I chose to tell him about Xu Shijin.
I thought about it carefully. After I chose a course of action almost identical to the poisoner’s out of curiosity, I did indeed need a sufficiently clever helper. He had to have a fair perspective, standing outside the classroom, observing everyone in the class, including me.
And this, I could not do.
Although I had no murderous intent towards Jiang Jie and the others, anger itself is a polarizing filter, causing their images in my mind to undergo changes that I myself could not perceive.
This was not fair.
For the truth, a miss is as good as a mile.
He finished listening and asked with great interest, “What was in those suicide notes? Tell me, I want to hear.”
His tone was as if I should remember.
I did remember, but my memory wasn’t top-notch. I could only guarantee a rough retelling, not an exact word-for-word repetition. I told him this beforehand. He said “Oh,” and looked a little disappointed.
“As if you could memorize it completely after hearing it once,” I jabbed at him.
“I actually can,” he said lightly. “I can memorize it after hearing it once, and I can memorize it after reading it once. Want to play a memorization game?”
He still had Xu Shijin’s desk open. He casually took a book from it and asked me to name a page number for him to look at for ten seconds.
“…”
I had no desire to play this boring game where I was highly likely to be shown up. I refused him flatly. He sighed dramatically, as if he had been eagerly anticipating going on stage to receive an award only to be told the organizer had decided to cancel the ceremony… as if I had bullied him.
It was too easy to get distracted with him. I pulled the topic back on track and tried hard to recall the contents of Xu Shijin’s suicide notes.
There were a total of six suicide notes from Xu Shijin. The first one was very simple, mainly accusing Jiang Jie of her arrogant violence.
The second was left when she chose to run away from home after being isolated, mainly accusing the school authorities of inaction.
The third was written when she returned to school after being away for two days. It used scenery to express feelings and feelings to allude to scenery. It was because this one was so well-written, like a template for composition taught by the language teacher, that the classmates who passed it around all thought Xu Shijin’s suicide note lacked genuine feeling.
I recited the third letter in order: “Yesterday at noon, the campus was playing Hu Yanbin’s ‘Parting Poem.’ The lyrics ‘a parting poem of two or three lines, who will sing for me on the road to the underworld’ is a true reflection of my heart…”
“I have a question,” he said. “She just came back from running away. How would she know what happened at school yesterday?”
I was slightly taken aback.
Before I could answer, he muttered to himself, “Ha, simple. Because she has a spy on campus! So even though she wasn’t here, she knows everything that’s going on at school. Does she have any very good friends?”
—Yes.
Xu Shijin had a very good friend.
Her name was Yu Xiaoyu.
The story of what happened to Yu Xiaoyu was actually a bit complicated. After a slight hesitation, I decided to tell him from beginning to end.
Yu Xiaoyu transferred to Class E only after the start of the second year of high school.
She was originally a student in Class A, but due to some incidents in the second semester of her first year, her grades were greatly affected, dropping from over six hundred to just over four hundred. So, after the placement exam at the end of the first year, she was assigned to Class E.
In the second semester of the first year, the students in the sports class had a sudden whim and came up with a terrible idea.
They wrote a love letter with no addressee and gave it to the classmate who came in last in the running test, telling him to randomly hand the love letter to a female student leaving the academic building after school. This was a “post-race punishment,” a “dare,” and a “random joke.”
But for the girl who was chosen, it was probably a random nightmare.
Yu Xiaoyu received this letter.
She herself, like her name, was a very quiet, nearsighted girl who usually wore a pair of round glasses. Even though she received a love letter from a boy she didn’t know at all, she still wrote back very seriously, thanking and rejecting the boy’s affection, and advising him to study hard.
As one might expect, this rejection letter was made public in the sports class.
The people in the sports class first laughed at their classmate who delivered the love letter, saying he had no charm. The classmate, humiliated and angry, ran up to Yu Xiaoyu and said to her, “It was just a bet. Take a look at yourself, ugly girl. Who would like you!”
And this was just the beginning.
The sports class students had enough restless energy, and school was boring enough, so even a small matter could be turned upside down and inside out by them. The sports class was next to the school’s bicycle shed. Every time students went to get their bikes, they would inevitably pass by the sports classroom. Yu Xiaoyu happened to ride her bike to and from school. Every time she passed by the sports class, the whole class would hoot and holler. Sometimes they would tell her to accept Zhang Yang—the one who gave her the love letter; sometimes they would directly call her “ugly girl” and tell her to look in the mirror; and other times, they would recite phrases from her rejection letter in a sarcastic and mocking tone.
It was under these circumstances that Yu Xiaoyu’s grades plummeted, and she ended up in Class E.
“She was a student from the honors class, right? Didn’t she tell the teacher about these things?” he suddenly interrupted my narrative.
“No,” I said.
“Why?” he asked again.
“I don’t know.”
I replied faintly. I really didn’t know. I knew about Yu Xiaoyu’s situation because it had been widely circulated as gossip. As for Yu Xiaoyu’s inner thoughts, I hadn’t spent any energy thinking about them. I couldn’t even control or understand my own heart.
