46

On their way out, Aunt Wu stuffed a little red envelope into each of their hands and said it was New Year money.

The second he got home, Wen Fu hurried to put the money into the piggy bank. Last time, it was Fei Bolin who'd put in the prize money. This was the first time Wen Fu had ever saved money himself.

He sat cross-legged in front of the cabinet, hugged the piggy bank tight to his chest, lowered his head, and with open curiosity in his eyes, fed the bills from Aunt Wu's red envelope into the slot one by one.

So this was what saving money felt like.

Fei Bolin leaned against the wall and watched. It took Wen Fu a full minute to push two hundred yuan in, centimeter by centimeter. He couldn't help laughing. 'Want to put mine in too?'

As he spoke, he held out his red envelope.

Wen Fu looked up. 'Can I?'

'You can,' Fei Bolin said. 'Think of it as from me.'

Wen Fu took it, then lifted the envelope to his nose and sniffed it first.

Fei Bolin didn't get it. Frowning in amused confusion, he said, 'What're you sniffing at?'

Wen Fu answered like it was the most natural thing in the world. 'An envelope Bolin-ge touched smells good.'

'...'

Fei Bolin went speechless. For no reason at all, the tips of his ears turned red. He rubbed the end of his nose, turned his face away, and headed for the kitchen. 'What nonsense are you talking about.'

Wen Fu seriously opened the red envelope. 'It does smell good.'

Fei Bolin said, 'It's the money that smells good.'

'Money smells bad,' Wen Fu shot back at once. 'Bolin-ge smells good.'

Getting told over and over that he smelled good made Fei Bolin a little flustered and annoyed. 'What do you know about what smells good or bad?'

Wen Fu turned to look at him and nodded solemnly. 'I do know.'

Good was good. Bad was bad. What was so hard about that?

Fei Bolin strode into the kitchen. 'Can't be bothered arguing with you.'

Wen Fu blinked, not understanding why, then turned back and kept saving his money.

As soon as he was done, Fei Bolin came out holding a bottle of Wuliangye and a tiny clear liquor cup, walked over to the sofa, and grabbed the backpack off it to put them inside.

As he packed, he asked Wen Fu, 'I'm heading out... to visit a grave. You staying home, or coming with me?'

Without even turning around, Wen Fu said, 'I'm coming with you.'

Only after he said it did he finally look up from the piggy bank. 'Visit a grave?'

Fei Bolin lowered his eyes. 'Yeah. For my mom.'

Wen Fu set down the piggy bank. 'I want to go.'

'Then get up.'

They were just about to leave when Wen Fu suddenly thought of something and went into the kitchen to grab several candied hawthorn skewers.

When Fei Bolin made candied hawthorn, he used toothpicks. Since he was making them at home for Wen Fu to eat, he'd kept it simple and only put one piece on each stick.

He saw Wen Fu clutching four or five little skewers, each one carefully wrapped in the leftover wax paper from the fridge, and just shook his head with a laugh. 'Twelve tangyuan still didn't fill you up?'

Wen Fu glanced at him and didn't answer.

The cemetery was in Nanxi City, pretty far from home. They took a bus for over half an hour, then a coach to another city. After getting off, they hailed a cab. After all that back and forth, they finally arrived at Lin Yuanyi's grave.

Lin Yuanyi's headstone was black. In the black-and-white memorial photo, her eyes were sharp, her lips curved in a smile. Her face was thin, but she looked vividly alive.

Even though they'd already laid everything about the Buddha Talisman out in the open, the moment Wen Fu saw Lin Yuanyi's photo, he still instinctively clenched Fei Bolin's hand. 'Bolin-ge... it's her.'

It really was her.

The woman who'd pulled him from the raging river ten years ago really had those same eyes, those same brows. Only now did he realize she looked about half like Fei Bolin, except sharper than him, with less softness. With just the faintest smile, Wen Fu could almost hear her telling him in that slightly stern voice, 'Don't run off to somewhere that dangerous again next time.'

