Yan Lie’s message was full of quiet longing and a hint of pathos. The issue was that Fang Zhuo had already fallen asleep at ten o’clock.
Little Sun: Happy birthday.
A Name Ablaze: Wow, so perfunctory.
Little Sun: ……
A Name Ablaze: Have you run out of things to say to me?
Little Sun: ??
How was this man so endlessly unreasonable?
Little Sun: Are you still at the seaside?
A Name Ablaze: The wind was wild today, it blew me into a thicker layer of skin — I’ve already headed back, just finished showering.
A Name Ablaze: Egg Cake went to the seafood market and bought two big fish. We’re going to find a restaurant to have it cooked.
Fang Zhuo thought to herself: of course — cats love fish, and they also tend to get into inexplicable little moods.
Little Sun: Which restaurant?
A Name Ablaze: [location] This place has a decent local reputation — good food, reasonable prices. I’ll bring you here next time.
Little Sun: Oh.
A Name Ablaze: [taking out a small notebook] Temporarily removed from the blacklist.
A Name Ablaze: You pigeon.
Little Sun: ……
Why was she on the blacklist in the first place? And yet Yan Lie would still blow up even when she said nothing.
A Name Ablaze: Do you know how cold six dots in a row feels?!
Little Sun: I’ll do better next time!
A Name Ablaze: ……
Fang Zhuo: “……” Fair enough. She now had a very clear understanding of just how cold six dots felt.
Little Sun: Where are you going after dinner?
A Name Ablaze: Maybe just wander around — could be basketball or gaming. Wei Xi and the other girls want to go sing karaoke.
Mentioning this, Yan Lie felt a renewed wave of low spirits.
He had asked the girls along hoping Fang Zhuo wouldn’t feel awkward when she arrived. But she hadn’t come at all.
And he didn’t like wandering shopping streets, or fighting other people for the microphone.
Little Sun: And in the evening?
A Name Ablaze: Watching a movie. [picture] Have you seen this one?
Little Sun: No. I’ve never been to the cinema.
A Name Ablaze: If it’s good, I’ll take you once you’re back in City A. What are you up to right now?
Fang Zhuo had just latched the door behind her and pasted a previously written note onto the door panel, and was replying from the doorstep.
Little Sun: About to head out.
A Name Ablaze: Then go quickly. Looking at the City A weather, it’s very hot today — finish at the grave early and get back home.
Little Sun: Mm.
Fang Zhuo pulled up the route on her phone and plotted it once more.
If things went smoothly, she could reach City A before noon. High-speed rail tickets to the city where Yan Lie was were generally easy to get; the journey was two and a half hours. Subtracting the time for transfers, waiting at the platform, and buying a gift, she should be able to arrive at the cinema Yan Lie had mentioned before five o’clock — and with luck, make it back to City A the same day.
The one-way rail ticket cost upward of two hundred yuan. Adding the cost of the gift, transfers, and miscellaneous expenses, she had brought seven hundred yuan in total.
Aside from tuition fees, this was the most expensive thing Fang Zhuo had ever spent money on.
Before she had any real earning power, seven hundred yuan would have been enough to cover three months of living expenses. Back then, she had thought that earning money was the hardest thing in the world — or rather, she had thought so right up until the end of high school.
Seven hundred yuan was equivalent to over three hundred catties of rice, seven thousand text messages, the fourteen thousand flower-knot buttons that were fashionable when she was small. It was more than she could have made hauling heavy bamboo baskets up and down the mountain all through a winter break or a summer holiday.
In the fragile, helpless first half of her life, she could never have imagined that, in the sweltering heat of July, she would make such an utterly irrational decision — all because of a promise she had once made to someone.
She told herself it was a matter of keeping one’s word, and that this mattered far more than money. Besides, she would keep all the receipts; if Yan Lie ever accused her of being stingy in the future, she could throw the evidence in his face and call out what a completely unreasonable person he was.
Fang Zhuo tucked the money into the small side pocket of her bag and set off along the road.
Even the wind in summer was scorching, each gust hitting her face like it wanted to shut her eyes; the world was blazingly bright, and the shadow she cast ahead of her was a sharp, solid black.
It wasn’t until she walked all the way to the high-speed rail station that it finally cooled down a little.
Worried her phone might die and leave her unable to navigate back, Fang Zhuo was careful not to take it out too often.
This phone was on the cheaper end, and its battery wasn’t particularly durable — it would heat up and grow uncomfortably warm in her hand the moment she connected to the internet.
Only when the train was nearing its destination did she unlock the screen and scroll through her messages.
Yan Lie had sent her a photo of the group meal — the table was covered with various seafood, but there was no cake.
Fang Zhuo asked: Why is there no cake? Don’t you love sweets?
Yan Lie didn’t reply.
Fang Zhuo switched to another page, and in Wei Xi’s latest update — posted an hour ago — she found a little slice of her day: “Arrived too early, waiting outside the cinema for half an hour. Mango pomelo sago is heavenly, ice cold and life-saving, hoping I don’t need the bathroom halfway through. [hehe emoji]”
By now everyone was probably in the film — phones off inside the theatre, apparently.
Fang Zhuo put her phone away and waited for the train’s arrival announcement.
At ten past four in the afternoon — later than she had planned, because she hadn’t been able to get a ticket for a closer departure time — the train pulled into City C’s platform.
This was an entirely unfamiliar coastal city.
Following the various directional signs through the terminal, Fang Zhuo hesitated out through one of several identical-looking exits marked with a letter, stepped outside the air-conditioned zone, and — in a humidity so thick it nearly stopped her breathing — encountered a city with a completely different character.
