THIS TIME, Xue Meng's plan would succeed. There was no such thing as an unbreakable ship—only players who didn't try hard enough to break them. In this game Xue Meng had mentally redubbed Mo Ran Totally Isn't Gay, Xue Meng had put on a masterclass demonstration of his talent and wit. For once, he would keep these two damned male lovebirds away from each other.
He and the candle dragon flipped through the booklet. They picked out a female lead and hashed out a plan. The man and the dragon each patrolled their own territory: Xue Meng kept a close watch over Mo Ran on the north side of the playground, while the paper dragon stood guard over Chu Wanning in the south. At last, when the spring outing had ended, Mo Ran got back on the school bus having seen neither hide nor hair of Chu Wanning. It felt like cause for celebration.
"We did it!"
"And we sparked a friendship between Mo Ran and that girl!"
"They'll be besties in no time!"
"Once they become teenagers, they'll sneak around behind their parents' backs!"
"They'll make out in their uniforms behind the gym after school!"
"They'll hide boxes of gross, super sweet chocolate in each other's backpacks!"
"There'll be a sudden thunderstorm after evening study hall, and he'll carry her on his back so she won't get her pink ballet flats wet!"
Xue Meng threw his head back and laughed uproariously. "Pink ballet flats is a bit much." He paused, eyes sparkling. "But carrying his girlfriend home in a thunderstorm is an excellent idea. How tall will Mo Ran be in high school?"
The dragon riffled through the booklet. "Between six-one and six-three, it depends—somewhere in that range."
"Tsk, he's really…" A strange expression flitted over Xue Meng's face—a flash of envy, quickly suppressed. The effect was vaguely pained, as if he was suffering from a toothache. He pouted instead of finishing his sentence and hoped the little dragon hadn't noticed that he was wearing padded insoles in his shoes. "At any rate, their love story will be smooth sailing from here on out," Xue Meng said firmly. "It has to be. Otherwise, I have no idea what I'll say to Jiang Xi."
In the interest of ensuring the budding relationship between Mo Ran and the girl would take secure root, free from disruptions, Xue Meng and the dragon observed them for some time. Conveniently, the passage of time could be adjusted at will in the simulation. They just had to tell the mission guide when they wanted to go.
"We want to see Mo Ran's first date with this girl," said the candle dragon.
"A proper, one-on-one date," Xue Meng added, "no third wheels. I mean, I don't know if you can call anything a 'date' at their age, but you're clever, aren't you? You know what we mean." He'd already forgotten that he'd called this guide Artificial Idiocy. He prompted: "Like playing together, doing homework, hanging out and doing stuff together, playing house, whatever. Anything along those lines."
Eager to redeem itself, the guide swiftly brought them ten days into the future.
It was dark out. They stood outside an apartment building in a large housing complex. Behind the creamy yellow squares of its windows, they could hear housewives doing dishes, children raising their voices, and the faint drone of the anchor of the evening news. It must have been about seven o'clock at night.
Mo Ran appeared in the distance. He looked just as they'd hoped: He had a small backpack slung over his shoulders and carried a lunch box emblazoned with a bootleg Winnie the Pooh. The cartoon's nose had flaked off, making the already unfortunate knock-off bear look comically sinister.
But the bad vibes from the bear were wholly offset by the little girl chattering away at Mo Ran's side.
"I live on the second floor. My dad's on a business trip, but my mom's home. Don't be scared; she's really nice." The girl's eyes curved into crescents, her long lashes fluttering in the orange light of the streetlamps. "I told her you were coming over to play yesterday. She said she's gonna make her salted egg yolk wings, plus she's getting the cotton cheesecake from the shop next door—you have to wait in line for it. Do you like cotton cheesecake?"
"I-I…" Mo Ran stammered. Xue Meng noticed the soles were peeling on his shabby sneakers. "I've never had it."
But the girl didn't mock him. After a beat of surprise, she laughed gaily. "You'll definitely like it! If you don't, I'll eat yours—just don't tell my mom. I eat so much she's always worried I'll get fat."
Mo Ran ducked his head, kicking the grit by the side of the road with his disintegrating shoes. This was asking for trouble—now those tattered sneakers looked even more unpresentable. "You won't get fat," he mumbled.
"What did you say?"
"You won't get fat," Mo Ran repeated. Even in the dim light, Xue Meng spotted a faint blush on his cheeks. "I'll give you all my cake if you want it." He bit his lip and turned awkwardly aside. This time, even the slow-on-the-uptake candle dragon noticed the redness of his ears. "I won't tell your mom."
The paper dragon cavorted around them in excited circles. "Ahh!" it crowed. "I'm in love with this girl!"
"I love her too," Xue Meng agreed, grinning. "Didn't I say it? There are so many sweet girls in this world. How could there possibly be a gay man who can't be swayed? Look—if it keeps going this well, we'll wrap this assignment up in no time."
"I wanna see their wedding already—no, I'm ready to meet their kid!" The little dragon's eyes shone as it loop-de-looped through the air. "So what if I'm a single dragon?" It wiped a fake tear from its eye with a little dragon claw. "As long as my ship sails, I'd happily be single for a hundred years!"
They followed Mo Ran and the girl upstairs, then observed as the two children ate dinner, split a piece of cheesecake, watched TV, and did their homework together.
