I slapped his body as hard as I could, leaving two bright red handprints on his skin.
“You asshole!” I shouted. “I can’t believe how stupid that was!”
“Ow! I’m sorry! I only wanted to see if you could learn to shrink under pressure!”
That got me even angrier. “You can’t trick me into learning new powers anymore!”
“But that’s the way we used to do it!”
His words gave me pause. Yes, back when Quentin and I were still feeling each other out, a lot of my former Ruyi Jingu Bang powers required an unpleasant jolt to kickstart them back into action.
But that was then and this was now. I felt like I had the right to demand more honesty from Quentin these days, and that included how we trained together.
I tried to smack him across the chest again, but he caught my wrists and sat up, knocking me off balance. To keep me from tumbling backward he threw my arms over his shoulders like he knew I wanted them there and gripped me tightly by the waist.
He looked up at me, his apologetic puppy-dog eyes driving me nuts half in a bad way and half in the really bad way.
My heart was pounding. From the mishap, of course. “Don’t do it again,” I muttered.
He craned his neck up, filling my vision, and brushed his lips against mine. “I won’t,” he said, the vibrations of his voice tickling me where my skin was most sensitive. “We’ll train the right way. Maybe on the top of a mountain. We haven’t done that in a long time, have we?”
Somewhere along the line he’d picked up the habit of talking about routine things while gently kissing me, and it drove me wild like nothing else. Despite my frustration with him, I gave in to temptation and ran my hands down his back, using both of them to seize his perfect, wondrous—
“Ahem.”
We looked over to the corner of my room.
Where Yunie had been sitting in my desk chair the whole time.
Quentin and I scrambled in front of her gaze. He found one of my hoodies on the floor and pulled it over his head. It was too big for him and he’d put it on backward, but at least he was covered up.
Even though he was the more naked one, I patted myself down to make sure I wasn’t exposed. I looked like I was searching for missing keys. My friend was enjoying our tango of embarrassment immensely.
“Your mom let me in,” she said. “Plus I texted you a bunch.”
She didn’t need an excuse to be here alone. Yunie and I had an open-door policy between our houses and parents. She’d waited in my room for me tons of times before.
A casual observer might have thought I was mortified that my best friend nearly saw me make out with my boyfriend like a couple of lake boaters during Spring Break. They would have been right, but it was more about the fact that I’d test-driven a power right in front of her. One was awkward, the other was dangerous.
Ever since I’d confessed to Yunie about my . . . situation, I’d kept the supernatural as far away from her as possible. Zero tolerance quarantine. No contamination.
I had a reason for my paranoia. Back when the original jailbreak from Diyu occurred, a particularly dangerous yaoguai named the Six-Eared Macaque had kidnapped her to use against me. Yunie didn’t remember it, but for me it was the worst moment of my life. The mere thought of the yaoguai laying its hands on her was enough to make my teeth crack.
Afterward, I’d made Quentin and Guanyin swear to keep a mundane dead zone around her. No magic, no demons, and no powers near Yunie. The possibility of our dealings causing her harm made me sick. So I was extra-peeved at Quentin now, for the way we’d made our entrance. We could have taken out her eye or something in our tiny state—two superpowered pellets from a BB gun.
Yunie tilted her head. “You can shrink?” she said. “It doesn’t look anything like it does in the movies. It’s got like a . . . you’re receding into the distance very fast quality, only you’re not going farther away.”
“That was the first time,” I said. I gave Quentin a glower. “It’s not happening that way again.”
“You know, if you’d just stayed small, you two could have finished your business without me even knowing,” she said with a giggle. “How’s Guanyin?”
The two of them had never met. But once Yunie realized how much I flipped out over her proximity to the supernatural, she started using it to intentionally push my buttons. She was too smart and too good of a friend to insist on getting personally involved with the supernatural; she’d told me as much that day in her basement. But she was also too good of a friend to pass on riling me up by making statements of sly curiosity, probing closer and closer to the worlds beyond Earth. Which I should have expected from her, the little troll.
“Guanyin’s fine,” I said.
Yunie chuckled. She’d successfully poked the bear; no need to be cruel about it. “I came over to talk plans for the weekend trip, but it’s getting kind of late. I don’t think we really need a plan. We’ll just follow my cousin around and figure things out on our own if she’s busy.”
This older cousin of hers was the reason why we were allowed to go on this campus visit over the long weekend without adult supervision in the first place. To hear it, Ji-Hyun Park was a super-woman, currently slicing her way through pre-med at the most prestigious college in our state like a hot knife through butter. Yunie had spotted an opportunity in her aunt’s relentless bragging about the next soon-to-be doctor in the family.
Some weeks ago, my friend had floated the idea to our parents that combining a girls-only campus tour with a stay in Ji-Hyun’s apartment over a four-day weekend would help us learn about the school. The experience would improve our characters as we got to witness an upstanding older woman in the real world ignoring the temptations of college life while adhering strictly to a high-status academic path.
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.