The second week at Huan’er Middle School began amid a raging storm. Heavy rain obscured the path ahead as a crowded bus inched forward, swaying with each start and stop. Squeezed in the middle, Qiao Qingyu couldn’t reach any handholds, her body rocking unsteadily. The magnetic male voice reading English prose in her headphones held no appeal. She looked up at the small TV mounted at the front of the bus.
“According to the weather bureau, the heavy rainfall caused by this typhoon will continue until the early morning of the 9th. No casualties have been reported yet. The meteorological department has issued a Level II typhoon warning. Relevant authorities should continue preventive measures for ships at sea, reservoir flood control, and secondary disasters such as urban and rural waterlogging, flash floods, and landslides…”
Above the scrolling text, rapidly changing images flashed across the screen. Unexpectedly, Qiao Qingyu caught a glimpse of Nanqiao Village. The once-gentle stream had transformed into a raging river, its muddy yellow waters flooding into a familiar white-walled, black-tiled mansion at the village entrance.
It was her grandparents’ house.
Qiao Qingyu removed her headphones—an unconscious gesture. When troubled, she preferred silence.
A pair of eyes from the back of the bus peered over the crowd at her. Qiao Qingyu turned, meeting a gentle gaze.
The girl wore the same Huan’er Middle School uniform.
After disembarking, the girl quickly caught up to Qiao Qingyu. She held a long-handled transparent umbrella, its dome curving to her elbow, the black frame resembling a birdcage.
“Excuse me,” the girl reached through the curtain of rain to tap Qiao Qingyu’s umbrella, “your hair is messy on top.”
Lifting her umbrella, Qiao Qingyu saw that the girl had delicate features. Though unremarkable compared to her sister Qiao Baiyu’s striking beauty, her curved, smiling eyes radiated kindness, possessing a comforting loveliness. Moreover, she dressed conservatively—wearing a long-sleeved jacket over her short-sleeved uniform, which inexplicably endeared her to Qiao Qingyu.
Touching her head, Qiao Qingyu indeed found a small tuft of hair sticking up. Her ponytail was already loose; she must have caught it when unconsciously removing her headphones earlier.
As she thanked the girl, Qiao Qingyu quickly glanced at her name tag: Wang Mumu, Class 1, Grade 12.
As Wang Mumu gracefully walked away, two words flashed through Qiao Qingyu’s mind with genuine admiration: school beauty.
After a night of mental preparation, Qiao Qingyu believed she was ready to face her misfortune. Passive people are always led by the nose; she had to take initiative.
Entering the classroom through the back door, she passed Ming Sheng’s desk and slapped down a black folder containing his weekend homework with a loud “thwack” on the empty surface.
“Why the black face? Scary,” Ye Zilin, who witnessed this, sneered. “What’s that?”
Qiao Qingyu ignored him and walked to her seat.
“Hey, are you deaf or mute?” Ye Zilin, embarrassed and angry, shouted, “Just because Sheng talked to you, you think you’re all that? Look at yourself, country bumpkin! If you weren’t useful, Sheng wouldn’t give you the time of day! Don’t tell me you wrote him a love letter thinking he’s interested in you?”
This harsh comment felt oddly familiar. Qiao Qingyu couldn’t help but wonder if Ming Sheng had told his friends about her sister, causing Ye Zilin to view her the same way and insult her so freely.
She certainly hadn’t written Ming Sheng a love letter, but she had placed an envelope in the black folder. Inside was a note with two sentences: one a polite, sincere apology for her mother; the other a firm declaration for herself.
Ming Sheng’s reaction would likely be another storm, how terrible, Qiao Qingyu didn’t want to or care to imagine. She could only do her best; this was the conclusion of her night-long deliberation.
The nightmare she and her family had endured in Shun’yun and tried to avoid in Huan’zhou was all caused by Qiao Baiyu, but the instigator had already passed away. Perhaps sparked by Li Fanghao, Qiao Qingyu now felt hatred towards Qiao Baiyu. She could forgive her sister’s past malice towards her, but she couldn’t allow her sister to drag the whole family into the mire. Cowering would only provoke others’ curiosity; facing the new life without fear of others’ opinions was the right attitude.
She had to stand tall and resolutely declare to outsiders that Qiao Baiyu’s shameful actions had nothing to do with her.
