Little Garden - 2
Once the rolling shutter came down, the optical shop was officially closed for the day.
They normally wouldn't close this early, but Li Jianye said he still had to go back to the hospital. He didn't feel comfortable leaving her mother alone there with her little brother.
Li Kuiyi said, "Okay. I'll go home by myself."
She dropped her eyes, hesitated, and decided to ask about her brother. But before she could open her mouth, Li Jianye spoke first. "Was that problem really difficult?"
The words died on her tongue.
"...Not really."
Li Jianye glanced at her and gave an ambiguous "Oh," then pulled a twenty-yuan note from his pocket and handed it to her. "Buy yourself something to eat. Be careful on the way home, go to bed early. Don't wait up for us."
Us.
Li Kuiyi knew perfectly well that, in this context, the word carried no hidden meaning. And yet she still felt the distance in it.
She silently took the money.
"All right, go home." Li Jianye waved a hand, turned and walked toward the children's hospital.
A middle-aged man's back was different from a young man's. It looked broad and solid, like a stretch of packed earth. Was it warm? Dry? Rough? Li Kuiyi didn't know.
Clutching the twenty yuan, she went downstairs to the noodle shop and ate a bowl of hand-pulled noodles.
The apartment was dark and empty when she got home. She walked straight through the living room and only turned on the light once she was inside her own bedroom. Soft, bright light instantly flooded the little room, though the space was so tiny that the brightness seemed almost wasteful.
Li Kuiyi locked the door behind her, set down her schoolbag, unzipped it, and took a phone from the inner compartment.
She'd bought the phone herself. Apart from her best friend Fang Zhixiao, no one else knew it existed.
She'd done well on the high school entrance exam. First in the city, nearly thirty points ahead of second place. Both Liuyuan Experimental High School and Liuyuan No. 1 High School wanted her. The schools had a simple, brutally direct way of competing for students: throw money at them. In the end, No. 1 High School won her with a hundred-thousand-yuan scholarship.
To be honest, No. 1 High School was still a little behind Experimental High School. Experimental High School was a century-old institution, with the reputation and accumulated prestige to prove it, and had long stood virtually unrivaled in Liuyuan City. On the other hand, No. 1 High School had only really risen over the past decade. Supposedly, it had adopted the Hengshui model: Study until you drop, and if you don't drop, study harder. Sure enough, its university admission rate had shot upward, and it was increasingly beginning to look capable of holding its own against Experimental.
Having tasted success, No. 1 High School wanted an even stronger pool of students. Not only did its admission cutoff rise higher every year, it also began openly poaching top students from Experimental High School.
Li Kuiyi had originally wanted to go to Experimental High School, but the generous scholarship was hard to turn down. Her parents had made the decision for her without hesitation and chosen No. 1 High School.
She didn't particularly mind. Being able to earn money with her grades felt good. Better than good.
Until her mother, Xu Manhua, smiled over dinner one day and said, "Perfect. Your scholarship can cover your brother's tuition for a few years."
Her little brother had just turned six, old enough to start elementary school. Li Kuiyi knew her parents were considering sending him to a private school. What she hadn't known was that they expected her to pay for it.
She immediately put down her chopsticks. Her face went cold. "Why should I?"
Li Jianye and Xu Manhua froze. Perhaps they'd considered the matter so self-evident, so perfectly natural, that it had never occurred to them that Li Kuiyi might object.
Or perhaps Li Kuiyi had always been so obedient in front of them that this version of her felt like a stranger.
Either way, the air at the dinner table thickened. Xu Manhua slammed down her bowl and flew into a furious rage, frightening Li Kuiyi's little brother so badly that he burst into tears.
Li Kuiyi didn't utter a word while Xu Manhua berated her, but when it came to the money, no meant no. That very afternoon, she went to Fang Zhixiao's house, borrowed her friend's phone, and called the admissions office at No. 1 High School to change the account the scholarship would be paid into. Once the money arrived, she withdrew five thousand yuan for emergencies and put the rest into a fixed-term savings account.
Even though she'd earned a slap from Xu Manhua and an endless stream of abuse for doing so, Li Kuiyi still felt immensely satisfied.
She spent fifteen hundred yuan on a smartphone, switched it to silent, and kept it hidden in her schoolbag. During her three years of boarding in middle school, she'd never felt the need for a phone. But now she understood she needed one. She needed a way to contact other people. She needed the internet.
