Jiang Zhuo stared at his own feet, not daring to look up at Qiu Xianzhi. “I’m not crying. I just figured you’d be unhappy if you saw, and getting angry is bad for your health.”
Qiu Xianzhi mercilessly exposed the little thought in Jiang Zhuo’s heart. “You’re afraid of getting scolded, aren’t you?”
Having his thoughts exposed, Jiang Zhuo didn’t feel embarrassed at all and nodded. “I’m afraid of getting scolded, and I’m afraid you’ll get angry too.”
Qiu Xianzhi’s style of being a guardian was rather unconventional. He didn’t lecture Jiang Zhuo about how fighting was wrong or anything like that. Instead, he asked, “Then did you win?”
“Of course. I’ve had training,” Jiang Zhuo said, even patting the muscle on his arm. Then he had Qiu Xianzhi feel it too.
Qiu Xianzhi looked at the muscle on Jiang Zhuo’s skinny arm and, not wanting to hurt the kid’s self esteem, reached out and gave it a squeeze anyway.
Jiang Zhuo had always believed in returning the favor, so he squeezed Qiu Xianzhi’s too. Then he looked back at his own and, well, the clown had turned out to be himself. He obediently went back to holding his little rabbit print bowl and eating his tangyuan…
The next day.
After breakfast, Ye Heng came out with his skateboard and deliberately made a lap around the place where the two of them had run into each other, but Jiang Zhuo was nowhere to be seen. Feeling smug and contemptuous, he sneered, “Coward.”
Ye Heng got bored, wandered around a bit more, then went back.
On the third day, Ye Heng still didn’t run into Jiang Zhuo, and he couldn’t help guessing, “Don’t tell me he really has to stay shut up in his room until that tiny injury heals before he dares come out.”
By the fourth day, Ye Heng was even wondering if Jiang Zhuo had been grounded. Why hadn’t he shown up at all? For several days in a row, Ye Heng came out and circled the area a couple of times, but he would absolutely never admit that he was here hoping to run into that Jiang Zhuo by chance.
Of course Jiang Zhuo hadn’t been grounded. Aunt Zhong had him under close watch, taking him everywhere with her for fear he’d slip out and go skateboarding again. Jiang Zhuo himself didn’t think it was a big deal. A kid raised out in the fields, what was a little injury like this?
It was just that when Qiu Xianzhi put medicine on him, he had poured the mercurochrome straight into the bottle cap, held a tray underneath, and tipped it right over the wound. What had originally been a small scrape instantly spread into a much bigger red stain. When Aunt Zhong saw it, she got a fright and absolutely refused to let him go out, not for less than three days.
Jiang Zhuo counted on his fingers how many days he’d been stuck inside. No way would that guy still be around to laugh at him for being timid. So after eating, he bounced around beside Qiu Xianzhi and said he wanted to go out skateboarding.
Qiu Xianzhi nodded and told him to be careful, and not to let anyone bully him.
He liked a dodder flower that clung to him, but that dodder flower had to have teeth. A toothless dodder flower that only knew how to whimper and cry was not something he could like.
Jiang Zhuo and Ye Heng had only met once, and it had been an unpleasant encounter at that, but as if they’d made an appointment, both of them went to circle around the place where they had met.
Ye Heng, who had arrived a little earlier, assumed Jiang Zhuo was too scared to come and went off to skate somewhere else.
Jiang Zhuo also assumed Ye Heng was scared of him. Then, thinking this spot wasn’t safe and that a car might suddenly come around the bend, he simply skated off somewhere else too.
And just like that, with perfect unspoken coordination, the two of them ran into each other again.
The moment they saw each other, each read the other’s thoughts straight from his eyes. Their minds were perfectly in sync: Bah, coward. What rotten luck!
They treated the middle of the road as the boundary. You don’t come onto my side, I won’t go onto yours.
If one of them crossed into the other’s side, the other would definitely skate right back across too.
The place they were skating was already at the very outer edge of the resort. On one side was a railing, and on the other was an artificial lake, though it didn’t look stagnant.
At some point, one of them started showing off fancy tricks, and of course the other refused to back down. After comparing, both of them knew they were about evenly matched.
So they got caught up competing, straining against each other, completely failing to notice that they were drifting closer and closer to the roadside. Then came two splashes, and they both fell into the water.
Jiang Zhuo and the others had always loved summer, when they could go down to the river and play, so he knew how to swim. Ye Heng had learned in paid lessons. Both of them could swim, so when they fell in, neither panicked. They surfaced from the water unhurriedly and spoke at the same time:
Ye Heng: “Damn it, Jiang Zhuo, did you come here specifically to mess with me?!”
Jiang Zhuo: “Screw you.”
Ye Heng’s hot temper flared at once, and just as he was about to grab Jiang Zhuo by the collar in the water, he saw panic visibly spread across Jiang Zhuo’s face. Jiang Zhuo even slapped his arm twice in quick succession. Thinking the other boy was scared, Ye Heng was just about to tell him to call him grandpa when he heard Jiang Zhuo say, “Damn it, there’s a snake. First, first get to shore.”