No one answered.
This was exactly the result I wanted.
And yet I was even more afraid than when I heard them speak.
The emergency room was too quiet.
The nurses' station phone hadn't rung. The wheelchairs had stopped rolling. Even someone who had been coughing had cut themselves off mid-cough. A dozen faces were turned toward me, as if waiting for me to fill in the answer myself.
I clamped my mouth shut.
My tongue pressed against my teeth.
I couldn't say it.
The moment I told them which bus route it was, they would know the next time.
There was no evidence for this thought. I didn't even know what their silence meant. Maybe they thought I was crazy. Maybe someone would burst out laughing the next second.
But I didn't dare gamble with the last thing she didn't know.
The man with the back of his hand taped up was the first to look away.
"Why am I standing here?" he asked.
He looked down and saw his IV tube pulled taut. Only then did he seem to suddenly feel the pain. A tiny spot of blood seeped from beside the needle, and he hurriedly stepped back. The IV stand tilted with him.
A nurse reached out to steady it.
Sound returned to the emergency room.
Someone asked what had happened. Someone else complained that it was too loud. The people who had all been staring at me a moment ago turned away one by one, as if nothing had happened.
I was the only one still sitting on the floor.
Lu Bo'an slowly crouched down, stopping just beyond the reach of my hand.
"That question just now... Was the answer something only you knew?"
I immediately looked at him.
His tone was completely normal.
Too normal.
I didn't know whether this was Lin Xu asking the same thing in a different way.
He noticed my look and didn't ask again. He simply placed a pen on the floor and pushed it between us.
I didn't pick it up.
The handwriting was mine too.
My handwriting could sign away a phone I didn't remember.
The nurse brought a dry set of hospital clothes and a thermal blanket. She didn't come any closer, setting them beside an empty bed.
"You can change by yourself," she said. "Pull the curtain closed. We'll all go outside."
I stared at her thumb.
That thumb had just brushed over my arm, exactly like Lin Xu's.
"I won't touch you," she added.
I still waited until she had stepped outside the curtain before using my left hand against the wall to stand up.
My right knee buckled, and I nearly went down again. Lu Bo'an took half a step forward. I immediately hunched my shoulders, and he stopped.
No one helped me.
Before pulling the curtain closed, I counted the exits once.
To the left was the nurses' station. To the right was an emergency door beneath a green light box. Behind me was only a wall. It was about fifteen steps from the bed to the emergency door. Two wheelchairs, a medication cart, and four people who might or might not suddenly turn their heads stood in the way.
By the time I counted the fourth person, I could no longer remember the first person's face.
So I started over.
The second count became five.
I didn't know whether someone had just walked in or whether I'd missed a face the first time. My stomach wasn't churning, but the back of my neck grew stiffer and stiffer, as if the moment I turned around, those people would change places.
It took me a long time to sit down on the examination bed.
My wet shirt clung to my skin. Every time I tugged at it, it felt as if a blunt weapon had struck my right shoulder all over again. I bit down on the collar to keep from making a sound and used my left hand to undo the buttons one by one.
When I reached my chest, I saw my ribs trembling.
Suddenly, there was a sound outside the curtain—paper scraping across the floor.
Cheng Xiaoqing's note was pushed inside again.
**I brought you dry clothes. Can I just leave them inside the curtain?**
I stared at the words.
She hadn't asked what happened to me. She hadn't said she was doing it for my own good.
I picked up the pen and wrote on the back of the paper:
**Come in. Stand by the entrance. Don't touch me.**
After I finished, I didn't push it out right away.
The first character for "you" looked too much like the one for "she."
I scraped at it with my fingernail several times until the paper roughened, then traced the character clearly again.
After the paper went out, Cheng Xiaoqing waited a few seconds before lifting the curtain.
She opened it only wide enough to turn sideways and slip through, carrying a convenience-store paper bag. Once inside, she immediately let the curtain fall back into place and stood where I had told her to.
She looked terrible too.
"I'm not coming any closer," she said.
I stared at her lips, and my chest began to tighten again.
"You..."
The word caught in my throat.
Cheng Xiaoqing didn't finish it for me.
I tried a second time.
"Just now, the people outside... Were they all looking at me together?"
"Yes."
"What about you?"
She was silent for a moment.
"After I heard your question, I suddenly had this overwhelming urge to know the answer."
My fingers tightened.
"You just wanted to know?"
"I don't know," she said. "I don't dare say I didn't become like them."
Her fear didn't seem fake.
But Lu Bo'an in the police car hadn't known that he had spoken like a woman either.
I pulled the half-changed hospital gown up over my chest and didn't ask her for help again. Cheng Xiaoqing stood by the curtain, watching me use one hand and my stiff right shoulder to pull the gown on.
She raised her hand several times, then lowered it again each time.
The hospital gown was dry, but when it touched my skin, I didn't feel any warmer.
The neckline was too wide, and wind kept slipping into the back of my neck. The sleeves were too short, exposing the red marks where the nurse had grabbed my right arm. I kept tugging the fabric upward until my shoulder hurt, then felt as if my back was still exposed.
There were reflective surfaces everywhere in the emergency room.
IV stands, scissors, the edges of carts, and the transparent film over Cheng Xiaoqing's paper bag. Every time I saw a blurred face in one of them, I immediately turned around.
The first time, it was the nurse.
The second time, there was nothing there.
