With a great deal of reluctance, Joy looked down. At first she told herself that the night probably couldn’t get any worse, but immediately knew that wasn’t true.
The violet kimono was gone. So were the four layers of red and gold at the sleeves, and the obi Nate had tied with his knee in her back. She was wrapped in white instead, layer on layer of it, heavy and soft and so bright in the phantom sunlight it almost hurt to look at. When she moved, patterns showed up in it, white woven into white, that only appeared when the light caught them: foxes, dozens of them, running nose to tail all the way around the hem. Something rested on her head. When she reached up she found a wide hood made of the same silk, folded so it framed her face.
Her ears did not appreciate the hood. They pushed at it from underneath until the silk gave up and let them stick out.
“Wow! That’s a shiromuku,” said Keiko faintly, reaching out and running a hand down the sleeve. “That’s real silk. Joy, I saw pictures of my grandma wearing something like this when she got married.”
“Somehow I’m guessing she was happier in those pictures than I am.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. She wasn’t too keen on the arrangement. She told me Grandpa cracked wise about her hair at the altar and… let’s just say there was a brief concern about them having children after that.”
Joy pictured this, and suddenly Keiko being the way she was made a lot more sense.
Yin appeared at Joy’s elbow in pale green with cherry blossoms on the sleeves, holding a big red paper parasol that Joy was fairly sure she hadn’t been holding a second ago. Yin looked at it, then at one of her long sleeves, and her face lit up.
“You look like you should be in some sort of fruity drink,” Joy said.
“Actually, I think she’s supposed to hold that over you,” Nate said.
“I can do that!” Yin said, and set about her new job with her typical cheer and enthusiasm.
Sophie was in deep blue with silver waves along the hem, and looked like she was trying to work out whether it would burn. Keiko was in red with gold cranes, and looked, out of all of them, like she’d been born in hers. Mia’s kimono was pink, with little white rabbits hopping all over it. She looked at it, gave an excited squeal, then looked up at Joy apologetically.
Mia had her phone out. Somehow it had survived the trip.
“We’ve got about forty-five minutes left,” she said.
Joy pulled a hand out of her kimono to check her watch and discovered two distressing facts. First, her watch was gone. Second, her hand and forearm, as far up the sleeve as she could see, were now covered in fine black fur, and her nails had grown into long and very sharp-looking claws.
Everybody else had noticed it too, and for a moment nobody said anything. Then at last Sophie spoke up.
“Well, if this doesn’t work out, I’ve got some great shampoo I use on my dog back home.”
The lanterns weren’t floating anymore. They were being carried, two by two, by figures in black formal kimono who had lined up on either side of the stone path to make an aisle. None of them were, strictly speaking, human. They all stood on two feet, but had the heads of foxes, and looking at them, Joy couldn’t help but feel with uncomfortable certainty that she was probably getting a sneak preview of what she was going to look like if her gambit didn’t work out.
At the far end of the aisle, where the big white house had been, there was a shrine now, red and gold, with a tall red gate in front of it and a wide flight of stone steps. Makoto was standing at the top.
He had changed too. Like the foxes in the procession, he no longer had a human head, and he was smiling at her with a long, fanged muzzle. But what really caught her attention was what was behind him. The single tail she’d seen on the porch railing had company now, eight more of them, spread out behind him in a great white-tipped fan of fur, making him look like a fuzzy peacock. They moved independently of each other, slowly, and to Joy’s eye just as self-satisfied as their owner.
“Okay,” said Nate. “That’s weird.”
“Not to alarm you, but speaking of which…” Yin said, craning her neck to look behind Joy while keeping the parasol in place.
Without even thinking about it, Joy moved her own tail to where she could see it. Sure enough, what had been tiny tufts of white minutes earlier had already grown into fully distinct tail tips that were branching off of the main one. The tail flicked in annoyance and Joy swore the tips all twitched as well.
A drum started somewhere. One beat. Then a long, long pause. Then another beat.
A gap opened up in the procession and a multitude of yellow eyes fell on Joy.
“I guess we’re getting in line, then,” Joy sighed, and the group fell in step with the procession.
The fox at the head of the aisle took one step forward on the first beat, and then stood perfectly still until the second.
Joy stared at him.
“Is that how fast we’re going?”
