Kinder Than Solitude

16

On the Sunday after their visit to the university Moran woke up with a start, as though something had happened and she was already late. The night before, she had told her parents that she was exhausted and gone to bed right away, but for a long time she could not sleep. The emotions that had stormed through her and left her mind a devastated land came back to her now, all pointing to that unmistakable fact: Boyang was in love with Ruyu.

But why not? Moran tried to reason with herself. He was right to choose Ruyu, and why should she be surprised? One’s mind, fooled by pride, does not recognize the wisdom that comes from sorrow. Prematurely one rushes for the remedy of dignity, not knowing that dignity, rather than rejection, turns one’s heart into a timid organ, pleading for protection.

In the first light of day the quadrangle stirred to life, the doors opening and releasing people from their houses into the open air: someone brushing teeth and rinsing with loud gurgles next to the spigot, Teacher Pang watering his flowers while humming an operatic tune, Watermelon Wen’s wife snapping at the twins, who had been working keenly to trap a cat visiting from the neighboring quadrangle. A moment later Moran heard Boyang’s grandmother asking if the visit to the university was fun, and Ruyu replied that it was. A different place than this, isn’t it? Boyang’s grandmother said, and Ruyu must have acknowledged the question with a nod, as Moran did not hear her reply.

Boyang was in love, but was Ruyu, too? Her disturbed mood and uninterpretable behavior of the previous night did not belong to someone in love. Could it be that she had no reciprocal feeling toward him? That hope, too precarious to be further explored, nevertheless left a door ajar in Moran’s heart. Boyang was one of those people who could get anything he wanted, but there must be a point when that luck ran out. Heartbroken, perhaps he would notice another heart broken for him.

After breakfast, Watermelon Wen’s wife asked Moran to look after the twins. The woman complained that once again it was her turn for the weekend shift on the trolley route, even though everyone in the quadrangle knew she asked for it whenever she could. She and her husband were a loving couple but both had quick tempers: on the weekends when they were home together they tended to get into fights, about children, grocery shopping, or simply some disagreement over a TV drama.

Moran was relieved to have something concrete to do. Already she had tipped over a bowl of porridge at breakfast. It threatened to be a long day, and she waited eagerly for Boyang’s return, yet she dreaded it, too. Loyalty required her to be happy for him, but she was not a good actor; and then, loyalty to whom? The separateness between them had not occurred to Moran until that moment. Since when had they reached the point where what was good for him was for her no longer so?

Ruyu came over to the table under the grape trellis and watched Moran teach the twins paper cutting. The boys complained when what they made turned out crooked. They poked each other with miniatures of Transformers, and asked to be let go so they could battle it out. Moran told them to stay in her sight. There was a trembling in her voice, but she hoped that Ruyu did not detect it.

Ruyu picked up a piece of finished work, and said she did not know Moran could do paper cutting. Ruyu’s effort at making small talk surprised Moran. There was a calmness in Ruyu’s eyes. Moran wondered, her heart sinking, if she had made a mistake: perhaps Ruyu was in love, too.

“I’m not very good at it,” Moran said, and explained that Boyang’s grandmother was a gifted paper-cutter, and she herself had tried to learn but could only do a few simple patterns. To bring Boyang’s name into the conversation felt like a challenging gesture, or else a surrender, but Ruyu did not acknowledge it as either, as though he did not, this morning, deserve a place in their conversation. Moran picked up a children’s book from the top of a stack, an adventure of two friends, one named Little Question Mark, the other Little Know-It-All.

“We used to joke that Boyang was Little Know-It-All,” Moran said.

“And you were Little Question Mark, of course?”

Moran was about to say yes, but then felt self-conscious that she would be unfairly boasting about a connection that Ruyu did not have with Boyang. “How are you feeling this morning?” Moran asked instead.

“You sound as though I’ve been ill.”

Had Ruyu forgotten the night before? “You looked wretched last night,” Moran said. “You talked about …”

“Never mind what I said.”

“How can I not?” Moran asked. “Are you less unhappy today?”

“There’s your question about happiness again,” Ruyu said. “Why are you trying so hard?”

“At what?”

“At being good,” Ruyu said and stood up.

“But wait,” Moran said, urgent in her pleading. “Don’t go yet.”

“Why?”

Moran looked around and lowered her voice. “Can you tell me what you took from the lab yesterday?”

