I could hear the rhythmic chanting from down the hallway.
“QUEN-TIN! QUEN-TIN! QUEN-TIN!”
Everyone was trying to get a look. I shoved and jostled past the gawkers hopping on their tiptoes, phones raised to take videos, until I reached the suite where the party was originally supposed to be contained to.
There, in a spacious kitchen, Quentin was doing a one-handed keg stand while the crowd drunkenly cheered him on. For what I guess was the extra challenge, he’d tilted the barrel on its corner edge and rocked back and forth like a unicyclist standing still.
It was a feat of inhuman balance, and child’s play for the Monkey King. His legs kicked the air to the beat of the music as he chugged, and he didn’t stop until the entire contents were gone.
Then he did something really stupid.
Upon finding he’d tapped the keg single-handedly, he hopped back to his feet. He picked up the empty steel barrel like it weighed nothing and slammed it against his forehead the way a bro might do to a normal beer can. The metal squeaked and groaned as it flattened into a disc under his might. Once he’d compressed the keg into a hubcap, he tossed it aside. It spun around and around on its perimeter, making wobbly noises, until it agonizingly came to a stop on the floor.
The entire party fell silent. People gaped at him above the screens of their phones, the nearest of which had still caught the whole impossible display.
Quentin pumped his fists into the air. “Haters gonna say it’s fake!” he whooped.
The crowd screamed in delight. They resumed raging twice as hard after the shot of adrenaline he’d given them.
I reached out, snatched him by the collar, and dragged him away.
? ? ?
Getting Quentin back into Ji-Hyun’s room required swatting away the adoring college girls who were getting unilaterally handsy with him as we scraped by. To his credit, he paid them little attention, his eyes never straying from me. To his detriment was absolutely everything else about him.
I slammed him against the closed door, prompting a “woo” from the people just outside who thought we were sneaking off for privacy. I mean, we were, but not that way.
“Are you trying to set new records for being stupid?” I said, still gripping his shirt in my fist. I’d snapped a couple of buttons off it already.
“I’ve gotten blitzed off Heavenly Elixirs of Immortality,” he said. “I’m not going to get drunk from a few sips of human beer.”
“That’s not the issue here! Right now there’s dozens of people outside who now know you’re stronger than a hydraulic press!”
He looked off to the side. “Who cares? They’re never going to see me again. You’ll be fine attending your classes here. I won’t be around to cause trouble.”
Ow. I mean, really,
ow.
I was breathing, my lungs caving in and out, but it didn’t feel like oxygen was reaching my brain. My throat was a solid lump. This was a continuation of our fight, only with me on the sharp end of the stick this time. And it hurt. A lot. Enough to make me let go of him and take a couple of steps back.
The root problem was that Quentin and I had never discussed how he would fit into my normal, human life. If he would. That uncertainty played a part in me losing my temper and implying he wasn’t welcome in my family, and him now implying he’d ghost me once I entered college. I had to address this issue now, before it gestated inside both him and me into a creature neither of us could defeat.
Instead I came up spectacularly short. “They. Have. Cameras!” I screamed.
Quentin’s eyes flickered, as if he was just as relieved as me to argue about a less important problem. “So there’s a video shot by drunk people in a poorly lit room. If it gets uploaded to the internet it’ll look like a viral ad for a beer company. Stop worrying about it.”
He was pitching me softballs. Quentin sloppy, Genie uptight. I could have kissed him.
“We’ve got a meeting with Guanyin tomorrow morning,” he said. “You might as well make the most of tonight. Otherwise your trip will be wasted.”
“I was never here to party in the first place!” I said, indignant that he thought I needed the pointless ruckus outside. “Yunie and I are not even having fun right now!”
Right then, Ji-Hyun burst into the room with Yunie slung over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry. The din of music leaked in through the airlock before Ji-Hyun kicked it shut again.
“WOOO!” Yunie shouted, swimming a crawl stroke in the air. “College rules!”
She was Asian-blushing so hard, she resembled an overcooked lobster. “Who wants to arm wrestle?” my drunken friend hollered. “Fight me!”