Chapter 33 Part 2

Lin Tianyi was utterly panicked now. Fang Zhi shoved him behind her with one hand and raised the baton for another swing, but someone grabbed her arm.

Chen Nian’s eyes were wide, her expression even more terrified than Lin Tianyi’s. She stepped in front of Fang Zhi, forcing down the hand with the baton—and took the dog’s full charge.

Anyone who’d never been bitten by a dog couldn’t imagine it felt like this.

This not-so-big dog packed the kind of force that could knock a person flat. As sharp pain lanced through her butt, Chen Nian felt that primal human terror of a wild beast.

Goosebumps and chills exploded across her skin.

But Fang Zhi was right there. Chen Nian bit back her cry of pain and lashed out with a kick at the dog, roaring, “Rawr!!!!”

The dog went flying, tumbling to the ground.

Chen Nian doubled over, baring her teeth in a snarl: “Grrr!!!!”

Terrified, the dog turned tail and bolted. A voice came cursing from nearby, and a hand scooped it up: “Who messed with my Mop!!!”

The name fit perfectly.

Chen Nian was still grimacing, the pain throbbing.

Lin Tianyi bellowed, “Your dog bit someone! Your dog bit someone!!!”

The middle-aged woman clutching Mop had a wild perm that shook like cornrows as she yelled: “Bit who? Bit who! Where’d these wild brats come from, bullying my dog!!!”

Wild brat Chen Nian flung herself flat on the ground and wailed at the top of her lungs: “Waaah! The dog bit me! It bit me! Broke the skin! It’s rabid! Rabid dog…”

Cornrows: “???!!!!”

Fang Zhi dropped to her knees in a panic, desperate to check Chen Nian’s injury. Chen Nian squeezed her eyes in a hard wink: “Mommy! Mommy!!! Daddy! Daddy!!!!”

Fang Zhi whipped her head around and shouted at Lin Tianyi: “Go get your mom!”

Lin Tianyi froze for a beat, then bolted off crying.

The ice cream stand was a ways off, but Lin Huiling could still make it out from afar.

Seeing Tianyi run back in tears set off alarms. She ditched the ice cream and raced over.

Once she was down, Chen Nian had no plans to get up. For one thing, it genuinely hurt and she needed a breather. More importantly, with this woman across from her, if she stayed on her feet, she might end up the one flat on the ground.

If they claimed the kids had hurt her dog and demanded vet bills, they’d be the ones in the hole.

Cornrows took one look at her and panicked: “You’re full of it! My Mop doesn’t bite people!”

Chen Nian: “You walk your dog without a leash! You let it attack me! Aaaah, my butt’s gonna fall off! I need the hospital, Mom! Hospital! Rabies shot…”

The words “hospital” and “rabies shot” hit Cornrows like a truck. She hugged her dog tighter and started backing away: “Who said my Mop bit you? You’re lying…”

Fang Zhi barked suddenly: “I saw it!”

Her eyes blazed as she glared at the Mop cradled in Cornrows’ arms: “You’re not going anywhere! You pay!”

Chen Nian lunged and grabbed her as she started to rise.

Fang Zhi didn’t dare yank free. She looked down, and Chen Nian mouthed silently: Forget it.

Forget it. She didn’t want to blow this up.

The dog had charged at Tianyi for reasons unknown, but Chen Nian had seen Fang Zhi whack it with the baton.

That hit had packed real force. If the dog ended up with problems later, sorting it out would be a nightmare—and Fang Zhi’s baton was impossible to hide.

Worse yet: Why did an elementary school kid have something like that? What were they planning to do with it? Which school? Which class? That was real trouble.

Chen Nian didn’t want Fang Zhi tangled in any more messes, and she especially didn’t want to shatter Fang Zhi’s image as the perfect good girl in her classmates’ and teachers’ eyes.

While the woman hadn’t spotted the baton yet, let her rabbit. Once Auntie Lin got there, they’d head for shots and call it done.

Fang Zhi looked baffled, but Chen Nian pinned her in place.

Sure enough, Cornrows spun on her heel, clutched her dog, and ran. By the time Auntie Lin arrived, they were long gone.

“What’s going on!!!”

Lin Huiling was scared out of her wits. She wanted to scoop up Chen Nian but had no idea how to go about it, completely at a loss in her panic.

“Auntie, it’s fine, it’s fine.” Chen Nian gently pushed Fang Zhi’s hand away, trying to reassure her. “I just got bitten by a dog—right on the butt. Drive the car over here and take me to the hospital.”

Lin Huiling bent down and straightened up, then bent down and straightened up again, repeating the motion twice before slapping her forehead in realization. She spun around and dashed off to fetch the car.

Lin Tianyi stood beside Chen Nian, arms outstretched, wailing “wah wah” at the top of his lungs.

Tears streamed down his face in a torrent, completely blurring his little eyes and filling the air with his piercing cries.

Chen Nian shifted carefully, propping herself up sideways on her uninjured butt cheek. While Lin Tianyi was too blinded by tears to see, she snatched Fang Zhi’s bag, collapsed the telescopic baton, and shoved it back inside.

She zipped it shut and handed it over to Fang Zhi.

Fang Zhi stared at the bag in a daze, torn between taking it and leaving it alone.

She had a vague sense that Chen Nian—who could have been fiercely aggressive—was letting the whole thing slide this time, all because of that baton.

But she couldn’t quite piece it together; her mind was a foggy haze, leaving her feeling utterly miserable.

“Alright, I’ll handle the explanation.” Chen Nian thrust the bag into Fang Zhi’s arms and cleared her throat.

