Back to Auntie’s School Days - Chapter 53

While she had indulged in fantasies about what might have happened that night, they were only that—fantasies.

In reality, Jian Hao didn’t truly wish for them to have had a physical relationship. Not only because she didn’t remember it, but because if they actually had, her disappearance the following morning would look even more like a “hit and run” escape.

If that were the case, what Tan Yanqing felt for her wouldn’t just be hate; it would be resentment. When resentment and hate dwell in the heart for too long, even the dead return as ghosts to seek vengeance. How could the living ever agree to return to how things were?

Tan Yanqing looked at her with a strange expression, her eyes narrowing as she asked, “You don’t remember?”

To her, this was something that happened seventeen years ago, but to Jian Hao, hadn’t it only been a month or two?

“Uh…” Jian Hao rubbed the side of her neck, lowering her head awkwardly. “I tend to black out when I get drunk.”

Tan Yanqing immediately realized something and asked, “Then the things I said to you that day when you were drunk…?”

Jian Hao answered, “I recorded them.”

A few seconds of the clock’s ticking filled the silence.

“Heh.” With a light, fleeting chuckle, Tan Yanqing turned and walked upstairs.

Jian Hao opened her mouth, but for a moment, she was speechless, unable to call out. She watched Tan Yanqing’s figure disappear into the dim corner of the landing.

She sat alone on the sofa. Slowly, she pushed the pillow aside, hugged her curled-up legs, and rested her chin on her knees. Her lashes flickered. Her cheeks, which had been burning hot just moments ago, felt like a piece of iron fresh from the forge being plunged into water—cooling down with a sharp hiss.

In the gaze Tan Yanqing had directed at her before heading upstairs, there were many emotions, but Jian Hao clearly recognized only one.

A sense of disappointment after discovering she had been played.

It wasn’t anger. It was disappointment.

She had schemed against Tan Yanqing. In Tan Yanqing’s heart, she had always been the sweet, cute, obedient “good child.” But now, she had become the “bad child” who let her down.

She was a bad child.

But if Tan Yanqing had looked through her phone, wouldn’t she know? The “pure” Jian Hao in her mind didn’t actually exist. She had been “bad” for a long time—from the moment she fell in love with Tan Yanqing. She wasn’t trying to push her badness onto Tan Yanqing or make her bear that reputation; she just wanted to say that the moment her heart harbored admiration, her “badness” had already taken root, growing alongside time until it fully matured.

So, being seen as a bad child by Tan Yanqing didn’t matter. As long as she could be with her, she would do anything Tan Yanqing disapproved of.

A bad child should act the part.

She was wearing pale mint-green socks, and her cream-white slippers were right there. After only two seconds, she stepped into them and headed toward the stairs.

This was the first time she had gone upstairs since traveling back. The concrete stairs were covered in tiles, so they didn’t “creak” like wooden ones, failing to announce to the person above that someone was sneaking up. With intentionally light steps, her ascent was as silent as a ghost.

However, when Jian Hao reached the door to Tan Yanqing’s bedroom and tried to push it open, she was barred. She stood at the door and looked at the other rooms on the second floor—all their doors were open. Only this one was locked.

She wasn’t quite “bad” enough yet. After scanning the area, she didn’t try to force the door. Instead, she stood in the hallway and shouted, “Auntie Tan, I was wrong!”

She waited two seconds, knocked thrice, and shouted loud enough for Tan Yanqing to hear: “I was wrong!”

This was simply who she was—shameless and thick-skinned. When she did something wrong that made Jian You, Tan Yanqing, or Guan Xinting angry and they ignored her, she would stick close and coax them. If she couldn’t fix it right then, she’d try again in two days. But this coaxing only happened when the fault was truly hers.

Because she was actually very “good”—though her grades were a bit lackluster, she wasn’t the kind of student who worried parents; no smoking, fighting, or delinquent behavior. She and Guan Xinting could spend half a day at the mall with a single cup of milk tea, eat the same meal at the same restaurant for the Nth time, and occasionally watch a movie or hang out at each other’s houses.

In life, she usually followed the lead of the three important people in her world. If there was a disagreement, she’d speak up, but she was obedient and never rebelled on purpose. So, she rarely made them truly angry. Especially Tan Yanqing—she had never even been angry with her, except for the one time Jian Hao crossed the road without looking and almost got hit by a car. Tan Yanqing had given her a stern lecture then. That was the harshest Tan Yanqing had ever been in her memory.

Usually, the things that made them speechless were trivial. She’d coax them slightly, they’d find a way to let it go, roll their eyes, scold her a bit, and move on. Jian Hao assumed today would be just as easy.

She whined softly, knocking on the door with her knuckles. “Auntie Tan, open the door~”

“Auntie Tan~ I know you’re in there~”

“Tan Wenpei, open the door!~”

“…”

“Auntie Tan, if you don’t open up, I’m calling the police!” She pulled her phone from her pocket and dialed Tan Yanqing directly, but the call was hung up as soon as it started ringing.

Jian Hao opened her mouth wide and shouted for the third time: “Auntie Tan! I’m really, truly sorry!~”

She waited, but no one came out. Pressing her ear to the door, she couldn’t hear even a hint of movement. Her hands, hanging at her sides, half-clenched into fists. She turned to go downstairs.

But as she reached the stairs, she whipped back around and returned to the door. She wiped her face, her voice trembling. “I was wrong, but my mistake was drinking to lie to you and tricking you into talking. But recording it—I wasn’t wrong for that!”

The bedroom door was simple white, devoid of patterns, much like Tan Yanqing herself—cold, unromantic, and strictly upright.

