For a very long time afterward, Lu Qingyuan regretted that he had chatted with the teacher just a little longer that day.
If it weren’t for those twenty minutes, nothing would have gone wrong.
When Chen Annan was picked up, for a full several dozen seconds, his eyes were completely vacant. His round eyes were unfocused, as if he’d turned foolish.
Chaotic sounds exploded in his ears. Faintly, he heard his brother calling him.
“Chen Annan… Chen Annan? Chen Annan…”
Then, his dark pupils slowly focused, gradually reflecting the shapes of the surrounding objects, and his brother’s face.
Lu Qingyuan’s face was completely colorless, even a little pale from the chill. For nearly a dozen seconds, his fingers trembled almost imperceptibly. A pressure weighed on his chest, making every breath he took heavy and turbid.
Chen Annan lay against his brother in a miserable state, thinking he was dreaming. Only when Lu Qingyuan reached out and turned his face, urgently checking him over, did Chen Annan dazedly snap back to reality.
The stubbornness and endurance from moments before vanished in an instant. He transformed back into that wronged, pitiful little child.
Chen Annan’s eyes reddened. He wanted to call out “Brother,” but the moment he opened his mouth, only the clattering sound of his teeth chattering together came out. His emotions were fluctuating too violently; he simply couldn’t control the physiological reaction. Tears pattered down his face.
Lu Qingyuan said nothing at all. Silently, he carried Chen Annan out of that small alleyway. Then he took off his own jacket and wrapped it around Chen Annan, covering half his face and his ears.
This summer was very hot. Chen Annan’s face and nose tip were sunburned red. Lu Qingyuan wiped the child’s tears away with his wrist. His voice was extremely calm and restrained: “Chen Annan, you wait here for me. Don’t worry about anything else. Don’t talk to strangers. Just stay right here and wait for me to come back and get you. You got it?”
After he finished speaking, he pulled the vacuum flask from the side pocket of his schoolbag and walked back into that narrow alley alone.
The group of boys surrounded him. The malice in Lu Qingyuan’s eyes was palpable. Anger burned into a raging fire, screaming, washing away rationality.
Before the others could even speak, he raised his hand and swung it down viciously. The stainless-steel vacuum flask smashed into the boy’s head with a loud thud. Heart-rending howls instantly echoed through the alleyway.
With just one hit, the boy’s forehead was struck, blood gushing out. He clutched his head in agony and screamed.
Although Lu Qingyuan looked lean, he was actually very strong. His arm had a solid layer of muscle. Lu Wenyuan had once joked that it was all from carrying his little brother.
His strikes were fast, accurate, and ruthless. The surrounding cronies were instantly dumbfounded. In the end, they were all just children. None of them had expected this.
The boy was wailing. Lu Qingyuan sent him crashing to the ground with a slap. He had never been this calm. All the blood in his body surged violently, yet the words from his mouth were utterly composed, carrying a terrifying intimidatory force. Every word was clear:
“You hit him?” He relentlessly pinned the boy’s head down, his other fist pounding down like a drum. “Are you sick or something?!”
The boy being hit was stocky and strong, but right now, he couldn’t break free at all. His fury surged, eyes instantly bloodshot. Grinding his teeth, like a wild leopard that had lost its mind, he roared, frantically clawing and gouging Lu Qingyuan’s face with his nails. Obscenities poured from his mouth like splashing water.
Even when his face was clawed raw, Lu Qingyuan didn’t let go. The malice in his eyes deepened. Veins bulged on the back of his hand as he strangled the boy’s neck. “Who the hell told you to touch him?! Can’t you see how small he is?!”
“Where did you touch him?! Speak!”
For a few seconds there, he really did want to strangle this kid to death. He could feel his tightening fingers touching the other’s bone. The veins bulging on his arm bore witness to his hysteria.
The boy’s face quickly turned a bluish-purple. His eyes rolled back. Seeing that things would really go terribly wrong if this continued, a few kids rushed forward to pull him off. Another, afraid a death would actually occur, slipped away to call for help.
Moments later, two adults charged into the alley. A deep, authoritative voice shouted, “Hey! You kids trying to get yourselves killed?! Which school are you from?!”
Things like gang fights and school violence—no matter where they happened—once the school and parents were notified, anyone could guess how serious the consequences would be. Not to mention they were still wearing their school uniforms. The group of kids scattered like startled birds and beasts in an instant.
Lu Qingyuan was forcibly pulled away by the adults. The boy finally gasped for breath, clutching his chest and coughing violently. The adults cursed a few times. Seeing the seriously injured one on the ground, they rushed him to the hospital.
By the time Chen Annan saw his brother again, it was already very late. A crow-blue hue pressed down from the sky, with a last lingering streak of dull blue.
That summer, the heat in Nanjing was strange and unseasonable. Chen Annan clearly wasn’t cold, yet his teeth kept chattering without stopping.
