Chapter 27
The bedsheets hung downstairs still had not dried by the next morning. The night air was heavy with dampness, and when Qin Yao woke up, there were still a few bugs stuck to the quilt. She had the distinct feeling that she had washed them for nothing.
Chen Huai came quickly down the stairwell with his crossbody bag slung over his back. He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked at her from a distance, waiting a little. Only after Qin Yao had brought the bedsheets inside and locked the door did she call out to him, “Do you know which bus we’re supposed to take?”
After thinking for a few seconds, he honestly shook his head. Qin Yao hung the canvas bag over her shoulder and crooked a finger at him, telling him to follow. The two of them walked toward the bus stop at the intersection, one in front and one behind, standing at opposite ends as though they were afraid anyone might find out they knew each other.
Qin Yao tilted her head strangely as she looked at him. Chen Huai felt awkward under her stare and narrowed his eyes at the opposite side of the street, lowering his chin slightly. “It’s best if we pretend we don’t know each other at school.”
“You’re afraid Yue Jian will come after me?”
Although Chen Huai did not say anything afterward, Qin Yao saw through him perfectly. She did not force the matter either. She straightened her head and pretended not to notice the gap between them, wide as a rift in the earth, then boarded the bus by herself. Chen Huai followed close behind.
There were only two seats left in the very back of the bus. Each of them took one, both turning their heads in different directions, one looking out the window on the left, the other looking through the aisle at the window on the right. They did not even exchange glances.
There was nothing worth mentioning about what happened at school. She recited her lessons so loudly that her throat hurt, then swallowed hot water slowly at breakfast. Cao Manman furtively pulled three or five children's magazines out of her schoolbag and congratulated Qin Yao. “Ta-da-ta-da! I guess I’m your number-one reader, right? If I had another five yuan in pocket money, I could even buy one more.”
Qin Yao was genuinely touched. Cao Manman braced both hands on her desk and asked curiously, “Then are you going to study literature or something like that in the future?”
The question was genuinely difficult to answer. Given Qin Yao’s circumstances now, choosing a major that could make money was the most practical option. Whether she even had any real interest in literature was still unknown. What kind of job she could find after studying it, and whether she could support herself, were both impossible to say.
Bread and distant horizons could never truly be had at the same time. So when Cao Manman asked her, Qin Yao found herself at a loss for words, unable to give a definite answer.
In any case, she would finish high school first. Worry about the college entrance exam first. And, more immediately, worry about this month’s monthly test first.
In between studying, Qin Yao gradually began to pay more or less attention to Chen Huai’s situation. Ever since he had gone all out and cornered Yue Jian in the bathroom, beating him badly, Yue Jian seemed to have grown wary of him and always avoided him.
But Qin Yao had also heard that Yue Jian would not let the matter go. Since he did not resort to physical violence, he began complaining to his family instead. Yue Jian’s parents went to the teachers several times, saying that a problem student like Chen Huai had to be expelled, otherwise they would report the matter to the Education Bureau. His father said that every one of Yue Jian’s injuries had been photographed and preserved as evidence. If the school did not take seriously the matter of his son being maliciously assaulted, he would make a huge public issue of it. By then, what happened to the school’s reputation, and how many students it could still recruit the following year, would no longer be his concern.
Yue Jian’s father worked for a listed company in the city. He spoke with reason and evidence, carrying with it the air of a highly educated person looking down on impoverished students. Between the lines, he repeatedly disparaged Chen Huai as a child with no proper upbringing.
There was nothing technically wrong with what he said. Yue Jian had parents who knew how to raise him, parents who could take even those few injuries he had suffered and hold them close to their hearts, carefully preserving evidence of every wound. Chen Huai, on the other hand, genuinely had no need to photograph his injuries, because he had not even gone to the hospital. The wounds on his body had never properly healed in the first place. The bruises on his wrists left by Yue Jian binding them with tape had lingered for a long time without fading.
Qin Yao had known from a very young age that, from a certain perspective, this world was terribly lopsided. Most of the time, it existed in a state of positive feedback, with some people forever climbing uphill while others, from the moment they crawled out of the womb, could only keep falling, tumbling all the way into an abyss they could never climb back out of.
The other side was determined to make a huge fuss over the matter. Several times, Qin Yao happened to see the teacher from Class Three call Chen Huai out. He had contacted Chen Huai’s parents several times, but they seemed to have been enraged by Chen Huai’s attitude of severing ties with them. They simply declared that Chen Huai was not their child, and after that, they could no longer be reached.