“When will you stop asking questions, Little Question Mark?”

“I worry about you.”

“But who asked you to worry about me?” Ruyu said and left before Moran could reply.

There was no one Moran could turn to for advice: to talk to any grownup, or to talk to Boyang, would be to break her promise to Ruyu. If only Shaoai had not been in so much trouble herself. She might even know what Ruyu’s real mood was. But to bother Shaoai now, with a crisis perhaps only imaginary, would be inconsiderate.

Loneliness comes with secrets; secrets in turn become the badge of honor for loneliness. Lingering in Moran’s heart was the wish, childlike, childish, for a transparent world, and to be barricaded in her loneliness by Ruyu’s secret — murky, inexplicable — gave Moran the first taste of a life violated. Sometimes she felt feverish; other times she shivered: loneliness, when not understood by its possessor, becomes a hallucination.

An odd thought occurred to Moran: that her life, compared with Shaoai’s or Ruyu’s, was so dull that it must not be a worthwhile one in the eyes of the other two girls. Even Boyang seemed to have a story elsewhere, his parents and his sister forming a world that had not much of an overlap with the quadrangle; he could have a conversation with a graduate student, and without any difficulty he could see himself in a house in America. Keep your eyes open, or else you won’t know how marvelous the world is, said a slogan for a travel program on television. The program was the first of its kind, and indeed the world appeared marvelous through its lenses: intrepid bungee jumpers on a cliff in New Zealand; a carefree young couple punting on the River Cam; the empty inner courtyard of Karl Marx’s birthplace, geraniums blossoming on the windowsills; green ivy climbing the redbrick buildings on the Ivy League campuses; the Golden Gate Bridge in the morning mist; Times Square flashing at night.

She could keep her eyes open all the time, but what Moran saw were those around her: her father going over the family accounting book item by item to make sure they had done their best to save a few extra yuan for a refrigerator; Aunt and Uncle plagued by the fear that Shaoai would be forever kept out of the system; queues for rationed food; gray moths living and dying without a purpose. If the world was indeed marvelous it must be so for those whose imagination was livelier than hers. To see, it seemed to Moran, required much more than to open one’s eyes.

But what did Ruyu see of the world? Moran did not know. She could not even say with any confidence what Boyang saw now, though that was because these days his eyes were turned to Ruyu constantly. Perhaps two people in love, having made an entire world by themselves, do not have to look elsewhere. There were songs and poems written about that, but no songs or poems had been, or would be, written about queues or ration stamps or the pettiness of worrying over the price of pork. Moran felt old. What if she would never have anything poetic in her for people to love?

These thoughts, circling and leading nowhere, often left Moran in a trance, and on Thursday morning she was caught in politics when her mind lost its track. When the teacher called her name, she stood up, vaguely aware that she had been asked a question.

“Can you give us an example, classmate Moran?” the teacher prompted her.

When she did not answer right away, Boyang, who sat behind her, whispered, “Bok choy.”

Moran said bok choy, and there were titters here and there.

“Hmm, that is rather a … unique example,” the teacher said. “But can you give us some better ones?”

“Cooking oil?” Moran ventured. “Maybe sugar? Rice? Flour?”

The classroom broke into roaring laughter. Moran turned to look at Boyang, who nodded and held up a thumb. Whatever the teacher had been talking about, Moran certainly had diverted the course of the conversation in a less serious direction. She was not a mischievous student; rarely was she caught in any kind of spotlight, but she was not remorseful about putting herself momentarily in the shoes of the class clown. For one thing, standing rather than sitting, being the cause of such glee, had jolted her out of her foggy mood.

The teacher signaled for Moran to take her seat. “All concrete examples,” she remarked when the class calmed down. “I wouldn’t disagree with you, though I was hoping for some better ones: the production and distribution of steel, for instance, or coal mining, or railway construction.” She looked at her watch, and then went on to summarize the lesson on Soviet versus Chinese models of planned economy.

At recess Boyang told Moran that the teacher had been asking for examples that demonstrated the advantage of a planned economy, and it had been brilliant of Moran to give her a list of rationed food. For the rest of the day some of the boys mouthed “bok choy” whenever Moran walked past them, though she knew they did not mean ill. She laughed when one of them told her that she should think of applying to the school officials to start a bok choy club; they would all join if she were to be the chairwoman, he said.

