As everyone filed back inside for lunch, Magnus — with sand still clinging to his feet, ankles, and places he'd rather not name — was walking with the specific stiffness of a man who had fallen out of the sky multiple times in the past few hours, and most definitely was going to feel it tomorrow, as well as possibly several days after that.
"So," Ethan announced as he kicked the sand off his flip-flops, "we've officially confirmed Magnus is approximately halfway toward becoming Jean Grey."
"No." Aaron didn't even look up from the notebook he'd somehow been writing in while walking.
"No? What do you mean 'no?' Bro, he can fly."
"That wasn't flight," Aaron insisted. "It was controlled self-levitation with limited horizontal and directional movement."
"That's flying," Ethan shot back. "You just described flight using more syllables."
"They're different."
"They're literally the same."
"They're not."
Miguel walked between them carrying the folded trampoline under one arm. "You two do realize you've just had different variations of this exact argument about everything in the past eight days, right?"
"Well, when Aaron stops being difficult, we can stop."
"I'm not being difficult, you're being objectively wrong."
"I'm not wrong, he achieved flight."
"Did he, though?" Jade shrugged. "Maybe more like floating with style and falling with less style."
"Thank you." Aaron gestured at her.
"Oh, come on!" Ethan protested. "Also, isn't that copyrighted?"
"Not that exact wording, I don't think?"
People drifted toward the dining table in loose clusters.
"…You know," Rachel said, once sandwiches were distributed and the table had settled into something resembling order, "we should all keep in touch after this Spring Break ends."
Camila blinked. "Aren't we already doing that?"
"No, I meant everyone. Everyone everyone." Rachel gestured broadly around the table. "The boyfriends. Chloe. Jade. All of it. This whole—" she waved a hand at the general chaos of the beach house, "—this whole thing. We can't just let this dissolve back into separate friend groups like it never happened."
"Say no more," Sofia said, already pulling out her phone. "I've got it."
Everyone's phones began vibrating within seconds. Magnus looked down.
Beach House Survivors was the name of the group chat. Within about ninety seconds, Sofia had added every girl at the table whom she and Alex had originally invited to the beach house, including Jade, then she added Magnus and Maya for good measure. Rachel, Carmen, Camila, and Maya followed suit, dragging their respective significant others into the group until the participant list had swelled to eighteen names — or rather, eighteen entries, since not everyone had used their actual name.
Camila scrolled through the list, squinting. "Who's Jay Green?"
Nobody answered immediately.
"I'm assuming that's one of you guys," Camila said, looking at the three remaining boyfriends.
"Wait, it's not Ethan?" Priya asked. "I thought it was a superhero secret identity or something."
"There's no superhero named Jay Green," Ethan said, offended.
"You're probably mixing up Jay Garrick and Alan Scott—who's a Green Lantern," Aaron suggested.
"Anyway." Camila clapped her hands together. "Back to the question at hand."
Jade raised her hand. Everyone turned to look at her in surprise.
"Having a male-sounding or gender-neutral name online comes in handy," she replied with a shrug.
There was a collective pause.
"…Yeah, okay," Maya said. "Fair enough."
"Okay, sure," Camila said. "But why Jay Green specifically?"
"Green is my favorite color, Jay sounds similar enough to Jade, and Jay Green is basically Jean Grey but—" she paused, searching for the word, "—nói lái. It's a kind of wordplay where you switch sounds around between words and end up with new words that still mean something, just something entirely different."
"Like what?" Ethan leaned forward immediately.
"Okay. English example." Jade thought for a second. "Kitchen. Chicken. Same letters, same sounds, different order, both real words." She held up a second finger. "Or a whole sentence: 'the chicken is in the kitchen' or 'the teachers are punishing the cheaters.' Swap the first sounds of teacher and cheater and you basically get each other. Those two sentences actually could count as parallel couplets, but that's a whole different kind of wordplay altogether."
"Oh, that's kind of fun," Priya said, sounding genuinely surprised to hear herself say it.
"Parallel couplets I get," Ethan said. "They exist in Chinese culture, too."
"Yeah, those originated from China," Jade confirmed.
"Back to what you were talking about before, though," Katie offered, already reaching for her notebook. "Switching the sounds around, I mean. Isn't that Spoonerism?"
Jade pulled out her phone, typed something, and nodded after a second. "Yeah. Spoonerism. Apparently, some other languages have this too — English, French, German — but it's usually just individual cases here and there. In Vietnamese, it's basically a whole genre. A whole tradition of it." She set her phone down. "Makes sense, though, because Vietnamese words are mostly one syllable. So when you swap pieces around, the odds that the new combination also happens to mean something real are a lot higher than in a language where words are longer."
"Give us a Vietnamese one," Aaron said.
"Okay," Jade said as she screenshotted something on her phone then sent it into the group chat:
[Thầy giáo tháo giầy vấy đất vất đấy.]
[Thầy giáo tháo giầy, tháo luôn cả ủng, thủng luôn cả áo, đem giáo án dán áo; / Nhà trường nhường trà, nhường nốt cả hoa, nhòa nốt cả hương, lấy lương hưu lưu hương.]
"You don't have to understand the meaning yet, just look at how the words are written and you should see the mechanics in action," she began, then turned to Magnus. "Okay, help me explain this to them—it would help with your practice too, assuming you're up for it."
