Chapter 25
After buying the ice, he sat by the convenience store’s floor-to-ceiling window, tore open the packet, and first stuffed a few painkillers into his mouth. Then he tilted his head back and pressed the rest against his eyes.
Qin Yao had finished her biology worksheet, but he still had not left. Under the store’s fluorescent lights, his shadow was cut into pieces, swallowed and divided by row upon row of shelves. The air was too quiet. There was only the crunch, crunch of him chewing ice.
At two in the morning, another employee came to take over her shift. Qin Yao took off her apron and zipped up her backpack. When she pushed open the door to leave, she turned her head for another glance. He had finished eating the ice, and Chen Huai was lying face-down on the table, lightly asleep.
The employee taking over frowned and walked over, apparently intending to chase him out. Qin Yao pushed the door open and stepped outside, the night wind in the alley billowing into the front of her clothes.
Qin Yao happened to walk past the floor-to-ceiling window just as she saw him being woken up. He picked up the now-empty cup that had held the ice and prepared to leave.
“Knock, knock.”
She tapped on the glass, and Chen Huai’s silent eyes turned toward her.
Qin Yao had not intended to speak to him. She had knocked on the glass to talk to her coworker on duty. She pointed at Chen Huai first, then at the table, and folded her hands together to make a sleeping gesture.
Her coworker seemed to understand what she meant and sighed. “Forget it, forget it. She hopes you can sleep here, so just spend the night if you want. Just don’t let me catch you taking anything from the store.”
After turning around, he was still muttering to himself. “How can someone this old still have a home they won’t go back to?”
When he turned his head again, Qin Yao had already left on her own. Chen Huai paused, threw the plastic cup into the trash can, and still pushed open the door and walked out.
He had left home, alone and with no one beside him, and had no intention of going back.
After that, Qin Yao often saw him at school. It was a strange phenomenon. Perhaps she had seen him before, too, but because she had never paid much attention, there had been so many moments when they passed each other without her ever looking up. Only after they had actually come face-to-face did she realize how many chances they had had to meet.
Chen Huai’s name was always linked with Yue Jian. Although Qin Yao had never deliberately paid attention to this kind of gossip, she still heard her classmates talking about it during their idle conversations. The rumors basically all originated with Yue Jian. He was on bad terms with Chen Huai, so he often made things up about him, saying that Chen Huai had driven his older brother to his death.
His older brother had also attended this school. When the incident happened, it had made the news. The principal had gone to great lengths to suppress it. During that period, the school had also tightened its focus on academic performance, as though it intended to use good college admission rates to reverse its bad reputation.
Qin Yao had seen him in the office. While the teachers were making phone calls, she heard his name mentioned again and again, saying that he had not gone home for several days in a row.
Yet even so, his parents had never once come to the school to look for him.
Later, Chen Huai rarely went to school. Once in a while, Qin Yao would run into him again. One time, in the pile of trash opposite the Science and Education Building, he had been dumped there.
Qin Yao guessed that Yue Jian and the others had probably thrown him there again. Chen Huai’s hands and feet were bound with nano tape. He did not move either. At first, his eyes rolled upward like a fish fallen into a dried-up land, staring at the clear, cloudless sky. Then they slowly moved downward. His eyelids covered half his eyes, and his gaze settled calmly on Qin Yao.
Leaves from the yellow-fruited ficus were blown down by the wind, landing on him. Qin Yao tossed the trash in her hands into the garbage cart, then stepped over and took hold of his bound hands.
The tape was thick. She tried several times, but could not tear it apart. Force was useless, so she could only start searching for the end of the tape, peeling it away bit by bit.
Once his hands were freed, Chen Huai tore off the restraints around his ankles himself. When he ripped the tape stuck to his lips away, it pulled out blood. He stuck out his tongue and licked it off, without even saying thank you.
Qin Yao crouched down and met his eyes. Chen Huai deliberately avoided her gaze.
She said, “You just let them beat you up like this?”
“You’d better not get so close.” He offered her a warning. “If someone sees you, you’ll get yourself dragged into it.”
“Are you going to drop out of school?” Qin Yao asked again, as though she had eight hundred questions stuffed inside her. Chen Huai did not understand why she was so interested in his affairs.
