Listening to Tao Guangzhi’s silly laughter from downstairs, Tao Tao, who had been hiding on the stairs peeking, finally felt a little relieved.
She’d gotten a few swats on the butt, but at least she’d fooled him and taken the first step.
From now on, she’d be able to do more things.
She didn’t dawdle. It was nearly ten o’clock at night. In the past, she’d been a playful kid who didn’t want to go to bed early, always wanting to stay up a little longer. But things were different now—staying up late stunts your growth!
Having been reborn, aside from worrying about her family and everything at home, Tao Tao also wanted to try changing her own life.
She wanted to grow taller! Ideally… she wanted to reach 170 centimeters!
She was only 130 cm now, but that didn’t stop her from setting such an ambitious little goal.
“Taro, let’s go.” She tugged on Yu Luan, who was mimicking her by pressing his face into the gap between the stair railings to peek downstairs. “Time to brush our teeth.”
The two stood in the green-tiled bathroom, side by side on plastic stools, facing the mirror as they brushed.
Tao Tao bared her teeth seriously, ready to teach him the vibrating brushing technique.
Protecting your teeth was also crucial. When Tao Tao was little, she’d been too greedy, loving snacks and half-assing her brushing, often poking around a couple of times before spitting out the water. As an adult, she’d had several cavities and became a regular at the dental clinic. The sound of the drill on her teeth and the smell of something like bone dust still made her scalp crawl just thinking about it.
Kids in the future were so lucky—schools organized fluoride applications and sealant treatments from a young age. Maybe big cities already had that technology, but right now, the dental clinics in Zhangxi Town could only do basic things like fillings, extractions, and dentures. The equipment was very rudimentary, and many instruments were reused, only sterilized with alcohol.
For now, all she could do was hope that diligent brushing and rinsing would protect her teeth.
“Taro, brush like I do!”
Yu Luan turned his head in confusion to look at Tao Tao in the mirror, who was ferociously baring her teeth and brushing, her mouth full of foam.
Did… did brushing teeth really have to be so fierce?
After hesitating for a moment, he also scrunched up his nose and fiercely bared his two rows of teeth at the mirror.
“That’s right, that’s right. Pretend you’ve touched an electric wire and shake!”
After that, Tao Tao led him through washing his face. Once they were done, she dabbed a blob of children’s cream on his forehead, cheeks, nose tip, and chin, then quickly smeared it all over with both hands. Yu Luan’s face twisted along with the motion of Tao Tao’s hands.
After she finished, his face was all red, and he looked dizzy.
“All done! Smells so good!” Tao Tao inhaled the milky scent of the children’s cream nostalgically. She didn’t see anything wrong with her face-smearing technique—she applied it to herself the exact same way.
Yu Meizhen happened to come upstairs just then. When she saw that Tao Tao had already taken Yu Luan through washing up, her eyes widened in surprise. “Huh? You’re both already done?”
Tao Tao still felt a little awkward around her. She looked down and said, “I’m going to bed,” then quickly handed Yu Luan over to his mother and pattered all the way up to the third floor.
The layout of their self-built house was quite peculiar. The first floor had the shop, a stairwell, a small living room, a dining room, and the kitchen. On the second floor, to the left of the hallway was a living room; to the right was a bathroom and Tao Guangzhi and Auntie Yu’s large master bedroom.
On the third floor, the room on the right was hers, with a small private bathroom that had a water heater. The strangest thing was… the bathroom was actually hidden inside a wardrobe!
Sometimes, Tao Tao really couldn’t understand Tao Guangzhi’s taste in home decor.
The room on the left on the third floor had originally been empty, used for storing out-of-season clothes, bedding, and some old furniture. After Yu Luan arrived, Tao Guangzhi had cleared it out for him.
The fourth floor was the rooftop terrace.
Tao Tao had started sleeping alone when she was very young—around five years old?
She didn’t remember it herself. She’d only heard about it as a cute childhood story from Tao Guangzhi when she was older. Around that age, she’d just started developing some awareness of gender differences. One day, out of innocent curiosity, she’d asked Tao Guangzhy why she couldn’t pee standing up, and why her older male cousin had a “little chicken” but she didn’t… Tao Guangzhi was so shocked he nearly fainted on the spot.
