MAMA-34: Not that kind of mother.
“What do you mean ‘gave too much’? That’s no reason for you to do this kind of thing!”
Li Yin hadn’t gone to the second round.
There was another small group besides the one with Mi Shanxin. The classmate pursuing Li Yin was in it too.
That matter had already fizzled out. Some friends had asked Li Yin privately what was going on, why she’d rejected such a good chance for furthering things for Mi Shanxin’s sake.
“And be her mother? That’s perverted! You have to stop contacting her.” Li Yin’s voice was exceptionally emotional, as if she was in some open space. Mi Shanxin could hear wind mixed in with the sound of music.
“Not that kind of mother,” Mi Shanxin said. “Her grandmother is about to die. She said I look a lot like her late mother, asked me to do an end-of-life roleplay.”
Even though Mi Shanxin and Li Yin were just friends, Mi Shanxin occasionally still felt a sense of heavy responsibility. Right now, Li Yin’s heart was racing, a complete mixture of worry and anger, her tone a bit fierce. “… Cough, cough… And you agreed to something so absurd? Isn’t this basically a caretaker? Where would you get the energy and stamina to do this?”
Li Yin was crouched on the roadside smoking, so angry she choked on the smoke and directly stubbed the cigarette out.
Mi Shanxin had no idea her friend even knew how to smoke. In front of others, Li Yin was an honor student, with outstanding grades since childhood.
Everything moved in the direction her parents expected, and presumably, so did the future. What job to take, who to marry, what car to buy, what kind of house to live in.
Mi Shanxin was her opposite. In front of others, she left a hard-to-define impression. Her pretty features, if paired with a tall stature, might be eye-catching in a crowd.
But she was too small and thin. A pretty face excessively pale, her eyes too dark and deep, giving off a ghostly, gloomy aura.
Plus she was unwilling to spend money on haircuts, only snipping her bangs herself once they grew to a certain length. The impression was that her eyebrows were never visible. Her hair ends were also self-trimmed, like octopus tentacles. Many people said she resembled a deep-sea creature, not quite like a living person.
Mi Shanxin was so distinct, yet had become a legend among classmates. Some even said Mi Shanxin could see ghosts.
Only Li Yin knew these were all baseless rumors. Her friend was just an ordinary girl.
Parents divorced, left with the older generation. Up to that point, the story overlapped with many others—essentially a variant of being left behind. Luckily, Ning City was a big city, so her education wasn’t a concern.
But then the older generation passed away one after another, and Mi Shanxin still wasn’t taken in by anyone. This inevitably deepened her loner solitude.
Li Yin could see her, approached her, and wanted to be her friend.
She felt she could protect her.
But it seemed Mi Shanxin didn’t need her that much. Perhaps she also struggled to fulfill Mi Shanxin’s needs.
At this moment, Mi Shanxin was unusually clear-headed, her voice very earnest. “Li Yin, I really need money to survive.”
“And it’s not as bad as you imagine. No need to act as a caregiver, just stay at the hospital for two hours every day.”
“She arranges a car to pick me up and drop me off. Very safe.”
The new phone felt very different in hand. Earlier, as Mi Shanxin walked toward the subway, someone had even asked for her WeChat. Maybe because of today’s different clothes, or the added effect of the makeup look.
Now at the subway station, she either stood in the shadows of pillars and escalators, or at the very end of the platform where the endless tunnel edges could be seen. Seemingly unnoticed, dark and dim—this was her most comfortable zone.
“That’s all you two do?” After separating from Mi Shanxin, Li Yin had thought a lot too. That woman’s age was clearly much older than theirs. But her accompanying classmates had said, of course lesbians prefer older, the older the better.
Setting others aside, Li Yin had no interest in anyone else’s sexual orientation. But if it was Mi Shanxin, it seemed way too possible.
From when they first met to now, her friend’s gaze had always lingered on older women.
Li Yin had her suspicions, of course. Her friend was just too indiscriminate—from the young intern teacher to the burly cafeteria aunt with the big waist, even the cleaning lady had merits she could find.
When asked what she was looking at, the girl would give a “Hm,” and say they seemed very strong.
