Chapter 30
The old woman, Granny Zhou, next door died.
She died alone, silently and unnoticed. It was only after her body began to stink from decomposition that anyone discovered it. Her home was completely bare, with nothing but a yellowed quilt, two rusty lunch boxes, and a lame cat that was nearly starving to death.
The cat had been hungry for a long time, but it still chose not to eat the old woman’s corpse. It was skin and bones, and after Granny Zhou’s body was carried away, it used the claws of its front paws to scratch at Qin Yao’s door.
Qin Yao gave it some leftover food, and it simply attached itself to her.
Although she was poor too, the cat was no fool. Clinging to a kindhearted poor person was still better than fighting with stray cats outside for scraps.
Compared with her, Chen Huai was more hard-hearted and more concerned with reality. Several times, he tried to drive the cat away. Qin Yao crouched down, softened a little, and said that they should just keep it.
By the time spring was almost over, around the end of April, the old cat died anyway. No one knew whether it had simply reached the end of its life or died of illness. After all, they had never taken it to a hospital, and Qin Yao could not tell how long it had actually lived. She only knew that one morning, when she opened her eyes, the old cat had already slipped out through the window and curled up outside Granny Zhou’s door, where it had died. No matter how much she called, it would not wake up. When it died, they did not even know what its name was.
Qin Yao found an old piece of clothing she no longer wore and wrapped the cat in it. In a soft voice, she said, “I’m not keeping cats anymore. If I come across one or two that are pitiful, I’ll take them to an animal shelter.”
Chen Huai buried the cat. “I told you from the start not to keep it.”
As they walked to the bus stop, Qin Yao shielded her eyes from the sun and sighed. “Chen Huai, summer is coming again.”
He turned his head and moved a little closer to Qin Yao, until the shadow cast by his tilted body happened to cover her. “Shouldn’t you have been looking forward to summer all along? Because you can leave.”
Qin Yao did not understand what he meant and asked in return, “Aren’t you leaving? Are you going to stay in Lincheng for university?”
Chen Huai narrowed his eyes at the cars on the road and avoided answering. “The bus is here.”
The two parted ways at the school gate. A countdown was hanging on the classroom wall, the days decreasing one by one. Qin Yao was doing more and more practice tests. Most institutions under the education system did not place much value on practical work, and she had only been in a laboratory a few times. Every day, she worked her way through stack after stack of exam papers. She had compressed her lunch break down to just fifteen minutes of rest. It was short, but because she was tired enough, the moment she put her head down, she could fall asleep. Yet the time was so short that she could not even manage to dream.
After waking, her mind was a little clearer, and she remembered that Sun Fusheng had finished a box of medicine and needed to go back to the hospital to get another one. But she had to go straight to her shift at the convenience store after school today, so she needed to tell Chen Huai.
She went to the sink in the restroom, scooped up a handful of water, and splashed it over her face to wake herself up. After drying off, she went to Class Five, where Chen Huai had most recently been transferred, to look for him. At first, she asked a student by the window. The student wore a complicated expression and said that Chen Huai was no longer in this class.
Qin Yao froze for a moment. “He transferred classes again?”
The student said he did not know. He had not come to school at all since the beginning of the semester.
She went down the line asking one person after another, until she reached Class Three. Yue Jian was sitting there with his chair tilted back, both legs hooked around the legs of the desk. He gave her a sly glance, his tone rather smug. “You and him were pretty close? Chen Huai should’ve... dropped out, I guess.”
“He deserved it.” Yue Jian rolled his eyes. “He went so hard on me before. My arm took a whole week to recover. My dad was never going to let him off.”
After saying that, he looked her up and down. “What are you to him? Why do you look so pissed off?”
As if he had thought of something, Yue Jian grinned. “Yo, he’s gotten himself into that state and he can still get into a puppy love relationship?”
Qin Yao stared at him until Yue Jian began to feel uneasy. Yue Jian furrowed his brows. “What are you staring at? You want to drop out like him too?”
Without saying another word, she went into Class Three, grabbed the wolf tail he had grown to look cool, and even used her teeth, biting him so hard that blood welled up on his neck. Yue Jian grabbed her hair too, and the two of them started fighting. The students in the class came over to pull them apart.