It was odd how a small incident like this had cleared her turbid mood. Moran remembered the couplet Teacher Pang and Teacher Li had hung in their living room: The world, unspectacular, does not offer complicacy; only the foolish complicate their lives with self-inflicted befuddlements. The world, like her parents and her neighbors, had never treated her unkindly; in return they expected her to act as a person in her position would do: pleasantly, obediently, sensibly.

When they left school that day, Moran decided that she must genuinely appreciate being close to Ruyu and Boyang. They were two extraordinary people, and how lucky she was to be their friend. One day she would look back and miss these days, and right away she chased the sentimental thought from her mind.

They stopped at a department store on the way. It was Aunt’s birthday, and Ruyu said she wanted to buy a present, and she already knew what it would be. Aunt used to carry a glass container as a tea mug in a net crocheted with colored nylon. The bottle, sturdy, its orange lid bearing the trademark of Tang, had been given to Aunt by her colleague when the latter finished the contents. A few days earlier, when Aunt had been buying pickles, she had put the bottle on the counter, and within a minute someone had stolen it.

None of the families in the quadrangle had tasted Tang, the powdered orange juice imported from America. It had been appointed by NASA as the official drink for astronauts, the TV commercial informed its audience, with a slow-motion single drop of liquid rebounding from a glass of juice, which was in a color so intense that Moran could not help but cringe at the contrast between that orange on the screen and the dinginess off the screen. More and more her life reminded her of the watercolor sets she had had in elementary school, a new set at the beginning of each school year. They were of the cheapest kind, with twelve ovals in a narrow box and a tiny brush. The only time the set looked beautiful was before she opened it: the colors, no matter how diligently she applied and reapplied, were pale to nothing on the paper, and afterward the ovals dried and caked and then fell off in small chunks and fragments. Still, she had never asked her parents for a more expensive set, like the ones some of the other schoolchildren proudly carried. Her parents, if asked, would have scrambled to buy her a good set, Moran knew; they would have skipped a few meals with meat, but she had feared that she could not prove herself worthy of a better set.

But the day Ruyu bought the bottle of Tang was not one of those gloomy days of faded watercolors. Aunt was overwhelmed by the extravagance of the present. It had cost eighteen yuan, more than a month of Moran’s lunch money; the sales assistant, a middle-aged woman, had looked with critical curiosity at Ruyu when she produced two ten-yuan bills, and when she had turned to the register for the change, she had mumbled to a colleague that she wondered what kind of parents would have spoiled a child with such luxury. Moran had fidgeted, yet Ruyu had stood still as though she had not heard the remark, loud enough and meant for her to hear.

In the evening, Boyang and Moran came over to see Aunt try her birthday present. Shaoai had not come home for dinner that day, and Ruyu could tell that Aunt had felt both sad that Shaoai was not there for her birthday and relieved that the meal, which Uncle had cooked for Aunt, had gone smoothly, without the usual tension.

Aunt lined up several mugs, and solemnly scooped the fine orange powder into each, while Uncle added water from a hot water kettle. Not boiling hot, Uncle explained, as a too high temperature would be detrimental to the vitamin C in the powder. Why not just add tap water, Boyang suggested, and Aunt said that cold water was not good for stomachs. “You all need to learn to take care of your bodies,” Aunt said. “You won’t always be this young.”

It took no time for the powder to dissolve, and the color in each mug was as intense as promised by the TV commercial. “Now go ahead and bring a mug to every family,” Aunt said to Moran and Boyang. “Don’t forget to tell them this is a present from Ruyu.”

“Why? Don’t we get to try it first?” Boyang asked.

“You’ll have yours when you come back,” Aunt said, and asked Uncle if they had more mugs.

“Hold your generosity,” Boyang said. “That bottle will be gone in no time.”

In a rare good mood, Uncle said that Aunt would be happy to see the powder gone, as she would have a new Tang container to carry around proudly. “And this time she can even brag about having drunk the whole bottle ourselves,” he said.

Aunt faked anger and told Uncle to stop poking fun at her. Boyang laughed, and carried two mugs, holding the door open for Moran, who followed him with two in her hands. Ruyu picked up a mug and said she would save it for Sister Shaoai in the bedroom. And don’t forget Grandpa, Ruyu said to Aunt, which made her pour a small portion out of her own mug and bring it to Grandpa.

