TBW - 13

13. So-called fate, so-called destiny.

Beibei had just been scolded and spanked in the bathroom by Cheng Simin. Hearing her dejected tone, he realized he had done something wrong—even though he didn’t understand why. Tail tucked between his legs, he hid behind his owner, peeking at Shi Ying through the gap between her ankles.

When Shi Ying turned his head, Beibei immediately wagged his tail slightly, his expression as anxious as Cheng Simin’s.

Who could stay mad at a wagging-tailed puppy? Certainly not Shi Ying.

He forced a smile at Cheng Simin, attempting to comfort her with a relaxed and lazy expression while continuing the lie he had been telling his family.

Earlier in the hallway, he had maintained polite language and acted as if he were determined to keep his distance from Cheng Simin, putting on a good show. But after this fiasco, his aloof facade crumbled in seconds, and now she had seen him at his worst. A wave of failure crashed over him, his dizziness lingered, and his face remained stiff, making his smile look less than convincing.

When mental defenses weaken, pretending becomes a burden.

Shi Ying loosened the tie choking his throat, exhaled deeply, and let his lips slacken, as if finally surrendering to someone. In a soft voice, he said, “It’s not your fault. Besides, it was just a job about soliciting deposits anyway.”

“Soliciting deposits?” Cheng Simin asked, puzzled.

Shi Ying patiently explained without hiding anything: “Yeah, their company deals with private equity funds. They have a 50-million-yuan target this year in Xicheng.” The interviewer had tried every trick to probe his background, asking about his parents—it was all part of another sales strategy. If he could personally contribute five million yuan to boost performance, the idle position paying 200,000 yuan a year at Banshan would naturally be his.

In fact, most of the financial jobs he had interviewed for in Xicheng over the past few months were of this nature—either recruiting clients or soliciting deposits.

“You saw the state of this place,” Shi Ying continued. “There was no chance. Failing the interview is my own problem.” He didn’t blame Cheng Simin, nor her dog. This capital game was low-level, but he himself was even worse—he didn’t even have the chips to get in the game.

Cheng Simin looked around. Indeed, Shi Ying’s public rental apartment was barren. The bedroom and kitchen were empty, with only a mattress, a table, a refrigerator, and four or five large suitcases scattered in the living room.

As he spoke, Shi Ying pulled out the only chair in the house, walked to the fridge, and rummaged through it, pulling out two bottles of water.

He opened a Diet Coke, handed it to Cheng Simin, and gestured for her to sit and drink. He poured the other bottle of mineral water into a bowl.

“Why don’t you let him go for now? He’s been running around for half an hour and must be thirsty.” What did a dog know? When hungry, it ate; when tired, it slept; when happy, it wanted to play.

Shi Ying squatted on the ground, tentatively extending a hand to touch Beibei’s nose. After receiving Beibei’s permission, the fingers holding the white porcelain bowl brushed lightly against Cheng Simin’s pant leg.

Pants weren’t external human organs and shouldn’t have tactile nerves, but Cheng Simin stared at his slender knuckles, unsure why she suddenly flinched as if ticklish, moving away reflexively.

The legs of the chair scraped loudly against the tiles. Embarrassed by her reaction, Cheng Simin took a big gulp of ice-cold cola and said, “Don’t bother. He’s not thirsty. We’ll drink at home later. Our place is right next door. Oh, isn’t this the bowl you eat from?”

Beibei, who was supposedly “not thirsty,” ignored his owner’s words and began lapping up water eagerly from the bowl held by Shi Ying.

With his tongue splashing droplets everywhere, Shi Ying placed the bowl on the floor and stroked Beibei’s shoulder blades. “Sure, I use it. I haven’t cooked here anyway. The bowl came free with a discounted yogurt purchase.”

Just a few sentences painted a vivid picture of dire poverty.

Moments ago, Cheng Simin had gleefully speculated about the decline of the Shi family’s fortunes. Now, faced with the unembellished truth presented by the person involved, she couldn’t help but feel a pang of pity for Shi Ying.