Qin Yao was left holding several strands of Yue Jian’s obnoxious hair. Her eyes were red, but she did not shed a tear. “Do you have no shame? You tied Chen Huai up before and threw him into a garbage heap. His arm still hasn’t healed even now, and you have the nerve to say that he bullied you?”
She counted them off one by one. “You tore up his homework, locked him in the bathroom, threw dirty mop water over his head, spread rumors that he caused Yuan Sheng’s death, and after school you brought people to block him at the stairs and beat him up. What did Chen Huai ever do to you? Did the girl you liked give him a love letter or something?”
Yue Jian’s expression changed, as though she had hit the sore spot in his heart. His face and neck turned red as he shouted, “Stop fucking talking shit!”
“So what if you have a dad? Why does that mean he has to drop out?” Qin Yao protested.
“So what if I have a dad to protect me? You guys don’t!”
Someone was pulling at Qin Yao’s arm. She suddenly stopped moving, gritting her back teeth tightly as she glared at Yue Jian. Her heart ached for a moment. She wanted to cry, but held it back. The tears only turned in her eyes for two seconds before drying up.
The homeroom teachers of the two classes each took the students involved aside to talk. Qin Yao’s hair had been pulled into a mess, and a row of teeth marks had been bitten into her lower lip.
“You know Chen Huai?”
Qin Yao answered without even thinking. “I do.”
The moment his name was mentioned, everyone sighed. “There’s nothing that can be done about what happened to him. His parents took the matter all the way to the Education Bureau. The officials spoke with the principal and said they were going to crack down on school bullying, that it had to be taken seriously...”
“Is the result of taking it seriously that the person who actually bullied someone gets to stay in the classroom while the one who fought back gets kicked out?” Qin Yao interrupted. “Then no one will dare fight back anymore. Everyone can just silently endure it.”
The teacher said nothing. She did not know what to do either.
“Everyone knows what Yue Jian did. You know, and I know.”
“You’re young, and you have that impulsive fire in you. You can tell right from wrong as clearly as day, because that’s what the textbooks teach you.” The teacher really was thinking of what was best for her. “But I only want to ask you one thing. Are you still going to sit for the Peking University entrance exam?”
“If you want Chen Huai to come back, you’ll have to deal with Yue Jian’s parents, submit all kinds of documents to the Education Bureau, wait for a response, wait for them to handle it. There are less than three months left before the college entrance exam. Chen Huai himself has already given up on this. Do you have the energy to do it for him? Or, to put it another way, do you have the ability to help him?”
She couldn’t help him. Qin Yao thought to herself. In truth, there was nothing she could do.
The teacher could see her mood too. She straightened Qin Yao’s clothes for her and told her, “Qin Yao, you’re a kind, good girl, but sometimes, being selfless doesn’t necessarily mean you’re right. There’s nothing wrong with being selfish, either. No one is so great that they should have to stake their future on someone else.”
She patted Qin Yao on the shoulder. “Go back to the classroom and study. I’ll help you mediate things with Yue Jian.”
Qin Yao began forcing herself to work through the questions. Her eyes scanned line by line across the study guides filled with annotations, the hundreds of pages of mistakes she had compiled herself. She had spent so much effort, stayed up through so many days and nights to make it this far. She could no longer stop.
News like this always spread quickly. Cao Manman brought her a new hair tie and had Qin Yao sit down while she helped tie her hair up.
“Ah, people like Yue Jian are just like that. Just like his name, really. Don’t keep thinking about it. Focus on preparing for the exam. If he dares come to the classroom and pick a fight with you again, I’ll help you send him packing.”
Once her hair was tied, Qin Yao turned around and hugged her. “Thank you.”
“We’re friends.” Cao Manman stroked her hair. “Besides, I know you need to leave here more than I do... I know you have a longer road ahead of you.”
That evening after school, as usual, Chen Huai was waiting for her at the school gate. Qin Yao carried her schoolbag and looked at him from a long way off. The hanging lamp at the entrance illuminated only a small patch of ground, and his shadow fell into Qin Yao’s eyes.
