On Rainy Days, Please Don't Pick Up the Runaway Young Lady

On a stormy night when he was nineteen, Gu Huai found a strange girl at a deserted bus stop. She was barefoot and soaked to the skin. She wore an ill-fitting men’s shirt, and her eyes were like a lifeless wasteland. Yet the first thing she calmly asked him was, “Got a cigarette?” Gu Huai was a “survivalist” who just wanted to scrape by at the bottom of society. The last thing he wanted was trouble. But the girl clutched his sleeve and said the craziest thing in the calmest voice: “Take me with you, or there’ll be an unidentified woman’s corpse in tomorrow’s paper.” That night, a crack opened in the stagnant waters of his humdrum life. From then on, a quirky lodger joined him in his cramped, shabby twenty-square-meter rental. She treated instant noodles like treasure, yet didn’t even know where the towels were kept. Gu Huai thought he’d merely helped a homeless stray cat on a whim. But when sunlight slipped between the high-rises and fell across her pale profile, he finally understood: The girl who had reached out to him in the rain had already become the one brilliant light in his dim life.