Chapter 6

Once Xue Miaomiao had gone, the party went back to what it had been. Some of them sang and danced, some got together to gossip.

While Ji Ran was in the toilets, Xiao Xiao turned down an invitation to a game of Werewolf and took Gi Changning upstairs to change.

She had to. There was blood on Gi Changning's trousers, which would be hard to get out, and if she went home in them her plain honest parents would assume she had been somewhere dangerous.

Xiao Xiao leaned on the door frame of the changing room and started. "When did this happen?"

Gi Changning answered while she changed. "Yesterday. Met the parents, moved house. Tomorrow I'm off school to move the household registration."

So that was what Gi Changning had meant by having met the parents.

Xiao Xiao kept her comment to herself, then thought of something. "Those earbuds you gave me. Why don't you take them back? You'd get something for them on a resale app, and Wenyuan's fees aren't cheap."

The state of the Gi family was no secret in class one. Ji Ran had always worn the old uniform from her first term and never let up for a second on keeping pace with Wenyuan, because of the size of the scholarship.

Wenyuan's scholarship system was not like other schools'. You could not apply in your first year. In the second year, after the midterms, they were awarded on results and conduct.

Ji Ran's fees had been waived when she arrived, and with the midterms over the scholarship was as good as hers. Gi Changning was another matter. She was bottom of the year.

The fees were high and the teaching was half in English. From the day they arrived, most pupils were preparing to study abroad. Besides the ordinary arts and science classes, Wenyuan had an international section and classes in smaller languages. Ji Ran had done middle school back home, where her English went no further than the textbook, and she had hammered her way through on memory alone.

Gi Changning finished changing and pushed the door open with a bang. "There's no taking back a present I've given. And wipe that look off your face. Have you forgotten what I actually do?"

Xiao Xiao made a noise and told herself that was what came of meaning well. She also knew Gi Changning had no use for sympathy. When other children laughed at her for having no mother, Gi Changning's answer was to hit them, with no discussion. Xiao Xiao shook her head. "I nearly forgot. You're a big account with a million followers. Two sponsored posts would cover the fees."

Gi Changning raised an eyebrow, pleased with herself. "You still haven't told me how you know Ranran."

Having seen Xiao Xiao go into a fight holding a bottle, Gi Changning thought she was being far too nice to Ji Ran.

"It was a while ago." Xiao Xiao propped her chin on her hand. "First year, I think. Some little creep I'd turned down drove at me on purpose, and Ranran pulled me out of the way."

She had saved her life.

Gi Changning clicked her tongue. "And the creep?"

Xiao Xiao smiled coldly. "Bankrupt, I imagine."

Spoken like the heir to the Xiaos. Somebody annoys her and the family goes under.

Gi Changning thought it, and said, "Ranran doesn't remember saving you?"

"She's pulled too many people out of the way to remember me." Xiao Xiao sighed. She had not known Ji Ran's name then, and had assumed the girl would come looking for something in return, right up until she passed her in a stairwell and Ji Ran walked straight by with her vocabulary book in her hand and nothing in her face at all.

Looking at that thin back, Xiao Xiao had thought very poorly of herself and of the mean little suspicion she had been carrying.

Gi Changning could work out with her toes exactly how ugly Xiao Xiao's suspicions had been, and on the principle that any hit is worth taking, she said, "Xiao Xiao, your mind has been equally disgusting for as long as I've known you."

"Too kind, too kind." Versions of this conversation had been going on between them for over a decade, and when they were small they used to fight on sight. Xiao Xiao was unbothered. She shrugged and said sweetly, "Not a patch on your noble self-sacrifice just now."

They looked at each other, said nothing for two seconds, turned their heads away at the same moment, went down the stairs one along each side, and snorted together at the bottom.

Ji Ran came out of the toilets and found Gi Changning and Xiao Xiao facing each other like two drawn weapons, and remembered Gi Changning saying yesterday that the two of them did not get on.

They had not started fighting, surely.

"You two?" Ji Ran said doubtfully.

"We're having a friendly chat." Gi Changning used her height to drape an arm over Xiao Xiao's shoulders and showed a row of small white teeth. "Aren't we, Xiao Xiao."

Xiao Xiao straightened her back as hard as she could and still came up short. She threw the arm off furiously, took Ji Ran's arm instead and smiled without any of it reaching her eyes. "We. Are."

