Chapter 22: The Quarry

Peng Qian came straight at her, grabbed her arm, and pulled her to the corner of the corridor.

"I made a fool of myself yesterday, didn't I."

He Lizhen pressed down a smile. "No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"I can't remember what I did."

"Good. Keep it that way."

Peng Qian puffed her cheeks out and exhaled slowly. "At least I don't teach Class 6. I'd be too embarrassed to walk in there."

"You still remember the game."

Peng Qian waved her hand. "Don't. Don't mention it."

She didn't let go of He Lizhen's arm. "I put you through enough last night. I'll make it up to you — let's go shopping this weekend, my treat."

Today was Friday. Everyone in the building seemed to be planning for the weekend at the same time.

"When were you thinking?"

"Whenever suits you. I'm flexible." Peng Qian paused. "Saturday?"

"Saturday doesn't work," He Lizhen said, faster than she intended. "I have something going on."

Peng Qian looked at her. "You have something to do? That's unusual."

"Just going out."

"What about Sunday?"

"Sunday I also have something—"

Peng Qian leaned against the wall. "So you're busy the entire weekend?"

"This week is a bit full."

"All right, forget it, next time then." The bell rang and Peng Qian headed to class.

He Lizhen watched her go. In the next moment — barely a pause — she had her phone out and was typing a message. She put the phone away so quickly afterward that by the time it was back in her bag she couldn't recall exactly what she'd written.

---

In the classroom, Wan Kun was asleep on his desk. His phone vibrated against the surface.

He picked it up. One unread message from White Underpants.

He sat up slightly and opened it.

[Saturday, 6 PM, Zhouping.]

He stared at it.

Zhouping was at the southern edge of Yangcheng, close to the suburban boundary. There was a quarry out there. He looked at the location and his expression changed slowly.

Before he finished thinking, the phone went again. Manager Xiu Ji — a group message by the look of it, short.

[Crackdown over. Back to work next week. Schedule to follow. Reply received.]

Wan Kun sat up straight, typed two words — Received — and sent it.

"Hey." Wu Yueming, beside him, was holding up his own phone. "You get it?"

Wan Kun made a sound.

As Wu Yueming turned away, the phone vibrated once more. Xiu Ji again, but this time clearly only for Wan Kun. He read it through twice, slowly, three short sentences. The bell rang. Wan Kun turned the phone face down and turned it off.

---

Wu Yueming dragged him to the basketball court after school. They played for a while before Wu Yueming said, between passes, "Finally out of school mode. You know, you've been weirdly regular lately. Coming in every day. You never did that when you had time before."

Wan Kun caught the ball, jumped, and put it through from outside the three-point line. Clean arc, clean drop.

Wu Yueming swore under his breath. He went to retrieve it. "When are you going back?"

Wan Kun looked down. "Sunday, probably."

"Sunday? Your schedule starts Monday. If you wait until Sunday, all the decent beds are gone."

"Then you go first. I'll follow on Sunday."

"I work Wednesday, I can manage. You got something on this weekend?"

"Yeah."

"What?"

Wan Kun glanced at him. "You have nothing going on again? Why are you so interested in other people's business?"

Wu Yueming laughed. "Fine, I'm leaving tomorrow then. I'm done with being at school."

Wan Kun gave a noise of agreement and looked back at his phone, reading or writing something.

Wu Yueming worked the same job Wan Kun did, but as a receptionist. He had never met He Lizhen. He didn't know the history.

---

Friday was journal day. Wu Wei collected them and brought them to He Lizhen's office. She went through them one by one and eventually had to accept that Wan Kun's wasn't there.

She sat with that for a moment.

He hadn't handed it in.

She thought about what he'd said — does that mean if I write more, you write more — and didn't let herself look at what she felt when she thought about it. She put the journals together, packed her bag, and went home.

She still felt the small absence of it, even without looking at it directly.

---

Saturday morning she was up at five-thirty. She checked the phone before anything else. He had replied to her message — just okay, nothing after that.

She washed up, made food, left the apartment at eight-thirty.

She was honest with herself: she didn't know what she had been thinking when she sent that location. Zhouping. He had wanted to take her somewhere in the city, which she had known meant he would pay for it, and she had wanted to avoid that, so her fingers had typed the name of a quarry on the southern edge of the city because it was the first thing that came up for places that were outside but not expensive.

She took the bus from her door — three changes, an hour and a half — and arrived at the Zhouping quarry at five past ten. It had been shut down since earlier in the year, some government order about boundary violations. The open pit below sat empty. No workers, no equipment running. The site was quiet in the specific way of places that used to be loud.

The surroundings were actually not bad. A small hillside, a stand of trees.

