This time, they had called the police, determined not to leave any loose ends like that naive encounter five years ago.
After handing the captured thief over to the authorities and retrieving all their belongings, the blond female police officer’s amazed gaze lingered on them.
She seemed puzzled about how this peculiar group had come together.
One mysterious woman wearing a striking face mask who refused to show her face; a young woman with a leg in a cast, sitting in the flower float; a scarred girl in a sleeveless top with a guitar case on her back; a tough-looking woman in leather clutching a motorcycle helmet; and the lately famous model with Down syndrome…
After taking in the whole lineup, she smacked the troublemaker’s head again, as if shocked that such a ragtag crew had unleashed a full-scale chase…
All for a petty little thief like this one.
In any case, with that little detour resolved, they piled back into the flower float and continued onward in grand style.
They seemed to have looped back to the starting point, the edge of the town.
The highway stretched out broad and straight, shimmering with the fresh sheen left by a passing water truck. The water’s gleam rippled, mirroring the wind-tossed flowers.
And five strikingly different young faces.
It felt just like five years ago, when five young people, clueless about the future, had crammed into one vehicle.
The float rolled forward, destination unknown. They shared this brief stretch of road, listening to the same song: “California Dream.”
Everything was pure coincidence.
Now it was Nicole’s turn to explain the whole story—why she had appeared out of nowhere and helped Zhu Manda intercept the blond thief.
She said her show in Milan had been delayed, and the flight back to San Francisco had hit turbulence, forcing a stopover in a city near this town. On her way out of the airport, she had spotted a motorcycle speeding by that looked just like Zhu Manda’s and Zhu Muzi’s. She rushed after them, but traffic held her up, and by the time she arrived, it was exactly the right moment.
The direction they had chased the thief in was precisely the way from that city. Still riding in her taxi, Nicole had seen Zhu Manda pursuing someone from afar. She rolled down the window and hurled her bag straight at the thief’s face.
The tale unfolded with such twists and turns, a chance encounter playing out right before their eyes.
“Fate draws people together across a thousand miles, but without fate, they pass each other by!” Zhu Muzi declared, sounding even more like a wandering bard than she had five years ago.
At that moment, though, she was squatting unceremoniously on the ground, wrestling a bottle of sparkling wine open with a cheap, rough oyster knife.
Zhu Manda steadied the bottle for her, brow furrowed tight—likely worried that Zhu Muzi might crush the neck with too much force.
The cork was nearly out, but the opener wouldn’t budge further. Zhu Muzi huffed in frustration and yanked it by hand. With a pop, she and Zhu Manda both toppled backward.
A chorus of “Oof!” rose as they tumbled ass-first to the ground, nearly rolling into each other.
Fu Tingli laughed so hard she clutched her stomach, swaying side to side and almost toppling into the soft, fluffy flower arrangement herself.
But her lower back had barely brushed the edge of the shaking blooms when a familiar warm palm caught her.
A gentle force steadied her into a sitting position, her nose nearly brushing those slightly trembling lashes.
The distance was so intimate that she almost couldn’t resist kissing her again.
Then came the woman’s soft chuckle, her hand still resting on Fu Tingli’s waist without pulling away. She even naturally smoothed down Fu Tingli’s shirt, which had ridden up from the motion.
Only then did she withdraw, casually, without a hint of reluctance.
Fu Tingli snapped back to her senses.
Her casted leg dangled casually over the float’s edge, swinging in mild dissatisfaction. She parted her lips to say something, but then realized Nicole was offering her a pack of cigarettes.
The blue-green box was far newer and neater than the crumpled ones Zhu Manda and the others had tossed over earlier—still full, plastic wrap intact.
It hovered quietly in midair.
That night, Nicole’s one line in Chinese was flawlessly pronounced, rivaling Siri, as if she had practiced it a hundred times.
“I bought cigarettes for you.”