“I think it’s very traditional,” whispered Keiko.
“To quote your grandma at her wedding, probably: screw that.”
Joy hiked up the hem of her kimono and made to march to the front of the line. Without even looking back, a couple of foxes moved, very politely, Joy couldn’t help but think, to block her way. Not to be deterred, she turned to go around them out the side of the procession, but was met with similarly well-manned opposition. Whoever had designed this kimono hadn’t done so with pushing and shoving in mind, or really with doing much besides moving forward at a sustained shuffle. She conceded that they were in this for the long haul.
It took them almost twenty minutes to walk a block.
Joy had been a runner her whole life, in both bodies. Her legs wanted to go. Every slow beat of that drum, they twitched under the silk like a racehorse in the gate. The foxes around her formed a polite, furry barrier that made it clear that they would get to the altar on whatever timetable Makoto had designed.
She looked up the steps at Makoto. He was smiling at her, very patiently.
That was when she understood. He’d said yes to why not now a lot faster than a fox should have. He didn’t care when the wedding started. He cared when it finished. Every beat of that drum was another few seconds closer to midnight, and every few seconds, she was a little more his.
He’d let her move the start time. He was taking it back out of the walk.
“He’s stalling,” she said through her teeth.
Mia checked her phone. “Eleven thirty-four.”
Joy breathed in. It was still raining, and she had to admit it smelled nice.
She hadn’t noticed that before. It smelled like stone and moss and the green insides of the bamboo, and under that the foxes, warm and musky, a whole crowd of them, and under that, the hills. Somewhere past the shrine there were hills, real ones, steep and dark and full of things that ran, and the smell of them came down through the rain and went straight into the middle of her chest and pulled.
She wondered what it would feel like to run up into those hills on four feet.
Then she caught herself and grimaced. It was bad enough that her body was changing. If not enough of her was still human by the time she made it up to the altar, she might have a real problem. That was future Joy’s problem, though. Present Joy was having a hard enough time shuffling along in a kimono that felt as heavy as the weight vests she used to train in.
At the bottom of the steps there were more introductions than Joy had ever sat through at any family reunion. A tall fox in gray, who Makoto introduced as his aunt, looked Joy up and down and said something in Japanese that made Keiko choke. A pair of identical twins in black, both of whom bowed so deeply their tails touched the ground. A very old fox with one milky eye, who said nothing at all and handed her a single persimmon.
“Lord Inari regrets he could not attend,” Makoto said, “but he sends rice.”
“Oh, he read the wedding registry!” Joy said. Makoto didn’t seem to get it.
Then an attendant came forward with a black lacquered tray. On it were three flat red cups, nested one inside the other, and a little silver pot with a long spout.
“First,” said Makoto, “the cups.”
Mia’s hand closed on Joy’s sleeve. She leaned in close.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “I read about it on the walk. Back in the old days, the sake is the wedding. You drink three times out of those, you’re married. That’s it. No vows. No priest.”
The attendant poured. The sake in the first cup was clear and very still, and when Joy looked down into it, she saw her face looking back.
Her eyes were yellow. Not contacts yellow. Gold, bright as a coin, with long black pupils that ran up and down instead of round.
She blinked, and the Joy-in-the-cup blinked back. Somehow, this annoyed her the most. Not the ears, not the tail, not the fur, not even the crushing, constricting weight of the kimono. She realized she really liked her old-new eyes, and she was not happy that they’d been taken from her. Joy-in-the-cup was now glaring back at her.
Then she put her hand flat over the top of the cup.
“Hey, Padre,” she said, a cold edge in her voice.
It took Nate a moment to realize she meant him.
“Uh… yes, my child?” he offered.
“I could be wrong, but getting sloshed before the vows isn’t part of a proper Catholic ceremony, is it?”
Nate looked around, trying to figure out how any of this was part of a proper Catholic ceremony, and then offered a reluctant, “No?”
Makoto was staring at her, and she noticed with great satisfaction that a bit of the cheer had left his face. She looked back at him and gave him a grin that was now stretching far too long in the corners.
“He’s our priest. We do things his way,” she said.
“Indeed,” Makoto said flatly. “So tell me, priest. How do we go about this?”
Nate looked at the tray, and at the cups, and at the attendant, and didn’t miss a beat.
