Chapter 42: “Her First Love” Part 2

It had been a long time since she had said that name aloud.

Her lips and tongue felt a little dazed by the taste of it.

The call was quickly swallowed up by the noisy crowd and vanished, like a single drop falling into a vast pool.

Chi Buyu didn’t seem to hear it.

She just kept walking slowly ahead.

“Chi Buyu.”

Cui Qijin called again.

Chi Buyu heard it this time. She turned back amid the especially chaotic night breeze, her lips pressed together.

“What?”

She still didn’t use Cui Qijin’s name.

Maybe Cui Qijin had thrown her into confusion, leaving her unsure which name to use when facing her.

It was Cui Qijin’s fault. She had kept the secret for so long. She had never been fully honest with her.

Cui Qijin walked over, step by step.

She stopped about a meter away and held out the two bags of mangoes, saying calmly,

“Let’s swap. I noticed you don’t really know how to pick good ones—the ones you chose are all round and wide, and they’ll taste bitter.”

She had just realized that when Chi Buyu picked mangoes, she always went for the ones that looked plump and cute. In reality, those were the worst.

The two bags rustled in the night wind.

Chi Buyu didn’t speak. She lowered her eyelashes, her upper face half-hidden in the shadow of her cap’s brim, stray hairs escaping from her hoodie pocket and blowing wildly in the wind.

She still looked like a little lion.

The plastic bags were digging into Cui Qijin’s palms, making them ache. Chi Buyu neither took them nor refused.

In a low voice, Cui Qijin urged, “My hands are getting sore.”

Chi Buyu sniffed, perhaps from the wind giving her a cold.

“Yeah… got it.”

With that, Chi Buyu took the bags and swapped them. She paused for a moment, shifted her feet as if to storm off in a huff, but then shuffled back and said softly,

“You know… this doesn’t really count as our official meeting today, right?”

“I know,” Cui Qijin replied.

She knows you’re not ready yet, Cui Qijin thought.

“But it’s not that I didn’t want to see you.”

Chi Buyu hesitated, fiddling with the two strings on her hood, speaking slowly and deliberately.

“I just don’t know what kind of mindset to bring to all this past stuff… or to you. I don’t know what to say to you, or how we should get along from now on. Should I treat you like Mine or like Cui Qijin? In my heart, you two were always separate people before…”

“Like that colorful leaf taro?”

It was the first time Cui Qijin, as Mine, had brought up the past—the time Chi Buyu had gone offline for days after her aunt passed away.

Chi Buyu was stunned for a moment.

It took her a while to recover, mumbling, “Kind of like that, but not exactly. It’s not quite the same.”

Cui Qijin understood.

She gripped the swapped bags of mangoes tightly. “Okay, no problem. I’ll wait for you—”

“But!”

Chi Buyu’s tone suddenly took on a dramatic lilt.

She cut her off, then snatched one bag from Cui Qijin’s hand and shoved a different one back at her.

“Now everyone has one sweet bag and one bitter one. Fair and square!”

Before Cui Qijin could react, Chi Buyu yanked tight the strings of her hood, puffed out her cheeks inside it, and rattled off at top speed,

“And another thing—you’re not allowed to skip meals or let yourself fall apart just to make me feel sorry for you. No moping, no slacking at work, no staying up late, no hiding under the covers to cry. You’re not allowed to look this pale like a ghost and claim you’re the one eating the bitter fruit to make me pity you!”

As if afraid Cui Qijin might argue back, she finished up with an exaggerated fierce tone, like a Jurassic dragon with hands on hips, spewing red fire.

“Anyway, I’m declaring it! All of that’s against the rules! Do it again and I’ll dock you a hundred points!”

After that rapid-fire speech, Chi Buyu didn’t wait to see if she’d gotten the message. With a “hmph,” she lifted her chin, grabbed her two bags of mangoes, and stomped off toward the end of the street.

Her retreating figure looked like a waddling, furious penguin.

Cui Qijin stood there dumbfounded for a long, long time. Until the elusive Record Store Boss suddenly reappeared, slinging an arm over her shoulder with a touch of melancholy but endless chatter right in her ear.

“Oh, so you two had a fight? It couldn’t be because my record picks were bad, right? I told you early on, no refunds even if you’re not satisfied…”

Cui Qijin wasn’t really listening.

She silently pushed the Record Store Boss’s hand away, her gaze fixed on that figure shrinking into a dot in the distance until it vanished completely. Then she gathered her words.

“She’s still…”

She trailed off, chuckling soundlessly.

It was like she didn’t know how to describe it. Only after a long pause did a word come to her, rolling it around on her tongue.

“Pretty fierce.”

“She? Fierce? Isn’t that just cute? Wait—do you mean the ‘she’ I’m thinking of?”

“Yeah, her.”

