Li Nanzhu couldn't remember when the rain had started.
She only remembered the sky turning gloomy without warning, pressing down so heavily it made it hard to breathe.
"Oh! It's raining!" Lin Xiao exclaimed softly, then smiled again. "It's okay, my mom definitely brought an umbrella! She always brings one whenever she sees the weather looks bad!"
Standing beside her and looking at the torrential rain outside the door, Li Nanzhu felt a strange lack of her usual irritation toward bad weather. She even thought the sound of the rain was somewhat pleasant, because it meant she might get to squeeze under the same umbrella with Auntie Lin and Lin Xiao again, walking together along that wet but warm road.
She even reached out to touch the side pocket of her schoolbag—inside lay two pieces of fruit candy she had saved for several days, wrapped in crinkled paper. The director had rare good spirits yesterday and handed them out; she hadn't been able to bring herself to eat even one, wanting to save them for Lin Xiao.
Sure enough, it wasn't long before Lin Xiao's mother came running through the curtain of rain, holding a large but somewhat old checkered umbrella. The bottom of her pants was already soaked.
"Mom!"
Lin Xiao's mother caught her daughter, her gaze naturally falling on Li Nanzhu standing to the side.
"Hello, Auntie."
However, this time, the smile on Lin Xiao's mother's face stiffened almost imperceptibly the moment their eyes met. The smile didn't disappear, but it was as if a layer of thin ice had suddenly formed over it, losing its usual natural warmth.
Her eyes quickly swept over Li Nanzhu's face before darting away to focus on her own daughter. Her tone carried a trace of subtle urgency. "Xiaoxiao, let's go. The rain is too heavy; we need to hurry."
"Can Nanzhu come with us? Let's walk her back!" Lin Xiao, completely oblivious, reached out to grab Li Nanzhu's arm just as she always did.
"Xiaoxiao!" Lin Xiao's mother's voice rose slightly, carrying an unprecedented tone of prohibition.
She pressed down on her daughter's hand and turned her gaze back to Li Nanzhu. The smile on her face became even more forced, leaking a sense of embarrassment and an indescribable alienation.
"Nanzhu," her voice was dry, "in the future... after school, just go home on your own, okay? Xiaoxiao... her father is getting off work early lately to take her to her hobby classes. We're in a rush, so we won't be walking together anymore."
As the words fell, the air seemed to freeze instantly.
The smile on Li Nanzhu's face iced over inch by inch, finally hardening into an incredibly awkward mask.
She opened her mouth, wanting to say "it's okay," wanting to say "thank you for taking care of me before," wanting to squeeze out one more smile to show she understood.
But her throat felt as if it were blocked by something, and she couldn't make a sound.
The muscles in her face were so stiff they wouldn't obey her. That standard smile, which had almost become an instinct, now felt like a heavy, icy mask clamped onto her face, pulling at her cheeks until they ached, yet she couldn't take it off.
Li Nanzhu saw Lin Xiao look up in surprise, glancing at her mother and then at her. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but her mother gripped her hand tighter.
She also saw the dodging gaze of Lin Xiao's mother, the clear defensiveness and apology deep within those eyes, and a realization of "so that's how it is."
That look was exactly the same as the one those other parents gave when they quickly pulled their children away.
It turned out that those warm smiles, the concerned inquiries, the shared candies, and the mung bean soup... were all built on a fragile premise: that the other party didn't know her "background," didn't know where she came from or what kind of "past" she had.
Once they knew, that gentle mask would be easily torn away, revealing the true wariness, alienation, and even... fear beneath.
"Not quite normal"... "bit someone"... "downright terrifying"...
This was reality.
The icy rain lashed diagonally against her face, cutting Lin Xiao's mother's final sentence, filled with awkwardness and distance—"In the future after school, just go home on your own"—into fragmented shards.
Li Nanzhu stood in place, watching the checkered umbrella disappear almost frantically into the depths of the grey rain, and with it, the fleeting warmth that had once sheltered her was washed clean by the water.
Li Nanzhu stood there alone. The entrance to the school building was empty; she was the only one left.
