Hello, Old Times Chapter 42

Chapter 42: A tired bird that doesn’t know how to return

Later on, Yu Zhou Zhou would always hum those two erhu songs inadvertently. It really sounded unpleasant but they seemed to have been entangled in her memories and couldn’t be pulled out. Only a loose thread was left in the open, reminding her of that embarrassing afternoon.

One early morning in December, it started snowing heavily. In PE class, the teacher showed mercy and changed the lesson from running to free activity. Yu Zhou Zhou dressed thickly and she spent a lot of effort trying to do a flip on the horizontal bar. She carefully sat on it and watched her classmates who were running around.

“Zhou Zhou, come join the snowball fight!” Shan Jie Jie ran over, and shouted at her while holding a snowball.

Yu Zhou Zhou shook her head.

Shan Jie Jie looked at her and mumbled a few words before running away. She didn’t understand why Yu Zhou Zhou had been so quiet recently.

In this world, there are very few friends but a lot of playmates. As long as you called out, there will be a lot of people holding snowballs who will accompany and run with you.

Yu Zhou Zhou saw Xu Di and a few other boys making a snowman seriously. There was a bucket and shovel placed next to it. They’d pile up some snow then drizzle some water on top of the snowman to make it freeze more firmly.

Once the snowman started to take shape, everyone stopped their snowball fights and circled around the snowball. Xu Di and the other boys became even more pleased but they pretended to be nonchalant and instructed the female classmates seriously, “stay away, stay further away, if you knock it down, just watch what’ll happen!”

Yu Zhou Zhou snorted out a puff of white air. She didn’t notice that her smile had become slightly different from these classmates of the same age as her.

She liked to sit from that high position and look down on all the happy children with what the kids at that age thought was sophistication and detachment.

Even though many years later, when she recalled this type of attitude, she thought it was very funny, at that moment, she truly felt a sense of loneliness. A sense of loneliness that was previously hidden because of her golden halo but has returned back to the surface now she has returned to a low point.

Falling is for climbing back or, perhaps climbing was only falling.

Yu Zhou Zhou looked up at the sky. There were too many things she couldn’t understand but she was no longer like her younger self who would innocently and passionately fantasize, as long as I work hard, there will always be a day where I can climb back to the highest point.  She had already started having some doubts about the point of this routine.

Seiya was knocked down, then stood back up again, then was knocked back down, then stood back up.

Was Seiya’s existence for being knocked down or for standing back up? Or, were there more for him to accomplish?

The Flower Witch Mary Bell existed for the peace and natural beauty of the world. Seiya existed to protect Athena. Sailor Moon, to maintain world peace in the name of the moon. Kazuya Uesugi* trained for the sake of going to the Koshien and the Shohoku Basketball Team put in their all for the national competition. Then, what exactly was heroine Yu Zhou Zhou living for?

*[From the manga/anime TOUCH]

This problem grew out of the heavy feelings that had arisen from Maths Olympiad and moving up to middle school, making her anxious.

Was it to make a name for herself in jianghu?

But Yu Zhou Zhou’s jianghu was much too deep.

The emotions of graduating affected a lot of people. It was already being mentioned in their Christmas and New Year’s cards. All the blessings contained, “We’ll still be good friends after graduating”, “We’ll always be good friends”, “Wishing you a bright future” – yes, a bright future was a fully mysterious yet meaningless term to primary students.

What was the future? Did children who didn’t know how to do Maths Olympiad also have a future? Yu Zhou Zhou discovered that even if the sky was much wider than the earth, what her little figure could actually see was a little, irregular piece from between all the buildings above her head. This was everyone’s future, there was only this little piece that was so small that a maths Olympiad question could cover half of it.

Yu Zhou Zhou dazedly sat on the horizontal bar, motionless –

When Lin Yang walked out from the classroom building, the first thing he saw was a quiet snowman sitting on the horizontal bar.

