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Quentin pulled some kind of innate cool guy maneuver, taking a step back so that the shadow of the building fell across his face. I couldn’t see his eyes as he spoke.
“You’re right,” he said, his voice flat and dull. “Sure. I’m going to leave before I do any more harm.”
He walked away with his hands in his pockets and disappeared into the air using the most half-hearted Cloud-Leaping Somersault I’d ever seen him do. It was mostly calves.
I wanted to call out to him, but I was too dumbfounded by my own cruelty to speak. A flash storm had swept in and left recognizable debris pooling around my knees. A moment ago, my life had been relatively orderly. Now it was . . . this. I stared into the dark sky, wishing for a do-over that would never come.
Then I went back inside. I had to go check on my mom.
8
I was scrunched up in a fetal position. My legs scraped the back of the train seat in front of me. Someone had scratch-graffitied “Richard sux” into the plastic and the “sux” was rubbing my shin and making it itch.
I had a view from behind of a lady eating pad Thai, or something that smelled very much like it. Elsewhere in the car, a man in a fleece vest made loud guarantees on his phone that as the chief marketing officer of his company, he could order, nay, force his team to toughen up and deal with the unpaid overtime.
Yunie sat across the aisle from me, reading an honest-to-god paper book. We hadn’t been able to find space next to each other. I was glad we couldn’t talk right now. The slightest spoken word, and the story of how terrible I’d been to Quentin, would come blubbering out of my mouth and join the other assorted stains on the floor. It grew worse and worse the more I thought about it.
I was born from a rock. Never had parents, never did.
I’d thought Quentin had merely been explaining his origins to me that night we first had dinner at my house. I hadn’t known him long enough to understand he’d been opening up to me.
His master Subodai had banished him. He’d first fought against, and then fought so hard for his little band with Xuanzang. If you looked at his story and considered him as a real person, then there was only one thing the Monkey King truly lacked. Family.
And I’d . . . I’d said that to him the other night.
The unlubricated screeching of the train and the cramped position I was in made it feel like I was sitting inside a trash compactor or a car crusher, the walls closing in around me. Each item of unfinished business thrown in here with me only hastened my demise.
Like the deal with Great White Planet and the Mysterious Demonic Threat he had talked about. I was very far outside my usual way of doing things when it came to that. In the past, if an unresolved issue or mistake ever showed its head, my instincts were always to run over and stomp it out of existence as soon as possible. Bring my full weight to bear on the problem to the exclusion of any distractions. It was how I knocked down and aced different subjects at school. The strategy worked in my academic life.
Not so much in my real life though. It had taken a while, but I’d realized I had to accept a certain degree of messiness in order to keep my wits about me. I’d wanted to agree with Guanyin and focus on one looming problem at a time. But this was a juggling act where I had to keep multiple balls in the air.
And my mom had tossed me a chainsaw in the middle of my performance.
I grit my teeth, thinking of her again. She was making me do this trip instead of staying home with her as some kind of punishment. She was screwing with me. She’d told me to enjoy myself, but she really wanted me to feel guilty about it the whole time. Or the whole thing could have been a test that I’d already failed. The right answer was ignoring her overt commands, throwing myself at her feet, and refusing to go at all.
r /> It was guesswork as to what crime I’d committed. By necessity I’d been spending more time at volleyball, with Quentin and Guanyin. Maybe she’d been feeling neglected. Maybe I’d hung out with Dad too much, or not enough. It was impossible to tell because she wouldn’t speak her goddamn mind. She wanted a psychic for a daughter. One who would cater to her every silent whim.
I was pissed off at Dad, too, which was rare. Had he and I presented a united front, we might have done the impossible and convinced Mom to back down. The one time I needed my father not to be easygoing, and we’d let our chance slip away.
An earsplitting metal howl made me look up. We were only a stop away from our destination. Even through the train window the surroundings already looked more collegiate. Instead of Santa Firenza’s barren lot with yellow paint marking where you should stand to avoid getting run over, this station had overgrown boughs embracing wrought-iron fences. The parking lot contained Bimmers, Lexi, Teslae. In one section, loose leaves of kale lay scattered over the asphalt like flyers, evidence that a farmers’ market had passed through here earlier. Despite what the map said, I was very far away from my home right now.
No, I decided. Enough. I wasn’t doing this anymore. I wasn’t going to be held emotionally hostage by my mother. She expected me to crawl back through our door, hobbled with guilt, having carried her in my mind every minute of the long weekend. Like hell I’d play along.
I stood up and banged my skull on the luggage rack overhead. It was hard and loud enough that everyone in the car but Yunie looked over and winced. I ignored them.
I can make it four days without thinking about my mom. I’m allowed to go four days without thinking about my mom.
A tug came at my insides, my gut reminding me of other injured parties. I pushed the feeling back down with a vengeance.
And Quentin, too, for that matter.
9
I would have been more impressed by the blue, sunny skies blanketing the campus had they not been the same ones I stared at from a couple of towns over. These stingy azure bastards were causing our drought. Screw these skies.
The families from New England and the Midwest, though, ate it up.
“I can’t believe how hard it was raining back in Boston,” one mother said, marveling, as if the West Coast weren’t all the way across the country from the East Coast.