My indifference must be very jarring.
Yu Xiaoyu and I were both victims of bullying, but I, this victim, was completely unconcerned about the other victim. This is probably the “pitiable people must have their detestable aspects.”
I waited for him to ask a question, but he said nothing, only motioning for me to continue.
“Later, Yu Xiaoyu came to Class E…”
After Yu Xiaoyu came to Class E, her situation didn’t seem to get any better. The sports class was still in its old place, it hadn’t moved. Yu Xiaoyu still had to go to the bicycle shed to get her bike every day. And the students in Class E, because there was a top student from Class A, were somewhat excited and hoped to copy Yu Xiaoyu’s homework.
Yu Xiaoyu had apparently never seen such a situation. She refused, saying it was better to do homework oneself.
She came to Class E later, had no familiar faces, and her grades didn’t seem that great. The head teacher just casually placed her at the back of the classroom, in an empty corner near the trash can.
The further one sat, the further one seemed to be from the people in the class.
The people from Class A, the original people of Class E, it was as clear as the Chu River and Han Border.
The people in the class felt that Yu Xiaoyu was arrogant and looked down on Class E, never talking to anyone from Class E.
They began to ostracize Yu Xiaoyu.
First, it was some ridicule and sneering, cold words and harsh remarks. After seeing no reaction from Yu Xiaoyu, the violence naturally escalated.
Silence and retreat will not eliminate violence; silence and retreat are the most beloved breeding grounds for violence.
“What happened next?” he suddenly asked.
Because when I got to this point, I had stopped.
The reason I stopped was because what happened next actually had something to do with me… People always hesitate a little when describing their own affairs.
After a moment’s hesitation, I continued, maintaining a neutral stance, not adding any emotion because of myself.
“The people in the class wrote Zhou Zhaonan and Yu Xiaoyu’s names on the blackboard, and drew a heart between the two names.”
He was stunned.
“Ah, you and Yu Xiaoyu are boyfriend and girlfriend, secretly dating, and they found out?”
“No,” I denied. “It was their malicious joke. I and Yu Xiaoyu are both bullied. A negative and a negative make a positive, isn’t that just right?”
I saw the confusion in his eyes, followed by a slowly emerging embarrassment. He was feeling embarrassed for me. He was really empathetic. I continued my description.
That day I walked into the classroom, and the whole class burst out laughing.
I hadn’t received this kind of treatment in a long time. I looked at the laughing people in the class, and at the only one, Yu Xiaoyu, who was lying on her desk with her face buried in her arms. I also saw the blackboard, with my name, her name, and the heart on it.
I stood there, without moving.
Malice was converging.
The insignificant malice of each person converges and accumulates, becoming mountains and seas, crushing and drowning the victim.
And they would forever think, “I was just laughing.”
Then suddenly someone stood up. It was Xu Shijin, sitting in the back row.
Xu Shijin rushed to the podium and erased the names on the blackboard with the eraser. After she finished erasing, she slammed the eraser on the floor and said loudly:
“What’s so funny? Which bastard wrote this!”
Thinking about it this way, the first outbreak of this usually ordinary girl, Xu Shijin, was not when she confronted Jiang Jie, but at this moment.
The lowered head of Yu Xiaoyu lifted. Her eyes were red.
The class was still giggling, not caring about Xu Shijin’s anger. No one would care about the anger of an ordinary girl.
Then Jiang Jie spoke up, a look of impatience on her face. “Are you guys done? If you want to bully Zhou Zhaonan, just bully Zhou Zhaonan. Don’t drag other irrelevant people into it. It’s boring. Don’t talk about Yu Xiaoyu anymore.”
Apart from her frequent targeting of me because of Huo Ranyin, she wasn’t a very unreasonable person at other times. It wasn’t strange for her to speak up for Yu Xiaoyu at this moment.
Plus, Jiang Jie was a sports student, so she didn’t need to copy homework anyway. Even if she needed to, she had Huo Ranyin from Class A to copy from. Yu Xiaoyu did not infringe on her interests, so she naturally had no ill feelings towards Yu Xiaoyu.
With Jiang Jie speaking up, no one in the class deliberately targeted Yu Xiaoyu anymore.
Yu Xiaoyu also became good friends with Xu Shijin.
Xu Shijin seemed to have become the person who could support her.
“Which one is Yu Xiaoyu’s seat?” he asked me.
I pointed it out to him. It was a desk at the very back of the classroom.
He closed Xu Shijin’s desk, walked to Yu Xiaoyu’s seat, opened the lid, and started rummaging through Yu Xiaoyu’s things.
“Looking for Yu Xiaoyu’s address?” I asked after watching silently for a while.
“Bingo,” he snapped his fingers. “Since Xu Shijin’s parents came to the school to make a fuss, it proves their daughter did indeed run away from home. There are limited places a 17-year-old girl can go when she runs away. Even if she doesn’t stay at a good friend’s house, her good friend should know some clues—although we could wait until Monday when Yu Xiaoyu comes to school and follow her, but for me, time is money, so let’s race against the clock.”