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

It did not look much like peace from any angle.

Xiao Xiao could not be bothered with Gi Changning any longer and took Ji Ran's hand. "Come on. Let's cut the cake."

Ji Ran stumbled, caught Gi Changning's wrist on the way and laughed. "Come on. All of us."

---

The night had gone deep and Villa One was emptying out.

Xiao Xiao found a driver to take Ji Ran and Gi Changning home, and stood waving her phone at them as they left, with Ji Ran's new WeChat on the screen. "Message me when you get in!"

Ji Ran nodded seriously. "I will."

The car ran fast past the evenly spaced street lamps and left long blurred blocks of colour behind it.

In the quiet of the car two voices arrived on top of each other. "You today..."

Ji Ran and Gi Changning looked at each other, paused half a second and said together, "You first."

Half a second more, and it was still Gi Changning who asked. "What's between you and that Xue, whatever her name is?"

What was between them.

Ji Ran did not know where to start, since she had never understood where the spite came from in the first place. One day her desk had simply been swept onto the floor, with a bootprint across the cover of her Chinese textbook, and the whole class had looked straight past it while Xue Miaomiao and her followers laughed in the back row with nothing to stop them.

"I did middle school back home. It's a small place, and if anything happens to a family the whole street knows within the hour." Ji Ran named the town and the village. "Thirteen, fourteen years old. The restless age. Everyone wants to be different and everyone is frightened of being different."

So they find the one who is more different than they are.

And cut her off.

Her father's burns were no secret. Adults discussed it with no thought for how much the children nearby were taking in, and the children carried the half-sentences they caught into the playground and passed them on. Passed on far enough, it became a story in which her father must have done something wrong to get his face burned, and in which an ugly man's daughter must be ugly too. Some of them went further and put it about that Ji Ran's birth had brought a curse down on the Gis.

The parents who heard it said children talk nonsense, and laughed it off. Push them on it and they would say your family was petty, picking quarrels with children, and it never once crossed their minds to wonder how the Gis felt in the middle of it.

Enough people say a thing and it becomes true.

Ji Ran at least had her results. In any school a top pupil gets more goodwill from teachers than anyone else, so if they wanted to cut her off, let them. Xue Miaomiao thought very well of herself and considered hitting people the work of small-time thugs. She was going to be a woman of society one day, and violence was beneath her. Whatever the reason, she never did Ji Ran any damage you could point at, so there was nothing the teachers could do and it went on.

In the second year Xue Miaomiao was put in a different class, and Ji Ran had a quiet year with friends to work and play with. In the third year they were put back together, and Xue Miaomiao tripped Ji Ran's friends up in every open and quiet way she could. The friends were furious and could do nothing from another class, so they stuck close to Ji Ran after school and at meals.

That went on until the second half of the third year, with the entrance exams coming.

"Xue Miaomiao's birthday is in April." The turn of spring into summer, the best weather of the year. "Her family had the supermarket, so they were somebody in the town, and when she broke the rules at school the head of year looked the other way. She invited me to her birthday party. She said she wanted to leave with the best memories she could, and to use the chance to apologise, and that she hoped I wouldn't hold it against her."

Gi Changning hissed through her teeth. She had a bad feeling. "You went?"

"I went." Ji Ran had put on her most respectable clothes and walked into the best hotel in the county seat, and in that gilded lobby she still did not fit. Xue Miaomiao wore a white princess dress and a paper crown, and as she handed Ji Ran a glass of cola she caught her by the wrist and pulled. The cola and Ji Ran went over Xue Miaomiao together. "Then she started crying. She cried and asked me why, if I didn't want cola, I had to push her over."

Ji Ran closed her eyes and leaned back against the seat. "There was nothing I could say and no camera I was allowed to see. Everyone round me was blaming me, and some of them knew my father. So my father came."

A man barely into middle age, in a shirt that was neither new nor old. He had a broad back, and when he bent to apologise the shape of the bones came through it, and his voice came muffled through the mask saying sorry, sorry, over and over.

Ji Ran, still young, looked up at one moment and caught the mocking tilt of Xue Miaomiao's mouth where she leaned against her father, and the flat contempt in her eyes.