My first love.

The first love I can finally admit to openly.

–

Chi Buyu stormed home in a fury, though she couldn’t say exactly why she was so furious.

Anyway, she charged right back.

She loosened the hood strings and checked the mirror, only to find her face flushed red, like a puffed-up red octopus.

She wasn’t pleased with that.

She was even less satisfied with heading out without makeup, and with her poor mango-picking skills.

She fumed.

She gnashed her teeth.

She punched the chin of her Strawberry Bear plush. The bear let out a pitiful wail and toppled over. She propped it back up, hugging it in apology even as she stayed mad.

Then she noticed the two bags of golden mangoes.

One she’d picked, one… Cui Qijin had picked.

The name Cui Qijin still felt awkward to say.

Chi Buyu wasn’t sure whether to call this woman Cui Qijin, or Cui Muhuo, or…

Mai Mai.

Mai Mai was the past.

But suddenly, unbelievably, it had become the present.

Over the past few days, she’d dug out her old phone and pored over the chat logs, hunting for traces of Cui Qijin.

Either she was too dense, or Cui Qijin had hidden it too well. Either way, looking back now, it was still hard to believe—

How could Cui Qijin use a Pineapple Ice avatar? How could she comfort her about nearsightedness not being scary, using Ziwei Gege as an example? How could she agree to all her unreasonable demands, replying to every single message, even answering what classes she’d taken that day and how many people she’d talked to? How could she watch a movie about lesbian romance with her? How could she chat online until they were this close to “internet romance” territory? How could she agree to meet up with someone from the net?

Cui Qijin, Cui Qijin.

But…

Chi Buyu’s mind was such a tangle it could knit a sweater. Just then, Ran Yan messaged her on WeChat—

【Isn’t this the bar you and Cui Qijin went to last time?】

【Public account card: Love Weather Forecast】

【Our group dinner’s heading there. Saw the past event records under this one’s activities—including that First Snow one with you two.】

【This is you and Cui Qijin, right?】

Followed by a screen recording from the event logs.

Chi Buyu hugged her Strawberry Bear, propped her chin on her hands with cheeks squished, and hesitantly tapped play.

It must have been Boss Sandy filming with a DV camera that night for the records; the footage was noisy. Chi Buyu remembered the bar doing a lights-out game then—she and Cui Qijin had been the only ones punished, downing that Irish Mist, and after that…

Chi Buyu rolled her burning cheeks, refusing to dwell on the unnecessary bits.

She kept watching.

Ran Yan’s recording went from start to finish, capturing nearly every moment of Chi Buyu and Cui Qijin in the long video.

But one scene in particular left Chi Buyu dazed—

It was after she’d left that foggy glass window, clutching the SpongeBob mask reluctantly as she entered for her punishment. The whole bar was dimly lit and hazy when Boss Sandy announced, “Let’s see tonight’s two lucky winners!”

The camera panned first to her at the door: thick earflap hat, buried in a thick red scarf, pulling a face at the lens.

Then Sandy grinned, and the shot swung again, searching the noisy crowd for Cui Qijin—

Cui Qijin probably hadn’t noticed the camera on her.

She had her back to the swaying crowd, facing the misty glass window, either still looking at something or lost in thought.

The image zoomed in—Ran Yan must have done that on purpose to show her.

Punishment time, and the bar started playing “Ordinary Friends.” The fog on the window had been cleared, revealing the two words she’d written back then, unaware the person in front of her was Cui Qijin, when she’d asked Octopus Bro Student:

Muhuo.

By the time she’d walked that stretch into the bar, it had faded a lot.

And then, over those long seconds that followed…

Cui Qijin stared at the two words she’d left, and amid the noisy crowd, she tentatively reached out a finger. Between them, she added one more:

Water.

Then, almost absentmindedly, she completed the phrase—

Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, Earth.

The camera shook again as Sandy called from off-screen, “Punishment time’s up! That girl over there, hands off!”

Startled, Cui Qijin quickly wiped the whole line away, withdrew her hand, instinctively turned around, straightened her spine, and hurriedly blocked the foggy words with her body. She looked straight over—

From that First Snow night, across an entire winter, gazing at tonight’s Chi Buyu.

Chi Buyu stared at that evening’s overlooked glimpse of Cui Qijin, her thoughts muddled as she wondered—

How could anyone, when writing out the five elements—metal, wood, water, fire, and earth—first insert a “water” character right in the middle? How could anyone write it that way, only to erase it afterward as if they’d made some terrible mistake? How could anyone remember every single one of her bizarre utterances, always responding with a mix of disdain and reluctant cooperation? How could anyone take her every random whim so seriously, humoring her flights of fancy without fail?

But… but.

If there really were such a person in the world…

How could it possibly be anyone but Cui Qijin?