The situation was difficult. The teacher also understood Chen Huai’s circumstances and still had some professional ethics. He did not immediately side with the powerful and influential party. Instead, he first came up with a compromise: separate Chen Huai and Yue Jian.
He figured that if they transferred Yue Jian to another class, he would probably make another scene, and the teacher had a headache over it. So he came to talk to Chen Huai, asking whether he was willing to transfer to another class.
But no homeroom teacher was willing to take on this huge headache. Although Yue Jian bullied people, Chen Huai had also retaliated plenty of times. His fists were hard, and hardly anyone at school had ever had a deep conversation with him. Without knowing what kind of person he was, it was easy to lump him together with Yue Jian as the same sort of troublemaker.
And so the matter kept being delayed. It did not, however, delay Chen Huai’s studies. The two of them bought a secondhand desk lamp online. Sun Fusheng’s family did not have a desk, so when Chen Huai did his homework, he either hunched over and wrote on the low table, or he could only wipe away the old grease stains baked into the dining table and do his homework there under the desk lamp.
After all, he had taken a very long leave of absence. It was only normal that he could not keep up. Sometimes, when Qin Yao came home from the convenience store after work and finally lay down on the bed, hoping to sleep for a while, she could still hear the thudding footsteps from upstairs, like some unconscious stomping brought on by anxiety, which invariably stopped at three in the morning.
By winter, the matter of transferring classes was finally settled. After evening self-study, the two of them walked one in front and one behind. Qin Yao walked a few steps, then slid a few steps as though she were playing around. One time, she failed to stop herself and nearly fell straight onto her backside. Chen Huai had noticed early and ran a few steps forward, reaching out to catch her by the arm. Qin Yao belatedly clung to him, still grinning.
“Is the ice here more slippery than the one at an ice rink?”
“I don’t know,” Chen Huai said. “I’ve never been to an ice rink.”
Qin Yao was still hanging onto him. She breathed out a puff of warm air, her eyes curving into a smile. It was clearly winter, yet somehow she burned Chen Huai’s eyes.
“I’ve never been either, but when I was a little younger, I begged my mom to take me.” Qin Yao tried her best to hold on to some of her memories with Sun Hongping and spoke slowly. “My mom got so worn down by me that she couldn’t do anything about it anymore... But my mom never really lost her temper anyway. She always seemed to have such a good nature. She just said that once she had saved enough money, we could go.”
Her voice was melodious and winding, like a wisp of smoke: “She just kept saving and saving, until she died, and she still never got to go.”
Once Qin Yao had steadied herself, she pushed him away. Afraid she would slip again, she lowered her head and walked very slowly, talking to Chen Huai about all sorts of things under the sun. “Next year is the college entrance exam, Chen Huai.”
She smiled. “We’re going to leave this place.”
For once, Chen Huai was the one to ask her, “Where do you want to go after you graduate?”
“Beijing,” Qin Yao said. “I still carry a pair of eyes on my shoulders. I want to go to Beijing and see it for my mother, and study the literature program she wanted to study.”
Chen Huai looked as though he wanted to say something but could not bring himself to. His right hand silently held onto the strap of her schoolbag so she would not slip again, but Qin Yao was completely unaware, seemingly lost in thoughts of something else.
“Are you going to live your whole life for your mother?” Chen Huai asked.
The moment he said it, Qin Yao was stunned. She had never considered it.
She studied hard because of her mother’s dying wish. Qin Yao did not want to disappoint her. Reading books and writing, too, had been influenced by her mother. Through all those long years of drifting and wasting away, Qin Yao did not know what she would have left to hold on to once she set aside her mother’s unfulfilled wish, once she set aside her grandpa, who had forgotten everything.
She did not know.
She only felt that being alive was the best way to repay those lives that had already passed away.
“It doesn’t matter,” Qin Yao said. “All we need to think about is how to survive. Choosing what to live for is something people with enough to spare can afford to think about.”
She smiled with a sort of relieved acceptance. “If a person is poor enough, they don’t even have the right to choose between life and death.”
As she said this, she stepped into another pile of half-melted snow. Her body tipped backward. Chen Huai did not know what he had been distracted thinking about at the time. Although he was holding onto her schoolbag strap, he did not have time to pull hard enough. The two of them fell into the snow together, Qin Yao landing on top of Chen Huai and hearing a muffled groan from beneath her.
