“Bai Yuqiao!”
“Uh, Sis, don’t worry about it! I’ll message you later and explain!”
Bai Kou finally snatched back her phone and hurriedly said that before hanging up the call.
On the other end of the line, Bai Yuqiao, who stood outside the lab, felt a mix of helplessness and amusement. She lowered her head and typed a few words in WeChat, then put away her phone, pushed open the glass door, and continued searching for reagents.
Bzzz.
Bai Kou’s phone, tossed on the sofa, lit up: 【Suggest brewing her a cup of honey water if possible.】
The next day turned out to be a rainy day, just as Yang Wanxi had said the night before.
A gentle spring drizzle continued without end.
Yang Wanxi rubbed her temples and opened her eyes, only to find a phone propped straight up in front of her.
Before she could react, Bai Kou’s smiling face appeared from behind the screen. She quickly tapped the video call—
“Bai Yuqiao, control your sister!” In the quiet living room on the rainy day, the drunken sheep’s furious roar echoed.
“…”
Yang Wanxi stiffened as she looked at Bai Kou, who seemed even more feeble. “Please tell me that call definitely didn’t go through.”
“Sorry.” Bai Kou pouted regretfully, her head tilting slightly downward as she showed Yang Wanxi the call log. “Let me check… Wow! It actually connected for eleven minutes and nine seconds! So you must have outrageously disrespected your sister by yelling ‘Bai Yuqiao’ at least a hundred times!”
Yang Wanxi’s head throbbed and her liver trembled: “Heh, that’s just great.”
After the two ate breakfast at an open-air stall that morning, Yang Wanxi had planned to take Bai Kou along to buy a router. But Bai Kou suddenly said she was so sleepy and tired that she wanted to go back and sleep some more.
Yang Wanxi thought to herself, you went to Beijing and were chatting in the group about heading out at seven or eight every morning—where was all this sleepiness and tiredness then?
But seeing Bai Kou genuinely yawn, she still waved her hand, lowered her head to fish out the keys, and tossed them to Bai Kou.
“Go on, go on.”
Yang Wanxi watched Bai Kou’s figure turn into the neighborhood before she headed off alone in the opposite direction.
Along the way, Yang Wanxi earnestly apologized to Bai Yuqiao in WeChat, saying haha, people really can’t get drunk, how could I yell your name like that, it’s ridiculous!
But at this hour, she didn’t know if Bai Yuqiao was busy or resting, so there was no immediate reply.
She went alone to the business hall near the school, and while buying the router, she heard someone introduce a new internet package. By the time Yang Wanxi returned to the neighborhood at noon, the whole courtyard was filled with the aroma of home-cooked meals.
As she knocked on the door, she was still wondering what to take Bai Kou out to eat later.
Bai Kou called out loudly from inside, “Coming—wait a sec—”, and it took nearly a minute before she ran over to open the door for Yang Wanxi.
“Awake now?” Yang Wanxi said as she walked in.
Then she froze.
The previously drab living room had completely changed.
The sheer curtains were drawn tight, and across them hung a string of “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” balloons in English.
Below the English letters stood a six-layer “cake” stacked from balloons of various colors.
On top of that, several long balloon strings dangled from the living room ceiling light fixture, looking at first glance like fireworks.
Bang.
Bai Kou closed the door, stepped past the still-dazed person, walked to the glass coffee table, picked up the inflater and a deflated little sheep balloon.
“I only realized when I got back earlier how silly I was.” The deflated little sheep gradually puffed up in Bai Kou’s hands into a plump little sheep. “Your birthday isn’t until midnight. Even if I’d set everything up before you got home, you’d still see it all when you arrived.”
Yang Wanxi paused for two seconds before asking: “…So, you weren’t actually sleepy?”
Once inflated, Bai Kou steadily pinched the nozzle, set down the inflater, and pressed the nozzle tight: “Of course not!”
This inflated little sheep was very cute, with white skin and rosy cheeks.
Bai Kou smiled and touched the rosy cheeks, then held it up to show Yang Wanxi.
“See if this doesn’t look just like you drunk last night!”
That evening, Bai Kou also had a cake delivered.
It was a little sheep style again, with chocolate sunglasses over the eyes, looking very cool.
Bai Kou said: “I drew this design for the shop owner ahead of time! One of a kind! Isn’t it cool?”
Yang Wanxi chuckled lightly: “Yeah, it’s cool.”
At midnight, the birthday rituals proceeded as usual, while Yang Wanxi’s phone buzzed nonstop on the sofa.
She didn’t pick it up, just quietly watched Bai Kou, who was pulling a gift from her bag.
“Want to open the gift first, or hear me read the letter?” Bai Kou asked.
Yang Wanxi smiled: “We’ve added a letter-reading segment this year?”
“Yeah!” Bai Kou nodded. “Because this year, I have some special words I want to say!”
Bai Kou’s eyes held sincere and deep affection, making Yang Wanxi’s heart race. She desperately slowed her breathing before calming down and poking at a spoonful of cake.
“Read the letter first.”
“OK!” Bai Kou laughed, then spread her hands to unfold the letter paper. “Ahem!” She cleared her throat and began reading. “To my dear Yang Kuikui!”
“Yang Kuikui, today is your 20th birthday. I traveled a thousand miles to Nanjing just to say this to your face—” Bai Kou paused and looked up.
Yang Wanxi hadn’t heard the second half yet and also looked up. The moment their eyes met, Bai Kou curved her eyes and said loudly, “Happy birthday, Yang Wanxi!”
