Chapter 7: Looks Like a Wolf, Acts Like a Dog

 

"You son of a—" The blue-haired man pulled back his temper the moment his eyes met Fu Shize's. He deflated visibly. "I'll apologize, okay? Why are you pushing me?"

He turned toward Yun Li without quite looking at her and rushed through the word as if hoping no one would hear it. "Sorry."

Fu Shize didn't move on. "Say it again."

Blue Hair had no choice. He shaped each syllable with reluctant precision. "I'm sorry."

Fu Shize's mouth curved slightly. "What's embarrassing about an apology?"

Blue Hair's jaw tightened. His eyes stayed fixed on Fu Shize. "I apologize."

"Are your eyes glued to me?"

Blue Hair took a slow breath, visibly deciding this needed to end. He turned to face Yun Li fully and said, with what seemed like genuine effort, "I'm sorry. My head wasn't right. I don't know why I did that. Please don't take it to heart."

Yun Li, still somewhat unsteady, managed something in return.

The muscular man stepped in to smooth things over. "Ze-ge, why are you still out here? You shouldn't be smoking — isn't your cold still hanging on?"

"Mm."

"This one's just drunk. He'll understand what he did when he's sober."

The blue-haired man made a noise of protest. "I'm not drunk."

Fu Shize ignored him. "Let's go."

Blue Hair, feeling aggrieved by the entire evening, muttered, "It was this girl who said earlier that if I asked her—"

The muscular man clamped a hand over his mouth before he could finish. He half-dragged the protesting figure away down the alley, calling back over his shoulder, "Bro, we'll head out then. I'll get him sobered up."

Their footsteps faded. The alley settled back into silence, which felt emptier than it had before they arrived.

Yun Li wanted to ask about his relationship with them. It didn't seem like her question to ask. After a moment she gripped the strap of her bag and said, "Thank you."

No reply came.

She was working out whether to say goodbye when Fu Shize asked, without preamble, "What did you call me earlier?"

"Huh?" She answered carefully. "Fu Shizhe?"

"Ze."

"What?"

"Fu Shize."

Yun Li repeated, uncertain, "Um. Fu Shizhe."

Fu Shize put out the cigarette. "Try again with your tongue straight."

The correction landed and Yun Li felt her face go warm. She understood now.

People from the West often had difficulty with retroflex consonants in Mandarin — the distinction between flat and curled tongue sounds. Her viewers mentioned it in her comments regularly. She had worked on it, but some words still moved past her without registering the difference, either in her ear or in her mouth.

She moved her lips, got as far as the first syllable, and stopped. Too embarrassed to continue.

Fu Shize noted the error and left it there, without pressing the way he had with the apology. Then, after a moment, he asked, "How do you know my name?"

Her mind caught up quickly. He hadn't introduced himself at any of their previous meetings. She could not say she had searched for him online. That would be — strange, at best.

She offered the most plausible version she could find. "I heard someone at EAW mention it. They said you're the new colleague."

This seemed to satisfy him. He nodded and glanced at the time. "What brought you out here tonight?"

"Fried rice noodles," she said quietly.

He made a noncommittal sound.

"Though I'll probably just go back now," she added. The episode in the alley had left the craving feeling less urgent. "It seemed far, and I can order in."

A brief pause. "Where?"

Yun Li, not entirely following the question, pointed vaguely in a direction.

Fu Shize said, "Let's go," and started walking without checking whether she was following.

She watched his back for a moment. Then she moved.

The fried rice noodle shop was tucked inside one of the smaller side alleys off the food street. Its location did nothing to discourage customers — at this hour it was still busy, mostly university students by the look of them. The bubble tea place next door had passed its peak but hadn't closed yet.

They didn't talk while they waited. There was no conversation filling the space, just the ordinary noise of the street and the shop.

Ten minutes later Yun Li collected the bag.

They walked out together and followed the street to the roadside. Across from them was the square she had crossed earlier — people still there, dancing in loose groups, a few skateboarders moving in wide arcs under the lights.

Fu Shize stopped. "Go home early."

Yun Li processed this slightly late. "Oh. Right. I'll head back."

She walked a few steps.

She looked back.

