In the summer of 1998, the smoke billowing from the factory chimneys concealed the fates of three girls.
As Lin Wei chewed on a dry steamed bun, hiding in a corner of the school field, she never imagined that having her textbook tossed into a muddy puddle was only the beginning. Standing beside her punctured bicycle, Su Xiao stared at the girls covering their mouths as they laughed, seeing for the first time how blurred the face of a “friend” could be. And when Zhao Man flung her workbook onto Li Ting's desk, she may have forgotten that just the night before, she had heard her mother shatter a vase with a sharp crash.
In the iron cage of high school, they were bullies and their victims, hands clawing at each other as they drowned, and trapped beasts passing their pain on through cruelty. They thought the college entrance exams were the key, only to discover in the autumn of 2000 that university was merely a lake covered in thin ice. In her dorm at a teachers' college in the north, Lin Wei counted her student loan bills. In the archives at a technical university in the south, Su Xiao stared blankly at the name of the major she had been assigned.
Later, in the financial crisis of 2008, they went their separate ways. Lin Wei filled her lesson plans with the words “I want to die.” Su Xiao's text messages stopped at “If only I hadn't fought back.” A shadow dragging a suitcase had lived beneath a Shenzhen bridge. In an office at a county-town middle school, there was a shattered phone and a reply left unsaid.
In 2014, a missing person's notice seeking help to identify a body was posted on the bulletin board. Lin Wei recognized the scar on Su Xiao's forehead. Among the belongings, half a piece of fruit candy, crushed underfoot, still held the warmth of 1998, like the lives of girls who had never been caught when they fell.
The daily grind cuts like a dull knife. There is no salvation, no reversal. From the metal shelves in a high school storeroom to the bottles in a cramped Shenzhen rental, they proved with their whole lives that some sorrows had their endings written from the very start.