“We do wine,” he said. “After.”
Makoto’s smile went even thinner. Joy watched him weigh it. She watched him decide, the way she’d watched him decide on the porch, and she could practically see him remind himself that he’d given his word.
“Very well,” he said, and waved the tray away.
“Eleven fifty-one,” hissed Mia.
Joy climbed the steps to stand across from Makoto, with Yin and the red umbrella one step behind her. Nate took his place between them at the top, with the shrine at his back and the sunlit rain coming down around all of them. He took off his sunglasses and tucked them into his cassock.
Yin and Sophie surreptitiously produced their phones and were taking pictures.
Wonderful, Joy thought. I’ll have something to remind me of this happy day.
Nate folded his hands, cleared his throat, and began.
It was Latin. Joy hadn’t kept up on her Latin since at least the fall of the Republic, so she had no idea what any of it meant. It sounded more like he was conducting an exorcism than a wedding, full of words ending in -us and -um, and Nate said it like he’d said it a hundred times before. A few of the foxes in the front row nodded along like they knew it too.
He turned to Joy, and gave her two words.
“Accipio te.”
Joy gave him another blank stare, something she was getting a lot of practice at tonight. Mia elbowed her.
“Repeat it,” she hissed.
“Accipio te,” said Joy, slowly and carefully, as if she were taking it very seriously. Something felt wrong in her mouth, like her teeth were getting in the way, but she ignored it, along with Mia’s face going pale as she looked at her.
Instead she turned to Makoto and gave what she assumed to be a bridal smile.
“Hope you brushed up on your Latin,” she said sweetly. “Screw up the vows and this whole thing is null and void!”
Makoto studied her. Then his eyes lit up as Joy watched him find what he thought was the trick. She’d picked a priest who spoke a dead language, one that probably didn’t come up much among ancient Japanese spirit animals.
“Well played, my bride!” he beamed. “I had wondered what trick you’d play, and I’m delighted to see you’ve found a clever one. Oh, I have chosen well indeed!”
“Save that bride business until you navigate the verbal maze our priest has in store for you. We managed to slip some real good ones in there, words he says only lawyers and wargamers use.”
Joy gave him a smug look, indicating it was his move.
“My bride,” said Makoto warmly. “I have copied the cry of every bird in Japan. I’ve spoken with the voices of generals, courtesans and emperors. I’ve recited the Chinese classics in the voices of those who wrote them and Buddhist scripture in the tongues of the far-off lands from which they originated.” He swept a hand toward Nate. “Please, Father. Begin.”
Nate and Joy exchanged a stricken look, and reluctantly, Nate began.
“Spondeo in fide mea…”
“Spondeo in fide mea,” said Makoto.
It was perfect. It wasn’t just the words. It was Nate’s voice, his exact voice, down to the slight flatness at the end of a phrase that Joy had heard every day for two years across their dorm room. Somebody in the crowd laughed in delight.
“…me fidelem fore amodo dominae meae…”
“…me fidelem fore amodo dominae meae…”
Joy lowered her head, her bridal hood obscuring her face.
Makoto saw it. His tails swayed with pleasure. He went on, and he got better, smoother, adding a little flourish here and there, enjoying himself enormously. Nate swallowed hard and continued.
“…et ei hominium integraliter observaturum, fide bona et sine dolo.”
“…fide bona et sine dolo,” said Makoto, and bowed to the crowd.
Joy let out a small, broken gasp.
Behind her, very quietly, Sophie said, “Oh, come on.”
Keiko elbowed her.
Something tugged at the base of Joy’s spine.
It wasn’t painful. It was more like a stitch coming loose. She felt the weight in her tail shift, and divide, and then the feeling of several things moving behind her, swaying happily.
The drum had stopped. The rain hadn’t. Joy could smell the hills again, stronger now, and she found she was having a hard time remembering why she wasn’t already on her way up into them. She wanted to run, play, chase butterflies and roll in the grass. Part of her felt Makoto was right, that did sound a lot better than anything she’d been doing.
But she remembered something else. Something about a plan. She’d had a plan. There had been a good part coming. It was starting to feel far away now.
Nate raised his hands over both of them.
“Ego vos declaro,” he said, “dominam et vassallum.”