He hadn't moved. He was still standing in the same place, his frame tall in the white t-shirt, pale in the glow of the street lamp, the surrounding noise somehow not touching him.

Something she had been keeping where it couldn't cause trouble slipped free of wherever she'd been holding it.

She thought: if she kept walking, this was probably the last time they would see each other by any reasonable probability. Their paths had crossed three times now through no arrangement at all. There was no reason to expect a fourth.

She also thought: she wanted there to be a fourth.

Yun Li's palms pressed closed. She swallowed.

"Um — could I have your contact? Your WeChat?"

Fu Shize looked up.

It was the first time she had done this with anyone. She needed something to attach the request to and reached for the nearest available reason. "I heard you have a cold. There's a brand of cold medicine I've found effective, I wanted to pass along the recommendation—"

He waited, without expression, through the explanation.

Then he said flatly, "Thanks. No need." A brief pause. "I should say — I hope what my friend did tonight won't affect your plans."

Yun Li stood with this for a moment.

She didn't need to pull it apart to understand what it meant.

His earlier actions hadn't come from any particular feeling toward her. His friend had behaved badly, an apology had been made, the matter was settled. He was making sure she understood that none of it should change what she'd been doing before the alley.

There was no interest in continuing acquaintance. He was being courteous about the limit.

The street was busy around them. Music from somewhere. People talking. All of it arriving as a kind of soft static.

The embarrassment came slowly and then all at once, the way these things do.

Yun Li produced a smile that she was fairly sure looked like one. "It's fine. Never mind then." She paused. "I hope the cold clears up."

She turned before she had finished processing the impulse to leave. She didn't say goodbye. She looked at the oncoming traffic, found a gap, and crossed the road quickly.

---

Home. Shoes off. Bag dropped onto the dining table. Three steps to the sofa, and then she let herself fall into it face-forward.

She lay there.

Fu Shize's expression kept returning — the same from the moment she had called out to him through to the moment she had walked away. Nothing in it had shifted. No discomfort at having to decline, no consideration of whether it might sting. The possibility of her feelings simply had not entered the equation.

Because it hadn't occurred to him that they were a factor.

She pressed a cushion over her face and bit down on her lower lip.

Embarrassing.

Genuinely embarrassing.

What had she been thinking?

The need to tell someone was immediate and strong. The desire to tell no one was equally strong. She lay there in the contradiction for a long time, then picked up her phone and searched: Asked for someone's WeChat and got turned down.

The results were plentiful. Apparently this happened to people with some regularity.

The consensus seemed to be that it was a small, common thing that shouldn't occupy more space than it deserved. Most people still reported wondering, afterward, whether there was something specifically wrong with them — the part of the mind that turns a neutral outcome into a verdict.

Yun Li read through other people's stories until the worst of the feeling had diffused.

She moved to the dining table, sat down, and opened the container of fried rice noodles.

Cold.

She chewed through a mouthful and swallowed it anyway. "Even my heart isn't as cold as yours," she told the noodles, with feeling.

She put them in the microwave to reheat. While the timer ran, she opened the E-station app. She had been off it for weeks — too busy with the move, the new apartment, everything that had accumulated since arriving in South Wu.

Her comment section was in a state of mild uproar. People asking where she had gone, leaving increasingly theatrical expressions of abandonment, inventing nicknames for the absent party.

Yun Li read a few of them and felt, unexpectedly, a little better.

She typed out an update:

Xian Yun Di Da Jiang: Please stop calling me Salted Fish Di Da Jiang, I beg you. New video this Saturday night.

Comments arrived before she had finished reading the previous ones.

Mixed in with the demands for updates, several reminded her of the milestone reward she had promised at five hundred thousand followers — she had asked for suggestions, received enough requests to fill a separate document, ranging widely enough to be dizzying. The most consistent vote was for a live stream.

Yun Li's live stream history was sparse. Her first had lasted a few minutes before she ended it, concluding that her unscripted reactions were not compelling and that watching her not know what to do in real time would bore anyone watching. She had done a handful since, only when her audience pushed for it, and had been consistently puzzled by the fact that people appeared to enjoy them.

It was late. There probably wouldn't be many people watching. And she felt, in the particular way that follows embarrassment, the desire to talk to someone without it meaning anything.

