Hedgehog's Belly - Chapter 4

Chapter 4

I have seen her.

Amidst a silent gloom, the entire world was quiet. Within a deathly despair and wordless roars, there lingered the stale warmth of pedantry, unable to reach the light of day. A violent heartbeat proved life remained. Yet, as motionless as stagnant water, it could hardly produce a ripple of vitality, seeking signs of life like a madman.

Silence.

Do you experience such pain as well? that person asked.

Perhaps, but it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten, she answered.

That person asked: “Then, will you be jealous?”

Yan Qingzhu: “Why should I be jealous?”

She looked at that person in astonishment; the person slightly lifted a smile and remained silent.

She had seen that person.

She only remembered that the person once stood upon a grand stage, dressed in a white gown, holding a large bouquet of fresh flowers in her right hand. She sang in a low voice, in a language she could not understand. Unlike straightforward English, her voice was clear and ethereal, carrying an inexpressible sense of melancholy and haze. These melodies of indifferent sorrow, blending with those obscure yet extremely ambiguous words, could give rise to a different kind of romance.

So sincere, so innocent.

She only remembered that at that moment, the light was a warm yellow, reflecting off the clean hem of the dress.

Her eyes grew moist as she watched. In that moment, she admitted her heart had skipped a beat.

Clang!

Yan Qingzhu tumbled from her desk onto the floor, the books on the surface swept directly to the feet of the person in front of her. Yan Qingzhu pulled the school jacket off her head; her brain was buzzing from the fall, and she pressed her temples.

Falling even while sleeping.

Her front-row neighbor, Ye Nanqiao, turned back to look at the mess and froze for a moment, then casually picked up the textbooks by her feet and placed them back on Yan Qingzhu’s desk.

“It’s the big noon break; what kind of scandalous dream were you having?” Ye Nanqiao turned around with a teasing smile.

“I dreamed that every ‘CP’ (couple) you ship ended in a ‘BE’ (bad ending).”

Yan Qingzhu spoke each word very clearly, knowing deep down that Ye Nanqiao would be infuriated by this. She casually picked up a fallen textbook and tossed it onto the desk. Her eyes caught Ye Nanqiao’s new novel. “Finished the last one? What genre is this one?”

“This one is new from the author, an ABO type,” Ye Nanqiao showed the new novel cover to Yan Qingzhu. “It makes me so mad; the physical book is the censored version. Almost everything I wanted to see was cut.”

Yan Qingzhu looked at this obsessed girl and slightly raised her left eyebrow: “Well said. Your reward is a roving yellow flag (for hygiene/discipline).”

Ye Nanqiao: “Get lost! If you ever ‘mark’ a partner, I’ll ship your CP every single day.”

Yan Qingzhu didn’t know what the ABO setting was: “Don’t you like ‘double male leads’ (BL)?”

Ye Nanqiao: “For other genres, I can change my taste once in a while.”

Hearing this, Yan Qingzhu let out a playful laugh: “Fine, I’ll go find one right now.”

She pulled a pen and a crumpled math weekly exercise sheet from her drawer and dashed out of the classroom.

“Holy crap, no way! Where are you going during noon break? Be careful, don’t get caught by the grade director!” Ye Nanqiao looked terrified. Seeing the woman rush out, she shook her head helplessly.

Sure enough, Yan Qingzhu was the type to act as soon as she thought of it.

The teaching building had a semi-open corridor, and the midday sun spilled directly onto the walkway. The building was exceptionally quiet during the noon break; a few students passed by in groups to go to the restroom, chatting softly. Yan Qingzhu strolled slowly, and as she passed a certain classroom, she quietly slowed her pace. The curtains of that class were drawn, but through a gap in the fabric, she could vaguely see the figure of that person writing fervently.

Fortunately, the person was sitting by the window, naturally tucking stray hairs from her temples behind her ears, lost in thought over problems in an exercise book. Yan Qingzhu felt a surge of joy; she leaned one hand on the windowsill and watched her quietly and patiently. The person propped her head on her hand, drawing circles on scratch paper and frowning from time to time.

In those days, a girl’s worries were never about basic necessities or the trivialities of life, but rather about endless vocabulary words and unsolvable math problems.

