Chapter 20: Wan Kun Waits in the Dark

People are tempered by hardship, He Lizhen had come to think. Thanks to Wan Kun specifically, she had developed a competency she had never anticipated needing: the ability to handle whatever unexpected thing came out of his mouth without visibly losing her footing.

She turned around.

He was squatting against the wall not far from her, tucked into the shadows, the kind of shadows a person his age had no particular reason to prefer. He Lizhen looked at him for a moment. "Why are you still out here at this hour? What are you doing?"

He appeared to have been smoking. He finished what was in his hand, dropped the butt to the ground, and stepped on it, then pushed himself upright. He had apparently been squatting long enough that his legs had gone partially numb — he swayed as he came to his feet, needing the wall behind him for a second before he found his balance.

He Lizhen's frown deepened. "How much did you drink?"

"Not much."

"How much, exactly."

Wan Kun tilted his head back and did a genuine inventory. "Ten bottles, I think."

He Lizhen said nothing. Wan Kun produced a short laugh. "I'm not drunk."

"Go home," she said. "It's very late."

"I came to ask you something."

"What."

He stepped forward out of the shadows and into the open, where the moonlight could reach him. It fell across his shoulders and turned the grayish-blue of his clothes into something richer, more present. He came toward her with his hands in his pockets, unhurried, the particular swagger of someone who has nowhere urgent to be and knows it — and brought with him, at close range, an overwhelming compound of cigarette smoke and alcohol that arrived like a physical presence of its own.

He opened his arms. Wide, generous, with the patience of someone extending an invitation and prepared to wait as long as necessary for it to be accepted.

"If I stop causing trouble in your class," he said, "will you hug me?"

He was tall enough that with his arms open like that, the gesture had a quality somewhere between wingspan and enclosure, as though there were simply no available direction to step that wasn't already accounted for.

He Lizhen, somewhat overwhelmed by the fumes at this proximity, looked at the ground. "Wan Kun. Don't be ridiculous."

He had been expecting this. She could tell by the way he received it — no disappointment, no argument, just a small nod, and his arms came down. He kicked at a clod of dirt near his foot, as though he were talking to himself and she merely happened to be standing there. "Mm. It's like this again."

"Like what?"

Wan Kun looked up. His eyes, in the dark, were not clouded or unfocused the way she would have expected from someone who had drunk ten bottles of anything. They were sharp and clear, catching the moonlight like two pieces of dark glass, direct and entirely awake. He pointed at her with one finger. "You treated me differently in class. And now you're doing it again. You think I'm easy to push around?"

He Lizhen almost laughed. Almost.

"Easy to push around?" She regarded him with something approaching genuine disbelief. "Wan Kun, if you're easy to push around, then there's no such thing as a difficult person in the world."

He received this assessment with the expression of someone who has just been told something unexpectedly favorable. A slow smirk spread across his face, and he stood there with his hands back in his pockets and his hips tilted slightly, still a full head taller than her even in that loosened posture, looking, against all reasonable odds, as though he had just been paid a compliment of significant weight. "Didn't you say," he said, "that you treat all students the same?"

"I did."

"Then stop causing trouble in class and come hug me." The tone he used was precisely the tone of someone cajoling a child into trading lunches. "It only makes sense."

In any standoff, the party that cannot afford to lose ground should not surrender it. He Lizhen kept her voice perfectly level. "Different people have different standards."

Wan Kun raised an eyebrow.

"If you want a hug," she continued, "the conditions are as follows. No more disruptions in class. Homework submitted on time. No skipping. No fighting. Present for every examination." She paused. "Do all of that, and I'll hug you."

She had delivered this with the straightforward intention of either provoking him into offense or boring him into retreat. She was not prepared for what actually happened, which was that Wan Kun appeared to consider her terms with genuine, extended seriousness — brow slightly furrowed, gaze thoughtful, as though he were doing real arithmetic. He Lizhen had a brief, disorienting moment of wondering whether she had just accidentally become someone's moral turning point.

Then Wan Kun lowered his head, took his cigarettes out of his pocket, and lit one with unhurried ease. He squinted at her through the first curl of smoke, and his eyes in that haze were dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with anger.

"...Then it won't be that kind of hug," he said, his voice dropping to something low and rough.

He Lizhen recognized, with complete clarity, that she had just lost this exchange in the worst possible way. Retreat was the only remaining option with any dignity attached to it. She turned and walked away without looking back.

Wan Kun, drunk on approximately ten bottles of something and with partially numbed legs, closed the distance between them in five steps.

