Chapter 12: “Cumulonimbus Clouds”

Q: In your impression, what kind of person has Cui Muhuo always been?

A: A very smart, very proud, very stubborn, very brave girl who loves making plans and has to see them through, who loves getting sick, who’s not all that enthusiastic, with a bit of a sharp tongue and tons and tons of childishness…

A little doll.

–

In her mind, Loopy shouldn’t have turned out like this.

It was supposed to be a pink beaver: big round black eyes, a nose that turned red now and then, one big front tooth that made it look dopey, cheeks puffing out when it cried, hands on hips when it got mad, and poor eyesight to boot…

A “stupid” pink beaver.

—Cui Qijin stood in front of the snowman Loopy, holding the bag from Truth or Dare Mango, staring off into space at the creature. Now that it was pure white, that pink beaver wasn’t cute at all anymore.

The night air hung heavy and murky, the snow on the street a chaotic mess. Cui Qijin had her hands stuffed in her pockets—one held a crumpled medicine box, the other her phone, which was shaped like a tube of lipstick.

Her breath turned to white mist in an instant. She casually scanned the shadowy figures passing by; no one had the leisure to pay attention to this spot.

She tucked her chin in a little.

With deliberate slowness, she pulled out the lipstick from her pocket, twisted it open, and dabbed some onto her fingertip. It felt cool, and the wind made it seem like it might harden into lipstick ice.

Her chilly fingertip rubbed it in gently. After a moment’s hesitation, she reached out and casually smeared it onto the tip of Loopy’s nose.

Just one swipe, and the snowman’s nose turned red, giving it a pitiful look.

A cold gust whipped past, tousling the longer strands of hair at the side of her face. She coughed out a puff of white mist in mild dissatisfaction—the uneven red made the snowman look even weirder than before. So she rubbed the leftover lipstick on her fingertip again, lifted it, and carefully spread it upward bit by bit.

She kept going until the snowman’s nose tip, cheeks, and even ear roots were all rosy.

Only then did she straighten her aching back.

Her expression unchanged, she stared at the dramatically altered snowman in front of her. Had she gone overboard? The thought crossed her mind, so she simply tossed the mango bag aside and squatted down right there in the roadside slush, her long down coat billowing in the wind.

Another gust chilled the skin at her waist, exposed beneath her sweater. With her now-reddened hands, chilled from the cold, she scooped up a lump of snow and patted it onto Loopy’s nose to tone down the red a bit.

She frowned at it, then chipped away a little at Loopy’s front tooth until the size felt right. Standing up, her chest felt brittle and thin, like it had been pumped full of the icy air—no sooner had she coughed than it felt like ice crystals were evaporating inside.

She had never had the experience of playing in the snow so recklessly before.

When she was little, she spent most of her sick days sleeping, and on her healthy days… Cui He and Yu Hongdong would tell her there were so many things she couldn’t do, explaining what being responsible to herself looked like and how to avoid getting sick.

It had ingrained in her some living habits that others found overly strict.

No playing in the snow in winter, no going to the sea in summer—that survival rule didn’t feel harsh to her. Besides, Chengdu didn’t get snow every year, and it had no sea.

When she got older, she learned that northerners mostly yearned for the sea, while southerners dreamed of snow, as if everyone harbored some unfulfilled longing deep down.

She had no interest in either. In fact, she disliked days like this, which felt like a catalyst for viral outbreaks.

But was she playing in the snow now?

Cui Qijin figured this was just seeing something through to the end. Once she started something, she had to do it until she was satisfied.

She lowered her gaze and saw her left hand—five fingers smudged with a messy blur of lipstick stains. Her brows furrowed tightly.

She had no tissues on her.

Standing there for a moment, she impatiently shut her eyes and tossed the now-ruined lipstick into a nearby trash can.

When she walked back.

The Truth or Dare Mango bag dangled from her left wrist, and she held her phone awkwardly in her right hand, long-pressing to bring up the camera. She aimed it at the snowman, who sported a little Christmas hat and scarf—

By now, the snow on the road had been trampled and rolled into slush by tires, leaving only patches of white on the lawns.

Loopy’s nose tip, ear tips, and cheeks were all rosy as it stood by the blue bus stop sign, grinning with its big front tooth at every passerby…

Click. Still looked so stupid.

