I ignored that he’d snuck up on me again, just this once. There was a bigger issue at play.
In the book was an illustration of the group done up in bold lines and bright colors. There was Sun Wukong at the front, dressed in a beggar’s cassock, holding his Ruyi Jingu Bang in one hand and the reins of the Dragon Horse in the other. A scary-looking pig-faced man and a wide-eyed demon monk followed, carrying the luggage. And perched on top of the horse was . . . me.
The artist had tried to give Xuanzang delicate, beatific features and ended up with a rather girly face. By whatever coincidence, the drawing of Sun Wukong’s old master could have been a rough caricature of sixteen-year-old Eugenia Lo from Santa Firenza, California.
“That’s who you think I am?” I said to Quentin.
“That’s who I know you are,” he answered. “My dearest friend. My boon companion. You’ve reincarnated into such a different form, but I’d recognize you anywhere. Your spiritual energies are unmistakable.”
“Are you sure? If you’re from a long time ago, maybe your memory’s a little fuzzy.”
“The realms beyond Earth exist on a different time scale,” Quentin said. “Only one day among the gods passes for every human year. To me, you haven’t been gone long. Months, not centuries.”
“This is just . . . I don’t know.” I took a moment to assemble my words. “You can’t walk up to me and expect me to believe right away that I’m the reincarnation of some legendary monk from a folk tale.”
“Wait, what?” Quentin squinted at me in confusion.
“I said you can’t expect me to go, ‘okay, I’m Xuanzang,’ just because you tell me so.”
Quentin’s mouth opened slowly like the dawning of the sun. His face went from confusion to understanding to horror and then finally to laughter.
“mmmmphhhhghAHAHAHAHA!” he roared. He nearly toppled over, trying to hold his sides in. “HAHAHAHA!”
“What the hell is so funny?”
“You,” Quentin said through his giggles. “You’re not Xuanzang. Xuanzang was meek and mild. A friend to all living things. You think that sounds like you?”
It did not. But then again I wasn’t the one trying to make a case here.
“Xuanzang was delicate like a chrysanthemum.” Quentin was getting a kick out of this. “You are so tough you snapped the battleaxe of the Mighty Miracle God like a twig. Xuanzang cried over squashing a mosquito. You, on the other hand, have killed more demons than the Catholic Church.”
I was starting to get annoyed. “Okay, then who the hell am I supposed to be?” If he thought I was the pig, then this whole deal was off.
“You’re my weapon,” he said. “You’re the Ruyi Jingu Bang.”
I punched Quentin as hard as I could in the face.
13
I will admit to being an angry person. Certain things I get upset about. Certain things are worth getting upset about.
But never in my life had I felt as furious as when Quentin called me the Ruyi Jingu Bang.
The volcanic surge of bile rising in my throat collided with a skull-cleaving headache going in the opposite direction. I was bisected by the pain of my anger. Blinded by it. My vision went.
The best way I could describe it was like my life’s work had been doused with gasoline and set on fire. I didn’t have a life’s work yet, but that’s how I felt.
“Genie,” Quentin said from a million miles away. I could barely hear him.
“Genie,” he said again, tapping me on my wrists. “Let up a bit.”
He was coming in garbled, on helium. The lights gradually turned back on.
I had bodily thrown him onto the table. My hands were wrapped around his neck. I was strangling him so hard that I could feel my fingernails beginning to bend.
“Please stop doing that,” he coughed. “You’re one of the few things in the universe that can hurt me.”
“Good.” I squeezed harder.
I couldn’t explain why I was behaving this way. Calling me the Ruyi Jingu Bang should have meant nothing. It should have been a non sequitur, like walking up to a stranger and saying, “Hello my good fellow, did you know you are a 1976 Volkswagen Beetle?” I was overreacting in a way that lent credence to a zero-percent scenario.
Quentin managed to loosen my grip on his throat enough for his face to return to its normal color. “Can we talk about this?”
He slid off the table and got back to his feet. I only let him go because I didn’t want to give my impending speech to a corpse. He wanted to talk? Sure. I was going to go Supreme Court on his ass and hammer home an articulate, lengthy, and logical rebuttal to his claim of me being the reincarnated Ruyi Jingu Bang.
“I hate you,” I said instead.
I poked my finger into his chest as hard as my joints would take.
“I hate you,” I said again. That was all I was capable of, it seemed.
He slowly put his hands up and began backing away. “Why?”
I wouldn’t let him get away so easily. “Because,” I said. “I don’t need a reason. People don’t need a reason to hate things. And I am people.”
I kept jabbing him over and over as he retreated, trying to drive home the message like a spear point.
“I am a human person,” I snarled. “I am not the Ruyi Jingu Bang. I am not a freaking stick, do you hear me?”
“Um, Genie,” Quentin said, looking down awkwardly.
I hadn’t noticed that I’d been continuously poking Quentin in the chest from where I stood, even though he’d now backed all the way across the room.
My arm had stretched out to follow him. My arm was twenty feet long.
There’s a moment when you realize that you’ve never been truly scared before. It wasn’t when I’d met Quentin, and it wasn’t when I’d been introduced to the Demon King of Confusion. Those times were apparently just practice.
“AAAAAAAAA!” I screamed. “WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?!”
“I didn’t do anything!” Quentin screamed back. “Put it back before someone sees us!”
I was too terrified to move my elongated arm for fear that it would shatter under its own ridiculous proportions. “It’s too big!” I said, waving at it with my other hand. “Make it smaller! Make it go down!”
“I can’t! You have to do it yourself!”
“I don’t know how!”
By now footsteps were coming down the hall toward us. I could hear teachers’ voices. If they sounded upset now, they hadn’t seen anything yet.
Quentin realized I wasn’t going to do much other than hyperventilate. He ran over and grabbed me by the waist. Then he rolled up the window behind us and jumped straight out of it. I could feel my arm accommodating his trajectory by bending in places where I didn’t have joints.
I saw nothing but cloudless blue sky as Quentin hauled me up the sheer brick side of the building. It didn’t fully register that he was dangling me two stories off the ground as he scampered up the school walls. I had, believe it or not, even worse things to worry about.
The ascent was over in a split second. Quentin reached the roof and unceremoniously dumped me onto the asphalt. We were safely out of sight for the moment.