His hand found her wrist. "We're not done talking. Why are you running?"

"Let go," He Lizhen said, without much force behind it. "It's late. Go home."

Wan Kun said, after a brief pause: "I'm not being ridiculous."

She didn't answer.

"Have you always thought of me as a child?"

"Aren't you?"

A moment of quiet. "I suppose." His grip on her wrist loosened and then released, slowly, and his voice shifted into something more inward, less aimed at her specifically. "I like being a child too. Children have privileges. They get more notes in their journals. They can be hugged by the teacher."

He had wandered somewhere in his own thoughts, the grandiosity of it deflating by degrees until he was almost speaking to himself, his voice fading at the edges.

"I don't have that many worries yet."

He Lizhen went quiet.

There was something about Wan Kun's presence — the way it occupied space even when he was being still, the way it persisted even when she wasn't looking at him — that was difficult to dismiss or file away neatly. In the classroom, she saw him mostly in one mode: loud, deliberate, performing. But at other times, when he surfaced in her thoughts in the middle of doing something else entirely, the image that came was different. Something vivid and ungoverned, like a flame burning through the available fuel with more urgency than it had time to spend.

One hundred and eighty thousand yuan. She still remembered the number precisely.

She didn't know how that debt had accumulated, and she had no intention of asking. What she hadn't been able to put aside was the image of Wan Kun's father that morning — the way his eyes had found her and then moved away again, quick and ashamed and deliberate. Wan Kun had not wanted her to know. She understood, probably, the shape of what that cost him: the weight of it, the embarrassment layered over the weight, all of it pressing down on whatever remained of his dignity and giving it that particular disheveled quality — stubborn and slightly crooked, but still standing.

She remembered him on that large rock beside the cornfield, smoking in the dark. Untethered. Going nowhere. Like something that should have been flying, held down at the feet.

Wan Kun leaned back against the wall beside her and said quietly: "Can I come sit at your place for a bit?"

"...Come on then."

They walked side by side down the road, the night quiet around them. He smelled strongly of smoke and alcohol, a combination that announced itself well in advance. She took him inside and told him to wash his face first.

He came out of the bathroom with his face still damp, his hair slightly wet and sticking to his forehead in dark threads. He Lizhen had retrieved a carton of yogurt from the refrigerator and held it out to him, then turned to look for a straw.

"No need," Wan Kun said.

She turned back. He had already torn open the top of the carton and tipped his head back, and she watched his throat work in three long swallows until the carton was empty. He set it down on the table. There was a small amount of yogurt at the corner of his mouth, and he looked, in this moment, faintly ridiculous in a way she found unexpectedly difficult not to respond to.

If only you could always be this manageable, she thought, and said nothing.

He was quieter than usual — the energy that normally came off him in visible waves had settled into something lower and more tired. He Lizhen let him exist on the sofa while she went to wash up.

When she came back out, he was curled on the sofa with his knees drawn up, watching her. "I'm hungry."

She blinked. "Hungry? Didn't you just come from a restaurant?"

He frowned with the sincerity of someone genuinely aggrieved. "I didn't eat enough."

"You can eat that much?" She turned to the refrigerator and assessed its contents, which were limited.

Wan Kun, from the sofa, said in a tone of mild philosophical acceptance: "I get hungry easily."

"You're not fat. Where does it all go?" The refrigerator yielded a last small bundle of noodles, which she took out.

"I'm heavy," Wan Kun said. "Seventy-six kilograms."

He Lizhen turned to look at him. After he said it, the sofa did seem to have contracted slightly. She took the noodles to the kitchen and turned on the burner to heat water.

Wan Kun watched her profile from the sofa. He Lizhen's appearance was, by conventional standards, ordinary — if there was one thing to note it was her skin, which was clear and fair in an unornamented, slightly old-fashioned way. Wan Kun thought of the two white pairs of underwear hanging in her bathroom, and his fingers moved absently against his stomach of their own accord.

"Are you going to splash me again?" he asked.

He Lizhen's hand paused on the bowl. The question was a joke — she knew that — but the memory of his back, the raw patches of skin she had spent a morning cleaning and covering, surfaced with enough clarity to produce a small, unwanted flicker of guilt.

She set the bowl down and said: "You think you can still get away with being difficult?"

Wan Kun said nothing. He Lizhen glanced back and found him watching her with dark eyes that held the beginning of something unhurried and slightly dangerous. "Do you really think," he said slowly, "that you could splash me."