With her smile fixed there forever, Wen Fu could remember her patiently explaining to him too: 'I'm not your mom.'

'Mom,' he called softly to the photo.

Fei Bolin gently squeezed his hand back, set down the flowers and fruit he'd brought, then took the bottle of Wuliangye and the little cup from his bag and poured a drink for Lin Yuanyi.

Lin Yuanyi had liked to drink when she was alive. Not heavily, just a little now and then. She especially liked Wuliangye. Back when she was in School, it was right next to the old Wuliangye factory. Every day when she opened her eyes, the air around campus smelled of fermenting grain.

She just couldn't bear to buy it when she was alive.

Once the fruit was arranged, the flowers set down, and the liquor poured, Fei Bolin stood up, took Wen Fu's hand, and stood with him before the grave. The first thing he said was, 'Mom, Happy New Year.'

He lifted the hand that was holding Wen Fu's. 'I brought didi to see you today.'

'He's grown up,' Fei Bolin said in a low, unhurried voice, like he was reminiscing. 'I don't know if you still recognize him.'

Wen Fu tipped his head up to look at Fei Bolin. 'Bolin-ge?'

'Hm?'

Wen Fu looked back at the headstone. 'Is she in there?'

'No.' Fei Bolin shook his head. 'She's a child now. What's in there is the ashes from her past life.'

Lin Yuanyi wasn't in the grave. That was what Fei Bolin hoped for. If there really was another life, then he prayed she'd have a brand-new soul and start her next life early.

Wen Fu took the five candied hawthorn skewers out of his padded coat pocket and lined them up in front of the grave. He'd already eaten all the strawberry ones, so the only thing he could bring Lin Yuanyi was the last five hawthorn ones left.

'Would a kid like these better?' he muttered under his breath.

'If you like them, she likes them,' Fei Bolin said.

By the time they left the cemetery, a fine drizzle had started falling. Wen Fu was bundled up warm, and just as he reached a hand up to catch the rain and play with it, Fei Bolin yanked up the hood on the back of his padded coat and covered most of his face.

'...'

'...'

He looked like one of those little ghost kids in capes from foreign movies.

Wen Fu tried to pull the hood back down, but Fei Bolin pressed a hand to his head. 'Leave it. Let's go.'

So he brought his ghost cat home.

By the time they got back, it was already five in the afternoon. Fei Bolin, rare for him, felt tired. He lay on the sofa for a good while. After resting, he went to make dinner and found that Wen Fu had already washed the vegetables he'd bought and was now closing the rice cooker after rinsing the rice, ready to start it.

That was progress.

He felt a flicker of relief and pride, right up until he noticed a fresh, lazy little rice weevil floating on the water in the rice cooker pot.

'...'

Progress, but not much.

Still, progress was progress.

Fei Bolin stopped Wen Fu from pressing the cook button in time, sent him back to the living room, then washed the rice again himself before starting on the dishes.

Figuring Wen Fu must've been tired today too, he even scraped the crispy rice off the bottom of the cooker and ate it clean at dinner.

After dinner, the two of them wordlessly crawled under the covers early and fell asleep in each other's arms, dreamless through the night.

Once the new year was over, Lin's Convenience Store hurried back into business. During winter break, they could make extra money off deliveries. A week earlier, final exam scores had come out. Fei Bolin was steady as ever with a 688, top ten in the grade. Wen Fu's total was almost sixty points behind him, and one look at his Chinese score showed why: he'd barely scraped a passing mark. In that one subject alone, he was nearly forty points behind Fei Bolin.

Fei Bolin stayed behind the counter, watching the store while keeping an eye on Wen Fu as he redid his Chinese final.

Wen Fu had his chin on the table. Usually his face gave nothing away, but the second he had to do Chinese, it showed a hundred kinds of reluctance. Subtle reluctance was still reluctance.

