Chapter 70 – You Ruined My Son
Senior year flew by. By the time the second monthly exams ended, Nancheng had slipped into early autumn. The heat eased, and the new floor fan Yu Fan had just bought was already shoved into a corner to gather dust.
The blue school T-shirt was out of season. Yu Fan pulled a barely worn white uniform shirt and black pants from the closet and threw them on. He habitually left the top button open, then hesitated with his backpack on and fastened the very top one too.
With all the buttons done he did not look dumb, which was a relief. He brushed his teeth, washed up, checked himself in the mirror a few times, grabbed his bag, and headed for the door.
“Wait,” Yu Kaiming said from the dining table.
Yu Fan paused and shot him a cold glance over his shoulder.
“I made noodles. Eat before you go,” Yu Kaiming said around a mouth slick with oil, pointing his chopsticks at the pot on the table.
Silence fell. He had wanted to act natural and loosen things up. When no answer came, he finally looked up. “What are you staring at? Come eat. Oh, and I bought some buns too. F***ing long line for those. Take some to school, share with your close friends, got it? Here, put them in your—”
An empty liquor bottle sliced through the air, skimmed past his cheek, and exploded against the wall with a crack.
He flinched so hard his chopsticks jerked. Eyes bulging, he came back to himself and turned to curse. “You—”
“Say that word again and I tear your mouth apart. Also,” Yu Fan said, “don’t talk to me.”
He left under Yu Kaiming’s furious, helpless stare. He hefted his backpack, ready to head down the stairs, when something in the corner of his eye caught a small head peeking over the stairwell rail, a tiny ponytail bobbing.
The little girl from upstairs was crouched behind the railing with a pink satchel, clearly waiting for her parents to walk her to school. She blinked and chirped, “Big brother.”
Yu Fan looked up. “Say it.”
“Are you going to school?”
He could not be bothered. He lifted a foot to go.
“Big brother!” she called again, hurrying, “Why doesn’t the other big brother come to see you anymore?”
He stopped. “What other big brother?”
“The one who’s really tall and really handsome…”
“When did you see him?” Yu Fan frowned, thought for a second, and asked.
“Right here. He said he was waiting for you to wake up.” She pointed to the patch of empty floor by his door. “When is he coming again?”
“He is not,” Yu Fan told her without mercy.
Her face fell. She shuffled a few steps closer. “Huh? Then can you, can you ask him to come?”
“What for.”
She pinched the hem of her white dress, a gap-toothed grin flashing. “I want to be that big brother’s girlfriend!”
“…”
She squatted, clutched the bars, and squashed her face against them. “Please? Please please please?”
“No.”
“Why?” She screwed up her face, breath drawn to protest.
“He belongs to someone else.” Yu Fan tapped her forehead with two fingers. “No chance, pipsqueak.”
Zhuang Fangqin’s moods had been swinging hard. Seeing Yu Fan gave her a headache. Seeing the class average rise made her happy. After a while she felt split down the middle.
This monthly exam the class average crept up again. When she handed back papers, she tossed a few lollipops to each student.
So at noon self-study half the kids had candy sticks in their mouths.
“I’m done. Done! I worked my a** off and my math score is still seven points lower than last time!” Zhang Xianjing snapped, flinging her pen.
“Come on, this test was hard,” Wang Lu’an said. “Did you not see your grade rank went up? Everybody tanked.”
“…”
Wang turned and spotted his other bro frowning at his paper.
“What is it, Yu Fan? With a score like that you are still mad?” Wang said. “You almost broke top 400 in the grade.”
What good was top 400. Score-wise he was still miles from the universities he wanted.
He had started from so far back that his rank shot forward at first. The further he went, the slower the climb. His score barely budged now. Yu Fan stared at the numbers that looked the same as last time and rubbed his face in irritation without a word.
The chair beside him scraped. He thought it was Wang and was about to tell him to sit in his own seat when a blank competition problem set dropped on his desk, followed by a very familiar expressionless face.
Yu Fan shoved the lollipop to one corner of his mouth and stared, stunned. Before he could speak, Wang beat him to it. “Top student? What are you doing here? Not going home for lunch today?”
“Family stuff. I didn’t go,” Chen Jing Shen said as he smoothly slid Yu Fan’s paper out of his hands.
Yu Fan froze with his arm midair, then kicked the chair leg. “Why are you looking at my paper?”
Chen glanced at the score. “Not bad. Did Fangqin go over it yet? Anything you didn’t get?”
“She didn’t. Not bad my a**, I am still more than eighty off the total I need.”
Class 7 did not have Class 1’s stranglehold study vibe. Some kids slept, some prepped, some whispered or went over questions up front.