He paused. Then he looked out over the crowd of foxes, and said, in English, loud and clear, so that nobody there could possibly misunderstand him:
“I now pronounce you Lord and Vassal!”
Nobody moved.
Somewhere in the crowd, a fox dropped his lantern. It rolled down the stone path, still glowing, and bumped to a stop against a bamboo stalk.
Then, breaking the silence, Sophie seemed to get the joke first and started laughing.
Makoto looked at Nate.
“Vassal,” he said.
“Vassal,” said Nate.
Makoto turned to look at Joy.
She watched it land on his face, all of it, all at once: the dare, the dead language, the bride clutching her chest while he showed off for his relatives. And it dawned on him that he’d been played. Joy hadn’t just bluffed without a single card to play. She’d tricked him into playing an entire game while the real gambit happened right under his nose.
It was the finest bluff he’d seen since he’d watched a monk fool the guards at Ataka in an age long past.
Then all nine of his tails fluffed straight out, and he laughed. It was the same surprised laugh from the porch, except bigger, and it kept going. A few of the foxes in the crowd started laughing too, uncertainly, and then less uncertainly.
“Oh, that was good,” said Makoto. He wiped his eyes with one sleeve. Then he went down on one knee on the shrine steps, and bowed his head. “My lord.”
Joy didn’t hear him.
The weight behind her had split again. And again. She could feel the tails now, each of them separately, the way she could feel her fingers, and every one of them was pointed at the hills. The rain was warm on her face. The sun was warm. Up the hill, behind the shrine, something small and quick ran through the bamboo, and she very badly wanted to chase it.
There was something she was supposed to say. She knew there was. It was right there. It had been very important about a minute ago, and it had words in it, and she could not, for the life of her, remember what any of the words were. Human speech seemed so cumbersome.
Makoto was still kneeling, watching her, with his head tilted.
She raised her head to sniff the air, and didn’t seem to notice the horrified looks on all her friends’ faces as they saw her.
The short one with the huge dark eyes was screaming something, but the words didn’t seem to land anymore. They were just noise.
Her thoughts drifted again to the hills. She could see them so clearly now. She just had to go to them. She took a step toward them on her new paws.
Then she felt somebody seize the front of her kimono, and a moment later she was struck hard on the side of her face. Joy blinked.
She looked down at the tear-streaked face of the dark-eyed girl, who was still clutching the front of her kimono with one hand, the other raised to slap her again.
“Danny! Please!” she sobbed.
It was Mia’s voice. Mia, at the zoo, crying in front of the okapi. Mia, at eight years old, standing at the end of Daniel’s bed in the dark. Nobody else in the world called her that. Nobody else would ever call her that.
All at once she remembered exactly who she was, and the hills could wait.
She looked down at Makoto, and grinned. It had a lot of teeth in it.
“Well, then,” said Makoto, smiling back up at her with every bit as many, “at least let me seal my oath to my new lord.”
He rose, and leaned in, very close, toward her mouth.
“I’m pretty sure,” said Joy, “if you kiss your Lord, you have to do the sword thing to yourself.”
Makoto stopped an inch from her face. Joy was staring straight at him. The far-off, vacant look in her eyes was gone, though it was clear it was in the process of trying to kick down the door Joy had slammed in its face.
“The sword thing.”
“You know.” Joy made a fist, put it to her own stomach, and pulled it sideways, sticking out a tongue that was longer than she remembered and making a theatrical “urk” noise. “The thing.”
“DANNY,” screamed Mia. “NOW!”
“Oh, right,” Joy said. “As your… Damiyo, I order you to change me back into a human!”
“Daimyo,” Nate said under his breath.
Somewhere above them, a great bell rang.
It was so deep Joy felt it in her teeth. It rang once, and the sound rolled out over the shrine and the bamboo and all the way down the hill, and before it had faded it rang again. Makoto put his palm flat against her forehead and bowed his head.
“As my lord commands.”
Three. Four.
Nothing happened.
Five. Six. Nobody in the crowd was breathing. Keiko had both hands over her mouth. Yin had let the red umbrella tip sideways, and the rain was falling on all of them.
Seven. Eight.
Behind her, Joy felt her ninth tail emerge. The hills and forests of the far-off place she’d been seeing rushed in and surrounded her.
