Xiaolei - Chapter 7

During dinner, my mother suddenly looked at me and said, “We paid for art classes so you could learn to paint, not so you could chase girls!”

Fear fluttered in my chest.

For the first dozen or so years of my life, I had been convinced that my mother had supernatural powers.

No matter how secretly I did something, she always seemed to know. Sometimes, before I opened my mouth, she even knew what I was about to say.

I hurriedly played dumb. “What girl am I chasing?”

My mother rolled her eyes, too lazy even to look at me. “If you’re not chasing anyone, what were you smiling about just now?”

That frightened me even more because I really had been thinking about Xiaolei.

Ours was a household utterly devoid of romance.

Neither of my parents had dated when they were young. Once they reached the proper age, someone introduced them, and they married.

Life was dull, punctuated by the occasional noisy quarrel that turned the house upside down.

Love? Romance? Our family did not go in for such things.

I had not expected my mother’s instincts to be so sharp.

Although Xiaolei and I spent every day together then, we only shared music and exchanged a few words now and again. Anything else existed, at most, in my imagination.

Even my imagination had never dared go too far.

Yet after my mother said that, secret delight bubbled up inside me. It felt as though someone had officially defined our relationship.

So this already counted as dating?

My father watched my mother brace for battle and laughed. His son was nearly an adult; it would be stranger if I had no such thoughts.

But my mother would not let it go. With my brain, she said, there was only room for either romance or schoolwork, not both.

She also said the girls in the city had all gone crazy and there was no telling what trouble one might cause. In any event, dating was forbidden.

I shook my head like a rattle drum and insisted I was not dating anyone, so she had nothing to worry about.

Seeing my mother act as if an enemy army were at the gates, my father joked, “Did you have his fortune told when you went back home? Is peach-blossom luck coming his way?”

My mother snorted.

“Who needs a fortune-teller? With Jinjiao’s fate…”

She looked at me again.

“You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“What’s wrong with my fate?”

I knew she meant that incident. Over the years, however, I had seen plenty of gentlemen. They had frightened me, but that was all. Later, after learning a few simple arts from Fourth Great-Uncle, I feared them even less.

Compared with those gentlemen, the thugs at school scared me more.

My mother could not be bothered arguing. She simply cut off my allowance.

“What does my allowance have to do with this?”

All my life, no matter the issue, she had always found a way to make it about money.

She sneered. “When you can’t even afford a bottle of soda, I’d like to see how you manage to date anyone.”

I looked to my father for help. To my surprise, he agreed.

“Not a bad idea. Let him taste the bitterness of love early.”

That made me even angrier.

You two philistines had made such a mess of your own life together, and now you assumed mine would be the same?

I was determined to prove them wrong.

My love had nothing to do with money.

Dating was actually simple. You waited for the right moment and pierced the paper screen between you.

That was wisdom Chen Wei—the shameless self-proclaimed saint of romance—had passed on to me.

Just when I decided it sounded easy, he added that neither too early nor too late would do.

One wrong move, and the entire game was lost.

“So what exactly am I supposed to do?”

“Act when the opportunity comes!”

I did not understand then. Now, I finally did.

For days, I tried to figure out how to confess, but no idea came.

Xiaolei seemed distant one moment and close the next, cold one instant and warm the next.

Something appeared to stand between us.

What was it?

I could not say.

In the eyes of a hopelessly straight man, the paper screen between a man and a woman was a plate of steel.

I never expected the steel plate between Xiaolei and me to be pierced in a way I could not possibly have imagined.