The Epic Crush of Genie Lo Read online

  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.

  “What are you doing, you perv?” I shut my eyes and bicycle-kicked the empty air between us.

  When he didn’t say anything I glanced between my fingers to make sure he was keeping his distance, and oh my god I shouldn’t have looked.

  I wasn’t sure how anyone could get muscles like that without eating meat. He had the kind of body-fat percentage where he could have done it for a living.

  “See?” he said, brandishing his tanned, professional-grade torso at me.

  “Like that means anything!” I said, throwing my elbow back over my face. “So you’ve got abs. Big deal. I’ve got abs.”

  “Not my body, you dolt! My tail! Look at my tail!”

  With great reluctance, great reluctance I tell you, I ran my gaze down his stomach. The last two cans of his rippling eight-pack were partly covered by a fur belt running around his waist. I thought it was just a weird fashion statement until it twitched and pulled away from his body, unraveling behind him.

  Quentin, it would appear, had a monkey’s tail.

  I gaped at the fuzzy appendage dancing in the air.

  “Go see a doctor,” I said, holding out my finger between us. “Have your weird mutation somewhere other than my room. Somewhere other than my life.”

  Quentin seemed moderately disappointed with the way this conversation had gone, like he had the right to expect better than a raging dumpster fire. He got up and put his shirt back on but neglected to button it up.

  “You’ve been through a lot today,” he said, using the same tone as a country gentleman who recognized that his lady’s corset was too tight. “I suppose I shouldn’t have sprung this on you all at once.”

  “Get out.”

  He smiled gravely at me. “Take some time to think. We can pick up where we left off tomorrow.”

  I found a stapler and threw it at his head.

  “Pei-Yi!” shouted my mother. She clomped up the stairs. “Where are you?”

  Dear god, finally. I didn’t care how bad it would look to have an undressed boy with an abnormal pelvis in my room. I just needed not to be alone with him anymore.

  My mom threw open the door to my room without knocking, her usual practice. She stood over me, judgment raining down from her birdlike frame. Her square, ageless face was a carved-in-marble ode to perpetual indignation.

  “What are you doing on the floor?” she said to me. “You look like a city bum.”

  I glanced back to see Quentin gone.

  He must have jumped out the window. I popped up and stepped to the sill, leaning into the air to look around. Not a trace of him anywhere.

  “What’s the matter?” my mother snapped. “You sick?”

  I pulled my body back inside and bumped my head against the window hard enough to make the glass rattle, but the pain was inconsequential right now. “No, I . . . I just needed some fresh air.”

  She squinted at me. “Are you pregnant?”

  “What!? No! Why would you even think that?”

  “Well then if you’re not sick and you’re not pregnant then ANSWER ME WHEN I CALL YOUR NAME!”

  Mom began screaming at me since she’d apparently been telling me to come down for the last five minutes and not ignoring me asking her to come up. This kind of crazy I could take. I almost sobbed with relief, her banshee song as soothing and familiar as a lullaby.

  9

  I had a whole sleepless night to figure out what to do. I couldn’t talk to anyone without proof. But at the same time, I needed to protect myself. I would have to take matters into my own hands.

  I was ready when Quentin approached me after school the following day.

  “Genie,” he said. “Please. Let me expl—moomph!”

  “Stay away,” I said, mashin
g the bulb of garlic into his face as hard as I could. I didn’t have any crosses or holy water at home. I had to work with what was available.

  Quentin slowly picked the cloves out of my hand before popping them into his mouth.

  “That’s white vampires,” he said, chewing and swallowing the raw garlic like a bite of fruit. “If I was a jiangshi you should have brought a mirror.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “You’re going to stink now.”

  “What, like a Chinese?” He pursed his lips and blew a kiss at me.

  Instead of being pungent, his breath was sweet with plum blossoms and coconut. Like his body magically refused to be anything but intensely appealing to me, even on a molecular level.

  I tried to swat away his scent before it made me drunk.

  “Stop it with the tricks,” I said. “I don’t know why you and your giant buddy needed to stage a magic show in front of me yesterday, but your act sucks and I never want to see it again.”

