Chapter 10

After the parents' evening, Gi Changning's mother thought about it for a long while, and at the weekend found a moment to talk to her.

In the small room, books and papers lay open on the desk with the working for problems scrawled across the rough paper. The girl, who seemed to know what was coming, puffed out her cheeks without noticing she was doing it and watched her mother carefully.

Her mother sighed. She was not in fact angry about the results. Where a person grows up shapes them more than anything, and she had no idea what her daughter had lived through for sixteen years, and there was a great deal of time ahead. She had a mother's instinct, and between Ningning's coldness towards the Jis at the start and the guilty, awkward way the Jis handled her, she could work out most of the reasons easily enough. What she could not do was let the child sink into the past and come to hate the future.

"Ningning. Come here." She sat on the edge of the bed and beckoned, and when Gi Changning came she put out an arm and pulled her in against her.

Gi Changning's body went stiff. The smell of soap in her mother's clothes went straight up her nose with nothing in its way, and her head went soft and vague. Slowly she loosened, rested her head on her mother's shoulder, and her heart started going fast where she could not control it.

Her mother went on like somebody chatting. "It's getting colder. I'm going to make you something new. I haven't made you a thing since you came home."

"I've got clothes." What she had brought from the Jis would see her through winter, but she did not want to refuse the offer either, and she climbed the pole as fast as it was held out. "I like them loose. Thank you, Mum."

They talked about nothing much for a while, and her mother measured her with a tape and wrote the numbers on the rough paper. She glanced over the books and the exercises. "Is there a lot to learn by heart, with arts subjects?"

Ji Ran took sciences, and her rough paper was always full of chemistry equations and diagrams and formulas nobody else could read. What Gi Changning wrote down were the key words for the long questions, word to sentence, then put together into a whole line of argument.

"A lot." Gi Changning lifted an arm so her mother could measure the span, and said quietly, "It's all right though, my memory is good. Sometimes the questions have too many traps in them, and I miss them when I'm reading."

Her mother wrote the number down and smiled. "Then read the question properly. There's no hurry, is there?"

"No." Gi Changning nodded, and the moment her mother turned she wrapped both arms round her waist from behind. Her mother's back was not broad and she was not much taller. Gi Changning did not dare look at her face, and asked into her shoulder, "You're not angry?"

Her mother did not know whether to laugh, held awkwardly as she was. "I'm not angry. I was only thinking that parents who bring you into the world and then don't do what they should have done are a problem belonging to the parents. They're not a reason for you to give up on yourself."

The cloth at her back grew damp. She heard Gi Changning say, perfectly steadily, "They tell me my mother died in an accident before I was two. She was a dancer. I like dancing too, and he was frightened. Frightened of what it would remind him of, frightened I'd go the same way, that something would happen on the road to a performance one day. So he did everything he could to stop me dancing."

Dance was the only comfort Gi Changning had in those empty years. The harder they pushed against it, the harder she danced, and the better she got.

Gi Changning could be moved by kindness and never by force. She was stubborn, like a thorn, and she pressed herself into the Jis' wounds again and again and never stopped, however much blood came out of it.

Once Mr Ji realised his daughter loved dance even more than his wife had, there was nothing he could do. He raged. He pleaded. It came to its worst when she got into street dance, and he said he would break her legs. Gi Changning, in the middle of her rebellious years, put a leg up on the coffee table and said, "Go on. Break it. I've got no mother and nobody to look after me anyway. If I die it's nothing to do with you, Chairman Ji."

To Mr Ji's old-fashioned eyes, street dancers were the youths who hang about on corners, smoking, drinking, fighting over territory. What decent family sends a child to learn that? His blood pressure went through the roof, and in the end it was Ji Changfeng holding his father down on the sofa that kept him from doing something he would have regretted for the rest of his life.

Then he came down hard on her schoolwork. He sent her to extra classes and she skipped them. He hired tutors and she deliberately did not listen. When her midterm results fell through the floor, she brought every paper home and tore them to pieces in front of her father and her brother.

The Jis had never been a home. Nobody came when she cried for her father as a child. What right did they have to start now?

She was young then, and she knew exactly which words wounded. She turned herself into a weapon out of sheer stubbornness, and it never crossed her mind what that choice might do to the road her life took.