Thinking this way, Qiao Qingyu even began to anticipate Ming Sheng’s reaction. From the moment he appeared in the classroom, a warning bell started ticking in her heart, as if awaiting an expected volcanic eruption—anxious yet exhilarating.
As Ming Sheng put down his bag, the physics class representative, Gao Chi, happened to reach his desk to collect homework.
“Take it yourself,” Ming Sheng said, dumping the contents of the folder onto his desk.
While extracting the physics test paper, Gao Chi accidentally knocked a small white envelope to the floor and bent to pick it up. “Sheng, there’s a letter here…”
“Don’t want it,” Ming Sheng interrupted Gao Chi, not even glancing at it. He spoke loudly and deliberately drawled, “The trash can is right by your feet, please throw it away for me.”
Qiao Qingyu turned her head slightly, then quickly straightened—stay calm, she reminded herself.
“I’ll check it for you, bro,” Ye Zilin laughed sleazily, “so it doesn’t dirty your eyes.”
He stood up and snatched the envelope from Gao Chi’s hand, about to open it when Ming Sheng suddenly stood up.
“Give it back.”
Taking the envelope, Ming Sheng bent down to retrieve the handwritten warning note Qiao Qingyu had given him last week from his desk. He strode towards the slender figure with a ponytail by the window, who remained motionless.
Qiao Qingyu sensed Ming Sheng approaching. To her left, rain poured outside the glass window; to her right, the air stagnated with the sudden appearance of a dark figure.
“Hey,” Ming Sheng’s impatient voice came from above, “stop writing nonsense and leaving it on my desk.”
At these words, several boys in the back row burst into laughter. Ye Zilin even excitedly applauded, drawing the attention of the entire class.
Qiao Qingyu instinctively wanted to retaliate, but as she looked up, she was surprised to find a gentle smile in Ming Sheng’s eyes. She opened her mouth, but the retort on the tip of her tongue dissipated into thin air.
“Here,” Ming Sheng spoke again, the smile in his eyes vanishing, replaced by lofty pity, “You poor thing.”
With that, he casually tossed the envelope and the rolled paper onto Qiao Qingyu’s desk.
The boys’ guffaws and the girls’ snickers made Qiao Qingyu want to push open the window and jump out. Blood rushing to her head, she stood up abruptly.
“What,” Ming Sheng spoke before she could, his tone full of challenge, “Didn’t you write it?”
“You’re the pitiful one,” Qiao Qingyu gritted her teeth, “Pitiful in your narcissism.”
Ye Zilin was the first to let out an “Ooh” of surprise. Other boys were about to join in but were silenced by Ming Sheng’s icy glare as he turned his head.
“Qiao Qingyu,” Ming Sheng turned back, his face darkening, “Personal attacks are not okay.”
“You called me pitiful first…”
“Wasn’t I stating a fact?” Ming Sheng raised his chin impatiently, his eyes full of contempt, “With a sister like that, a mother like that, don’t you know how pitiful you are?”
Qiao Qingyu was speechless again.
Like a dreamer suddenly awakened, she realized she had always been insecure. Her hatred for Qiao Baiyu intensified—”a sister like that.” Stealing all the attention in life, pushing the whole family into an abyss after death, and torturing their mother into “a mother like that,” robbing Qiao Qingyu of freedom in life and dignity among classmates. Qiao Qingyu hated her.
“Considering how pitiful you are,” Ming Sheng assumed a victorious posture, “I’ll forgive you for saying I’m…”
“Qiao Baiyu is Qiao Baiyu, and I am me,” Qiao Qingyu roughly interrupted Ming Sheng, looking directly into his pitch-black eyes, “Her degrading herself doesn’t mean I will too. Using her shameful acts to threaten me makes you despicable.”
She watched as the light in those black eyes faded, long eyelashes falling and rising again, a piercing cold glare as sharp as a knife:
“You’re boringly annoying, Qiao Qingyu.”
To Qiao Qingyu, this sentence was tantamount to a death sentence. Rather than being labeled as the “boring” and “annoying” girl by the school’s most popular figure at the start of the semester, she would have preferred to be plagued by rumors about Qiao Baiyu. The terrifying thing was that both had befallen her simultaneously.
