Chapter 36.1 - A Bystander’s Youth (1)
That afternoon, she sat at her desk, a few strands of hair on her forehead damp and flat from the rain. Emotions swirled just beneath her skin—anger, grievance, confusion, sadness—ready to surface at any moment, but she paid them no mind. She opened Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and was engrossed until eight in the evening. Then she started on her statistics homework, did the laundry, cleaned her room, turned off the lights, and surprisingly fell asleep quickly—no dreams. The next morning, she woke up fresh and went to morning study.
She often got sentimental and moved by small details, but when real things happened, she remained indifferent. It was as if inside her lived another, stronger Luo Zhi who usually let her control the body and make a mess, but at crucial moments took over without a word, occupying the soul and leaving the sensitive, emotional side on the sidelines.
Whenever she had free time, she studied vocabulary. She had registered for the IELTS exam in mid-December. The whole day she spun like a top.
Reading until eleven-thirty, her eyes ached. After washing up, she lay in bed trying to fall asleep. Maybe because she had drunk too much coffee during the day to stay efficient, she couldn’t fall asleep. She took out her MP3 player to listen to some audio but realized she only had recordings of New Concept English 4—nothing else.
She couldn’t listen to New Concept English 4—it would drive her crazy.
Bai Li hadn’t returned yet. Tossing and turning, her mind wandered, and suddenly she remembered the end of her second year in high school—sitting on the steps, repeatedly listening to the first lesson of New Concept English 4 but not understanding a word. She started laughing, and as she laughed, tears fell uncontrollably.
She got up, washed her face, changed clothes, put on her headphones. It was past midnight; she went out for a walk.
Yesterday—or rather, the day before—the rain had fallen all night, stopping only in the morning. The weather was especially cold. She pulled her neck in and walked toward the southern commercial district. The lights there were still bright, though all shops had closed. Only a few 24-hour restaurants had people loudly chatting and laughing inside. Occasionally, a few pedestrians walked the streets, but more often she saw trash swirling in the wind.
When she reached the Qianye Building, she looked up at a huge advertisement that caught her eye—clear white crystals.
Swarovski.
She suddenly thought of Ye Zhanyan.
Or rather, she had never forgotten Ye Zhanyan for a single moment, even more than Bai Li keeping a photo of Chen Mohan in her wallet.
That woman—subconsciously hidden, never mentioned in front of him, yet left with a little trail for herself to carefully toy with—Sheng Huainan’s ex-girlfriend.
As for why she avoided the topic, she didn’t know. Maybe out of pity for herself, maybe out of calculation.
She couldn’t remember her motives clearly anymore.
Her dark motives slowly merged with their pure disguise, forming a thin layer that covered her body every day. The longer it lasted, the more painful it would be to tear away.
For two years in the same class, she and Ye Zhanyan barely had any interaction. When they met, maybe a greeting, but only when caught off guard; usually a polite smile. Most of the time, she would turn her head to look at portraits of physicists or geography facts on the wall to avoid the greeting—the furious Einstein with his hair standing on end, and the stern-faced Newton who seemed owed a few pounds of apples.
She had no grudge against Ye Zhanyan; this avoidance and coldness weren’t just directed at her. She believed she had gotten along peacefully with most people.
Peaceful coexistence — that phrase already sounds a bit old-fashioned. In the summer of her second year of high school, Eileen Chang’s books were popular in class, and to describe this feeling, it was best said as “a calm present life, a peaceful passage of time”. She had never read Eileen Chang’s books, so when she first heard those eight words, she was slightly shaken. What puzzled her more was why, after saying that phrase, everyone would fall silent and sigh, as if those words described some distant, unreachable illusion.
Her life, at least on the surface, was peaceful.
She never cared how others lived, or how well they lived. But she couldn’t deny that whenever she saw Ye Zhanyan’s youthful and sincere smile, she felt a bit jealous. Sometimes she wondered whether, many years later, she would regret not having worn pretty clothes, styled her hair in the latest fashion, and stood happily smiling in the sunshine when she was young.
It wasn’t that she didn’t envy that other kind of youth — a more colorful kind.
She often looked at herself in the full-length mirror by the main staircase, not to fix her appearance. The girl in the mirror was slightly pale, delicate-faced, calm-eyed. Maybe it was narcissism, maybe self-pity; maybe those two feelings were really the same. She liked to hug her stack of papers tightly and walk down the long corridor with her head lowered. At times like this, she felt a sudden, inexplicable pride in herself. Over the years, only this kind of inexplicable pride clung to her like a shadow. It was as if with it, she wouldn’t feel lonely. Or perhaps her pride stemmed from this reserved loneliness — she didn’t know.
.jpg)