Yan Qingzhu lightly tapped the window with her long knuckles, gesturing with her left eyebrow. The person looked up but didn’t show much surprise; she only revealed a small dimple, her eyelids drooping slightly as she ducked her head, unable to hide a smile.

Luo Mu slowly peeked her head out of the back door of the classroom, walked out, and carefully closed the door. Before Luo Mu could speak, Yan Qingzhu folded her arms across her chest, tilted her head, and asked, “Why are you still doing problems during noon break? Aren’t you going to rest?”

“Just organizing some previous mistakes; I didn’t expect it to take so long.” Luo Mu gave a forced smile: “What about you? Why did you run over here?”

“I don’t quite understand a trigonometry problem; help me take a look.” Yan Qingzhu smoothed out the wrinkled exercise sheet, handed the pen to Luo Mu, and pointed randomly at a question: “How do you solve this diagram with an angle bisector?”

Luo Mu held the pen, looking at the problem and pondering for a moment. “The sum of the cosine of angle ADE and the cosine of angle ADC equals zero.” She gestured at the image on the test paper, explaining step by step.

Yan Qingzhu watched her quietly, nodding as if in deep thought.

“Or there’s another way, using the ratio of line segments. Look, because this is an angle bisector, BE over BC equals AE over AC. That’s another method.” Luo Mu paused, looking up to see if the girl understood, only for their eyes to suddenly meet.

Luo Mu saw her own reflection in the other’s eyes. The other’s gaze told her: No, that’s not why I came. But those cold, brownish-hazel pupils—so clear and clean—could not hold a trace of the world’s chaos or any extra emotions, yet they were trying so hard to feign indifference.

Was it a sudden, spring-like tenderness?

“So, do you… understand?” Luo Mu’s gaze shifted slightly downward, returning to the trigonometry problem.

“I don’t. Explain it to me again.” Yan Qingzhu’s answer was quick and blunt, much like a child who lost at rock-paper-scissors and wanted to cheat. “I can’t follow just by talking; you have to write it down.”

Luo Mu frowned, feeling this person was quite unreasonable: “Do you have scratch paper?”

“No,” Yan Qingzhu replied, but she rolled up the sleeve of her jacket, extending her fair arm toward Luo Mu. The arm had no excess fat; it wasn’t too thin, but it was firm. Yan Qingzhu’s confident look left Luo Mu completely baffled.

Luo Mu was a bit stunned: “You want me to write on it?”

Yan Qingzhu said: “Why not?”

“If you sleep with your arm as a pillow, be careful or the ink will print onto your forehead,” Luo Mu reminded her again.

Yan Qingzhu managed a comeback: “If that happens, my math teacher will surely praise me, saying, ‘Yan Qingzhu is so hardworking, she even writes her drafts on her face.'”

The two burst out laughing in unison.

Luo Mu carefully wrote down the general problem-solving steps on her arm, while the person in front of her stared intently down at her.

The girl’s eyelashes were slightly curled, and her framed glasses couldn’t hide the natural aura in her eyes. Today, her rare high ponytail made her look exceptionally fresh. The way she looked while seriously solving math problems seemed like a unique, precious fragment of youth.

At that time, Yan Qingzhu only heard the sound of the wind in her ears and a heartbeat that was thumping for some unknown reason, feeling as though time had been paused.

And this memory would travel to every corner of her future life, sealed within the trials of time, living repeatedly through the passing years. Many years later, Yan Qingzhu would be hunched over a table, drunk, the corners of her eyes red and filled with tears.

When talking to her sister about her student days, she would always proudly mention the math problem on her arm, complaining that the person’s handwriting needed work, while privately mocking herself that she hadn’t actually understood any of the notes that year.

Forcing a smile, yet secretly sobbing.

That first close contact—she didn’t even dare breathe too quickly, fearing she would scare the girl in front of her.

She brought her arm closer to her, but kept her body away, solely to suppress that restless heartbeat.

The girl carried a faint woody scent, but it couldn’t suppress her agitation; instead, her heart beat even more violently.

The person wrote stroke by stroke on her arm, muttering the problem-solving steps under her breath.

What those steps were, Yan Qingzhu truly wasn’t listening at all.

“Finished.”