Cui Qijin stared at the photo for a good while, then glanced at the lipstick stains on her hand. Suddenly snapping out of it, she felt bored. Out of nowhere, why was she standing here instead of going home? Why do something so childish? She’d ruined a tube of lipstick and gotten her hands filthy just to save a photo like this on her phone?

Cui Qijin pressed her lips together tightly.

She locked her phone screen and turned to leave.

Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a rowdy group of junior high kids approaching through the snow, one of them carrying a takeout egg waffle cake. They rustled along in North Face jackets worn over their school uniforms.

She narrowed her eyes, and her steps halted.

The wind grew colder, fiercer, kicking up snow slush onto the hem of her coat. With a blank expression, she turned around again, her snow-spattered boots crunching back through the slush to stand beside the Loopy snowman.

It was nearly closing time for the shops now.

The lamp shop owner was hollering his catchphrase—”Alrighty!”—at a rush of last-minute customers; a road bike with heart-shaped tail lights made its final loop, not coming this way again;

The record store owner had dragged out another lounge chair, sprawling lazily on it to sip beer amid the icy snow; when the last community bus swung by, it was packed with a fresh batch of passengers.

Headlights blurred in the haze, cars and buses and motorcycles crisscrossing in front of the bus stop sign, their red and blue lights smearing into ghostly afterimages.

The woman stood with her back to the city’s remnants of snow, shoulders hunched inside her long down coat, black-framed glasses perched on her nose, her gaze sharp and solitary—like a supple branch holding firm in winter.

She stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a squat little snowman, a comical sight that somehow evoked a warm Hokkaido movie scene on a winter’s day.

Even though the snow was on the verge of melting away, it inexplicably made this first snowfall feel like it had only just begun.

—Chen Wenran was pedaling a Qingju bike, legs splayed wide in her wobbly ride, a bag of jiggly little puddings dangling from the handlebars. Passing by, she caught exactly this scene.

“You’re waiting for me, Cui Qijin!” she bellowed at the top of her lungs.

The traffic noise drowned her out. Cui Qijin, across the street, lifted her eyelids and looked up without a word.

Assuming she hadn’t heard, Chen Wenran pedaled in circles until she pulled up beside Cui Qijin, waving in the line of her slightly upward gaze.

“What are you spacing out here for? Aren’t you afraid of catching a cold?”

“Why haven’t you gone home yet?” Cui Qijin glanced at her leisurely, then finally started walking toward home.

“Forgot your house code—how am I supposed to get in?” Chen Wenran pedaled gently alongside her.

Cui Qijin said flatly, “I meant your own home.”

Chen Wenran spat a “Pfft!” and replied, “If Ran Yan doesn’t come pick me up, there’s no way I’m going back.”

“You’re holding a grudge, then.”

“Hey, don’t stereotype us Scorpios. When you’ve been with someone a long time, that’s just how it is. A little spat now and then doesn’t hurt—it’s just a matter of who swallows their pride first, who admits defeat, who goes soft…”

“You think that kind of relationship is fun?”

“Try it and see.”

“…” Cui Qijin shot her a look. Even through the clear lenses of her glasses, the thin crease in her eyelid was visible. “Are you crazy, or am I?”

“Fine.” Chen Wenran shrugged, her knee on the Qingju twisting back and forth like it might bump into her. “So, you finish chatting with Shuishui?”

She couldn’t dodge the topic after all. Cui Qijin sidestepped Chen Wenran’s knee and exhaled a puff of white mist. “No.”

“No?”

Chen Wenran sounded utterly shocked.

“Then what were you doing standing here? Just spacing out with that ugly snowman?”

“I just taught a lesson to a few rude junior high kids.” Cui Qijin said.

She narrowed her eyes at Chen Wenran’s baffled expression. “Ugly snowman?”

After eyeing it for a bit, before she could answer, Cui Qijin let out a very unladylike cold “Hah.”

“Not as ugly as that Crayon Shin-chan butt toilet plunger of yours.”

–

The weather report said Chengdu’s subtropical monsoon climate made snow after Spring Festival extremely unlikely.

Cui Qijin huddled drowsily on the balcony lounger, the weak sun sliding across her eyelids like a trickle of water.

Colds and headaches were old companions shadowing her life, showing up without warning or reservation, no matter how strictly she managed her schedule.