She didn't see him when she arrived. She was tired from the journey and started walking up the slope to stretch her legs. Halfway up she spotted someone already sitting in the trees, looking out at the quarry below.

"Wan Kun?"

He turned and held up his phone at her. "Teacher, you're late."

He was sitting on steep ground. She came down toward him using two trees for balance, picking her way across the stones. He didn't get up. She thought: genuine brat. She made it to level ground and stood beside him.

"When did you get here?"

"Nine-thirty."

"What time did you get up?"

"Six."

She almost laughed. "You're never that motivated when school starts."

Wan Kun stood up. She was close to him on the slope and grabbed the nearest pine tree as a precaution. "Let's go back up. It's not stable here."

"Dangerous," he repeated, and something in the word sat differently than she expected. She looked up at him. "What's wrong?"

He didn't answer. He looked at her.

Wind through the leaves, the sound of it. The light came through the canopy in pieces and moved across his clothes and the ground around them.

He was wearing the same outfit as the first time she had seen him. She had seen this combination on him three times now, and each time it folded back into that memory in a way she couldn't quite explain.

Maybe that was it. Some association she'd made that she wasn't fully tracking. Whatever it was, she had never felt him cold before, not through any of the silences between them. She had always been able to read some warmth in it somewhere.

Not right now.

She produced a smile that she was aware wasn't quite convincing. "Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed? Next time I'll pick somewhere closer. If you can't get up, just call me, we can move it."

Wan Kun brushed off his clothes and stood. He Lizhen started to say something about food — he hadn't eaten, she knew he got hungry — and then Wan Kun leaned forward and kissed her.

She pulled back, startled, and stepped wrong on the slope. He caught her arm before she could fall and pulled her in.

Only when his fingers closed around her wrist did she understand how much stronger he was than she'd registered.

"Let go. What are you doing—"

She pulled. His hand didn't move.

He lowered his head again.

She raised her free hand. Wan Kun caught that one too.

He pressed both her wrists down. His voice was quiet against her ear. "You can try saying that again if you want."

"Wan Kun—!"

"You agreed to come out here." There was something behind the easy tone that was not easy at all. "So drop the act."

He Lizhen stopped fighting. The anger in her had shifted into something more tired. "If I'd known you were going to be like this, I wouldn't have agreed."

"Like what."

"You know."

His expression had gone somewhere she didn't fully recognize. His eyes were bloodshot. She couldn't quite connect it to the face in front of her — he was twenty.

"And what about you?" he said.

She looked at him. "What about me?"

"How different are you, exactly." He let go of her wrists and she pulled her arms back sharply. There were already marks forming where his fingers had been, but she didn't touch them. "Why did you pick this place."

He Lizhen was quiet for a moment. "If you didn't like it you could have said so yesterday."

"Don't." He made a short, humorless sound. "You picked somewhere with no one around because no one can see us here. No one to recognize you. No one to know."

The feeling that moved through her was sharp in a way that left no room for anything else.

"You're using me," he said. "To entertain yourself."

"No—" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to.

"You can't show your face next to me. You think I owe you money, so you're letting me get away with whatever."

"That's not—" She lifted her head. "You've misunderstood."

"Sure." Something shifted in his face — the hard thing underneath collapsed suddenly into something careless, almost performative. "Just having fun, right? Everyone does it."

He Lizhen looked at him. His collar was open, the wind pushing it back, the clean line of one collarbone visible. She said, without planning to: "You're going back to work."

He stopped.

"Aren't you."

He recovered his expression. "What if I am."

"You shouldn't be doing that job anymore, Wan Kun."

He said nothing.

"I've told you this before. That kind of place — it's not somewhere a student should be. It'll catch up with you eventually."

"Whether I go back is my business."

"I've said it so many times and you still—"

"Mm." A beat, then: "Right. I'm the kind of person who does that kind of work." His voice had gone flat. "If you don't like it, you don't have to look."

He turned and started up the hill, and while he was still walking he said over his shoulder: "And since we're giving each other advice — you think I'm shady, fine. But don't kid yourself either. Just because you have a nice figure doesn't make you so impressive. Men aren't interested in that type. Friendly warning, from a student."

He was gone.

He Lizhen stood in the wind. She listened to his footsteps fade.

Then she grabbed the trees on either side of her and started climbing back up the slope.

Partway up, her foot slipped. Her knee hit a rock and the skin opened. She didn't make a sound. She steadied herself, found her footing, kept going.

When she was back on level ground she picked up her bag and walked.

The bag was heavier than it looked. Inside was a thermos lunch container with egg pancakes she had made that morning. She had made a lot of them because she knew he got hungry fast and she had been a little worried they wouldn't have enough.