The high school intern teacher was indeed strong, able to carry the fainting Mi Shanxin to the infirmary.
Li Yin had said at the time, what’s so surprising, I could carry you too.
Mi Shanxin was so skinny, even the old lady selling barbecue skewers at the stall outside the gate could do it.
The PE teacher was a sports university graduate. The athletic pants worn during class made her legs look very long.
Mi Shanxin failed volleyball and needed private remedial lessons. Maybe that was why she frequently watched her. But the PE teacher was married, her kid already in kindergarten.
So, married with kids was okay too? Or did Mi Shanxin actually just like married women with children?
Li Yin had been searching en route for “types lesbians like” online, her heart growing colder. She suspected her best friend was not only a lesbian, but a gerontophile to boot.
So what qualifications did that woman just now have? She had money, she wasn’t bad looking, but her body shape was impossible to tell under those clothes. Her build and bone structure made her look like she could swallow Mi Shanxin whole.
Especially wearing that restaurant-provided outfit. Maybe it was a trick of the light and the wall decorations misaligning, but Li Yin kept feeling that when the other woman took Mi Shanxin away, the shadow she cast was a large, bushy-tailed fox.
Her friend was about to be deceived by a monster! And she’d been making small talk, completely oblivious! Such a terrible lapse of duty!
“What are you thinking about?” A new subway train arrived. Mi Shanxin didn’t get on. She wasn’t in a hurry, standing in a corner counting the brush strokes of the station names. She asked Li Yin, “Can we still be friends?”
“What are you saying?!” Li Yin, who had been squatting on the roadside, suddenly stood up. If she could find her, she’d grab Mi Shanxin by her collar and ask: “How could we suddenly not be friends?”
“I like the same sex. You hate that kind of person the most.” Mi Shanxin said these words calmly too. Occasionally people walked past, her back to the crowd. “You said before, this kind of feeling isn’t normal.”
“Alright, maybe I did say that.” But Li Yin had forgotten the exact wording. “And I wasn’t targeting you.”
“I feel like you’d probably love for us to part ways sooner.” Li Yin sighed. “So little faith in me? Hiding so many things from me?”
More than being fundamentally pessimistic, Mi Shanxin simply seemed accustomed to being left behind. She thought for a moment, then said, “Aren’t you the same? I didn’t know at all you were seeing someone.”
Li Yin let out a short “Uh.” That was indeed her problem. “No, the guy was just someone a friend introduced.”
She didn’t hide things from Mi Shanxin anymore. “Honestly, the moment I saw him I was annoyed. But he’s highly educated, from a prestigious school, good family background. More than good enough for me.”
That was also very Li Yin. When she looked at people, she seemed to care more about the visible, external indicators. Zero interest in the person themselves.
When Mi Shanxin first realized this, she’d marveled at why she could be Li Yin’s friend. The other girl’s parents had high hopes for their daughter, wanting her to be so respectable that even her social circle had to be dazzling. Mi Shanxin knew Li Yin had other friends—all too outstanding. Parents were either red-circle lawyers or department heads at top hospitals.
Even though Mi Shanxin’s father was a senior executive posted abroad, he still seemed a bit unpresentable.
Mi Shanxin had long known their friendship rested entirely on Li Yin’s momentary whim. But being alone sometimes got boring. Li Yin was willing to hang out with her, and Mi Shanxin was pretty happy about it.
Grandpa always said, judge people by their deeds, not their hearts. No matter how Li Yin viewed her, if she was willing to spend time wasting time with Mi Shanxin, and Mi Shanxin didn’t feel uncomfortable during it, then she was satisfied.
“Then you’re at a loss, you should have kept playing,” Mi Shanxin advised her. “Your mom likes that kind of guy too.”
Li Yin wasn’t smoking anymore. She’d been squatting a while, so she stretched her limbs and stood under a streetlight to talk to Mi Shanxin.
The outdoor air at this hour was freezing. She stomped her feet. “To be honest, I don’t like him.”
“And I don’t even know what type you do like,” Mi Shanxin thought, then said, “The male classmate you said you liked before—you only liked him because he always ranked first in exams.”