She went to the sofa, checked her angle and the background, confirmed neither was immediately problematic, and started the stream.

The viewer count climbed within seconds.

Yun Li composed herself, greeted the room, and started reading the incoming comments aloud. "Why the sudden live stream — this is part of the milestone reward, I'm doing a trial run. Why has the background changed — I moved, it's not fully decorated yet, I'll fix it later. What are you eating—"

She reached over and picked up her reheated noodles. Eating broadcast, apparently.

"This is boring, do a talent show. What's the point—" Yun Li read the comment with a neutral expression. "I don't have any talents. You're welcome to switch to another stream."

"Why does Salted Fish seem withdrawn today — you're mistaken."

This comment was immediately followed by a flood of the same image macro repeating a joke about her pronunciation. It's 'withdrawn', not 'with-drawn'.

Yun Li read it and felt, without intending to, her mind return to the alley. The cigarette smoke. The flat correction delivered without heat.

She took a breath and said clearly, "I said it right. Don't put words in my mouth."

The chat, smelling an opportunity, began sending her words. Tongue twisters. Difficult sounds. Paired minimal pairs designed to expose exactly the category of error her audience had long considered her defining characteristic.

Something in Yun Li — the desire to prove herself, or possibly just the accumulated restlessness of the evening — decided to engage. She read each one carefully and pronounced it, and when she wasn't sure, she invented a sentence around it to give herself context.

This went on for approximately ten minutes.

She finished the last of the noodles. She scanned the incoming comments, letting her eye move quickly through the stream—

And stopped.

Somewhere in the flow of words, two characters: shi ze.

---

Fu Shize left the shop with a bag in one hand and his phone in the other. It rang before he reached the street.

Xu Qingsong: "Where are you? I've got the car."

"Out."

"Bus station. Come."

"Mm."

He found the car, got in, set the bag on the floor beside him.

Xu Qingsong glanced at it while pulling out. "Who's that for?"

"My dad."

"The old man's still up?" He checked his mirror and added, "So — North Mountain Maple Forest, or somewhere else?"

Fu Shize's eyes were half-closed. "Home."

Xu Qingsong shook his head slowly. "You know, given your personality, it's genuinely surprising how many messages I've gotten asking for your contact information. Multiple people. These past few days."

Fu Shize showed no evidence of having heard this.

Xu Qingsong let it go. The car was quiet. He reached to turn off the navigation, and in doing so accidentally tapped a notification that had come through at the top of the screen. His E-station account — the one He Jiameng had set up for EAW to follow the participating content creators — had pushed an alert.

Your followed @Xian Yun Di Da Jiang started a live stream 15 minutes ago.

He hadn't meant to open it. But the sound filled the car before he registered that it had.

Xu Qingsong looked at his screen. On it, a girl he half-recognized sat on a sofa in what looked like a recently moved-into apartment. He Jiameng had shown him the list of invited influencers; this face matched something in his memory.

He was about to close the app when it occurred to him. "Ah Ze — isn't that the girl who was sitting next to you the other day?"

The sound was already in the car. Fu Shize, who had not moved, opened his eyes by a fraction.

The girl on the screen was sitting with the camera at roughly eye level, the same clothes from earlier. On screen she looked much as she had in person — small-featured, pale, with eyes that appeared to work harder on camera than they had when pointed at him.

She was in the middle of repeating something. Her lips shaped the same two syllables, over and over, quietly, as though testing the sound.

"Shi ze. Shi ze."

On a cold night, in a quiet car, on the Ghost Festival, an accidentally opened live stream — and the girl's voice filling the space, repeating something that sounded, with some precision, like the name of the person sitting in the passenger seat.

A long pause in the car.

Xu Qingsong said carefully, "Is she... calling your name?"

Before Fu Shize could formulate a response, the girl stopped repeating. She looked directly into the camera with an expression of someone arriving at a conclusion, and said:

"Looks like a wolf."

A pause.

"But is a dog."

The car was silent.

Three seconds passed.

Xu Qingsong had caught only the second part clearly. He turned to look at his passenger. "Did she just call you a dog?"

Fu Shize said nothing.

"She said you're a dog."

"…"