Swiping open the screen, a flood of notification pop-ups appeared at once.
Li Kuiyi opened them.
Fang Zhixiao: What time are you going to school tomorrow?
Fang Zhixiao: Just thinking about military training makes me want to die [crying][crying].
Fang Zhixiao: I went shopping with my mom this afternoon, bought two bottles of sunscreen. I'll bring you one tomorrow.
Fang Zhixiao: Aaaaaah, school is really starting tomorrow. I want to die!!!
Fang Zhixiao: Say you want to die too, let's go down together in a blaze of glory [fireworks] [fireworks]!
Li Kuiyi could practically hear Fang Zhixiao's shrieking, melodramatic voice as she typed each message, and a smile crept onto her lips. If there was one great advantage to attending No. 1 High School, it was that she could stay together with Fang Zhixiao. They'd shared a dorm room in middle school and later become deskmates. The two were as close as could be.
Li Kuiyi: No. I'm not dying with you.
Li Kuiyi: I'll get to school at 8:30 tomorrow.
Li Kuiyi: Thanks.
Registration day had no fixed arrival time. You just had to sign in with your homeroom teacher before noon, pick up the freshman handbook, and fill in your training uniform size. The classes wouldn't actually gather until that afternoon.
Fang Zhixiao: That early?!
Fang Zhixiao: Last chance to sleep in and you're wasting it!
Li Kuiyi: It gets hot if I go later. And crowded, too.
Li Kuiyi: Better to go early and come home early.
Fang Zhixiao: Suicide pact canceled! Go as early as you want. I'm not coming!
Li Kuiyi: ...Hmph.
At half past eight the next morning, Li Kuiyi arrived at the gates of No. 1 High School. Contrary to what she'd expected, there were already quite a lot of people. They came in groups of three or five, families in tow, boarding students hauling bags and boxes. Li Kuiyi looked rather solitary by comparison.
No. 1 High School was close to the neighborhood where she lived. Less than twenty minutes on foot, so she wouldn't be boarding. Fang Zhixiao had said, "If you're not boarding, then neither am I. Hehe. My mom bought me an electric scooter."
Red banners hung outside the gate, most of them reading things like, "Warmest Congratulations to Our Student XXX on Admission to XX University." Row after row, billowing proudly in the wind. Parents crowded beneath them, praising, beaming, as though the achievements belonged to them too.
Inside the school grounds, a long row of announcement boards lined the left side. It was packed, people crowded shoulder to shoulder, craning their necks to find the class assignments. Li Kuiyi figured that, given her grades, she should be in Class 1 if nothing unexpected happened.
So she walked straight toward the first board.
But as soon as she got closer, she saw several dark, grainy photographs pasted across it. One of them was hers.
The admissions office had taken the photo after she chose No. 1 High School. She hadn't expected to see it displayed here, with several large, flamboyant words beneath it: Li Kuiyi, 2013 Citywide Top Scorer in the High School Entrance Examination.
The photo was not flattering. Bad lighting, her face too dark, and she wasn't smiling. She looked like a stern old scholar. Apparently, Fang Zhixiao hadn't been exaggerating. When her face was blank, her face really did look rather terrifying.
A parent nearby openly exclaimed, "Good heavens, the citywide top scorer! That's a future ahead of her!" Another father smacked his son on the shoulder. “Look at her. She came first in the whole city and she's still so calm. That's what you call modest."
Li Kuiyi quickly lowered her head and escaped the scene.
The class lists were taped to the glass of the boards farther back. She rose on her toes and peered through the crowd. Sure enough, she found her name at the very top of the first list. She was indeed in Grade One, Class 1.
She glanced down. The name immediately after hers was Qi Yu.
She paused. The three boys from yesterday surfaced in her mind. One of them had been called Qi Yu. She wondered if it was the same person.
Recalling how he'd taught her to solve that problem, she stepped away from the crowd, pulled out her phone, and typed into the browser: Liuyuan high school entrance exam Qi Yu.
Though she would find out for certain at the afternoon class meeting whether this Qi Yu was the same Qi Yu she'd met yesterday, she was curious and wanted to find the answer herself.
The first result was a congratulatory notice on the No. 1 High School website. She clicked it open. Among the congratulations was a line that read: "Warmest congratulations to Qi Yu of Class 4, Grade Nine, on achieving third place citywide in the 2013 high school entrance examination!”
Third in the city. That matched the ease with which he'd solved that problem yesterday.
