The Scorching Sun - 59
Yan Lie's words were full of wounded reproach and pathetic misery. The problem was, Fang Zhuo had already fallen asleep at ten.
Little Sun: Happy birthday.
They Call Me Lie: Wow. So perfunctory.
Little Sun: ...
They Call Me Lie: Do you have nothing else to say to me?
Little Sun: ??
Why was this man being so unreasonable?
Little Sun: Are you still at the seaside?
They Call Me Lie: The wind was insanely strong today. It blew me so cold I felt like I had an extra layer of skin, so I came back. Just finished showering.
They Call Me Lie: Cake went to the seafood market and bought two huge fish. We're going to find a restaurant and have them cooked.
Fang Zhuo thought to herself, Of course. Cats all like fish, and they have a strange habit of getting offended for no reason.
Little Sun: Which restaurant?
They Call Me Lie: [Location] This place is pretty famous around here. Good food, reasonable prices. I'll bring you here next time.
Little Sun: Oh.
They Call Me Lie: [Takes out little notebook] Temporarily removed from the blacklist.
They Call Me Lie: You professional ghoster.
Little Sun: ...
Why was she on the blacklist in the first place? And yet, even when she said nothing, Yan Lie still managed to work himself into a fury.
They Call Me Lie: Do you have any idea how cold dots are?!
Little Sun: I'll do better next time!
They Call Me Lie: ...
Fang Zhuo: ...Okay. Now I know exactly how cold dots are.
Little Sun: Where are you going after dinner?
They Call Me Lie: Probably just wander around. Maybe play some basketball or video games. A few of Wei Xi's friends want to go singing.
The subject made Yan Lie feel gloomy again.
He'd invited the girls along because he didn't want Fang Zhuo to feel awkward if she came. But she wasn't coming at all.
And he didn't particularly like shopping, nor did he have any interest in fighting other people for the microphone.
Little Sun: What about tonight?
They Call Me Lie: A movie. [Picture] Have you seen this one?
Little Sun: No. I've never seen a movie.
They Call Me Lie: If it's good, I'll take you to see it when you get back to A City. What are you doing right now?
Fang Zhuo had just turned around and locked the door behind her. She stuck the piece of paper she'd prepared earlier onto the door, then stood there replying.
Little Sun: Getting ready to go out.
They Call Me Lie: Then hurry up. It's really hot in A City today. Go home early after you visit the grave.
Little Sun: Mm.
Fang Zhuo opened her phone and worked out the route again.
If everything went smoothly, she could reach A City before noon. High-speed train tickets to the city where Yan Lie was staying were usually plentiful, the journey would took two and a half hours. Even after accounting for transfers, waiting for the train, and buying a gift, she should be able to reach the cinema Yan Lie had mentioned before five. If she got lucky, she might even make it back to A City that same day.
A one-way ticket cost a little over two hundred yuan. With the gift and various transfer expenses, she had brought seven hundred yuan in total.
Aside from tuition, it was the most expensive purchase Fang Zhuo had ever made.
Before she had any real earning power, seven hundred yuan would have been enough to cover three months of living expenses. Back then, she thought making money was the hardest thing in the world. Or rather, she'd thought that way until the end of high school.
It was the equivalent of more than three hundred jin of rice, seven thousand text messages, or fourteen thousand decorative knot buttons from the craze that had swept through her childhood.
It was money she couldn't have earned even after spending an entire summer picking through the fields in the heat, washing clothes through the winter, and hauling heavy bamboo baskets around the mountains.
During that first, helpless half of her life, she probably never could have imagined that one day, in the blazing heat of July, she would make such an unreasonable decision simply because she'd once promised someone something.
She convinced herself that it was because a person had to keep their word, and that was far more important than money. Of course, she'd keep every receipt. If Yan Lie ever called her stingy again, she could throw the evidence right in his face and accuse him of being the unreasonable one.
Fang Zhuo tucked the money into the small compartment on the side of her backpack and headed down the road.
Even the wind was scorching in summer. Every gust striking her face made it hard to keep her eyes open. The world was almost painfully bright, while the shadow she cast ahead of her was sharply black against the pavement.
It wasn't until she reached the high-speed rail station that she finally felt a little cooler.
Fang Zhuo was worried her phone would run out of battery and leave her unable to find her way back, so she hardly dared take it out.
Her phone was a relatively cheap model with a battery that wasn't particularly durable. The moment she went online, it would start heating up until it was almost too hot to hold.
Only when the train was about to arrive did she light up the screen and check her new messages.
Yan Lie had sent her a picture of the group meal. The table was covered with all kinds of seafood, but there was no cake.
Fang Zhuo asked: Why isn't there any cake? Don't you like desserts?
Yan Lie didn't reply.
Fang Zhuo switched to another screen and saw Wei Xi's latest post she'd updated an hour ago: "Got here too early. Have to wait outside the cinema for half an hour. Mango pomelo sago is so good. It's ice-cold and saves my life. Hopefully I won't have to use the bathroom halfway through. [Hehe]"
Everyone should be watching the movie by now. She'd heard you weren't allowed to use your phone inside the theater.
Fang Zhuo put her phone away and waited for the high-speed train to announce its arrival.
At 4:10 p.m., a little later than Fang Zhuo had expected because she hadn't been able to get a ticket for an earlier departure, the train pulled into the station at C City.
It was a completely unfamiliar coastal city.
Following the signs scattered throughout the station, Fang Zhuo hesitantly made her way out through Exit D, which she could barely distinguish from the others. The moment she left the air-conditioned station, she was swallowed by suffocating heat, and with it came a cityscape different from anything she knew.