He stood transfixed at the entract for a long time until a classmate pushed him on the back, “What are you doing, why haven’t you gone out yet? Let’s play soccer together. We said that we were going to play soccer in the snow a long time ago but that snow from the other time was barely enough to stuff between my teeth*!”

[Meaning it was a tiny amount]

A girl on the side laughed, “Just drink the North-western wind*, why do you need to stuff snow between your teeth!”

*[Meaning to have nothing to eat but the air]

As they argued, Lin Yang woke up from his daze and awkwardly walked towards Yu Zhou Zhou. But as he stood by the horizontal bar, he didn’t know if he should open his mouth and break the silence.

“Zhou Zhou?”

It had been too long since they spoke, even calling out her name felt awkward.

Especially since the estrangement this time was far more tragic than kids ‘breaking ties’ when they played house. Lin Yang didn’t know what to say. In short, that day, when his mum was shaking with anger and pointed at him saying, “Can you listen to me, can you stop making trouble for me, can you let me have peace for two days, can you…”

He cried as he nodded and said, yes.

The world of adults were far more complicated than everything he had seen before. He didn’t like his mum who smiled at Zhou Shen Ran’s parents and pretended to flatter them but yet he couldn’t dislike gentle and beautiful mother either. He wasn’t able to figure it out at all.

Ever since grade 3 when Zhou Shen Ran jumped up one grade and joined Lin Yang’s class, he felt that his parent’s attitudes were weird. Perhaps it was because he was used to seeing his mum respond calmly to the flattery of others so once he say the same type of cautiousness on his own mother’s face, he couldn’t bear it and felt very upset.

So he said, mum, I’m wrong.

Yu Zhou Zhou looked down, “It’s you, Lin Yang. What’s the matter?”

Lin Yang lowered his head, “Nothing.”

He scratched the back of his head then felt that his behaviour was quite dumb. A large half of the students in his class had gone to take the vaccination. The few of them who had already been vaccinated were released to join the PE class so Lin Yang felt that if he talked to Yu Zhou Zhou now, he shouldn’t be discovered by the teacher nor be reported by Ling Xiang Qian or the others.

So he randomly found a topic.

“Zhou Zhou, your exam last week… how was it?”

“Not good. I couldn’t do any of it.”

Lin Yang was stunned. He raised his head and the cold snowflakes fell on his face.

“Then…” He didn’t know how to comfort Yu Zhou Zhou and truly couldn’t understand what was hard about Maths Olympiad. Yu Zhou Zhou was so smart, why was she always unable to get it?

“Actually, I remember the teacher of my Maths Olympiad class say that it doesn’t matter if you don’t learn Maths Olympiad either. Maths Olympiad, Maths Olympiad has no use at all…”

“Then why do you learn it?” Yu Zhou Zhou tilted her head to look at him.

Lin Yang had no preparation at all for this strange conversation and was choked with nothing to say. He looked at Yu Zhou Zhou with a little embarrassment and realized that Yu Zhou Zhou was staring at a group of people surrounding a snowman in the distance and wasn’t paying him the slightest attention.

He became silent. Yu Zhou Zhou was watching other people’s snowman but he was looking at his own snowman.

The snowman suddenly smiled and a crescent bloomed on her face.

“Lin Yang, I didn’t have the chance to thank you for last time.”

“…What’s the matter?”

“You know that I don’t have a dad right?”

This question came up so unexpectedly that Lin Yang nearly jumped up with surprise. He looked at his snow covered shoes flustered and thought about how to answer it. He didn’t expect Yu Zhou Zhou to suddenly jump down from the horizontal bar, splashing snow everywhere. The snow that had accumulated on her shoulders also drifted down everywhere.

“Lin Yang, what do you want to do in the future? What do you want to learn Maths Olympiad and why do you want to be the captain? You’ll go to Normal University Affiliated Middle School right, and then get into a good high school – I heard that the best high school in the province is Zhen Hua and the best university in the country is in Beijing. Will you go to Beijing? What do you want to do after that?”

