“Then it’s an easy decision, right?” Dad said. “You have to pick and choose your battles. Fight too much and you’ll wear yourself out.”
Dad smiled at me. “You take everything so seriously. You’re still young, you know? I feel like I have to remind you every so often or you’d forget. Your future’s not going to be set in stone because of what happens today.”
His certainty, the same certainty that had gotten him into so much trouble, flowed out to me like a balm. He couldn’t conceive of my failure, of my unhappiness. All my faults lay buried deep within his mile-wide blind spots, where I could pretend they didn’t exist.
I didn’t love my dad more than my mom. But it was hard not to think of him as my favorite person in the world sometimes.
“Is that who I think it is?” said a booming voice behind us.
I turned to see two of the gym’s trainers—Brian and K-Song—quickstep over.
“Miss Loooo!” Brian hooted. “Whaddup whaddup?”
I traded high fives with the two bros like we were three bros. They knew me from previous visits.
“Hot damn, girl, you’re even taller than I remember!” K-Song said.
“She’s a beanpole!” Brian roared. “We got to get you in the cage! Strong is the new skinny! A lady with your length could be putting up two plates!”
I laughed. Brian always said the same thing every time I visited. He was a great proponent of women lifting heavy, but he had a hard time convincing the clientele. His biker beard and tattooed cannonball shoulders probably scared them off. Sleek, hairless K-Song was more trusted by the ladies.
These two random coworkers of my dad’s were oddly the only people I didn’t get pissed at for commenting on my body. They were meatheads, sure, but they were the most well-meaning, least snarky meatheads I knew. They thought of my flesh purely in terms of its output and potential.
“I got your pops pulling one-thirty,” K-Song bragged. He slapped Dad on the shoulder. “New PR.”
“Pfft. One-thirty sumo,” Brian said, rolling his eyes.
“IPF legal, dickbag!” K-Song shouted back. “Get with the times!”
The two started arguing viciously about the merits of different deadlift techniques. It would be resolved around the same time as the heat death of the universe.
I turned to my dad. “I’m gonna go.”
“Give my best to Mom,” he said, his eyes shining at me.
I rushed forward and gave my father one last hug. I would see him again soon. In the meantime, it would be back to trying my hardest not to turn out anything like him.
23
I left the gym and went around the corner to where Quentin was waiting. It wasn’t him stalking me—in a moment of weakness, I’d called him during the cab ride after leaving Anna’s and he promised he could meet me soon, regardless of the distance. Better to think about demons than my future.
I laughed as I walked up to him. He’d taken some of my advice to heart. He was still wearing his school uniform, but with a gigantic chunky candy-cane-striped scarf around his neck and shoulders.
“What?” he said. “It was cold.”
The look actually worked, in a Tokyo-street-fashion sort of way. Another instance of beautiful people looking beautiful, no matter what.
“I was waiting at Viscount and Second,” Quentin groused. “You told me the wrong address.”
“This is New Viscount and Second, and no I didn’t. Anyway, I’ve been thinking. I have a theory about you and where you come from.”
“Which is?”
“Scientists say once it becomes possible to create computer simulations of reality, simulated universes will vastly outnumber real ones,” I said. “Heaven and Earth are both virtual realities. Beings like you and Guanyin use different number values for things like gravity and light, so when you’re inserted into the Earth simulation, you bring your own laws of physics into localized surroundings. That’s how you do magic.”
Quentin raised an eyebrow.
“It explains everything,” I argued. “Earth time passes faster because our clock speed is faster. Reincarnation is when the source code for a person is pasted into a different era.”
“That is the nerdiest thing I have ever heard,” Quentin said. “Even coming from you.”
I shrugged. He wasn’t wrong.
“I have a theory about you, too.” He brought his hands out from behind his back. In one he held a cup of bubble tea he’d already finished drinking, and in the other was a coffee.
“Thanks, but I’ve already had some.”
“Have more. I want your heart racing.”
I took the still-hot cup from him and sniffed it gingerly. It smelled divine. “This is for your theory?”
“Yes. I may have taken the wrong approach with your training by asking you to attain stillness.”
The coffee tasted like rainy mountains and toasted honey. I’d have to ask him where he got it.
“Yours is a power born of battle,” Quentin said as I drank. “Rage. Bloodlust.”
“Way to make me sound like a monster.”
“You’re as much of a monster as I am. The only times your power has manifested so far have been when you were absolutely furious. We shouldn’t run away from that. We should embrace it.”
“That is the complete opposite of everything you’ve told me, and everything I’ve read about gongfu.”
“That’s because most teachers and disciples are focused on the aspects of soft power. Wavy, flowing soft power that redirects instead of confronts. There’s hard power, too. The kind that moves in straight lines and overcomes instead of giving way. It’s just as valid and just as essential.
“In my hands you were the living embodiment of hard power,” Quentin continued. He looked nostalgic. “We’ll double down on that instead of trying to suppress it.”
“Won’t that throw my yin and yang energies off balance? I thought balance was an important concept.”
“Screw balance,” he said. “What are you, old?”
I grinned and banked our empty cups into a nearby recycling can. No I was not.
Quentin motioned me into the alleyway where no one could see us. He held out his arms.
“Hop on.”
“What?”
“I’m going to hold you for a moment, as an exercise. Carry you.”
I shook my head. He was acting like he wanted me draped across his arms bridal-style but wasn’t considering our relative proportions. I would have dangled all the way down past his knees.
“Will you stop fighting me on every single little thing and get in my arms?” he hissed. “I have to lift you up completely for this to work! Just trust me for once!”
Well fine, if he was going to be pouty about it. I spun him around, ignoring his protests, and made him lean over so I could get on top of him piggyback.
This wasn’t much better. I had to straighten my legs out to the side and hold them there or else my soles would’ve touched the ground. I felt like I was riding a child’s tricycle downhill.
Quentin shifted me around for a better grip as easily as if I were a sack of feathers. Unfortunately his hands landed where they weren’t supposed to.
“Hey!” I yelped. “You’re grabbing my aaaaAAAAAAAAAHHHH!”
Then we disappeared into the sky.
24