Kinder Than Solitude

14

After the celebration on October 1, life went back to the old routines, nearly normal again, though Moran no longer knew what kind of normalcy she was thinking of. There was little hope in the case of Shaoai, who no longer belonged to any school or work unit. Neither Moran nor Boyang had the courage to ask Shaoai about how she spent her days. In the evenings, she could be seen in the house or in the courtyard, moody and distant.

Uncle was no more reticent than before, bearing his trademark smile without fail, and Aunt was as chatty as ever. Yet their stoic efforts could not dispel the despondent fog hanging over their faces. They looked older now, and were sometimes distracted when they tried to follow the neighbors’ conversations. More than before they seemed intimidated by their daughter.

Hardships in lives, Moran was raised to believe, are like unpleasant weather, which one endures because bad weather will break as inevitably as bad luck will run its course. Hope is the sunshine after the storm, the spring thawing after the bitter winter; the goddess of fate, capricious as she is, has nevertheless an impressionable mind, as any young female does, who would smile at those who have perseverance.

Moran’s nature was to find hope for others before she could feel hopeful herself. To stay silent was the first step in resigning oneself to hopelessness, so armed with inherited and wishful thinking, she repeated the stale wisdom to Shaoai when they found themselves alone in the courtyard. It was a Saturday afternoon, a half day at school, and both Boyang and Ruyu disappeared around noon. Moran wondered if Ruyu had a rehearsal; as for Boyang, he must have gone to a basketball or soccer game with other boys.

“Things will become better, Sister Shaoai,” Moran said. “Don’t lose heart. Remember the tale in which the man lost one horse only to find that it brought another horse back to the stable?”

“Since when did you turn yourself into a mouthpiece for the wise and the optimistic?” Shaoai said, looking at Moran askance.

Moran blushed. “I don’t want you to feel alone in your situation,” she said.

“You don’t want me to feel alone, huh? And I bet you want many things for others, too, right?”

Moran shook her head confusedly. Too young to know that her affection was the kind that made a child revolt against a mother, she was disheartened by Shaoai’s punishing words.

“It’s ambitious of you to want things for me,” Shaoai said. “But let me give you a solid piece of advice, the same I’ve given my parents: don’t waste your feelings on an unworthy person.”

Moran stammered and said she admired Shaoai as always.

“My dear Moran, in this case I wasn’t talking about myself. Sure, my parents should’ve known by now not to spend their energy worrying about me,” Shaoai said. “And you, don’t you think you’re a bit childish, following your two other friends as though you can’t see they’d prefer to be left by themselves?”

It took Moran a moment to understand what the older girl was insinuating, and by then Shaoai had unlocked her bicycle, leaving Moran in an abyss. Slowly she turned toward her house, fumbling for the key.

There was no reason not to believe Shaoai. Moran wondered if others — her parents, for instance, or Boyang’s grandmother — had wanted to warn her, too. Since childhood, Moran had seen, in the approving eyes of their elders, a future for her and Boyang. She had refrained from naming it because he had not named it. Loyalty to that future was all she had, yet loyalty to a future, unlike to the past, is a feeling both blind and arrogant. What begins with a label bears an expiration date; by defining something only after its disappearance — a sibling, a friend, a childhood sweetheart — Moran would one day understand that the loss, limited for him because he must have long ago dismissed it with a name, was for her a continuing void.

Moran slipped into bed with her school uniform still on, and under the cover of the blanket she shed quiet tears. A small shift in the past few days, which had been so minute that she had been uncertain whether it was only in her imagination, came back to her with new significance. It used to be that Ruyu would hop on whichever bicycle was closer to her, though one morning last week she had walked around Moran and sat behind Boyang, and ever since had chosen his bicycle.

The next day Moran proposed to Boyang that the three of them use his room rather than Ruyu’s for their night study. To give Sister Shaoai some space, Moran said. After a difficult night she had decided that her friendship with the other two should not change, but she did not want her bravery — or foolishness — to be seen by Shaoai.

Boyang readily agreed. He must have found it hard to be around Shaoai these days, too; Moran wondered if Shaoai had embarrassed Boyang by commenting on the relationship between him and Ruyu. Moran did not detect any change in him toward herself, and Ruyu was distant but no more than before. Perhaps Shaoai had been in such a bad mood that she wanted to hurt others; what she had told Moran might not be true. This thought made Moran hopeful again, and it cast a pitying shadow over her sympathy toward Shaoai. Like anyone with a youthful mind, Moran, too occupied with her own prospect of happiness, had little capacity for real sympathy — the kind that is not perfunctorily expressed out of one’s duty toward another person’s misfortune. But how many people are strong enough to give — or to receive, even — real sympathy? In distress and in catastrophe, one often looks for the strengthening forces not in people closest to one, but in the perfect indifference in strangers’ faces, who put one’s woes back to where they belong — irrelevant to the extent of being comical.

