The Scorching Sun - 5

 Senior year life marched to a steady, metronomic beat. Every day traces the exact same path, like clockwork.

But the passage of time still brought a certain pressure to bear on Fang Zhuo.

It wasn't the college entrance exam that made her tense. It was the financial pressure waiting on the other side of it.

Her grades were badly lopsided, leaving her ranking stuck in an awkward middle zone. And there was no way around it. The village primary school she'd attended hadn't taught English, and the middle school faculty hadn't fared much better. Some of the teachers couldn't even speak standard Mandarin.

Compared to the other students at A-High, English as a subject was an alien territory to her. She had no idea where to even begin catching up. And so the school scholarship remained out of reach.

Fortunately, her other subjects were solid enough to partly make up the shortfall.

Her goal was a first-tier university, the tuition there was relatively low there. If she failed to make the cutoff, scraping together the extra costs would be nearly impossible.

After paying this year's senior tuition, she had just over thirteen hundred yuan left. The math was grim.

Fang Zhuo recorded every last miscellaneous expense in her notebook. She stared at the final figure, a number that offered zero sense of security, then pulled out her review books and started grinding through practice problems.

A low murmur of whispers floated through the evening self-study classroom.

The back door opened. Their homeroom teacher walked in. She made a round of the room, and when she passed Fang Zhuo, she rapped her knuckles on the desk.

Fang Zhuo looked up. The teacher leaned in. "Fang Zhuo, do you know XX Village in XX County?"

Fang Zhuo's pen tip pressed still on her scratch paper, not expecting to hear that familiar place name here. "I know it," she said. "I used to live there."

"There's a letter for you in the security booth, forwarded to the school from that address. It's been sitting there for days. Whoever sent it didn't specify who it was for. Since no one claimed it, the admin opened it." The teacher said, "Go to my office. See if it's yours."

Fang Zhuo was bewildered. After her grandmother passed, Fang Yiming had sold the house. She had no idea what could possibly need to be forwarded all the way to the school.

She stood and followed the teacher to the office.

Inside, a few students were clustered around the desk asking questions. The teacher pulled an opened courier envelope from her drawer, had Fang Zhuo confirm the address, and, after verifying it matched, handed it over.

The sender was listed as "Ye Yuncheng." The return address was in an underdeveloped village on the outskirts of A City.

The recipient was her grandmother. The village shopkeeper must have forwarded it on to A-High for her.

Fang Zhuo pried the envelope open with her fingers and peered in. Her eyes widened.

Inside was a sum of money. And alongside it, a small white paper.

She pulled the paper out. It held only a few very brief lines of greeting.

They asked how Fang Zhuo was doing. Was she nearly an adult now? They hoped Grandmother would give this cash to Fang Zhuo. A person coming of age should have a little money to carry with them.

The handwriting was clean and neat. The signature and date at the bottom were from June.

Fang Zhuo shifted her fingers and noticed a smaller annotation written in the corner.

"July 16th. The fifteenth anniversary of Yaoling-jie's passing.”

Probably hoping she'd come back to visit the grave.

Fang Zhuo had never known when Ye Yaoling had died. Instinctively, she tried to remember what she'd been doing on July 16th.

It hit her then. Her life back then held no real color. It was just a constant, blurring hustle. That day, she figured, was probably spent just like any other, working odd jobs under a blazing sun. Or maybe she'd ducked into a library for a bit, sat inside escaping the heat with a book.

This news, coming out of nowhere, hollowed out a space inside her. Her chest tightened, a thread of panic crept in. Yet when she tried to grasp the reason, she couldn't say exactly why.

The homeroom teacher saw the shift in her expression. "Are you alright?"

Fang Zhuo folded the paper shut and shook her head, dazed.

"Is it from family?" the teacher asked.

Fang Zhuo hesitated. "Yes," she said quietly.

When she'd sorted through her grandmother's belongings, she'd found a stack of empty envelopes, all with the same signature.

