“Idiot!”
The students, led by Jiang Jie, cursed at him in unison.
Idiot.
The same word appeared in my heart. I felt no gratitude. A person who doesn’t need saving from others, of course, would not feel any sense of gratitude when someone suddenly appears to save them.
I felt some annoyance that my plan was being interfered with, even though I might not have implemented that plan.
Ultimately, my annoyance probably stemmed from the motive behind this person’s act of salvation.
Humans are driven by self-interest; people do not act against their own interests.
He and I are not related in any way. His sudden appearance to interrupt this act of violence could only be because he was born a “champion of justice.” “Saving people” gives him a sense of satisfaction, gives him the opportunity to look down and pity his fellow man.
He gained a great sense of accomplishment.
And this sense of accomplishment, built upon my weakness and helplessness, was naturally nothing to be happy or grateful for. Besides, what use was it for him to stop it this time? He was just a passerby here. And I, who was left behind, would only become the target of Jiang Jie’s repeated revenge.
He jumped down from the wall.
The dark veil brought by the sun retreated from his face, and I finally saw his face clearly.
Very young.
His face had an air of fearing nothing in heaven or on earth. There were still some faint red marks on his left cheek that hadn’t faded.
Not marks from being beaten, but pressure marks from sleeping on a desk.
And he called us “little friends,” showing no intention of calling the police or telling teachers or parents. This “non-adult” way of handling things revealed his identity.
A passing university student?
A passing university student who was just sleeping in class?
I was assessing this person’s identity, but Jiang Jie and the others had no such patience. After shouting at him and him not complying, Jiang Jie and her group immediately started to attack him.
The outcome was somewhat unexpected, but not entirely so.
To dare to intervene in a fight among delinquent students, he must have a few tricks up his sleeve. The tricks were bigger than I had imagined. He made short work of Jiang Jie’s group, his movements very clean and efficient.
Judging from his skills, he seemed to have received military training.
Could he be a university student from a military or police academy?
But there was no police academy in Qin City, and it wasn’t the military training period at the beginning of the school year, so there was no possibility of someone from the army being here as an instructor and wandering to this place. I realized my previous deduction was not rigorous enough. There were probably still doubts about his identity.
But who he was, what did it have to do with me? While he was entangled with Jiang Jie and the others, I got up and left.
As I was leaving, I thought I heard him call me from behind.
“Little friend,” again.
I felt a slight annoyance and didn’t stop. Since I couldn’t put on a grateful and tearful expression to fill his sense of righteous accomplishment, leaving early might make him less upset.
But I did not go home.
I came to the outside of the classroom, stood before the door and window, and glanced inside.
The water dispenser at the back of the classroom was gone. The machine, along with the barrel, was gone.
It seemed the school teachers had already discovered the problem; otherwise, they wouldn’t have taken even the machine.
Just as I was thinking, I suddenly heard a voice next to me.
“What are you looking at?”
I turned my head. It was him. The person who had suddenly appeared to “save” me had followed me here. Did he have to hear a “thank you” from my lips?
The annoyance in my heart grew a little heavier. I remained silent, hoping he would find it boring and leave soon since I wasn’t talking. However, he stood next to me.
He had just exercised, and there was a thin layer of sweat on his neck. The sweat droplets glistened in the sun. I could even smell the faint salty taste of sweat. Just as I wanted to distance myself, I heard him say:
“So you’re looking at the missing water dispenser in the classroom.”
“So,” he said, “you know someone put poison in the water.”
“…”
I still didn’t speak. This time, there was a trace of shock in my silence.
How did he know?
That person’s gaze swept the room twice, not very seriously, and his gaze didn’t even land on me, but he seemed to understand the doubt in my heart. The words he spoke hit the nail on the head:
“I just did some research on your school. Your school’s first and second years don’t have makeup classes on weekends. You’re not carrying a school bag, so you don’t seem to be here for an interest class. You deliberately came to the classroom door but didn’t go in, so you’re obviously not here to get something you left behind. Most importantly, standing from your position, from your perspective, you can see the empty spot where the water dispenser was at a glance… So, I came to the above conclusion. Does that answer your basic questions?”
“…”
He never mentioned the “thank you” I had expected.
I looked at him properly for the first time.
“Classmate, are you still unwilling to speak?” he said again, still with a somewhat casual and flippant air. “You’ll make people think you’re mute.”
I didn’t find this sentence particularly offensive, perhaps because his tone carried a familiar sort of teasing, not malicious ridicule, but a joke between friends.
Becoming friends with someone you just met five minutes ago, who doesn’t even reply to you.
How ridiculous.
I thought, but still spoke, because I also had a question.
“How did you know?”
“Know what?” he asked, a cat-and-mouse amusement seeming to play on his face.