Looking at the messy formulas and calculation steps, Luo Mu smiled awkwardly in embarrassment: “Sorry, I forgot to tell you, my math handwriting is quite… unrestrained.”

Sure enough, half the arm was covered in dense writing. The black water-based ink stood out starkly against the white skin, with no sense of orderly layout. From afar, it looked a bit like a strange tattoo on a delinquent youth.

“It’s fine. Water-based ink can be washed off; I’ll clean it after I understand it.” Yan Qingzhu frowned while staring at the math handwriting, pointing to one of the steps to ask a question.

“But, what does this ‘31061017’ mean?”

“…That’s sinAOD.”

Alright, then.

After Yan Qingzhu returned to the classroom through the back door, Ye Nanqiao whispered a confused curse: “Where the hell did you go, you crazy woman?”

Yan Qingzhu didn’t speak; she just revealed her jacket sleeve, showing an arm covered in black and white patches.

“Holy crap!” Ye Nanqiao suddenly yelled, was shushed by those around her, and asked in a frustrated whisper: “Where did you go to get these ‘ghost talismans’ drawn? Which Taoist priest drew these?”

“What do you know? In a way, I’ve basically been ‘marked.'”

With a bewildered expression, Ye Nanqiao pulled Yan Qingzhu’s arm in front of her. “Impressive. Tell me, did the priest draw this charm to ward off evil for you?”

Yan Qingzhu: “Get lost. It’s for warding off you.”

“Wait, even though it’s a bit ugly, it looks familiar.” Ye Nanqiao fell into thought. “No way… wait, isn’t this a math problem?”

“The weekly test from last time, the trigonometry one. I just grabbed it at random.” Yan Qingzhu handed the crumpled paper to Ye Nanqiao.

Ye Nanqiao looked on in shock: “I was wondering, didn’t you get a perfect score on the trigonometry test last time? Turns out you took my paper to cause trouble! I couldn’t even find it!”

Yan Qingzhu took a serious look at the name on the paper. Great, it really was Ye Nanqiao’s.

“Alright, Boss Ye, then I’ll give a brief blessing for the CP you ship to grow old together.” Yan Qingzhu put her arm around Ye Nanqiao’s shoulder. “Does this count as being ‘marked’?”

Ye Nanqiao: “Whoa, so you’re…”

“Go away, what are you thinking?” Yan Qingzhu gave Ye Nanqiao a shove. “Hurry up and take a nap; you can have everything in your dreams.”

Yan Qingzhu sat back in her seat, lying quietly on the desk, looking at those messy problem-solving ideas on her arm—crooked and barely legible mathematical symbols. Although the writing was scribbled, the logic was clear, without any beating around the bush. Maybe I gave her something too simple to look at? Next time I’ll ask her about a final ‘boss’ problem on functions.

Would it be too hard and make her unable to do it? Better not to make things too difficult for her.

Yan Qingzhu took off her jacket and covered her head as usual to prepare for a nap, but her front-row neighbor Ye Nanqiao lightly tapped the corner of her desk. Yan Qingzhu gave an impatient “tsk” and looked up.

Ye Nanqiao whispered tentatively: “Song Chenxi?”

“Why so gossipy?”

“Is it?”

“Not exactly.”

“What’s her name? How long have you liked her? When did it start?” Ye Nanqiao turned around curiously, propping herself on the desk with one arm, firing off a series of questions with “I am Yan Qingzhu’s personal paparazzo” written all over her face.

Yan Qingzhu squinted her eyes, staring straight at the girl with disdain. After a silence, she slowly uttered a few words.

Yan Qingzhu: “I saw her a year ago.”

A year ago, I did see her.

She was right beside me; the lights were dim. That person sat right next to me, translating poem after poem that I didn’t understand into Chinese—those ambiguous poems from the East, so delicate and gentle when stated directly in Chinese. Like the hazy and tender bright moon in a dream, yet crashing so violently into my heart.

I still remember, watching you from the shadows, seeing you shine brilliantly, calm and resolute.

I still remember, watching you from the crowd, seeing you pure and white, untainted by the dust of the world.

Though the terrible night may be cold and long, there is always a beam of light to tear through the gloom and light up this tragic world.

A smile couldn’t help but spread across Yan Qingzhu’s lips: “I have seen her.”