From then on, he’d been determined to have her sleep on her own. He even went to a rental bookstore and borrowed many parenting books, staying up late every night with a lamp burning to learn how to raise a daughter.
He’d also blushingly and circuitously explained to her for a long time that boys and girls were different.
Perhaps it was also starting that year that Tao Guangzhi realized that as she grew older, it would become increasingly inconvenient for him to raise a daughter alone. There were many things that only a mother would know, things he couldn’t teach her, and he worried that he might not do a good job and would end up teaching her the wrong things.
Gradually, he stopped resisting his grandmother’s nagging that he should remarry, and later, Auntie Yu came along.
But Tao Tao hadn’t understood back then.
In her childhood world, good and bad had been sharply divided, and she hadn’t yet learned tolerance.
Tao Tao sighed, closed her door, and turned on the light, illuminating the room full of Dalmatians: Dalmatian bed sheets and duvet covers, Dalmatian stuffed animals and pillows, Dalmatian posters, Dalmatian slippers… Oh, and a wooden desk covered in Dalmatian stickers.
She hadn’t noticed all this when she first got back. Amused, Tao Tao thoroughly explored her room. Finally, she walked to the desk with a sense of nostalgia. This desk, made of some unknown wood, was also a veteran piece. It was very good quality—she remembered it lasting all the way until she graduated high school without falling apart. But by then it was too old and she no longer used it much, so Tao Guangzhi had taken it to serve as an altar table for offerings to the gods during festivals.
She looked down and froze again.
On the desk, besides the stickers, there was a line of crookedly carved letters mixed with pinyin, made with a knife:
“Bad women and sǎzi (idiots) are not allowed inside.”
Tao Tao blinked blankly.
Well… the pinyin for “idiot” was wrong. So typical of her.
Half laughing, half exasperated, she pulled open a drawer, found a small knife, and scratched it out. Then she dug out some stickers she’d saved up from eating “Da Da Juan” bubble gum and silently covered the mark.
She climbed into bed, hugging the Dalmatian stuffed toy that had been flattened out of shape from being slept on, and stared into space for a while.
What would the future hold? In her past life, she’d been so carefree, growing up in a daze without a worry in the world. She’d looked forward to becoming an adult, convinced that when she grew up, she wouldn’t have to listen to Tao Guangzhi anymore and could do whatever she wanted. She’d also been eager to leave this small town, backed by mountains and facing the sea.
She’d finally become an adult as she’d wished, only to learn that nothing in life was easy.
But one thing, she knew very well.
Having been given another life, no matter what, she wanted to be happy—and she wanted all the people she loved to be happy, too.
Holding that flattened Dalmatian plush, she gradually fell asleep.
In the middle of the night, she was woken again by the rumble of thunder.
Summer thunderstorms always came without warning, pouring down the moment they arrived. Tao Tao groggily turned her head, and just then a flash of lightning streaked across the window. Soon, the security bars and plastic awning were clattering with the sound of rain.
It was pitch black outside. Tao Tao pulled the blanket over her head and rolled over to go back to sleep. She’d just closed her eyes when she heard someone knocking at her door. The person knocking called out in a trembling voice, “Sister.”
Tao Tao shot up in bed. She reached for the bedside lamp, but flipping the switch did nothing—probably a power outage. When she was little, it seemed the power would always go out when it rained heavily. So she had no choice but to stumble through the dark and rush to open the door.
Sure enough, it was Yu Luan.
He was wearing a little white tank top and blue shorts, clutching his pillow tightly to his chest. Barefoot, he was crouched in front of her door, his head buried in his knees, muttering to himself.
Confused, Tao Tao crouched down in the midst of the lightning and thunder to listen carefully to what he was saying.
He alternated between tearfully but politely negotiating with the heavens—”Mr. Thunder, hello, could you please stop thundering?”—muttering “Sister, sister…” under his breath, and comforting himself: “Mom said thunder only hits bad people. It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m not a human anymore. I’m Taro…”
“…”
What the hell was any of that?
Tao Tao sighed, reached out, and pulled him inside.
The rain was pouring down outside. First, Tao Tao wrapped Yu Luan up in her own blanket, then quickly shoved the misshapen Dalmatian plush into his arms as well.