And Xue Miaomiao's father saying, with some disappointment, "I always thought a girl who did so well at school would be a decent sort. I was wrong about her."

Ji Ran pulled her coat tighter and went on. "I boarded at that school. After evening study Xue Miaomiao pretended she was helping the sports pupils put the equipment away, and shut me in the equipment room. The teacher checking the dormitories at night doesn't open doors. After lights-out they sweep a torch round and that's all, so nobody noticed I wasn't in my bed. It wasn't until the sports pupils came for the basketballs the next morning that anyone found out I'd been in there all night."

Having been burned once, Ji Ran stayed well away from Xue Miaomiao. But some things come and find you whether you go looking or not. Xue Miaomiao and her followers surrounded her, dragged and shoved her into the equipment room, and however hard she hit the door and shouted, nobody could hear her.

April into May, and a night in the equipment room.

Something tightened in Gi Changning's chest. She could almost see Ji Ran curled up in the corner of it. Her eyes went hot and she swallowed what was rising in her throat. "And then?"

"There's no and then." The car was into the city now, traffic and neon running into each other with horns going the whole time. For a second Ji Ran felt as though she had walked into some strange glittering dream. "I was ill. I sat the exams. We moved. I started here. There's no and then."

It was past ten, and Pingchuan's night was only beginning.

The sports pupil said afterwards that he opened the door, found a classmate unconscious inside and dropped the key in fright. Her head was burning to the touch. He shouted for the others and for a teacher, and they rushed her to hospital.

Then somebody remembered to ring her father.

It went as far as the head teacher.

Her form teacher cared about her pupils and banged the table in the head's office demanding the one who had done it be punished. The head of year had taken several supermarket gift cards off Mr Xue and fudged it from the middle. The head, who took the largest share, decided in the end that there would be no record and no punishment, that it was children knocking about together, and that it was not to be allowed to spread.

A friend of Ji Ran's had been away for a few days for a death in the family. She came back, found Ji Ran gone, heard the whole story and wanted to take it up for her, and the school put that down hard too.

From beginning to end, neither the school nor the Xues asked Ji Ran what she thought, or the Gis.

Her mother only learned her daughter was in hospital when she got home from work. The woman who held the Gi family up on her own wiped her eyes once, shut the ward door and said to her husband, "When Ranran's exams are done, we go. Work in the county, or go to Pingchuan and lean on my brother-in-law. We are not staying in this dump."

Ji Ran was still in a bad way at the exams. The fever had set off, all at once, an old weakness left from the years her parents had carried her round the doctors, and it came on hard. Her temperature went down and came back up. Her mother had to work, so her father sat with her day and night. By the morning of the exams she was just about upright, and even so she came first in the city.

And so, when the results came out, the special admission letter from Wenyuan arrived by post.

The Gis took it for a scam at first. It was only after a phone call and a lot of questions that they understood it was a real school.

After that the calls came in from the top state schools, one after another. Ji Ran compared the scholarships and picked the most generous, which was Wenyuan Foreign Language School.

Her mother handed in her notice with great satisfaction, put the Wenyuan letter in the safest place in the house and kept saying things about how this was exactly what they needed, arriving exactly when they needed it.

Ji Ran was never one to dwell. If she had not run into Xue Miaomiao, the cold cruelty of middle school and the rest of it would have stayed pressed down where she kept it. She did not want her family humiliated for her sake, and still less did she want to lose the one thing that could change her life, which was her schooling. So she looked ahead and nowhere else.

Like a rubber band pulled longer and longer, with no way of knowing when it reaches the point where it snaps.

Other people might call it cowardice. For a girl of thirteen or fourteen, in the narrow world she had, it was the choice she had worked out would cost her least.

She was very young at the time.

Ji Ran came back to herself and turned the question round. "What about you? Why did you tell everyone about the swap at Xiao Xiao's party?"

Gi Changning raised an arm and brushed a sleeve across the corner of her eye as if by accident, then turned her head away so Ji Ran would not see the state of her. "No reason. It was going to come out sooner or later. That Xue girl looks down on you, doesn't she. So I wanted her pride under my foot."

The background Xue Miaomiao was proudest of, broken into pieces in front of the person she despised most.

Not just beaten. Humiliated.