Fei Bolin couldn't stand how half-dead he looked sprawled there and wanted to tell him to sit up straight. His ruthless iron hand was just about to reach for Wen Fu's back when Wen Fu instinctively dodged first, then quickly tipped his head back, craned his neck to look at Fei Bolin, blinked once, then again, and asked in confusion, 'Bolin-ge?'

Fei Bolin's hand suddenly forgot how to be ruthless.

He patted Wen Fu's back lightly. 'Sit properly.'

Wen Fu obediently sat up.

'Do your questions. Stop looking at me.' Fei Bolin pressed that round, messy cowlicked head back toward the paper. 'Are the answers written on my face?'

Wen Fu lowered his head and went back to the test.

Customers kept coming up to check out one after another. Luckily, after New Year, Fei Bolin had set Wen Fu up with a little folding wooden table. Fei Bolin worked the register, and Wen Fu sat beside the little table doing questions.

Over half an hour passed. After one wave of customers finally cleared out, Fei Bolin turned to see how Wen Fu was doing.

Wen Fu had slumped sideways across the tabletop with one arm under his head, and his messy hair blocked the entire test paper from Fei Bolin's view.

Fei Bolin quietly walked over and looked past Wen Fu's shoulder to check his answers. Only then did he notice Wen Fu's eyelashes trembling slightly. He'd fallen asleep right on top of the test.

His gaze dropped to the paper. He meant to check Wen Fu's multiple-choice and written answers.

...it was a pile of incomprehensible scribbles.

Fei Bolin's face went completely dark.

He went to the shelf, grabbed a box of Jule Milk, came back, and tapped the table.

Wen Fu sat up and rubbed his eyes. 'Is it lunchtime?'

'No.' Fei Bolin held the milk out to him. 'Want some milk?'

Wen Fu's eyes lit up. He was just about to take it when Fei Bolin pulled his hand back. 'You can drink it when you're done.'

Wen Fu's eyes dimmed again.

He dragged it out until two in the afternoon before he finally finished the objective and subjective questions before the essay. Fei Bolin picked up the paper to check it. Wen Fu got about half the multiple-choice right, all the classical poetry dictation right, barely scored anything on reading comprehension and classical Chinese translation, and if you added in the thirty-something points he usually got on essays, patched together here and there, it came out to about his final exam score.

He held the paper and looked it over for a long while before deciding to start with Wen Fu's classical Chinese section.

For one thing, classical Chinese was the easiest place to score through brute memorization. Since Wen Fu could get every poetry dictation question right, that meant he wasn't lazy. His problem was more with language comprehension and expression.

That wasn't his fault. Growing up in an environment like that had made him quiet and withdrawn. Closing himself off had been the only way he knew to protect himself, physically and mentally.

Once he really got the classical Chinese section down, the rest wouldn't be that hard. For modern reading comprehension, Wen Fu just needed those standard answer templates and enough practice. As for grammar and the like in the objective questions, even pretty good students often couldn't fully master that stuff, so that could wait until last.

Fei Bolin was the hands-on type. Once he'd made up his mind, as soon as School started and he got the textbooks, he used one evening study period to map everything out for Wen Fu.

Fei Bolin's method was pretty extreme. He ignored every unit except classical Chinese and poetry. Aside from the eight poems, there were three classical prose texts in a semester. Starting right at the beginning of term, Wen Fu had to work from the first text forward, using the notes under the text to memorize and understand every single word in every piece of classical Chinese. If there was anything he didn't understand, he asked Fei Bolin.

For each text, Fei Bolin gave Wen Fu two weeks to digest it word by word and line by line, then kept one extra week for random daily checks. Every night after they got home, he'd first have Wen Fu write the original text from memory, then pick key lines for him to translate.

People were probably just like that. The thing you were worst at was the thing you least wanted to face. Or maybe even if you did face it, you couldn't summon the same full interest you had for what you were good at.