Nine.
Ten.
Eleven.
Twelve.
The last note of the bell hung there for a long time, and then it was gone.
Joy looked down at the hair spilling over her shoulder.
At the roots, right up against her scalp, it was going pale. She watched it travel down the strands like water soaking into a paper towel, and behind it came the color she knew, strawberry blonde, and then the wave came back into it too, the same stubborn wave she’d been fighting with a wide-tooth comb for two months. Her tongue found her teeth, and they were once again the teeth Mr. and Mrs. Lockheed had spent a lot of money to keep straight. The weight at her back pulled together, every tail folding back into one, and then there was a small, sharp tug at her waist, like something clicking onto a belt.
She reached up with a hand that was back to its normal smooth, delicate self, though she couldn’t help noticing her nails were much longer than they had been that morning.
Her fingers closed on a gold faux-fur ear. It was cool. It was stiff, and wired so it wouldn’t flop.
She pulled the headband out of her hair, then raised it up like a conquering warrior displaying the head of a vanquished enemy.
Mia made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob and grabbed her around the middle, kimono and all.
The sun went out like somebody had turned off a lamp.
The bamboo shrank back into trees. The stone path went back to being asphalt with a crushed beer can on it. The shrine wavered, and was a big white house again, with a rented spotlight on the lawn and a clipboard at the bottom of the porch steps. All up and down Gayley, people were looking down at themselves and finding that they were bananas and zombies and inflatable dinosaurs again, and nobody seemed to know what to say about it.
Mia was a sheet ghost. Keiko had her turban back. Sophie had her mustache. Yin was Galois again, and clutched the letter to her chest with both hands like a pet that had gone missing and come home.
Joy was still wrapped in white silk, with foxes running all the way around the hem.
On the porch railing, in his dark kimono, with a single tail draped over the rail beside him, sat Makoto.
“Hey,” said Joy. “You forgot the kimono.”
“Did I?” Makoto looked very innocent. “You said to change you back, my lord. You didn’t say a thing about the kimono.”
Joy opened her mouth, and closed it again.
“It’s yours,” said Makoto. “A wedding gift. From your devoted servant.”
Joy hiked up a sleeve, balled a fist and, taking inspiration from Keiko’s grandma, took a step forward.
“I’ve got a wedding gift for you, you son of a…”
A bullhorn crackled on the lawn.
“Okay!” said the guy holding it. He did not sound like he’d had a great night either. “Okay. So, we were going to do the costume contest. The judges have, uh. The judges have conferred. And I think we can all agree that after… whatever that was…” He gestured vaguely at the entire street. “First place, and five hundred dollars, goes to the fox!”
Joy paused mid-haymaker, and looked up at the announcer. He looked back at Joy and Makoto and clarified.
“To the dude fox!”
He lowered the bullhorn and added apologetically to Joy.
“Sorry, we agreed that since you changed costumes midway, we had to disqualify you.”
There was a cheer. It wasn’t much of one, more that the shell-shocked crowd seemed to have decided it was that or confront what had just happened, and this was a lot easier. A bit confused himself, Makoto walked up and took the envelope. Before he could open it, Joy seized the other end.
“Oh, good timing!” she said, a bit of bitterness in her voice. “I was just about to mention the tribute you owe me as your Damiyo.”
“Daimyo,” Keiko sighed.
Makoto didn’t let go.
“Of course you’re correct, my lord. As your humble vassal, I do owe you tribute, and I shall see to it that it’s paid in the proper manner at once.”
Joy frowned. She didn’t like the sound of that.
“Uh, what do you mean by…”
“Until then, farewell, my beautiful and clever lord. I look forward to our next meeting!”
Joy was about to tell him exactly where he could go and what he could do when he got there, but then there was a gust of wind that smelled like dead leaves, and he was gone. For a moment Joy also caught a whiff of the far-off hills and forests and had a pang of longing to run and play in them, but her mind quickly stamped out the embers of what she’d nearly become.
Joy had some complicated emotions about what had just happened to her, and she ran through them as quickly as possible on the way to “I need a drink.”
She found herself at the improvised bar and, thinking back to Yin’s parasol, ordered the fruitiest thing they offered and drank it with shaking hands. She wasn’t sure if this had been a good evening or a bad evening, but right now she wanted to get enough alcohol in her so that she didn’t need to think about it.
