Hot flashes

Zhou Heng arrived at school the next day.

He entered the classroom through the back door. The laughter that had been filling the classroom suddenly subsided, as if a machine that was running had been partially unplugged, its speed slowing down and eventually becoming an almost inaudible hum.

Those gazes swept over him and then returned to him. Some people huddled together and whispered, glancing up at him before quickly looking down again.

Zhou Heng walked to his seat, put his schoolbag on the table, unzipped it, and took out his textbooks.

He vaguely heard a few words in those voices, like fragments floating in the air, some landing in his ears—mistress…harming the wife's son…vicious.

His body stiffened for a moment, his fingers gripping the edge of the book page and stopping there, his knuckles turning slightly white from the force.

Then he laid the book flat, turned to the first page, lowered his head, and didn't look up again.

From then on, no one ever surrounded Zhou Heng again.

The girls who used to come to him with one question after another have stopped coming. Some will walk away quickly when they pass by his seat, and others will lower their heads and pretend not to see him when they bump into each other in the corridor.

Several girls felt sorry for him when they saw him standing alone in the last row and wanted to go over and say something to him. But as soon as they took two steps closer, the group of boys next to him started making a fuss.

"Oh dear, are you worried about it?"

"You like the son of a mistress? Then you're not a mistress yourself, are you?"

"You like mistresses so much, does your mom know?"

The words bounced off the desk and onto the podium, hitting the air like shards of glass scattered on the floor.

Zhou Heng raised his head.

Across several rows of desks and chairs, his gaze passed through the crooked desks and arms holding books, landing on the group of boys—Song Yu sat there, his hands on the table, his legs crossed and stretched out under the table, his gaze also fixed on Zhou Heng.

Their eyes met briefly in the air.

Zhou Heng's gaze lingered on his face for two seconds before falling back down to the open pages of the book in front of him.

Song Yu looked away.

He looked out the window, where the leaves of the sycamore tree were fluttering in the wind, revealing the grayish-white fuzz on the underside of the leaves. He felt the lump of damp wood in his throat grow even heavier.

But Song Yu's symptoms did not improve.

Zhou Heng would still appear in his dreams at night, and the images in his dreams became clearer and more detailed.

It takes him a long time to catch his breath after each wake-up.

He told himself that this was not what he wanted, and that it was Zhou Heng's fault.

Those dreams were evidence that he had been seduced.

He repeated those words to himself over and over until they lost their meaning, like over-recited scriptures.

When it came time to fill out college applications, the school handed out a thick admission brochure, and the whole class spent the entire afternoon hunched over their desks flipping through it.

Song Yu flipped through the pages for a while before putting them down. His gaze swept across the table and landed on Zhou Heng, who was sitting by the window.

Zhou Heng was looking down at the application form, his pen making a few marks on the paper before stopping, as if he was hesitating between several options.

Song Yu looked at him, then looked down at his watch.

He found himself subconsciously waiting for Zhou Heng to finish filling out his form first, so he could see what Zhou Heng had written before starting his own.

He was already used to doing this—when choosing a school for junior high, he found out which school district Zhou Heng was going to, and then told his family, "I want to go to that school too."

When choosing a high school, he heard that Zhou Heng had applied to that school, so he filled in the same name on his own application.

He told himself it was to keep an eye on him and prevent him from doing anything funny again.

But this time his pen hovered over the paper, not falling.

He recalled Zhou Heng's face in his dreams those nights, and how he couldn't take his eyes off Zhou Heng's profile in the corridor.

His fingers tightened around the pen.

What if I stay away from him? What if I make him disappear from my sight completely? Would things get better? Would those dreams stop? Would that lump of damp wood in my chest slowly dry, become lighter, and finally crumble into powder and be blown away by the wind?

He filled in the school that was completely different from the one Zhou Heng had written. After he finished filling it out, he left the form on the table for a long time. Only after all the other students in the class had handed in theirs did he get up and hand it in.

The light from the window fell on the table, creating a quiet, bright area.

He sat there, no longer looking in the direction of the window.