It was a cloudless night, and the moon, a day short of being full, cast a layer of silver on the courtyard. When Moran finished her deliveries — the two families had sent compliments and good wishes back with her to Aunt — she found Boyang waiting for her under the grape trellis. A few days earlier Teacher Pang had harvested the grapes to share with the neighbors, but a few clusters, not quite ripe, had been left behind.

Boyang reached for a cluster and handed half to Moran. “See, she is a good-hearted person,” he said in a hushed voice.

The comment, coming out of nowhere, startled Moran. For one thing, she wanted to say that she had no idea whom he was talking about, though that would be dishonest. “Who has ever said she’s not?” Moran asked.

Boyang looked sternly at Moran. “Then why are you hostile to her these days?”

“Am I?”

“Maybe others can’t tell, but you know you’re treating her a little differently from before,” Boyang said. “Is it because of what I said to you last Saturday?”

Perhaps love allows perceptions that one does not possess otherwise. Like many boys his age, Boyang had not been observant. That boy has a mind like a sieve, his grandmother used to remark about his inattentiveness.

“Is it true that I’m hostile?” Moran asked. “How can you tell?”

“There’s really not anything that we don’t know about each other.”

Is there, Moran wondered, or should there be? “Do you think Ruyu feels that way, too?”

“That you’re being unfriendly? I hope not, though even if she feels it, she won’t say anything,” Boyang said. “You know how she is. She has grown up holding everything in.”

Moran sighed. “I’ve been trying to be a good friend to her.”

“Have you really?” Boyang asked. There was an unfamiliar edge to his voice, which made Moran’s heart ache.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I think you are jealous of her.”

Moran felt grateful that they were in the dark, and even the bright moonlight would not reveal the coloring of her face, which was burning with shame and anger and a helpless despair. The line between innocent and heartless, if indeed there is one, must be so subtle that only those most experienced with human nature can perceive it. Moran, herself having not outgrown the age when innocence and heartlessness often go hand in hand, felt herself shrinking in front of Boyang. To appease him and to defend herself were equally impossible. There are moments in life when to speak at all is to speak wrongly.

“If you’d met someone special I would be very happy for you,” Boyang said. “I don’t understand why you’re not happy for me.”

“But I am happy for you!”

“You know you’re not, and I know why you feel that way,” Boyang said. “You’re like a sister to me, and I thought you and I had the purest friendship.”

Was there ever a pure relationship between two people? Moran wished she could tell Boyang about the chemical Ruyu had taken from his mother’s lab, but the right moment of telling — if there had been one — had passed. “Let’s go back,” Moran said, feeling a sickness in her stomach.

A door opened, and Uncle, stepping out of the house, looked up at the moon for a long moment before trying to discern the figures in the shadow of the grape trellis. “Is that you two?” he asked. “Hurry before the Tang turns cold.”

The next morning Moran woke up with a high fever. “Must be an early flu,” she overheard Boyang’s grandmother saying when her mother told Boyang and Ruyu to go to school without Moran.

She spent the day in bed, sleeping on and off, welcoming the physical illness because she was now exempted from thinking. Her mother had moved the radio from the living room to a chair next to her bed, and had left a kettle of hot water underneath the chair. She would ask Boyang’s grandmother to check on Moran at lunchtime, her mother said, but Moran said she had better not; if she did have the flu she would rather not have anyone come near her, she said.

Ever so sluggishly time moved forward. Moran had forgotten to wind her wristwatch the night before, so it had stopped sometime before daybreak. She watched the slanting angle of the sunlight entering the window, leaving a path of floating particles in midair. In her Chinese textbook there was the poem about a lifetime passing like a white horse leaping across the narrowest crevice; the ancients had not been wrong if a thousand years had passed easily between their writing and her reading the poem, but had they also felt the weight of a never-ending movement when they had written those lines?

The radio, kept on at a low volume, proceeded from the morning news to the weather forecast and later the preschool children’s sing-along program, though they all sounded unreal in her feverish half dreams. Moran thought about the people who would be listening to the radio on a morning like this: pensioners, shop owners sitting behind counters and waiting for the first customer of the day, a bicycle repairman at a roadside shed pulling out a punctured inner tube, someone outside the system like Shaoai, having no place to be.