Qin Yao turned her head and glanced back. Chen Huai’s hair had been driven straight into the snow, snow clung to his eyebrows and eyelashes, and his clothes were soaked through. He frowned and looked at her displeasedly, saying irritably, “It’s quite a feat to fall twice on the same stretch of road.”
He had barely finished speaking when snow slipped down inside his collar, making Chen Huai jolt from the cold. Qin Yao was sprawled on top of him, laughing uncontrollably, her warm breath spilling onto his neck and completely melting the little bit of snow that had not yet melted, sending it trickling down over his rigid bones.
Chen Huai silently stared into her eyes. Then, all at once, he let out a laugh with a sigh, the warm mist drifting upward like clouds, returning to the sky.
He pinched Qin Yao’s cheek and pulled her up by the shoulder. Qin Yao had laughed until tears glimmered in her eyes. There was quite a bit of softness to her face, and it rubbed gently against his palm.
The warmth was frighteningly hot, enough to make one suspect she was ill. Or perhaps his body had been cold for too long, his heart thoroughly chilled as well, so that even the slightest bit of warmth poured over him was enough to scorch straight through his chest.
“What are you doing?” Qin Yao grumbled, batting his hand away.
Chen Huai stared at her for a long time. Then, all of a sudden, he let go, rolled over, and lay down on the other side, causing Qin Yao to tumble into the snowbank and jolt from the cold as well.
The two of them lay there with the sky for a quilt and the earth for a bed, both children abandoned by life. It was rare for them to find a moment to catch their breath, free to laugh when they wanted to laugh, shout when they wanted to shout.
Chen Huai said, “Do you know what day it is today?”
Qin Yao lay on the ground beside him and tilted her head toward him. “What? Is it your birthday?”
She shamelessly played the pauper. “I don’t have any money to buy you a present. At most, I can repay you with two eggs.”
Chen Huai was always both annoyed and amused by her. “If you repay me with two eggs, won’t I still have to boil them for you and bring them over tomorrow morning?”
She dragged out her voice, long and long, like a broken gramophone: “Ohhh...”
After a few seconds of silence, he said, “There’s a meteor shower tonight.”
There were few places in Lincheng where meteor showers could be seen, let alone in winter, when the sky turned into a heavy, boundless expanse of gray.
Because of the terrain, there were many mountains, which was why places like Shancheng Alley were so famous. Finding somewhere with a sufficiently open view for stargazing was difficult, so Qin Yao simply assumed Chen Huai was making things up.
But she had been wrong. There really was one tonight. A few tiny meteors streaked past, dragging their tails behind them and vanishing in an instant, like sparks exploding into the air.
Qin Yao narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth, breathing out a very warm puff of air. “There really are some.”
Because her hair was beginning to show signs of getting wet, Qin Yao propped herself up with her arms and said blankly, “I like Lincheng winters. I hate summer.”
Chen Huai glanced at her, then sat up from the snow as well. “Why?”
She was silent for a long time. In the end, all that came out was a lighthearted, airy sentence: “Silly. Of course it’s because when it’s cold, you can cover yourself with a quilt, but when it’s hot, there’s no air conditioner at home to blow on you!”
Chen Huai could not be bothered to indulge her. He relaxed his hand and lay back down.
He casually chatted with Qin Yao about a few pointless things, asking whether that Sun Fusheng upstairs was her grandfather, and why they did not live together when doing so could save them an expense.
Qin Yao kept her eyes open for a long time before simply saying, “No.”
That was not exactly a lie either.
But deep down, she still blamed Sun Fusheng for failing to give Sun Hongping the care she should have received. She felt that while Tang Juan could be said to bear most of the responsibility for what had happened to her mother, Sun Fusheng could not escape blame either.
Men in a family could so easily take on the role of an invisible presence, only to regret everything when it was too late, playing the armchair strategist after the fact and imagining themselves to have been so deeply devoted.
Qin Yao’s feelings toward Sun Fusheng were complicated. Even she could not explain them clearly, much less make them known to Chen Huai.
When they reached the bottom of the residential building, Chen Huai was about to go upstairs when Qin Yao hesitated for a few seconds before calling him back.
“Since you’re transferring classes, then at school, from now on...”
“Can I call you by your name?”
He took a few steps up the stairs, then slowly turned around and looked down at her. He looked at the white snow caught in her hair, at the outline of her figure veiled in a hazy layer of light.
His chest trembled for an instant. Chen Huai parted his lips.
“You can.”
“Qin Yao, only you can.”
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