CH 7

When Zhang Man got home, Zhang Huifang was sitting on the living room sofa, watching a harmless and funny variety show as she wore a sweater. When she saw something interesting, she laughed so hard that her face became a blooming flower.

When she was young, Zhang Huifang made a lot of money in the bar business with her friends and bought several houses in N City, one to live in herself and the others to rent out. She has not worked since Zhang Man can remember, and mother and daughter live on some financial dividends and rent, so their lives are fairly good.

Frankly speaking, Zhang Huifang’s own life was a mess, but it wasn’t bad for her, although it wasn’t as all-consuming as other mothers. For someone as capricious and selfish as her, her attitude towards Zhang Man was already much better compared to others.

Although she kept changing many boyfriends and all sorts of people to bring home, she never left anyone overnight. She had a good grasp of propriety and it barely affected Zhang Man’s life. Of course, whether it had affected her personality or not, that was another story.

“Dinner is on the table, go do your homework when you’re done.” Zhang Huifang smoothly flipped up the brown curls that hung down to her chest, yawning and mechanically repeating the action in her hand.

She didn’t skimp on her beauty at all, her whole body was like an intense red rose that still bloomed warmly and brightly even after some age.

“Mm.”

Zhang Man looked at her, remembering the reason why she had transferred to a new school in his previous life in her sophomore year of high school, and pressed her eyebrows anxiously.

Zhang Huifang will meet her next boyfriend, Zheng Zhi, this winter and will follow him to H City a year later without any hesitation, even if she has to follow suit and transfer to another school.

Zheng Zhi is a man who on the surface seems polite, gentle and considerate, with a sensual and artistic style that other greasy middle-aged men don’t have, making Zhang Huifang fall in love with him at first sight.

In the beginning, the two got along so much better than with Zhang Huifang’s former boyfriend that even Zhang Man was convinced that for once her mother had found her true love. However, after the mother and daughter followed Zheng Zhi to H City in their previous lives, the man’s hypocritical nature began to be exposed. He is not only a hustler, but also a lustful and tyrannical gambler, who has lost all of Zhang Huifang’s savings by throwing a lot of money at the gambling table just to save his face, using his poor gambling skills.

In the end, Zhang Huifang’s breakup with him was quite miserable, so much that in future, she completely lost faith in love and stayed alone until she was reborn.

Therefore, whether it was to stay by Li Wei’s side or for Zhang Huifang’s sake, she had to do something about it. That scum who cheated money and love, she wouldn’t allow him to set foot in their house half a step again.

After finishing her meal, Zhang Man returned to her room and opened the computer to go on the school posting site.

She flipped through the bits and pieces of posts, and sure enough, she quickly saw a floating red hot post, in which people were successively spilling out some rumors related to Li Wei.

【Landlord】: I think we all know about the 1st class Li Wei, the one who has good grades and looks super handsome. He and I were in the same middle school back then, he was also very famous in the school but I advise you ladies to be more sensible, this person has problems! Would you like to hear it? If so, I’ll be back after dinner.

【A flower in a middle school】: Of course I know Li Wei. Although it’s only been a week since he started school, this little brother’s face totally beats those nasty guys in school, okay? By the way, what’s his problem? It couldn’t be that he’s gay, no?

【Angry Pig】:  I feel like this would be a big gossip, watermelon-eating person here…

【Moon Water Rises】: I already know what the landlord is going to say …… To be honest, Li Wei’s matter is quite famous in our area, in fact, you can check it out by looking at our Middle High School posting bar, or you can continue to eat watermelons here ah……

【Landlord】: I’m back from dinner, sorry to keep everyone waiting. Li Wei this person is not just abnormal, he is schizophrenic. His father was a psychopath. Do you know what happened to him in the end? I heard that Li Wei once came back from swimming outside when he was little, still wet and his father thought he should dry him out, so he hung him by the neck with a rope to the clothesline …… and was nearly out of breath when he was rescued.

【Did you take your medication today?】：F*ck, can’t the landlord give a quick warning first? Scared the shit out of me in the middle of the night…… So creepy ah! Hanging on the clothesline …… made my cold hairs stand on end, Mental illness is too scary. So Li Wei is actually pitiful ah.

【Landlord】: We felt sorry for him at first when we heard about it too, but!!!! The point is that Li Wei himself went to the hospital for tests when he was young and was also diagnosed as a schizophrenic, exactly like his father!