The dynamic between us seemed to have unknowingly reversed.
Just now he was looking for me, now I was asking him.
“About the poisoning,” I added. “Without this prerequisite, you couldn’t have deduced anything.”
“That part is quite simple,” he said. “Your school’s teacher found something was wrong and carried the water dispenser to the police station to report it. Having said so much, it’s time for a self-introduction—”
He extended his hand to me.
Long fingers, nails trimmed short, and calluses on the pads of his fingers, calluses left from training. I saw a small scrape on his knuckle, probably an injury from the fight just now.
“Ji Xun, police officer, in charge of investigating the Qinjiang Affiliated High School poisoning case.”
“…”
“Why are you not talking again?” he sighed as if troubled. “Communicating with you is a bit difficult, Classmate Zhou. You’re all in your second year of high school; you should understand that citizens have a duty to cooperate with police investigations, right?”
“You’re lying,” I said coldly. He recognized my intelligence, yet he thought I was a fool?
“What did I lie to you about?”
“You’re not a police officer.”
“It seems I still have to show you my police ID…”
“You don’t have a police ID, and you don’t need to go to a shop in the back alley of the school that makes fake certificates to get a five-yuan one to show me. Impersonating a police officer is illegal. Moreover, the school teachers would never take the initiative to report to the police before the situation is clear and no major chaos has erupted, making the matter known to everyone and causing a city-wide storm. They want to protect the school’s reputation. So they first preserved the evidence—taking away the water barrel and the machine. They should have taken the remaining liquid in the water barrel to a laboratory for testing. The affiliated high school doesn’t have a toxicology lab. They might—no, definitely. They definitely took it to Qinjiang University for testing. You found out about this at Qinjiang University.”
I said it all in one breath. I hadn’t spoken such a long string of words in a long time.
I saw the surprise in his eyes.
But he immediately said, “Classmate Zhou, your analysis has some merit, but would you like to think about it again: If I’m not a police officer and haven’t seen the student files, how did I know your name when we first met?”
“…” I was slightly stuck.
I knew in my heart that he was definitely not a police officer, but indeed, how did he know ‘Zhou Zhaonan’?
This doubt was answered when I inadvertently looked down.
The student card hanging on my chest was gone. It must have fallen off during the chase and fight with Jiang Jie and the others just now, and was then—
“Alright, I’ll tell you. I picked up your student card.”
His voice suddenly rang out. He saw my movement, so he revealed the result before my thoughts could get there. His mind really did work fast.
Along with his voice, something was thrown towards me. I caught it. It was my student card.
The ID photo on the card was facing my face.
Dark, heavy hair covered half my face, obscuring one of my eyes.
But the gaze of those gloomy eyes could not be completely hidden even by the thick hair. I could feel these eyes, hiding under the hair, peeking at the beast in my heart.
I loathed everything on this student card.
I turned it face down and clipped it back onto my collar.
By this time, he had already opened the classroom door with a bus card. I had said before, the classroom doors were simple; a plastic card could easily pry them open. When he took out the bus card, I glanced at it. It was a card from the capital city.
I still thought he was a university student. Could he be studying in the capital?
But there were still things that didn’t add up. How could a university student from the capital come to Qin City during class time?
He opened the classroom door, walked in, stood at the podium, bent his knees slightly to the height of the desk, and squinted at the desktop. Then he pointed to two desks.
The third desk in the first row.
The fourth desk in the sixth row.
He asked, “What’s the deal with these two desks?”
Of these two desks, the front one belonged to Xu Shijin, and the back one belonged to me.
He continued to explain, explaining his reason for choosing these two desks: “The desk in the first row, its surface is very clean, but there’s a lot of dust on it. You can see it hasn’t been used for a few days. Such a good spot couldn’t possibly be empty. So the only answer is that the student who originally sat here had some sort of accident and hasn’t come to class for a few days. As for the desk in the back, it’s very clean. It must have been recently dragged to a sink and thoroughly scrubbed.”
After he finished, I didn’t answer. He didn’t seem to be entirely expecting my answer either.
He sat down at the desk in the first row himself and opened the lid.
“Swoosh—”
A fist shot out of the desk like lightning.
But it didn’t reach his face. Although it was a sudden event, his nerves were sharp, and his movements were agile. He put his hand up in front of him and caught the fist that popped out of the desk.
“Whoa—”
He cried out, not just because of the prank spring-loaded fist, but also because of the snakes, centipedes, and insects that appeared in the desk—disgusting plastic models of that sort.
Of course, they were all put there by Jiang Jie and her lackeys.
“It seems the reason this student is out of school has emerged,” he said. “Subjected to very obvious school bullying, just like you. The very clean desk in the back, that’s your desk, isn’t it?”
I said nothing.
