CHAPTER EIGHT
Cyrus lets out a high-pitched, Oscar-nominated-horror-movie scream.
This is far more noteworthy than the ghosts that have surrounded us in the crimson glow of the main dining area. I only really glance at them—their blood-splattered faces; their long, tangled wigs drooping over their pale robes; their bright red contacts—out of politeness and appreciation for their efforts. Despite my complete lack of reaction, they’re still throwing themselves into their performance, moving their limbs jerkily as they reach toward me.
I turn away from them to raise my brows at Cyrus, so many taunts rushing into my mind at once that I almost give myself a headache trying to decide which one to aim at him first.
“Don’t,” Cyrus says with a warning look before I can even open my mouth. “I was merely startled—”
“That was definitely a scream,” I say.
“That was a small sound of surprise,” he argues. “A stranger’s face appeared out of nowhere, and I behaved how any normal person would.”
“Yes. By screaming.”
“You know, we should be looking for our next clue,” he says, aborting his previous defense strategy—denial—and opting for the classic let’s-turn-our-attention-elsewhere tactic instead. He steps forward in as dignified a manner as possible for someone who’s just leapt back three feet. The ghosts don’t block our way, but they don’t disperse either. They simply continue haunting us as we study the setup.
Half the space has been dedicated to private rooms, each with their own flower and poetic name—at least, I’m assuming it’s poetic, based on the calligraphy and the fact that I don’t recognize a single character—printed above the carved lattice doors. The rest of the floor is taken up by round tables and silk-cushioned chairs in various colors, a few of them pushed back as though the guest had risen bare moments ago, the double-layered trays still wet with spilt tea. A folding screen has been propped up by the window, its surface overgrown with moon-white and sun-yellow chrysanthemums, their petals curling inward as if protecting a secret.
“Does it have anything to do with the flowers?” I venture. “Like, I don’t know—maybe the number of flowers is important. Maybe we should be counting them, or the petals—”
“I don’t think this is one of those he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not situations,” Cyrus says.
“I wouldn’t need to count petals to guess whether someone loves me. I’d know that they do,” I say, the haughty coolness of my tone masking the heat in my cheeks. I immediately feel stupid for making the suggestion. This is one of the reasons I stopped answering questions in any of my classes—because most of the time, I’d say something silly and irrelevant without realizing it, and I’d want to shrivel into a ball while the teacher fought to keep their expression professional. You don’t even try , the same teachers accused when it came time for feedback, but I had. I simply wasn’t very smart, not school -smart, which is the only kind of smart that seems to matter at our age.
Cyrus pauses. “Well, you’re right, it could be related to the flowers,” he says slowly. “I’m not sure if it’s a number that we’re looking for though. I haven’t seen anything in the room that would require a passcode.”
“Hey, there’s something here,” I notice, pointing to a piece of paper tucked underneath the screen.
He bends down right away and picks it up, flattening it out on the closest table so we can both read the characters scrawled over it. Or so he can read it, and I can stare at it. I’d expected it to be a message, but it looks more like a riddle: The words are listed one by one down the page.
“What is it?” I ask.
“A riddle,” Cyrus replies unhelpfully.
“Yes, I figured as much, Cyrus,” I say, squinting harder at the note as if it’s my vision that’s the problem here. “I didn’t think it was a love poem you’d composed for me.”
“I would never compose a love poem this bad,” Cyrus says with a scoff. “There isn’t even any rhythm to it.”
“Okay, but there has to be some—” My words are drowned out by the incoherent shrieking of the ghosts as they charge forward again, waving their pale fingers right in our faces, their eyes rolling back dramatically, blood dripping down their chins. I try again, louder: “There has to be some—”
One of the ghosts breaks from the ranks and starts circling me like a shark in water, his features contorting with so much effort I worry they’re going to end up permanently altered. He lets out another pitch-perfect horror-movie scream as he claws at the air.
I raise my hand like I’m hailing a taxi. “Can you please just let us talk for a second?” I say, first in English, then in Chinese: “Deng yi xia.” Wait. The only words I can remember on the spot.
But they’re the right ones, because the ghost clamps his mouth shut mid-scream.
“Xie xie,” I say, smiling at the ghost.
He smiles widely back at me before his ghost colleague elbows him.
“What do the words say?” I ask Cyrus, relieved to be able to hear my own voice again. Then, because he’s taking too long to respond and it seems like I’m kind of on a roll with the Chinese, I add, “Wo wen ni ne.”
His complexion changes color, as if directly absorbing the light of the scarlet lanterns above us. “Do you realize what you just said?”
“Yeah? I said that I’m asking you a question.”
“No.” He raises his brows. “You said that you were kissing me.”