There weren’t many things in Yu Xiaoyu’s desk.
He first picked up her class notebooks. These notebooks were all of a basic style with kraft paper covers, nothing special.
He said, “Yu Xiaoyu rides her bike to and from school, right? The one-way trip for cycling to and from school is generally no more than 30 minutes. Considering that Yu Xiaoyu is taunted every time she passes the sports class next to the bicycle shed, it can be inferred that her home is not on a direct bus route from the school—only having to transfer repeatedly or the bus not reaching there at all can explain why she has to endure the taunts and ride her bike to and from school.”
He took out a map from his pocket and unfolded it.
It was a detailed map of Qin City.
With Qinjiang Affiliated High School as the center, he drew a circle with a red pen, then excluded the direct bus routes.
Then he said, “Now we’ve eliminated two-thirds of the places in the circle. The remaining—”
I waited for his analysis.
However, after looking at the map for five seconds, he folded it up and said, without a blush or a pant, “I haven’t even seen the person, I don’t know any of her characteristics. How could I possibly figure it out? Let’s just go to the school nurse’s office and see if there’s a contact book for Class E or something. Since the school has already discovered this public poisoning incident, they must be very concerned about the safety of the students in Class E now. It would be a reasonable approach to have the head teacher and the school nurse call each student one by one to ask.”
“…”
Speechlessly, I led him to the school nurse’s office.
In the nurse’s office, the head teacher of Class E was indeed there, and she was really holding…
The class address book. I watched to see how he would get it.
I saw him stretch his body on the spot, wipe his face, put on an anxious expression, and rush directly into the school nurse’s office!
The head teacher and the school nurse were startled by him, and then angry, but he acted even more anxious and angry than they were: “Teacher, you just called my home asking if my cousin was okay. An elderly person answered and couldn’t explain clearly, saying my cousin was fine, but now my cousin’s condition is very strange. Did he eat something bad at school? Otherwise, why would you call to ask? This is your responsibility as teachers!”
This is a civilized society, a society that constantly emphasizes civilization, politeness, humility, and courtesy.
However, the reality is, if you act both vigilant, difficult to deal with, and willing to make a scene, then you are destined to receive more favor than someone who is humble, polite, and reasonable. Just like bullies always enjoy more than the bullied.
It’s probably a case of ‘he who complains loudest gets the most,’ just like Xu Shijin.
Seeing this, I could already guess the smooth progression of what would follow. And as I expected, it went very smoothly.
Because in his ‘anxiety,’ he actually ‘forgot’ his cousin’s name. He kept saying ‘Chen’ for a long time but couldn’t come up with a full name.
The head teacher and the school nurse didn’t catch on. They even comforted him in a kind voice, mentioning a few students with the surname Chen that didn’t match, and then took out the address book and showed it to him directly.
He had said he had a photographic memory, and indeed he did. I timed it. The address book was in his hands for only five seconds before he put it down, randomly pointed to a student with the surname Chen in the front row, and walked out without waiting for the head teacher to say anything more.
He said, “Got the address. Yuhu Road, Meijiu Village, 3-501. Got the phone number too. But meeting in person fosters goodwill, so let’s find Yu Xiaoyu and talk to her face-to-face.”
Before he could take out his map again to look for Yuhu Road, I told him I knew the address and could take him there.
We left the school. Yuhu Road wasn’t close; it required two or three bus transfers, taking nearly an hour in total.
While walking on the road, I noticed many people around us were looking our way.
Were they looking at him?
No, they were looking at me.
When passing a stationery store, I saw my bruised and scraped face in the reflection of the store’s display window.
I really looked like a stray dog that had been kicked around on the street.
I pulled at the corner of my mouth at my reflection.
In the reflection, I also saw his gaze on me. He suddenly said, “Wait for me a second, I’m going next door to buy something.”
I stood outside and watched him walk into the sporting goods store next to the stationery store.
Was he going in to buy me a hat to cover my wounds? How thoughtful. I felt bored. I don’t like wearing hats. While a hat covers my face, it also obstructs my vision even more. My bowl cut already has the same effect as a hat. If I wear a hat, my gaze has to shift to the ground, and then I see more dirty things—things that stir the beast within me.
He came out. I was expecting to see the anticipated hat.
But there was no hat.
He was holding a pair of boxing gloves.
“…?” I looked at the boxing gloves in confusion, and watched in confusion as he hung the pair around my neck.
He adjusted the position of the gloves for me, letting the two chubby red gloves hang on my chest, one higher than the other. Then his hand reached for my chin and lifted my face.
My gaze went upwards, meeting his satisfied face and the azure sky behind him, with clouds like cotton.
He smiled at me, “This is more unique than a hat. My clever brain can always come up with something different, right?”
“Head up, chest out,” he told me. “You’re as smart as I am. These scars will sooner or later become your medals of manhood.”