It must be him.
Li Kuiyi's finger paused over the screen. Then, on a sudden impulse, she tapped into the school homepage and typed another name into the search bar. He Youyuan.
The result that popped up was... a schoolwide disciplinary notice.
She skimmed it. Apparently, He Youyuan had been publicly reprimanded for skipping evening self-study and sneaking off to climb the school's artificial rockery.
Zhang Chuang was named in the same notice.
So No. 1 High School really did have strict discipline. Skipping evening self-study to climb a rockery earn you a schoolwide disciplinary notice. At No. 158 middle school, you only earned that ‘treatment’ for serious cheating or a real fight.
Li Kuiyi smiled knowingly, put away her phone, and went back to the boards to find Fang Zhixiao's class. The crowd had grown even thicker, a sea of dark heads packed together. Fortunately, Li Kuiyi wasn't short and her eyesight was good, so it wasn't too difficult to search.
Before she found Fang Zhixiao's name, she found Zhang Chuang in Class 9 and then He Youyuan in Class 12. It wasn't surprising. They'd attended the No. 1's middle school, continuing at the same school for high school was the most natural choice.
As luck would have it, Fang Zhixiao had also been assigned to Class 12. Her name sat not far from He Youyuan's.
And as if that weren't coincidence enough, Fang Zhixiao called her right then.
Li Kuiyi walked a little farther away before answering.
Fang Zhixiao's voice still had the nasal rasp of someone who'd only just woken up. "Li Kui, are you still at school?"
"Yeah, I'm still here. I just found your name on the class assignment list. You're in Class 12."
"What class are you in?" Fang Zhixiao asked, only to immediately deflate. "We're definitely not in the same class, are we? Your grades are so much better."
"I'm in Class 1. But Feng Luanxin is in your class."
Feng Luanxin was their middle school classmate.
Fang Zhixiao pouted. "But I barely know him." Then she turned right around and started wheedling Li Kuiyi. "I wanted to be in your class. I should've studied harder. Wuwuwu I regret everything…"
The whining, coaxing tone made Li Kuiyi's scalp prickle. She thought quickly, then consoled her. "Class 12 may not have me, but it has handsome boy you love."
Sure enough, she heard Fang Zhixiao practically spring upright in bed. "Handsome boy?! How do you know there's a handsome boy in our class? How handsome? Is he tall?"
"I ran into him while I was looking at the class lists. He told his friend he's in Class 12." Li Kuiyi guiltily improvised a small lie. "He's pretty handsome. Tall, too."
"Achoo!" He Youyuan sneezed the moment he stepped through the school gate. He rubbed his nose, deeply aggrieved. "Who's thinking about me this early in the morning?”
Zhang Chuang and Qi Yu both rolled their eyes in perfect unison.
Zhang Chuang said, "Bro, it's not that early anymore."
Qi Yu said, "You probably just have a cold."
He Youyuan raked a hand through his hair and said, lazily and in a put-upon manner, "You two wouldn't understand what it's like to be missed like this.”
Zhang Chuang spread his hands, clearly not remotely wounded. "Oh. But I have a girlfriend." Qi Yu, meanwhile, seemed to have reached the end of his patience. He suddenly turned around, grabbed He Youyuan by both shoulders, and hooked a foot behind his leg, nearly sending him sprawling.
That was when Li Kuiyi noticed them.
Phone still at her ear, she watched helplessly as the "handsome boy" she'd just been talking about cursed his way upright. "Qi Yu, you bastard! Are you crazy?"
He Youyuan had no idea what had gotten into Qi Yu. He was just about to retaliate when Qi Yu dragged him to the notice board and pointed at a photo. "Hey. Isn't that the girl from yesterday?"
"Which girl?" He Youyuan's attempted revenge was forcibly interrupted. He frowned in annoyance.
"The Little Boss from the optical shop!" Qi Yu said. "Isn't it obvious?"
"Oh, it really is." He Youyuan squinted at the photo, finally placing her. He couldn't help snorting with laughter. "So her name is Li Kui. No wonder she's so fierce. Black Whirlwind."
Li Kuiyi: "..."
Qi Yu was speechless. "Did you eat the 'Yi' at the end of her name?"
He Youyuan: "Huh? Wasn't that a dash?"
Li Kuiyi: "..."
Li Kuiyi, the 2013 citywide top scorer in the high school entrance examination.That tracked, actually.
---
Comments
Post a Comment