In yet another surprise for the night, she looked over as Sophie sat down next to her with a drink of her own. She looked about as rough as Joy felt.
“There’s never a dull moment with you, is there, Cheerleader?”
“That seems to increasingly be the case,” Joy admitted, draining half of her drink in one pull.
“Not going to lie, it was pretty fun watching you put that fox in his place,” she said, draining a similar amount of her cup. “Pretty sure Yin had a good time too, though I think you could put her in a World War I trench and she’d love all the cute rats running around.”
Joy laughed. It was about the most fragile laugh she’d ever made, but she hadn’t realized how badly she needed it.
“Speaking of which, where is she? Figured she’d be with you.”
“Dunno, turned around after everything changed back and she was gone. Was going to look for her but then decided I wasn’t doing it sober.”
Joy nodded sympathetically and raised her cup, and Sophie bumped hers against Joy’s.
It was almost one when the two of them went looking for Nate and Yin.
They found them on the steps of the house next door, where they’d first met. Yin’s letter was sitting orphaned next to her, as both her hands were very busy in Nate’s hair. Neither of them seemed to have noticed that the night was over.
Joy and Sophie stood on the sidewalk and watched.
“Huh,” said Joy. “Good for them!”
“Took her long enough,” said Sophie.
“They met three hours ago.”
“Like I said.”
Joy couldn’t stop grinning.
“Should we tell them we’re leaving?”
Sophie looked at them with an uncharacteristically soft look on her face.
“Nah,” she said. “I think it’s only fitting somebody finds love this evening.”
Joy didn’t remember getting home. Whatever that drink had been, she’d decided it was good, and that one wasn’t enough to keep her from thinking about what she might have been doing right now had the evening not gone her way.
She remembered the stairs, sort of, and the door to the room, and the couch-bed coming up to meet her face. She remembered thinking she ought to take off the kimono, saying “to hell with that” into the mattress, and that was about it. She didn’t remember Mia putting a blanket over her, or sitting with her all night.
When she woke up, the sun was coming in through the blinds, and her face was stuck to a pillow, and she was still wrapped up in about forty pounds of white silk. Her head hurt, her mouth tasted unspeakable, and the first thing she did was awkwardly grope the top of her head to make sure she didn’t have any errant fox ears, and was relieved just to find her normal soft hair instead.
She sat up and saw Mia was sitting on the floor next to the couch-bed. Her duffel bag was packed and zipped beside her. She had her pink phone in her hand, and she was looking at Joy with a look that sobered her up faster than a shot of raw egg and Tabasco.
“Morning,” said Mia.
“Morning,” Joy said gingerly.
“You ready to talk to Mom and Dad?”
Joy opened her mouth. It seemed to stick.
She was going to say soon. She was going to say let me at least get out of the wedding dress first. She was going to say something about how it was early, she was hung over, and it was a lot, and maybe it would be better over Thanksgiving, in person, where she could explain properly.
She had a whole legion of bad excuses lined up. Mia, on the other hand, held up her phone like an army of war elephants descending from the Alps.
“Guess what,” said Mia brightly, and pressed a button. “Calling them now!”
“Mia!”
The phone rang once. Then their mom’s face filled the screen, a little too close, the way it always was, with the kitchen in Seattle behind her and the window full of gray morning, and their dad leaning in behind her shoulder with a coffee mug.
“Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!” said Mia.
“Hi, honey! You’re up early.” Their mom squinted. “Is that Daniel’s room? Is he up?”
Mia turned the phone around.
Joy sat on the couch-bed with her hair everywhere and a crease from the pillow across one cheek, in a white silk wedding kimono with foxes running around the hem, and looked at her parents with the same look she’d have given an oncoming train.
Her parents gave her a similar look.
Nobody said anything. Her dad slowly set down his coffee.
“Mia,” said her mom carefully. “Who’s your friend?”
“Mom, it’s Danny.”
“Hi, Mom,” Joy said miserably. “Hi, Dad.”
Her mom’s eyes went very wide. She studied Joy’s face. Then the hair. Then the face again, searching for something, and Joy didn’t know what she’d do if she couldn’t find it. Mia handed the phone over to Joy, who took it and looked down at her mom. Her mom leaned in even closer to the screen, which Joy hadn’t thought was possible.
