Jiang Yu didn't answer.
He watched the tears fall from the girl's eyes.
After leaving her chin, the tear didn't drop to the ground. It slowly faded in midair, then disappeared.
Just like Lin Zi'an.
Nothing could be left behind.
Outside the school infirmary, a nurse was shuffling through documents.
The curtains swayed gently in the breeze.
The girl stood in the sunlight, the outline of her white uniform almost transparent. If not for how real her eyes looked, Jiang Yu might have thought he was hallucinating from lack of sleep.
“You said I'd already disappeared once?”
Jiang Yu finally spoke.
The girl didn't answer right away.
She reached out and tried to touch him again.
This time, she touched Jiang Yu's shoulder.
Her fingers passed through his uniform without resistance.
The girl pulled her hand back and lowered her head to stare at her palm. She seemed to have already known the result, but she was still a little disappointed.
“You can see me,” she said.
“That doesn't mean you can refuse to answer my question.”
The girl raised her eyes.
Jiang Yu's voice wasn't loud, and there was little inflection in it, but she still froze for a moment.
A few seconds later, she smiled.
“So you can get angry.”
“I'm not angry.”
"You're lying again."
Jiang Yu frowned.
Those words made him inexplicably uncomfortable.
It was as if someone had pulled open, without permission, a drawer he had always kept tightly shut.
“Who are you, exactly?”
“I don't know.”
“You don't know?”
“I don't remember.”
The girl said it calmly, as if she weren't answering a question about her own name, but about something she'd long since grown used to.
“My name, birthday, where I lived, who my parents were—I don't remember any of it.”
“Then how do you know you've disappeared?”
“Because no one can see me.”
She turned toward the door of the school infirmary.
A small rectangular pane of glass was set into it. Outside, the nurse had her head lowered as she organized the medicine.
The girl walked over and stopped beside the nurse.
She waved a hand in front of the woman's eyes.
The nurse didn't react at all.
The girl picked up the ballpoint pen on the desk.
Or rather, she tried to pick it up.
Her palm passed right through the pen.
The pen remained lying quietly on the desktop.
“At first, I thought I was dead,” the girl said. “But dead people should have bodies. Someone should be sad. At the very least, someone should know they died.”
She turned back to Jiang Yu.
“I have nothing.”
Jiang Yu said nothing.
Lin Zi'an's expression before he disappeared surfaced in his mind again.
That face, only half of it left.
That plea: “Please remember me.”
What if he became like that too?
Not death.
But every trace connected to him being wiped from the world.
His mother would forget ever making him breakfast.
His father would forget ever signing his school notebook.
His sister would forget she had a brother.
The class seating chart would be short one seat.
The people in group photos would naturally shift toward the center, filling the spot that had once belonged to him.
The world wouldn't crack because of it.
It might even become more coherent.
As if he had never been there.
Jiang Yu looked up instinctively.
There was no number above the girl's head.
“What about your Love Value?”
The girl's expression shifted slightly.
“You know what those numbers are?”
“You don't?”
Instead of answering, she took another step toward him.
“How many can you see?”
“Everyone has one.”
“The exact numbers?”
“Yes.”
“When did it start?”
Jiang Yu stared at her.
“I'm the one asking questions right now.”
The girl fell silent for a moment.
“I can't see it.”
“But you know why Lin Zi'an disappeared.”
“I only know that people whose numbers hit zero disappear.”
“How do you know?”
Her lips moved.
In the end, she said, “I've seen it happen many times.”
Jiang Yu's heart sank slightly.
“How many times is ‘many’?”
“I don't remember.”
“You don't remember again?”
“There are things I genuinely don't remember.” The girl looked at him. “And there are things I can't tell you right now.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Yes.”
“What difference?”
“The first means I don't have the answer. The second means I don't want you to die.”
The air fell silent for an instant.
Jiang Yu looked at her.
The girl didn't look away.
Her eyes were clear. There was no threat in them, and she didn't seem to be deliberately trying to create an air of mystery.
She was simply stating something with complete seriousness.
Jiang Yu would die.
“I thought disappearing wasn't death.”
“It's worse than death.”
“Yet you're still standing here.”
The expression on the girl's face faded.
“Does standing here count as existing?”
Jiang Yu didn't answer.
“No one can hear me. No one can touch me. I'm not in mirrors, and cameras can't capture me. I can't sleep, and I don't get hungry. I can't even tell how much time has passed.”
She looked up at the clock on the wall.
The second hand moved forward, one tick at a time.
“Sometimes I stand in the same place and watch the sky turn light, then watch it grow dark. People pass through my body. A day, two days, a month…”
She paused.
“I don't know why I'm still here, or how much longer I'll remain.”
Jiang Yu remembered what she'd said earlier.
Finally, someone remembers me.
It hadn't been surprise.
It was more like a person who had been drowning for too long suddenly catching one breath of air.
Jiang Yu looked away.
“You said you disappeared three years ago?”
The girl froze.
“How do you know?”
Jiang Yu froze too.
He remembered knowing this.
But he couldn't remember when, or from whom, he'd learned it.
They had only just met.
“I…”
The door to the school infirmary suddenly opened.
“Jiang Yu?”
The nurse stood in the doorway, holding a cup of warm water.
“Who are you talking to?”
Jiang Yu looked at the girl.
She was standing right beside the nurse.
Their shoulders nearly overlapped.
“No one,” Jiang Yu said.
The nurse suspiciously scanned the room.
“I could have sworn I heard you talking the whole time.”
“I was on the phone.”
Jiang Yu picked up the phone beside the bed.
The screen was dark.
