It felt as if I’d been run over by a dozen trucks. My body hurt where I’d been hit, sure, but I also seemed to have self-torn every muscle fiber I had.
One down, ninety-nine to go, I thought to myself. If the remaining bottles of beer on the wall were going to be similarly hard, then I did not like my chances of emerging unscathed from this mess.
I staggered over to Quentin, who was only now coming out of his daze.
“Way to be useful, chief,” I deadpanned, slapping my hand on his shoulder. I kept it there for support, so I didn’t topple over in the next breeze.
Quentin scrunched his eyes. “I could see you two, but you were always just out of reach.”
He draped my arm over his neck and dragged me to the stairs. We took each step slowly.
“To think you beat her completely on your own,” he said. “You were amazing.”
“I was lucky. You have got to teach me wushu. I can’t handle not knowing what to do in these situations.”
“I keep telling you, I don’t know any formal martial arts. If you want these fights to get any easier, we should work on shape-changing you back into a staff so I can wield you like I used to.”
I smacked him on the chest with my load-bearing arm.
“That’s gross,” I said. “Wield me? No.”
“We did it all the time back in the day! It would only be temporary.”
“I’m not transforming into anything else. If everything you’ve told me is true, then I must have worked my ass off as the Ruyi Jingu Bang in order to get a human body. I’m not throwing it away just so you have a blunt object to beat on people with.”
Quentin grumbled but gave up the argument. At least for the moment. He took me to the first floor, a much smaller room. The little girl sat in the corner on a pile of rubber hose, nervously chewing on his scarf.
She saw us and burst into tears. I kneeled in front of her and tried to pat her head soothingly. The cut on her cheek was clean and not too deep. Other than that she wasn’t injured.
“La llorona,” the girl sobbed. “La llorona.”
Crud. “Uh, todo bien,” I said. “Nosotros . . . ganamos? Todo bien, todo bien.”
Quentin picked the girl up and hushed her, swinging gently back and forth. She calmed down immediately. I’d forgotten how much of a wizard he was with children.
“La mala mujer se ha ido,” he murmured. “Ella ha sido derrotado. Vamos a traer a tu mama. Duerme ahora, preciosa.”
The girl nodded into his shoulder and fell asleep.
I gave Quentin a look. He shot one back.
“What?” he said. “I talk to non-Chinese people too, you know.”
25
I don’t remember how I got home after we snuck the girl into the fire station. I don’t remember how we did that without getting caught, either. Events were lost in a haze of exhaustion.
Mom usually gave me some wiggle room on when I returned from the city due to the vagaries of public transportation, but this evening was pushing it. I was only able to end her angry harangue by telling her I had run into Quentin on the walk back through town and stopped to chat. Her hypocrisy between me hanging out with “boys” as a vague concept versus an individual boy she knew and liked was astounding.
I ate a reheated dinner, showered any remaining demon residue off my skin, and collapsed in bed. I would never leave my mattress again.
But I couldn’t sleep.
I slipped my hand out from the mound of covers and groped around for the replacement clamshell phone I’d been forced to use after Quentin crushed my real one. There was a message from my dad, just his usual ping about how glad he was to see me. There were status updates from Yunie trailing into a long, one-sided thread that made me laugh. She knew that I went into the city for these appointments and wasn’t always online.
I scrolled past all of the messages and dialed Quentin while lying on my side. We were going full middle-school.
“What’s up?” he said.
It was noisy on his end. “Why is it noisy on your end?”
“I’m at a casino off the highway.”
“What?” I had to stop myself from speaking at full volume so as not to wake up Mom. “Why?”
“I’m earning money. I need cash to fit in and move around human society. Plus I don’t need as much sleep as you do, and it’s a decent way to kill time.”
It shouldn’t have been weird that he was blowing off steam by gambling; there were more ads for the local casinos written in Chinese than in English. But his teasing from before had been on point. It did feel strange, knowing that he did things without me.
“Did you just want to talk?” he asked.
I didn’t have an answer. As cheesy as it was, maybe I simply wanted to know that I could hear him and that he could hear me, for a while.
“What’s Heaven like?” I said to break the silence. “Is it nice?”
“It’s very nice. Everything about Heaven is nice. There is nothing ugly, sick, or out of place in Heaven.”
Whoops. From the shift in his voice I could tell we had started off heavy for a simple chitchat.
“Being allowed inside was everything I wanted for a very long time,” he said. “When they let me through the door, I thought I would finally become content. At peace with myself. And then . . . well, you know what happened. Technically you were there, even if you don’t remember it.”
If the legend was true, then I’d been the instrument of the Monkey King’s wrath in Heaven after he realized he was nothing but a second-class citizen among the gods. The moral of the tale was probably supposed to be that patience and good manners were more important than power. But what I took from it was that the people in charge could withhold respect from you, and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it.
“Can I see Heaven? Can you take me there?”
“Absolutely not,” Quentin said sharply. “It’s too dangerous for a normal person born of Earth. Your base humanity would be scorched away by the excess of qi energies, leaving only your spiritual essence behind. Genie Lo would be gone, and only the Ruyi Jingu Bang would remain. Forever.”
“That’s not what you would prefer? You’d get to fight with your stick like you used to, without any backtalk.”
“Don’t twist my words. Even if I took you to Heaven now, any powers you haven’t recovered in your current human form would be lost forever. You’ve got strength and true sight, sure, but there are still a few tricks you haven’t remembered yet.”
“Well, if you didn’t want your magic iron staff back immediately when we first met, what exactly were you hoping for when you came to my school?”
Quentin sighed and took a sip of some unknown drink, the ice cubes clinking against his glass.
“I was hoping you’d recognize an old friend,” he said. “I assumed the memories would come rushing back and you’d be so happy to see me that you’d take my hand right there in class and I don’t know . . . we’d run off and have an adventure or something. Go exploring, like back in the day.”
“Ha! You wanted to sweep me off my feet. Dork.”
I could practically hear him blush through the receiver.