The water nearby was beginning to move, heat rising off the surface in thin wisps of steam. He Lizhen felt half her face growing warm, and she was not entirely certain the steam was the cause. She said, with more confidence than she entirely felt: "Don't talk big. How do you know you're unsplashable?"

Wan Kun grinned — not a nice grin, but a live one, with something in it that was both roguish and coiled with readiness. He said: "I don't let the same thing happen twice. Try it if you want."

He shifted his weight as he said it, pulling his knee back and settling onto the balls of his feet, his upper body going perfectly still — the posture of someone who has genuinely prepared to intercept whatever comes next. His eyes on hers didn't blink.

He Lizhen had the distinct and startling sense that he was completely serious about this, and that some part of her, unasked, had actually begun calculating angles. She caught herself, and a cold wave of clarity moved through her in approximately the same moment.

What was she thinking.

She had nearly walked directly into that. She shook her head with the controlled composure of someone who has just narrowly avoided a trap they helped set. "Stop messing around. Sit properly."

Wan Kun deflated back into the sofa cushions with the abrupt listlessness of something that has been switched off, all the coiled energy gone at once.

Two minutes passed.

"Can I smoke?"

"No."

"Oh."

Five minutes.

"Really can't? I'm going to fall asleep."

"Then sleep."

"...Oh."

He did not, in the end, fall asleep, because the noodles were ready.

He ate with the focused, efficient attention of someone who is genuinely hungry and has no interest in performing otherwise. He Lizhen sat beside the table and watched. After a couple of bites he stopped and looked at her. "Aren't you eating?"

"I'm not hungry."

"Then I'll eat all of it."

"I made it all for you."

He looked at her for a moment — just briefly, something in the glance she couldn't quite categorize — and then lowered his eyes back to the bowl and ate in silence. Half a pot of noodles, gone in a handful of minutes. He drank the broth as well.

He Lizhen picked up the empty bowl and took it to the sink. Wan Kun stayed at the table, and she could feel his gaze tracking her as she moved.

"I can't concentrate with you staring at me like that," she said, without turning around.

"Don't you like me looking at you?"

It wasn't a question she intended to answer. "If you're full," she said, "go home."

She had been quietly bracing for a repetition of the last time — the bag, the slammed door, the wounded silence. It didn't come. Wan Kun stood up without drama and looked at the floor for a moment. Then his gaze came back up to hers.

"Have any other students eaten here?"

"Do you think this is a cafeteria?" She kept her voice even. "It's late. Go."

"I'm different from the other students, aren't I."

He Lizhen kept her expression where it was. Wan Kun pressed forward: "You wouldn't do this for other students."

The faucet was still running. He Lizhen turned it off. "Stop thinking about things that don't matter. Go home and get some sleep."

"I want to know." His voice from behind her was steady and unhurried. "How different am I."

"Wan Kun."

"Do I have any special privileges?"

"What kind of privileges do you want?"

He was quiet for a moment. Then, with his eyes on the floor, very calm: "For example — if I wanted to ask you out. Would you say yes?"

The faucet was off, but a last few drops fell from the tap one by one into the empty bowl below, each one landing in the quiet of the room with its own small sound. The overhead light seemed to be making a noise of its own. The room was that still.

He Lizhen looked at the bowl in her hands for a long time.

Then: "Where do you want to go?"

Wan Kun's head came up sharply, as though he were checking something — verifying that the words had actually come from her, that they meant what they appeared to mean. He Lizhen turned to face him and said it again, clearly: "Tell me. Where do you want to go."

"You said yes."

"I'm asking where."

Wan Kun's face broke into a grin — wide and unguarded and completely unambiguous, a grin that reorganized his whole expression into something different, younger, stripped of the performance he usually kept around himself like a second skin. He Lizhen, looking at it, had the involuntary impression of something she had no particular interest in having.

"Anywhere," he said, with the magnanimous ease of someone who has just won something and is being gracious about it. "Wherever you want to go is fine with me." He looked at her with satisfaction. "This weekend. You pick the time and text me."

He slung his bag over one shoulder. At the door, one hand on the frame, he looked back:

"Any mall you want. It's my treat this weekend."

Then the door closed, soft this time, nothing slammed.

He was so close to broke he was practically wearing the debt, He Lizhen thought. And he was standing there performing the role of someone who could afford to be generous about it. She looked at the closed door with an expression that couldn't quite decide whether to be exasperated or something else entirely, and after a moment, without fully meaning to, she laughed.