Part 152

Zoe Young was actually startled by her and quickly tried to comfort her, “Calm down, sis, put your shoes on, put your shoes on first.”

Claire Daniels stared blankly at the suitcase standing by Zoe Young’s feet. Both of them had drunk too much last night, and now she was still a bit dazed, her gaze falling on the black canvas front of the suitcase—a long gash had been accidentally scratched into it by a tin can last night, and now it was flapping open messily, like a flattened mouth on the verge of crying.

Then Claire Daniels started to cry.

There were four girls in the dorm, two left yesterday, and today Zoe Young had to catch an early morning flight, leaving only Claire Daniels by herself.

“Why didn’t you call me!” Claire Daniels cried so hard it was ugly, not bothering to control herself, her mouth stretched wide like a winter melon.

“Can you cry any uglier?!” Zoe Young rummaged through all her pockets but couldn’t find a single tissue, so Claire Daniels turned around and grabbed a box of tissues from her bedside, pulled out several, stacked them together, and blew her nose hard.

“Tell me, why didn’t you call me? You were just going to sneak off? If I woke up and found you gone, how bad would I feel? Are you even human?!”

After blowing her nose, Claire Daniels started firing off complaints at Zoe Young like a machine gun, talking so fast she almost blacked out.

“Why would I wake you up? What’s the point of dragging things out? It’s just graduation, it’s not like we’ll never see each other again.

Save your breath, if you have the energy to say all this, you might as well use it to yell at Daniel Hughes. Why do you always act like that when you see him?!” Zoe Young suddenly got angry, pressing down on Claire Daniels’s head to make her sit back on the bed.

At the mention of Daniel Hughes, Claire Daniels quieted down for a moment.

Zoe Young felt a little bad, but didn’t know how to continue saying goodbye, so after a pause, she started vigorously ruffling Claire Daniels’s hair.

“We talked all night yesterday, and you’ve only slept a few hours before getting up again. Come on, get back in bed and sleep some more, I have to go. Andrew Lane called a black cab, he’s waiting to take us to the airport, I’m not going to nag you anymore.”

After saying that, Zoe Young quickly grabbed her suitcase. Claire Daniels knew that Zoe Young’s suitcase was a keepsake from her mother, and it had even been dragged to a tropical beach, used for many years. The handle was broken, but she just couldn’t bear to throw it away. Sometimes the handle wouldn’t go in, sometimes it wouldn’t come out, and every time it took both of them, with Claire Daniels stepping on the suitcase with one foot, using all their strength to push and pull.

She’d never have to help with that again.

Thinking of this, Claire Daniels’s eyes turned red again, but she quickly held it in and said to Zoe Young, “Go on.”

Zoe Young nodded, “Yeah, I’m going.”

The wheels rolled carefully across the floor, turning the farewell into slow motion.

The door clicked shut. The cicadas, which had just quieted down, suddenly became noisy again, as if they knew only Claire Daniels was left in the dorm, and arrogantly poured in through the window, driving away all her sleepiness.

She grabbed her phone and glanced at it, finding an unread text message.

Claire Daniels remembered that around midnight, when she and Zoe Young were drunk, she vaguely felt her phone buzz twice, and instinctively picked it up to check, but Zoe Young snatched it away and tossed it aside.

“It’s definitely him. Don’t look at it now, Jenny, have some self-respect.”

“But what if it’s not?”

Zoe Young always got a bit violent when drunk. She pointed at Claire Daniels’s forehead and shouted, exasperated, “Claire Daniels, I’ll say it again, have some damn self-respect.”

Claire Daniels’s hands were sweaty, and she wiped the screen with her thumb, only making it dirtier.

In the end, she put the phone back by her pillow, lay down on the bed, and closed her eyes.

Claire Daniels extra: Claire Daniels, have some self-respect.

When Claire Daniels woke up again, it was already 11:30 in the morning. She’d sweated through her sleep, her bangs damp and sticking up. Hungover and groggy, she felt awful, lying in bed sulking as soon as she woke up.

She wanted to go to the bathroom, wanted to eat, but didn’t want to get up.

The bottles and trash on the floor had all been cleaned up and thrown away by Zoe Young. After a nap, those few hours seemed to stretch on forever. The sharp sadness of the recent farewell, dulled by this interval, began to feel distant and numb, and was finally baked away by the blazing midday summer sun.

