CH 15

Zhang Man was standing right behind him, very close to him while listening to his gentle voice, calling another girl.

—Zhang Man’s heart ached.

She kept trying to convince herself that maybe that girl was just Li Wei’s relative, or some familiar friend despite the fact that she had never heard him mention it.

She waited patiently for him to hang up the phone, barely smiling, suppressing the sourness in her heart that was about to explode, and asked him as if unintentionally: “Li Wei, were you on the phone just now? Uh …… you have other friends, Janet … who is she?”

She couldn’t even look at him when asking the question and kept her head down, the tip of her shoe scraping unconsciously against the ground and her hands were sweaty with nervousness.

The young man answered without hesitation: “Janet is my mom, I was just on the phone with her.”

Zhang Man’s sour heart relaxed when she heard the answer…it was his mother.

She smiled at him and nodded, her eyes curving.

See, how could he be so gentle with another girl? She must be the special one for him.

Zhang Man didn’t pay attention at that time, but Chen Feier, who was standing on the side, changed her color instantly after hearing the young man’s answer.

Later, Chen Feier hurriedly dragged her away and told her very seriously that Li Wei was lying to her.

“Man Man …… he was just lying, I heard that his mother died in childbirth when she was giving birth to him. He must have a girlfriend there, Man Man, you don’t like him, do you?”

Being young and silly in love, the first reaction is always to deny it.

“No, I don’t like him.”

Although she denied her feelings for him, Zhang Man still chose to believe the young man she secretly liked: “Feier, you must have misremembered or misheard something, there is no need for him to lie about such things.”

Back then, her head was set against the reddish sunset and the side of her face was tinted with a pale pink hue as she smiled firmly and brightly. She felt that she was brave and sensible enough not to be overwhelmed by jealousy and still know the difference between right and wrong to trust him.

Unfortunately, a lie can never be true even if the person who lied doesn’t realize that he or she is lying.

When Chen Feier saw her disbelief, she got anxious and took Zhang Man to find some of Li Wei’s childhood neighbors, who also attended the First Middle School at that time.

“We’ve never met Li Wei’s mother but I heard from my mother that she died when he was born.”

“His father became more and more abnormal back then, just after his mother passed away due to a difficult childbirth.”

“Yeah, otherwise if his mom was there, he wouldn’t have to go to the orphanage.”

After hearing all this, Zhang Man only knew that Li Wei had really lied to her.

She who was so confident in him before, was feeling so bad now that she made herself out to be a joke, she thought she was wise and brave for guarding her heart’s small thoughts.

Heh, turns out everything was her own imagination.

A person like him, who can easily solve even the most difficult Physics problems and complex logic puzzles, told a lie that can be easily debunked.

It seems that he really doesn’t care about her at all. 

First love is the most painful memory of every young girl’s heart.  After soaking their hearts into the sour plum soup, it is picked up and ruthlessly wrung out.

Who does he think he is? How could he tease her like that? What about the tenderness in his eyes when he was walking with her down the street and the embrace he gave her under the streetlight that day? Was it all for nothing?

For the first time, the 17-year-old Zhang Man truly felt what it meant to have a heartache, and her heart felt like it was being stabbed one by one at that time.

It turned out that his lie can be the sharpest knife in the world.

That day, Zhang Man did not even go to the next class and went home immediately and cried all night.

She realized that she had fallen out of love. Or rather, the relationship, which began with her, also ended with her.

All those tacit understanding and unspoken feelings she thought she had with him were just her own self-interest. Perhaps, the Li Wei she knew was not the real him.

–Perhaps the real him didn’t take her seriously at all.

The next day, Zhang Man, who had calmed down a bit, chose to confront Li Wei face to face.

She was grasping the last shred of hope and possibility for herself and tried to appear calm when she said, “Li Wei, you don’t have to lie to me anymore, just tell me who that girl is, as long as you tell me who she really is, I can understand.”

The young man’s eyes were confused for a moment: “…which girl?”

The more he played the fool, the worse she felt. It was as if her heart had been crushed over a fine stone and was not bleeding too badly, but was grinding against her heart so much that it broke through the skin, and every breath she took carried an unbearable pain.

“Janet, the one you spoke on the phone last time.”

The young man actually smiled back then, with tenderness in his eyes that she truly couldn’t bear.

The teenager she secretly liked, the one she thought who also liked her, lied without changing his face or his heart.

“—Janet is my mom.”

Zhang Man closed her eyes, she could clearly hear a deep valley cracking open in her heart and felt herself shivering as she stood on a glacier despite being in N City in November.

On that day, she made an application to her homeroom teacher for a new seat.

After she returned from the teacher’s office, Zhang Man started to pack up her books and all her things without saying a word and prepared to move to an empty seat on the other side of the classroom.

The young man was reading a book at the time, but when he saw what she did, he put down his book and turned around to stare at her.

When she was leaving with a pile of textbooks, the young man grabbed her sleeve.

There was a drizzle on that day in the early autumn, and the rain drifted in through the window sill, bringing a slight chill.

He clutched her sleeve with his clean, strong fingers, and looked at her so steadily with his eyes slightly red.

“Are you …… going to switch seats? …… Why?”

Zhang Man hardened her heart and tried to pull his hand away: “No reason.”

However, the young man was obstinate and held her firmly in his grip, never letting go.

His lips were uncharacteristically dry, and the blood under his eyes was rapidly creeping over his entire eyeball. He pulled her tightly, his Adam’s apple rolling up and down and tried to open his mouth with great difficulty.

—His next words seemed to be ‘don’t go’.

The more he behaved like this, the more she felt that he was beyond redemption. She felt that if she stayed with him for one more second, she would collapse.

So Zhang Man didn’t let him say anything and one by one, she broke his fingers and smiled faintly.

“Li Wei, you truly make me feel sick.”

…….

Just like that day in her previous life, a soft drizzle began to drift outside the window and the air was slightly cool.

Zhang Man buried her head in the crook of her arm, her eyes a little moist from the memories.

Perhaps the sensitive and paranoid young man didn’t know what she was leaving him for until the very end of his life in the previous life.

How could she know at that time that he was just sick and that he had never lied to her?

If she had gotten to know him better, would she have realized that he was actually just sick?

If she had tried to understand him after that, would she have been able to accompany him to the end. Then, he wouldn’t choose suicide, even in the end?

But how can we get to the right answer if our initial assumptions are wrong? Such things cannot be thought about at all, or else one will be trapped in a dead cycle as a result.

In her previous life, after Li Wei’s death, these series of hypotheses made it difficult for Zhang Man to sleep all night long. ……

When the young man saw the girl, who was just in good spirits, lying exhausted on the table, he thought she was sick again, and his pretty eyebrows furrowed lightly.

He raised his hand to close the window and couldn’t help but call out to her, “Are you sick? Don’t sleep on your stomach, it’s easy to catch a cold.”

Zhang Man raised her head, yawned slowly, and blinked her eyes covertly, “No, I’m just very sleepy,” she added. “See, I’m in tears.”

“The next class is Physics, listen well, the test should be this weekend.”

Zhang Man straightened her back, looked at his serious side face, and curled her lips.

“…… Okay.”