【Angry Pig】:  No way ah, I’ve seen him a few times and he seems pretty normal to me. What happened to him… It’s scary ah. Then, that’s not just attempted murder … Holy fudge, this is giving me goosebumps…

【Moon Water Rises】:  A lot of our middle school classmates have seen him talking to himself alone, talking to the air, and looking crazy. Anyway, what the landlord said is true, my classmate and Li Wei’s family is from the same neighborhood. I heard that when he was in primary school, he had a seizure and locked a boy in his class in the bathroom for a whole day and when that boy came out, he was almost scared silly.

【Bulletproof Kid】：I’m kind of convinced that …… Many mentally ill people actually seem to be normal most of the time.

【Landlord】: Thanks to the students in the previous row for explaining. So, even though he’s not committing any crime right now, he’s just a ****. I just don’t understand why people like this can go to school like normal people! What if one day they get some kind of stimulus and become mentally ill and take revenge on society? Did you guys know that Psychiatric offences are not punishable?

【Eating watermelon】: Cherish your life and stay away from Li Wei.

【==】: Up this comment ↑

……

Zhang Man was having a hard time looking at it, more and more people were replying to this post, the better impression Li Wei had left before, the deeper everyone’s curiosity and panic now.

She closed the webpage and lay on the bed with her eyes open, her right hand unconsciously picking at the bed sheet. She kept telling herself in her heart, don’t be angry with these people, they are just a bunch of immature children. In their minds, there is no concept of what exists as reasonable, they are young and only know that Schizophrenia seems to be something scary and new, which is why they hang on to it as if it will be comforting for everyone to go stomp on it.

They still don’t know how much it hurts to laugh at other people’s misfortunes.

In her previous life, she had shared a desk with Li Wei for over a year and had never noticed anything abnormal about him, so she scoffed at the rumors that he was suffering from Schizophrenia.

But now that she knew that it was all true. After Li Wei committed suicide, his life, childhood, and upbringing had been revealed one by one, causing her to be shaken when she thought back to this day.

Zhang Man brought her hands up to cover her eyes, her hands subconsciously gripping the bed sheets.

He was only seven years old when such an unthinkable thing happened and for someone so young and so small, who was supposed to be the most joyous of ages, suffered in ways that no adult could endure.

Naturally, this was only the beginning of all the misfortune.

The empty room was surrounded by up to the ceiling bookshelves on three sides and a huge desk was set up on the one side against the floor to ceiling windows. Outside the window is a sight of a high-rise building at night, a car drove sparsely through the not-so-congested roads of the small town.

Li Wei was sitting at his desk pushing an equation from quantum mechanics and halfway through writing it, he suddenly forgot a theorem from a matrix calculation. He rubbed his eyebrows, and stood up and took two steps with a bit of anxiety.

It had been almost a week and his body hadn’t quite adjusted to having his left hand in a cast, the bandage hanging around his neck was rubbing against the back of his neck causing it to ache.

He went to one of the shelves and deftly lifted his hand to draw a reference book from the third tier of books, but ended up bringing down an entire row of books by mistake.

‘A dozen or twelve books fell on him with a clatter.’

He ignored it, flipping through the book first to take a look at the formulas from before, and hurried back to his desk to continue finishing the derivations he hadn’t been able to make. Those formulas seemed to be disassembled and crammed into his head, like a ball of interwoven wool and only after half an hour, could he straighten out a thread.

Li Wei stopped writing and only then did he notice the pile of books that had fallen by the bookshelf, he fidgeted and pressed his eyebrows, feeling a little tired.

He shook his head, took a deep breath to calm himself, went to the bookshelf, squatted down, picked up the books with his right hand and put them back in their original position, his heart still had an uncontrollable irritation.

Suddenly someone came to mind.

She was quiet, but stubborn. She dragged him forcefully to the infirmary, she rushed the school nurse to give him a thicker plaster cast, she bought him delicious mango sago and lied to him that it was a ‘buy one and get one free’.

If she had been here, would she have been able to stay with him in peace?

The thoughts were just there and the recent irritation intensified immensely, as Li Wei returned the last book to its original position he kicked the bookshelf.

He clenched his hands to stop himself from thinking about that unrealistic possibility. Inertia was a unique property of all things of quality, but thoughts could not have inertia.

Once you get used to it, you will count the gains and the losses, and you will suffer the consequences.