Her mother listened without a word. Then she turned round and gathered her daughter in. Since the swap this was the closest she had come to the inside of Gi Changning, and what she felt was beyond sorting out. How she wished Ningning had grown up beside her, and how little she could bear for Ranran to have gone through it instead. The bitterness and the ache of it nearly tore her in half.

In that small room a mother stroked her daughter's hair and said slowly, "Ningning. Everything has two faces to it. If we're going to live honestly, we shouldn't hurt ourselves over anyone else's expectations. All right?"

---

Having cried properly in her mother's arms and let out years of it, Gi Changning felt extraordinarily light. Any notion that crying was humiliating had gone out of the window long since.

Don't be absurd. Crying in your mother's arms is not crying.

That is honest feeling.

On the last weekend of November, Gi Changning, who had been good for a fortnight, finally had a chance to get to the studio she rented.

There were two keys, one for her and one for Meng Lai. Meng Lai lived closer, and had already changed and was warming up on a yoga mat by the time Gi Changning arrived.

The north had its heating on by the end of November and the studio had air conditioning on top of it, so it was baking. Gi Changning got the door shut and took off her thin down jacket in a hurry.

Since the real-and-fake-daughter business at the start of the month, Gi Changning had not been near the studio. Meng Lai had asked her several times and been put off with "I'm studying", which left Meng Lai itching all the harder for the details. Now the woman herself had arrived, and the first thing that struck Meng Lai was what she was wearing. "I have never seen you in anything like that."

Gi Changning shut the door and turned twice in front of her, showing off. She had on a hoodie in clashing red, blue and white, strong irregular shapes of red and blue that the white pulled into something surprisingly harmonious. Both sides had an unusual design with wide ties, and the bows moved as she walked as though they were about to lift off, which put something light into a look that was otherwise very loud, and suited her exactly.

Out of school Gi Changning dressed nothing like the room she used to sleep in. Unless a stage demanded it she rarely wore anything with much design to it, because in her arithmetic design meant trouble, and she preferred sportswear, because sportswear felt like freedom.

Meng Lai was the opposite. She liked strong design on stage and off, and strong design in her case included, but was not limited to, clothes made of plastic bags and clothes made of cardboard. She regularly complained that the school uniform held her back, and that if she had not gone into dance she would certainly have become a world-class concept designer.

She had her phone out at once. "Come on. Share me the link."

"There is no link." Gi Changning could not keep the smugness off her face at all. "My mum made it. Isn't it good?"

Meng Lai looked at that expression and understood that if she said it's all right, she would be dealt with physically. But the thing really was lovely. She put the phone down with regret, eyes shining. "Ask your mum for me. Could she make me one? I'll pay. I will absolutely not use our friendship to get it free."

Gi Changning warmed up as she answered. "You can dream."

Once she had, Meng Lai set the phone in its stand, ready for a livestream they had not done in a while.

The two of them had met over dance in middle school. Their personalities fitted, and their views on dance were different and somehow still ended up in the same conversation. Under each other's influence Meng Lai had taken up a little ballet and classical, and Gi Changning had got into contemporary and jazz.

With short video everywhere, the summer before their second year the two of them had an idea and set up an account on a video platform, "Can't Tell N from L", off their two initials. They threw together a routine to a clip of music that was popular at the time, and the setting and the filming and even the choreography were thoroughly unprofessional, and their luck was so outrageous that it took over a hundred thousand likes and went off for no reason anyone could name.

One video brought the account twenty thousand followers. Within three days influencer agencies were asking about contracts, and no-name products casting a wide net were quoting rates for advertising.

Gi Changning did not need money then. Meng Lai was interested, and then thought about it again. She was a minor and a secondary school pupil with no time that belonged to her, and signing to an agency would mean being managed and taking a cut. Better to dance when they wanted to dance and enjoy it. So they said no.

Fate being what it is, the two of them were young, there was real air in the way they danced, and Gi Changning's gift for choreography was stronger than her gift for dancing. They put out very little and still set off waves of people copying their routines more than once, and today the account had passed a million followers.

Neither of them was satisfied with that, so they started making original work, commissioning original music and choreographing to it.

God knows what an original track costs when it has to be good and open to changes. Five figures to start and no ceiling, and then the costumes, and the rest of it, which is why Gi Changning was always complaining about money.