Yes, her previous dislike of Shi Ying stemmed from the innate resentment of the proletariat toward the wealthy—a resentment filled with inferiority, jealousy, and envy. To put it bluntly, she had harbored resentment toward the rich. But now that their wealth was gone, continuing to harbor hatred seemed petty.

After all, losing money was an agonizing experience. She had felt that bone-deep pain when she sold her house in Jicheng at a loss.

Cheng Simin prided herself on not being the kind of person who, having been rained on, would snatch away someone else’s umbrella.

Thus, naturally, as she sipped her cola, Cheng Simin steered clear of topics that might embarrass Shi Ying, instead bringing up cheerful childhood memories to lift his spirits.

“I remember we sat together as desk mates for a few years in elementary school, right?”

Opening the drawer of memories, Cheng Simin squinted and rummaged through the scattered fragments of the past. “In middle school, I was in Class Three, and you were in Class Four, both on the second floor of the west teaching building. Wow! It’s really incredible. Ten years have passed, and now we’re neighbors again.”

Shi Ying tilted his head to look at Cheng Simin’s face. There was no air conditioning in his apartment, only an old-fashioned ceiling fan light, which creaked softly as it slowly rotated above their heads.

The fan didn’t produce much breeze, but with each rotation, the flickering bulb cast a spot of light on Cheng Simin’s cupid’s bow.

Shi Ying stared at that fluctuating curve, silent, because Cheng Simin didn’t know that before they discovered tonight that they were neighbors, they had already crossed paths twice—once on a train and once on a secondhand trading app.

If it weren’t for the fact that she was already married, Shi Ying might have believed that the two of them were truly fated.

But now, he only felt that fate had been cruel to him.

Cheng Simin’s incessant chatter continued. Shi Ying suspected that his gaze toward her wasn’t entirely pure, so he lowered his head again and focused on stroking Beibei’s soft fur.

After Beibei had lapped up most of the water, he leaned into the shoulder massage, extending his wet tongue to wash Shi Ying’s fingers and knuckles. He even pushed his head under Shi Ying’s other hand, prompting the “masseur” to rub his head as well.

Cheng Simin had always had a knack for stand-up comedy. Even though Shi Ying, engrossed in interacting with the dog, showed no desire to talk, she could still amuse herself. “Haha, speaking of the west teaching building reminds me of the ghost story about the two windows.”

Back when they attended Banshan No. 1 Middle School, the campus had been converted from several abandoned military buildings. The three floors above ground in the west teaching building housed the junior high classrooms, while below was a large air-raid shelter capable of accommodating ten thousand people.

No one among the students knew where the entrance to the basement was, but everyone walking past the bike shed behind the building could see two small windows at the semi-basement level—painted over and reinforced with steel bars.

Teenagers’ imaginations ran wild, so each class year had its own legends about those two windows.

Aliens and parallel universes aside, the most clichéd and uninspired tale was about a long-haired female ghost in a red dress who would appear at the windows whenever it rained. She supposedly targeted solitary students, so even in spring, summer, autumn, or winter—whether it was windy, snowy, or merely forecasted to rain—timid children would always go to the bike shed in groups.

At this point, Cheng Simin placed the empty cola bottle back on the table and doubled over, laughing like a cooing pigeon.

“What nonsense about a rainy-night ghost! As if such things exist! Only you would believe it. Every time you came to school, you insisted on parking your bike next to mine. Seriously, it was such a short walk, yet you still made me accompany you when retrieving your bike!”

“Huh? How old were you then? You’d tremble every time we passed by those windows.”

Cheng Simin knew exactly how to provoke him. Shi Ying, who had been rubbing the dog’s head, couldn’t help but lift his head and look directly into her eyes. His gaze intensified, and his voice grew slightly louder. “I didn’t tremble! What are you talking about? I didn’t believe in that stuff either.”

“Oh really? Then why did you lock your bike to my wheel, chaining the two bikes together? When you got held back after school to write a self-criticism, I had no bike to ride and had to walk all the way home!”

Shi Ying hadn’t expected Cheng Simin to remember so many trivial details. For adolescent memories, one person’s recollections often feel thin, making those reckless heartbeats seem like fabrications. But when two people share an experience, it’s different. This interwoven narrative carried a solid weight, suddenly pulling adults back into their pasts.

