Chapter 9: “Rain-Mist Reverie”

The old movie came to an end amid the fine details shrouded in rain and mist: a motorcycle, a streetlamp, an asphalt road, and a cigarette burning between the fingertips of a woman who was both refined and carefree.

The wind toyed with the cigarette too, making its ember flicker dimly, as if everything had been veiled by a thin layer of fog, with the glowing tip as the only tear in that shroud.

A scorching, crimson tear.

Through that tear, Kong Liyuan smiled at her, like a dream with nowhere to settle.

A motorcycle roared past between them, the gust it kicked up seeming to rip the tear even wider. Fu Tingli thought it was a bit silly for them to be shouting across the street at each other.

Resigned to her fate, she walked over.

Kong Liyuan watched her approach but didn’t put out the cigarette. Instead, right in front of her, she slowly exhaled a plume of white smoke.

Her face, obscured by the mist, hid beneath her long, straight hair, gradually sharpening from hazy to clear, right before Fu Tingli’s eyes.

“Doesn’t Teacher Kong hate the smell of smoke?”

Surrounded by the swirling smoke, Fu Tingli made out the familiar letters on the filter of the slender white cigarette between Kong Liyuan’s fingers.

The same brand—a rare one in Shanghai, not the sort you’d expect to see in Kong Liyuan’s hand.

“It’s not that I hate the smell of smoke.” Kong Liyuan lazily brushed back a strand of hair tousled by the wind.

“It’s just that this is the only brand I can tolerate smelling… or smoking.”

The cigarette’s burning end flickered on and off. Fu Tingli realized the rain-mist in the air had lightened, so she lowered the hand she’d been holding over her head and shoved it into her pocket.

She scuffed her slippers against the damp ground.

“Oh, but you should still smoke less.” After saying that, she felt like she was butting into someone else’s business, so she added, “Though if Teacher Kong is under a lot of stress, it’s fine to have a few now and then. I was just saying.”

Kong Liyuan laughed again, her laughter seeming to drown in this insignificant drizzle.

Was she in an especially good mood? Why was she smiling so much tonight? Fu Tingli wondered oddly.

“Don’t blame Rong Wu for this.” Once her laughter faded, Kong Liyuan said.

“Mm, I know. It’s your fault.” As Fu Tingli spoke, she secretly added in her mind:

Your fault for making me stand on the roadside in slippers and a haphazardly grabbed jacket, next to a female celebrity who was still made up and stunningly beautiful, beyond description.

The stunningly beautiful female celebrity—and con artist—was covering for her accomplice.

Fu Tingli replied, “Then why did she end up going along with it?”

Smoke billowed, laced with dampness, like the tangled overhead power lines dripping water onto Fu Tingli’s eyelashes.

Kong Liyuan gazed at her.

She watched until the moisture on Fu Tingli’s lashes finally dripped away, blurring the misty world. Fu Tingli raised a hand to wipe it, but Kong Liyuan reached out first, brushing away the haze.

The woman’s soft fingers, carrying a faint warmth, passed before her eyes, as if they’d never touched them at all. Yet they left behind a clear, lazy smile.

“Because I told her you’d believe it.”

Fu Tingli blinked involuntarily. Her vision blurred again, and she saw Kong Liyuan, leaning against the car hood, step a few paces away to stub out the cigarette and toss it into a trash bin.

By the time she returned, the smoky scent clinging to her had faded considerably. This was a light-scented brand anyway; a breeze scattered it easily.

Smokers tended to dislike such sweet, mild flavors. Non-smokers hated any cigarette smell.

Yet Kong Liyuan only smoked this one.

Snapping back to reality, Fu Tingli noticed the car she’d been leaning against had started up. Kong Liyuan, already inside, glanced at her through the rearview mirror.

“Get in.”

“Where to?” Fu Tingli asked on instinct.

“Aren’t there still a hundred burgers?” Kong Liyuan countered.

She was really taking her for a hundred burgers? Or was this another trick? But what about her was worth Kong Liyuan’s elaborate deception?

Fu Tingli met Kong Liyuan’s eyes in the rearview mirror, weighing the odds of the screaming kid upstairs in her rental having quieted down if she went back now, versus whether she’d even get onto the set tomorrow if she let Kong Liyuan drive off alone.

It was too tough a call. Before she could answer, Kong Liyuan did—with a smile. It was faint, but it made the mist seem to spread across the mirror.

The fogged-up mirror folded the inside and outside of the car—and the two of them—into one hazy world.

This was Kong Liyuan’s fourth smile of the night. Fu Tingli realized that, then heard her say,

“It’s getting pretty late.”

Her voice softened. “If you don’t want to, you don’t have to come.”

Fu Tingli opted to get in first. In the warm blast of the car’s AC, she finished her unfinished question.

“What if I hadn’t believed Rong Wu? What if I got out and left right now?”