He was in a bad mood. He licked the blood from his lower lip, his tone sharp. “What does it have to do with you? So you can turn around and spread rumors about me with your classmates?”
Qin Yao paid no attention to whether he looked happy or not and simply continued saying what she wanted to say.
“Don’t drop out.”
Chen Huai blinked once, meeting her calm gaze.
Qin Yao said, “If you drop out, your life really will be over.”
There were teasing voices nearby, drawing closer and closer. Chen Huai did not respond. He watched her for a few more seconds, his lips pressed into a tight line, then got up from the ground and quickly walked away. He did not return to his class, but he could not leave through the school gates either.
That night, while Qin Yao was doing her worksheets at the store, she saw him again. He was carrying a very large bag and had changed clothes. He had probably just taken a shower. His hair was still wet, plastered against his head, droplets soaking the white collar of his shirt.
He walked over to the freezer with practiced familiarity and took out a cup of ice. Qin Yao rang him up and saw his swollen, aching wrist extending from his sleeve, marked with the ligature bruises left by the tape.
The store was quiet, filled only with the very low sound of music, like the thin, curling smoke of incense drifting slowly through the warm air indoors.
The tip of her pen left a tiny blot of ink on the thin worksheet. The hands of the clock on the wall pointed to twelve when Chen Huai suddenly asked her if there were any pharmacies nearby that were still open.
She glanced at him and said no.
Chen Huai said nothing more and prepared to leave. Qin Yao hesitated for a second, then called after him.
“My house is nearby.”
Chen Huai turned to look at her. She put the completed worksheets into her backpack.
“There’s iodine and some ointment at home. You can take them and use them.”
More precisely, they belonged to Sun Fusheng’s home. Qin Yao had never stocked such things herself, but Sun Fusheng was getting old, and his health was already somewhat frail. On top of that, his mind was muddled and he often wandered off, coming home with scrapes all over him. So Qin Yao had stocked some medicine for bruises and other injuries at his house.
Before the key had even turned the lock, the two of them could already hear thunderous snoring from inside. Qin Yao switched on the light and stood on tiptoe to reach for the plastic bag stuffed into the corner of the cabinet.
The old house had very simple furnishings. The stove was tiny, and the innermost partition served as a bedroom. A very low table stood in the cramped living room, with some dishes covered by a mosquito net.
Qin Yao handed him the iodine and spray and told him to sit on the sofa and treat himself. Then she muttered under her breath in complaint,
“…Forgot to put the dishes in the fridge again.”
Qin Yao tidied up the scattered things, then, as usual, checked around the house to make sure nothing was missing. Chen Huai was left-handed, and he was awkward with his right hand, so he was slow even when applying the medicine. Qin Yao leaned against the edge of the table and lingered there for a long while. Chen Huai did not look up, yet seemed to sense her hesitation, as though she wanted to say something but could not bring herself to. So he spoke openly.
“If you have something to say, just say it. There’s no need to keep it bottled up.”
“Where do you sleep at night?” Her eyes were wide, as if she were genuinely curious.
Rumors about what happened at school had been flying everywhere, and Qin Yao knew he did not go home at night.
Chen Huai pressed the cotton swab hard against the wound, his voice barely audible. “You don’t need to worry about it.”
The bruise where the cotton swab had poked was even darker. She stared at it for a few seconds, then reached out and stopped him, taking the cotton swab from Chen Huai’s hand. She squeezed out some ointment and slowly smoothed it over his skin, passing over the knobby, protruding bones of his wrist, grazing the back of his hand, and finally covering it with a sterile dressing.
“Sleep on this sofa.”
She snapped the cotton swab in half and threw it into the trash, tied up the plastic bag filled with various medicine bottles, and put it back into the cabinet.
“I…” She paused, taking a breath before continuing. “When my family fell apart and I lost everyone, I didn’t have anywhere to stay either. The convenience store owner let me get by for a while on the board bed in the storage room where they kept the stock. Later, I found a cheap place to live, so I made do there.”
“Back then, my situation wasn’t much different from yours.”
Qin Yao picked up the backpack from the table and slung it over her shoulder. The keys hanging from her fingers clattered loudly. She had just turned and walked to the doorway when she heard Chen Huai’s voice behind her.
“I know.”
She felt vaguely puzzled by those words and turned her head slightly, only to see that he had already lain down.