Mi Shanxin was good at listening, rarely voicing her own opinions. Maybe because Jian Wanji had unsettled her mind today, she seemed a bit more talkative than usual. “If he didn’t get first place, you stopped liking him.”
“You just liked first place, not the person.”
“I sound terrible.” Li Yin pursed her lips, saying gloomily, “Back then, everyone had a secret crush. It would be weird if I couldn’t name a specific person.”
Mi Shanxin: “I didn’t have one.”
That was because Mi Shanxin was weird enough already.
Li Yin didn’t say it out loud. Mi Shanxin said it for her: “Anyway, I’m a weirdo.”
“But pretty enough to attract perverts.” Li Yin still couldn’t stand the thought of Jian Wanji’s smiling face. Flirtatious manner, lewd requests. What ‘be her mother’—clearly meant to devour the most adorable friend in the world.
“She’s not a pervert,” Mi Shanxin still didn’t say the pervert was actually her. She seemed to sigh lightly, quietly complaining, “If I’d known there’d be so many people, I wouldn’t have gone.”
Draped over Mi Shanxin’s arm was the small purse Jian Wanji had given her. While strolling through the mall earlier, Jian Wanji had seen a penguin plushie in a shop window and insisted it looked exactly like Mi Shanxin. Ignoring what seemed to Mi Shanxin like a price that could cover several months of living expenses, she’d attached it to Mi Shanxin’s bag.
Mi Shanxin asked, why don’t you hang it on yourself? Jian Wanji shrugged, saying she couldn’t really use it at work.
And she probably couldn’t use it outside work either.
It seemed she didn’t mean anything else by it, just loving to scatter wealth, saying spending money relieved stress.
Li Yin of course knew Mi Shanxin disliked bustling scenes. Rather than bustle, she preferred to observe bustle from the sidelines. Like some school performance event—she’d rather stand by the side watching than stand on stage being watched.
“Sorry.” Li Yin apologized to Mi Shanxin again. Hearing the frequent sound of subway doors opening and closing in the background, she asked, “Didn’t you say your…”
She didn’t know how to refer to Jian Wanji. She felt that even as a stand-in actress, Mi Shanxin’s relationship with the other was too intimate.
Even if the other didn’t look old, had a pleasant voice, and appeared in that outfit straight out of a period drama wedding scene in the restaurant, all red and green, smiling so vibrantly. Mi Shanxin, who was so hard to approach, actually didn’t mind the other getting close at all. Her body was oriented toward the other’s.
Li Yin knew very well she had no feelings for Mi Shanxin beyond friendship. But she couldn’t avoid friendship possessiveness and an unhealthy sense of priority based on first-come, first-served.
Mi Shanxin wasn’t an ice cube. She was a cup of plain water, ready to blend with anything added. Whatever you were, she would become.
But humans couldn’t live without plain water. Li Yin knew this clearly. She wanted to be Mi Shanxin’s best friend forever.
“Did that woman see you off?” Li Yin struggled for a moment, then said the word ‘Boss’ didn’t quite seem like a term from their age group. She refused to call her ‘Jie’ either, which implied too much closeness.
Jian Wanji, with her looks, wasn’t a ‘Da Jie’ (big sister) or ‘Ayi’ (aunt). She was a bit too dazzling, unlike the ordinary university students they knew, more like the teacher generation the film academy students gossiped about.
“She had something to do. Offered to get me a cab, I refused.” At this hour, Wan Qingqing was already asleep. It was also the time Mi Shanxin usually initiated the sleep aid session.
Her sex tool had a normal social life outside of her. Mi Shanxin hated that she couldn’t throw irrational tantrums. Otherwise, she could keep Jian Wanji here, trap her in her bed, making her a trophy inside and outside of dreams.
“What kind of work does she do?” Li Yin had seen the business card Mi Shanxin passed over that day, but hadn’t studied it carefully. Now she deeply regretted it, fearing Mi Shanxin would be tricked out of both body and mind.
Her innocent, white-bloom-like friend wasn’t even proficient with social apps, like an old-fashioned sponge cake, whose sweetness wasn’t on the surface, always attracting covetous scoundrels.
There had been a case before. Just as Mi Shanxin never mentioned the senior who wrote her love letters, Li Yin never mentioned the girl from another school who almost led Mi Shanxin astray.
