“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, mashing 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.”