So she had no choice but to complete her mandatory weekend sunbathing ritual under their company.

Along the way, she spotted a post from Crab Boss Class Monitor in her Moments feed. One photo showed the sign from Love Weather Forecast Tavern, reading—

Today’s Love Weather Forecast: Low temperatures, clear.

She suddenly noticed the scab on her lip had fallen off naturally.

The faint pain was almost gone now—not even triggered by drinking water.

“Why pick a fight with a bunch of kids for no reason?”

Chen Wenran was in the other half of the living room, folded into a caterpillar-like pose. To keep up her thoughtful poise, she exhaled slowly before continuing.

“Chengdu snow’s all gone by the second day anyway. You waited till they left, stood there for over an hour yourself, and now look—you’ve gone and caught a cold…”

“It was a snowman I spent all that time building. I even used a brand-new tube of lipstick on it…”

Suppressing a cough in her throat, Cui Qijin kept her hands naturally draped over her waist and belly under the thick fleece blanket. “Why should I let a pack of ill-bred junior high kids kick it over?”

Chen Wenran let out a “Ha!”

“You already taught them a lesson and let them go. So why stand there so long afterward?”

Cui Qijin half-lidded her eyes. “Who knows if they’d come back for revenge?”

Talk about thorough thinking.

Chen Wenran glanced at her through the balcony floor-to-ceiling window, not rushing to reply. She shifted into another back-breaking pose before drawling, “Wasn’t it really for Shuishui?”

Cui Qijin decisively grabbed the pillow she’d been leaning on and chucked it over without looking up. Her lashes lowered, veiling her lower lids.

“You’re dreaming.”

She was probably too weak from being sick.

The pillow didn’t hit Chen Wenran—instead, it flopped onto the living room sofa.

Chen Wenran didn’t even dodge. She burst out laughing and collapsed face-first onto her yoga mat. After giggling for a bit, she grabbed a bottle of water for a sip, then grinned and pressed on.

“So why’d you change a lightbulb for Shuishui?”

Cui Qijin irritably opened her eyes.

She scanned the lounger—no good projectiles in reach. So she shut her eyes again and said flatly,

“If it were you with night blindness, I wouldn’t refuse to help either.”

“Yeah…”

Chen Wenran gulped down two mouthfuls of water. “Thinking about it, you’ve actually been pretty good to me. That one time I fought with Ran Yan, cried my eyes out, and said I didn’t want to live anymore—didn’t you ride a shared electric scooter over in the sweltering summer heat to pick me up?”

“You’ve got it wrong.”

Cui Qijin squeezed her eyes shut. “Heh,” she said. “The one who came that night was a ghost, not me.”

Chen Wenran let out an appeasing “Haha.”

“That must be my bad memory. Why do I remember it being such a youthful beauty—tall, with long legs and perfect proportions, a real stunner of a woman?”

Cui Qijin had no patience for banter.

Looking utterly listless, she rolled over on the recliner. From the other side of the living room, she heard Chen Wenran shifting positions again. She must have opened another workout in Keep, because a mechanical female voice suddenly rang out, counting down loudly.

The slight tension in Cui Qijin’s back eased.

“But…”

The next second, Chen Wenran’s voice cut through the mechanical countdown, a little muffled.

“I’ve known her for so long, and I never knew Shuishui had night blindness. How did you find out? Did she tell you about it?”

Just then, the thick fleece blanket draped over Cui Qijin slipped down below her ribs. She opened her eyes and cast a lazy glance skyward at the castle clouds drifting by, puffy as cotton candy.

Thick layers of clouds piled up like battlements, reminiscent of Chengdu’s recent first snow, now melted away. They blanketed more than half of the tile-blue, chilly clear sky.

The cold virus had her mind wandering off on tangents.

Whimsically, she thought of Magritte, the painter renowned for his clouds. He had once observed that visible things always conceal other visible things.

Just like those clouds at this very moment.

If they drifted apart, they might reveal a bright expanse of open sky—or perhaps some other mocking, jumbled cloud formation.

“Hey, why’d you suddenly go quiet?” Chen Wenran’s voice floated over from the living room, as if muffled by that same castle cloud.

“I told you.”

Cui Qijin rolled over again, tugged the fallen blanket up, and pulled it over her entire face until the castle clouds vanished from view. Only then did she murmur,

“I don’t remember.”