“Every generation has to learn this lesson,” Moran’s mother said at dinner when the topic turned to Shaoai. “Public protest will never do in this country. Unfortunately, some pay more dearly than others. Now that you’re not a child anymore, use your brain better.”

Moran mumbled an answer. The neighbors did not discuss Shaoai’s situation. All had gone through the political “recheck” over the past few weeks, none but Shaoai with a harsh outcome. They all treated her with the same respect and patience, but behind closed doors, they must have exchanged critical words about Shaoai, as Moran’s parents had.

A moth fluttered into the lamp above the dinner table, and Moran’s father waved his chopsticks as though the gesture alone would make the distraction go away. Moran watched the moth, its wings dusty and gray, its flight purposeless. These moths, no larger than ladybugs, seemed to have become a permanent fixture in the house. They came from the straw-colored worms that lived in the bags of rice her parents had scrambled to buy out of fear of the ever-worsening inflation; it was Moran’s job to winnow out the wiggly worms before cooking the rice. Unlike the mosquitoes and flies her mother hunted down with a single-minded determination, the moths, doing no harm, were left to live and die on their own.

Moran sighed, and her mother, as though she had been waiting for the opportunity, launched into a speech about why a young person like Moran felt she had the right to sigh. Moran listened with an obedient expression. These days, the moths, along with supplies her parents had stored in their battle against inflation — bars of alkaline soap, drab yellow and wrapped in straw paper, boxes of matches that had become damp and became harder to strike by the day, toilet paper, laundry detergent, inexpensive tea in the form of crude bricks, all growing stale, collecting dust — these made Moran’s heart despondent: every time she turned around, she seemed to bump into another pile of things, stirring another moth from its repose into a frenzy of blind flight. The world had become smaller, dimmer, but was it for her alone?

Such despair Moran had to hide from her parents. Hadn’t her mother survived an impoverished childhood among six siblings, supported by the meager earnings of their father as a pedicab driver? Hadn’t her father weathered years of humiliation as the son of a petit bourgeois?

The same gray moths fluttered in other houses, too, yet Boyang and Ruyu never seemed to be bothered. Why would they be, if life was generous and granted them all the good qualities that Moran herself lacked? But such a bitter thought made her feel guilty: certainly Ruyu had experienced bigger loss; certainly she deserved more kindness, better love.

After the last class of the day, Ruyu went to the music room to practice the accordion. Sometimes, when she played on the porch, Moran came over to watch. She did not want to go into the low-ceilinged cottage, which was gloomy, and indeed she had no right to be in there; besides Ruyu, there were a few other student musicians Teacher Shu supervised — four violinists, two boys who played four-hands on the piano, and a middle school girl who played the xylophone and belonged to a fifty-member, all-girl xylophone ensemble in Japan, where she was the only Chinese student. How the girl could join a Japanese ensemble Moran did not know, and some days, sitting on the porch and listening to the instruments, each preoccupied with its own music, she wondered about the things she had missed or would miss in life. She had no talent for creating anything beautiful — the only music she could make was to whistle a simple tune, wobbling with uncertainty, and even that drew disapproving looks from her mother because it was unladylike to whistle; her drawings and her handwriting were childish, and she had few skills in any art; even her body and face were nondescript.

Moran turned to study Ruyu — it was one of the best autumn days in Beijing, the sky blue in a crystal way, and Teacher Shu had driven all his charges, other than the two pianists, onto the porch to practice. In the shade of the eave, Ruyu moved her fingers up and down the keyboard in a distracted way, yet when Moran closed her eyes, she could not tell the difference between a halfhearted performance and a dedicated one, as she could not tell the difference between Ruyu’s confidence and her impertinence.

“This must be boring for you,” Ruyu said when she finished a piece. “You shouldn’t feel obliged to wait for me.”

“No, it’s not boring at all,” Moran said. “What is it that you just played?”

Ruyu turned over the sheet of music as though she had not heard the question. “I can walk home,” she said after pausing to read the next sheet. “Or else I’ll catch a ride with Boyang.”

