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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, bu
t 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?”
