The creases in the candy wrapper
The first month with Li Zichen felt like being immersed in honey.
He would secretly give me the fried egg from his breakfast, saying, "I don't like egg yolks"; he would draw an ugly little dog for me on a piece of paper during math class, with a note next to it that said, "It looks like you when you're angry"; on the way home from school, he would drape his school uniform jacket over my shoulders while he wore only a thin T-shirt, saying, "Boys are strong."
I kept all those notes in a tin box and hid it under the bed. That was my only secret hideout, where my mother kept her joy unseen. She would still throw my textbooks when I didn't make it into the top ten in my exams, and when my father scolded her, she would vent her anger on me. The sound of her slapping my back was always clearer than the sound of Li Zichen handing me a candy wrapper.
Once, I was beaten so badly that my back was covered in bruises. The next day, when I wore my school uniform, the collar rubbed against the wound, and I grimaced in pain. Li Zichen saw me in the corridor and reached out to touch my neck, but I dodged away abruptly.
"What's wrong?" He frowned.
"It's nothing, just a mosquito bite." I lowered my head, not daring to look him in the eye. The shadow of being bullied in junior high was still there. Those people mocked me as "unwanted trash" because I was always beaten by my family, threw my schoolbag into the toilet, and wrote swear words on my textbooks. I was afraid that Li Zichen would also think I was dirty and troublesome.
He didn't press me further, but instead pulled a bottle of safflower oil from his pocket and handed it to me: "Apply it to your face tonight, but don't get it wet." His fingertips touched my palm and he gently squeezed it. "Tell me if anything's wrong."
That night, I locked my bedroom door and undressed in front of the mirror. The bruises on my back looked like an ugly map. I gritted my teeth and applied safflower oil to them, tears streaming down my face from the pain. The metal box was on the bedside table, the note inside gleaming in the moonlight. Suddenly, I felt that maybe I could really trust him just this once.
But the thorns in sweetness are always cleverly hidden.
I first noticed something was wrong after the monthly exam in November. I went to Class 3 to find him, intending to give him the chocolates I had just bought, but I saw him chatting and laughing with a girl in a red hoodie. The girl stood on tiptoe and brushed the stray hairs from his forehead back, her movements as natural as if she had rehearsed them a thousand times.
My footsteps faltered at the doorway; the chocolate in my pocket was digging painfully into my palm.
He spotted me quickly, smiling and waving: "Zhi Xia, come here. This is my deskmate, Lin Wei."
Lin Wei turned her head, smiled at me, her eyes curving into crescents, but carrying a hint of inexplicable hostility. "Oh, you must be Shen Zhixia. Zichen always mentions you."
"Really?" I looked at Li Zichen, whose eyes were slightly evasive.
"I just... mentioned it casually." He scratched his head, changing the subject, "Did you come to see me for something?"
"It's nothing." I hid the chocolate behind my back. "I was just passing by."
As I turned to leave, I heard Lin Wei laugh and say, "So this is the 'pretty well-behaved' girlfriend you were talking about?"
"Don't talk nonsense." Li Zichen's voice was very soft, but it pierced my ears like a needle.
I threw the chocolate in the trash that day. The wrapper twirled in the wind, like the creases that suddenly appeared in my heart.
Later, I saw him with Lin Wei a few more times. They would go to the cafeteria together to get food, and Lin Wei's plate always had green peppers that Li Zichen didn't like; they would team up to play badminton in PE class, and Li Zichen would always deliberately lose to her, watching her jump, clap, and laugh; once, I even found a pink hair clip in his school uniform pocket that didn't belong to me, exactly the same as the one Lin Wei always wore.
"What is this?" I placed the hair clip in front of him, my fingertips trembling.
"Oh, Lin Wei dropped it. I'm keeping it for her." He said it casually, without even looking up at me.
Why don't you just return it to her?
"Forget it." He closed the book, his tone a little impatient. "Shen Zhixia, can you stop being so suspicious? We're just deskmates, ordinary friends."
"Would a regular friend fix your hair? Use your chopsticks to eat? Leave a hair clip in your pocket?" My voice grew louder and louder, attracting the attention of the students around me.
His face darkened, and he grabbed my wrist, pulling me towards the hallway. "Have you made enough of a scene?" he demanded, shaking off my hand with considerable force. "It's just a hair clip! Is it really that big of a deal?"
"Do I really need to?" I looked at him and suddenly felt like a stranger. The boy who said "Tell me if you need anything" at the alley entrance seemed to have been blown away by the wind, leaving only this shadow in front of me with a frown and annoyed that I was a nuisance.
"Yes, you really need to." He took a step back, his tone as cold as ice. "Shen Zhixia, were you bullied a lot in junior high school, so you see everyone as a bad guy?"
Those words were like a knife, piercing precisely into my most painful spot. Memories of being stuck in the toilet during junior high, the torn-up notebooks, the curses of "nobody wants me" flooded back, suffocating me.
I looked at him, and tears streamed down my face. "Li Zichen, you bastard."
He didn't say anything more, turned around and left, his back view as resolute as if he had never known me.
The wind was strong that day, rattling the windows in the corridor. I stood there, the old wound on my back seeming to ache again, even more than when I was beaten. The note in the metal box was still there, but the sweet handwriting had suddenly become blurred, like a wet candy wrapper, crumpled into a ball.
The light I thought I had seemed to be casting shadows. But at that time, I still clung to a sliver of hope, thinking that maybe it was just a misunderstanding, and maybe he would still smile and offer me candy, saying, "Don't be angry."
I didn't know that this was just the beginning. Once wrinkles form, they can never be smoothed out.
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