This is very much news to me. But rather than letting any of my embarrassment show on my face, I decide to lean into it. “It’s an innocent mistake. And I mean, isn’t that what happens in your secret little fantasies about me?”
It works even better than I thought. He goes rigid for a second, his eyes widening as if someone’s started reading his actual fantasies out loud through a speaker, and then he quickly busies himself studying the piece of paper again. “So the words here are: lipstick, strawberry, wedding dress, and wine.”
“Those are all things you’d get at a wedding, right?” I say. “Maybe not necessarily the strawberries, but the bride could have … strawberry wedding cake? Or chocolate-covered strawberries? Sidenote: Now I’m really craving chocolate-covered strawberries.”
Cyrus makes a face. “I used to enjoy chocolate-covered strawberries until I witnessed a couple sharing one.”
“One? A single strawberry? For two people?” I say, echoing his disgust.
“A single, extremely small strawberry,” he confirms with a grimace. “Both their mouths were on it. I’ve been traumatized ever since.”
“Some things just shouldn’t be shared. I almost broke up with one of my exes after he suggested that we try out the Lady and the Tramp noodle thing. Like, yeah, it’s cute when dogs do it, but that’s because the dogs are cute. For some reason, he didn’t get it.”
Cyrus’s brows crinkle. “You almost broke up with him? I would’ve asked to break up on the spot.”
“I didn’t get a chance to, because he dumped me first,” I tell him, then wish I’d just lied. You don’t go running to the enemy to point out the wound on your back, even if the wound itself is more aggravating than fatal. Especially not when there’s an older, deeper wound inches below it from when the enemy pressed in with a knife. That one had felt fatal.
“Who would dump you?” Cyrus asks. He doesn’t sound like he’s mocking me; he sounds like he’s genuinely baffled. But for all I know, it’s a trap.
I shrug. “It’s whatever. I don’t even remember his name.” His name was Brian. He had been sweet on our first date, the perfect gentleman, complimenting my hair, my outfit, my smile. But with every date we went on after, I could feel his interest slipping away as he slowly realized, like other guys did, that I didn’t have much to offer other than my appearance. I didn’t have any passions, and I didn’t always understand his jokes right away, and I would ask the dumbest questions when I wanted to sound smart, like, What year was this restaurant founded? As if he would know or anyone would care.
“We should get back to the riddle,” I say, a little too loudly. “Do we think it’s wedding related somehow?”
“The word wedding is already included here,” Cyrus says. “I feel like that’s too obvious.”
“Well, three of the four things are red.”
“No,” he says, in the hushed voice of a hero from an action movie upon discovering who the real villain is. “ Four of the four things are red.”
The wedding dress. I had been imagining a white veil and white tulle, but then I remember the qipao my cousin wore for her wedding, and my mind continues racing forward, gathering up clues, leading me to: “The cushions. That one over there.”
We both turn to the only red cushion on the chairs. The ghosts spring back into action, screaming and scrabbling at the space around our heads, but Cyrus dodges them and searches around behind the cushion, his features hard with concentration, then brandishes a key. It’s a dull bronze, slim and barely longer than my pinkie finger, the ridges already starting to rust.
Everything is easy after that. We find the private room with a red poppy painted next to its name and enter it together, slamming the door shut behind us to stop the ghosts from barging in. The room itself is so small as to be suffocating, and I’ve definitely been inside closets that are more spacious, but that’s all fine because the room opens up to a balcony. Or it should, if the glass doors to the balcony weren’t locked. I can see the sunlight streaming in, the pretty rock gardens out the back, promising fresh air and freedom. I’m just getting ready to make my victory march when Cyrus spins toward me and holds his hand out expectantly.
“What do you want?” I ask him.
He frowns, like he thinks I’m picking an inappropriate time to crack a joke. “The key,” he says, his hand still stretched out in front of him. “You have it.”
“No, I don’t,” I say, wondering if he’s joking. If this is one of those instances where he’ll pretend to fumble around in his pockets searching for it before grinning and waving the key in front of my face. “You took the key. Come on, Cyrus.”
But his expression is as grave as the ghosts on the other side of the door. “I gave it to you just now,” he says. “I wouldn’t waste precious competition time pulling a prank.”
So it turns out that the universe is the only one joking here. This can’t be happening. “That’s just—I mean, that’s simply not true. You never gave me the key—”
“I did ,” he insists. “I distinctly remember passing it—”
“You must be from another dimension, then, because that didn’t happen in this timeline—”
“I’m one hundred percent certain that I handed it to you,” he says.
“And I’m one hundred percent certain you didn’t,” I shoot back. “I guess that makes it two hundred percent likely that you lost the key.”