The architecture, the street food, the local dialect, the rules governing every piece of basic infrastructure — all of it put her on her guard, surrounded her with a kind of unfamiliar, agitated uncertainty.
Fang Zhuo had never been far from home; more precisely, she had never left City A. Even within City A, she only moved between a handful of fixed locations.
This was also her first time riding a high-speed rail train.
Following the navigation, she left the station and walked just over a kilometer to the bus stop.
It being the holidays, the wait was crowded, and many buses stopped at this stand.
Fang Zhuo was still standing in front of the route board, checking the stops one by one, when a bus with a very similar route number pulled up at the white painted line. The crowd around her surged forward in a rush. Acting on instinct, Fang Zhuo took a few steps along with the flow.
She stopped at the back of the crowd and called out from a distance: “Excuse me, driver — can this bus connect to Route 213?”
Whatever the driver said, Fang Zhuo couldn’t make it out. She only saw him wave his hand, as if beckoning her aboard.
The passengers were urging her to “hurry up, move further in,” and worried they’d leave without her, Fang Zhuo quickly climbed on.
Once aboard, she spotted the bus number posted on the wall and thought it looked very similar to the one she needed. She compared the last two stops on the route and they matched, so she settled her nerves.
The bus swayed along for half an hour. After it left the busy center of the city, the passenger load thinned.
Fang Zhuo exhaled, standing in a corner spot, gazing out the window at the unfamiliar scenery in a daze. She hadn’t heard the stop she was waiting for announced, so when the ride had steadied, she took out her phone to double-check.
But when she opened the map app, she found the bus had veered away from the route she had planned.
Fang Zhuo was momentarily stunned. She quickly stepped to the front of the bus and tapped a woman on the shoulder, handing her the phone: “Excuse me, auntie — am I on the wrong bus?”
The woman glanced at the screen and announced loudly: “Good heavens, what do you mean wrong bus — the navigation told you to take B2, but this is a short-loop service! “
Fang Zhuo said, bewildered: “But isn’t this also B2?”
The woman explained bluntly: “You got on the wrong bus! You have to read the full route number on the sign — even one extra character makes it a different line. The two buses share the same start and end terminals, but the stop you need isn’t on this short-loop route. And besides — haven’t you noticed you’re going in the opposite direction?”
For someone with no sense of direction, this was nothing short of a disaster.
For a moment, Fang Zhuo’s entire world went dim.
She should not have come.
Seeing her face go white in an instant, the woman glanced toward the road ahead and offered: “You could just ride to the terminal and transfer from there — it’s not far off now anyway.”
By the time Fang Zhuo was standing at a bus stop again, she had received a reply from Yan Lie.
A Name Ablaze: Don’t feel like having birthday cake — too festive. Not really in a celebratory mood right now.
Little Sun: Are you all heading back now?
A Name Ablaze: Should be.
A Name Ablaze: The film wasn’t that good — a bit dull. Next time I’ll take you somewhere better.
Fang Zhuo was seized by a vague sense of having missed something.
All the fluttering ideas she’d had were gone. Her hands and feet felt hollowed out, her mind close to stalling. She told herself it was from sweating too much, affecting her normal state. She pulled a bottle of water from her bag, drank it halfway down in one go, and began to feel somewhat human again.
Fang Zhuo took out her phone and switched her navigation to Yan Lie’s address.
In the middle of entering the location, she wavered — considering whether to tell Yan Lie she was here and have him come and get her.
The thought barely surfaced before she dismissed it.
Yan Lie would definitely mock her mercilessly — lost despite the navigation, unable to read a bus route number properly.
She felt that every decision she had made today had been outside the range of her rational mind.
It must be the heat.
Evening came, and with it a cooling-down, at seven o’clock.
The sky still held some light, but the wind blowing through it had grown gentle. From the sides of the streets came the sounds of cheerful, lively voices, and the air carried all manner of different aromas.
The day’s heat receded along with the slowly softening light, and Fang Zhuo at last arrived at the room number Yan Lie had given her.
The weariness from her long journey began, strangely, to ease a little in front of this door. Fang Zhuo adjusted the strap of her bag, set down the cake she had bought from a roadside stall, reached up, and pressed the doorbell.
The monotone electronic chime repeated itself — how many times she couldn’t count — and the fevered haze Fang Zhuo had been carrying through the whole journey finally started to lift, replaced by a slow-settling, inexpressible disappointment.
All kinds of complicated feelings knotted and coiled around each other, concentrating from the faintest wisp into a dense, heavy lump, and the hand she had kept pressed on the doorbell gradually went slack.
Fang Zhuo thought: she still couldn’t escape the ordinary, petty kind of feelings that came with certain states of mind.
She was poor. Extraordinarily poor. Which meant she couldn’t afford to be generous, couldn’t afford to be impulsive. Everything she bought had to be the cheapest option; any time she thought of going out she first had to calculate her savings; any gift she received she would think about whether she’d ever be able to repay it; even choosing vegetables and fruit meant looking for the discounted ones.
Compared with their easy-handed generosity, she was conspicuously ordinary in every way.
But she could open a special window, reserved only for Yan Lie.
She could spend half a month’s wages, ride a train for several hours, and appear at his door to say happy birthday — so long as that was what he hoped for.
But even a self-invented romance doesn’t always have the good fortune to unfold exactly as planned.
This day of hers, born from a sudden impulse, could be summed up in just two words: an ordeal.