"How's life with those two little girls lately? I heard the three of you skipped class together and got a public reprimand?" Faint sounds of recitation drifted through the air. The big girl who pretended to be mature and the little boy who pretended to be a child sat side by side on the swings beside the sports field, watching the distant sunset.
"Sister, your information network is really something. Something that trivial, and you hear about it all the way over at the elite academy... You're not a teacher, you're an FBI agent, aren't you?" Jiaming sighed.
"Ha." Yahan couldn't hold back a laugh. "I saw the bulletin board when I came in. Your blacklist is still hanging up there. Oh, right — has that Huang Haoyun been giving you trouble at home lately?"
"Mm, I'm usually not home, so even if he wanted to, he couldn't find me..."
"If he gives you any more trouble, tell me."
Truth was, Jiaming's contact with Yahan had hardly ever broken off since that camping trip. He would have liked to shake off this nuisance, but Zhang Yahan exercised at the Ye Family Martial Arts School, so they ran into each other every so often; now and then, when the mood took her, Yahan would even show up at the Huang family villa to wait for him, and for a while the place was turned upside down.
Every time Zhang Yahan turned up at the Huang family villa, Huang Haoyun was bound to be there hovering about, chattering and fawning on her.
Unfortunately for him, Yahan-MM had had no feelings for this young master Huang from the very start, and Huang Haoyun's cowardly showing on the day of the camping trip had disgusted her even more, so the two of them had nothing to talk about.
The trouble was that Yahan, without a second thought, treated Jiaming as a friend and kept his company, which landed him in hot water.
Huang Haoyun was over twenty in years but under twelve in emotional intelligence; since gentle tactics couldn't draw a girl's eye, he wore himself out every day finding fault with Jiaming, hoping that would catch Yahan's attention.
Luckily Jiaming didn't have a child's temperament, and he treated the whole business as a farce. Otherwise, being picked on at home every single day for no reason at all — over this, over that — he probably would have wanted to kill someone.
Still, even if he only looked helpless on the surface and sneered on the inside, after being harassed by Huang Haoyun for a stretch he couldn't help feeling gloomy, and since he had been avoiding Zhang Yahan a little to begin with, he avoided her even more in that period.
Not long after, Zhang Yahan found out about Huang Haoyun's harassment. It was around New Year of '94; taking advantage of the New Year visits, Zhang Yahan gave Huang Haoyun a thorough dressing-down and made it clear they were no longer friends.
After that she never went to the Huang house again, and Huang Haoyun's harassment of Jiaming gradually tapered off.
As for Yahan's feelings toward Jiaming, she mostly took him for some sort of precocious child prodigy, and since the two of them had been through life and death together, she naturally treated him as a friend.
In all the time since his rebirth, Jiaming had kept company with two childish little kids, and it was rare for him to meet a friend he could talk to from an adult's viewpoint; once he had worked that out, he stopped shutting Yahan out.
When they occasionally met at the martial arts school or somewhere else and traded a few needling remarks, it made for a pretty good friendship. But meeting her at school — that was a first.
Hearing Yahan bring up Huang Haoyun again, Jiaming snorted with laughter. "Give it a rest. If he's got it in for me, you running over there will only make him hate me more... Of course, if you're willing to sacrifice yourself and sleep with him, that'd settle it once and for all..."
Yahan blushed. "How can a child your age say..."
"I want booby milk..." Hearing her call him a child, Jiaming bounced up off the swing and, in a babyish voice, lunged at Yahan's chest for a hug — then bang, a bottle of milk smacked into his arms. Yahan's face was red and her expression caught between laughing and crying. "Every time I call you a child, you pull this stunt..."
"Heh..." After two gulps of milk, Jiaming reached out and lifted the plain-glass spectacles off the bridge of Yahan's nose, studying her closely until her cheeks burned and her eyes went fierce; only then did he grin. "That's more like it — now that's pretty. These glasses are mine now."
"Stop making trouble for me." Yahan grabbed for them several times, but in the end Jiaming wouldn't give them up, so she let it go. Jiaming set the glasses on the bridge of his own nose; his looks were ordinary to begin with, and now he looked like an honest, dull little bookworm. Yahan laughed again at the sight. "You just love clowning around..."
"You wear these glasses so you don't attract quite so many bees and butterflies, right?" Jiaming said with interest. "Hey, come clean — how many of those male teachers are your suitors? Is that handsome one who came over to talk to you just now one of them?"
"None of your business. You just love stirring things up." Yahan smiled, but it brought back the moment the two of them had greeted each other earlier: this little brat, small in years and big in schemes, utterly shameless, had come over to cop a feel, and then a colleague beside them had kindly leaned in to ask, "Yahan, is this your little brother? How come you've never mentioned him?"
"No — Yahan is my child bride." He had put an arm around her waist the way a boyfriend would; Yahan went red and shoved him off on the spot, but the man's stunned expression really had been funny. Thinking back on it now, I can't help laughing again. She glanced the way Jiaming had indicated: those teachers really were still wandering around the sports field, sneaking looks their way; catching Yahan's eye, they hurriedly spun around and pointed left and right at nothing.
"Don't underestimate him. That male teacher is named Xu Mo, a top graduate of Peking University. His family is in ocean shipping now, though it's his elder brother Xu Ran who runs it — he didn't get involved. The scale can't match your Huang family or our Zhang family, but he's not someone to look down on either."
"I bet he's told you something about not wanting to lean on his family's power, wanting to carve out a path of his own — that kind of thing."