  “Genie, I am telling you, that was a yaoguai.”

  “Yaoguai don’t exist!” I was firm in my conviction, but that hadn’t stopped me from looking them up online last night. “They’re folk demons, and I bet no one has believed in them for hundreds of years!”

  “That’s because no one has seen them in hundreds of years. They’re not supposed to be walking the earth anymore. Especially not that one.” Quentin looked chagrined, as if his disposing of another living being were akin to being caught double-dipping at a party.

  “I came to this town because I felt a demonic presence stirring in the human world for the first time in centuries,” he said. “I knew modern people weren’t equipped to deal with yaoguai, so I hunted down the source myself. I didn’t expect to find you of all people here as well.”

  There were many things I was not okay with in this explanation. The way he said human world like he had been hanging out somewhere else. His loose use of time signifiers. The way he still talked to me as if he knew me intimately.

  “So you’re only stalking me as an afterthought,” I said.

  “Yes. I mean no!” Quentin closed his eyes and pinched invisible threads from the air, trying to figure out which ones were connected to the end he wanted.

  “Look,” he said. “What happened yesterday was impossible.”

  I was about to violently agree with him in a general sense, but he kept going down a weird path.

  “The Demon King of Confusion should not have been up and about,” he said, seemingly more concerned about which monster we’d seen, like a fanatic who believed in Bigfoot but was shocked by the Abominable Snowman. “I personally rid the mortal world of him a very long time ago. The fact that he showed up alive means that there’s something funny going on here, and until we find out what it is, the two of us have to stick together.”

  “You are the funny thing that’s going on,” I said. “You and your . . . demons, yaoguai, whatevers. I don’t want any part of it. In fact, if you ever trot this horse crap out in front of me or my family again I will make it my life’s mission to see you regret it.”

  I turned away and walked halfway down the block before stopping.

  “That wasn’t a cue to follow me!” I screamed at Quentin, who was trailing only a few steps behind.

  “Well, tough. We’re heading to the same place, regardless of whether or not you believe me about yaoguai.”

  “Oh you have got to be kidding me.”

  “Yup.” He grimaced like a man condemned. “Tonight is when I promised your mother we’d have dinner.”

  One of the reasons I didn’t have friends over for meals very often was because of how seriously my mother took the occasions. Eating at our table was like some kind of blood pact for her. If the get-together went well, you were in. For life. You could sleep in our cupboard if you wanted to and she wouldn’t bat an eye.

  If you did not hold up your end of the bargain in terms of being good company, or if, god forbid, you flaked, then you were cast into the lake of fire for eternity. Quentin, who must have picked up on Mom’s peculiarities in this regard, was right in that we were locked in for one last dance. The Apocalypse couldn’t have prevented this dinner.

  I could smell food even before entering our driveway—a deep, savory promise of good things to come. My mother must have been at the stove all day. For someone who gives me such a hard time about my weight, you’d think she wouldn’t cook so goddamn much.

  “Remember,” Quentin said as we went inside. “This was your idea.”

  His parents were already there, sitting at our table. “Pei-Yi,” Mom said. “Come and meet the Suns.”

  Mr. Sun was tall and reedy with wiry hair, most of the resemblance to his son coming from the mischief in his eyes that his banker’s suit failed to tamp down. Mrs. Sun was the picture-perfect image of a young taitai. She was a straight-backed beauty resplendent in tasteful fashions, the kind of woman Yunie would turn out to be in a decade or two if she dropped the punk-rock look in favor of European couture.

  “Eugenia,” said Mr. Sun. “We’ve heard so much about you.”

  To their credit, they didn’t flinch at my height. Quentin must have warned them that I was a kaiju.

  “We’re forever in your debt,” Mrs. Sun said. “Our boy can be so careless. It was a miracle you were there to save him.”

  Having seen what I’d seen, I seriously doubted Quentin was in any sort of trouble when I’d first run into him at the park. I wondered if his parents were in on his weirdness. They had to have been aware of his extra limb at least.

