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After scrolling through the nearly hundred messages He Youyuan had sent, Li Kuiyi felt that no one on earth could possibly know the details of Beijing better than she did — because she now knew not only that the trumpet creeper flowers in Wudaoying Hutong were blooming exuberantly at this time of year, but also that the sunset over Shichahai truly did smell like oranges, and furthermore that a circle of stray dogs had gathered around a certain braised food shop, and that near a certain bus stop there was a heart-shaped tree, and that the owner of a certain fruit stand on the roadside had been watering the potted fortune tree by the door, and sunlight had once refracted through the water to cast a small rainbow……

Of course, she also knew that at this very moment, on the dormitory balcony of an art studio on the outskirts of Beijing, a certain boy was riding high on the thrill of her single remark, unable to sleep, and in the middle of the night was still unable to resist calling her through the phone line just to indulge in a bit of cheerful crowing.

“Li Kuiyi, you……hey, what kind of person are you? Sneaking something like that in, are you?”

“It’s not like I forced you to say it. I was originally going to wait until the next time we met to hear you say it. How could you not even hold out until then? Aih……seriously, I could hold out.”

“Hey, you……”

He made an elaborate show of sighing several times, as if exasperated — and yet he couldn’t carry it any further, because everything that came after was just a string of delighted laughter.

After a while, he cleared his throat and adopted a grave tone: “But the way you said it like that definitely doesn’t count, you know — that’s considered cheating. When I come back, you have to say it to my face again. I’m not so easily satisfied.”

Just keep up the act, Li Kuiyi thought.

He’d nearly laughed the broken motion-sensor light in the corridor of her building back on.

“Mm. It’s getting late — I’m going to go shower and sleep. Let’s talk next time.” She pressed the phone close to her ear and murmured.

“Okay.”

His voice dropped lower as well. After two seconds of quiet, he suddenly said, in all seriousness: “I like you too.”

Li Kuiyi hung up the phone, took a long deep breath, clenched both fists, and stood rigid in the middle of her bedroom for a brief moment. She didn’t quite know why — she’d heard those words several times now — but she still hadn’t managed to get used to them.

Early July. The final exams were over, though the results hadn’t come out yet, and the summer courses had already been arranged down to the last detail. It was the hottest stretch of the year again, and the city was stifling, sealed tight as a steam basket, the air motionless and wrung completely dry of any moisture. The streets were empty and still; buildings cast only short, stubby shadows; the colorful billboards along both sides of the road looked ready to melt in the heat, simmering together with the lush green of the treetops in a rolling boil. Everyone prayed desperately for a downpour, some relief from the sweltering city.

No downpour came, and the school added insult to injury by installing surveillance cameras in every single classroom. The students rolled their eyes in collective exasperation and said: if you have money to spare, you’d be better off putting in a couple more air conditioning units.

To give the Year Twelve students a greater sense of urgency, the school had them move to the Year Twelve building on the very first day of summer classes. The outer walls of the Year Twelve building were hung with row upon row of fresh red banners, featuring slogans along the lines of: “Without struggle, life is wasted; without hardship, life has no flavor.” Even more extreme was the fact that the name of a university and its provincial admission cutoff scores for that year were printed on every single step of the staircase. At the Year Twelve mobilization assembly, Chen Guoming delivered a stirring speech, informing everyone that this was called “Tsinghua on your left foot, Peking University on your right — take them both!”

But the students, deep in the height of adolescent rebellion, weren’t having any of it. Within a few days, a new slogan had spread through the school: “Tsinghua on your left, Peking University on your right — slip on both, and end up back in your hometown.”

Well, they had to find something to laugh about — anything to relieve the combined misery of studying and the heat.

Li Kuiyi brought the CCD camera to school, and in her free moments, she snapped a few photos at random. Sometimes it was the school cafeteria food and a cup of bitter coffee, sometimes a grammar rule or formula left unwiped on the blackboard, sometimes a corner of the sports field or classroom building. But mostly she photographed the trees outside the classroom window, the sky blazing almost white, the evening’s sunset at dusk. Later on, many of the girls in the class gathered around the lens with laughter, flashing bright teeth and throwing up peace signs, pressing their youthful faces into the small frame of the film.