Toward the end of the day Moran heard people come back from work. Her fever had not broken, which gave her the excuse to stay isolated. Later, Moran heard Boyang’s voice from the living room, and her mother explaining to him that he had better stay away. Could he just say hi, he asked, and Moran’s mother said she would check to see if Moran was awake. Moran closed her eyes, and when she heard Boyang leave, she wept quietly.

It took Moran a week to recover, and except for the weekend when Boyang went to his parents’ apartment, he came over every evening to chat with her, and once Ruyu came with him, too. When Moran was feeling less sick, she would prop herself up with a pillow, and he would sit astride a chair placed at the entrance of the bedroom. They had been polite with each other at first, but soon Boyang returned to his usual self. Several other classmates had caught the flu, too, he said, but he and Ruyu had been lucky not to have it; the midterm was in two weeks, but there was no need for Moran to worry about the missed classes, as he would go over everything with her once she felt well enough; in biology lab the next day they would be dissecting frogs, which he knew she would not like to do, so she might as well stay sick and skip it; and, by the way, did she know that Sister Shaoai was also sick, so when everybody was at work or at school she and Shaoai could keep each other company.

“What happened to Sister Shaoai?” Moran said, surprised that her parents had not told her about it.

Boyang said it was probably the same virus. Remember when they had the measles together, he asked, and she said of course she did. In third grade Moran and Boyang had been caught by a measles epidemic, and his grandmother had set up her house for the two to be quarantined from the rest of the quadrangle; every morning and evening she would feed them dark, bitter liquid brewed from herbs, but otherwise they had been left alone with a chess set and a radio. Moran was a terrible chess player. Every time she was about to lose Boyang would switch sides with her, and it amazed her that however badly she opened her game he was able to change it for the better; sometimes they would switch sides several times in a game, until she would lose almost all the pieces for both red and black, and there was nothing to do but to call it a draw.

Those had been the happiest days, she thought, but did not say so to Boyang, for whom happier days were to come.

Unlike Moran, who was recovering by day, Shaoai deteriorated. By the time Moran was allowed to go back to school, little was on her mind but Shaoai’s illness — she had gone into a coma a few days before. The doctors were baffled, as the flu-like symptoms had quickly given way to other, more serious problems: hair loss, vomiting, seizures, and loss of much of her brain functions; all the tests run had offered few clues.

Before Boyang left for his parents’ home for the weekend, he told Moran to call him if there was any news about Shaoai. Every day Aunt and Uncle took turns being at the ICU with Shaoai; neighbors had offered to take a few shifts so the couple could rest, but they had declined, saying it was best if they could be there before the doctors could give a definite diagnosis.

After lunch on Sunday, Moran went to Shaoai’s house and looked for Ruyu. Earlier in the morning they had studied for midterms together. Uncle was taking a nap, and Ruyu was feeding Grandpa some rice mush. These days Ruyu spent much of her free time taking care of Grandpa, who alone was spared the worries that had shrouded the quadrangle like a dark fog. For each day Shaoai stayed in coma, it seemed one more person started to lose heart. At breakfast that day, Moran’s mother had wondered aloud if they should hope now for a different scenario: “For sure Shaoai cannot recover as a normal healthy person again — sometimes you don’t know if it’d be easier for everyone if her parents let her go.”

In the small cube of Grandpa’s bedroom Ruyu looked pensive. After she fed Grandpa and cleaned his face and neck with a towel, she told Moran in a low voice that she would be sitting here with Grandpa until he fell asleep. I’ll sit with you, Moran whispered back. Ruyu glanced at Moran, and she knew that Ruyu did not welcome her company. Still, Moran could not help but feel less uneasy if she could keep an eye on Ruyu; during the weekdays Boyang was always around, but on a Sunday like this, when everyone’s attention was elsewhere, Moran was particularly unwilling to leave Ruyu alone.

Neither spoke. Grandpa looked exhausted, and dozed off soon. The only window high on the wall was open, and Moran watched the blue sky beyond, and listened to a few sparrows pecking on the roof. Autumn would soon be over, and when winter came the peddlers would set oil drums aflame on the street corners and later roast sweet yams and chestnuts in the hot ashes. In the past winters, Moran and Boyang used to stop by one of the oil drums and pick up the biggest yam, its purple or brown skin charred and wrinkled. Easily she could see, in her mind’s eye, Ruyu and Boyang divide a yam into halves, smiling at each other through the steam rising from the golden inside of the yam.

