Chapter 73: In this moment, Chen Jingshen finally accepts it
Before speaking, Zhuang Fangqin had imagined all kinds of reactions Chen Jingshen might have once he learned the news: grief, shock, panic.
But Chen Jingshen was calm. He sat there without a word. Only when the broadcast booth opened and the speakers on the field started playing the intro to “Summer Wind” did he finally speak.
“What did he say?”
What did he say…
In Zhuang Fangqin’s mind, the image rose at once of that usually sloppy, brash boy, shoulders tiredly hunched, eyes lowered to the floor, saying offhandedly, “Teacher, I can’t keep studying.”
At first she refused to process his withdrawal. She told him that if he really could not continue, he should at least take a leave of absence, then come back once things were handled. Yu Fan shook his head. He said he would not be coming back.
Chen Jingshen listened and said nothing, only nodded. He packed up, swung on his backpack, and said, “I understand. Goodbye, teacher.”
Zhuang Fangqin had stood in the Year 3 Class 7 hallway and watched him go.
Classes had been out for a while. Only a few students remained on the track. Chen Jingshen walked toward the gate with his bag slung over one shoulder, his shadow stretched long by the setting sun, upright and alone.
Zhuang Fangqin took off her glasses. Tears sprang up again.
She had not finished what she meant to say.
She had wanted to slap Yu Fan. He was getting better, he was improving, so why had he been dragged back in again? But when she stood up, her raised hand turned into a hug.
“Does Chen Jingshen know?” she had asked.
She had clearly felt Yu Fan jolt, maybe finally understanding what she meant by “a thousand difficulties.” He stayed silent for a long time.
Only at the end did she hear a soft, choked, “Please don’t tell anyone, teacher.”
Chen Jingshen went to that shabby old complex.
Yu Fan never seemed to want anyone seeing him there. Every time Chen Jingshen came before, he would be yanked inside in a hurry.
But today he knocked for a long time, then sat on the steps outside for two hours, and still no one would let him in.
The stairwell lights were sound-activated. For a long stretch, the only glow in the stairwell came from a ghostly phone screen.
Text messages went unanswered. Calls went unheard. Chen Jingshen made a rule for himself: one round of Snake, then try again. It was a weekend. Yu Fan had already beaten his high score, barely breaking a thousand more points.
When another game ended, Chen Jingshen backed out by habit to check the top of the leaderboard, only to see his own avatar there.
But he had not beaten Yu Fan’s score.
He sat frozen for a long time, until someone came upstairs and the light clicked on. The person jumped at the sight of him and blurted, “Sh***! Are you insane sitting there without a word!”
Chen Jingshen did not respond. He finally moved his fingers and, following his rule, switched back to WeChat to send another message.
It would not go through anymore.
He sat on the stairs until ten at night. Only when his phone died did he rise at last and leave the building.
The old street was small. He combed through every shop, then went to Cool Boys, then even to the Yuhe internet café. By the time he had run through every place he could think of, even the barbecue stalls were closing up.
Standing outside the internet café, he tried calling again. This time there was not even the long “doo” of a dial tone. A cold, polite female voice informed him that his number, together with his WeChat, had been tossed into the trash.
When he got home, the house was brightly lit, quiet as an uninhabited island.
He had messaged Ji Lianyi earlier to say he would be late. Then his phone died. Judging from the lights, she was still waiting.
She must have been pacing between her room and the living room for a while. Her door stood wide open. She sat at her desk, hand to her forehead, eyes closed with fatigue as she spoke on the phone.
Chen Jingshen lifted his hand to knock.
“Mom, don’t contact the schools abroad. Don’t arrange a transfer for Jingshen for now.” Responding to a question on the other end, Ji Lianyi rubbed her brow and said vaguely, “It’s nothing. There was a bad-influence student before, I was afraid he would affect him. That student has withdrawn now, so it is more or less resolved…”
She fell abruptly silent when she saw her son at the door.
Ji Lianyi had always believed her marriage was good, enviable even. Reality had slapped her. Her marriage was full of lies and deceit, filthy to the core.