Gi Changning had not worked out at first which father Ji Ran meant by "insulted my father". Once she realised it was the Gi one, she noticed that even after Xue Miaomiao was exposed, every scrap of hate in her eyes still landed on Ji Ran. Gi Changning knew Ji Ran was not the sort to start anything, so it had to be an old debt.

The Gis had no money. They did not even have a bed big enough for her to turn over in. But sitting at the party eating pasta made by a proper chef, Gi Changning was thinking about the plain noodles her father had made for last night's dinner.

A handful of noodles, a little spring onion, one egg.

A warm mother, a gentle father, and an uncle's family with nothing but goodwill in their faces.

It was the best meal Gi Changning had eaten in the years since her grandmother died.

Nobody was going to bully Ji Ran in front of her. And nobody was going to insult the home she had waited so long to get.

The car slowed at the entrance to the city village, and under Gi Changning's directions stopped in front of the shabby three-storey block.

Looking up, the third floor was still lit, waiting for somebody to come home.

Ji Ran could not help looking up as well, and in the moving light she seemed to see her parents in the sitting room, waiting.

Gi Changning picked up the bag with her tracksuit in it, got out, took two steps, thought of something and came back to knock on Ji Ran's window.

Ji Ran wound it down and found herself facing a look that could only be called ferocious, undermined entirely by the redness round the eyes.

Gi Changning put a hand on the window frame either side of it. "If somebody wrongs you, you say so. If somebody bullies you, you tell your family. That Xue man wants to do business with the Jis, does he? Does he hell. Why should anyone make money off you after what they did. You go and tell. Have you got that?"

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

Gi Changning said it again. "Have you got that?"

"I've got it. I've got it."

Satisfied, Gi Changning turned away at last and left Ji Ran a departing back that looked rather like a drunk's.

Gi Changning was happy. She went up two steps at a time, ran cheerfully to the third floor and knocked.

Her mother's voice came through the door. "Old Gi, go and see if that's Ningning home."

All those lit windows in the city, and at last one of them was left on for her.

---

The Ji villa in Jinhua Gardens was silent. Nobody had come home.

Ji Ran felt in her coat pocket for keys, searched for a while and then remembered the door opened on a fingerprint or a code.

Ji Changfeng, who thought about these things, had given her the code yesterday and registered her fingerprint.

Ji Ran stood a long time in front of the dark door, let out a breath, felt her way to the sitting-room light, changed her shoes and dropped onto the sofa, worn out.

Perhaps because she had slept so much, she was not tired. She shut her eyes to rest for a moment, then opened her phone and messaged Xiao Xiao.

Xiao Xiao replied instantly. "Got it. Rest properly, Ranran. Night!"

Ji Ran wrote back. "Mm. Night."

She came back to the main screen, turned the phone face down, and in the silent sitting room found herself thinking about what Gi Changning had said as she left.

If somebody wrongs you, you say so.

If somebody bullies you, you tell.

Telling was a long way outside anything Ji Ran knew.

At the Gis' she had understood perfectly well that telling did no good. When she was cut off at school, her form teacher wanted to help and could not order the class to play with her. Even real harm had ended up buried under a few supermarket cards.

Ji Ran did not know whether to laugh at herself for being worth less than a few gift cards, or to be glad she was worth a few gift cards at all.

At Xiao Xiao's party today, Xue Miaomiao had grovelled, and the shadow that had sat in Ji Ran's head since middle school had come down with a crash. It left her with a strange feeling. Pushing back did not look as impossible as all that.

Still sprawled where she was, Ji Ran turned her head to the big clock on the wall. Past eleven.

At the Gis', whoever was out late, somebody rang to ask, so the food could be kept warm.

Ji Ran opened her phone. Her finger hovered between "Big Brother" and "Dad" for a long while, then she opened Ji Changfeng's thread and typed, "What time are you two getting home tonight?"

---

At the office, Ji Changfeng was working through the overseas subsidiary's proposal late into the night. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. His phone chimed. He picked it up off the desk without thinking, saw the name on it and sat bolt upright. Then he was out of the door and down to his father's office, where he walked straight in without knocking, as grave as a man about to announce the collapse of the company.

His father jumped, and asked in the same heavy tone, "What's happened?"

Ji Changfeng put the phone down in front of him. There was one line on the screen.

Ranran: What time are you two getting home tonight?