Ah, puppy love! Truly, the best time to find a girlfriend was in primary school. Otherwise you might find that, by the time you graduated from college, you didn't have a single female friend in your contacts. Maybe that was the point where the gay bar started to look like a good option.
At eight-thirty, Xue Meng and the dragon followed Mo Ran out of the apartment as he said goodbye to the girl and her mother. With a spring in his step, Mo Ran left to catch the last bus. The two interlopers followed with dopey grins on their faces.
They continued to watch. Mo Ran came to visit a few more times, but he seemed to be worried he'd give her parents the wrong impression if he came too often. When he wanted to play, he snuck around the back of the building and tossed pebbles against the girl's bedroom window.
"Looks like his angsty teen years have arrived ahead of schedule," Xue Meng remarked. His arms were crossed over his chest, but his eyes were sparkling.
"I think we've got this in the bag," the paper dragon said.
The little dragon had jinxed it—no sooner had the words left its mouth than Mo Ran's aim slipped, and the pebble hit the neighbor's window instead.
The two CWPB representatives, oblivious to the wheels of fate churning before their eyes, were still congratulating themselves.
"What a devoted little kid this Mo Ran is."
"And so romantic too!"
"After they start dating, this'll be such a cute memory."
Their enthusiastic chatter almost drowned out the sound of the neighbor's window opening. A young voice called out, sleepy and clearly annoyed: "Pulling pranks at this hour—don't you think it's a bit much?"
Xue Meng and the dragon felt like buckets of ice had been dumped on their heads.
Maybe it's Maybelli—wait, no. Maybe it's him. Again.
Man and dragon wore identical looks of horror. They swallowed, then turned fearfully—
"Ah!"
"Aaaaahhhh!"
Each wail was more terrible than the last, like death knells ringing in the day of reckoning. They turned to one another and cried in unison, "What the fuck?! Chu Wanning lives next door to that girl?!"
They couldn't accept it—how could they possibly accept it?! How could they let fate reach out and slap them across the face like this?! How could they let the pride of their country turn into a fruity-ass queer—that was the wrong kind of pride!
"At least they met under unhappy circumstances this time," said Xue Meng, trying to find the silver lining—though he looked deflated.
"That's right," said the dragon, trying to convince itself as much as Xue Meng. "After such a bad first impression, there's no way they become friends."
"There's still hope for this route; we should keep trying."
"I think so too. At the very least, we should see what happens a year from now."
In agreement, they told the guide to zip them a year in the future.
They found themselves in the same housing complex, on a night much like the previous one. Mo Ran was standing in the same spot under the flickering orange streetlight, plunged into darkness every so often when the voltage dropped. He was even using the same little pebbles to hit a window gleaming in the moonlight.
But the window he was hurling pebbles at belonged not to the girl, but rather to the girl's neighbor, Chu Wanning.
"Tell me this is a coincidence," the little dragon said weakly. "Tell me he just has awful aim and missed the window he was trying to hit."
Xue Meng was a rational young man. He watched in silence, ashen-faced.
One errant pebble could be chalked up to chance, but ten pebbles could only mean true love. No one could possibly hit the wrong window ten times in a row. The person he wanted to see was the boy who lived next to the girl—Chu Wanning.
What the actual fucking hell!
The window opened, and the fragrance of magnolia spilled into the room on the summer breeze. Behind the fluttering gauze curtain, Chu Wanning was wearing a set of fleece pajamas. Though his expression was sleepy and impatient, he had brought a little stool over to the window. He clambered atop it, then stood on his tiptoes and peered down.
"What are you doing here again?" Chu Wanning yawned, elbows propped on the windowsill. His voice was soft as he asked Mo Ran languidly, "Weren't we just playing basketball this afternoon?"
Mo Ran grinned up at him from beneath the street lamps. He'd brought several paper airplanes. One by one, he tossed them up toward Chu Wanning.
Finally, one of them caught a lucky breeze and landed in the room. Chu Wanning unfolded the little paper plane. A drawing of a white cat next to a little dog revealed itself, along with some words scrawled in yellow crayon:
I forgot to tell you goodnight. Hope you have sweet dreams. Tomorrow we will play in the swiming (I don't know how to spell this word) pool. Let's ask our friend Ling-er to come if she is intrested (I haven't learned this word yet).
Mo Ran
"So." The paper dragon twitched with each word. "He and Chu Wanning are we, and the adorable little girl next door is our friend."
Xue Meng didn't answer for a good while. He scoured every obscure corner of his mind for some refined or subtle phrase to appropriately describe the misery he felt right now. Perhaps some Tang or Song dynasty poetry, or Yuan dynasty plays, even a Western opera would do—the kind of pithy line that made him break out in goosebumps. But he couldn't think of a single thing. At last, rage burning a hole through him, he gritted out, "Goddamn homosexual—fuck you and your fucking grandpa."
"Watch your language there."
"My language's none of your business! I'm so mad I could die!"
"That's not what I meant," said the paper dragon. "I'm just saying, if you fucked his grandpa, you'd be a homosexual too."
Xue Meng glared at the dragon in speechless fury.
"And it would be such a problematic age gap. Like an age Mariana Trench."