Three days a week, Boyang played basketball, and on the other two days, he played soccer or just hung out with a few boys by the bicycle shed, exchanging tall tales. Sometimes Moran joined them, as they were all friendly with her, though their favorite topics — Michael Jackson, breakdancing, Transformers — did not interest her. Once in a while, she played Ping-Pong, but she was not a great player, and would step aside when the games became competitive. Three girls with whom she had been close in middle school stayed after class, too, talking more than doing anything; Moran’s friendship with them had not continued as easily as she’d expected: there seemed to be a dangerous undercurrent, a triangle of complications in which Moran often got lost, and their words, seemingly pregnant with meaning, sometimes sounded too assiduous or simply silly.

“I don’t mind waiting,” Moran said. “In fact, I like to watch you play.”

Ruyu looked at Moran with a cold scrutiny. “Do you mean you like to watch people play music? Or do you mean you like to watch me?”

Moran blushed. What right, Ruyu seemed to be saying, did Moran have to sit next to Ruyu, claiming to be her friend? “I don’t know. Maybe I just like to listen to real music being played on an instrument.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t play music?” Moran said, wavering under Ruyu’s steadfast gaze. “No one I know plays music.”

“Do you want to?”

Moran looked at the girl on the xylophone, who was practicing with such abandon that even when her eyes were open — and they were huge, almost inhuman eyes, mysteriously deep — she seemed to be seeing nothing. Years later, the girl would transform herself into the drummer for the first female rock band in China, and Moran would see her photo in a magazine: clad in a layer of shiny black leather, she had the same abandon, or exaggerated despair, in her eyes.

Ruyu glanced at the girl. Moran wondered if in Ruyu’s eyes the girl was simply a pretentious actor, or worse, a nuisance. Yet the girl could travel with her instrument on an airplane to Japan, showing her passport to the officials in both countries. Apart from Boyang’s sister, Moran had not known another person who had left the country; none of the people in the quadrangle was even qualified to apply for a passport.

With wordless contempt Ruyu turned to look at Moran, as though to ask her if she wanted to be the girl at the xylophone. “I do wish I could play music,” Moran said. “But not everyone can afford to.”

“Why not? I’m an orphan, and even I can do it.”

It was the first time Ruyu had used the word orphan. Moran did not have words to comfort Ruyu, but the claim, with its haughtiness, had been thrown more as a dagger at the world, and Moran, unable to reply, offered herself as the target.

Ruyu returned to her practice and launched into a maddeningly paced polka. Moran understood that she was not a welcome companion on the porch. Pride would have required her to apologize and to absent herself, but whether she left or not seemed to matter little. Of course Ruyu could do many things that no other person could do: it was not because she was an orphan — had Moran been an orphan, she would have been one of those shivering and begging by the roadside; it was not because Ruyu was beautiful — she was, but there were other girls more beautiful, better built than she, yet at times they, too, were susceptible to the uncertainties that Ruyu was immune to; no, Ruyu could do anything she wanted, to others, to the world, because she knew she was someone destined to be special. She felt no burden to prove it to herself or to anyone, nor had she any tolerance for those who were not chosen as she was. What was Moran like in Ruyu’s eyes? Years later, it would strike Moran as either the most fortunate or the most unfortunate happening in her life that the first time she looked at herself through someone else’s eyes, she had chosen Ruyu’s: who was she to Ruyu but someone so ordinary that neither her joy nor her pain would amount to anything but the dross of everydayness?

A few days later, Boyang told Moran that Ruyu had asked to see the university where his parents taught. “Saturday afternoon,” he said. “Shall we go together?”

The university, on the west side of the city, was not far from the Summer Palace, and its campus had been, in its previous incarnation, a residence for the closest cousins and allies of the emperors of the last dynasty. It was said to be one of the most beautiful places in Beijing, yet in all the years Moran had known Boyang, she had never once visited the campus. It was part of the world he did not want to share with her; nor would she have found herself at ease near it. His parents, she knew, had little regard for her and her parents and people like them.

Ruyu’s request did not come as a surprise. Still, it agonized Moran that what was forbidden for her was something ordinary for Ruyu, who had only to ask to be handed the entry pass. Was Boyang aware of the difference? She looked at him, and he seemed excited by the plan. “Of course we’ll put her on a bus and we’ll meet her at the university. But do you think she’ll handle the bus ride all right? She’d have to change to another route midway. Alternatively, you could ride the bus with her. But then we won’t have the two bicycles, and it’s an awfully big campus to walk around.” Boyang stopped. “What? Did you already plan something else for Saturday?”

“No, not at all,” Moran said. She sounded too eager, she thought, but she did not want to disappoint him.

