She watched Makoto’s ears.
They didn’t move. Not a twitch. Makoto smiled back at Nate with the patient, gracious look of somebody who didn’t understand a word and wasn’t going to admit it.
“I accept your request and your priest,” said Makoto, turning back to her. “Midnight. I’ll send for you.”
“But beloved, why not now?” said Joy, and gave him the sweetest smile she had.
Makoto tilted his head, giving Joy a long, measured stare, then spread his arms.
“Very well! Let the procession begin!”
There was a gust of wind that smelled like leaves and wet earth. It went up the porch and through all of them, and when it was gone, so was he. There was nothing left on the railing but a single red-gold hair, which blew off into the dark.
Mia let out a long breath under the sheet.
Joy turned to Nate.
“What did you say to him?”
“I said his kimono looked like that of a gambler and a degenerate,” said Nate, “and that his mother was a tanuki.”
“Harsh,” Joy said, having no idea what any of that meant. “What’s a tanuki?”
“Something tells me that if this doesn’t work you’re going to find out.”
Joy grinned again. It was frighteningly wide now.
“But yeah, he doesn’t speak Latin,” she said.
Almost as soon as Makoto was gone, the music on Gayley Avenue stopped.
It didn’t fade, or get turned down. It stopped all at once, at every house up and down the street, in the middle of a song, like somebody had pulled a single plug. In the silence, people stood around holding their cups, looking at each other and laughing a little nervously, waiting for it to come back.
Joy’s ears turned on their own, both of them, toward the bottom of the hill.
There were lights coming up the street. Little round ones, pale blue and green, bobbing along at about the height of a person’s hand, two by two, in a long line. They didn’t light up anything around them. They just floated, cold and steady, and the crowd parted in front of them without seeming to know it was doing it.
And around them, things began to change.
Trees became thick and impossibly tall clusters of bamboo. Houses shimmered and then morphed into red lacquered shrines. The asphalt of the street became a wide path of interlocking stone tiles and the streetlights became ornate stone lanterns.
And then the sun came out.
It wasn’t all at once, but it followed the procession in a line that banished the darkness like the sun emerging after an eclipse, bathing the street in phantom daylight. Where the light touched, people changed. Joy watched as Keiko’s banana-clad customer was illuminated, and suddenly he wasn’t a banana anymore. The costume had vanished, replaced with what Joy had to assume was a very formal kimono. He looked down at it, in shock. It was happening to everybody all down the street, costumes were being replaced, and the bewildered partygoers were trying to come to grips with what was happening around them.
“I guess your fiancé has a dress code for the wedding,” Nate said. “Those kimonos are old school, like hundreds of years out of style.”
Joy opened her mouth to say something but then felt her ear twitch as something hit it. She looked up and took a raindrop straight to the face. It came down soft and fine, glowing gold in the light of the sun in a cloudless blue sky.
Beside her, Keiko had gone very pale.
“Rain while the sun’s out,” she whispered. “Just like Grandma said.”
“Keiko.”
“It’s a fox’s wedding, Joy.” Keiko took her hand and squeezed it hard. “They’re here for the bride, and I think we’re all invited.”
Joy squeezed back just as the sunlight reached them.
Just like the others, their costumes vanished. In their places, Mia, Keiko, Yin, and Sophie were now clad in beautiful colorful kimonos with long wide sleeves much like Joy’s. They were a shocking splash of color in the sea of austere black kimonos the rest of the crowd seemed to be dressed in.
Nate was the only one whose costume hadn’t changed. He seemed completely untouched, and his shoulders dropped slightly at that small mercy.
But then they looked at Joy. In fact a lot of people were looking at Joy now and that didn’t strike her as a positive development.
She looked at her friends.
“I don’t want to know, do I?”