Yahan was slightly taken aback, her pretty eyes going wide. "How do you know?"
Jiaming took a sip of milk. "Silly girl, have you never read a novel? That's what playboys all say when they're chasing a girl... Mm. That guy is my love rival."
"Drop dead!" Yahan burst out laughing and smacked him on the shoulder. Truth was, she knew her own business best: she had always been quite confident about her beauty and her family background. Put the two together and she knew very well how many boys she would attract, and what those boys had in mind. That was also why she normally kept a deliberately low profile; warm and courteous as she was to everyone, she unconsciously kept her distance from all of them, and that attitude meant she was fated to make very few close friends.
Jiaming, though, was different. He was a child — maybe a little precocious, a little sharp-tongued, occasionally sly, occasionally filthy-minded, but without a doubt a good friend.
Quite apart from anything else, that time on the camping trip he had volunteered to trade places and become the hostage — how many people in the world today could do such a thing? And at the critical moment he had shown the responsibility of a man as well: secretly working the ropes loose, snatching the gun, facing that Scarface head-on.
Without him, the girl named Zhang Yahan would most likely have been raped and then killed as a hostage long ago.
Thinking of all that, she couldn't help being glad she had found such an interesting friend — even if he cops a feel now and then, who cares...
"Oh, right — when I came up just now, I saw that fat boy with a few others surrounding you. They weren't going to beat you up, were they?" The thought made her ask. "His dad brought him over a few days ago, wanting to transfer him into the academy. Just say the word and I'll immediately—" She drew a finger across her throat and laughed. "Snip him."
"Mm, we've had a bit of a run-in," Jiaming admitted, nodding. Seeing Yahan's eyes shining, he hurried on: "Don't stir up trouble. I'd be only too happy if he dropped dead somewhere far away from me — just get him out of this school quick, so he stops coming after me."
"Mm, leave it to me!" Yahan laughed and patted her chest, then caught Jiaming staring at her with glassy eyes and spat lightly. "Don't you go getting ideas again."
"Ahem, no ideas, no ideas..." Jiaming checked his watch. "Class is almost over. I need to hit the bathroom. Go do your thing — I've still got to find Lingjing and Shasha so we can head home after school."
"Mm, I drove here today, and I was thinking of stopping by the martial arts school anyway. Oh, right—" Yahan stepped in front of Jiaming. "Give me my glasses back."
"In your dreams. Have you ever seen anyone spit out something that's already in his mouth?"
"Come on, hurry up."
"Go ahead, kill me."
"You think I don't dare? Hand them over, or this young lady swears she'll fight you to the death."
"Go ahead, kill me."
"You think I don't dare? Don't hand them over right now and I really will!"
"Go ahead, rape me."
"You think I don't dare — I... ah—"
The two of them grabbed for the glasses, tugging back and forth, and pulled too hard: Jiaming, sitting on the swing, toppled backward onto the grass, and Yahan's whole body came down on top of him, pinning him underneath.
"Mm... mm... Help... I'm dying..."
There was a good gap in their heights, so as she fell, Yahan's chest landed right on Jiaming's head; smothered between those two soft mounds, Jiaming promptly found it hard to breathe. Yahan yelped and scrambled off him, her face burning red, yet she still didn't forget to snatch up the glasses while she was at it.
"Heh... Sister, if you want to kill me... there's no need to do it like this... haha..." Jiaming laughed from the ground, a conspicuous red mark from one of Yahan's buttons pressed into his forehead. Mortified, Yahan punched him off to the side. "Drop dead!"
She climbed up, put her glasses back on, straightened her hair and her dress, and after a few steps turned back. "Hey, I'm going to look for Lingjing and Shasha later too. If you don't see them, wait at the school gate. You know my car, right?"
"OK, got it. Are you my child bride or my mom?"
"A kid your age, not a decent thing in your head..." Yahan spat lightly and finally turned to leave, face red. Only when she was far away did Jiaming get up, laughing, and take several deep breaths.
"Spend too long around the little ones, and once in a while you get a taste of a big-busted girl... Life really is beautiful... Thank you, you turkey..."
Coming out of the bathroom, the five-man group headed by the fat boy popped out again. School would be out soon, and this was the quietest stretch of the day on campus; Jiaming's smile collapsed in resignation. "What do you want now?"
"What do we want? No teacher's going to come by now, and there's nobody around either. I'm going to beat you so bad your own mother won't recognize you!"
"Beat me or not, my mother definitely won't recognize me — and I don't recognize her either. But..." A smile curved at the corner of his mouth. "There really isn't anybody around, huh."
His right hand clenched into a fist, and he flexed his wrist a few times in the air. Seeing the movement, the fat boy charged first. "You motherfucking dare to hit back?!"
The fat boy stood a head taller than Jiaming, and in sheer tonnage he was more than twice his weight; there wasn't a trace of fear in him now. Using the momentum of his run, he thrust both hands at Jiaming — and... hit nothing.
In that instant Jiaming retreated a step, lightning-fast, and his right fist, following the swing of his body, traced a perfect curve through the air.
"Bang—"
With that one punch, the fat boy's whole body went flying; he spun twice in the air and flew nearly two meters before crashing down in front of the other four, teeth and blood spilling out together, his body unable to stir an inch.
Under the four's dumbfounded gazes, Jiaming calmly tucked his hands into his pockets and walked over.
"Thirty percent of my strength. That one's from Shasha. Don't let me see you again."
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