Page 25 of The Epic Crush of Genie Lo (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo 1)

I poked my finger into his chest as hard as my joints would take.

“I hate you,” I said again. That was all I was capable of, it seemed.

He slowly put his hands up and began backing away. “Why?”

I wouldn’t let him get away so easily. “Because,” I said. “I don’t need a reason. People don’t need a reason to hate things. And I am people.”

I kept jabbing him over and over as he retreated, trying to drive home the message like a spear point.

“I am a human person,” I snarled. “I am not the Ruyi Jingu Bang. I am not a freaking stick, do you hear me?”

“Um, Genie,” Quentin said, looking down awkwardly.

I hadn’t noticed that I’d been continuously poking Quentin in the chest from where I stood, even though he’d now backed all the way across the room.

My arm had stretched out to follow him. My arm was twenty feet long.

There’s a moment when you realize that you’ve never been truly scared before. It wasn’t when I’d met Quentin, and it wasn’t when I’d been introduced to the Demon King of Confusion. Those times wer

e apparently just practice.

“AAAAAAAAA!” I screamed. “WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?!”

“I didn’t do anything!” Quentin screamed back. “Put it back before someone sees us!”

I was too terrified to move my elongated arm for fear that it would shatter under its own ridiculous proportions. “It’s too big!” I said, waving at it with my other hand. “Make it smaller! Make it go down!”

“I can’t! You have to do it yourself!”

“I don’t know how!”

By now footsteps were coming down the hall toward us. I could hear teachers’ voices. If they sounded upset now, they hadn’t seen anything yet.

Quentin realized I wasn’t going to do much other than hyperventilate. He ran over and grabbed me by the waist. Then he rolled up the window behind us and jumped straight out of it. I could feel my arm accommodating his trajectory by bending in places where I didn’t have joints.

I saw nothing but cloudless blue sky as Quentin hauled me up the sheer brick side of the building. It didn’t fully register that he was dangling me two stories off the ground as he scampered up the school walls. I had, believe it or not, even worse things to worry about.

The ascent was over in a split second. Quentin reached the roof and unceremoniously dumped me onto the asphalt. We were safely out of sight for the moment.

I squeezed my eyes shut so I wouldn’t have to look at my arm trailing away like the streamer on a bike handle.

“I can’t be stuck like this!” I wailed. Visions of having to gnaw it off like a jackal in a trap flooded my brain.

Quentin knelt before me and put his hands on my trembling shoulders.

“You’re not going to be stuck,” he said, his voice low and reassuring in my ears. “You are the most powerful thing on Earth short of a god. You can do absolutely anything. So believe me when I say you can certainly change your arm back to normal.”

He held me firmly, the way you’d brace someone trying to pop a dislocated joint back into place. “Just relax and breathe,” he said. “It’ll happen as you will it.”

I took his advice and focused on calming down. Focused on nothing. Focused on him.

I couldn’t really feel my arm retracting. And I certainly didn’t want to look at it happening. I just . . . remembered how I was supposed to be. I kept quiet, kept at it for what must have been a good ten minutes, until I could feel both of my hands firmly on Quentin’s broad back.

“There you go,” he said.

I opened my eyes. My arm was normal again. I was aware that we were sort of hugging.

I buried my face in his chest and blew my nose on his shirt. “I’m a human being,” I muttered.