Wang had gone to the front to argue with the discipline monitor about why his name had been written down in third period. Everyone was turned toward the blackboard, so no one noticed the back row.
Which was why Chen reached over and ruffled his boyfriend’s hair. “I’ll explain it.”
After going a few rounds and returning in triumph an hour later, Wang saw his bro half slouched against the wall, listening to a low explanation, a lollipop clenched in his teeth like a cigarette.
Wang remembered a few problems he had not understood. With the top student right here, jackpot. He dove into his disaster of a drawer, rustled around forever, pulled out his test, and turned. “Top student…”
Chen pushed his chair back and stood. “What.”
“You’re leaving already?”
“Mm. Ten minutes to the bell,” Chen said.
“…Right.”
Wang sagged into his seat, clutching his paper full of wrong answers, and watched Chen pick up a stack of sheets and his pen and leave with a lollipop in his mouth.
He sighed. He would ask Fangqin after school… Hold up?
Something occurred to him and he jerked upright to stare at the desk beside his own.
Yu Fan frowned. “What now.”
“The top student’s lollipop had a pink stick. Strawberry.”
“?”
“You’re the only one who got a strawberry in the whole class,” Wang said slowly. “That lollipop was in your mouth just now.”
“…”
“…”
They stared at each other in silence. Soon Wang noticed something else. The cuffs of Yu Fan’s uniform shirt, a wrinkled mess all morning, were now neatly folded, every edge crisp. Exactly the way Chen did it.
Yu Fan followed his gaze to his forearm. After a long beat he stood. “Bathroom.”
“Hey, I will go too. Tell me what—”
“Don’t follow. Buzz off.”
“…”
Yu Fan hid by the window near the bathroom and decided to wait for the bell.
Hands in his pockets, bored, his eyes drifted up toward the sixth floor.
All Chen’s fault. Why did he have to want candy, why did his hands have to mess with his sleeves…
Two minutes to the bell. Yu Fan pulled out his phone and opened Chen Jing Shen’s chat. He had typed two characters when the phone buzzed. A text banner slid down from the top.
[Unknown number: Hello, Yu Fan. Please come to the café at 11 Nanyang Street right now.]
Yu Fan’s fingers stopped. He frowned blankly. Nanyang Street? Behind their school?
He rarely texted anyone. His last text was months ago, a nearby school trying to set a fight. This did not sound like that.
The bell rang. Yu Fan swiped the notification away to head to class. A second later the phone chimed again.
[Unknown number: I am Chen Jing Shen’s mother. I want to talk to you about him.]
…
He ran into Hu Pang on the way downstairs. Where are you going, Hu asked.
Helping a teacher move something, Yu Fan said. In the past Hu would have hauled him back by the collar. Lately Yu Fan’s behavior had been so good that Hu believed him and waved him on.
As soon as Hu disappeared into the building, Yu Fan vaulted the back wall like he had been born doing it.
He was elsewhere all the way to the café.
What did Chen’s mom want with him? They were not in the same class anymore. They were not even deskmates. Why seek him out?
He reflexively assumed the worst. Maybe she already knew. How? House cameras, phones, or that day on Chen’s birthday, when she was in the living room and saw.
So was his brain broken that day? Why sit there feeding mosquitoes waiting for him? Why not stash the stuff and leave?
Blindsided by the text, Yu Fan wondered what she would say if she did know. He was not good at reasoning or arguing. He preferred using his hands. So he lowered his head and silently rehearsed replies as he walked, eyes on the bricks.
-I saw you. Are you and my son dating?
-Yes.
-Break up with him immediately.
-Tell your son to come say that to me.
-Name your price. How much to leave my son?
-I will think about it.
He could not help a small laugh at that, a little absurd and a little bitter.
Did Chen know Ji Lianyi had asked him out? From lunchtime, probably not. Good.
Yu Fan had never been scared of much. Ever since he could remember he had fought back against a man many times his size. If five guys were in a fight, he would charge in anyway. And yet, outside the café, his feet stalled.
After a few seconds he pushed his fringe back and opened the door.
After dropping her son at school, Ji Lianyi had been sitting in the café ever since.
She had booked the whole place. With no noise around, she could think through how to negotiate with Yu Fan.
She had steered tables for more than a decade in commercial negotiations. Today, facing a teenager, she was the one who felt on edge.
The door opened. The clerk she had briefed started to step forward, but she raised a hand to stop him. He understood, topped off her coffee, and went to the back.
When she lifted her eyes she saw that wild grass hair, the images she could not stop replaying flashed up, and a wave of nausea rose before she could stop it. Her fingers trembled. She leaned back a hair and forced her tone level. “Sit.”