Afterward, she told herself every hour of every day that it was fine, that it did not matter. She might have lost a marriage, but she still had a perfect son who was obedient, upright, and top of his class. Yet right now, her perfect son stood straight before her and, in the same calm tone he used to say “I’m going to school,” told her:
“I’m gay.”
The sentence hit Ji Lianyi, who had been trying so hard to hide this, like a blow to the head. It took several minutes before she found her voice. “No, that is not true… you are not. You were just led astray. He threatened you. He admitted it himself… kids like that lack family education, which is why their sexuality gets twisted and perverted. You must not—”
“He is perfectly normal. The twisted one is me.”
“No! No!” Ji Lianyi snatched the cup she had bought only days ago and smashed it on the floor, shards scattering everywhere. She screamed hysterically, “It is him! It is him! You are normal. How could you be gay? Are you still afraid of him? But he is gone. You do not have to keep—”
“I wrote him a confession letter. I chased him for half a semester. I brought him home, the time you came back—”
Slap. The crisp crack of a palm cut him off.
His face tilted aside. It did not hurt. He said, “He rejected me the whole time. He said he was not gay. But I would not let him go, I—”
He did not finish. Ji Lianyi clapped both hands over his mouth, nails digging into his cheeks. Expressionless, she shook her head. “No. That is just your adolescent confusion. You are normal, Jingshen. You used to be so obedient, so good. Why? Why would you—”
Chen Jingshen caught her wrists and lowered her hands.
“Because whether perverted or normal, I am a person,” he said quietly. “Not a dog you raised.”
Ji Lianyi stood stunned. Her strength seemed to drain away. She could only watch as Chen Jingshen picked up his bag from the floor and turned toward the stairs.
Before going up, he looked back and asked, “Do you know where he went?”
She was still staring at the wooden door of her room. She murmured, “Jingshen, you are not gay.”
Chen Jingshen turned and went upstairs.
Early the next morning, the downstairs was dead quiet. He opened his door to find her staring blankly from the sofa, looking as if she had not slept, the coffee table crowded with pill boxes.
Her mental state worsened quickly, and she was soon admitted to the hospital. Chen Jingshen stayed with her for two nights, until his grandmother arranged for caregivers to take shifts so he could return to school.
When he arrived at school, several people were crouched by Class One’s door, and the moment they saw him they ran over.
“Top student, did you know Yu Fan dropped out?” Zhu Xu blurted.
“He quit the WeChat group, deleted us, and blocked my number! What about you, can you get him on the phone?” Zuo Kuan demanded.
Chen Jingshen shook his head.
“Do you know where he went?” Wang Lu’an asked, eyes red. “He didn’t tell me anything.”
“I don’t.”
“F***, I told you. If even we don’t know, there is no way he would know, but you still had to come ask.” Zuo Kuan thought for a moment. “Should we ask your homeroom teacher? She must know, right?”
“I already did. She wouldn’t say,” Wang Lu’an answered.
“Ask again, come on!”
The three boys blew downstairs like the wind, leaving only Zhang Xianjing, who had not spoken, still standing there.
Chen Jingshen was about to step into the classroom when he heard her rasp out, “Top student, you and Yu Fan, were you two… in a—”
The bell cut her off. Zhang Xianjing shut her mouth, suddenly a little grateful she had not finished the question.
“Yeah.” Once the bell fell silent, she heard Chen Jingshen say it.
Ji Lianyi’s condition was worse than before. Chen Jingshen visited every weekend, even if she did not want to speak to him.
On weekdays, after school, he went to the old complex. He went so often that everyone in the building had seen him by then.
As usual, he stopped before the old black wooden door and was about to knock when a little girl on the stairs spoke up.
“Big brother, are you here to see other big brother?” She gripped her backpack straps and peered at him.
“Yeah. Have you seen him?” Chen Jingshen asked.
The little girl shook her head. “Big brother moved away. He went with that big bad man.”
She found it very strange.
She had said clearly that the big brother from this apartment had moved. Why was this brother still knocking?
She glanced downward along the stairs. “Big brother, didn’t your big sister, your girlfriend, come with you?”