“Would your parents be okay if we have dinner there? Not with my parents. Ruyu asked if we could see my mother’s lab, and I thought we could have dinner in a dining hall and then go there after hours, so we won’t have to deal with talking to people.”

“Will your mother be there?”

“Oh silly, don’t you worry. She wouldn’t stay for us. She wouldn’t change her plans for the prime minister.”

Despite Moran’s misgivings, as the day came nearer, she, too, started looking forward to the outing. There was little doubt that Boyang would attend his parents’ university — he was a top student and would not even need to claim family privilege to get in. He had always believed that Moran would attend the university, too, though she wasn’t so sure herself. She would have to improve her academic standing and score perfectly on the entrance exam, but when she voiced such doubts to Boyang, he only teased her for being overcautious. Of course things would work out, he told her; she was better than she allowed herself to think. Imagine the freedom they would have when they went to the university, he had said, and she had seen no option but to trust his enthusiasm, and had, up till now, enjoyed his vision.

“So,” Shaoai said on Friday evening at dinner. “Did I hear right about some visit to a university tomorrow?”

Ruyu did not raise her eyes to acknowledge the question. These days, dinnertime was a torment for her, worse than bedtime, because by then she had an open battleground separating her from Shaoai. Only once after that night had Shaoai tried to touch Ruyu again, but she had, with the most even voice she could manage, told the older girl to leave her alone. No more words had been said afterward, no more advances made, and every night Ruyu wrapped her blanket tightly around herself and stayed alert by only sleeping shallowly.

Ruyu had sworn, and had so far kept her word, that she would never lay eyes on Shaoai’s face again. The presence of Aunt and Uncle, though, made things harder. At dinner, with the older girl sitting across the table, Ruyu had to either look into her bowl of rice or, when Aunt talked to her, look up at Aunt, yet willfully blur her peripheral vision.

“What university?” Aunt said, bristling. University was one of the words they did not want to bring into the household lately.

“Ruyu here,” Shaoai said, “is going to check out where she’s going to spend her bright future studying.”

What was worst was that there was no way for Ruyu to shelter herself from the noises the other person made: the clinking of chopsticks, the scraping of chair legs on the floor, the grunts in place of answers to Aunt’s questions, and the various comments hurled at Ruyu to provoke a reaction.

Aunt looked at Ruyu, was about to ask something, but then changed her mind.

“And I just heard that our dear old Yening got an internship at Sino Oil and Gas,” Shaoai said.

When no one responded right away, Aunt sighed and asked what kind of job Yening would be doing.

“Learning how to be a charming and accommodating young woman in the real world,” Shaoai said. “What else would she be doing?”

If only Shaoai would shut up, Ruyu thought, but these days it was Shaoai who led the dinnertime conversation, as though her topics were harmless, everyday subjects. No doubt she was aware of — perhaps even enjoying — the pains she was inflicting on her parents, who were unable to stop her from tormenting them. Already Ruyu could see Shaoai slowly losing her place everywhere but in her parents’ hearts — not a prospect for a job, less sympathy from the neighbors, fearful looks from Moran and Boyang. But why should one feel sorry for Shaoai’s parents? It was their doing, bringing a person like that into the world, and they were not to be spared from living under her despotism long after she ceased mattering to the world.

“Are you all right, Ruyu?” Aunt asked.

From the look on Aunt’s face, Ruyu knew that she must have missed a question, asked by Aunt to avoid carrying on a difficult conversation with Shaoai. Ruyu apologized, and said she was wondering if she had forgotten to bring an important test prep kit home.

Aunt looked worried; Ruyu wondered if secretly Aunt welcomed the opportunity for a manageable misfortune. “Do check your school bag,” she said. “If it’s not there, Boyang or Moran must have theirs with them. Is it something you have to finish tonight?”

Ruyu said she would check and excused herself from the dinner table. In the bedroom, on the narrow desk, was the folder of the test kit, and mechanically she picked up the top page and started to read the first question; halfway through she got lost, but she kept looking engaged, lest Aunt look in. On the chair was her book satchel, a new one that Aunt had insisted on buying, as she said no high school student should use a child’s satchel like the one Ruyu had brought from home. In the corner of the room was an old chest of drawers, the bottom two drawers belonging to Ruyu. A glance at the top drawers, where Shaoai kept her underclothes, made Ruyu recoil violently, tearing the paper.