“Are you eating?” she said.
Joy let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding for two months.
“Yes, Mom.”
“Mostly cereal,” said Mia.
“Shut up, Mia!” Joy snapped. “Don’t think I can’t chase you with a frog in this stupid dress.”
Joy’s mom looked at Joy in stunned silence for a moment and then put a hand to her mouth, closed her eyes and started shuddering. Joy went rigid, trying to think of anything that would keep her mom from crying. But then she stopped. Her mom was laughing.
“Oh, yeah, it’s you for sure, Daniel,” she said. “Nobody else could bicker with your sister like that. Move the phone up a bit, I want to see your hair!”
Her dad picked up his coffee again. He took a long sip, looking at her over the top of the mug the same way he’d look at the rosebushes out front deciding how to go about pruning them.
“Well,” he said. “I guess you’d better find yourself a nice rich guy, then. Your mother and I have always wanted a place in Hawaii.”
Her mom smacked him on the arm without looking. Then she sat back, and Joy watched her take a breath and decide something, the same way Mia did.
“I suppose this means I can start counting the days until I start hounding you about giving me grandchildren,” she said with a wry smile.
“That’s it?” said Joy, looking at her parents in disbelief.
“That’s what, sweetie?” her mom asked.
“I mean… like, I assumed finding out you now had another daughter would be a bit of a bigger deal.”
Her mom looked back at her dad, who pursed his lips as he looked for the right words.
“Daniel, we’ve been worried. We thought something bad might have happened to you, that you might be in some sort of trouble. All we knew is you didn’t want to talk to us about whatever it was.”
He paused, looking at Joy.
“You are okay, right?”
So it was going to be this kind of day, Joy thought. Mia had already ripped off one bandage, and, Joy reasoned, why stop there? She had a whole pile of stuff she had intentionally not thought about for the past two months, and that question was probably the biggest one in there. When she’d changed, when she saw her new face in the mirror for the first time, she’d told herself, I’m going to deal with this later. There had been more important things, more immediate issues that needed to be resolved. The paperwork, the tuition, getting shoes that fit, and then poker games, trees, sorcerers and the other nonsense that her transformation seemed to have opened the floodgates for and let pour into her life. And sitting here now she was increasingly unsure if this was her being practical or just running from something she desperately didn’t want to confront.
She wasn’t sure if it was the hangover, the slight existential dread that had carried over from last night, or one of a dozen other things, but Joy decided she was going to stop running, at least from this question.
She thought about it. She really thought about it as her mom, dad and Mia waited silently and patiently for an answer. Was she okay? She looked at the shadowed reflection of her face in the glare on the phone screen. The bright blue eyes staring back at her. She thought of the past two years, not much but hauling furniture, running track and studying. Then she thought of the past two months. It wasn’t just the crazy stuff. She thought about doing cheer practice with Keiko, Tiffany teaching her how to take care of her hair, having lunch with Yin and Sophie.
She’d lived more in the past two months than she had in the past two years. And she’d loved it. And she realized, with a deep, aching yearning she’d never felt before, not even sitting in that sorcerer’s mahjong palace about to make the riskiest bet of her life, that she wanted more. That she couldn’t go back to the way things had been. Even with the problems she now had, this new life was far too fun.
Her mom and dad were both staring at her, and they were both smiling.
Joy hadn’t realized she was smiling too. Not a small one, either.
Now her mom began to cry.
“Oh, sweetie, I’ve never seen you smile like that before,” she said through her hand.
“You always looked so serious,” her dad said. “Looks like you’re finally having a good time at college.”
Joy heard a sniffle and looked up to see Mia making the same face their mom was, a hand over her mouth and her eyes wet.
And they talked. Mia planted herself on the couch-bed next to her, and Joy told them what had happened to her. They didn’t fully understand, and at one point her dad suggested maybe asking Aunt Linda about it, and her mom rolled her eyes and said the last thing she wanted to do was get her sister involved.
Then the real question came up.
“Why are you wearing a wedding kimono?” her mom asked, then gasped. “Aw, was my little girl a beautiful bride for Halloween?”
