To Covet (GL) - Chapter 4

Perhaps because we’re both girls, Yu Zhouwan, my older sister, didn’t feel the need to be reserved. She’d walk around the house barefoot in a loose nightgown—only when Shi Yunya wasn’t home, since Shi Yunya would lecture her on the importance of proper behavior.

When we didn’t have to go out, she’d lie on the couch with me, the TV on as background noise. I’d play games on the new tablet Yu Hanyang bought, while she curled up in the single armchair, reading.

We maintained a friendly roommate-like relationship.

The only time I couldn’t control my hostile tone with her was on a sleepless night. I tossed and turned, then sat on the floor by my bed until my legs were numb. I crept into the living room and curled up on the sofa.

This wasn’t my home, and the bigger the house, the more terrifyingly empty it felt. The narrow sofa was just right.

I was on the verge of falling asleep when I suddenly heard the front door unlocking, followed by the sound of shuffling feet. I sat up, hugging the blanket, and a blinding light from a cell phone shone on me.

Yu Zhouwan held a tissue box, her headphones dangling by her hair, her eyes as red as a rabbit’s.

“You’re so loud,” I said, only realizing how sharp my tone was after the words were out.

“I’m sorry.”

She apologized before I did. She drank a glass of water and wiped her tears away.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“You always say things like that. Our conversations are never productive.”

I felt awkward for a moment. She was talking on the phone and hadn’t noticed me at all.

“Who are you talking to in the middle of the night?” Shi Yunya stood silently at the bedroom door, her arms crossed.

Yu Zhouwan quickly turned off her phone and took off her headphones.

Only as Shi Yunya slowly walked closer did she notice someone was hiding under a blanket on the sofa. In front of an outsider, she didn’t explode. She simply pulled Yu Zhouwan firmly by the arm into the room.

“Yu Zhouwan, why would you lie to me? I’m your mother.”

By the time Yu Zhouwan stormed out, it was already dawn.

I stayed wrapped in the blanket, pretending to be asleep.

She didn’t come back until the sun was high in the sky.

“You should go out for a walk. There are a lot of malls around here, and the park is nice, too.” Seeing me still tangled in my air-conditioned blanket with messy hair, she tried to persuade me to get up and move. She put her keys down and intentionally tugged at the corner of the blanket.

“No, I’m not going. It’s too hot.” I took out the remote control, changed the channel, and got into a more comfortable position.

She didn’t stay home for long. She tapped away on her phone for a bit, sprayed on some sunscreen, and headed out again.

“Going back to school?”

She hummed in agreement.

As soon as I heard the door lock, I shot up from the couch. After hearing the elevator close, I immediately opened the door and sprinted down the stairs. Before I left, I grabbed the flattened hat from my suitcase.

Bus route 177 went straight to the school. I pulled my hat down and called a taxi on my phone.

The temperature was over 30 degrees Celsius, making everything in sight feel heavy and sticky, like it was submerged in oil, shimmering with a faint golden haze.

Interfering in other people’s lives was something I was routinely forbidden from doing. The excitement of nervousness and prying curiosity spurred me into action.

I had a gut feeling that her leaving again was related to last night’s phone call.

Yu Zhouwan had her secrets.

And I wanted to know what they were.

Although Linzhou Foreign Language School had summer classes, not many students were on the direct path to the national college entrance exam. Nearly two-thirds of the students were preparing to go abroad, so the school offered special foreign teacher-led classes for IELTS and TOEFL. Standing under the shade of a tree by the school gate, I could hear groups of students chattering and discussing their scores and desired offers. It sounded like they were under a lot of pressure.

I was an anomaly without a uniform, and after just a few minutes, a security guard waved me away from the gate. I had to find a nearby bookstore and sit down.

Afternoon classes started at 1:40 p.m. I checked the time: it was 2:00. Two buses on route 177 had already passed.