The wind rustled the flowers in the float with a soft patter. After a long, weighted pause,
Kong Liyuan laughed lightly and took the pack, as if accepting those fractured, drifting five years along with it.
Then she murmured softly,
“Thanks.”
But Fu Tingli suddenly recalled that on this journey from Los Angeles to this town, she hadn’t seen Kong Liyuan smoke once.
What a shame, because only when those gray-white tendrils of smoke unfurled did Kong Liyuan’s vivid beauty intensify in stark contrast to the faded haze.
“You’re welcome,” Nicole replied in English. She shrugged, then frowned at Fu Tingli’s casted leg dangling over the float’s edge. “What happened there?”
“It’s just this whole mess, you know!” Zhu Muzi had already brushed off her backside and stood up. She and Zhu Manda each held two paper cups, passing them around as she crowed,
“Enough talk—cheers first!”
“I fell a few days ago. No big deal,” Fu Tingli explained to Nicole, accepting the cup from Zhu Muzi.
It naturally held sparkling wine, the pale golden liquid bubbling densely. She lifted it to drink, only to hear a clear voice from beside her:
“Aren’t you afraid it’ll sting your eyes?”
She curved her eyes in a sly smile and downed a big gulp first, draining half the cup before deliberately glancing at Kong Liyuan like a mischievous child picking a fight.
To her surprise, there was no reproach in Kong Liyuan’s gaze.
After that, Kong Liyuan only let out a faint sigh and poured her own cup into Fu Tingli’s half-empty one.
She offered a generous smile. “Drink if you want.”
Now Fu Tingli hesitated to chug it, sipping slowly instead. “Aren’t you drinking?”
“Not really in the mood.” Kong Liyuan brushed Fu Tingli’s hair in the growing wind. “I’ve got to drive later.”
By then, the other three were getting rowdy. Zhu Muzi was trying to convince Nicole to duet “California Dream” with her, but Nicole refused, saying their statuses were different now—if a passerby filmed them and posted it online, what would that look like?
Zhu Muzi grumbled that Nicole was putting on airs and should buy a face mask to hide her face too.
A face mask?
Fu Tingli took another sip of wine, eyeing Kong Liyuan’s mask. In her mind, only Kong Liyuan made it look good.
Then she thought how that tiny scrap of fabric could veil their two world-weary faces, concealing a first kiss that had shaken the heavens.
Fu Tingli stared at Kong Liyuan’s face, struggling to follow the distant argument for a while, torn between mediating and egging them on. At last, she said,
“You can’t drive a flower float drunk either, but we don’t have a license for it and we’ve made it this far…”
She found herself amusing and laughed until her eyes narrowed to slits. She laughed at how, in this dilemma, the path she chose led straight to Kong Liyuan’s eyes.
Kong Liyuan doubled in her vision—one shadow saying, “You’re drunk already.”
The other whispering, “Kiss me.”
Both shadows smiled at her.
“Kong Liyuan.” She tossed her empty cup aside and scooted slowly toward her.
The already unsteady float creaked under her movement, flowers swaying and poking at her back.
Like an insistent spinal rebirth.
“Hm?” Kong Liyuan looked down at her, her expression hazy and blurred.
Fu Tingli gripped the float’s edge to steady herself, breathing lightly as she said,
“Do you think in another five years, we’ll still remember all this?”
At those words, Kong Liyuan gently lifted her chin, gazing down intently with a soft laugh.
Across the thin face mask, their noses brushed in a bone-deep seduction.
“What do you think?”
The words came so close, her voice a breathy whisper—not drifting into Fu Tingli’s ear, but forcing its way into her mouth.
Fu Tingli inhaled softly, and Kong Liyuan’s scent enveloped her completely.
It pinned her in place, yet filled her with joy.
“Whoa, I said no fighting, and now these two are making out, treating us like background noise!”
Zhu Muzi’s muffled voice drifted from afar, unclear where the trio had wandered off to.
Fu Tingli thought to herself—this wasn’t even a kiss yet; those three must need glasses.