The chair scraped roughly. The boy dropped into it across from her.
They faced off without a word, silence feeling like a test.
After a while, against her will, Ji gave him a once-over. A rumpled collar. A thin face. A slouched, careless posture. Hands limp on the table. A body steeped in the reek of the street.
She swallowed her distaste and began. “You should know why I am here.”
“I don’t,” Yu Fan said.
“You and Jing Shen,” she said. “I have seen it.”
His fingers twitched, barely. He said, flat as ever, “Oh.”
“You will break up with him,” Ji said.
“Tell him to ask me himself.”
That indifferent face sent waves of familiar anxiety through her again. She clenched and released her beautiful long fingers, over and over, then said evenly, “Say it straight. How much to leave my son.”
He let out a small laugh that prickled her skin. Eyes down, lazy voice, “I will have to think about it.”
That sound snapped her straight back into the last few times she had faced another man. Her nerves jerked taut. She took a breath and added, “Fine. But be clear. Once you take this money, you and your father will never appear before me or my son again.”
At that word Yu Fan’s head snapped up.
Every trace of expression vanished. He stared at her, breath barely lifting his chest.
Ji’s face did not change. “I know you two have a plan. Let me make this clear. Every transfer I made to you, every chat log and call record, I have saved. I have consulted a lawyer. I can say plainly the amount now is enough to put the two of you away for years.”
Yu Fan only looked at her.
“If I really meant to sue, I would not have asked you here. I will be direct. I will pay to make this go away. I will give you a last lump sum. You get your father to delete the photos in front of me, then sign a guarantee…”
“What photos?” he said, toneless.
She stalled, the images she could not choke down surging up. She closed her eyes and asked, “What do you think?”
“What photos.”
“…The library. The park,” Ji said. Then, after a beat, “Or are there others?”
The library.
Yu Fan’s brain felt pierced with a stick. The memory hurt. After Chen had returned home those days, they had only gone to the library once. They did problems, read, then on the way back, in a corner of the park they thought was empty, they kissed.
He had not been home long before Yu Kaiming returned. Soon after, one day out of nowhere, Yu Kaiming had asked why he was not going out.
“There aren’t any,” Yu Fan heard himself say.
Ji did not believe him, but she was tired of grinding this point. “In any case, if we settle this today, you will delete everything in front of me and break up with my son. If you and your father try to extort me again, I will take legal action. Now name your number.”
“How did he find you?” Yu Fan asked.
That single question yanked her back into the nightmare she had been living.
She would never forget that day. She was in her car when a man knocked on the window. When she lowered it, he grinned with a mouthful of yellow teeth and called her “in-law.”
The torment began then. She received a photo of her son kissing a boy. Then texts and calls demanding money. She could barely sleep. Every time she closed her eyes at night her head filled with:
“Go to the cops and I swear I will plaster your son’s gay photos all over Nancheng before they haul me in!”
“Do not tell the kids, I think they are a good match.”
“You think it is my kid doing your kid or your kid doing mine?”
Ji could not understand why Yu Fan asked what he already knew. She forced her thoughts back and repeated, coolly, “How much.”
Her gaze flickered to his forearm.
Yu Fan drew his arm back and dropped his hand below the table, hiding the neatly folded cuff Chen had rolled for him at lunch. He asked in a flat voice, “How much has he gotten from you so far?”
“Eight hundred thousand.”
“Oh,” Yu Fan said. “I will go back and discuss it.”
Which meant yes.
Ji pushed a packet across the table. “These are legal provisions my team compiled, spelling out the sentences for crimes like yours if you were charged.”
In truth, she had no real intent to prosecute. She could not bear the idea of one more soul on earth learning of this.
So when she saw Yu Fan take the packet, a long breath slid out of her.
“Once you agree on a number, have your father text me directly. Also, while I handle transferring Jing Shen to a different school, I want you to stay home and not contact him. I don’t want his studies disrupted.” She paused. “That should not be hard for you.”
“Mm.”
With everything arranged, Ji rose, unwilling to linger.
She took up her bag, stood with her customary poise, and turned to go. After two steps she stopped, turned back.
She swallowed several times before she could ask, voice lowered. “One last thing. You and Jing Shen… did you force him?”
The sound was small, like a drowning person’s last struggle.
Yu Fan dropped his eyes, glanced at his cuff, and said yes.
Ji finally breathed. She took the untouched coffee and threw it in his face. Brown liquid ran from his hair to his chin and soaked the white uniform shirt.
He shut his eyes by instinct. When he opened them, her voice was shaking.
“You ruined my son. You are as disgusting as your father.”
0 Comments