The nurse glanced at it but didn't call him out. She only set the water on the bedside table.
“I couldn't get ahold of your mom, so I contacted your dad.”
“You didn't need to.”
“You weren't doing well in class just now. It'd be safer to have a parent take you to the hospital for a checkup.”
“I'm really fine.”
The girl stood behind the nurse.
"You're lying again."
Jiang Yu glanced at her.
“I can go back to class by myself.”
The nurse sighed.
“Your dad's already on his way.”
Jiang Yu's movement stopped.
“He answered?”
“Of course he did,” the nurse said. “He sounded really worried and said he'd be here within twenty minutes.”
Really worried.
Jiang Yu thought about it, but found he couldn't imagine what his father looked like when he was worried.
His father worked for a technology company and was always busy.
In the morning, he usually hadn't gotten up yet when Jiang Yu left the house.
At night, his father was sometimes already asleep when Jiang Yu got home, and sometimes still in his study holding a meeting.
The two of them often exchanged no more than five sentences a day.
“Did you eat?”
“How did your test go?”
“Do you have enough money?”
“Go to bed early.”
“Okay.”
Jiang Yu had never thought there was anything wrong with it.
His father worked hard.
He was already seventeen. He didn't need to be fussed over every day.
“Get some rest,” the nurse said. “And stop wandering around.”
The door closed again.
The girl stared at it.
“What is your dad's name?”
Jiang Yu looked at her.
“Why are you asking?”
“Just curious.”
“Your expression doesn't look casual.”
The girl reached up and touched her own face.
“Do I have an expression?”
“You do.”
“Then maybe I forgot how to hide it.”
She walked to the window, turning her back to Jiang Yu.
“Don't let him see me.”
“Can't he not see you?”
“Normally.”
Jiang Yu caught the oddness in her words.
“What does ‘normally’ mean?”
The girl didn't turn around.
“I don't know if your dad is a normal person.”
Jiang Yu got out of bed.
“You know him?”
“I don't know.”
“Not knowing again?”
“I have no memories of that man.” Her voice was very soft. “But when you said he was coming, I felt afraid.”
“You don't even know his name.”
“Some fears don't need names.”
Jiang Yu stared at her back.
She had clearly lost her body, yet her shoulders were trembling slightly.
She wasn't pretending.
“My dad is just an ordinary office worker.”
“Would an ordinary person have a son with a Love Value of negative one who hasn't disappeared?”
Jiang Yu's breath caught for half a beat.
He looked at the reflection in the glass.
The “-1” hovered quietly above his head.
It hadn't changed at all since morning.
“You said I'd already disappeared once,” Jiang Yu asked. “What does that mean?”
The girl turned around.
“I don't know the whole answer.”
“Tell me what you do know.”
“Disappearing doesn't happen in an instant.”
She raised her hand and drew an invisible line through the air.
“After a person's Love Value hits zero, the world first erases their traces, then erases other people's memories of them, and finally erases the person themselves.”
“Lin Zi'an disappeared first, and everyone else forgot him afterward.”
“What you saw was the last few seconds,” the girl said. “Before that, part of him had already been erased.”
“What part?”
“The people who are usually the first to forget him are those most distant from him. Strangers, ordinary classmates, friends they haven't contacted in a long time.”
Jiang Yu remembered the first break between classes.
Lin Zi'an had asked someone from the neighboring class to lend him a ball.
The other student had stared at him for a long time before finally asking, “What class are you in?”
At the time, Lin Zi'an had cursed him for being crazy.
“Next are friends, then family,” the girl said. “When the last person who remembers him starts to forget too, the number becomes zero.”
“I still remembered him before Lin Zi'an disappeared.”
“That was why he looked at you when he disappeared.”
Jiang Yu froze.
“I was the last one?”
The girl nodded.
“You kept him here for a few seconds.”
During those few seconds, Lin Zi'an had reached out to him.
And he hadn't been able to catch him.
Jiang Yu lowered his head and looked at his hands.
“What if someone keeps remembering him?”
The girl fell silent.
“Could he come back?”
“I don't know.”
“Didn't you say you've seen many people disappear?”
“But I've never seen someone still be remembered by the living after disappearing.”
The girl looked at him.
“Except you.”
Jiang Yu raised his head.
“Why do I remember?”
“Maybe because you're like them.”
“What does that mean?”
“You're not one of the living.”
As those words fell, the sound of a car braking came from outside the window.
The girl's face suddenly went white.
She whipped around toward the area beyond the schoolyard.
A black sedan had stopped at the school gate.
A man stepped out of the driver's seat.
A dark shirt, black suit pants, no tie.
It was Jiang Yu's father.
Jiang Chengyue.
He closed the car door and looked up toward the school infirmary.
Across the distance of dozens of yards and the second-floor window, his gaze landed precisely on Jiang Yu.
No.
Not Jiang Yu.
On the girl beside him.
The girl took a step backward.
“Impossible…”
Her voice began to tremble.
Jiang Yu looked at the number above his father's head.
His father's Love Value had been seventy-two all morning.
But now, the number was changing rapidly.
Seventy-two.
Sixty-one.
Forty-eight.
Twenty-nine.
Finally, it stopped at—
0.
Jiang Yu's heart clenched.
His father didn't disappear.
He stood at the school gate and calmly raised his right hand.
Across the vast distance, he put a finger to his lips in a gesture for silence.
The girl stared at him.
All the color drained from her face.
“I remember now.”
Jiang Yu turned to her.
“What?”
The girl backed toward the wall one step at a time.
“Why I disappeared.”
She looked at Jiang Yu, real fear appearing in her eyes for the first time.
“Your dad erased me.”