Fang Zhi clutched it mechanically. Lin Tianyi seemed utterly stunned that Chen Nian, who had been rolling on the ground in agony just moments ago, had snapped back to her usual composure. His mouth hung open, and even his tears paused for a beat.

“No matter who asks later, this is the story we stick to,” Chen Nian instructed. “Tianyi was playing happily when a dog came charging out. Tianyi’s scared of dogs, so he bolted, and the dog gave chase. Fang Zhi and I reached him just as the dog bit me, and I scared it off.”

Lin Tianyi furrowed his brow in concentration. “Yeah… that’s exactly what happened…”

Chen Nian nodded firmly. “Right, exactly like that.”

Fang Zhi’s brows knitted together tightly. Lin Tianyi caught her expression and suddenly remembered. “Wait, no—Fang Zhi got there first to help me. She dealt with the dog…”

“Shut it,” Chen Nian cut him off. “That part didn’t happen.”

Lin Tianyi blinked. “Huh?”

Chen Nian pressed on. “I scared the dog away. It had nothing to do with Fang Zhi.”

Lin Tianyi gaped. “Huh??”

Chen Nian insisted, “I got bitten! This is my heroic deed today! Don’t go telling anyone it was Fang Zhi—it’s mine!”

Lin Tianyi’s little mind whirred as he snuck a glance at Fang Zhi. “Ah… but… isn’t that kinda not fair…”

Chen Nian shot back, “I’m the one who’s hurt! I got injured saving you—what’s unfair about that? If you breathe a word about Fang Zhi to anyone, I’ll never be your friend again!”

She ramped up the bratty menace for full effect. “Not only that—I’ll bully you every single day, just like I do to Li Gousheng…”

Lin Tianyi snapped his mouth shut.

After a moment, he waved his hands frantically. “I won’t say anything! I swear, I won’t!”

“Good.” Chen Nian slumped sideways again. “Now keep crying.”

Lin Tianyi sniffed hard, but the moment had passed, and the tears wouldn’t come. To fill the awkward silence, he turned to Fang Zhi. “What was that thing you had? It was so cool…”

Chen Nian bolted upright on her good side, fixing him with a fierce glare.

Lin Tianyi clapped a hand over his mouth. “Ahh! No, forget I said that—no such thing!”

Auntie Lin pulled up in the car and scooped Chen Nian aboard.

Fang Zhi wedged half her body underneath Chen Nian’s for extra padding, doing her best to make her comfortable.

Lin Tianyi could only stand there helplessly, eyes locked on Chen Nian, terrified that one wrong blink and she’d vanish.

The Sanmo screeched to a halt in front of the hospital. Auntie Lin hoisted Chen Nian up and barreled inside. Chen Nian could have walked on her own by then, but there was no point—she played up her frailty, draping her head over Auntie Lin’s shoulder and twisting back for one last look at Fang Zhi.

Fang Zhi and Lin Tianyi trailed right behind them: one radiating icy worry, the other bubbling with hot urgency. The sight warmed Chen Nian’s heart.

It wasn’t quite hot season yet, and Chen Nian’s pants weren’t paper-thin, so the bite wasn’t too deep.

The treatment was straightforward: rinse the wound, disinfect it, apply ointment, bandage it up, then roll up her sleeve for the rabies vaccine.

It stung—not excruciatingly so, but enough to make her wince and bare her teeth with every little shift.

Auntie Lin stuck by her side through the whole process, then stepped out to call Chen Nian’s family. With the vaccine freshly administered, Chen Nian needed half an hour of observation, so she emerged from the exam room and joined Fang Zhi and Lin Tianyi on the hallway bench.

Her injured butt made sitting properly impossible. Fang Zhi draped an arm around Chen Nian’s shoulders, inviting her to lean in.

Chen Nian tilted her head and took in Fang Zhi’s slender shoulder and flat chest, a smile tugging at her lips despite herself.

Fang Zhi watched her with pursed lips. Chen Nian wiped the grin away, mustering her best pitiful, woebegone expression. “Sis, I wanna lean~”

Fang Zhi’s response was immediate. “Go ahead.”

Chen Nian pulled back and let her body tip over, resting her head squarely on Fang Zhi’s lap.

She was lying on her side, which made it a bit of a struggle for Fang Zhi to hold on to her.

Even so, Fang Zhi stretched out her arms with all her might, cradling Chen Nian securely. She was afraid her friend might tumble forward and crack her head open—or slip backward and aggravate her injured backside.

After lying there for a moment, Chen Nian said, “Lin Tianyi, go check if my mom’s here yet?”

Lin Tianyi sprang to his feet at once, the picture of a dependable young man in that instant.

Of course, there was no way her mother could have arrived so soon. Chen Nian simply wanted a little time alone with Fang Zhi.

She was the one who’d been hurt, but it was clear that Fang Zhi was the one suffering more on the inside.

Her eyes and brows were tightly furrowed, as if she were holding back a storm of emotion—tending to Chen Nian all the while and refusing to let her own defenses crumble.

It was hardly the face of an ordinary young girl.

Chen Nian’s palm came to rest on Fang Zhi’s knee, patting it softly, over and over. “It’s okay now. It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt. Don’t be scared…”

Fang Zhi said nothing and didn’t stir. A long moment passed. Just as Chen Nian started to shift into a new position to offer more comfort, Fang Zhi suddenly leaned down. Her lips drew close to Chen Nian’s ear as she whispered.

Her breath was soft and warm, her whole presence soft and warm—but the words that came out sounded utterly bizarre, no matter how you turned them.

“I threw away the telescopic baton,” Fang Zhi said. “Don’t worry. They won’t find it.”