Moran stopped herself from pursuing the thought, ashamed that she was so selfish as to dwell upon her minor pain while Shaoai’s life was in danger. Moran did not believe Shaoai would die, and these days before her recovery reminded Moran of the time when she had fainted in a municipal bathhouse as a child. The air, hot with thick steam, had been oppressive, and grownups, comfortable in their nakedness, gossiped loudly; their voices, mixed with the running of showers and the splashing of the bathwater, had sounded as though they had come from far away; when Moran’s legs turned cottony, the last thought on her mind had been to hold on tight to the bath soap because fragrant soap was not cheap.

Any day now, any moment, Aunt or Uncle would come back with some good news — a diagnosis, or better, a retreat of the virus, and Moran would breathe freely again, as she had found herself awake in the cold air of the locker room, though the soap had slipped away, and had never been recovered. One day the neighbors in the quadrangle would refer to this time as the days when Shaoai had been mysteriously sick, as they would speak of the May afternoon when an army tank was overthrown and burned down at a nearby crossroads, or the day in June when Teacher Pang’s cousin pedaled three bodies on his flatbed tricycle from the Square to the hospital. Perhaps Moran would even think of these days as the beginning of a love story between Boyang and Ruyu. Life, in retrospect, can be as simple as a collection of anecdotes, and anecdotally we live on, trading our youthful belief in happiness — and at that age happiness almost always means being good, being right, and being loved — for the belief in feeling less, suffering little.

The gate to the courtyard opened, and it was clear from the neighbors’ gathering that Aunt had come back. Moran looked at her wristwatch — it was two o’clock, not yet time for Uncle to change shifts with Aunt. At once Moran felt hope arising — for sure by now the doctors would have found out how to treat Shaoai, though that hope was dashed when she heard Aunt’s voice.

“No, she’s the same,” Aunt said to the querying neighbors. “But one doctor asked me if she had been in contact with any chemicals recently. I told him that she was an international trades and relations major, but he said her symptoms more and more reminded him of a poisoning case he had seen in the seventies.”

“Poisoning?” several neighbors gasped. “But how could it be?”

“I don’t know,” Aunt said. “We don’t know how she’s been spending her time these days, or what kind of people she has met. I was coming back earlier because I thought we might find the phone numbers of her old classmates and ask them.”

Moran turned to look at Ruyu. The latter was watching Grandpa’s shallow breathing as though she found it mesmerizing. Moran hesitated and then grabbed Ruyu’s elbow. “Come,” Moran said. “I need to talk to you.”

Ruyu did not resist, and led the way to her bedroom. She sat down on the bedside and looked up, her eyes lucid. Moran pulled over the chair and sat down, feeling as though she herself had committed a crime and had to enlist Ruyu in a cover-up. “Where is the chemical you took from the lab?” Moran asked.

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know,” Ruyu said. “I put the test tube in my drawer, but it was gone.”

“Since when?”

“I’m not sure. A few days now,” Ruyu said, and looked irritated. “I’m not like you, Moran, and this is not my home. Nothing I have really belongs to me. If someone takes something from me, what can I do but shrug and say, suit yourself?”

Taken aback, Moran did not know what to say.

“You think I poisoned Sister Shaoai?” Ruyu said, looking into Moran’s eyes with a taunting half smile. “Are you interrogating me now?”

“No! But did you hear what Aunt just said? The doctors thought it might be some chemical poison.”

“The doctors said it was meningitis earlier. And they may say something else tomorrow.”

“But why didn’t you say anything when Sister Shaoai got sick?”

“About what? Everyone got the flu last week. And then they were talking about bacterial infection.”

“Do you think it was Shaoai who took the chemical?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did she ask you about it?”

“You think people will ask your permission when they take something from you?”

Moran felt an urge to shake Ruyu. There was a life they had to save before it was too late. “What did you take from the lab, do you remember?”

Ruyu shook her head. “I never did say I took anything.”

“Do you understand that this is a serious matter? Can you come with me to tell Aunt and Uncle what happened? We need to call Boyang and his mother.”

“Do you think,” Ruyu said, raising her eyes, “that Sister Shaoai would like it if indeed it was her intention to commit suicide?”

“But we can’t sit here, doing nothing.”