Unsure where their reminiscing had wandered, Shi Ying’s eyes flickered brightly before dimming again. Lowering his eyelids, his voice softened once more. “I wasn’t afraid of such childish ghost stories.”

After going abroad, his favorite pastime became horror films—violent gore, found footage, jump scares, and demonic cults, all fair game. Even watching them alone through the night during stressful times didn’t scare him; instead, he found the adrenaline rush exhilarating.

He clearly wasn’t a coward, yet Cheng Simin had reduced him to a fragile, clingy vine.

“Tch.” Cheng Simin’s dimples mocked him, her tone dismissive. “Sure, keep telling yourself that. You were scared stiff, not to mention how much you used to cry. You’d burst into tears at the drop of a hat.”

“You cried when someone teased you, when the teacher made you stand as punishment, and most ridiculously, when I used your eraser!”

“Hey!” Shi Ying couldn’t take it anymore. Rising to his feet, he looked down at her from a sharp angle. “Cheng Simin, enough already. Did you never cry?”

“You cried over injured birds on the road, when the teacher asked everyone to donate money for a baby with leukemia, during biology class when dissecting dead frogs, and even during the weekly flag-raising ceremony! Don’t think I didn’t notice—you’d secretly wipe your tears whenever the national anthem reached its climax!”

“Don’t be so crude. What do you mean by ‘bursting into tears’? And what about you? Were your eyes leaking too?”

Each heartbeat caused her eyelashes to flutter slightly. Though they were bickering, the distance between them was barely an arm’s length, creating an oddly intimate atmosphere. Caught off guard by his articulate rebuttal, Cheng Simin struggled to respond to his barrage of arguments.

She only remembered how comically Shi Ying used to cry as a child, forgetting that she herself had also been an emotionally sensitive softie. Before turning twenty, she had been prone to uncontrollable tears, highly sentimental and easily moved. But how did this former crybaby learn to swallow her pain whole? It must have been after severing ties with Cheng Wei and Chen Xiaofen.

There was no one left in the world to pity her tears, so those teardrops turned into meaningless stains.

Their gazes locked, pupils floating like ice on water. The atmosphere between them grew strange. They had stared at each other for too long and urgently needed one of them to subtly avert their eyes or continue the conversation.

Shi Ying’s face was flushed, his gaze intense as if preparing for a debate, showing no signs of backing down. Cheng Simin, however, stood up abruptly from her chair.

“Damn it,” she thought. She always lost these staring contests. Oh well, losing was something she excelled at anyway.

As she shifted her gaze, Cheng Simin solemnly justified her retreat: “Oh no, I didn’t realize the time. It’s late. I should head home. I’ve got things to do.”

Reattaching Beibei’s leash, Cheng Simin stepped out of apartment 1201 before remembering to ask for Shi Ying’s contact information.

Having been ostracized by her peers in high school, Cheng Simin had never attended a Banshan alumni reunion nor kept in touch with classmates. Shi Ying was the first old acquaintance she’d run into in years.

Though the friendship they’d nurtured since elementary school had hit rocky shoals, turning them into bitter rivals upon meeting, that was all a decade ago. Yesterday’s grievances were ashes scattered to the wind. Moreover, both of them were now in similarly unfortunate circumstances. Fellow failures should empathize with one another, like sparrows huddling together in winter for warmth.

When Cheng Simin opened WeChat, so did Shi Ying. After she gave him her phone number, he paused when searching for her profile.

Cheng Simin’s profile picture was a selfie of her hugging her dog in the elevator. The photo was taken quite some time ago because Beibei, wearing a yellow twisted-pattern sweater, still looked slim.

Shi Ying shifted his gaze from the cute photo and, lifting his eyelids with a forced smile, asked, “Cheng Simin, are you really giving it to me? Is it convenient for me to add you?”

Cheng Simin rolled her eyes, refusing to indulge his sarcastic tone. “Whether it’s convenient or not is something you should ask yourself. Aren’t you old enough to make your own decisions? I’m leaving!”