Her grandaunts’ willow trunk was under the bed, and Ruyu had covered it with an old shawl to keep the trunk free of dust. Her accordion was at school, locked in a place that looked as if generations of monks’ ghosts visited at night. These were all the things she owned in life — not much, but enough for her not to be a disposable being. When her parents had left her on the doorstep of her grandaunts, had they thought of the possibility that she might have died of hunger or cold before the two sisters discovered the bundle? In her grandaunts’ eyes, God had made them find her before bad things had happened, but Ruyu understood now that their god had no more wisdom than whatever words they put in his mouth. If Ruyu packed everything and left at this moment, she would leave no trace in these people’s lives, yet she would have no place to go but to jump into the river with the trunk. If she killed herself, her grandaunts could ask and ask, but neither their god nor any mortal would have the simplest explanation.

Yet people do not die until they are made to. An infant for whom no love can be found in her parents’ hearts, if left in the wilderness, will cry until her voice grows hoarse; it is not in our nature to expire quietly.

The next day, Ruyu took the bus to the west side. It was the first time she had ridden a bus since the day she arrived. Just a little over two months, but already so much had changed. The men and women around her could not harm her because she had learned the secret of willing herself out of their sights and thoughts. Invisible, she felt indestructible.

Halfway to the destination, two children, a boy and a girl, not older than ten, came up and stood next to her. Neither reached for the back of a seat but swayed back and forth, keeping their balance. They were talking about rocks, using the terms sedimentary and igneous and metamorphic with such ease, as though they had no other reason to be in the world at that moment than to understand how millions of years had made one piece of rock different from another. A few stops later, they got off the bus. Through the window Ruyu watched them cross the street, threading between honking cars that did not slow down for them. That must be how Moran and Boyang had once looked. So much confidence in their ability to keep the dangerous world at bay; so little doubt about their futile efforts.

The university campus was indeed as beautiful as Boyang had boasted: a tree-lined lake, where the supple branches of weeping willows, their leaves barely turning yellow, reached for the water’s surface to touch their own reflections; a boat carved out of stones, forever moored next to an island; a pagoda, a temple, an ancient bell sitting on a hilltop; a bronze statue of Cervantes as a skinny man holding a broken sword; a few graves of famous people, both Chinese and Western, who had died long ago — neither Moran nor Ruyu had heard of any of them, though what a place to be buried in, their ancient solitude pleasantly interrupted by the hustle and bustle of the college students on foot or on bicycles. Toward the end of the day, many students were heading toward the dining halls, spoons clanking in the metal pails they carried in their hands or in the carriers wired to their bicycles.

Moran felt shy sitting at one end of the long table in the dining hall, with Boyang and Ruyu across from her. Some college boys whistled at them, finding them laughable in their high school uniform perhaps, yet this did not seem to bother Boyang or Ruyu. Once in a while someone would come over and pat Boyang on the back, girls and boys alike — they were his parents’ students, he told Moran and Ruyu. His mother had left the keys to her lab with one of her graduate students, he said, who would meet them at the entrance of the old chemistry building.

“Is there a new chemistry building?” Moran asked, but Boyang, who was saying something to Ruyu, did not hear.

Ruyu turned to Moran, waiting for or daring her to repeat the question, but Moran looked away as though she was studying a young couple at the other end of the table, who were gazing at each other without touching their food. The hunger in their eyes made Moran feel like an intruder — and perhaps she was, there and elsewhere. She thought about the people who welcomed her as an audience: Boyang’s grandmother when she reminisced about the famines in ’41 and ’58; Watermelon Wen’s two boys, who mimicked the quirks of the neighbors with exactitude; strangers in the alleyway, who had this or that complaint to make; her parents, who never tired of repeating the lessons they had learned from living humbly. If only it were that easy to be around those she wanted to be closest to; but they, it seemed, only wished her to be absent: Ruyu did not like her around when she was practicing the accordion, and now, sitting across from her friends, Moran wondered if Boyang was only trying to be nice by including her.

The laboratory was on the top floor of a three-story building. The hallway was cramped with old equipment, rolled-up posters, three-legged chairs leaning on rickety tables, and other nameless things that seemed to have been sitting in the dust for years. The graduate student with the keys looked introspective, and he said a few words about locking up before disappearing down an unlit hallway.

Boyang unlocked the door and turned on the fluorescent lamps. “Not much to see, really,” he said. Still, he walked the girls through the aisles, opening a cabinet here and there to show where the chemicals and supplies were stored, flipping on the switch for the fume hood to show off the toxic signs with grinning skulls on a few brown bottles.