He had guessed it all anyway.
He didn’t press about the desk, but started taking out the spring-loaded fist and all the plastic insect models.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Throwing them all away, of course,” he answered as if it were the most natural thing to do. “If I hadn’t seen them, that would be one thing. But since I’ve seen them, am I supposed to just leave them here to poke at your little hearts?”
Talk about Xu Shijin, but why bring me into it again.
I was slightly displeased.
“Come on,” he said, “tell me the story of the classmate who sits here. You’re in the same class, you should know something, right?”
I didn’t want to say.
However, when there are too many active brain cells, just one or two keywords can trigger a cascade of memories.
Xu Shijin had not appeared at school since last Monday.
By Wednesday, her parents had come to the school, saying their daughter had left a suicide note and run away from home. Her whereabouts were now unknown. She might have already done something drastic, and they wanted Jiang Jie to pay with her life for their daughter’s.
The school authorities were at their wits’ end.
The conflict between Xu Shijin and Jiang Jie began when she talked back to Jiang Jie during a conversation.
From then on, Jiang Jie took a dislike to her and started playing small tricks to bully her.
In my previous impression, Xu Shijin was a quiet girl with average grades. Neither outstanding nor lagging behind, neither beautiful nor ugly, she was the spitting image of 39 out of the 49 people in the class.
These 39 people, of different genders and sizes, were all identically ordinary and faceless.
To others, I was probably just as faceless, the only memorable point being “always bullied and dirty.”
Everyone subconsciously thought her reaction should also be just as ordinary and unremarkable, swallowing her anger. However, that time, Xu Shijin fought back.
In the second year of high school, there was a rope-skipping competition. Each student had to pay 7 yuan to purchase a jump rope. This money was collected by the sports committee member, Jiang Jie, and given to the gym teacher to buy the ropes uniformly.
But after Jiang Jie collected all the money, during half a class break, the 343 yuan in her desk disappeared.
Class wasn’t in session yet. Jiang Jie had her lackeys close the front and back doors of the classroom and told all the students to open their bags. She was going to check everyone’s bag one by one.
The first was me.
I didn’t move, so they searched it themselves and were disappointed to find no money.
The other students, perhaps thinking that the innocent have nothing to fear, were all very cooperative, opening their bags for Jiang Jie to see. The only one who didn’t open her bag was Xu Shijin.
Xu Shijin said, “You are violating my personal freedom! You have no right to search my bag!”
In 2007, “personal freedom” was a new term. Jiang Jie was a school bully who wished she could walk sideways like a crab at school. Of course, she wouldn’t care about Xu Shijin’s resistance. Besides, the jump rope money had disappeared from her desk in just half a class break, and no students from other classes had come over during the break, so it must have been an inside job. Out of 49 people, 48 had been checked, leaving only the last one who refused to be checked. Suspicion naturally fell on the last person.
Even Jiang Jie, who seemed to only use her muscles to get through school, could make this level of deduction.
Before Jiang Jie could order someone to forcibly search her, the class bell rang. The teacher came in, and not just the teacher, but the head teacher too. I noticed that the subject teacher had arrived before the bell rang, and seeing the doors and windows closed, went back to the grade office to get the head teacher.
The head teacher sternly stopped the disorderly ruckus in the classroom. After finding out the reason, she took Xu Shijin and her schoolbag to the grade office. She hugged her schoolbag tightly, clutching her pocket, and went out with the head teacher.
After a while, Xu Shijin came back alone, still in the same posture of hugging her schoolbag and clutching her pocket.
Someone couldn’t help but ask, “Did the teacher search you?”
Xu Shijin held her head high. “The teacher has no right to search me either!”
Then, she put down her schoolbag in the classroom, suddenly ran out, and went to the restroom. On our academic building, there was a restroom on each floor, and the restroom was near the grade office.
Jiang Jie gave one of her lackeys a look. The lackey immediately followed Xu Shijin out. In a short while, she came back, and without caring that the teacher was still lecturing at the podium, she leaned close to Jiang Jie and said she saw Xu Shijin throw a wallet into the trash can in the restroom. When she picked up the wallet and looked, it had exactly 343 yuan, not a cent more, not a cent less.
Jiang Jie’s temper exploded. She immediately dragged Xu Shijin to the head teacher to have her convicted.
Then, what happened next was a real eye-opener for everyone.
Xu Shijin cried aggrievedly, saying that Jiang Jie’s lackey had framed her. Jiang Jie had always disliked her, and now she even wanted to slander her as a thief!
The head teacher also told Jiang Jie that Xu Shijin had already let her search her in the grade office earlier, and she didn’t have the jump rope money on her.
So, Jiang Jie received a punishment, had to write a self-criticism, and apologize to Xu Shijin in public.