She selected some of the photos and shared them with He Youyuan, and at the same time created a folder to archive all the photos together, naming it “朝花夕拾” — “Morning Flowers, Evening Gleanings.” She thought: the true backdrop of these photographs could perhaps only be seen clearly after they had grown up.

More than half a month passed without much incident — until one night, a sudden phone call came from Second Uncle’s house. Grandmother had gotten up in the night to use the bathroom, slipped on the stairs, and fallen, apparently injuring her back quite seriously. The hospital in the county town had refused to admit her, and they were now en route to transfer her to a hospital in the city.

Li Jianye threw on a jacket and drove straight to the hospital. Xu Manhua didn’t go, and said matter-of-factly that the household couldn’t be left without an adult. Seeing that Li Kuiyi had been woken by the commotion and was standing there bleary-eyed, she shooed her back to the bedroom: “It’s nothing to do with you — go back to sleep. You have school tomorrow.”

Li Kuiyi’s head was fuzzy. She shuffled back to bed and fell asleep almost immediately. It wasn’t until the next morning that she thought of the incident again, and even then she couldn’t quite tell whether it had been real or a dream.

During the second evening self-study session, Jiang Jianbin called her out of the classroom, looked at her for a moment, then hesitated as though the words were difficult to say: “Your mother just called me. She said your grandmother……didn’t make it. You should go to the hospital now.”

“Mm……”

Li Kuiyi lowered her eyes, digging her fingernail into the center of her palm, letting the news sink in. Her mind was blank right now — there was no grief, no pain, only a kind of difficulty understanding it. To put it precisely, what she struggled to understand was death itself.

The faint, subtle shadow that had crossed her face was interpreted by Jiang Jianbin as grief. He solemnly patted her shoulder: “My condolences.”

Li Kuiyi went back to the classroom, packed up her bag, took the leave slip Jiang Jianbin had written for her, and left the school to hail a taxi to the hospital. The hospital’s red sign blazed brightly in the night, and inside it was lit up and alive with constant movement — people coming and going at a hurried pace, the air permeated with the smell of disinfectant, which created an inexplicably oppressive feeling.

Following the floor maps, she took the elevator upward, floor by floor. The higher she went, the more anxious she felt. She couldn’t picture what her grandmother looked like in death — was it the same as when she’d seen her sleeping at New Year? Just without the snoring, perhaps?

She was terrified.

When she finally reached the right floor, she found she couldn’t make herself walk over there. She stood frozen in place for a long while, then suddenly turned and fled. She fled out of the hospital, and once the night breeze hit her, she felt a little more alert. She found a telephone booth nearby and called Xu Manhua, her voice carrying a trace of tears.

“I don’t want to go up……I don’t want to go see Grandmother. Is that okay?”

“Do as you like.” Xu Manhua sighed and didn’t press her.

She hung up the phone and got on the first bus she could find, leaning against the window and staring out into the dark night. It wasn’t that late yet — the streets were full of living, breathing people, walking, walking their dogs, laughing, eating street food. She felt even less capable of understanding what death meant. The body gone to rest forever? Consciousness extinguished? Or perhaps death had nothing to do with the person who died, but only with those who had formed bonds with that person?

Grandmother’s funeral arrangements were handled swiftly. The ashes were brought back to the county town, and a funeral hall was set up in front of Second Uncle’s self-built house. Li Kuiyi took a week off school, though there was nothing she could actually help with — she just watched the adults manage everything. Throughout the whole process, she didn’t shed a single tear, and she felt this made her rather cold-blooded, since she had, after all, lived with her grandmother for nine years.

But later, once all the guests had dispersed, she saw Li Jianye standing alone in Second Uncle’s courtyard, crying without a sound — and at that, her nose stung suddenly, and tears slid down her own face.