Back then, she thought Mi Shanxin was as unlucky as her—clearly straight as an arrow, yet nearly forced into love by a girl. Truly destined to be friends.
“Don’t know the specifics, but she runs a company. Probably in investment.” Mi Shanxin found Jian Wanji’s work something there was no point in trying to get interested in. If not for their encounter that day, they were lines so completely non-intersecting, they might not even exist in the same universe, let alone run parallel.
“Did you look her up online? What if the business card is fake, and it’s a scam?”
Li Yin’s anti-fraud awareness was extremely strong, perhaps influenced by the face-to-face education from her lawyer mother and police officer uncle. Her worry for Mi Shanxin was like stepping into a family member’s role.
“Scammers these days package themselves really well. What looks like a full designer outfit might all be rented second-hand. Saying they’ll send a car for pickup and drop-off—that’s part of the scam too.”
“And is her grandmother a real grandmother? Do you want me to have a relative help look into it?”
Li Yin knew she couldn’t help Mi Shanxin financially. The few thousand kuai she could give was just a drop in the bucket. Mi Shanxin needed stable, long-term worry-free living—a scope a friend simply couldn’t provide.
Others aside, Mi Shanxin could still do part-time work. Whether it was offline promo or online stuff, or part-time at the mall. But Mi Shanxin was so fragile, so prone to fainting and malnourished. Li Yin was afraid she wouldn’t earn money but instead end up in the hospital from overwork. That would be a net loss.
“No need.” Mi Shanxin said. “We signed a contract.”
“What?!” Li Yin truly couldn’t bear it anymore. “Where are you? I’m coming to find you.”
“I’m heading home,” Mi Shanxin said. “You might as well go back to the party. There’s a female classmate, the daughter of your mom’s friend, right? I heard you mention her.”
Li Yin didn’t want to maintain those things anymore, leaning toward letting it all go. “Until I get to the bottom of your situation, I’m not in the mood to play.”
She was very well-behaved in front of her parents, but Mi Shanxin did know Li Yin wasn’t that docile. Maybe there was room for an explosion. Like that girl she vehemently rejected before—did she really hate her? More likely, she sensed something off about herself, hence the intense reaction.
Mi Shanxin still refused. “Let’s talk on WeChat. I want to get to sleep early.”
…
After Jian Wanji left the mall, she went to a certain tea bar, open by the roadside. Someone had booked the place. Besides clients, there were some project acquaintances.
Probably because she kept glancing at her phone, someone laughed and asked, “Daji, whose call are you waiting for?”
The person next to her immediately chimed in: “Is there a situation here? Rare! No wonder Sui Yuqian said her info might not be accurate anymore.”
“Did Sui Yuqian introduce someone?”
“No.” Jian Wanji denied it. Someone else came over holding a wine glass and asked, “Heard you have a daughter now, is it true? The rumor’s gotten really elaborate, even people at your company were asked about it.”
Jian Wanji glanced at the heavily-shared photo. It was Mi Shanxin carrying a backpack, background on the first floor of her company. Probably taken that day she came looking for her.
“No way.” Jian Wanji brushed it off. “How could I have a daughter that old.”
The people making small talk there were mostly gossips. They asked, “Then not a daughter, not a relative… a girlfriend?”
Jian Wanji shook her head. “Look at my age.”
“What does age matter? President Wang is forty-five, and the boyfriend she found just started university.”
“Can I be compared to President Wang?” Jian Wanji didn’t like this analogy. She was very clear on the difference between playing around and being serious. But it wasn’t good to get upset in this setting either, so she could only change the subject. Suddenly, she felt weary of this kind of socializing.
Before, she’d found it a decent way to pass time. Now she kept checking her watch.
If it were yesterday, this would be her time to serve as a soothing tool.
She should be admiring the little mama’s erupting state, not here listening to other people brag.
Finally finding a moment, Jian Wanji sent a WeChat message to Mi Shanxin, asking: [Asleep yet?]
After a while, the other party replied with a photo.
Jian Wanji glanced at it and immediately closed it.
Scarlet red, glistening wet, looking pitifully squeezed.