Later they sat in the office adjacent to the lab. Boyang boiled water on a hot plate to make tea. It was oddly formal, as none of them drank tea at home. Still, it seemed to make him happy to play the host. There were two chairs in the office, a tall spinning one for his mother and a small wooden one. Moran hesitated when Boyang asked them to sit and took the wooden chair. Ruyu sat down behind the desk and looked at the titles of the papers in front of her.

“I wouldn’t touch them if I were you,” Boyang said.

“Why?” Ruyu said. “Will your mother notice?”

“Notice? There is nothing she doesn’t notice.”

“Will she mind?”

“No, she won’t. Rather, you might give her the wrong idea that I’m into her research now, and who knows, maybe the next time I see her, she’ll give me a whole folder of papers.”

“What kind of research does she do?” Ruyu said.

Boyang shrugged and said it was too complicated a subject to be interesting to anyone but his mother.

“Will you study chemistry when you go to college?” Ruyu asked.

“No,” he said. “Too boring.”

“What subject will you major in?”

“I don’t know. Something useful. Engineering. Or something with computer programming. What will you study?”

Ruyu did not answer, and turned to ask Moran what she was planning to study. Until recently, Moran had thought she would major in whatever Boyang chose. It had seemed sensible, as he knew these things better, but now it would sound ridiculous if she said engineering or computer programming. “Maybe chemistry,” she said. “I don’t mind boring subjects.”

Boyang laughed and said that statement alone would set his mother off. “But since when have you thought about studying chemistry?”

Moran shook her head confusedly, aware that Ruyu was watching her with an intensity she did not understand. She changed the subject and asked Boyang a few questions about his mother’s graduate students, but she could see that his heart was not in the topic. He was uncommonly quiet.

Their conversation lagged a little, though neither Boyang nor Ruyu seemed in a hurry to leave. The sun had set, and from the only window in the office they could see the slanted roof of the neighboring building, its terra-cotta tiles, once painted golden and green, all faded now. A crow croaked in a nearby tree, and immediately someone cursed loudly the bad luck a crow’s cry would bring.

Something about the evening — the dinner away from home, the closeness of the world that carried on its mundane business outside the window, their freedom unintruded upon — made Moran feel as though at long last she had arrived at the threshold of her real life, for which she had been rehearsing as a diligent child. Trust and loyalty, disappointment and resignation, happiness and sadness, friendship and love — in this new life, unlike in a rehearsal, everything was in place, and nothing would stop the play from moving toward curtain fall. Moran looked at her friends: confident, they appeared better prepared.

What if nothing could be changed, and she would always be given that minor role? What if there was nothing in her that made her lovable? But there must be something lovable in every one of us, or else why would we go from one day to the next? In her despondence, unknown to herself, Moran held out seeking hands to her friends: a smile, an affectionate gesture, a wordless affirmation — it does not take much to save one from despair, but they, untouched by the urgency devouring her, watched the dusk fall in their intimate obliviousness.

Moran wished she could be part of that quietness; her own, forced upon her, only made her heart ache for words. But if she spoke, she would be a thoughtless crow, disturbing a dream, gaining nothing but a silent curse.

Ruyu stood up and said she would be back in a moment, and Boyang nodded, saying that the ladies’ room was down the hallway. When she left, Moran turned to him, but he was still looking at the roof across the yard, and she knew that he had something on his mind. She wished she were the same person she used to be, the one who would not hesitate to ask him. There had never been secrets between them.

“Isn’t she a special person?” Boyang whispered, turning to Moran with a pleading look, as though by not mentioning Ruyu’s name, she would be kept a treasure.

Moran smiled and agreed.

“Do you really think so, too?” Boyang asked eagerly.

“We’ve never met someone like her,” Moran said.

Boyang looked happy. “I wonder what she would study at the university.”

“I think she wants to go to America.”

“I know. We can go, too.”

It both comforted and pained Moran that, like a sibling, she was still included in every plan he made. “And then what?” she said.

Boyang seemed not to detect any change in her mood. “We could rent a house together,” he said. “Imagine that, a real house, with a yard and an attic. I know you can do that in America.”

Innocently — yet with the cruelty that only the innocent can execute — Boyang had made Moran see herself as a chair in that house, a poster on the wall, a curtain half-pulled. They were good matches for each other, she thought, both handsome, smart, both special in ways that she herself would never be. She should count herself lucky to be invited into their lives in any manner, but when the time came, there would not be a place for her in that house. She had enough pride not to be a piece of furniture or a decoration in anyone else’s life, but it would not be her pride that separated her from them but the truth he was unable to see now: when the time came, she knew, he would have forgotten that he had ever issued the invitation.