He wasn’t crying anymore. Only the dried tears remained on his face, and his eyelids were terribly swollen. Lu Qingyuan wiped his face. He still gave an occasional sniffle.
Lu Qingyuan ruffled his hair. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Let’s go home.”
But Chen Annan said, “I heard someone calling me… Brother, someone was calling me…”
Hearing this, Lu Qingyuan crouched down and took his hand. “It was me calling you. Listen carefully. It’s your brother’s voice.”
With red-rimmed eyes, Chen Annan looked at him, at his brother’s face bearing crisscrossing bloodstains under the streetlight.
Chen Annan didn’t speak anymore. Lu Qingyuan hoisted him onto his back. He lay quietly against his brother’s back. The schoolbags hung from his brother’s arms, while both hands supported the bends of Chen Annan’s knees, hefting him upward a couple of times. Veins bulged fiercely on his arms.
The entire distance from the school to the hospital, Chen Annan didn’t say another word. It was as if his spirit hadn’t returned. His eyelids drooped, his mouth only producing the sound of weary breathing. He was so quiet it was almost frightening.
Lu Qingyuan first had him undergo a full-body checkup, not thinking about himself at all. Instruments were pushed back and forth. Report after report came out. Chen Annan sat dazedly on his brother’s lap, very obedient.
The tears had dried, but the skin on his face was still stretched taut, like the tightness after a wound closed.
After repeatedly confirming that nothing was wrong from the checkups, Lu Qingyuan still couldn’t rest easy. He found the emergency room doctor and asked, “Could you please take another look? Why does my little brother keep trembling like this?”
The doctor said it might be shock, told them to let the child go home and sleep it off.
Lu Qingyuan had no choice but to carry Chen Annan home again. With such a huge incident, he still hadn’t had the chance to call Lu Wenyuan.
There were many night markets in the evenings. Every street had a rising and falling chorus of hawkers’ cries. Passing by a snack stall, Lu Qingyuan suddenly asked, “Do you want something to eat?”
The stall mainly sold Plum Blossom Cakes, but also had Wheel Cakes and Egg Braised Dried Tofu—all things Chen Annan usually loved.
Right now, Chen Annan didn’t say he was hungry, nor did he say he wasn’t. He just lay there on his brother’s back, his head tilted.
Lu Qingyuan carried him and continued forward. Chen Annan blinked. Suddenly, he raised his hand and pointed to the left, saying softly, “Cotton candy.”
Lu Qingyuan initially thought he was calling the dog. But looking in that direction, he saw an Erba bicycle parked ahead, a wooden pole bound to it, stuck full of candied hawthorn skewers. Beside it, an industrial-sized deep pot churned continuously, rolling colorful sugar strands into fluffy puffs of cotton candy.
Chen Annan slid off his brother’s back and stared at the cotton candy.
Lu Qingyuan bought him two sticks. The brightly colored cotton candy, puffed up like clouds, covered Chen Annan’s entire face.
Chen Annan ate slowly. Lu Qingyuan could almost see how the food traveled down his thin neck as he swallowed. Just watching this, Lu Qingyuan’s heart suddenly felt heavy and tight, as if stuffed full of something—swelling, swelling until it ached, the ache rising to his nose.
Because of this incident, Chen Annan became strange. His unprecedented silence was even more worrying than crying or throwing tantrums.
Lu Wenyuan took him for checkups many times. But the child was too young, and doing too many CT scans wasn’t good either. Eventually, the doctors refused to let him continue. They went to Drum Tower Hospital and the Children’s Hospital many times without seeing any results. In the end, the doctor suggested seeing the psychology department—it might be autism.
When Lu Wenyuan was picking up a report, he received a phone call. He glanced at Lu Qingyuan, then walked a few steps further away before continuing the conversation.
The Children’s Hospital was very crowded in the afternoon. Sick children were all held in their parents’ arms, crying and fussing nonstop. This made Chen Annan seem particularly well-behaved. He lay on his brother’s shoulder like a rag doll, limp and soft, only his large eyes appearing vacant due to their lack of focus.
Lu Qingyuan tousled his hair. Chen Annan reached out a small hand and gently touched the wound on his brother’s face, just a light touch before pulling back.
Lu Qingyuan grasped his little hand and pressed it to his own face, patting it twice. “It’s nothing, see? It doesn’t hurt.”
Lu Wenyuan was still on the phone with the school leaders. He loved his children to the bone. Lu Qingyuan had grown up cherished in the palm of his hand since childhood. Only when joking around had he ever patted his bottom.
And as for Chen Annan, let’s not even talk about it. Now they didn’t even know if the problem was psychological, which made Lu Wenyuan’s heart ache terribly.
Lu Wenyuan pressed a hand to his forehead, trying his best to state his demands in a calm and reasonable tone. “I don’t agree to mediation. If the other party only offers an apology, then I’ll find a lawyer to appeal, and I’ll have this matter published in the Jinling Evening News.”