“Why? What’s wrong with doing nothing? The world would be a much better place if people did less,” Ruyu said. “Why do you all think you have the right to change someone’s life only because you want to?”

Ruyu’s anger baffled Moran. It was useless to go on arguing. Moran stood up, and realized that her legs were shaking.

“Where are you going?” Ruyu asked.

“I’m going to talk to the grownups,” Moran said. “Are you coming with me?”

There was something unreadable in Ruyu’s eyes, a mixture of pity, derision, and curiosity. In the years to come Moran would return to this moment to study Ruyu’s face, searching for panic or guilt or remorse or fear — anything that would make Ruyu comprehensible — yet once and again Moran would see none of those, only a chilling tranquility, as though Ruyu had foreseen all that would come. But how could she have? To grant that prescience to a fifteen-year-old was to give her a mystic power beyond her capacity. Still, in every revisiting of the moment, that look had again manifested itself as Ruyu’s tepid effort to save Moran from taking a wrong turn; unseeing, unthinking, Moran had not heeded Ruyu’s admonition. Don’t tell, that look had said, warning more than pleading; stay still, that look had said; rehearse your lines before you put yourself on stage; those who have not the words for themselves will be the only ones found guilty.

Over the years Moran never stopped imagining that alternative of not speaking. It comforted her at times to think how things would have turned out: without the belated injection of the antidote — Prussian blue, a name belonging more to a painter’s easel than to a doctor’s cabinet — Shaoai would have died young, a heroine whose death could be explained only by fate, which was both unjust (letting a senseless tragedy befall a young woman already wronged) and merciful (it could’ve been worse, dragging on and making everyone suffer unduly, people would console themselves). A secret would have stayed alive between Ruyu and Moran for some time, though like other adolescent episodes, it would be put aside one day, presumed to be buried, and never let out to light again. Perhaps something good would eventually have come out of the love between Boyang and Ruyu, or else it would have taken the natural course as all first loves do, blossoming and fading and leaving no permanent damage. Either way, Moran herself and Boyang would have remained friends, and one day, when things stopped mattering so much, she would tell him the secret. They would shake their heads then, baffled or resigned, but too removed from the tragedy to feel perturbed. Life had been kind to them, they would tell each other, even with its mysteries unsolved and unsolvable.

“Go ahead,” Ruyu said. “It’s your decision to talk, not mine.”

The moments and hours and days that followed became an elongated tunnel, in which Moran was the lone traveler, carried forward not by her own will but by the unforgiving current of time; if that tunnel had ever ended she would not have noticed it. One day, when she arrived in America, she would see a commercial for a local support group for autistic children, in which a girl in a lilac-colored dress sang and acted out a story about the futile battle of an itsy-bitsy spider against the rain. Moran was not the only person in the living room of Westlawn then; her housemates were around, waiting for the opening game of the football season between the Badgers and a visiting team. None of them would notice Moran’s tears, and she would never again sit among them to watch television. She was not the only one trapped by life. She was afraid of meeting another person like her, but more than that she was afraid of never meeting another person like her, who, however briefly, would look into her eyes so that she knew she was not alone in her loneliness.

The blood tests confirmed Moran’s words and what had been taken from the laboratory, and Prussian blue saved Shaoai’s life but not her damaged brain. Ruyu must have stuck unwavering to her side of the story, which Moran could only piece together, over the years, by herself — she could not bring herself to ask others, and even if she had, no one would have told her anything: yes, Ruyu would say, she had stolen the chemical out of despair; no, there was not any concrete reason for her despair, but only a passing mood; no, she wouldn’t call herself unhappy, though she wouldn’t say she was happy, either; she had not felt she needed to worry when the tube of chemical was gone, as she had thought someone might have tossed it out while cleaning the room. Again and again she had to answer the questions, asked by grownups in the quadrangle, the high school officials, the university security committee, the police: no, she did not know who had taken the poison; no, she had not had a plan to kill Shaoai; no, Shaoai had never spoken of suicide with her; had she spoken of that with Shaoai? no, though she had talked about it briefly with Moran; perhaps Moran had told Shaoai; perhaps Moran had rummaged through Ruyu’s things and looked for the tube, or Shaoai had done that; had Moran ever spoken of suicide, no, of course not; would Moran want to kill Shaoai, no, she did not think so, though she could only speak from what she knew, and she did not know anyone well in this city; no, she had no reason to want to harm anyone; no, she did not do anything to harm anyone.