For a Year Twelve student, she couldn’t afford to miss too many classes. The moment the funeral was done, the adults hurried her back to school. Jiang Jianbin called her in for a talk, offered words of comfort, and also reminded her that she must adjust her state of mind, not let grief occupy all her thoughts, and follow the teachers’ pace in revision, steadily and grounded.

Li Kuiyi didn’t feel this had made a particularly huge impact on her life — it had just left her with a few more questions she couldn’t answer.

A few more days passed, and then Li Jianye and Xu Manhua came back from the county town with her younger brother. The two of them seemed to have had an argument — Li Kuiyi could see both of their expressions were sour, and they were treating each other with indifference.

On Saturday evening, Li Kuiyi had no evening self-study session. After dinner, she retreated to her bedroom to read the latest issue of the literary journal Harvest that had just arrived. Before long, she heard the sound of Li Jianye and Xu Manhua arguing in the adjacent room.

The wall insulation was ordinary — she could make out the general gist.

“……At the very least, you could have called her Mom. She only just passed, and there you were saying those things in front of all those outsiders.”

Xu Manhua’s voice was sharper: “Then tell me — which word I said was unfair to her? When I was in confinement after having our eldest, she never once checked in on me during the whole month. And she had nothing but cutting, unkind things to say to me all the time. You know that better than anyone — and now you expect me to call her Mom?!”

“That was……that was so many years ago, what’s the point of bringing it up now?”

“I will never forget it, no matter how many years pass! You didn’t give birth to our child — you didn’t go through what I went through — so of course it means nothing to you!”

Li Jianye raised his voice: “Then……when you had our second child, didn’t she look after you for the whole month of confinement? Why do you only remember the grudges and not the kindness?”

“That wasn’t looking after me! That was looking after her grandchild!”

“Isn’t that the same thing? Caring for the child is caring for you too!”

Li Kuiyi rubbed her ears — she just found it all exhausting and noisy. She knew there were the ordinary tensions between Xu Manhua and her grandmother that come with any mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationship, and that these tensions had extended to affect her as well — but there was nothing she could do about it. She didn’t know where it had all begun, and she could only tell herself: let it end here. Let it stop with me. She didn’t want to hate anyone, or love anyone in that way either. Either way, this family was somewhere she intended to leave.

She set down the magazine and got ready to go to the bathroom, then sleep.

As she turned the handle of her bedroom door, the argument in the next room grew suddenly louder. Xu Manhua, apparently at her wit’s end, gave way to unbridled fury: “Don’t put on that act like you’re such a devoted son! Your mother is gone now, and suddenly you’re defending her — where were you when she was alive? Why didn’t you tell her that Su Jianlin is your father’s child? Does your mother know that all of you conspired together to deceive her? Does she know she’s been supporting the other woman’s child this whole time?!”

“Enough!” Li Jianye roared.

Li Kuiyi’s footsteps came to an abrupt halt.

For a moment, she couldn’t trust that what she’d heard was human language.

Wha……what did that mean?

Su Jianlin — and herself — were they truly related by blood?

Su Jianlin had come back for Grandmother’s funeral as well. He was about to enter his fourth year of university and had been interning at a company over the summer. During those days, Li Kuiyi hadn’t spoken to him much — because even though Su Jianlin was only a few years older than her, he was of the same generation as Li Jianye, and functioned in the role of one of Grandmother’s sons. He moved through the whole event like a true adult, handling things inside and out.

Heavens above — in some sense of the word, Su Jianlin was actually her younger uncle?

Li Kuiyi was so startled she stumbled backward into her room and pulled the door shut, not daring to breathe, as though knowing this secret meant she might be silenced.

If this had happened in a TV drama, she would have called it melodramatic. But when it happened in the real world, she suddenly had no idea how to process it. All she felt was that the world was apparently far more absurd than she’d imagined, and that the adults in it were apparently capable of extraordinary hypocrisy behind respectable facades.

And then — did Su Jianlin know about this? Her instinct was that he didn’t. From what she knew of him, if he knew, he wouldn’t be willing to remain part of this family. Of course, after having been shaken by something like this, she could no longer vouch that she truly understood anyone.

