“Isn’t the feeling of being fed by a girl at the celebration pretty good?”
“…What?”
Hellish information came from the other end of the phone.
I could not recover for a moment and subconsciously asked back.
“Gu Fan.”
Zhi Nian’s voice came from the other end of the phone.
Usually her voice was always light, like stepping on cotton, afraid of startling something.
But today was not. Today her voice was taut, like a string pulled to the limit that could snap at any time.
“The words I said, you didn’t hear them? Or is it… that you want to defend her?”
I steadied myself.
“Zhi Nian, you went to the celebration too? Just now I…”
Her voice interrupted me.
“I saw you.”
The volume was not very large, but every word seemed squeezed out from between the teeth, carrying a sharpness I had never heard before.
“You were together with Shiratori. She was feeding you food. The two of you acted very intimate. You even bought her a hair clip. I don’t know what else happened afterward. Maybe she also had her back to you, and Gu Fan, your hand combed her hair, then personally put the hair clip on her. Maybe it was like that, right?”
A tone so calm it felt eerie.
The emotions contained in the words were complex to the point that they could no longer be distinguished by sound alone, so that what I heard from the phone was only Zhi Nian’s tone that was calm to the point of feeling eerie.
“Zhi Nian, you misunderstood.”
“Misunderstood? But she was smiling so happily. A girl who was already very good-looking, whose usual social interactions were as free and easy as a social butterfly, outstanding in every aspect, unlike me, like an idiot, unable to say even one good word, only able to make people dislike me all day. If not for my large chest, I wouldn’t even know what to use to compete with her.”
Gradually, Zhi Nian’s voice began to tremble.
“I saw you lowering your head. I saw her leaning over. I saw…”
The air solidified for a moment.
“You were eating something. I don’t know if it was secretly kissing first behind my back and then eating, or truly as you said, just a misunderstanding?”
Zhi Nian’s tone grew even colder.
It was as if something inside her body had shattered, and then those fragments sank little by little downward, sinking to a very deep, very deep place where even echoes could not be heard.
“You said you would never lie to me.”
“I didn’t lie to you.”
“So then, she was simply feeding you food, just that her personality is rough and she didn’t pay much attention to these details and boundaries, and you also half-pushed half-accepted her feeding, just like a pair of loving little couple, hehe. When others feed you, you eat. Pretty good. Being able to eat is a blessing, Gu Fan.”
“…There was no feeding. I took the stick myself and ate. There was no situation of being personally fed by hand.”
“Is there a difference?”
Just as the words fell, Zhi Nian suddenly laughed with a wa.
Clearly it was a clear laugh, yet one could not feel the slightest sense of amusement. Instead it was like mistakenly entering an ice lake on a winter night, feet stepping on that thin layer of ice on the lake surface, something seeming to surge underneath, the heart also trembling along with it, worrying that the ice would break at any time and fall into the lake.
“No, it seems I have no qualifications to hold you accountable. In the end, I am only an old classmate who reacquainted with you for half a year. Strictly speaking I cannot even be called a childhood sweetheart who grew up together and knew each other for more than ten years, yet now like a resentful woman questioning you this and that. Indeed not appropriate.”
Completely different from the soft and soft Zhi Nian in my impression, at this moment her aggressiveness was fully maxed out.
“Can I explain?”
“Explain what? Explain that you didn’t deliberately want me to discover you were stepping on two boats and playing ambiguous, only that you didn’t expect I would appear at the plaza, and coincidentally happened to bump into Shiratori feeding… oh, wrong, treating you to delicious food. Right? Have to say, Gu Fan, you are really good at it, dangling me like a dog, and I am truly that cheap, insisting on entangling with you and not letting go. What am I after? I also don’t know, but I really want to eat this piece of fatty meat that has made me crave for so long. Yet you keep not giving an answer, like fishing while always pulling the fish without reeling it in. The fishhook only gets stuck in my mouth. I want to leave but cannot leave. I want to go up but you don’t let me. I’m so chaotic.”
“Gu Fan, are you still listening?”
“…You speak.”
I did not rush to respond. I knew Zhi Nian’s emotions right now were a bit high. She rarely was like this. Most of the time she was even like a soft and glutinous little milk cat that occasionally exploded its fur. Stroke the fur a bit and she would purr purr and rub against your body, leaving her own pheromones.
I had only seen her this angry once, that was when we graduated elementary school, when I questioned her why she hid the matter of being bullied. At that time she was also nearly hysterical in attitude, yet the tone of speaking was especially cold and calm, as if fallen into complete despair.
The other end of the phone was silent for a long time.
Long enough that I thought she had hung up.
