“But I read through the first parts very carefully. Why don’t you start the academic withdrawal process a little later? Wait until I’ve edited the entire thing…”
“No.” He shook his head with a smile. “I must go when morning comes.”
She felt so remorseful; why had she always thought that there was still time?
Why hadn’t she stayed up all night to edit his essay?
And why had she gone out to shop and chat and attend those long and meaningless meetings?
Her student’s dreams were about to shatter, and his heart about to give out. As his teacher, she couldn’t even offer up a bouquet of flowers to bid his dream farewell.
“I’m sorry…”
“It’s fine,” he said. “But I wrote one last poem. Can I give it to you?”
She readily nodded.
He took a piece of paper out of his backpack and handed it to her. The paper was thin, almost weightless.
She read every word. It was an adoring love poem, searingly passionate yet tentative and careful. She’d read the works of many masters who spoke of romance, from the “when will the moonlight in our bed dry the tears on our faces”1 of the past, to the “my eyes are more beautiful because they have you in them”2 of the present. Yet at this moment, it seemed like none of them could compare to this sheet of paper that her student had presented to her.
He didn’t put anything out in the open, as if doing so would spoil the meter of the poem.
This young man was a poet. He knew that if the love between two people from different social statuses lost its poetry, all that would be left was embarrassment.
“It’s a memento for you.”
Tenderness was written all over his face—both on the grotesque and ordinary halves.
“I’m sorry, Laoshi. I can’t afford to buy you any gifts.”
“There’s nothing better than this.” She turned around, suppressing her sobs. “You…you should eat something. I’ll find you some snacks to go with the tea.”
In a bid to keep her emotions in check, Xie-laoshi rummaged through her cabinets. She picked up a tin of butter cookies and placed it on the table.
He thanked her politely. Under Xie-laoshi’s gaze, he finally touched the teacup tentatively, only to pull back instantly. Softly, he said, “It’s so hot.”
Xie-laoshi touched the cup. “Huh? It’s lukewarm.”
Nonetheless, she added some cold water to the cup. Her student chewed on his favorite cookies and slowly began to drink. By the time he finished the cookies and the tea, the night was still young.
“Laoshi, can I stay here for a little while longer to read?” he asked.
“Of course.”
He smiled again, slightly sheepish. “I’m inconveniencing you so much, even when I’m about to leave.”
“It’s fine, you can stay for as long as you’d like… Right, give me your address—I’ll send you a copy of all the good books I see. Given how clever you are, even if you only study on your own, you won’t do too poorly.” Xie-laoshi could only offer some words of comfort. “If you need any help with anything, you can contact me on WeChat.”3
He looked at her. “Thank you.” He paused. “If only everyone were like you, then perhaps…”
He lowered his head and didn’t continue.
Her dorm had no shortage of books. With his undisguised disease, his grotesque appearance made him the center of attention every time he went to the library. Thus, she invited him to the faculty dorm and lent him her own books to read.
In that same spirit, he spent the whole night reading inside the faculty dorm, as if he wanted to bring all the words back to his hometown using this night.
He rarely acted so selfishly. In the past, he would never stay too late, worried that he’d disrupt his teacher’s routine. But today was an exception.
Xie-laoshi didn’t blame him for this final willful streak. She stayed up with him, but into the latter half of the night, she grew tired. Without realizing it, she drifted off to sleep at her desk.
In her hazy unconsciousness, she heard her student suddenly say, “Xie-laoshi.”
She blearily made a noise of assent.
“There’s one more thing. I want to apologize to you. Those thefts in our class that you got criticized for… When those students kept losing their belongings and couldn’t find them no matter what… Actually, I was the one who took their things.”
Shocked, she stirred from her slumber, but her body was too tired, too heavy to get up.
“But I didn’t keep any of those things. I didn’t take any of their money,” he said sorrowfully. “When they mocked me, I really hated them… I threw all their bags into a pile of straw and burned it all. They suspected me, but you chose to vouch for me without question. But in truth, I was the culprit. I didn’t have the courage to admit it. Only in one person’s eyes have I ever been a normal person, or even a good person—that’s you. Laoshi, I’m very vain, aren’t I?” He paused. “I wouldn’t know what to do if you were disappointed in me. You’re the only person who has ever acknowledged me.”
His voice trailed off.
But his gaze was clear, almost transparent, as if a weight had been taken off his shoulders.
“This is the one thing I regret the most… Xie-laoshi, I’m truly sorry. My disease seems to have metastasized from my face to my heart. If there is a next life, I really want to be a normal person… I don’t want to be so sick that I don’t even have the right to be loved. Xie-laoshi…”
Wind rushed in through the window, making the papers on the table flutter, like soul-summoning flags.
Then silence returned.
The tea on the table cooled.
When Xie-laoshi woke up the next morning, she found that she’d slept the night away at her desk. Her room was neat and tidy. Her student was always polite, but this time, he hadn’t said goodbye to his teacher before packing up his things and leaving.
Unable to suppress a twinge of melancholy, she rose sleepily and went to the living room. When she looked down at the tea table, her eyes flew open, as if a basin of ice water had just been poured over her head.
The tea she’d made for the youth had frozen over, but how? The room was clearly 27 or so degrees Celsius!
Her dark eyes wide, she looked around the room only to be plunged into even deeper shock. Last night, she’d clearly seen her student eat the butter cookies, yet not a single one was missing from the tin. The tea which had frozen into ice was untouched, and finally…
That veiled love poem, the contents of which she still sheltered in her heart, the paper farewell he’d gifted her…
It had disappeared.
Or, perhaps it was more accurate to say that the paper had never existed in the first place.
She was almost shaking. Suddenly, her phone alerted with a ding, causing her to jump in fright. She grabbed it immediately, only to find that it was a spam message. She let out a breath of relief, but then, as if struck by a thought, as if waking from a dream, she quickly dialed the student’s number.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Her heart pounded with every beat of the mechanical tone.
“Hello?”
The call had gone through.
On the other end of the line was the familiar voice of a middle-aged woman. It sounded coarse, but right now, it was also nasal with tears. Xie-laoshi exchanged a few words with the young man’s mother.
Her heart sank into a pitch-black hole, careening downward.
After a pause, she heard a flurry of accusations—“It was you people! You again!! I haven’t had time to come for you, yet you actually called us first!”
Xie-laoshi couldn’t remember what she had said at the beginning anymore; her mind had blanked out. All she could hear was the miserable shouting at the other end, like a bludgeoning wake-up call. “He’s dead! Dead!”
Blood froze in her veins.
Dead?
“It’s all your fault!! He got into an argument with me and ran out. There was a torrential storm outside, and the police said a section of an electric cable was exposed…”
Xie-laoshi’s ears were ringing.
Amid the intense castigation and mournful sobbing, she could barely make out a few words, ghostly and ghoulish, like an otherworldly farewell.
The woman on the other end of the line gave an ear-splitting shriek.
“Why bother calling? Why bother?! Yesterday was his seventh day!!”4