Her grandmother was illiterate. Fang Zhuo could never figure out who would write to her so persistently, or why the envelopes were always empty.

Her grandmother had never spoken a word of it to her, and likely had never relayed Fang Zhuo's situation back to the sender, either.

In this moment, an old, unresolved confusion from her youth finally found its belated answer.

She now knew something about her mother. She had an uncle.

A crack appeared in the mask of indifference she'd maintained for so many years. More questions surged up from the depths of her mind. She felt like a child again, to that time when she'd been achingly curious about family and parents.

Yet the instant that strange emotion surfaced in her eyes, Fang Zhuo ruthlessly forced it back down.

She tucked the letter away, nodded to her homeroom teacher, and walked out the door.

People filled the hallway. She realized it was already the break time.

Yan Lie had his head down on his desk, dozing. His eyelids flickered slightly when Fang Zhuo sat down.

Once quiet settled back over her, Fang Zhuo returned to the half-finished calculus problem in front of her.

Her head wasn't in it tonight. Her thoughts kept drifting. Several times, she clearly had the formulas written out, but just couldn't push through to the next step. Her pen scrawled wildly across the page, only to realize she'd make a basic arithmetic error and have to start over from scratch.

Fang Zhuo rubbed at her hair and tossed the densely scribbled scratch paper aside. Turning her head, she found Yan Lie wasn't sleeping.

He was still slumped over his desk, his eyes were lazily half-open. His gaze unfocused, pointed in her direction.

Fang Zhuo froze. Their eyes met and she forgot to look away. Seeing her reaction, Yan Lie perked up a little and even beat her to the punch: "What are you sneaking peeks at me for?"

Fang Zhuo: "..." So shameless it defied reply.

Yan Lie sat up, slouching loosely in his seat, smiling. "I was just watching a lost lamb. Does the lamb require a wise man's guidance?"

Fang Zhuo ignored him, pulled out the answer key and checked her work. Her reasoning had been right, she found. She'd just made a careless calculation error. She corrected the figures directly.

Just as Yan Lie figured she wasn't going to speak, Fang Zhuo suddenly asked, "Does your phone have a maps app?"

"So you really are a lost lamb." Yan Lie laughed. He pulled his phone from his pocket and unlocked it with practiced ease. "Know how to use one?"

Fang Zhuo barely used phone with a basic keypad, let alone anything with a touchscreen.

Yan Lie demonstrated, opening the app and showing her where to type. He didn't show the slightest impatience as she slowly and clumsily tapped in the address, only murmuring something under his breath when he saw the name Li Village appear. "There's really a village like that near A City?"

Fang Zhuo hit search. But the result that came back was: no suitable bus route available.

Her movements faltered. She looked at Yan Lie, lost and helpless, angling the phone toward him.

Her long lashes blocked the fluorescent light overhead. The shadows they cast softened the habitual coldness in her eyes. The light that carved out the lines of her face instead accentuated the plain, slender delicacy of her features.

Yan Lie leaned in closer, catching a faint trace of milky fragrance lingering in her hair. His gaze traced down the contour of her face, then halted. He coughed, quickly averted his eyes, and leaned back. "Let me. "

He opened a search browser and looked up similar queries. Luck was on their side; there was an answer.

The most convenient route was to take the county-town bus to the end of the line, walk to a spot under a certain bridge and wait for a minivan that passed through daily. That van could then take her the rest of the way to Li Village.

But the van only stopped at the village entrance. She'd have to cover the remaining distance on foot.

Fang Zhuo committed the route to memory. Her expression grew a shade more solemn. She thanked Yan Lie and handed the phone back.

Yan Lie stuffed both hands into his pockets, seemingly lost in thought for a moment, then sprawled back across his desk, feigning sleep.

***

Saturday classes ran until half past noon before letting out. Fang Zhuo unhurriedly packed the things on her desk, slung her backpack on, then headed for the school gate.