“You’ve got no idea how close to the truth that was,” Joy said under her breath, and realized too late that she’d said it loud enough to hear.
“Wait, Daniel. Did you get married?”
“Technically, no,” Joy said, desperately looking for a way to walk things back.
“Technically,” said her dad, who now had a very thoughtful look on his face that worried Joy.
“There was a fox,” said Mia, “and I got to be a bridesmaid and…”
“Mia, I swear to god,” Joy said, as the two of them went back to bickering.
Her mom held up a hand, and both of them shut up, which was a thing she’d been able to do since they were small.
“Okay, enough, you two,” she said. “Daniel, we want to hear everything, but I don’t think over the phone is the right way to do it. You’re coming home for Thanksgiving, right?”
Joy’s first reflex was to try and find an excuse, but she rallied.
“Yeah. Yeah I’ll be coming home.”
“Okay. Then we’ll all talk about this in person. And Daniel…” She stopped. She seemed to hear herself say it. She went on anyway. “Do not let your grandmother find out about this until we’ve figured out what to tell her. You know how she is. She’ll have a stroke.”
“Yes, Mom.”
“Good girl.” Her mom held her eyes a moment longer. Her face did something complicated, and settled. “Love you, sweetheart.”
“Love you too, Mom.”
“Bye, kiddo,” said her dad, and raised the mug.
The screen went dark.
Joy fell back on the couch-bed and put the pillow over her face.
“See?” said Mia, very pleased. “That wasn’t so bad.”
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.” Mia grinned, hitting her with another pillow.
“How about just a little?” Joy asked, taking her beating with a smile and feeling lighter than air for reasons now wholly unrelated to nearly losing her humanity not twelve hours earlier.
Mia’s car was parked at the far end of the lot, with the new rims shining. Nate’s Corolla was pulling in two rows over, with what looked like everything he owned piled in the back seat, as Joy carried Mia’s duffel bag down. Mia had argued they were both girls now, so Joy shouldn’t have to do that, and Joy had flicked her in the forehead and said she was her big brother no matter what her anatomy had to say about it.
She was still in the kimono. She’d tried to get it off, and found out it was even more complicated than the original, and decided she was going to need either Nate or a box cutter to get out of it. A guy walking his dog stopped to stare at her. She waved at him.
Mia threw the duffel in her back seat and shut the door. Then she turned around, and before Joy could say anything, she threw her arms around Joy’s neck and hung on, hard, the same way she had the night she’d shown up at the door.
“Call Mom on Sundays,” Mia said into her shoulder.
“I will.”
“And eat something that isn’t cereal.”
“How about gummy bears?”
Mia let go. She stepped back and took Joy in, the whole of her, from the strawberry blonde hair down to the foxes on the hem. Then she smiled, a small one, with her lower lip pushed up into her upper one.
“Love you, Big Sis,” she said.
She got in the car and shut the door and started the engine before Joy could get a single word out, and pulled out of the lot with a little honk, and was gone up the street toward the freeway with all her keychain animals swinging from the ignition.
Joy stood there in the parking lot in a wedding kimono, with her mouth still open.
Nate came up beside her with a cardboard box in his arms. He glanced at the street, and then at her.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” said Joy, and found that she was. “So. How was the rest of your night, Father Nate?”
Nate turned a shade of red she had never seen on him before.
“Divine.”
They stared at each other for a moment, then both grinned and bumped fists.
He turned to head for his car. Then he stopped dead.
There was a fox asleep on the hood of the Corolla.
It was red-gold, and curled up in a tight ball in the morning sun, with its nose tucked under a long, full tail with a white tip. It was lying exactly in the middle of the hood, where the metal was warmest.
“You don’t suppose,” Joy began, “That that’s just some random fox. Here in LA. In the middle of the city. Who just happened to decide to take a nap, here, out in the open, on your car specifically.”
“No,” Nate said, giving the fox a hard look, not least because it was touching his car. “I don’t suppose.”
The fox opened one yellow eye. It looked at Nate. It looked at Joy. Then it shut the eye again, and went back to sleep.
Joy nodded, then nodded again, then pursed her lips and nodded a third time. She rolled up one long kimono sleeve and advanced on Nate’s car.
“I am not putting up with this shit two days in a row.”