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There was a stoop that faced the pool, so I plunked down on it. The pool itself was much less impressive an amenity than it had sounded when Yunie and I looked up Ji-Hyun’s address a day ago. Apparently the nearby buildings and townhouses all shared communal access to it, which meant it was difficult to get a single party to pony up for maintenance and lifeguard fees. Right now it was locked behind a surrounding chain-link fence. A sign told any would-be swimmers that they’d have to wait until the chemicals reduced the algae levels to the point where the water wouldn’t sicken anybody.
That was okay. I wasn’t planning on taking a dip. It was comforting enough to listen to the gentle sloshing from the night breeze. The smell of bleachy fumes was preferable to smoke at the moment.
The way Kelsey and Trish spoke to me like it was in the bag that I’d have the chance to play for one of their teams had exposed an uncomfortable truth—I didn’t know what I was doing with this whole college thing.
Yeah, I talked a good game about getting in. But I hadn’t spent any time thinking about what life would be like on the other side. Breaking through the gates had seemed so distant a concept that I never bothered to figure out what I wanted from the college experience itself, and now it was dancing in front of my face, asking me to choose.
I had made a big mistake, treating College with a capital C like a monolithic concept, a single finish line. When in fact there were tons of complications. Repercussions. The biggest of which boiled down to money.
I’d left it unspoken before, but the biggest reason why I couldn’t see myself at this school was because it was expensive. Of course my family couldn’t afford it outright. And the more I’d learned about the financial aid process from my college adviser, the murkier my choices became. Even a decent aid package might require my family to pitch in an amount that looked small to others but would be completely
devastating to us.
Just get a full scholarship! said an inner voice that was some combination of the ignorant me of a year ago and terribly scripted movies about college.
Sure! I thought. The prize for being poor was that I’d have to compete yet again with other needy, motivated students for a limited pool of free money, a tournament within the tournament. I’d have to look twice as exceptional and win the Quarter Quell. Easy peasy.
I laughed to myself. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t that special. For crying out loud, by college standards I wasn’t even that big. Full-ride scholarships didn’t fall from the sky for semi-special wafflers like me who couldn’t formulate a simple theory about how the world worked.
The door behind me opened violently and a boy stumbled out, kneeing me in the back of the head.
“Jesus, Axton, knock her over why don’t you?” a girl yelled from inside, over the din of the party.
The boy caught his balance and smoothed the lapels of his jacket. “Maybe if you didn’t push me,” he said calmly.
“Maybe if you weren’t such a shill, you prick!” a completely different voice roared, a guy this time. The door slammed shut as the exclamation point on the insult.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” said the boy who’d been booted out. He gave his hair the same treatment as his clothes, checking carefully that each gelled strand was in place.
Not that it had hurt, and not that I wanted him anywhere near me right now, but he could have at least made sure the person he’d run into was okay. Plus he’d interrupted my alone time at a really bad moment. When he opened his mouth to speak again, I shot him a look so harsh it could have finished sterilizing the pool.
The kid got the message that this doorstep was my territory. He adjusted his cuffs and did a little two-fingered salute at me before walking away into the night.
The fact that he had been wearing a ridiculously expensive outfit for a simple off-campus rager sent my brain on a return trip to the dark valley of money problems. I had been selfish the first time around, thinking only of myself and my tuition. Of course the higher priority was my mother. My family.
Guanyin’s handwaving around my mother’s health scared me more than anything else. The uncertainty that we would have to live with was an unwelcome, permanent addition to our family. The scene that had played out in the hospital was like a horrific inversion of birth, my father rushing to my mother’s side while I held her close and waited for the terrible news.
Even if I worked while I went to school, I’d be saddling us with a burden that would be difficult for our combined efforts to manage under the best of circumstances, with Mom and Dad both healthy. Forget this school. Every single one of my first choices was expensive and out of state. I’d made a list for Santa like a greedy little brat, putting down a pony, a diamond ring, a castle in the sky, without thinking about the logistics.
The chlorine was getting to me. I closed my eyes and wiped a tear off my nose. Good children used their wishes on their parents’ health and happiness. Or world peace. I hadn’t been a good child.
“Shouhushen!”
I woke up from my reverie, thinking maybe I had imagined hearing that.
But no. The speaker was standing in the pool right there in front of me, where he hadn’t been a second ago. He was knee-deep in a section where the waters should have reached his chin, as if he was standing on an invisible platform.
It was an old man. Not as weathered and wiry as the Great White Planet, but still rather bulky and strong, full of piss and vinegar, able to smack around a dozen whippersnappers half his age.
He wore a coat of exquisite bronze lamellar armor that accentuated his ramrod-straight posture. And he stood completely motionless, with only his eyes following me intently, as if he were a British guardsman sizing up my threat level.
There were too many windows facing the courtyard. “If you know conceal, you’d better do it right now,” I said to him.
From what I had gathered, concealment was a fairly basic spell among spirits both great and small. Luckily this guy was no exception. He made a quick series of hand gestures, more formal and ornate than Quentin usually bothered with, and the telltale fuzz of magic descended over us, blocking him from mundane view.
The old man was a complete newcomer to Earth, I was sure of it. There was no human-looking character out of a historical war drama among the yaoguai under my supervision, and he didn’t have quite the same ambience as a full-fledged god.
“You picked a bad time, buddy,” I hissed. “I don’t care who you are and how you got here, but I’m off duty. And this is one of the worst places on Earth to conduct business. Do you know how camera-happy people my age are?”