And another thing Li Kuiyi couldn’t make sense of: why had Li Jianye accepted Su Jianlin’s existence in the first place? Wouldn’t his reaction to his own father’s affair have been the same as He Youyuan’s? Shouldn’t he have stood on his mother’s side?

She thought until her head throbbed. Eventually, her stomach turned with a creeping nausea, like the feeling after inadvertently lifting a veil and discovering that the world underneath was a filthy, tangled mess — that human beings were actually not good to each other at all, that betrayal and deception were everywhere. And when these things happened not between strangers, but between family members, the sense of rupture was especially unbearable.

After turning it all over in her mind, she let out a helpless, sardonic laugh. She thought of her grandmother, who had just passed away — the woman who always had “the Li family” on her lips, who fiercely guarded the honor of the family line. Had she ever realized that both her husband and her son had betrayed her?

In the nine years they’d lived together, Grandmother had not been kind to her. But she felt no vengeful satisfaction in this — only a deep, encompassing sadness.

Li Kuiyi barely slept at all that night, and she was miserable.

On Sunday, she made plans with Fang Zhixiao to wander around a shopping mall — she wasn’t sure what she wanted, just to get out. She did want to talk to someone, but this matter involved Su Jianlin’s privacy, so she couldn’t lay it all out. She only said that her parents were fighting and she was feeling troubled and upset.

“Oh, what parents don’t argue? Mine argue too, it’ll be fine.” Fang Zhixiao laughed and patted her on the cheek, then bent her head to type on her phone.

Li Kuiyi glanced over and saw that she was chatting with Zhou Ce.

She said nothing, waiting for Fang Zhixiao to finish — but the wait went on and on, and Fang Zhixiao grew more and more animated, until she gave up typing entirely and began sending long voice messages, eyes bright and brows dancing.

Li Kuiyi was annoyed. Catching a gap when Fang Zhixiao paused between voice messages, she whined: “Look at you! You come out with me and all you do is talk to him!”

Fang Zhixiao gave a cheeky laugh and perfunctorily patted her on the cheek again: “Don’t be upset.” Then she went straight back to talking to Zhou Ce.

Li Kuiyi let go of her arm and stood to one side, puffed up with irritation.

“Why are you always getting jealous? Jealous of Chen Luyi isn’t enough — now you want to be jealous of my boyfriend too? You’re not even in the same category as him.” Fang Zhixiao shot her an amused glance.

“But don’t you think — ever since you started dating, you’ve been seriously neglecting me? You don’t eat with me, you don’t walk home with me after school, nine times out of ten when I ask to hang out you’re with him, and then that one time before, you literally abandoned me to go off with Zhou Ce!”

Fang Zhixiao hadn’t expected her to bring up old grievances — she was taken aback: “I can’t help it — there’s only one of me. I can’t be in two places at once. If I’m with him, I can’t be with you, and vice versa.”

Li Kuiyi pursed her lips: “But you’re always with him, always with him.”

“Isn’t that perfectly normal? When you’re in a relationship, the center of your life naturally shifts a little.”

“If this is how you are when you’re dating, what about when you get married? And when you have kids? Will you just stop being my friend altogether?”

“I didn’t say I was going to stop being your friend.” Fang Zhixiao seemed to be getting a little annoyed too, and she put her phone down. “It’s just that I can’t have my whole world revolve around you, can I? Li Kuiyi, can you dial back the possessiveness a little?”

Li Kuiyi froze. She stared at her.

A glimmer of moisture slowly welled up in her eyes. She kept her eyelids taut, her throat moved slightly, and she forced herself to produce a single syllable: “Fine.”

And then she turned and walked away.

As she left, there were a million moments she was silently hoping Fang Zhixiao would call her back — but she didn’t.

By the time she stepped out of the mall, she found that a strong wind had risen outside, bending and breaking the flowers and plants in the ornamental beds, sending a white plastic bag drifting aimlessly through the air, a smell of damp dust lifting from the road.

In an instant, the rain came down in torrents.

In late July, Liu Yuan City finally entered its rainy season.