I was surprised at first, but then I thought about it and understood.
Most of this was probably intentional on Xu Shijin’s part. Xu Shijin did steal the jump rope money and had thrown the wallet into the restroom trash can early on. Then she acted as if the money was still hidden on her and refused to be searched. She had calculated Jiang Jie’s hot temper of never being willing to suffer a loss, and step by step, she led Jiang Jie into the current situation where Jiang Jie couldn’t argue her way out.
After that, the matter didn’t end. Instead, it escalated uncontrollably.
The big sister, having suffered such a huge loss at the hands of the Xu Shijin she had always looked down on, of course couldn’t swallow her anger. So the degree of retaliation against Xu Shijin escalated linearly. That very evening after school, she had her lackeys block the front and back doors and throw chairs at Xu Shijin.
Xu Shijin also wrote a suicide note the next day and showed her injuries everywhere.
The suicide note was passed around the entire school.
At the same time, Xu Shijin wrote a letter to the city’s education bureau, reporting Jiang Jie’s parents for abuse of power and Jiang Jie herself for her domineering behavior at school. This was also a very novel approach. Because of this report letter, Jiang Jie’s parents, who had never appeared at the school, came out and apologized to Xu Shijin with their daughter, and also compensated Xu Shijin for her medical expenses.
I heard it was several thousand yuan.
Later, the head teacher moved Xu Shijin’s seat away from Jiang Jie’s—they originally sat very close—and moved Xu Shijin to the third desk in the first row, right under the teacher’s nose.
With things escalating to this point, perhaps Jiang Jie’s parents also talked to her. Jiang Jie did indeed restrain herself a bit. She no longer left obvious scars on Xu Shijin, but other pranks, like putting all sorts of things in her desk, increased, and she mobilized the entire class to isolate Xu Shijin.
Perhaps people who use their muscles for school learn to use their brains a little at times like this.
But when it came to using brains and causing trouble, Jiang Jie was really no match for Xu Shijin. On the surface, Jiang Jie was still domineering, still forcing a classmate to the point of writing suicide notes and crying.
But inwardly, who was gaining and who was losing, anyone with a bit of a brain knew.
This could perhaps be considered the wicked being punished by the wicked.
Xu Shijin did not stop her steps because of this periodic victory. She wrote suicide notes one after another, and in each letter, she found new ways to torment Jiang Jie and the teacher.
It could be said that both Jiang Jie and the head teacher were driven to distraction by her. They wanted to ignore her, but she could still take her suicide note and go up to the roof of the academic building.
She didn’t really jump.
Everyone in the school knew that the suicide note was just a means of coercion. Of course, she wouldn’t really jump.
But the dean of teaching, afraid of an accident, could only negotiate with her, asking if she was willing to transfer to Class A.
Class A, the honors class that you couldn’t even get into with money. Only the top fifty in the grade could study there. Once your exam scores fell, you would be moved to a regular class, and the empty spot would be filled by someone with good grades. Xu Shijin had managed to get something that even Jiang Jie’s father, a department head, couldn’t achieve, all through these suicide notes.
Hearing this news from the grade office, Jiang Jie cried her eyes out in the classroom.
And after the last suicide note, Xu Shijin had not appeared at school for a week now.
“Hey—”
I came back to my senses and saw his face and hand suddenly close.
I slapped his hand away.
My reaction was over the top, but he didn’t get angry. He just smiled and comforted me in a gentle voice:
“Don’t react so strongly. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Your face is scraped. I’ll put a bandage on it for you, see.”
He showed me the cat-paw bandage in his hand.
I stared at the cat paw.
Why would a grown man use such a silly bandage?
I tried to resist, but soon realized the disparity in our physical strength. I couldn’t resist. His palm supported the back of my head, and his other hand, holding the bandage, came over, gently sticking it on my face. He even blew on my face.
“There, it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
A cat paw was forcibly stuck on my scraped face, and he also took a new bandage and wrapped it around his own scraped and bleeding knuckle.
Then he said, “Were you thinking about the classmate who sat here just now? Don’t just think, tell me about it too. A person who would poison the mineral water is generally someone who dislikes or even hates the entire class or a specific person in the class. And this kind of dislike and hatred is more likely to appear in someone who is often bullied.”
“So you, Classmate Zhou,” he said, “are one of the suspects. When these poisoned students come to their senses and find out you were suspiciously at the school over the weekend, they might even, in their emotional state, directly label you as the suspect without asking for evidence. The malice of children can sometimes be terrifying.”
“You must clear your name—and you also want to find the real culprit. And I can help you.”
He curled his lips slightly, his finger tapping his temple.
The sunlight outside the window stained his fingertip with a touch of gold.
“My brain,” he said with a roguish smile, “is super useful.”
