That was the surface story. My parents had bought into it hook, line, and sinker. But my alarm bells went off based on the rack of new going-out tops I’d spotted in Yunie’s closet afterward.
“A college party’s not going to kill you,” she’d said when I’d confronted her about our true plans. “If anything, this is a good opportunity to blow off steam. No demons or magic or any of that. I told you a while ago that I hated seeing you so stressed out, and instead of relaxing you got wound up even tighter. And we are going for an important campus tour. During the day. That’s not a lie.”
I knew why Yunie was leaning so hard on this. It was our chance for one last adventure, the two of us. She knew I couldn’t afford to go traveling any great distance with her. Grand tours of Europe or South America like the ones some of our classmates took were out of my reach. And the resource disparity between our families always made Yunie more uncomfortable than it did me. So in her mind, she saw this as the perfect way we could both explore new territory, hand in hand.
That was how she’d sold me on a vacation, albeit one that was still focused on college. You could take the girl out of the high school, but you couldn’t take the dork out of the girl.
I was still both wary and guilty about the trip, though, to the extent that I’d told Quentin and Guanyin the same version that my parents got. We were going for academics only. No one else but Yunie knew about the partying we’d likely do at night.
“How long did we keep you waiting?” I said.
“I don’t know.” Yunie held up her phone. “I’ve been too busy playing this game you made to notice the time. How many levels does it have?”
“They’re procedurally generated on the client, so . . . infinity?”
She shook her head. “That’s evil. People are going to waste their lives trying to beat this thing.”
The game that I’d made as coding practice wasn’t very complicated. You played as a little monkey trying to hop between clouds. If you fell, you had a limited number of special items you could use to save yourself, the most common being an iron pole that extended all the way to the pits of death below and propped you back up to safety.
Rutsuo Huang, our school’s resident CompSci wiz, had to look over my shoulder a lot while I developed it. Over the course of our hangouts in the computer labs, I got to see a new side of my quiet, unassuming classmate, the one that had utter contempt for a half-assed job. I could have made the game in much less time if he hadn’t scowled most of my early code into oblivion.
“I never fixed the randomization,” I said. “It’s too hard, and you end up dying every other round. I don’t think anyone’s actually going to play it for real.”
“Uhh, I don’t know about that,” said Yunie. “This says you’re number ninety-six out of one hundred on the app store.”
The three of us gathered around her phone. Sure enough, Monkey King Jumps to Heaven was right there on the bottom of the chart.
“You have to have a ton of users to get any rank at all,” Yunie said. “This is a pretty big deal.”
“Woo!” Quentin shouted, raising his fists into the air. “I’m going to be famous!”
“You’re already famous, you dip,” I said. “I learned who you were through one of the oldest stories still being told. You are literally legendary.”
Quentin grinned. “Yeah, but now I’m going to be New Economy famous. I’ve gone multi-platform.”
I flipped up the hood over his face.
6
Yunie couldn’t stay for dinner despite my mother’s impassioned pleas. She had a prior commitment at her aunt’s, and blood marginally won out in that scenario. But Quentin knew he h
ad to stick around. There was no way in hell that my mother was going zero-for-two on feeding her favorite people in the world.
He sat next to me at our kitchen table while Mom cooked and I brought her up to speed on what happened at school. Today had been so hectic that my promotion on the volleyball team felt like ancient history. It had already petrified. I had to dig the story out from the surrounding layers carefully for my mother, without getting any residue of gods or demons on it.
“Captain?” she said, tossing a pan of string beans into the air and catching them over the burner without looking. “What’s so good about that?”
Yes, she was doing the denigrate my child’s accomplishments compared to other people’s kids thing. But in her defense, the last time she’d heard the term used in relation to one of my sports teams was in grade school gym class, where each kid took turns being the “captain” so everyone would get a chance to feel in charge. It made very little sense on the days we did Parachute.
“It’s a big deal,” Quentin reassured her. “Varsity captain is a position with a huge amount of prestige. It looks great on college applications.” He sat next to me at the table and placed a hand on mine like we were announcing a newborn.
Such a public gesture of affection and commitment made me flinch. “Why are you talking like you’re the expert?” I said, snatching my hand away. “What were you ever captain of?”
“Nothing.” He grinned. “That’s why I was such a horrible person when I was younger.”
I thought back to the story of Sun Wukong. You could have argued that he was technically the head of Team Xuanzang on their quests to find the holy sutras, with Sandy and Pigsy as the subordinates he regularly trod underfoot. But beating the freshmen into submission wasn’t a leadership style I wanted to emulate. Despite what had happened today with the yaoguai.
“It’s going to help a lot when you’re searching for a job, too,” Quentin said. “Companies want to recruit leaders out of college. It’s the number one thing they look for.”