  “You two are just in time,” Mom said. “Dinner’s ready.”

  The table was decked out with more food than my entire volleyball team could have eaten in two sittings. Red wine chicken. Steamed white radish with conpoy. Misua swimming in broth.

  “Wait a sec,” I said, tilting my head at Quentin. “He’s a vegetarian.”

  “It’s all mock meat,” my mother said proudly. “It took me a few tries.”

  Of course she would kill herself over an attempt to impress. The Suns were everything she wanted our family to be. Rich. Refined. Whole. Quentin’s parents even had British accents when they spoke in English, like they’d learned in an overseas grammar school or owned property in London. If there was one group of people my mother idolized more than the wealthy, it was the British.

  “This looks absolutely delicious,” said Mr. Sun.

  He was not wrong. Mom was a spectacular cook. But I already knew that very little of this dinner was going to be touched. Mr. and Mrs. Sun were too genteel to finish the massive quantities that had been prepared, and if I had anything more than a “ladylike” serving in front of guests, my mother would have lasered me to death with her eyes.

  Quentin alone had license to eat. He began chowing down with delight, scarfing the mouthwatering grub as fast as he could.

  Over the course of the conversation I learned that his dad worked in international shipping and logistics, coming up with new route calculations based on incidents like storms and pirates. And his mom ran her family’s charitable foundation, which spread basic technology like flashlights and cell phones to undeveloped areas around the world.

  Now both of those jobs were actually really, really cool. I’d gone into this dinner eager to harness my class resentment and write Quentin’s parents off as useless gentry, but both of them were genuinely interesting. I could have coasted on them talking shop all night.

  Instead of going on about themselves, though, his parents kept turning the conversation back to me. I hated talking about myself to other people. It was why I had such a difficult time with my application essays.

  But what really caused my gears to lock up was the way, whether through prior research or on-the-fly Holmesian deduction, they continually managed to avoid bringing up my dad. Not even a question about where I got my height from, since it clearly wasn’t maternal. Their collective inquiries left a father-shaped hole in the conversation, like snow falling around a hot spot. I
would have felt less on edge and defensive had they not been going out of their way to be tactful.

  “So Genie,” said Mr. Sun. “What are your plans for the future? What do you want to do with your life?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said, with what I hoped was a demure smile. “I guess one of the reasons why I study as much as I do is to keep my options open.”

  There. A better answer than screaming I just wanna be somebody! like a chorus member from a forties musical.

  “Do you have a favorite subject?” Mrs. Sun asked. “Sometimes that can be a big life hint.”

  Jeez, let it go already. “I like them all about the same.”

  “Really?” said Quentin. “Rutsuo told me you once got pretty excited about computer science.”

  “That was an elective that didn’t count for credit,” I said. “And I only jumped on the table to celebrate because my code for a binomial heap finally compiled after fifteen tries.”

  “Passion’s passion,” said Mr. Sun. “Ever thought about being a programmer?”

  I had. And no.

  We lived in the epicenter of the tech industry. I’d paid enough attention to the news to know that all the good programming careers were concentrated right here in the Bay Area, not even fifty miles from where we were sitting. I wasn’t going to work my ass off only to end up right back where I started in life, within shouting distance of my mother.

  I racked my brain for a more polite way of saying that I felt zero obligations to the place where I grew up. Santa Firenza wasn’t a quaint bucolic suburb where happy families were grown from the rich earth. Santa Firenza was a blacktopped hellscape of bubble tea shops and strip-mall nail salons, where feral children worshipped professional video-game streamers. The major cultural contribution of this part of the country was recording yourself dancing alongside your car while it rolled forward with no one driving it.

  “Well, I’m sure that once you decide what you want, you’ll get it,” Mrs. Sun said in response to my silence. “You have so much determination for someone so young.”

  “She’s always been like that, even as a baby,” said Mom. “She used to watch the educational shows with the puppets and get the questions for the kids right. But then there would be a joke for the adults that she couldn’t have possibly understood, and she’d get so angry that she’d missed something. That she didn’t get a ‘perfect score.’ She was such an angry little girl.”