Listless, Moran stood up and said she would be back in a minute. Again Boyang pointed the way to the ladies’ room down the hallway, yet this time he seemed to be doing so in a dream, his eyes looking for something outside in the dusk. The sky had turned from the bright colors of sunset to a deeper gradient of red, magenta, and blue. Love can make an ordinary evening poetic. Sadness, too, can do that.

When Moran exited the office, she saw Ruyu standing next to the fume hood, and when she heard Moran’s steps, she turned to face her, both hands in her pockets. Instinctively Moran glanced at the brown bottles in the hood. The light and the fume switches were on. “Have you two had a good talk?” Ruyu said, and turned the switches off. “I didn’t want to disturb you, in case you needed some private time.”

Flustered, Moran said that they had been waiting for her.

Later in the evening, Moran waited at the bus stop for Ruyu. Boyang had gone to his parents’ apartment, but before he left, he had said several times that Moran was to meet Ruyu’s bus so that the latter would not get lost on the way home. How could she? Moran wished she could ask; the bus stop was only a ten-minute walk from the quadrangle, and it wasn’t late enough for any real safety risk. But she had agreed, promising that she would make sure all went well.

Ruyu looked tired when she stepped down from the bus, yet when Moran asked her to hop onto the back of her bicycle, Ruyu only shook her head. “Go ahead and ride home,” she said. “I’ll walk.”

Moran said she was not in a hurry in any case. She pushed her bicycle and walked next to Ruyu, knowing that she must be a nuisance in Ruyu’s eyes. After a moment of silence, Moran asked Ruyu what she’d thought of the university.

“What do you think?” Ruyu said.

“Beautiful campus, isn’t it?” Moran asked. When Ruyu did not say anything, Moran added, “It’d be wonderful if we could all go there after high school.”

“Do you really think so?” Ruyu asked, and stopped to look sideways at Moran.

What she thought of anything was a question she could no longer answer with confidence. It dawned on her that when people asked for her opinions, they were not truly interested in hearing them. “Why did you want to see the lab?” Moran said.

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I thought you would be more interested in seeing the campus. I didn’t know you were interested in chemistry labs.”

“But we saw the campus, too.”

Yet Ruyu had not asked to see where Boyang’s father, who was a specialist in high-energy physics, did his research; this, though, Moran did not want to say just for the sake of contradiction. They walked across an alley, stepping on the crunching leaves with the same rhythm.

“Where do you think people go after they die?” Ruyu asked when they turned into another alleyway.

Moran paused and turned to look at Ruyu. Her eyes were limpid enough, and there was not the coldness Moran dreaded in them. She sensed that Ruyu was in a mood to talk about something, but Moran felt tired; all she wanted was to go home and curl up in her bed. “I don’t think they go anywhere,” she said. “They’re cremated, and that’s all.”

“But that’s only according to you atheists.”

“Do you—” Moran recalled the question she had never before dared to ask. “Are you religious?”

“Why, because my grandaunts are religious?”

“Why else did you ask the question? Where do you think people go after they die?”

“Nowhere,” Ruyu said, the weariness in her voice reminding Moran of an older woman. She had seen the exhaustion in people like Aunt and her own mother, defeated by a shortage of money and food or by unfairness at work and beyond. “Are you all right?” Moran said.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“But something must have made you ask the question,” Moran said. “About people dying.”

“People die all the time. Shaoai’s grandfather will die sooner or later. One day my grandaunts will die, too. Anyone could die anytime. Even young people. Even you and I. Today. Tomorrow. Who knows?”

Moran shuddered. They had both unconsciously come to a stop under an old locust tree, its canopy of leaves — it was too dark to tell what colors they had turned or how soon they would fall — sheltering them from the deep, clear sky. Autumn crickets sang in the grasses and in the cracks of the alley wall. From a house in a nearby quadrangle, they could hear a TV commercial for Maxwell House instant coffee, a brand that had just begun to be imported into the country. It would be followed by another commercial for Nestle’s instant coffee, also newly introduced. If she closed her eyes, Moran could see the steam rising from the mugs in both commercials, the actresses taking deep, dreamlike breaths. But what did coffee smell like? No family in the quadrangle would squander their money on a jar of either brand, and it occurred to Moran only then that she had never thought about what made the actresses look blissful. How many people watching the commercials would know the fragrance of coffee? Perhaps that’s what happiness is like, looking more real when it is scripted and performed by others.

The theme song of a popular TV drama came on after the Nestle commercial. Moran’s parents would be watching it, and they would be wondering what in the world could have made her miss the show. “Did you,” Moran started the sentence, and then wavered before she could gather the resolve. “Did you take something from the lab?”