He had been waiting for a long time. Qin Yao did not run over to him. She simply stood where she was. Chen Huai checked the time again and again, his brows knitting together. He raised his head and searched the crowd for a glimpse of her. The two of them looked at each other across hundreds of meters of lamplight, too far apart even to make out the expressions on each other’s faces.
Chen Huai called to her, “Why are you standing over there?”
Qin Yao said nothing. Very slowly, she began walking toward him. They came to lean against each other side by side, their hearts drawing closer and closer too.
“Where did you go?” Qin Yao asked him.
Chen Huai gave a “heh” and cast her a sidelong glance. “Shouldn’t I be the one asking you that? You took so long to come out. I thought you were planning to stay up all night in the classroom doing practice questions.”
“You know what I mean,” Qin Yao said. “Where did you go during this time you’ve been out of school?”
Waiting for the bus together in the mornings and going to school had been a lie. He had done it deliberately, even pretending to wear a full school uniform. No wonder his schoolbag had felt so light, as though it could hardly hold anything.
And deliberately coming to find her around the time school let out in the evenings had been an act too. He had really gone to all that trouble, running back and forth just to put on a show for her.
Thinking about it this way, the five thousand yuan he had given her on New Year’s Eve might not necessarily have come from asking Grandma for it either. Maybe he had worked several jobs outside, had not even had time to go home for New Year’s Eve, and still made sure to buy her chestnuts for her in the freezing snow.
Why?
Sun Fusheng wasn’t his grandfather. It was one thing for Qin Yao herself to care so much about the old man, but what was his reason?
Qin Yao could not figure it out. There was no way for her to.
After she asked that question, Chen Huai did not answer. His footsteps paused for a moment before catching up with hers again. Silence, then more silence.
Her voice remained fairly calm, though for no apparent reason there was a hint of a laugh in it. “No wonder when I asked you this morning whether you were going to stay in Lincheng for university, you didn’t answer me.”
Chen Huai finally spoke. “Don’t get involved in this anymore.”
“Yes.” Qin Yao was burning with anger inside. “I can’t help you. Whenever something happens to me, you give me money without saying a word. You hide everything about your own problems from me. You want to push me as far away as possible, tell me to stay away from you. You think you’re doing it for my own good, but you never ask whether I think it’s good for me.”
Chen Huai kept his tone under control. He did not want to argue. “I gave you money, didn’t I? And you didn’t take it. You don’t want to drag me down, and I don’t want to have you dragging me along either. You think dropping out is bad for me, but there’s nothing I can do about this. You’ll finish high school, fly off to Beijing, and I still won’t be able to leave.”
“I can’t leave. Don’t you understand? This record is going to stay in my file. Unless I spend money, I won’t be able to get into a proper school. They don’t want me. They’re afraid I’ll hit people. They want to clamp my mouth shut like I’m a dog that might bite.” Chen Huai said, “When the time comes, just go live your good life and forget all about me. Neither of us needs to worry about the other.”
“Otherwise, why do you think my parents let me go so easily? My brother struggled for so long and still couldn’t escape. How did I manage to leave that family?” He tugged self-mockingly at the corner of his lips. “Because they know there’s no hope for me. I have no school left to attend. In their eyes, I have no value anymore.”
Qin Yao suddenly took his hand and stubbornly pulled him forward. “So what if I insist on dragging you along with me?”
She did not turn her head. Her voice was firm and forceful. “You can take these six months off and save some money. Once I finish my exams, there will always be a way to get you into school. You’ll only be six months behind me. It’s not as though you can’t wait that long.”
Suddenly, Chen Huai smelled that rotting-fruit scent again. He was dazed for a moment, dragged by the arm as he walked a long way.
Six months was something they could wait for...
But what about a year? Two years? Seven or ten years?
What if he remained trapped here and could never leave?
What right did she have to wait for him?
Though his rational mind told him this, the indescribable emotions surging up inside his chest still swept over him.
Because Qin Yao was simply too good. So Chen Huai, being careful and then even more careful, still fell in love with her.
No one had ever taught him how to give his heart to someone. In this regard, everyone seemed capable of learning it without a teacher.
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