Though she had believed, and hadn’t even questioned how anyone could handle a hundred burgers. It only hit her after buckling in that Kong Liyuan’s “hundred burgers” probably weren’t literal.

“Then I’d just head back, no big deal.”

Inside the car, Kong Liyuan’s voice sounded oddly hollow—maybe because Fu Tingli was still wearing her ear muffs.

She started to take them off, then heard Kong Liyuan say carelessly,

“I was just passing by and stopped to smoke one.”

Her hand paused on the ear muffs. She decided to leave them on. They were cozy, keeping her sluggish daze from spilling out and freezing her ears in the process.

Just passing by, then.

That was fine. Just stopping for a smoke and remembering the burgers she owed her.

She ought to be glad Kong Liyuan had put it that way.

Pretending to yawn, Fu Tingli steered the conversation elsewhere. Her gaze drifted inevitably to the car Kong Liyuan was driving now.

It wasn’t the same as the one that had dropped her off last time—another new one—but the interior was just as understated and sleek, all black except…

For the purple, bushy-eyebrowed head dangling from the keychain.

Buzz Lightyear?

How had that ended up here? She wondered if she was dreaming. Why else would Buzz Lightyear be in Kong Liyuan’s car out of nowhere?

Catching her dazed stare before she could ask, Kong Liyuan answered first.

“Someone gave it to me. The keys always get lost, so I put it on.”

“Xia Yue?” Fu Tingli asked. She’d seen Xia Yue sneaking Buzz Lightyear into gift boxes for the cast, sticking her tongue out at the manager and declaring, “Buzz Lightyear is the cutest in the world.”

“No.” Kong Liyuan turned a corner. “Xia Yue’s is in the company car. This one’s from…”

She glanced over. “Someone else.”

Fu Tingli nodded slowly, too dense to probe who this “someone else” was, and let out another yawn—as if karma for her fake one had come swift.

“Tired?” The car glided through the lazy rain-mist, Kong Liyuan’s voice drifting to her ears.

Fu Tingli yawned again, her eyelids drooping sleepily.

“A little.”

The car’s speed seemed to ease with her words, the warm air melting into a creamy heat that pooled comfortably in the cabin.

“Then sleep for a bit.”

Hearing that from Kong Liyuan, Fu Tingli’s eyes drifted shut in a daze.

And she really fell asleep.

Strange. Back in that empty rental, the slightest noise from upstairs or down—the grit in the walls, muffled voices next door, the whoosh of a shop shutter slamming shut below—could keep her wide-eyed and frazzled, ready to lash out with a knife.

But here in the car, with roaring traffic outside, the midnight streets still raucous—blaring horns, distant wailing sirens, splashing puddles from passing vehicles, revelers laughing boisterously by the roadside—she slept soundly.

She figured the difference was noise versus white noise.

Much later, she’d learn the rental’s true thief of sleep was the loneliness of those twenty square meters, the fear of a blank future.

While in the car, what lulled her into heavy slumber was Kong Liyuan driving beside her.

And a brief, kaleidoscopic dream that mashed it all together.

In the dream, it was California: sun-drenched open highways, swaying California lupine, her hands gripping the wheel to wrench a veering car back on course.

A woman in the passenger seat, elbow on the door, laughing freely in the open-top car; warm fingers brushing her golden hair; the woman asking with a smile,

“Want to be with me?”

She drove in the dream, feeling like the captain of her fate, destination unknown.

But her heart soared, secure in the knowledge that no matter where they went, a fresh new sun would always hang above them.

The dream in the car felt vividly real. When she drowsily opened her eyes, she struggled to separate reality from reverie.

Her eyes fluttered open in a fog, car horns blaring sharply to pierce the veil between dream and waking. The wipers scraped away the blurring rain-mist bit by bit.

Kong Liyuan watched her from the driver’s seat, her back to the dawn-bright streetlights.

Her hand hovered right above Fu Tingli’s head.

Fu Tingli blinked, her vision blurred by overwhelming drowsiness, as though shrouded in a veil of steam. Through the haze, she watched the yellow lights outside the car melt into a translucent, buttery glow.

The light trickled into the dim blue interior of the car, flowing past Kong Liyuan’s sidelocks, her deep eyes, her full Cupid’s bow, her slender eyelashes…

An emotion flickered in those eyes—something Fu Tingli couldn’t read. She never had been able to understand her.

Back then, at their first meeting, when Kong Liyuan had spoken those earth-shattering words with not a trace of expression on her face, Fu Tingli hadn’t understood her either.

Now, she watched as the translucent glow finally slid from Kong Liyuan’s lashes, dripping into her eyes and slowly diffusing.

She still couldn’t understand why Kong Liyuan was gazing at her with that inscrutable emotion.

The hand that had been hovering in midair finally settled on her head, gently stroking her hair as she murmured,

“Your hair is a mess.”