Every night when Wen Fu got home and sat shoulder to shoulder with Fei Bolin at the desk under that warm-toned lamp, he would first stare at Fei Bolin with bright, intent eyes, waiting to see which subject workbook he pulled from his bag. Ever since Fei Bolin had taken him in, he'd covered Wen Fu's material fees and tuition too. Wen Fu was evenly good at every subject except Chinese, so once Fei Bolin had taken charge of that one, he might as well arrange the others too.

So on any night they weren't studying Chinese, Fei Bolin would randomly bring home a workbook from another subject.

If Fei Bolin pulled out math or physics, the little cat was happy.

If it was English or the science set, the little cat stayed calm.

If he pulled out Chinese, then the little cat needed a bottle of Jule Milk to soothe himself before he could settle down.

Wen Fu waited every night to see what subject Fei Bolin pulled from his bag like he was opening a blind box. Fei Bolin watched Wen Fu's face every night like he was opening one too.

The days turned one page after another, like a book being flipped through. The shoreline of the Jinsha River slowly rose. The big tree downstairs sprouted fresh buds. And on the day the last cold snap of early spring finally passed, Wen Fu saw a butterfly resting outside the classroom window.

Spring had come to Rongzhou.

The weekend School released the expulsion notice for the two senior PE students who'd bullied those middle schoolers, Fei Bolin took Wen Fu to a barbershop for a haircut. It was the first time in Wen Fu's life he'd ever had his hair cut in a barbershop. The moment he stepped inside, he stared all around at every mirror in the place.

The second he realized he'd have to lie back and let someone sit behind his head to wash his hair, he didn't want to do it. He kept hiding behind Fei Bolin and refused to go over.

The idea of someone looming over his head made him uneasy. Other than Fei Bolin, Wen Fu didn't want to hand his head over to anyone else.

Luckily, this was the barbershop Fei Bolin had gone to since he was little, and the owner was a middle-aged auntie who lived in their Residential Complex.

Fei Bolin tried several times to lead Wen Fu over, and every attempt failed.

In the end, with no other choice, he talked it over with the owner and had Wen Fu lie down while he washed Wen Fu's hair himself. All she had to do was cut it.

Thanks to Wen Fu, the all-capable Fei Bolin unlocked a fifteen-minute trial experience as a shampoo assistant on a spring evening, adding another neither-light-nor-heavy line to his list of life skills.

Unfortunately, over the next several decades of his life, that skill would have exactly one and only one authorized user: Wen Fu.

A hero had found his place to shine, but the place was only a patch of land the size of a cat's head.

After a long round of coaxing, they finally got Wen Fu to sit down and let the owner cut his hair. Wen Fu stared wide-eyed into the mirror, watching every snip of her scissors with complete focus, until even the owner got visibly nervous under his gaze.

By the time both sides finished the haircut feeling like needles were at their backs, they both let out a breath of relief.

Standing nearby, Fei Bolin got a quiet headache. Maybe he should just go learn how to cut hair himself.

The second they walked out, Wen Fu looked completely wilted, like he'd just burned through all his energy battling wits with someone in the barbershop. Fei Bolin looked around, took his hand, and led him to the nearest milk tea shop to buy him a drink. Wen Fu gulped down four mouthfuls in a row before a little light came back into his eyes.

Seeing how fast and simple his mood swing was, Fei Bolin didn't know whether to laugh or cry. So he asked, 'Then how did you cut your hair before?'

Wen Fu answered without thinking. 'I cut it myself.'

His hair was thick and dense. Truth be told, he'd secretly cut it himself several times at Fei Bolin's place too. Ever since he saw Fei Bolin go to a barbershop for the first time, Wen Fu had realized that if his hair got too long, he'd get dragged to a place like this too. So he always kept a special eye on his hair. Every time it grew a little, he'd wait until Fei Bolin wasn't paying attention, then quietly snip it off with scissors while showering.

The trash bags at home were black, so if he tossed the hair in there, no one would notice.

