His saliva spattered against my cheek. I shut my eyes, screamed my lungs out, and kicked him as hard as I could.
It felt like I completely whiffed, which should have been impossible given how big he was. But the stench abated. I looked up to see an expression of complete shock on the man’s face as he backpedaled away, a foot-size chunk missing from his flank. Black goo dripped from the wound onto the sidewalk.
He and I must have shared the same bewilderment at that moment. Look buddy, I’m as confused as you.
“Don’t touch her!” Quentin roared, taking advantage of his opponent’s distraction to make his flying reentry. He dropped from the sky onto the man’s platform-like shoulders and the two of them spiraled away into the street.
Despite their injuries, the fight wasn’t over by a long shot. The giant managed to get Quentin at both arms’ length and smashed him into the ground repeatedly like he was trying to open a coconut. I thought Quentin was dead from the first impact alone, but his legs snaked out and wrapped around the man’s neck. He pulled the man’s head into his abdomen and began strangling him with his whole body, all while being bounced against the pavement so hard I could see an outline of his shoulders on the ground where they blew away the dust.
The giant kept ramming Quentin into the earth, but his strength started to flag, especially since he was still bleeding heavily from his side. His knees buckled and he fell to the ground like a chain-sawed oak. Quentin maintained the chokehold until the man in black stopped moving, and then some.
Finally he scooted out from under his opponent. Then, without hesitating, Quentin clambered onto the man’s back and grasped his chin and the top of his head.
“Wait, no!” I shrieked once I realized what he was going to do.
With a twist of his arms, he broke the man’s neck.
Quentin looked up at me, breathing heavily.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“No,” I whispered. “No no no.”
“Genie, please,” he said, reaching toward me. “I can explain—”
I wasn’t listening. I was too busy staring at what was happening to the giant’s corpse.
It was dissolving. Into the air. The dead man’s body suddenly resembled a still-wet painting dunked into a tank of water, the colors and hues that made up his existence bleeding away into a surrounding liquid.
His body silently burst into a great splash of ink. Spouting swirls of his former mass chased each other in all directions like calligraphy strokes until they faded into invisibility.
Nothing remained of him. Even his blood, including the half that had been splattered all over Quentin, was gone.
Quentin waved his hand over where the body had been. “I, uh, can explain that, too.”
No he couldn’t.
I didn’t waste another word. I just ran, and ran, and ran.
8
I arrived home in a daze, trying to figure out what to do.
Mom wasn’t going to be any help in this situation. I passed her in the kitchen without a word. That little slight would probably snowball into a future screaming match between us at a time yet to be determined.
I climbed the stairs to my room. Once I got there I sank into my desk chair, my head in my hands.
Taptaptap.
I could have tried to call the cops again on our landline, but what was I going to say? That my classmate fought with some kind of runaway circus experiment, killed him in cold blood, and that I helped? That I had no evidence any of this happened, because the victim self-liquefied somehow?
Taptaptaptap.
The bigger problem was Quentin. I didn’t know if I was next on his list of people to murder, or if he had a list, or if he was trying to initiate me into his gang. I mean, if he’d just stop knocking on my window for one second, I could think straight—
Taptaptaptaptaptap.
I fell out of my chair. Quentin hovered outside the glass with a pleading look on his face. The worst part was that in my current state I couldn’t even remember if we had a tree there for him to stand on.
He slid the window up and clambered inside. “Silence,” he said.
“Mom!” I shouted, crawling backward on my butt. “Help!”
“This isn’t what you think! Let me explain.” He got down on his knees to look at me on my level. It was more terrifying than reassuring.
“Mom!” She was just downstairs. Why wasn’t she answering?
Quentin began kowtowing in submission, knocking his skull against the floor. It only added to the commotion in my room.
“Please,” he said. “I’m not a danger to you, and I can prove it. Give me a chance. If you don’t like what you hear, you can do as you will. You can even take my head if you wish.”
“I don’t want your head!” I said. “What is it with you and murder? You killed a man back there!”
“That wasn’t a human being. That was a demon. A yaoguai. If the two of us weren’t there to stop him, he could have slain this entire town!”
I was going to tell him that was stupid, but remembering the man in black’s hulking form and monstrous visage made me seize up in post-traumatic fear. He could very well have been right on that point.
Quentin sensed my hesitation. “And I didn’t kill him in the sense you’re thinking of. I only sent his evil spirit back to Diyu, where it belonged.”
“Diyu? You mean Chinese Hell? That doesn’t make any sense!”
“It will once I tell you my real name!”
So he’d been operating under a false identity this whole time to boot? Wonderful. I couldn’t wait to see how much deeper he was going to dig this hole.
“Go ahead,” I said, groping behind me for any heavy, hard object I could find to clock him with. “Tell me your real name and we’ll see if that makes it all better.”
Quentin took a deep breath.
“My true name,” he said, “ . . . is SUN WUKONG.”
A cold wind passed through the open window, rustling my loose papers like tumbleweed.
“I have no idea who that is,” I said.
Quentin was still trying to cement his “look at me being serious” face. It took him a few seconds to realize I wasn’t flipping out over whoever he was.
“The Sun Wukong,” he said, scooping the air with his fingers. “Sun Wukong the Monkey King.”
“I said, I don’t know who that is.”
His jaw dropped. Thankfully his teeth were still normal-size.
“You’re Chinese and you don’t know me?” he sputtered. “That’s like an American child not knowing Batman!”
“You’re Chinese Batman?”
“No! I’m stronger than Batman, and more important, like—like. Tian na, how do you not know who I am!?”
I didn’t know why he expected me to recognize him. He couldn’t have been a big-time actor or singer from overseas. I never followed mainland pop culture, but a lot of the other people at school did; word would have gotten around if we had a celebrity in our midst.
Plus that was a weird stage name. Monkey King? Was that what passed for sexy among the kids these days?
Quentin let go of his temples and began unbuttoning his shirt.