Ruyu looked calm as she studied Moran. “You must have been brought up well, not to use the word steal,” she said finally.

“You did, didn’t you?”

“Did you see me do anything?”

“No, but I thought …”

“If you didn’t see with your own eyes, you can’t say what you think,” Ruyu said. “What you think or what anyone thinks does not count.”

“But won’t you tell me?”

Ruyu shook her head. “What’s the point of telling you anything?” she said in a quiet voice, yet rather than sarcasm, which Moran had braced herself for, the words seemed to contain a sadness she had not imagined Ruyu would be capable of showing to others.

“What did you take?” Moran asked gently.

Ruyu looked down at the tips of her shoes, and when she looked up again, the melancholy had vanished. “Are you going to report your suspicion to Boyang?” Ruyu said with half a smile.

Moran felt an acute pain she had not known before. If it were yesterday, she would have ridden into the city to find the last telephone stand open at this hour and dialed the number of Boyang’s parents; she would have weathered their questioning just to talk to him, to tell him her worries, but all, after today, had become impossible. What could she say to him, that the girl he had fallen in love with had stolen from his mother? But why, he would ask, and how did she know? — and Moran would not be able to answer. Ruyu was right. Moran had not seen anything, and she had no right to claim knowing anything. Boyang would shake his head to himself, too generous to say that he was disappointed in her, that her unfounded suspicion came from nowhere but that unkind place where jealousy fed dark imagination. The thought of living with people’s disappointments, his in particular, made Moran panic. She looked pleadingly at Ruyu. “I won’t say anything to him if you prefer that.”

“But whether you say anything to him or not should have nothing to do with me,” Ruyu said. “You can’t say you have done or not done something only for my liking. Isn’t that true?”

Moran felt overwhelmed by queasiness. “I won’t tell him. It’s my decision,” she said.

“Then that’s that,” Ruyu said. “Shall we go back? It’s late.”

“But wait. We can’t just yet,” Moran said. “Why did you take something from the lab? What are you going to do with it?”

“If I say I never took anything, will you believe me and forget about it?”

Moran took a deep breath but could not sense any relief. “No,” she said. “I can’t.”

Ruyu smiled. “People want things for different reasons. Some want money to buy things; others want money that they never spend. Some want people to be their properties; others want to be properties of other people,” she said. “If your imagination were right, have you thought that I only wanted something that could make me feel better?”

“But how?” Moran said, seized by the fear that either she was losing her mind or Ruyu was. “You’re not thinking of killing yourself?”

Ruyu’s eyes, unfocused for a split second, narrowed with derision. “I don’t know how you came up with that silly idea, Moran.”

Only that morning she had been a different person, Moran thought; she’d felt sad, but the sadness was no more than a young girl’s mood. Even sitting in the office next to Boyang, watching the sky change its hue, she had still been that person, sadder but never for a moment uncertain about the world. Between then and now, what had been was no more, but why and how this change had happened she did not know.

“Are you worried?” Ruyu said. “Are you going to talk to all the grownups so they can be alarmed? The truth is, if anyone ever wants to destroy herself, there’s nothing you can do. But at least you should know that it’s a sin, according to my grandaunts, to commit suicide. There’s no redemption for people like that.”

Words like sin and redemption did not exist in Moran’s vocabulary. She did not know half of what Ruyu knew about life, and now, was it too late? “Are you feeling unhappy?” Moran asked, trying to steer the conversation in a less treacherous direction.

“You know, I notice that you always ask people if they’re happy or not.”

Did she? Moran wondered. She had not been conscious of it, but perhaps she did have the habit. Sometimes she ran into one of the younger kids in the neighborhood, and if he or she was crying, the first question she would ask was what made you unhappy?

“I don’t think people ask that question,” Ruyu said.

“They don’t?”

“No one has ever asked me that question,” Ruyu said. “You’re the first one, and the only one. And if you think about it — I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Moran — but if you think about it, that’s the most pointless question. If the person says yes, I’m happy, then what?”

“I would be happy for them.”

“And if he’s not happy?”

“If the person is unhappy, I’ll make an effort to change that,” Moran said.

Ruyu looked at Moran as one would look at a baby bird maimed by a feral cat, sympathy and disgust seeming to blend into something less distinguishable. Without another word, Ruyu began to walk.

To be brought to an understanding of her own foolishness like that was like walking into a wall she had never known to be there. The pain was so acute that for a moment Moran felt the urge to gasp.