Derailed - Chapter 6
Did she know him?
Of course Yu Huan knew Gao Yan.
During the first term of their first year of high school, almost as soon as the military-training program ended, he became one of the school’s best-known students. The son of a distinguished entrepreneur in F City, he had family connections, good looks, and athletic ability. His somewhat world-weary face did nothing to stop girls falling for him.
Yu Huan was much more ordinary. She wasn’t good at initiating friendships and had kept to herself since enrolling. Quiet and often expressionless, she was mistaken for aloof, and few people made an effort to get close to her.
They were in different classes then.
She concentrated entirely on her studies. Even though the girls in her class talked about him often, she paid little attention.
They did share a math teacher. As her class’s subject representative, she sometimes ran into him while going in and out of the teachers’ office. But they had never spoken alone, or even exchanged a glance.
Then, one drizzly afternoon while she was helping the teacher mark homework, a fierce pain suddenly churned through her stomach.
It was her period, nothing seriously wrong.
But in high school she was painfully thin and badly run-down. The first day or two of every period felt like punishment. If she’d happened to get chilled beforehand, the pain became much worse.
Alarmed by her pale face, the teacher hurried to take her to the infirmary. She held him back. After some halting explanations, he finally understood.
“Ahem… All right. Take the afternoon off. I’ll call your family to collect you.”
Her parents worked away from home at the time, and Yu Huan lived with her father’s older brother.
Unfortunately, nobody was home that day. The phone rang busy for ages. Slumped over the desk, she said that once the pain eased, she could get a taxi home alone.
The math teacher wasn’t comfortable with that.
He wanted to take her himself, but had an important meeting coming up. Gao Yan happened to knock and enter. The teacher clapped his hands, delighted with the solution, and entrusted Yu Huan to him.
“Can you… walk by yourself?”
Those were the first words Gao Yan ever said to her.
With one hand pressed to her stomach and the other braced on the desk, she struggled to stand. He looked at her, then suddenly turned his head slightly away and removed his jacket.
“It’s a little cold outside. Why don’t you put this around you?”
Only after she got home that day did Yu Huan discover a patch of blood on her trousers.
That was probably why he’d given her his jacket.
She hadn’t realized it then.
She had simply looked up at the tall, straight-backed boy with his serious expression. Light fell across his handsome face, making everything around him seem carelessly drawn and dull.
Almost without thinking, she took the jacket.
Gao Yan held an umbrella over her all the way to the school gate. There he handed it to her and ran into the rain to flag down a taxi.
The teacher had only asked him to take her to the gate and get her a cab.
But once one finally stopped, Yu Huan closed the umbrella and passed it back. She was about to take off his jacket too when he opened the door on the other side and got in first.
“I’d better see you home. The rain’s getting heavier.”
She had no choice but to follow.
Summer brought the rainy season to F City. It rained almost every day: sometimes a lingering drizzle, sometimes a downpour.
That day began with light rain. Once they were in the taxi, the sky abruptly darkened. Moving banks of black cloud spread overhead, and suddenly great drops hammered down.
The enclosed cab kept out the violent wind and rain, but the downpour still drummed hard against the car.
Yu Huan and Gao Yan sat at opposite ends of the back seat. The noise conveniently spared them an awkward conversation.
He turned to look out of the window.
Once her pain had eased a little, Yu Huan studied him properly for the first time in the rearview mirror.
The dim light outside hid half his profile in shadow. Even so, with his deep-set eyes, straight nose, and precisely proportioned thin lips, he was undeniably handsome.
No wonder so many girls at school idolized him.
He accompanied her into her residential complex too, holding the umbrella until she reached somewhere dry. Only then did he take back the jacket she offered and return to the taxi.
Smartphones weren’t common then. There was no WeChat, and transferring money wasn’t an everyday habit.
Yu Huan repaid the taxi fare through their math teacher. The only thing she’d said to Gao Yan was a thank-you when they reached her home.
After that, they went back to passing each other like strangers.
Sometimes she wondered whether he’d even known who he was taking home that afternoon.
She’d developed late. While other girls began filling out in middle school, she was still as thin as a bamboo pole in high school, with no figure to speak of.
Her features were bold. With her now-full cheeks and healthy coloring, plenty of people might call her beautiful, but that wasn’t the look high-school students appreciated back then.
Her oversized features sat in a dark, sallow face behind thick glasses. She wasn’t exactly ugly, but combined with her frail build, she was so unremarkable she disappeared into a crowd.
No boy gave her a second glance.
Of course, she did have one distinction: her excellent grades.
But people remembered the student ranked first, or second, perhaps even third. Who remembered eighth or ninth?
And later, she chose the humanities stream while Gao Yan chose science.
*Clear wine cups greet autumn skies; at a grand banquet, lingering joy remains.*
Once, her deskmate came across those lines of poetry and pointed them out to her.
*Gao yan*—a grand banquet. *Yu huan*—lingering joy.
“Look,” she’d said. “Your name is right there beside Gao Yan’s.”
Yu Huan had already known the poem.
But so what? Who would ever associate her with Gao Yan?
If work hadn’t brought them together many years later, she thought, he might never have remembered that someone called Yu Huan had existed during his high-school years.
