Chapter 16 Attic
Ji Minghuan sat quietly on the chair, staring at the isolation door in the dark. After a while, he closed his eyes and drooped his shoulders, as if he had fallen asleep on the chair.
"I haven't seen her for a long time..." he thought.
These might be the longest five minutes in Ji Minghuan’s life.
It was as if there was a clock ticking in his mind, with the second hand moving slowly clockwise, round and round, and he couldn't wait to end these meaningless five minutes;
But the clock was moving backwards quickly, taking him back to the past, memories of his time in the orphanage.
When Ji Minghuan and Kong Youling met for the first time, he was only nine years old.
It was a morning three years ago.
Ji Minghuan learned from the nurse that there was a new child in the welfare home. It was said that she was a mixed-race child with a horrible white body and was deaf-mute. Because of her, the nurse asked all the children to learn sign language in advance. Some children couldn't sit still and blamed her for everything. Everyone didn't like her from the beginning.
She liked to wear a wrinkled white linen dress and hold a sketchbook with a pencil in it.
When she first entered the classroom, the children were shocked by her appearance and fell silent. Her whole body was sickly white, even her hair and eyelashes were white, and she was different from anyone they had ever seen.
The window of the classroom was open, and she lowered her eyes in the sunlight that hit her face, as if she couldn't open her eyes because the eyes of albinos have weak light.
At that time, she walked up to the podium with her eyes closed and almost fell down. Amid everyone's laughter, she stood up and then quietly wrote in the sketchbook by herself.
Then, under everyone's strange gazes, she turned the front of the sketchbook to the classroom. The children looked closely and saw three crooked small words written in pencil on it:
—— Kong Youling.
That was her name.
She still closed her eyes to avoid the light, but raised her head as much as possible. The teacher never closed the curtains, but just laughed with the children.
She was deaf-mute and could not hear the shrill laughter. She opened her eyelids vaguely in the sunlight and saw the smiles on their faces. She thought everyone liked her very much.
So even though she didn't like to laugh and didn't know how to laugh, she still slightly raised the corners of her mouth.
Force a smile.
Ji Minghuan, who was sitting in the corner of the classroom that day, was stunned for a moment. The girl smiled alone in the sun, and her snow-white hair swayed gently in the breeze. He did not smile, nor did he speak, but just looked at her quietly.
Ji Minghuan also knew that she could just ask the teacher to write her name on the blackboard, there was no need to do this.
Later, Ji Minghuan asked her why she did that at the time. She wrote on the notebook that she didn't like others to learn sign language for her alone, as it would seem like she had become a burden to others.
She is a very sensible child and doesn't like to trouble others.
But even so, the children often gave her trouble, because they all knew that the nurses asked them to learn sign language just to make them less mischievous in the classroom and give them more things to do.
But no one dared to mess with the nurse, so they went to find the white-haired girl. Some said she was a monster that her mother didn't want and was thrown away because she was too ugly. Others said she was a foreigner's child and that the foreigners played with her mother and then abandoned them.
Some people say that she is a devil, and that devils' eyes are all red. However, they do not know that this is because the lack of pigment causes the iris to be translucent, so her pupils appear red to others.
Until one day, the children blocked her in the classroom. She couldn't hear what others were saying, so she wrote on the notebook, but no one paid attention to her. The children knew that she couldn't hear, so they used the sign language they learned from the computer room to curse at her, making some obscene gestures, and some people shone a flashlight into her eyes.
She stood there blankly, the sketchbook in her hand almost falling to the ground.
There were words half written on the notebook: "Do you want to play with me?"
At that time, Ji Minghuan, who was sitting in the corner of the classroom, suddenly stood up, took her hand and ran away.
They ran very fast, as if riding on the wind. The children chased after them, but they could not catch up. Finally, they hid in the attic above the library. No one in the orphanage dared to go there because it was where the director punished people. They were afraid of being locked up in there by the nurses, so they didn't catch up.
In the quiet attic, only the wall clock was ticking. Ji Minghuan climbed up the bookshelf on the pile of old books, then jumped to the skylight on the old bookshelf, climbed onto the roof, then turned around and stretched out his hand to her.
The girl looked up at her. The sun was very strong that day and the light coming through the skylight made it difficult for her to open her eyes. But she opened her eyes with a trembling eyelid and looked intently at the boy's smile on the roof and his outstretched hand.
She hesitated for a moment, and then...she ran.
That was the first time Ji Minghuan saw her running.
She ran very fast, her fair calves rising and falling, and her figure was as light as a white deer wading across a river. She stepped on two or three increasingly tall bookcases and jumped towards the skylight in the sunlight.
Ji Minghuan took her hand and pulled her onto the roof.
That evening, the two children sat side by side on the rooftop covered with afterglow, watching the sunset slowly sink from the horizon. Ji Minghuan read a lot of books and knew that albinos were afraid of light, so she picked up a book from the attic and gently placed it on her head.
She opened her eyes in the shadow of the book and quietly looked at this man who usually didn't talk much.
"Kong Youling, your name is very nice." The boy took her sketchbook without permission and wrote on it with a pencil.
"Don't you hate me? I can't speak and I can't hear anything." The white-haired girl wrote on the notebook, "I look... ugly."
She had a book on her head to avoid the light, like a little frog hiding under a lotus leaf.
Ji Minghuan took her notebook and pen, wrote something, and then returned them to her.
There were some neat words written on the notebook: "You are not ugly at all."
Kong Youling lowered his eyes and took a look, then wrote on the notebook: "But... everyone hates me."
After thinking for a while, she continued writing and then turned the notebook towards Ji Minghuan:
“Is it because I’m disabled?”
Ji Minghuan looked at the line of words and was stunned for a long time.
He took the girl's notebook, wrote on it, and then quickly turned the page towards her: "You are disabled, but I am still mentally ill!"
At this point, he blinked his eyes slyly like a puppy. "Let me tell you, I often see some strange images. Sometimes I see myself participating in World War II, and the soldiers around me are shouting something at me. Sometimes I see myself playing the violin on the streets of Paris, and everyone applauds me. Sometimes I see... I see myself destroying the world! I dreamed that I was sitting on the moon and looking at the empty earth. I stretched out my right hand, and black bandages surrounded the entire planet like giant snakes, and then..."
Kong Youling was stunned for a moment and wrote on the notebook: "Then?"
"Then I will swallow the earth!" He snorted twice and wrote seriously in the notebook.
“You are awesome.”
"Isn't it?" Ji Minghuan was writing, and there seemed to be an inexplicable sense of pride in the crooked words.
That year Kong Youling was 8 years old, and Ji Minghuan was one year older than her, only 9 years old. The two children sat on the eaves, looking at the crimson sky in the distance, with airplane clouds passing over their heads.
The setting sun fell towards the horizon, taking away the last ray of light in the sky. In the pitch-black darkness, Ji Minghuan supported himself on the tiles of the roof with both hands and looked up at the night sky.
The first ray of moonlight fell from above his head, and he said silently with his lips:
"We're all the same, we're all weird...you're not alone."
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(End of this chapter)
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