Yu Luan, now bundled by his sister into a towel-roll with only his messy-haired head poking out, managed to free an arm from under the blanket to hug the limp stuffed toy. He pressed his chin against the dog’s head, curled up obediently, and watched Tao Tao get out of bed again to fumble in the dark for a new blanket from the closet.
With the brief, fleeting light of a few lightning flashes, Tao Tao finally managed to pull out a small towel blanket.
She dragged the blanket back onto the bed. Seeing Yu Luan flinch every time the thunder clapped, she swallowed a pang of sadness, went over to hold him, and gently covered his ears with her hands to comfort him. “Sleep. I’ll cover your ears for you. It’ll stop soon. It won’t hurt in a little while…”
It wasn’t just thunder that frightened Yu Luan. When he was little, the sounds of firecrackers, pop-pop poppers, or fireworks would also send him scrambling frantically under the stairs, under a table, or under the bed—so deep inside that no one could pull him out.
The adults would always laugh and say, “Oh my, where are you going? This kid is so timid!”
But in reality, for him, these sounds weren’t simply a matter of being brave or timid.
Tao Tao had only learned this after she started volunteering: many children with autism have physiological sensory processing disorders. Their experience of these sounds is completely different from ordinary people’s. We might just find them noisy, but for them, it can feel like a sharp knife piercing straight into their brains. They can actually feel pain from it.
Even severe pain.
Tao Tao had been stunned when she heard that.
She remembered every Lunar New Year of her childhood. While she was joyfully setting off fireworks with Lili and the other kids, Yu Luan would always cover his ears and retreat to his room, only peeking out from under the window to watch them play.
So he had been in pain.
All along, the New Year that every child loved and looked forward to, those dazzling fireworks that exploded all night long, had been like an unrelenting torture to Yu Luan. And no one understood his pain.
She wondered if, later on… after he went to the big city for treatment, things got any better.
Tao Tao lowered her eyes and held his still-trembling body even tighter. “It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt…”
In the darkness, Yu Luan opened his eyes wide in astonishment.
His sister… knew that he felt pain?
He had told his mom that thunder hurt. He’d told his teacher, and his grandmother too. But no one believed him. They’d just laugh and say, “How could it hurt? It’s just loud, isn’t it? It’s okay, be brave—you’re a little man.”
Yu Luan lifted his head from her embrace. Another flash of lightning lit up Tao Tao’s grape-like dark eyes. Yu Luan suddenly felt a little wronged, a little like crying.
He gazed at her. Even though his body was still trembling with fear, even though every clap of thunder still sent a sharp, needling pain through his ears… his heart suddenly felt as if it were wrapped in warm water. He wasn’t afraid anymore.
He didn’t say anything. He just leaned back against Tao Tao’s shoulder, trustingly.
Tao Tao held him like that for a good while. Eventually, the thunder began to subside.
Although Auntie Yu was a gentle mother, she never coddled Yu Luan. She’d realized early on that his self-care abilities were lacking, and instead became more intentional about making him independent. So even though Yu Luan was younger than Tao Tao, Auntie Yu had the resolve to let him sleep alone.
In the few childhood memories Tao Tao still had, there were indeed several nights of rolling thunder, power outages, and darkness. In a self-built house like theirs, once the power went out, it became very eerie. Countless pieces of furniture, the hallways, the bathroom—all their dark shadows grew large and distorted in the blackness, as if countless monsters were hiding inside.
Unfortunately, Tao Guangzhi and Yu Meizhen were the kind of sound sleepers who wouldn’t wake up even if an earthquake hit. On rainy, thundering nights like this, when it was nice and cool, they probably slept even more soundly.
Yu Luan was too scared to go down to the second floor to find his mom, so he could only pitifully come knock on Tao Tao’s door.
This had happened before. He would stand outside her door, chanting “Sister, sister” like a spell, and crouch there crying softly. In a pitch-black, rain-pounding night where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, hearing a child crying faintly outside your door… was absolutely terrifying! It scared Tao Tao so much that even though she hadn’t wanted to deal with him, she couldn’t sleep. She’d end up pulling him inside with a sigh, half-disgusted.
So that was how it had been. She felt a little slow for not realizing it sooner.
No wonder.
After that, every stormy night of her childhood, Yu Luan would come knocking on her door.