The lamp worked.
That was the first thing Joy saw when she opened her eyes Wednesday morning, Nate’s desk lamp, reassembled, on, and pointed at a textbook like nothing had ever happened to it. Nate was under it with his glasses on. She squinted her eyes and sat up wondering why Nate would need a lamp this early, but then the patter of raindrops against their window and no light of note coming in through the drawn curtains gave her her answer.
Last night’s winnings sat in a pile of bills in various states of distress on her desk where she’d put them the night before, squared up into a neat little stack that she was fairly sure she hadn’t left neat.
She reached over the front of the bunk, stretched valiantly, and finally plucked a ten from the pile and, proffered it to Natte.
Nate looked at it, frowning.
“I gave you a five.”
“And this is your share of the winnings!”
Nate hesitated, then took it.
“So,” he said.
“So.”
“Two hundred and twenty-five.”
“You counted.”
“I counted.” He turned a page. “You came in with twenty-five.”
“Kevin already did this bit.”
“I’m doing it again.” He looked up. “Nine times.”
“I know.”
“And now there’s a game Thursday.”
“Keiko told you.”
“Keiko told me last night. She was very loud about it.” He took the glasses off, which meant he was done with the textbook for now. “Two hundred buy-in.”
“Yeah.”
“In Culver City.”
“Yeah.”
“With people you don’t know.”
“Theo knows them.”
“And you don’t know Theo.”
“I’ve played with him three times!”
Nate gave him a look.
She sat down on the couch-bed and tucked a leg under. It was becoming a habit, the leg thing, and she hadn’t decided how she felt about it, and there was a lot of that going around.
“Okay,” Nate said. “Honest question.”
“Go.”
“What do you get out of this?”
She opened her mouth to answer and found she didn’t have one. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to tell him, she’d shared way weirder stuff than this. She just couldn’t put it to words. There was the card in Kevin’s hand, and the half-second, and the feeling that it was both things at once, and she didn’t have a word for any of that and she could tell from his face that “it was fun” wasn’t going to cover it. But an echo of the feeling she’d had in her stomach last night returned and she knew she needed to get it back.
“I’ll tell you when I figure it out,” she said.
He nodded, slowly, the way he nodded when he’d asked a question and gotten a real answer, even if it wasn’t a useful one.
“You know what two hundred and fifteen dollars buys?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Shoes. Actual shoes. Pants that go all the way down.” He was counting on his fingers. “A bra that isn’t Keiko’s, which she mentions wants back before you, and a quote “ruin it forever”. A shirt with your whole stomach inside it. That’s about two hundred and fifteen dollars, if you go to Target and don’t get fancy.”
“I know.”
“Or one poker game.”
“I know.”
“You’re going to the poker game.”
“Yeah.”
He put the glasses back on. “Okay.”
That was the whole conversation. She’d expected - she wasn’t sure what she’d expected. Something with more friction in it. But he’d asked the question and she’d given him the answer and he’d written it down somewhere in his head, and now he was reading about containerization, or some other IT concept Joy could never wrap her head around. And that was apparently that.
The rest of Wednesday passed without incident.
She tried to run before class, in the slides, and got about a hundred yards before realizing the slides were the least of her problems.
She went to class in Keiko’s capris, sat in the back, and discovered that the professor who had called on Daniel by name for two quarters could now get only as far as “Yes, Miss…um….” The guy she usually sat next to had moved close enough that their elbows touched and spent ten minutes trying to lend her a pen she already had.
She ate at Bruin Plate on the last of Nate’s meal swipes, because her own card was still flagged and, and she found that the flag could be cleared in person at a desk in Dogwood that was open for one hour on Tuesdays, and she wrote that down. It was that or go back to Admissions and Records and talk to that clerk again, and she decided she’d starve before she did that.
She put the two hundred in a sock in her drawer and didn’t look at it.
When Nate returned from his classes, he said, “I’m driving you.”
He said it the way he said everything - flat, to the lamp, while doing something else. Not a question. Not an offer.
“Oh, you don’t have to, I can-”
She stopped.