Then Zhi Nian opened her mouth, yet the tone became somewhat unfamiliar to me.
No longer a taut string, nor cotton containing blades.
It was soft.
Soft as if wanting to completely encompass and dissolve into liquid.
Also carrying a kind of eerie emotion I had never heard before that made the heart panic.
“Gu Fan.”
“Mm.”
“Do you know what kind of person I am?”
“…I know.”
“You don’t know.”
I clearly heard Zhi Nian coldly laugh once on the other end of the phone, carrying a bit of bitter meaning.
“You don’t know I am a person with such nauseating thoughts, dirty like a rat in the sewer.”
“Zhi Nian—”
“Shut up. Let me finish speaking.”
She took a deep breath.
I could feel that Zhi Nian right now should be trembling all over. Even the action of inhaling was intermittent, like a wave with blurred curves.
This breath was inhaled very deep, very deep, as if wanting to fill the entire person, stir and shatter, then slowly, slowly spit it out.
“From childhood to now… I have never truly possessed anything.”
Zhi Nian’s voice was very light, like sleep-talking self-muttering.
“Mother raised me, gave me food and clothing. I know she is good to me. But… I don’t know if this counts as love. Perhaps my innate empathy ability is very poor. I feel Mother is good to me only because she is my mother and needs to bear this responsibility to ‘love’ her own daughter, not ‘love’ me.”
I did not quite understand the meaning of this sentence, but I did not interrupt her.
“I have no friends, from childhood to now none. I don’t know how to speak with people. I don’t know how to make others like me. I only know how to stay.”
“Because I am afraid.”
“Just staying, staying in the corner, staying in places where no one can see me, like a stinking maggot about to rot.”
“Afraid of saying the wrong words, afraid of being disliked by people, afraid of myself… not being good enough.”
From the other end of the phone came a very light, very light sound like sniffing.
“Zhi Nian…”
Zhi Nian’s tone suddenly rose a bit higher again.
“Let me continue speaking, okay? Please, I’m about to cry.”
As if wanting to vent in one breath the courage that had been hard accumulated. As if using all strength to support something, not letting it fall.
“I still remember, when I met you… I felt you were different. You wouldn’t feel I was strange, wouldn’t feel my slow speaking was annoying, wouldn’t feel my not loving to smile was a spoiler.”
“You were just there, always there, always by my side.”
Zhi Nian’s voice was a bit choked.
“I thought as long as you were there, I would… but I discovered that actually I still would be afraid.”
“I am afraid you will leave, afraid you will leave me and be with someone else for a long time, I am afraid you…”
Her voice grew more and more urgent, more and more fast, like a car that could not brake, on a downhill road, charging straight downward.
“I am afraid you will meet a girl better than me, prettier than me, more interesting than me, better at speaking than me, able to coax you happy, make you laugh, and also able to provide various emotional values, perhaps even with a larger chest than me, more…”
“Enough!”
I finally could not help interrupting her.
The other end of the phone was quiet for one second.
“Wu…”
Then… I heard the sound of crying.
Not that kind of heart-rending loud crying.
It was very small, very small, extremely suppressed, the kind of crying as if afraid of being heard by people.
One after another, intermittent, like something shattered into very small fragments, every fragment piercing people.
“Do you know… how much I hate myself.”
Her voice mixed in the crying, unclear.
“I hate this timid and shrinking appearance of myself. I hate to the extreme being unable to do anything well. Speaking as if having eaten gunpowder always making people furrow their brows. I hate even more that I cannot be like Shiratori… openly and uprightly standing by your side, like a proper and dignified female host properly entertaining your friends. I cannot do it. I am not even as good as a social anxiety patient. Just pure social waste…”
“Zhi Nian, I didn’t—”
“I only know how to hide. Hide in the distance looking at you, hide in the corner thinking what you are doing, hide in the quilt thinking of you, then…”
She stopped once.
“I know you didn’t.”
Not knowing what was touched, her voice suddenly calmed down. This calmness was more terrifying than crying.
“I know a good man as self-disciplined and restrained as Gu Fan would not go outside to steal food. I know I thought too much. In the end, the cause of all contradictions is…”
From the other end of the phone came a bitter laugh.
“All because I am not good enough, with shortcomings as many as a wasp nest.”
“It’s not.”
“It is me.”
“Zhi Nian, you are not—”
“It’s that I am not worthy of you. No need to comfort me anymore. You clearly really want to shake me off, right? A childhood sweetheart with no merits except large chest, a childhood sweetheart who only brings you trouble, a childhood sweetheart who all day relies on the childhood friendship to kidnap you into chatting with me.”
This sentence was like a basin of ice water poured down from the top of the head.