Yu Zhou Zhou had never asked him such a large series of questions this quickly before. Lin Yang hadn’t even thought through one question when Yu Zhou Zhou was already standing in front of him, patting his head with a smile. She stood on her tiptoes and he realized that he was already taller than her.

“I’m just casually asking.”

He let out a sigh of relief.

“So, we may never meet again” She said while continuing to smile.

Lin Yang stupidly stood on the spot and watched his snowman walk step by step towards the group of people with her hands behind her back.

“Zhou Zhou!” Lin Yang shouted anxiously, “Are you okay, what ‘s wrong?”

Yu Zhou Zhou didn’t turn back.

As Yu Zhou Zhou approached the crowd, she discovered that the classmates who were building the snowman were a little enraged.

“I said it wasn’t me!”

Zhan Yan Fei’s voice nearly broke but on the courts after the snow, her shout seemed to be sucked away by some unknown monster. She was hoarse but still sounded unconfident.

“We didn’t let you join us in building the snowman is all, did you have to be like this?” Xu Di snorted and fiercely slammed the shovel on the ground.

“What happened?” Yu Zhou Zhou pushed Li Xiao Zhi beside her a bit to the side.

Li Xiao Zhi looked at the people in the middle of the dispute with some awkwardness, “The snowman was close to being finished and it was frozen pretty solid as well but someone discovered a footprint on the back of the snowman. No-one was paying any attention and had already drizzled water on it so it can’t be smoothed out.”

“Then what does it have to do with Zhan Yan Fei?”

“I don’t know who said it… But someone said that it was Zhan Yan Fei who stepped on the snowman. Just then, she had circled around the snowman for a long time. Xu Di said that she wasn’t helping so told her to stay further away and she even argued because of it.”

“Who said it was her who stepped on it?”

“I don’t know but someone said it.”

“Someone” was the most mystical and powerful person in the world.”

Yu Zhou Zhou watched Zhan Yan Fei face off against a group of boys and girls in vain and even saw Xu Yan Yan’s smirking face in the midst of the group. She felt a little upset but didn’t have the confidence to stand on Zhan Yan Fei’s side and argue for her against so many people so she could only bow her head down and fiercely despise herself.

“Forget it, forget it. It’s already like this. Everyone, join your hands in a circle and I’ll use this shovel to smash the snowman!”

Everyone finally dispersed murmuring then held hands to create a circle that wasn’t flat nor found. On Yu Zhou Zhou’s left was Li Xiao Zhi and on her right was Shan Jie Jie. They spread their arms a little to create more distance. Once the circle began to take shape, everyone suddenly discovered that in the middle, apart from Xu Di and the snowman, Zhan Yan Fei was also there.

 Zhan Yan Fei stared at the big circle stunned and felt extremely embarrassed to be surrounded in the middle. Hence, she hurriedly ran to two random people, wanting them to let go of their hands to give her a space to stand but those two people gripped their hands tightly and refused to look at her.

It was like a sinner being paraded in a crowd.

Zhan Yan Fei tried three or four times with different people. Yu Zhou Zhou seemed to already see beads of sweat appear on her forehead on such a cold day.

Yu Zhou Zhou didn’t know that the way she looked at Zhan Yan Fei was similar to Zhan Yan Fei’s gaze at her five years ago when Yu Zhou Zhou walked back to her seat with her pinyin paper filled with red crosses.

Pity.

However, there was a slight difference.

“Zhan Yan Fei!”

Yu Zhou Zhou subconsciously called out and was taken aback by herself. Under Li Xiao Zhi’s astonished gaze, she let go of Li Xiao Zhi’s hand.

“Come over here.”

Everyone looked at her but she looked towards Zhan Yan Fei solemnly.

She looked at a little sparrow with broken wings, wearily walking step by step to her side.