The architecture, the varieties of street food, the local accents, even the rules governing basic public facilities all made her instinctively cautious. She felt surrounded by a chaotic world she didn't know how to navigate.
Fang Zhuo had never traveled far from home. More precisely, she'd never even left A City. And even within A City, she'd only ever gone between a handful of familiar places.
This was her first time taking a high-speed train.
Following the navigation on her phone, Fang Zhuo walked a little over a kilometer after leaving the station to reach the bus stop.
Because it was the middle of the holiday, there were people everywhere waiting for buses, and a steady stream of different routes pulled into the stop.
Fang Zhuo was still standing in front of the route numbers, checking the stops one by one, when a bus with an almost identical number pulled up at the white line. The crowd around her surged toward it all at once, and Fang Zhuo instinctively followed them a few steps forward.
She stopped behind the crowd and called out from a distance, "Driver, can this bus connect to Route 213?"
Fang Zhuo couldn't make out what the driver said. She only saw him wave his hand, seemingly telling her to get on.
The passengers on board were already urging people to hurry and move farther inside. Afraid the bus would leave, Fang Zhuo quickly climbed aboard.
Once inside, she spotted the bus number on a notice posted against the wall. It looked similar again. She compared the next two stops, which were identical, and finally relaxed.
The bus lurched along for more than half an hour. Once it left the bustling central district, the number of passengers began to thin.
Fang Zhuo breathed a sigh of relief and stood in a corner, staring blankly at the unfamiliar scenery outside the window. She still hadn't heard the name of the stop she wanted. When the bus steadied, she took out her phone again to check.
But the moment she opened the map, she realized the bus had veered off the route she'd planned.
Fang Zhuo stared in disbelief. She hurried to the front, tapped a woman on the shoulder, and held out her phone. "Auntie, did this bus take a wrong turn?"
The woman glanced at the screen and exclaimed loudly, "Oh, it's not the bus that's wrong! Your navigation told you to take a B2, but this is the short-route one!"
Fang Zhuo looked bewildered. "Huh? Isn't this a B2 too?"
The woman explained bluntly, "You got on the wrong bus! You have to check the route number carefully. One extra character and it's a different bus. The two routes share the same starting point and final destination, but the stop you're supposed to get off at isn't served by this short route. Didn't you notice you were going in the opposite direction?"
This was a nightmare for someone with absolutely no sense of direction.
For one brief moment, Fang Zhuo felt as though her entire world had gone dark.
She shouldn't have come.
Seeing her face suddenly turn deathly pale, the woman glanced at the road ahead and reminded her, "Why don't you just stay on until the terminal, then transfer from there? We're almost at the end of the line anyway."
As Fang Zhuo stood in front of the bus stop sign once more, she received Yan Lie's reply.
They Call Me Lie: Didn't feel like eating birthday cake. It's too noisy. I'm not really in the mood for anything festive right now.
Little Sun: Are you going home now?
They Call Me Lie: Probably.
They Call Me Lie: The movie wasn't very good. Kind of boring. I'll take you to see something else next time.
Fang Zhuo felt a vague, inexplicable sense that she'd missed something.
All those scattered thoughts had vanished. Her hands and feet felt weak, her body drained, even her mind seemed close to shutting down.
She decided she'd simply sweated too much and that the heat had thrown her completely off. She dug a bottle of cold water out of her bag and gulped down half of it in one go. Only then did she begin to feel better.
Fang Zhuo took out her phone and changed the destination to Yan Lie's address.
As she typed it in, she hesitated for a moment, wondering whether she should tell Yan Lie she'd arrived and have him come pick her up.
But the thought lasted less than a second before she rejected it.
Yan Lie would definitely laugh mercilessly at the fact that she'd managed to get lost while following navigation, and couldn't even tell one bus number from another.
She felt that every decision she'd made today had been completely outside the bounds of reason.
It had to be because the weather was too hot. Right, definitely.
The weather finally cooled down at seven that evening.
The sky was still bright, but the evening breeze had softened, brushing gently against the streets. Laughter and lively voices spilled from the roadside, carrying a medley of different aromas through the air.
As the heat slowly receded with the fading sunlight, Fang Zhuo finally reached the room number Yan Lie had given her.
The exhaustion that had accumulated over the entire journey miraculously eased a little when she stood before the metal security door. Fang Zhuo hitched her backpack higher on her shoulder, set down the cake she'd bought along the way, and raised her hand to press the doorbell.
After the monotonous electronic chime had sounded "ding-dong, ding-dong" an unknowable number of times, the overheated mind Fang Zhuo had carried all day finally cooled. In its place came a disappointment she couldn't quite put into words.
Countless complicated emotions twisted together, gathering from a thin thread into a heavy knot that dragged down the hand resting on the doorbell.
Fang Zhuo felt that she still couldn't escape the ordinary concerns of the world, no matter what state of mind she was in.
She was poor. Too poor. She couldn't afford to be generous, couldn't afford to indulge in whims. Every purchase had to be the cheapest option. Whenever she thought about going somewhere, she had to calculate her savings first. Whenever she accepted something from someone else, she had to consider whether she could ever afford to repay it. Even when buying vegetables and fruit, she looked for the discounted ones.
Compared with their generosity, she seemed painfully ordinary in every way.
Yet she could make an exception for Yan Lie.
She could spend nearly half a month's wages, ride a high-speed train for several hours, and come all the way to his doorstep just to wish him a happy birthday. If that was what he wanted.
But self-appointed romance didn't necessarily have the good fortune to unfold according to her plans.
That impulsive day of hers could be summed up in two words: an adventure.
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