So Wen Fu's hair would grow a little, then get cut a little. Grow a little, then get cut a little.

If he cut a gap into it, that was fine too. He had plenty of hair. A quick messy fluff with his hand and you couldn't tell.

For a full four months, that bird's-nest mess of stubborn cowlicks on Wen Fu's head somehow never got any longer right under Fei Bolin's nose.

But he'd been worked too hard by Chinese lately, and in a rare lapse, Wen Fu forgot all about cutting his hair. At last Fei Bolin noticed it was getting long enough to cover his eyebrows, so he immediately hauled Wen Fu off to the barbershop.

One haircut was more exhausting than causing havoc in heaven—and the tired one wasn't even Wen Fu.

'You cut it yourself?' Fei Bolin said. 'Weren't you scared it'd look bad?'

Wen Fu tilted his head around his milk tea cup like he didn't understand. 'Look bad?'

Only then did Fei Bolin realize that Wen Fu had grown up behind such a wall of blocked-off information, barely touching media or any healthy social input. Other than studying, he'd had no ordinary common sense shaping him at all. Maybe he really didn't understand what counted as ugly or good-looking.

But taste like that was always at least a little inborn.

A person might not know whether a monkey was ugly or pretty, but a hairless monkey would still look obviously bad at a glance, right?

He asked Wen Fu, 'You don't know what good-looking or ugly means?'

Wen Fu's eyes shifted slightly, like his mind had taken a long turn around something, and he said seriously, 'I do know.'

Fei Bolin said, 'You do?'

Wen Fu nodded. 'Bolin-ge is good-looking.'

Fei Bolin laughed. He wasn't buying it at all. 'Cut it out.'

Then he asked again, 'If Bolin-ge is good-looking, then are you good-looking yourself?'

'Me?'

Wen Fu froze a little. The first image that came to mind was himself years ago behind the dorm building after getting caught stealing money, his face bruised and swollen.

'I'm not good-looking,' he said. 'A lot of the time, I'm not.'

Even the first day he knocked on Fei Bolin's door, he'd had a nosebleed, swollen eyes, and countless bumps all over his head.

Wen Fu thought about it, then answered again with certainty. 'People who get beaten up aren't good-looking.'

And he got beaten a lot, so a lot of the time, he wasn't good-looking.

'What about after you came with me?' Fei Bolin asked. 'After no one hit you anymore?'

Wen Fu got stuck on that question.

There was only one mirror in their home, in the bathroom. Wen Fu only stood in front of it twice a day, once in the morning and once at night.

In the morning he was still drowsy, brushing his teeth beside Fei Bolin, and whenever he looked at the mirror, he never had time to look at himself. That was why he was so sure Fei Bolin was good-looking—because when they brushed their teeth, he always wanted to look at Fei Bolin. At night, Wen Fu was in a hurry to shower. By the time he slowly finished rinsing off and came back to the mirror, all he could see through the fogged glass was that blurred, slender outline. The bathroom light was dim and yellow. He'd never really looked at his own face. He didn't know he had beautiful features and skin almost pale as porcelain.

'You are good-looking.'

When Wen Fu couldn't answer, Fei Bolin said it for him first, firm and certain.

Then Fei Bolin bent a little and leaned in close to Wen Fu's face, asking softly, one word at a time, 'Xiao Fu, has anyone ever told you what your eyes look like?'

Anyone who got close to Wen Fu's face would notice his eyes first. And before that, they'd notice his thick, dark lashes.

There was still a tiny bit of cut hair caught on the bridge of Wen Fu's nose. If you weren't close, you wouldn't spot it.

Fei Bolin gently plucked it away for him.

Wen Fu looked straight back at Fei Bolin, then blinked very slowly once, clearly curious about the answer. 'Like what?'

Fei Bolin's lips curved. Smiling, he bent his index finger and lightly brushed it along Wen Fu's eyelashes.

'A butterfly.'