I even wondered if I had mistaken someone else for her in the constant flow of people at the school gate, because I hadn’t seen Yu Zhouwan at all.

“Yu Keyi?”

I thought I was hearing things and turned my head in the direction of the voice.

“Lanlan,” I said. It was a good thing her schoolwork was on the table in front of me; otherwise, I wouldn’t have recognized her. “Are you here, too?”

Xu Lanlan was one of the few people I had met since getting my class assignment list. Her childhood friend went to this school, so she managed to get a school ID. She pulled me along, and we blended in with the students leaving class, getting into the school successfully.

“Linzhou Foreign Language School is great. They don’t force you to go to all the evening study halls. With a simple application, you can go home by 7:00 at the latest,” Xu Lanlan said, probably seeing the look of ignorance on my face. She began to talk about their packed high school schedule. “Unlike us, our evening study halls go until 10:30, and teachers even supervise us. And our grades still aren’t as good as theirs.”

I just nodded along to everything Xu Lanlan said.

As expected, Yu Zhouwan was a perfect student outside of school. I stood in the shade with my arms crossed and saw her picture high up on a display of honors, with a string of awards I didn’t recognize sparkling behind it.

I pretended to be clueless and asked around in her class. “She didn’t come this afternoon,” a girl at the desk behind me said, closing a magazine with a yawn. “Why don’t you ask Teacher Feng?”

“Yin Sien, are you stupid?” a girl next to her, who was copying a test, made a face. “Teacher Feng’s internship is over. Where’s her sister supposed to find her?”

“You know I never listen in physics class,” Yin Sien said, raising her magazine as if to hit her. “I’m not wrong, though. They were really close. I saw Wanwan and Teacher Feng going out together all the time.”

The school gates closed after the class bell rang, so I waited in the school library until the first dismissal bell and came out with the students who were heading home early.

Yu Zhouwan was home before me. She was leaning on the sofa, flipping through a thick vocabulary book.

“Go for a walk?”

She heard the door close, no matter how quietly I did it.

“Yeah, just went for a walk.”

She glanced at the harsh sunlight outside, then at me.

“Where did you go?” I asked, leaning against the doorframe.

“Back to school,” she said without looking up, continuing to highlight key points. “I left something behind.”

The sudden lie felt like a jolt. Afraid that I might reveal my hand by saying too much, I didn’t press her. I simply went back to my room, opened my tablet, and started playing my game.

After finishing the game’s long-winded story, I got up to get a drink of water. I found Yu Zhouwan asleep, a book with a parchment-like cover resting on her lap. Her legs were bent and propped on the armrest, her calves enveloped by the gentle curve of the sofa pillow, like a flawless piece of jade.

I got up and adjusted the air conditioner’s airflow. The room door was still locked, so I had to go to my room to get a blanket to place over Yu Zhouwan.

Yu Zhouwan was in a deep sleep. I guessed she hadn’t slept well all night because of the fight with Shi Yunya, so it was normal for her to be tired in the afternoon.

She shifted unconsciously in her sleep, and the blanket slid to the floor.

I was standing on the living room rug, and aside from the rustle of my clothes, everything was silent.

I was about to crouch down to pick up the blanket when I accidentally caught sight of a secret hidden beneath the rolled-up hem of her shirt.

There were many reddish-blue bruises and deep pink scratches on the skin from Yu Zhouwan’s back to her waist, extending down to where her pants covered them. I thought she had been physically abused, and my heart sank. I didn’t dare to wake her. I pretended I hadn’t seen anything, but my gaze shifted to the inside of her thighs, where there were several deep red bruises slightly larger than a fingernail, hidden in a private area.

Sex is a tempting, forbidden fruit for teenagers. When my fingertips touched the marks on her neck, those bruises left by something illicit, full of suggestion and temptation, I could clearly feel the blood flowing through my own body.

All my suspicions seemed to be leading to an untouchable truth.