Claire Daniels tossed and turned, getting hotter and hotter, glaring resentfully at the blank wall above the window—the air conditioner they’d been promised still hadn’t been installed after four years.

They’d endured for four years, clinging to hope.

Some people couldn’t stand these summers and rented apartments near campus, enjoying cool, comfortable summers every year, never bothered by the midnight power cuts in the dorms.

It was also more convenient for dating.

Like Daniel Hughes.

He probably hasn’t had a real summer in years, Claire Daniels thought.

Yet Claire Daniels always remembered the summer she ran into Daniel Hughes again—just as hot and blazing as today.

She’d done well on her high school entrance exam, scoring six points above the cutoff for the High School Affiliated to Normal University, and spent the whole summer happily traveling around. It was almost time for school to start when she finally came home and began previewing high school courses. One day, passing by the ordinary No. 17 High School near her home, she happened to see the newly posted list of admitted students.

She didn’t know why, but she stopped under the sun to look.

And then she saw the name “Daniel Hughes.” It was a common name, with the place of origin listed as the junior high division of the High School Affiliated to Normal University.

Claire Daniels wasn’t sure if this was the Daniel Hughes she knew. Among her elementary school classmates, except for Zoe Young, Fiona James, and a few others whose household registration wasn’t in the city center, the rest had all gone to the junior high division of the Affiliated High School or No. 8 Middle School.

That annoying Daniel Hughes was at the Affiliated High School.

Staring at that name, Claire Daniels remembered many moments from the past, like when she’d just transferred to the Affiliated Elementary School and Teacher Yu made her class monitor, Daniel Hughes was the first to come over and suck up.

“New class monitor, you’re really pretty.”

Remembering this, Claire Daniels couldn’t help but laugh—she’d been too young back then to get any joy from that comment, and only now did she realize, is it too late?

But by fifth grade, the girl class officers had lost their shine, and Daniel Hughes was the first to lead a group of boys in “singing the song of the liberated serfs.” He was the one making trouble at the back door during sanitary pad distribution, the one running wild at the sports meet and refusing to sit with the group, and especially after he and Andrew Lane won the top prize in the Math Olympiad, he started kicking Fiona James, Zoe Young, and other campus stars when they were down. That smug look was something Claire Daniels would never forget.

At sixteen, staring at that list outside No. 17 High School, Claire Daniels still couldn’t understand Daniel Hughes’s natural “sense of timing”

and “ability to bend and stretch.”

Everything she hadn’t understood back then eventually played out in her own life.

Claire Daniels stared at the blank space above the window until she felt dizzy, and in a daze, it was as if the list from No. 17 High School appeared, stroke by stroke, on the wall in front of her.

She didn’t want to remember anymore, so she jumped up, grabbed her washbasin, and rushed to the bathroom, sticking her head under the tap and letting the water run.

The cool water gently washed away the list from her mind.

The TV in the second cafeteria was always playing some incomprehensible foreign prank show. Claire Daniels gnawed on a fried dough cake while glancing up, when suddenly her mom called.

“Did you mail all your stuff home?”

“Yeah. Sent it out yesterday at noon, by China Railway Express. That pile cost over five hundred in shipping.”

Claire Daniels extra: “I don’t even know what you bought in four years of college. Are they going to dump a ton of trash at our door?”

“A ton of trash for five hundred yuan shipping, Mom, you wish.”

“Don’t joke with me. I’ve always wanted to ask, why did you mail everything home? You could use those things in the company dorm, are you planning to buy everything new?”

Claire Daniels paused, pretending to choke on her fried dough, coughed for a while, and only after she’d calmed down did she say slowly, “I used them for four years, I already threw out what needed to be thrown out. What I mailed home was just some clothes I don’t wear anymore, could still be donated to poor areas.”

“If you want to donate to poor areas, send it there! You mailed it home, now I have to sort it out. Are you treating home like Project Hope?”

Here we go again. Claire Daniels sighed deeply, knowing she’d made it through her mom’s questioning, so her heart settled back in her chest. She patiently listened to her mom’s nagging, repaying her as a daughter who’d already survived adolescence to a mother still in menopause.

Table of Contents