The sofa was a little too small for him. Half of his lower legs hung outside it. Chen Huai curled himself up, facing the back of the sofa, his still-damp hair pressed against the peeling old upholstery, spreading out in a dark mass.
She lowered her eyes, closed the door securely, and went downstairs back to her own home.
Summer disappeared quickly, like a cheap cigarette that burned away too fast. Before the hot smoke had even passed through your lungs, you would realize the ember had already burned down to your fingers, urging a sharp pain through you. And so summer, like a cigarette butt, was despised and discarded.
Chen Huai would give her money. On the first day of every month, Qin Yao could always find several hundred yuan beneath the flowerpot on Sun Fusheng’s windowsill. It was not much, but given his circumstances, it was probably all he could afford to give.
Since she was collecting rent, Qin Yao gave him a spare key to Sun Fusheng’s house. The money Chen Huai gave her did not go into her own pocket either. She put it all into the cardboard box inside Sun Fusheng’s wardrobe. The old man liked taking the money from there to the market to buy vegetables.
Qin Yao saw him only a few times over the entire summer. She did not often run into him at school either. Later, she learned that he had gone after Yue Jian for revenge and beaten him badly. Yue Jian’s parents came to the school, and Chen Huai stood in the corridor, his head forced down as he apologized. His thin back protruded into a curved ridge of bone, his back molars clenched hard.
Then he took a full two months’ leave. He did not even sit for the final examinations of his second year of high school. His name fell to the very last line of the ranking list, with zeros recorded for every subject.
During the days Chen Huai did not go to school, he worked at a bookstore on a small street in Tianguan Prefecture. Qin Yao had seen him there.
To be honest, there was nothing about him that suggested any sort of literary or artistic temperament. He was practically a complete mismatch for a place like a bookstore, yet for some reason, he stuck with the job.
During the October National Day holiday, Qin Yao went to the bookstore to buy the latest issue of a magazine. In August, she had submitted a three-thousand-character short story to a publication, and it was printed in this month’s issue. She received a four-hundred-yuan payment for it. She could not wait for the editorial department to mail her a contributor’s copy, so she went out and bought one herself.
When he saw her, Chen Huai showed little expression. When it came time to pay, he told her she did not need to.
“Consider it a gift from me.”
Qin Yao said very sincerely, “But this store isn’t yours.”
The corners of Chen Huai’s lips dropped. He insisted, almost like he was forcing a sale.
“What I mean is, I’ll pay for you. Just take it and go.”
Qin Yao nodded and slipped the magazine into her canvas bag. Then she asked again, “Can I take another one?”
He was so exasperated that he almost laughed. “Give you an inch and you want a mile?”
Qin Yao quietly looked at him. Chen Huai held the corners of his lips taut for a second, then turned his head away and relented.
“Go pick one.”
Before long, a children’s magazine with a cartoon character printed on its cover caught his eye. Qin Yao was smiling brightly, as if she were genuinely happy, and even her speech quickened.
“This issue has a story I wrote in it, so I’ll give you a copy. You can read it when you have nothing to do.”
She had submitted thirteen times, and this was the only time she had gotten accepted. Qin Yao really could not resist telling someone about it. She told Cao Manman first, then went to tell Sun Fusheng, but unfortunately, Sun Fusheng could not quite understand what she was saying.
So she went to tell Sun Hongping too, talking for thirty-eight minutes, just after she had returned from the cemetery.
The illustration on the cover was very childish, with the recommended reading age marked as five to eight years old.
Chen Huai accepted it. He felt that the exaggerated expression of the child in the illustration, just like Qin Yao, revealed an innocence untouched by the ways of the world.
Yet that quality was also completely at odds with Qin Yao, because she had clearly been through everything. And precisely because it was at odds with her, it was also what made her charming.
Qin Yao walked out of the store. Chen Huai saw her heading in the opposite direction from home. He thought about it for a moment, then determined that the road led toward No. 136 Zhongxin Road. As though he had remembered something, Chen Huai pressed his lips together.
That day, Qin Yao did not find a reply in the mailbox. The next day, unwilling to give up, she went again.
Inside the rusty green mailbox lay a brand-new letter.
It was addressed:
“To A Melancholy Blue Corpse.”
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