Knowing that the reason Yu Zhouwan left was related to “stealing forbidden fruit” filled me with a sense of schadenfreude. What did it matter that she had a mother like Shi Yunya? With Yu Hanyang’s low-quality bloodline, the child he raised wouldn’t be innocent and carefree. With the slightest lapse in judgment, she would fall into an abyss of desire.

I had always thought I was lowly enough, but I never expected Yu Zhouwan’s shocking dark side to be so easily revealed.

My vague resentment began to solidify into a clear plan. I had a risky and preposterous idea—

I would use Yu Zhouwan to destroy this family.

The next day, Yu Zhouwan said she was going to school again. I sent her an iMessage right at the end of the last class, saying I would be waiting for her by the staircase on the first floor of the east building.

Yu Zhouwan read the message but didn’t reply. Still, she showed up on time after class.

“How did you get in?” she asked, seeing me sitting on the steps at the entrance. She immediately walked over, grabbed my arm, and pulled me up. “Don’t sit here. The steps are too cold, and there are so many people; you’ll get knocked into.”

“I was at the city library looking for some information. Are you guys done with class?” I rubbed my eyes, feigning innocence. “You don’t have evening study hall, right? Let’s go home together.”

Yu Zhouwan probably didn’t expect me to suddenly cling to her. “You go on home. I have something to do.” She pinched my cheek like she was comforting a child.

At home, we hadn’t reached the level of true heart-to-heart conversation; we maintained a psychological distance. But now, I had changed my behavior. She subconsciously sensed something was wrong and awkwardly pulled her hand away.

“What do you have to do?” I pouted and grabbed her wrist again, this time with more force. “My classmate recommended a restaurant today. Do you want to go eat together tonight?”

“My club has an event. I can’t get away,” she said.

Then, she must have realized that the excuse didn’t hold up, so she added, “And I have a one-on-one tutoring session. You go eat by yourself.”

Even someone as dense as me could see through Yu Zhouwan’s poor acting and her resistance. I felt disdainful inside, but on my face, I maintained a look of disappointment as I stared blankly at her.

“We can hang out another time.”

Thinking I was throwing a tantrum, Yu Zhouwan bent down and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

She turned to leave, but I didn’t hurry away. I took two steps back and stood in the shadow of a concrete pillar.

My phone kept displaying a low battery warning. I unlocked it to the photo album. It contained a blurry picture of a person’s back, as if it were a mistake caused by the volume button and my finger accidentally touching.

Yu Zhouwan’s back was straight. Standing there, her white school uniform shirt outlined the clean, sharp lines of her shoulders and back.

My intuition told me that Yu Zhouwan was in some kind of inescapable danger. But I wasn’t in a hurry to help her. Instead, I turned back from the school gate with the goal of getting to the bottom of things, and I followed her.

Yu Zhouwan jogged through a small gate on the west side. I thought I heard the rustle of tree branches against her clothes, but the sound of dry leaves on the ground was too loud. I just leaned against the teaching building’s railing, watching. Then she got into a car and disappeared from sight.

I locked myself in my room and took a printer wrapped in duct tape from a secret compartment in my suitcase.

I stroked the cracks on it with a hint of regret. If no one had carelessly rummaged through it, Yang Chun probably wouldn’t have found the photos I had carefully collected, and she wouldn’t have smashed this poor-quality printer to pieces.

Later, I haphazardly put it back together and fixed it.

Now, no one could control me.

It was badly broken. It laboriously spit out a sheet of paper covered in vertical black lines. I tore it up and threw it in the trash, then pressed the start button again. I carefully picked out the clearest photo from a pile of shredded paper and placed it at the bottom of a dented, peeling tin box. Then I took it out again, as if I was worried it would get dirty from the other photos. But I couldn’t help but scratch at it with my fingernail, scratching back and forth over the image of Yu Zhouwan, until it was wrinkled, gray, and torn, and I could no longer make out the image.