She wasn’t sure why she stopped. It just seemed like the rest of the sentence didn’t want to come out, and Nate wasn’t looking at her, and after a second she found that she didn’t especially want to finish it.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.”
And that was that. He went back to whatever it was.
Keiko showed up late Thursday afternoon with Tiffany in tow.
Joy knew Tiffany the way you knew anyone on the floor. She was a face, a name, a general sense of what her deal was. About all she knew was that she and Keiko were friends, her deal was ballet, and she stood like someone was holding a string attached to the top of her head. She could and would pirouette on command. Her hair was longer than Joy’s had become, and she had a way of looking at things through her glasses as if she was about to give them a scolding.
“Joy, meet Tiffany!” Keiko exclaimed, barging into her and Nate’s room.
“I know Tiffany,” Joy said, looking up from the couch-bed.
Tiffany gave a nervous smile, looking between Joy and Keiko while clutching the garment bag she was carrying to her chest a little tighter.
“Um…sorry, I don’t think I know you.” In her typical soft and slightly nervous voice.
Both Joy and Keiko looked at her and could see the telltale signs of panic building up on Tiffany’s face. A casual social faux pas was attaining critical mass in her head.
“Sorry, I was Daniel,” Joy quickly interjected, shooting Keiko a look. “Why didn’t you tell her?”
Keiko gave a sheepish grin.
“Oops.”
Tiffany noticeably sagged with relief.
“Oh, I was wondering who the new girl Keiko said needed to borrow some clothes.” She adjusted her glasses. “But I can’t believe that’s you, Daniel! You’re so pretty!”
Joy took the compliment and looked over to Keiko.
“Mind explaining to either of us what’s going on?”
“Oh yeah!” Keiko said. “I had a good think about it and realized that Tiffany is probably closer to your size, so maybe you could borrow some of her stuff.”
“That makes sense,” Tiffany said, holding out the garment bag. “Sorry if they aren’t your style. I kinda had to work with the information I had.”
She shot Keiko another look for emphasis.
Joy wasn’t sure what her style was. Right now anything that actually fit would be a big win.
The moment Tiffany unzipped the garment bag, her nervousness found purpose. She handed Joy three possibilities, rejected one herself, and defended another until Joy demonstrated that she couldn’t take a full stride in it.
“Fine,” Tiffany said, with the air of somebody accepting an injury substitution. “Green top. Black skirt.”
Joy came out of the bathroom in a black skirt that stopped above the knee, a dark green top that was fitted in a way none of her shirts had ever been fitted, and shoes with about an inch of heel on them. She stood in the doorway and did what she’d done on Tuesday, which was assess.
Before she could speak, Tiffany crossed the room, straightened one shoulder seam, and pressed two fingers between Joy’s shoulder blades.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re slouching.”
“I live like this.”
“Not in that top you’re not.”
“Can I sit in this?”
“Yes.”
“Can I run in this?”
“Why would you need to run?”
“I’m asking.”
Tiffany considered it. “I wouldn’t.”
“Can I fight in it?”
“What?” Keiko shot both Nate and Keiko concerned glances.
“Hey, guys think about these things.”
“Joy.”
“Ok, ok!” Joy took two experimental steps and turned. “Stairs?”
“Stairs are fine.”
“Stairs down?”
“Stairs down are-” Tiffany stopped, and Joy watched her do the honest arithmetic, because Tiffany could not do any other kind. “Hold the rail.”
“And if somebody sets the building on fire.”
“Then you are going to have a bad night in a nice skirt,” Tiffany said, “the same as everybody else there,” and went to find the shoes, and Joy decided she liked her enormously.
“Okay.” Joy walked the length of the room and back. The heels were fine as long as she thought about them, which meant they were going to be a problem the moment she stopped thinking about them. She walked it again, faster. Then she did it again and took the last two steps at something approaching a jog, pivoted on the ball of one foot, and stopped.
Tiffany had both hands up.
“Don’t.”
“I’m finding the edges.”
“You are wearing my shoes.”
“If I don’t find the edges now I’m going to find them in a stairwell in Culver City.” Joy came up onto her toes, held it, and came down. “Okay. Two problems. I can’t stop fast, and I can’t go backwards at all.”