The rain grew heavier, turning the world into a vast expanse of white.
The stiff smile on her face finally couldn't be maintained anymore. The corners of her mouth dropped powerlessly, leaving behind only complete emptiness and numbness.
But in truth, she didn't feel much sudden shock or the sting of betrayal in her heart.
She had expected this all along.
During those evenings walking home side-by-side with Lin Xiao, in those dusks drinking sweet mung bean soup at the bottom of Lin Xiao's apartment building, at the moments she accepted the candies Lin Xiao insisted on stuffing into her hand... every time she felt that unreserved closeness and warmth, a cold voice would always ring out subtly yet clearly in a hidden corner of her heart:
"This is stolen."
"It has to be returned sooner or later."
"They don't know yet."
She just hadn't expected this day to come so soon.
So fast that she hadn't even had the chance to give away the two pieces of candy she had saved for so long; so fast that she had only just begun clumsily learning how to "reciprocate" that kindness; so fast that she had almost started to believe that perhaps she really could, like a speck of dust, quietly cling to someone else's warm wings and find a moment's respite.
It was even more direct and... mundane than she had imagined.
There were no heated arguments, no vicious slander, not even a single word of explicit rejection or accusation.
There was only the tacit, polite withdrawal between adults and the lingering confusion and helplessness in a child's eyes.
It was for the best.
Li Nanzhu thought.
This was for the best.
A blunt knife cutting through flesh made one more sober instead.
She even felt she should thank Lin Xiao's mother. Thank her for using such a clear method to draw a crisp, clean conclusion to this brief "friendship" that shouldn't have begun in the first place.
There was no dragging of feet, no fake pleasantries, leaving her with no room even to deceive herself.
She slowly raised her hand and fished the two pieces of fruit candy out of her bag's side pocket. The cheap wrappers lost what little pitiful luster they had in the dim light.
She clenched them tightly. The edges of the wrappers dug into her palm until it hurt, but that slight pain strangely restored a hint of sensation to her icy fingertips.
She looked at the two pieces of candy, staring for a long time.
She didn't throw the candy away in a fit of heartbreak like other abandoned children, nor did she rush into the rain in a daze. She simply turned around calmly and walked step by step back into the empty classroom.
The light in the classroom was dim. The desks and chairs were arranged neatly, and the air still held the lingering scent of chalk dust. She walked to her seat and sat down, peeling back the wrapper of one candy to reveal the orange-yellow sweet inside.
She looked at it for a few seconds, then put it into her mouth.
It was still that familiar sour-sweet taste with a heavy artificial fragrance spreading through her mouth.
But this time, that sweetness only stayed for an instant before being rapidly drowned out by a boundless bitterness spreading from the tip of her tongue. That bitterness crept from the base of her tongue to her throat, then to her chest, and finally settled in her stomach—heavy and piercingly cold.
Sweetness was a momentary hallucination.
Bitterness was the eternal truth.
She chewed the candy meticulously until it had completely dissolved, until that bitter taste had soaked into every taste bud, until she was certain she had carved this flavor deep into her memory.
Then she picked up the other piece of candy and used the tattered wrapper to carefully wrap it back up, layer by layer.
Her movements remained slow, like she was holding a crude funeral for some absurd dream of hers.
Once it was wrapped, she didn't throw it away. Instead, she unzipped the innermost layer of her schoolbag—the tiny pocket where she kept her most private and useless trinkets—and gently placed the candy inside.
It wasn't a keepsake; it wasn't for nostalgia.
It was evidence.
It was evidence that she had once briefly believed in something illusory, a reminder that beneath every sweet facade lurked a core called "reality."
The sound of the rain outside gradually diminished, turning into a pitter-patter of dripping water.
The sky grew even darker.
Li Nanzhu sat quietly in the dim classroom, motionless.
After a long time, so long that the rain had almost stopped and the sky had turned completely black, she finally stood up slowly, shouldered her bag, and walked out of the classroom.
The muscles in her face had already automatically adjusted their curve the moment she took her first step.
Rate on N.U.