Then she wrinkled her nose slightly and nuzzled her face haphazardly against Kong Liyuan’s.
Eager to bite that damp mask right off.
But her tolerance for alcohol was truly abysmal. She couldn’t bite off the face mask. Instead, through that thin layer of fabric, her teeth found purchase on something else—her eye? The bridge of her nose? Or perhaps the delicate skin of her cheek…
No, it was soft.
The fullest, most alluring part of Kong Liyuan’s face had to be those beautiful lips, the kind that flushed blood-red at the slightest touch of water.
Emboldened by the booze, Fu Tingli tilted her chin up slightly and grazed them gently with her teeth. The scent of alcohol seeped through the mask, moistening their lips as it spread in hungry tendrils.
In her haze, she lost her strength and felt a hand cradle the back of her head. She slumped against the woman’s shoulder.
Then she heard the woman’s muffled laugh, followed by those quiet words:
“Now you’ll never forget.”
~~~
When her awareness sharpened a little, Fu Tingli realized she was sitting in a moving car.
A thin blanket draped over her body, and a gentle wind caressed her face. A baseball cap covered most of her view, with her disheveled hair trailing in the air, occasionally whipping against her ears.
She lifted the brim with effort, blinking her sore eyes. Ahead stretched a deep gray-blue, tinged with black—like the hour just before dawn.
She glanced to the side.
There was the vague silhouette of the woman. Kong Liyuan was driving, her long hair tousled by the wind, swaying softly. Her profile was dark and mesmerizing.
“Awake?”
The slightest turn of her head, and Kong Liyuan had noticed.
Fu Tingli yawned sleepily and pushed the cap fully up. The sky remained that heavy hue, like the eve of the apocalypse.
She turned her head, and Kong Liyuan was already gazing at her.
“Where are we headed?” she asked, luxuriating in the breeze. Her eyes stung a little, but otherwise, she felt fine.
“To hide you away, where no one else can find you.”
Perhaps it was the gray-blue sky filling her entire field of vision, but Fu Tingli caught a glint of mischief in Kong Liyuan’s smile.
It was almost unbelievable.
After all, this woman always delivered her most earth-shattering lines with a calm face, utterly devoid of expression.
Fu Tingli figured that even if they were on their way to die right then, she could still laugh out loud.
“Then I’ll sleep a bit more. Wake me once you’ve got me hidden.” Fu Tingli closed her eyes lightly and let out a genuine laugh.
She suddenly remembered the Kong Liyuan from that videotape, the one talking about the Golden Little Bird. She had that same childish lilt now—absurdly perfect.
That was her past lover, a side of Kong Liyuan rarely shown to the world. Fu Tingli had only glimpsed fragments of it.
“Aren’t you going to ask where I’m hiding you?”
“I won’t ask, but you’d better hide me well. Pick a good spot.” Fu Tingli grinned from ear to ear.
Then, narrowing her eyes, she thought to herself: I really want to grow up with you, my love.
When you were fifteen or sixteen, I’d be eleven or twelve—the age when I was full of energy, fearless of heaven and earth.
Maybe from that year on, I’d go searching for the Golden Little Bird with you.
You, so eccentric; me, so carefree. We’d spend every one of the Northern Hemisphere’s longest days together—our birthdays. The birthday cakes you bought always had four fewer candles than your age; the ones I bought had four more.
Every year at this time, you’d check into that sanatorium in California, and I’d always climb the wall to sneak in and see you.
If it had been like that, then in the videotape that Doctor Li Qiao kept, there’d surely be a girl a head shorter than you by her side, bursting with energy as she declared:
“Come on! I’ll take you to see my little brown pony!”
The soft breeze still carried traces of floral scent. Fu Tingli was probably truly drunk, lost in these wild daydreams.
Meanwhile, Kong Liyuan laughed beside her in the open-top vintage car, her laughter light and lingering.
Once the laughter faded, she murmured softly,
“I really do want to hide you away.”