“Nobody goes backwards.”
“Tiffany, people go backwards constantly, it’s like a third of walking-”
“Nobody,” said Tiffany, who had spent fifteen years in a ballet studio learning to move correctly and was now watching all of it get reinvented badly in ninety seconds, “goes backwards.”
Joy decided to not argue with the girl whose clothes she was wearing and asked, “Where does the money go?”
Tiffany produced a small black bag on a thin strap and handed it over without comment.
Joy put the two hundred in it and then held it and didn’t know what to do with her hands. She’d never had a strap before.
“Sit,” Tiffany said. “I’m doing your hair.”
“Keiko already-”
“Uh.” Tiffany glanced over at Keiko, who to the best of Joy’s knowledge didn’t even own a comb. “I’m doing your hair.”
It took twenty minutes. Tiffany didn’t speak for most of it, and when she did it was to herself. She made constant small corrections while she worked something through the mass of it that Joy couldn’t see and didn’t ask about. At one point she stopped, and came around to the front, and looked at Joy’s face for a while the way she’d look at a position she wasn’t sure about.
“You know,” she said. “I still see a lot of your old self in you.”
“Tiffany, I have freckles now.” Joy said, pulling her shirt collar down over her shoulder for emphasis.
Tiffany looked a moment longer, adjusted her glasses, then conceded the point and went back around.
Keiko had been on the couch-bed the whole time with her feet up, not saying much, which for Keiko was something of a minor miracle. She had a habit of becoming mindlessly destructive when bored, like a house cat that wants somebody to play with it. When Tiffany finished and stepped back, she had pinned the front of Joy’s hair away from her face and somehow persuaded the unfamiliar mass of waves to fall instead of expand.
Keiko’s mouth opened. Nate stopped turning a screw. Tiffany, who had been correcting things for twenty minutes, found nothing else to correct.
“Wow,” Keiko said.
Nate had been looking at her since Tiffany stepped back. He looked a while longer, and then said, “Hmm.”
“Hmm?”
“I’m thinking.”
“About?”
“That one way or another you’re going to have one hell of a story to tell after tonight.” He picked up his keys. “Which is either great or terrible. Time to go.”
Nate’s car was a 2011 Corolla that had belonged to his mother, and then his sister, and was one missed oil change away from dying spectacularly. It smelled like the little tree hanging from the mirror and, underneath that, like a hundred meals she and Nate had eaten in it. He drove it the way he did everything; carefully and with both hands, thinking about it.
Culver City was twenty minutes away. Neither of them said much. She spent it working out how to sit in the skirt, which turned out to be a different problem from standing in it, and somewhere on Venice Boulevard she gave up and just sat.
“Text me when you’re in,” Nate said. “Text me when you’re out. If you’re not out by two I’m coming in.”
“Yes Dad.”
Nate responded by way of hand gesture.
The house was on a side street off Overland, and it was just a house. That was the thing. She’d been picturing something, she wasn’t sure what. A warehouse, a fist fight out front, a guy at the door cracking his knuckles menacingly? It was a two-story stucco home with a lemon tree in the yard and a Prius in the driveway and a porch light on. There was a kid’s bike leaned against the garage. Someone had put out the recycling.
Theo was on the porch, waiting, in the same jacket from the other nightt.
Nate pulled to the curb and put it in park.
“Still not too late to back out.”
“Worst case it’s one of those Triad gambling operations and I wind up short a kidney.”
“Why do I get the impression that wouldn’t dissuade you.”
Joy had been thinking about it the whole way over, but that prickle in her stomach had gotten stronger throughout the day as the game drew nearer.
“Nah, we’re doing this.”
She got out. The heels found the sidewalk, and she thought about them, and they held.
“Two,” he said.
“Two.”
Theo came down the steps. He nodded at Nate, looked at her outfit, and then at her, and for the first time since she’d known him something in his face moved.
“Okay,” he said. “Wow, really going full hustle tonight?”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s great.” He held the door. “I can’t wait to see their faces.”