Moran did not know how much the world had trusted Ruyu’s words; though people must have trusted her enough, as eventually the investigation stopped, leaving too much space for everyone to come up with his own conjecture: could it be that there had been two suicidal souls under one roof? Or could it be that the thought of suicide was like a virus — it did not matter how it had started, but in the end it had caught both girls, and by mere chance one was spared? There had been reasons for Shaoai’s despair, and evidence: her being expelled from the university, her uncertain future, her dark mood, her one drunken episode that many had witnessed; quite a change from the ambitious and outgoing girl she used to be, people would agree. Less sense could be made out of Ruyu’s situation, though she was an orphan sent to live with strangers, and she was at an age when hormones could easily induce untrustworthy moods; who knows, the neighbors sometimes thought — there was no way to find out how her life had started: suppose there had been genes of madness to start with, in the parents’ lines? Their abandoning a baby girl could be more than being irresponsible; any orphan could be a host of dark secrets and unseemly history.

Ruyu’s grandaunts had been telegraphed and phoned; they, citing the inconvenience of travel at their age, did not come, though they did send a telegram, in which they said that they had raised Ruyu as a God-fearing child, and they believed that she would not lie. The telegram arrived in the middle of another crisis, when Grandpa was found unconscious; he was rushed to the emergency room, and never returned to the quadrangle.

Moran’s mother had signed for the telegram. Months later, when Moran found an excuse to stay home on a weekday — she felt sick, she told her mother, who let her skip school without further questioning — she looked around to see if her parents had saved anything related to the case, but the only thing she found was the telegram. Her mother must have conveyed the unkind message to Aunt and Uncle subtly, or did it matter even if she had not said anything? By then all was over: Boyang had been transferred to the high school affiliated with his parents’ university, and was allowed only to visit on weekends to see his grandmother; Ruyu, with Teacher Shu’s help, had become a boarder at school, and her stay in the quadrangle, barely four months, was never brought up by the neighbors afterward; Grandpa had passed away, and Shaoai’s family, having relocated to another district, had not come back for a visit again, though they were not forgotten: each year the neighbors pooled their money and sent a donation to Shaoai’s parents for her caretaking.

The vacated house had stayed empty for more than a year; bad feng shui, people would say, with two disasters hitting the family in a short time. Eventually a young couple moved in. They had been married for three years, but had been living in separate dorms assigned to them by their work units, which they had had to share with others. They were so happy to have a place assigned to them that the neighbors could not bring themselves to ruin their mood. By and by, however, the story would reach their ears, as in this city no secret would stay a secret, no history could be laid permanently to rest in peace.

After the case was closed, Moran’s parents never spoke to her about it again. They must have learned how she had wept in front of strangers because unlike Ruyu, Moran could not answer the questions. Why had she not alerted anyone about the theft? people wanted to know; had it happened before that she had witnessed other illegal actions but had refrained from telling? Why had she not said anything to any grownup when her friend had talked about suicide with her? Had she worried about her friend’s safety? Had she considered herself a responsible friend?

Moran did not know if Ruyu had been suicidal, or murderous; could it be that a person could not be one without being the other? The more she tried to understand Ruyu, the murkier her own mind became. All the same she did not protest when, in the end, blame was laid on her more than on the two other girls, as her silence could not be acquitted as their potential madness would be. People were lenient not to say this to Moran — that is, all but Boyang, who, as always, came up with his quick conclusion, and did not hold back. “You never really liked Ruyu, did you?” Boyang said to Moran in their last real conversation. He had moved away by then, and had written and asked to see her on a Tuesday afternoon. She had skipped school and met him near the Back Sea.

But that was not true, she argued weakly for herself.

“Why didn’t you say anything, then? I understand your decision not to tell a grownup, but why not tell me?”

Nothing she could say would appease Boyang’s fury now, or ever. He had lost too much — his first love, two friends, and his childhood home.

“Did you think I would love you if Ruyu had been taken out of the picture? Did you think if she killed herself we could go back to where we were?” Boyang asked.

When Moran broke into tears Boyang did not seem to soften his opinion. Angrily he sped away on his bicycle. Look at what you’ve done, a voice said to Moran, though she did not understand that it was her future self speaking: look at how you’ve destroyed everything.