The first half of the letter reminisced about their happy childhood, even mentioning how they once went together to stand up for their sister when she was bullied by classmates. “Back then, I thought we were the Sailor Scouts—as long as we were there, justice would never be absent!”
Yang Wanxi lowered her head and laughed softly, about to respond.
But then Bai Kou suddenly said, “However.”
Yang Wanxi raised her gaze to Bai Kou’s face.
Bai Kou pursed her lips in silence, looking nervous about what came next.
“But what?” Yang Wanxi prompted.
“However, one day I realized our lives aren’t like an anime, and we’re not the girls in the anime. Sis grew up first—she went to junior high, boarded at school, and overnight, justice no longer needed us.”
“Last Mid-Autumn Festival, when you asked if I still needed you, actually, I felt… I felt unhappy for a while. But later, thinking it over, was it because these past few years we haven’t been like before… you know, because we’ve grown up, there are so many differences now. I wondered if I’d done something to hurt you…”
“I thought about it over and over these days…” Bai Kou pursed her lips again, not looking up this time, and continued reading on her own. “My answer to myself was yes.”
“Because I hurt you, so for a while, you didn’t want to pay attention to me anymore.”
Hearing this, Yang Wanxi, with her eyes downcast, twitched her lips slightly. She sighed softly and looked up, wanting to tell Bai Kou it “wasn’t hurt feelings,” but was surprised to see a tear slide down and drop onto the letter paper.
The ink on the letter slowly blurred.
It was the character for “love.”
I love you is love.
I’ve always loved you and Sis.
This, too, is love.
The next day, on the way to drop Bai Kou off at the airport, Yang Wanxi kept nagging: “Please, next time don’t prepare such big surprises. No matter what, your safety comes first. If you’re coming to find me, you have to tell me ahead of time so I can pick you up—”
Bai Kou nodded vigorously like pounding garlic: “Yes, yes, yes, okay, okay, Sis Xiaoxi is right.”
Standing in place waving goodbye to Bai Kou, Yang Wanxi kept a faint smile on her face, while one hand hid in her pocket, clutching something.
It was a fluffy handmade little sheep keychain.
As a birthday gift keychain.
Bai Kou had painstakingly made twenty of them, each marked with numbers “1,” “2,” “3”… representing Yang Wanxi’s first year, second year, third year…
Up to “20.”
Not long after Yang Wanxi’s birthday, early in May came Lu Tongtong’s birthday.
When they were little, Bai Kou and Lu Tongtong would meet up at McDonald’s for a big feast, then head to their favorite Frog Clacker Machine to “battle to the end.”
Bai Xiaochu once remarked: “Bai Doudou and Tongtong are the two most nostalgic kids in the world.”
Times changed, seas turned to mulberry fields, winds and clouds shifted—from kindergarten to junior high, the machines at Dream Fantasy Plaza had been replaced over a hundred times.
Yet the two kids still persisted day after day, stationed in front of that ugly frog.
“Aren’t you going to play a hundred years from now, still meeting up for this?” Bai Xiaochu had asked uncomprehendingly back then. “Is it really that fun?”
The ugly frog grinned with its round red mouth.
“Do you want to play this one?” Seeing Bai Kou stop, Pei Yue followed her gaze and turned her head to look.
It was an ordinary weekend. Pei Yue flew back from Guangzhou as usual to see Bai Kou. After watching a movie, as they walked down the street, Bai Kou suddenly said she wanted to browse Dream Fantasy Plaza.
They walked along with the flow of time, but Dream Fantasy Plaza remained the same—always filled with kids walking in pairs, excitedly shouting over some machine.
Bai Kou shook her head: “Let’s go…”
Lu Tongtong had deleted Bai Kou from her friends list.
Bai Kou discovered this on her way home from school. She couldn’t believe it, scrolling through the list back and forth, and only confirmed it after getting home—Lu Tongtong had really deleted her.
All the comments on her social feed, the likes on the message board, everything wiped clean.
Bai Kou desperately wanted to call Lu Tongtong right then and demand why.
But she didn’t dial the number, nor did she try any other way to contact her.
Until last night, when she clutched her phone in bed, tossing and turning, drafting a birthday message in the text interface but lacking the courage to hit send.
She recalled the words her sister had sent her: “People always grow up.”
So after leaving Dream Fantasy Plaza with Pei Yue, as sunlight fell on her face, Bai Kou squinted at the sun, took out her phone, pulled up the number.
【Happy birthday!】 Sent.
Bai Kou took Pei Yue’s hand and laughed easily: “Come on! I’ll take you to try a new shop with iced glutinous rice dumplings!”
As the weather warmed up, the end of the high school first-year semester approached.
Pei Yue’s visits went from once a week at first to every two or three weeks lately.
She still had to leave, and even before summer vacation ended, she’d head to America in August.
Bai Kou had long since abandoned any hope that “maybe Pei Yue would stay.” That was back when Pei Yue first went to Guangzhou—she’d asked almost everyone she could, and everyone concluded that once you’d left school to prepare, how could you possibly not go?
Time, money… were they just going to waste all that?
That Saturday, Bai Kou walked home from school alone, from dusk until dark. By the time she got home, Bai Xiaochu was already sitting in the living room with a face mask on.
That night, Bai Kou felt obvious reluctance about it for the first time—depressed, uncomfortable, wanting to blame someone, but not knowing whom.
Turns out the “process” of growing up was the most helpless thing.