He straightened slightly, pleased to be included. "I can try."
He stared at the words in the screenshot. "Okay, so 'thầy giáo' means 'the male teacher;' 'tháo giầy' means 'taking off your shoes;' 'vấy đất' means 'shaking of dirt;' and 'vất đấy' means 'throwing it away' or 'leaving it there?' So, the whole first sentence means 'the teacher takes off his shoes, shaking off the dirt then leaves them there,' right?" he translated for the rest of the group.
"Yup, think you can do the longer one?"
"Hang on! I have a question." Aaron raised his hand. "For the second example you sent, there's a pair of swapped words that aren't spelled exactly the same. Are they homophones?"
"Good eyes!" Jade praised him. "And yes, they are indeed homophones—the 'r' sound, the 'd' sound, and the 'gi' sound in Vietnamese are similar to each other. Now, Magnus, the meaning."
"The teacher takes off his shoes, then his boots as well, his shirt has holes in it, so he uses lesson plans to patch the holes? The school gives up the tea, then the flowers as well, even the incense is gone, so they had to use their pension to travel away from their homeland?"
"Yup, more or less. Don't pay too much attention to the meaning, it's mostly about the wordplay."
"Right." Magnus nodded.
"That's genuinely wild," Ethan said.
"Give us something with more of a story," Sofia said.
Jade considered. "Okay. There's a real historical one. A scholar — a really famous one, actually, one of the most respected scholars of his era — got asked by his village to write something to protect their meeting hall from fire, after the old one burned down. So he wrote one giant character on cloth. Just one word. Nhất. Means 'one.' Hang on, let me send you a screenshot. Ethan, you probably will know this one."
[一]
"Oh yeah, that's Hanji, yī in Pinyin."
"That's it?" Camila asked.
"That's it. But he told them to hang it sideways over the door. Nobody understood why, but he was famous enough that they just did it and didn't ask questions."
"And?" Alex prompted.
"The character, written the way he wrote it, looked kind of like a mallet. A chày. Hung sideways, and it looks like a 'standing mallet'—chày đứng." Jade paused for effect. "Say that backward."
Magnus tried it under his breath. His eyes widened slightly. "That's… đừng cháy. Which means, don't burn."
"Don't burn," Jade confirmed. "Hidden inside a picture of a standing mallet. And apparently the village didn't have a fire for years afterward, so everyone assumed it was some kind of magic."
"That's not magic," Aaron said. "That's just really good branding."
Jade scrolled through something on her phone that made her chuckle. "Oh, a lot of you will be able to appreciate this one."
She sent another screen shot into the group chat:
[Ai bàn chi chuyện đã an bài,
Trai khiển đồng tình gái triển khai.
Cứ sợ cho nên thành cớ sự,
Mai than mốt thở lỡ mang thai.
Tính từ ngày tháng vương tình tứ,
Khai ổ bây giờ báo khổ ai.
Cưỡng chúng ông bà nghe cũng chướng,
Thôi đành để chúng được thành đôi!]
"Again, you don't need to understand the meaning, Magnus and I can explain that," Jade said. "The fun bits you can see right now is that the first two and last two words of every sentence of that poem are basically spoonerized versions of each other."
"Oh, that's really clever!" Magnus looked at the image too. Then, he began translating the meaning for everyone:
"It's basically saying:
'The matter is already settled, so why argue about it?
The young man and the young woman are in love.
Fear only made the situation worse,
And now she's pregnant.
Looking back to when their romance began,
Who can really be blamed now?
Even if the elders disapprove,
It's better to let the two of them marry.'"
"There's a story behind this one, isn't there?" he added after a moment.
"Yes," Jade confirmed. "From the meaning Magnus had just translated, anyone wants to take a guess?"
"It's a poem telling the family to stop protesting young love?" Camila asked. "Because she's already pregnant and they actually love each other and wanted to get married?"
"Yup. And speaking of that, there's this one idiom in Vietnamese. Though I don't think Magnus will be able to understand this one."
She typed something on her phone, screenshotted it, then sent the picture to everyone.
[Ăn kem trước cổng / Ăn cơm trước kẻng]
Magnus stared at it. "I can understand the meaning, but I assume there's a hidden joke in there somewhere? Because the literal meaning is just 'eating ice cream in front of the gate' and 'eating before the bell,' from what I can understand?"
"Yup, thought so. Your power doesn't give you cultural context." Jade nodded then began explaining. "Basically, 'ăn cơm trước kẻng' is a metaphor for 'having sex before marriage.' It came from an era when everyone in the community was supposed to eat together at a certain hour—hence, 'kẻng' or 'the bell.' So eating before said hour was considered improper—you know, doing something before you're supposed to. 'Having sex before marriage,' at the time, was also considered improper for similar reasons. So that was how the idiom took root. Nowadays, though, with globalization and people feeling more relaxed about the matter, they started joking about it more, which is how the spoonerized version came into existence."
"I appreciate languages that reward pattern recognition." Aaron concluded, smiling.
"That's one way to describe Vietnamese."
"It isn't the usual way?"
"Not really, no." Jade shook her head, then thought about something and hesitated. "…There are also…"
"What?" Maya asked immediately.
She sighed. "…The vulgar ones."
"Okay, now you have to!"