On the advertising side, Gi Changning had people behind her and simply asked Ji Changfeng to look into every offer, every detail of it, so the account stayed clean. Everything it earned she split down the middle with Meng Lai.

Before the two families swapped, Gi Changning transferred everything in her bank account to Ji Changfeng. She did not want to owe the Jis money, and she could not repay much, so she repaid what there was.

Even if the Jis had no use for it.

The stream opened with hardly anyone watching, so Gi Changning and Meng Lai sat and talked in front of the camera. Both took arts subjects and both were in the second year, except that Gi Changning had started school early, and on results Meng Lai was better than her by a long way. Having nothing else to do, they started reciting The Road to Shu Is Hard at each other line by line.

Then three booms came through the stream, somebody set off the most expensive rainbow firework there was, the platform announced it everywhere and sent people in to pick up the sparks, and the viewer count began to climb.

The person who set it off was another dance account, a classical dance student, said to be an excellent one, whose ambition was the national dance theatre and who got on well with both of them with no sense of the age gap.

Jinghong: Is the theme of your stream today reciting Li Bai?

The viewers were typing too.

Hahahaha, watching Jinghong type and get ignored until she had to let off a firework.

Secondary school pupil weeping here. It is impossible to memorise. The road to Shu is harder than climbing to the blue sky!

Excuse me, the Epang Palace Rhapsody would like a word.

Gi Changning put her palms together and Meng Lai made a fist in her hand, both the picture of piety. "Sister Jinghong, be merciful and forgive us."

The chat filled with laughing.

Then somebody noticed what Gi Changning was wearing, sent a gift and asked, "NN's hoodie is exactly my taste, who makes it? I searched it by image and got nothing."

Gi Changning had been waiting for a crowd. She stepped back so the whole thing was in shot, grinning. "My mum made it. Entirely by hand, made for me. Of course you can't find it."

The chat went too fast to read.

Jealous. Other people's mothers.

Even better seen whole!

Would your mum not consider mass production?

That is how you clash colours. Red and blue that saturated and the white takes all the glare off.

Petition signed in blood for mass production.

Does your mum make other things?

Gi Changning rarely mentioned her family on stream, and the moment she did the older followers were curious. She leaned in to the screen and answered them one by one. "We aren't a clothing factory. How do you mass-produce something made by hand?"

"She does. My mum embroiders as well. She put a twining pattern on the sleeves of a coat and it's beautiful."

The stream did not last long. Once they had finished being amazed by the hoodie the two of them danced the pieces people asked for most, talked a while longer and signed off.

The moment they were off, Gi Changning's WeChat chimed twice. It was Jinghong, who had set off the firework.

Jinghong: NN, can I ask. Does your mum take commissions for performance costumes? Money isn't an issue.

---

At the weekend Ji Ran finished her last tutoring job as agreed. The child had done well in the midterms, the parents settled up cheerfully and were so pleased that they kept pressing fruit and cake on her, hoping she would carry on.

Ji Ran turned the kindness down. Her own work was getting heavier and she might not have the time. The parents could only see her onto the bus with regret and some reluctance.

The Wenyuan scholarship had come through, and with her tutoring pay on top of it Ji Ran looked at the balance in the bank message. A number she would not have dared imagine sat quietly in her account. If she were still with the Gis she would have handed the card to her mother at a run, or bought things for the house, or put it away for university, or paid her uncle some rent.

She was with the Jis now, and the Jis seemed to want for nothing.

The bus reached her stop and Ji Ran pushed her hands into her pockets. There was nothing she needed to spend it on. New Year was coming, so perhaps she could use some of it on presents. What, though.

Thinking that, she reached the villa door, and in the drive stood a car she knew well. Not one of her father's or her brother's. One she had seen somewhere else.

Visitors?

She opened the door, puzzled, and found that her father and her brother, who were never not working, were both at home, and the sitting room was unexpectedly full of noise.

A small figure planted itself in front of her and put its hands behind its back. "Teacher!"

Mr Ji put down his cup. "Ranran's back? Come and meet your aunt and uncle. Straight off a work trip, they haven't even changed."

Ji Ran looked at the kind-faced woman her father had called her aunt, and said in astonishment, "Is it you?"