“What girlfriend big sister,” Chen Jingshen said.
“Your girlfriend!”
“No.”
“Huh? But big brother said you do!”
Chen Jingshen’s hand stopped midair. He turned his head. “What did he say?”
“He said…” The girl thought for a moment, then her eyes widened. “Oh!”
“He said you were already someone else’s boyfriend!”
Right? That was it, right? She tilted her head and thought for a good while before feeling certain.
When he did not answer, she looked down over the stair. “So, big brother, are you… big brother? What is wrong?”
These days, Chen Jingshen had been stretched tight as a wire. He numbly rotated through home, school, and the old building, the same three points for a long time, as if completing a task. If he kept at it, if the count ticked high enough, maybe the door would open.
For an instant, that fuzzy number became clear. He had long since surpassed it. The door before him still did not move. Silent, immovable.
The sound-activated light clicked off. Darkness fell, a brief, cool hush in the stairwell.
In that moment, Chen Jingshen finally accepted the fact that he could not find Yu Fan.
He stood there in silence, lifted a hand to his eyes, and felt heat pooling in his palm.
A school or a class rarely changes because one person leaves.
Teenage feelings flare and fade. With the heavy workload of senior year, time passed, and most of Class 7 grew used to days without Yu Fan.
Only the boys in the back row still nursed anger at his vanishing act, swearing loudly in the bathroom while sneaking smokes.
At parties they swore too that whether he ever came back or not, they were strangers from now on, they would never waste another word on him.
Later the pressure of the college entrance exam ground them forward step by clumsy step. They tried, painfully and slowly, to study a bit more. Bit by bit, they stopped bringing him up.
But Yu Fan’s desk stayed where it had always been, along with the one beside it. For every exam Wang Lu’an would automatically carry two extra desks and chairs, then quietly put them back afterward.
The little WeChat group went quiet for a while, then grew lively again. Two people were missing from the chat, one who had quit the group, the other who no longer spoke.
Wang Lu’an once joked that it felt like Chen Jingshen had never been in their class at all. After Yu Fan withdrew, that feeling only grew stronger.
They were still in the same school and in the same WeChat group, yet they rarely saw or spoke to him. He no longer appeared on the Monday platform, though everyone knew he was still first in every exam.
Even when they heard he had an early admission to Jiangcheng University, they only praised him in private. In the group, no one mentioned it.
Occasionally they would pass in the corridors. Everyone felt he had changed somehow, though no one could say how.
Which seemed normal enough.
In that dull, stifling senior year, even Zhang Xianjing stopped dyeing her hair and could not be bothered with flashy nails, spending her days with a tired face, lying over her desk and reciting.
Winter turned to spring. Wang Lu’an and Zuo Kuan even started a cross-class study group: whoever scored higher got to be “dad” for a month. The two took turns playing each other’s father and son and kept falling out, over and over.
At the very end of senior year, on the day of graduation photos, summer heat once again blazed.
The night before, Zhang Xianjing had forwarded a bunch of cheesy graduation traditions into every group: signing names on school uniforms, confessing with the second button closest to your heart, shredding books… After lurking for ages, Zhuang Fangqin finally popped up to say that if anyone dared to tear a book, she would tear them.
Warnings were useless against the crowd. The next day everyone still took their graduation photos in a blizzard of paper scraps. On the far right of the last row of Class 7, Wang Lu’an deliberately left the space at his side empty. It was a small bit of romance for him and his brother.
In the final minutes before leaving campus, Zhang Xianjing, wearing a school shirt covered in the signatures of everyone in Class 7, went back to the classroom to grab her water bottle.
She drained it, picked up a marker, and scrawled on a blank spot she had saved on the shirt: Yu Fan. Chen Jingshen.
She re-tied her ponytail, gathered her things, and started out. Before she left, she glanced without thinking at the seat that had been empty for nearly a year.
And paused.
A slant of morning light fell into the room.
Inside the empty desk lay a clean, translucent white button.
They had tucked themselves into a corner of the campus, keeping each other company, quiet and alone.
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