“I did want to record what you said so I could confront you if you denied it later, but after hearing what I heard, I didn’t want to do that anymore. I didn’t contact you for over a month because I wanted to give us both a buffer. You said you forgot that night, that it was too far away, so I used a month to try and forget too. I know it doesn’t compare to how long you’ve been trying to forget, but I love you. Every day I don’t talk to you feels like a year. It’s so agonizing that everything I do reminds me of you. A month feels like a very, very long time to me…”

Jian Hao blinked, the milk-white door blurring like a patch of mist. “I… but I just kissed you, just told you I liked you, just accepted living a life where it felt like we were dating. But I woke up and I’m back to now, back to being rejected, back to having to call you ‘Auntie’ and not being able to call you by your name or ‘Taotao’…”

How am I supposed to accept this?

How am I supposed to accept that you don’t love me anymore?

Jian Hao hugged her own arms, digging her fingers into the soft flesh of her triceps. She crouched down, hiding her chin in the crook of her elbows. Within two seconds, the tears falling from her face soaked her knees. She bit the flesh on her right wrist to keep from sobbing out loud. After a moment, she sniffed and said: “I can understand you avoiding me, lying to me, and not wanting to recognize me. But can you… please not abandon me? Auntie Tan, I can’t be without you. You can’t not want me…

“Auntie Tan…”

“Taotao…”

“Tan Yanqing!”

“Please open the door, okay? I’m begging you, please open the door!”

Jian Hao’s sobs became hitching gasps; unable to catch her breath, she coughed twice and wiped her face with her arm, smearing tears across her whole face. She hugged herself again, rubbing her face against her arm before sobbing: “I’ve figured it out during this time. Once you were sure I was Jian Lai, was it… was it that you loved and hated me at the same time?”

It had snowed twice in Nanqing this December. But right now, it was raining in Nanqing. This rain had been falling since 2008. It was being shed by two different people.

Jian Hao sniffed her aching nose, her tear-clumped lashes too weak to flicker. She stared blankly at the crack beneath the door, less than a centimeter high.

—There was the shadow of a pair of feet.

She let out a short, sharp laugh, but after the laugh, she cried even harder.

“You love me because I’m Jian Lai; you hate me because I’m Jian Lai. You love me because I’m Jian Hao; you hate me because I’m Jian Hao.”

Things she didn’t understand before, she understood now.

That’s why Tan Yanqing minded when others kissed her, minded when she kissed others, bought her whatever she wanted, smiled at her, and spoke softly to her. It’s also why, once she grew up, Tan Yanqing stopped holding her hand or hugging her in the way a normal elder would—avoiding any intimacy that could be construed as ambiguous.

“So you were sometimes good to me and sometimes bad, sometimes close and sometimes distant.”

In that process, how much had Tan Yanqing endured?

Jian Hao used to think Tan Yanqing’s gaze always held an unclear gloom. Whether she was calm or smiling, there was always a mist in her eyes that couldn’t be cleared. Some people lose their way in the mist. But as it turned out, the person in the mist was Tan Yanqing herself.

She had been trapped in a mist named “Jian Hao is Jian Lai” for seventeen… no, eighteen years.

Now, Jian Hao finally understood that her confession amidst the “romantic” fireworks was actually a disaster. The crackling in the sky wasn’t courage for her; it was a warning for Tan Yanqing. The love she spoke of wasn’t love—it was a fire surrounding Tan Yanqing. A yellow-green fire. A fire that had burned Tan Yanqing from 2008 until now.

At the time, she only heard her own racing heart. She only saw Tan Yanqing give her an unreadable look. What was in that look? There was surprise, but it was the surprise of not expecting a sudden confession, not that she loved her. There was confusion, but it was over why she confessed then, not that she loved her. There was restraint, there was endurance, there was…

The look that night was actually quite similar to how Tan Yanqing usually looked at her. Like a flame that flickered out only to be relit, over and over. This fire burned nothing else but Tan Yanqing’s soul. Tan Yanqing’s soul had died in that fire again and again, turning to ash.

Tan Yanqing always looked at Jian Hao with pain in her eyes, yet she often glanced at her nonetheless—as if looking at Jian Hao, though painful, was also the only thing that could stop the pain.

And that day, besides all that, there was also waiting. But what was she waiting for? Was she waiting for her to finally turn seventeen, to see if she would travel through time? If she disappeared on a certain day at seventeen, then Tan Yanqing would finally have the answer she’d waited seventeen years for.

But was an answer really all Tan Yanqing wanted?

Jian Hao had been sobbing quietly, forcing herself not to make a sound, but at this point, even though she bit her arm tightly, the sobs broke through uncontrollably. It wasn’t a loud wailing, but it sounded terrible. She crouched on the floor, whimpering, rubbing her eyes against her arm to clear her vision. She looked at the door crack again, but the shadow was gone.

She covered her mouth, swallowing her voice, forcing herself to stop. Having crouched for too long, her feet and legs were numb. She tried to stand but collapsed onto the floor instead. She sat there by the door for a while, then used the door to pull herself up.

She knocked on the door three times with her right hand.

Her palm felt itchy from the vibration, but she ignored it, staring at the closed door, sobbing: “Open the door…”

The hand pressed against the door curled into a fist, sliding down. Just before it fell away, she pressed it back to the same spot. The knocking became urgent, like a sudden downpour.

“Auntie Tan… please open the door, okay?”

Please open the door…

A tear hung from her chin, trembling on the verge of falling when another took its place. Jian Hao was already beyond words.

“I don’t believe you don’t love me…”