“She looks quite quiet…”
“Don’t be fooled by her appearance. She’s quite formidable, calling Sheng narcissistic and despicable to his face…”
“I heard it’s because her handwriting is good, so Sheng asked her to help with homework, but then…”
“Poor Sheng, he’s never been spoken to like that before…”
“If it were someone else, they probably wouldn’t be able to find their teeth by now, but she’s a classmate and a girl, so Sheng just ignores her…”
“No one in their class dares to get too close to her. She has an older sister who was quite wild, and reportedly died of AIDS. We should stay away from Class 5 too…”
Qiao Qingyu’s hand, holding a spoon, stopped—she had been stirring the soup in her bowl. Looking up, she saw Jiang Nian sitting resolutely across from her, looking at her with concern.
Qiao Qingyu opened her mouth but chose to remain silent.
“Don’t listen to them,” Jiang Nian said, “It’s getting more and more ridiculous. Even if it were AIDS, so what? It’s not like you can catch it from her. Absurd!”
Qiao Qingyu remained silent. The persistent rumors had finally seeped in from Shun’yun.
“If I were you, I’d go over there right now and flip their trays,” Jiang Nian glared at the people behind Qiao Qingyu, “Let them gossip shamelessly! They’re in their senior year, did they learn nothing in biology? Go away, go away, what nonsense!”
“Jiang Nian,” Qiao Qingyu’s nose stung, “It’s okay.”
“The way they talk, anyone with a disease should be avoided. Shouldn’t all hospital doctors be isolated then?” Jiang Nian seemed even more furious than Qiao Qingyu, “Let me tell you, my mom works in obstetrics and gynecology. She even performed an abortion for a girl with AIDS before!”
As if struck by something, Qiao Qingyu’s pupils rapidly dilated.
“So you’re saying,” she spoke softly, tentatively, “if someone with AIDS got appendicitis, they would still have appendix surgery?”
“What else do you think?” Jiang Nian asked rhetorically, suddenly realizing, her eyes widening in horror, “You mean your sister, right?”
Qiao Qingyu felt a chill throughout her body. Of course, she knew not to believe rumors, but those people spoke so convincingly, and Qiao Baiyu indeed had no self-respect. Associating with a bunch of lowlifes, and selling her dignity, it wasn’t impossible that she had contracted a terrible disease. So, Qiao Baiyu dying during appendix surgery was true, and the rumors were likely true as well.
This was the real reason they had fled Shun’yun as a family. The truth, wearing the cloak of rumors, weighed so heavily on her parents that they couldn’t stand straight.
Recalling Qiao Jinrui’s reaction on Sunday night, Qiao Qingyu further believed that although they didn’t say it, every adult in the family probably knew about Qiao Baiyu leaving with the disease, right?
Otherwise, why would Qiao Jinrui be so ashamed to speak of it? After all, that was his soon-to-be wife, his closest person.
Not mentioning it, yet secretly giving money. Before going to bed that night, following Li Fanghao’s instructions, Qiao Qingyu divided the fruit Qiao Jinrui brought into two portions—Li Fanghao planned to take one portion to the sports school for Qiao Jinyu the next day. Under a box of deep red, shiny cherries, Qiao Qingyu found a thick red envelope with “A small token of apology” written on the back.
When he learned of Qiao Baiyu’s passing, Qiao Jinrui repeatedly blamed himself for not taking better care of his sister. Working in Huan’zhou, he was geographically closest to Qiao Baiyu at the time and naturally shouldered the responsibility of caring for her. However in Qiao Qingyu’s view, Qiao Baiyu’s acute appendicitis had nothing to do with Qiao Jinrui—after all, he had his work and couldn’t constantly watch over the adult Qiao Baiyu.
Seeing the red envelope, Qiao Qingyu was a bit surprised by Qiao Jinrui’s conscience but didn’t think much of it. Now, she suddenly understood.
What Qiao Jinrui felt guilty about wasn’t the appendicitis incident, but his failure to stop Qiao Baiyu from falling into hell.
“Don’t be upset, but let me say something,” Jiang Nian carefully watched Qiao Qingyu, “Although all surgeries have risks, the mortality rate for appendicitis surgery is really low. Your sister was so young; many people wouldn’t believe it if you told them.”
“She’s too dumb to understand such subtlety,” Ming Sheng’s condescending voice suddenly came from above, “Pitiful and stupid, truly pathetic.”