That certainly had been the point of Guanyin’s lesson to me. I needed to become the kind of strong person who could hold a loss, like her. She wanted me to be a leader who stayed firmly in the present, maximizing the amount of good I could do, rather than dwell on past wrongs or dream about the future. She wanted me to be a leader who could sacrifice.
I’d learned. After everything that had happened this weekend, I’d absorbed the message.
Hadn’t I?
No.
I bolted upright in my seat and scraped my head against the car roof.
“Ha! Haven’t seen you do that in a while,” Dad said.
I pulled out my phone, fingers scrabbling for the onscreen keyboard. I almost locked myself out with wrongly entered passcodes, I was so manic right now.
Guanyin may have been the ultimate embodiment of all that was good in the cosmos. But that didn’t mean she was right about everything. She could be flat-out wrong sometimes.
Like about me, for instance. I wasn’t a saint. I wasn’t a worthy follower of her enlightened way of thinking.
To borrow Kelsey’s term, I was a beast. A rage monster. I was no better than a yaoguai, an iron demon in the shape of a girl. I had to embrace that reality.
I managed to fit five typos into “are you there?” before sending the message on my phone.
“Who’re you texting?” Dad asked teasingly.
The other animal I knew and loved.
“what’s up? high five cheeseburger guy on bicycle” Quentin texted back.
Yunie had given him her spoils of war, the phone she’d jacked from that unfortunate bystander. It replaced his old Swedish bricklike model, the one he must have reached a decade into the past to buy. Now Quentin could finally message me like a normal human being.
I steadied my thumbs and wrote out my plan. The block of words was so long it went past my entire vertical screen. Quentin must have been looking at the “message being composed” ellipses for a good five minutes.
Once I was finished, I hit send. My thesis statement.
“r u serious?!?!?! fingernail polish briefcase cat” was his response.
Okay, so he needed a bit of time to get the hang of emojis. I dove into a furious back-and-forth with him that was intelligible once you stripped out our excesses.
Your plan, he said. It’s not a plan. It’s speculation. Madness.
Life belongs to the risk-takers. I asked you if it was possible. Not if you liked it.
I don’t know. You’ve done that trick exactly once in your entire past life as the Ruyi Jingu Bang. I don’t know if you can anymore. Not only that, there’s the damage it might do to your mind. There’s no precedent for what you’re describing.
I’ll train so that I can pull it off. With you.
I don’t know how long it will take to relearn. We may never succeed.
That’s the gamble, isn’t it? I don’t care how long it takes. We’ll be together while we try. Even if it’s a lifetime.
Quentin took his time replying to my insinuation that he and I would be together our whole lives. The modern declaration of love, folks. A sideways comment over a text message.
“we’ll start tomrw,” he wrote back. “peach peach peach kissy face kissy face kissy face.”
I don’t think he understood what the peach emoji implied. I’d have to explain it to him. Or show it to him. My face flushed at the memory of the night he and I had spent together under a sky beyond Earth.
“So,” Dad said. “Do you think you might put that school on your list of top choices?” There was a strong note of hope in his voice.
I relaxed into my seat and stared out the window. The highway carried us into the falling night.