The main road was packed with vehicles of every sort. Even from a hundred meters away, you could hear the honking floating over from the street.

Fang Zhuo paused at the gate. Facing the identical tree-lined streets stretching in both directions, she couldn't tell which way to go. She turned back to ask the guard for directions to the bus stop and made her way following the gradually thinning crowds.

A bicycle sped past her, then slowed and reversed until it was keeping pace alongside her.

The rider worked the pedals, controlling his speed. Seeing her stubbornly stared straight ahead, he whistled to get her attention.

Fang Zhuo had no choice but to turn her head. "What a coincidence," she said to her deskmate.

Yan Lie was wearing a black-and-white cap. He freed one hand to push up the brim, revealing a face full of youthful vigor, grinning. "And here I thought I had the power of invisibility."

He braked, planting one foot on the ground to stop. "Heading for the county-town bus?" He gestured toward the back. "Hop on. It's right on my way. I'll take you."

Fang Zhuo glanced at his back seat, a conflicted look in her eyes.

"I know the way," Yan Lie said. "It'll be faster. You don't want to get there too late. Might get stranded and not make it back."

At that, Fang Zhuo walked over. She carefully settled onto the back seat, found her footing on the frame, and gripped the hem of Yan Lie’s jacket tightly.

"Good?"

Yan Lie’s voice drifted on the wind, carrying with it a faint, crisp scent of lemon. As his weight shifted forward, a sliver of previously blocked sunlight broke through—and they surged ahead.

There were still e-bikes and pedestrians nearby. Yan Lie wove through them on the bike lane like a fish through water, nimble and swift. Fang Zhuo, however, was rigid with tension.

She was braced so tight, solid as a stone, planted on the back seat. Yan Lie didn't need to look back to sense her nervousness.

He glanced down at the hands clenched in his clothes, the fabric already wrinkled beyond shape. The bloodless pallor of her skin and the blue veins standing starkly on the backs of her hands told him everything about her state right now.

Every muscle tensed. Every hair on her body on high alert.

A laugh escaped Yan Lie. "My driving's really steady! Don't be scared!"

"Oh," Fang Zhuo said. Then, as if that single syllable somehow proved too much, she added the thinnest of denials: "I'm not."

Yan Lie slowed down anyway, riding steadily along the side of the road.

By the time he'd delivered her to the bus stop, the bus was just pulling up from down the street.

Fang Zhuo dashed for it. Yan Lie watched her board, then turned his bike to leave. Right then, in front of a massive billboard, he spotted a face full of pure, undiluted grievances.

They'd been roommates for over two years. Pretending not to see him at this face-to-face range would've been a hard sell. Yan Lie grinned and raised a hand in greeting.

Shen Musi was not having it. "Lie Lie!" he howled. "You're too much! Didn't you say you don't give people rides? Am I not your long-lost blood brother?!"

"Alright, alright," Yan Lie said. "Want me to take you back to school?"

"I'm going home!" Shen Musi raged. "I walked twenty minutes to get here! Damn you!"

Yan Lie parked the bike behind the bus stop sign and walked over to pacify him. "Fine. I'll wait for the bus with you.”

The young man was tall, with a lean, athletic build. His skin alone was a few shades lighter than the average guy's. Standing there, he was practically a natural floodlight. People passing by couldn't help stealing glances.

Shen Musi felt the temperature of the surrounding gazes tick up. Sourness pooled in his heart. "You've changed," he finally said, voice dripping with snark.

"I haven't," Yan Lie said, making a weighing gesture with his hands. "You're just twice Fang Zhuo's weight."

Shen Musi: "I am not."

A moment later, he asked, "Why's your face all weird like that?"

Yan Lie's mouth curved up. In the direct sunlight, the color of his irises washed out to a hazy blur. "Nothing," he said, still smiling.

"I've realized she's exactly my type too."

---

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