School bullying doesn’t discriminate by gender.

Beside the trash can in our classroom sat a boy with an intellectual disability.

His family was also poor, and like me he commuted from home rather than boarding, but he had a grandmother who doted on him dearly.

Every day his clothes were clean—patched, but they smelled faintly sweet.

Every day, his schoolbag held a boiled egg and a rice ball his grandmother had made for him.

If they showed any restraint at all toward me, they showed none toward him—pure malice, pure cruelty.

Taking advantage of how simple and trusting he was, they tricked him into the bathroom and made him drink dirty water, even urine. They called him an idiot while stealing the little pocket money he had. They dumped all the class cleaning duties on him, threatening that he could only go home once he’d finished every task.

They called it friendly teasing between friends.

He believed them.

No one bothered to learn his name. Everyone just called him the idiot.

So the idiot’s first task every morning was to hand over his pocket money, to keep this pack of tyrants satisfied.

He couldn’t bear to waste food—even after they’d stomped his egg and rice ball into the dirt, he’d still eat every bit of it clean, then walk home covered in footprints.

His grandmother, already old, could only pick up more trash to sell each day, just to scrape together a little extra pocket money so he could have a slightly better life.

I knew all this because I’d run into his grandmother while collecting trash myself.

She was a very kind old woman, with gentle, warm eyes.

Just like him.

But kindness invites cruelty.

I could barely protect myself, so the most I could do was shout “the principal’s coming!” whenever they dragged him toward the boys’ bathroom.

Why not shout for a teacher instead? Because the teachers never did anything.

When he came out covered in footprints, I’d help brush the dust off him, so it wouldn’t be so obvious when he got home.

In winter, after school, I’d help him clean the classroom so he could go home early.

Because it got dark early, and his grandmother would worry.

He was different from me—no one waited for me at home, but someone kept a light burning for him.

A child with no shelter from the storm has nothing to look forward to in going home.

Over time, I realized he wasn’t really so slow after all.

His name was An Qi—a very lovely name.

He could tell perfectly well who was kind to him and who wasn’t.

When I helped him, he thanked me, and the next day he’d bring me a share of his breakfast.

Every day he had a sausage as a snack. He used to eat it secretly before even entering the school gates, but later he started bringing it in to secretly share with me.

Half for him, half for me.

Because the others always mocked him as filthy, whenever he handed the food to me, his eyes carried a careful, timid uncertainty.

He said, “I’m not dirty. This is clean. Please don’t look down on me.”

He said I was his good friend—the only friend he had in the whole class.

He said that if he didn’t obey them, they’d go bully his grandmother instead.

Because I stayed close to him, I became the second idiot of the class.

From then on, no one called me Tang Heqing anymore—I became the “idiot girl” they mentioned constantly.

They said the idiot boy and the idiot girl made a perfect match.

They said the two idiots were falling in love.

They wrote “the idiot’s wife” on the back of my homework.

They asked me when I was going to marry that idiot.

They laughed wildly, like demons crawling straight out of hell.

The good and evil of youth stood sharply divided, one from the other.

In the second semester of eighth grade, we got a new homeroom teacher—a young woman, surname Li.

In her, I saw what the textbooks meant by “imparting knowledge, transmitting the Way, and being a teacher in the truest sense.”

She was strict, but she was also fair.

She managed everything.

Every week she held a class meeting, stressing that no form of school violence would be tolerated.

Reporting things to her actually worked.

So I no longer had to endure crude jokes, and An Qi no longer came home covered in bruises.

He was so happy. He said that to thank me for helping him by reporting it, he’d bring me a whole sausage the next day.

I said okay, and I’d bring him a little gift the next day too.

We were both celebrating a justice that had come, though late.

An Qi loved the balloons sold near the school’s south gate, especially the ones shaped like Lazy Goat.

But since his pocket money kept getting stolen, all he could do was look, never buy.

So the next day, I got to school early.

The balloons cost five yuan each. With the money I’d saved, I bought him two.

I waited for a long time.

That seat remained empty the whole time.

Until our homeroom teacher’s voice broke as she made the announcement to the class.

“Everyone, please be careful crossing the street from now on. This morning, our classmate An Qi was struck and run over by a truck that ran a red light. The driver fled the scene. An Qi died on the spot.”

In an instant, every eye in the room turned toward me.

I sat frozen in my seat, my mind blank, unable to think at all.

By the time I came back to myself, I realized tears had already soaked my face.

Just yesterday—just yesterday he had been perfectly fine.

We hadn’t even had the chance to celebrate yet.

We hadn’t even gotten to enjoy a few good days.

I hadn’t even given him the balloon he loved.

I hadn’t even told him that he, too, was my only good friend.

How could everything suddenly be too late.

His grandmother came to school to collect his belongings, her eyes swollen red, her hands trembling.

I helped her load his things onto her tricycle.

Choking on her tears, she pulled two sausages from her pocket—still warm from her body heat—and pressed them into my palm.

“Little Qi told me—he said he wanted to give his best friend two sausages today. He’d been talking about it since last night, telling me to remind him this morning.”

“You’re a good child. Thank you for looking after Little Qi all this time.”

“He never had much luck in this life, poor boy—going before this old woman does.”

I stood at the end of the road, watching her stooped figure push the tricycle away, slow and unsteady, her clothes hanging loose and empty in the wind, like a small wooden boat about to capsize any moment.

Lazy Goat balloons were tied to the handlebars on either side, swaying in the sky.

Swinging back and forth, as if An Qi were saying goodbye to me.

Until the last trace of her figure disappeared around the bend in the road.

I blinked my dry, stinging eyes.

The winter afternoon sun stabbed painfully at them.