"You two knew each other from before?"
"How could that be?" Without waiting for Gu Qiumian to speak, Zhang Shutong immediately shook his head and said, "You're thinking too much, Teacher. I've never seen her before."
They were both children from "big cities," but their lifestyles were completely different.
Even if they had been to the same amusement park, he would have been waiting in a long line outside the gate, while she leisurely walked into the VIP channel. It wasn't impossible for her to have bought an annual pass.
He recalled how Gu Qiumian used to take her Pokémon to a play outside the island, with a fleet of taxis grandly heading toward the largest commercial plaza.
Stepping onto the clean marble floor, with dazzling fashion stores on both sides, she would lead the way with people carrying her large and small shopping bags behind her. They would definitely go to a karaoke bar afterward and book a huge private room... As for more entertainment, Zhang Shutong's imagination was poor and he couldn't think of any for the time being.
He noticed that Gu Qiumian's clothes rarely repeated, except for that scarf, unlike him, who could wear one coat for a whole week. He felt the situation was quite dramatic. She was clearly a rich young lady who should have lived a carefree life, yet she was the one being targeted, and her life was also in danger. He really didn't know whether it was happiness or pain.
"Why do I feel like there's something off about you two from the very beginning?" Teacher Song didn't give up.
"Then you're feeling wrong."
He had never noticed Teacher Song was so gossipy before. Zhang Shutong wanted to roll his eyes but held back, preparing to let Gu Qiumian do it. The girl would definitely say unhappily, "Oh, teacher, are you annoying or not..."
But in reality, that didn't happen. Gu Qiumian seemed oblivious to their conversation. It was as if she had just swum ashore from the long river of memory, belatedly nodding her chin and saying indifferently:
"Mm, we don't know each other."
Then, without turning her head, she asked Zhang Shutong:
"I usually live in Deer Alley. Where's your house?"
Zhang Shutong hadn't heard of this name, but felt it sounded a bit familiar. He figured it was some famous ultra-high-end residential area, which he shouldn't have known about given his family's circumstances. He reported a name of a similar caliber to "Warm and Sweet Home." Sure enough, Gu Qiumian also said she hadn't heard of it.
"Then it's even more impossible," the girl said straightforwardly.
Teacher Song's curiosity fell flat, and he muttered:
"That's right, it's not on the island. The provincial capital is much bigger than this..."
But no one echoed him. The car fell silent again in an instant.
Zhang Shutong just wanted to wait for Gu Qiumian to get home safely, hear what the important thing Teacher Song mentioned about the girl was, and then go do what he should be doing.
At this moment, the Ford was about to drive onto a winding mountain road. The road ahead was empty, with a mountain on one side and a lake on the other. This meant they were already far from the city. Song Nanshan relaxed here, and opened the radio, even having the mood to adjust the station.
A crackling sound of static came, sometimes mixed with a blurry female voice. The signal was probably bad. He adjusted for a long time but couldn't find a frequency, so he simply told Gu Qiumian to find a disc from the armrest box.
With one eye on the road and one eye on the armrest box, he also directed, "Yes, it's called 'Poetry of the Later Youth,' the cover has a very big tree..."
The disc was swallowed by the player, and the sound of a guitar strumming rang out. Song Nanshan didn't forget to introduce it:
"Listening to Mayday is fine, right? You kids all like to listen to their songs..."
Zhang Shutong didn't mind. Listening to music quietly was nice. It had already gotten dark. He didn't notice when a few drops of water had appeared on the front windshield, and as the car moved forward, they accumulated more and more.
It was raining.
It started raining just like that, without any warning.
It made Zhang Shutong feel, for no reason, that coming along on this trip might have been the right decision.
The windshield wipers swept half-heartedly, the yellow candle-like lights illuminated the road ahead, with only the sound of music in his ears. The car also became dim. Perhaps this sudden light rain washed away some kind of disguise, making Zhang Shutong realize that the three people in the car all had their own thoughts.
He looked out the window and realized that Gu Qiumian had to take this road every day. The scenery could only be said to be so-so.
The car drove on the dark road.
The condition of the small car was not good. From a future perspective, it was an old car that was backward in every way. But even in the present of 2012, it wasn't very new. Perhaps it was a used car before it came into Teacher Song's hands. Every time it passed over bumps, the chassis would squeak, and Zhang Shutong was shaken quite a bit. These were things he hadn't noticed before.
Now he found that besides the chassis, the gray-white fabric interior had turned yellow, the roof had a tear, the seat foam was exposed, and the plastic on the center console also had cracks. This little car had had a rather miserable life following Teacher Song for so many years.
But Song Nanshan was just such a rough guy.
He probably didn't care about these things.
For some reason, there was a Bulbasaur figurine on the center console. A metal spring was connected to its stomach, and it would shake every time it went over a bad road. That figurine was probably the newest thing in the car, and it was well-protected, as if he had just bought it yesterday while shopping, although a closer look showed it was a bit faded.
That little guy was ugly but cute, with a big mouth and green skin. It was said to be the most steady and docile one among the three starters. Zhang Shutong didn't know why Teacher Song put it in the car before. Maybe he was afraid of an accident since he drove too fast, so he put it in the car to try to get the blessing of the God of Bulbasaur.
But now he had a new theory.
He asked if Teacher Song's ex-girlfriend bought the frog. The man nodded and said yes, then smiled and reached out to flick the garlic-head turtle:
"Actually, I bought it to give to her as a decoration for her desk. But then she came back and glued it to my car. This ugly thing, if it wasn't glued on so tight, I would have thrown it away long ago."
Zhang Shutong thought to himself that Teacher Song was also a tsundere, and an old tsundere at that.
Who knew Teacher Song would suddenly say again:
"But if I throw it away, I won't be able to buy it again. This one's a bootleg. I shouldn't have been so cheap as to buy a bootleg back then. Look at this turtle's eyes, aren't they yellow?"
Zhang Shutong looked closely and saw that the yellow-eyed Bulbasaur was indeed a unique item.
He couldn't smoke in the car, so he started to ramble:
"It was at that small stall inside the amusement park I was just telling you about. Twenty yuan a piece, but they'd be five yuan elsewhere. I hadn't been working for very long back then and was dirt poor, but I felt that romance was the biggest thing in the world, so I bought it with a firm heart.
"It was only after I bought it that I found out she liked a yellow mouse the most, or at least a blue turtle. She said this frog was the ugliest one after it grew up, and when I searched online, it was true. You tell me, is there something wrong with the game company's people's brains? You could have just drawn a cute pet that girls would like, why make a frog so ugly? Did a frog offend your whole family..."
At this moment, the radio changed songs. He suddenly stopped talking, seeming to have waited for a long time, and listened quietly. Zhang Shutong also listened to a few lines. The song's name seemed to be "Like Smoke."
The small car then entered a bend to the tune of the music. As the front of the car turned, a van suddenly appeared in their field of vision from the opposite side, driving very fast, with one of its wheels already past the center line. Zhang Shutong had been staring ahead. Before he could warn him, Song Nanshan immediately turned the steering wheel sharply, making the tires screech.
The two cars just barely passed each other, but the Ford's right rearview mirror scraped against the mountain side.
"...How do you drive?"
Teacher Song wanted to curse, but he held back thinking about the two students beside him. He no longer dared to relax his guard at this point. He held the steering wheel with both hands and slowed down a bit.
The car's headlights illuminated the slanting rain, and amidst the silence of the journey, they finally lit up the building in front of them.