“Okay, that is—mathematically, that can’t be right. But it does appear likely that the key is missing.”
I bite back a hysterical laugh and pat down my bangs a little more aggressively than I usually would, if only to do something with my hands that doesn’t involve punching the doors. The glass is thin enough that it ought to shatter with one solid strike. Thin enough that it feels all the more ridiculous to be stuck here, separated by nothing except a stupid misplaced key.
“You’re sure you don’t have it?” Cyrus asks after a beat of depressing silence. “Because I recall that we were heading into the room, and I was busy closing the doors because those ghosts kept trying to stick their heads in after us, so I took the key out of my pocket and I held it out—”
“Oh my god, Cyrus, I don’t have the key,” I interject, raising my arms above my head like I’m walking through airport security. “If you still don’t believe me, you’re welcome to feel me up. Go on. Check my back pockets. See if the key is there.”
He flushes. Turns away. “I—I do believe you,” he says. “We should look for the key. It can’t have hopped out of the room on its own.”
But I’m starting to think that the key really did sprout a pair of tiny legs and make a run for it when we weren’t paying attention, because even after patting every inch of the floor and reaching into every odd crack and nook, it remains nowhere to be found.
“This is the absolute worst,” I declare, pinching the bridge of my nose in frustration. I can feel our chances of winning suffocating slowly in this dark, cramped room as we speak.
“I can think of far worse things,” Cyrus says blithely, checking behind the table for the fifth time. “The year 536, for instance.”
“What happened in the year 536?” Though I’m not sure if that’s even the right question here. The year 536 sounds very well like it could also be a band, or a fancy club for rich people to chat about their yachts, or one of those supposedly profound four-hour-long movies where everyone dies.
“A devastating series of natural disasters,” he says. “There was a volcanic winter and major crop failures as a result. I think about that year often.”
“You think about major crop failures from centuries ago … often ?”
He nods. “At least three times a day.”
I have no idea if he’s just messing with me at this point.
“Because I often feel like life is terrible,” Cyrus explains, moving on to check the porcelain vase propped up in the middle of the table. “And then I remind myself that, well, you know, looking back on the long course of human history and everything we’ve survived and haven’t survived, I’m actually very lucky. Helps put things into perspective— Hey, I found it,” he says, triumph blazing through his voice.
I jerk my head up to see him dangling the bronze key between his fingers. Forget the northern lights. Forget Niagara Falls at sunset, snow on the beach, and every Michelangelo painting—this is officially the most beautiful sight to ever exist. If I could, I’d take a photo of this exact scene and hang it up in my bedroom. “It fell into that vase?” I demand.
“It appears so.”
“Well, it definitely didn’t fall from my pocket,” I can’t help emphasizing.
“How about we just agree it was lost in transit?” Cyrus says, which is about as diplomatic as we’re getting, even if I’m still certain he’s wrong. He slides the key smoothly into the lock and sunlight bursts through the door. The open air is perfect, layered with flavors I hadn’t noticed before we entered the teahouse, like the crisp aroma of bamboo leaves and the damp scent of the soil.
Wang Laoshi is waiting for us outside. My heart falls. We must be so far behind that everyone has already left.
“We’re last?” I ask.
Wang Laoshi shakes his head. “No, you’re first.”
“Wait. Seriously?” As a rule, I don’t like to gape—it’s never a graceful look. But I’m pretty sure I’m gaping at him now.
“Of course. I’m always serious,” Wang Laoshi says with a stern frown, which is the best kind of confirmation he could offer. “I’ll be letting Dr. Linda Shen know you’re today’s winners. I’m sure she’ll be pleased—she was the one who chose the teahouse for this activity.”
Now that I think about it, I do recall my mother mentioning how much my aunt loves her tea.
“See? I told you,” Cyrus says, nudging me with his elbow and forcing my attention back to him. “Even if one of us lost the key and caused some unexpected delays—”
“You,” I cut in. I mean to say it with vehemence, but my anger evaporates before it can boil, the euphoria of our victory plating everything in rose gold. It’s been so, so long since I last won anything. Since I didn’t feel like I was struggling alone at the very bottom. “You lost the key.”
“We would’ve been way ahead of the others with the clues,” Cyrus goes on, grinning at me. “What can I say? We make a good team.”
I’m not totally convinced that we make a good team—I just feel like good teamwork shouldn’t involve such frequent thoughts of murder—but with our first win secured, everything is working out according to plan. And if I’m being fair, I have to give Cyrus credit for getting us here.
So I bite down on my tongue and nod. I can put up with this a little longer if it means getting my revenge and getting into my aunt’s good graces, I tell myself. I can.
After all, I’ve put up with more in the past for less.