The third time, I turned too quickly. The side of my neck felt caught, and everything went black for a few seconds. Cheng Xiaoqing took half a step toward me, then forced her foot back into place.
She really was still standing where I'd told her to.
But that didn't reassure me. It only made me start fearing when she would move.
After I wrapped myself in the thermal blanket, she finally asked in a low voice, "What did you mean by that question about the bus?"
My whole body went rigid.
She immediately said, "You don't have to answer."
Too late.
Footsteps stopped outside the curtain.
The shadow of a pair of shoes appeared on the fabric, followed by a second pair, then a third.
They were still listening.
I couldn't make them wait forever.
No. I didn't have to answer.
But what if it had only been a coincidence? What if, just because a group of strangers had fallen silent, I was mistaking the only person willing to remain outside the curtain for a monster?
I started miscounting my breaths.
One, two, four.
One, three.
I saw the pen on the floor and suddenly picked it up.
"Does Lin Xu know where I lived in elementary school?"
Cheng Xiaoqing froze.
"I don't know."
Outside the curtain, an old man's voice recited the complete address.
The building number, the alley, the floor.
Every detail was right.
My stomach didn't churn. I only felt a chill crawl up the back of my neck.
I remembered once showing Lin Xu my old ID card. She'd asked why the photo was so ugly, and we'd laughed together.
This wasn't something she didn't know.
I'd asked the wrong question.
"Then on my twelfth birthday..." I hurriedly asked, "Where did I hide the thing my grandmother gave me?"
No one answered.
The shadows of the shoes outside the curtain didn't move.
My heart beat faster.
It felt as if I'd caught hold of something, but I didn't dare believe it. Question after question clogged my throat. Each one was tangled up with memories I'd once told Lin Xu, might have told her, or that she might have secretly seen.
"What day was the first time I wanted to break up with her?"
I regretted it the moment I said it.
Cheng Xiaoqing looked up.
The man with the back of his hand taped up answered in Lin Xu's voice:
"September 17 of last year, at 11:42 p.m."
It felt as if someone had punched me in the chest.
"You wrote two lines in your notes. The first said, I can't take it anymore. The second said, I want to move out."
The man's voice was very soft.
"You deleted them, thinking I was asleep."
He lifted the curtain.
His face was covered in tears.
But the corners of his mouth curved into the gentler smile Lin Xu wore when she was angry.
"I saw them."
I shrank backward, my right shoulder striking the bed rail.
The notes were real.
The date was real.
Even those two lines were real.
I'd never told anyone, including Cheng Xiaoqing. I'd even forced myself to forget, because the next day Lin Xu had made me breakfast as if nothing had happened. So I had believed she really hadn't seen them.
But she had.
And after that day, every hug and every time she'd asked whether I would leave her, she had known the answer.
I remembered that, before writing those two lines, she'd just pressed my thumb against my phone.
Half asleep and half awake, I'd heard the sound of the unlock confirmation. She said she only wanted to check my alarm for the next day and told me not to make a big deal out of it. After she went into the bathroom, I opened the notes app.
I'd thought about stuffing my ID, charging cable, and two changes of clothes into my work backpack and leaving before dawn. But the moment I finished the second line, I heard the bathroom doorknob turn.
I deleted the text and turned the phone facedown on the nightstand.
The next morning, Lin Xu washed my work backpack.
She said it was too messy and casually put my ID back in the drawer, coiled the charging cable, and set it neatly on the nightstand we shared.
At the time, I had only thought she was organizing my things again.
Only now did I understand. She had put even the escape I hadn't started back where it belonged.
The man suddenly grabbed his own mouth.
The smile vanished from his face.
"What did I just say?"
He backed away too quickly, his elbow knocking over the IV stand. The metal pole crashed to the floor, the IV needle tore free from the back of his hand, and blood immediately ran down his fingers.
The nurse rushed over and pressed on the wound.
The man kept shaking his head.
"I don't know him. I don't know. I really don't know."
"Sit down first," the nurse said.
"Don't touch me!"
He shoved her away, clutching his bleeding hand as he backed against the wall. His movements were exactly like mine a few minutes earlier. The nurse had no choice but to set the gauze on a chair and teach him from a distance how to apply pressure himself.
He did as she said, but his eyes stayed fixed on me.
Not angry.
Afraid.
For the first time, I saw myself on someone else's face.
I wanted to apologize.
The moment I opened my mouth, he pressed his back harder against the wall, and the hand holding the gauze trembled.
I made no sound.
What had come out of his mouth just now hadn't been his words, but his hand was the one that had been injured, and he was the one everyone saw as a monster. Lin Xu had only borrowed a few seconds. She had left him all the pain and all the explaining.
If I asked again, the next person could end up like this too.
It could be the nurse. It could be Lu Bo'an. It could even be Cheng Xiaoqing, standing by the curtain and trying her hardest not to come closer to me.
I thought I'd found a door only I could open.
It wasn't until this moment that I realized the doorknob was actually growing out of someone else's body. Every turn could injure a stranger who didn't even know me.
Everyone around us was looking at him.
And at me.
I had asked the question.
I only wanted to know how much Lin Xu knew, but I'd shoved her into a stranger's mouth and made him announce my ugliest escape in front of the entire emergency room.
My hands began to go numb.
I threw the pen away, as if it could hurt someone too.
"Don't ask anymore," Cheng Xiaoqing said.
I looked up at her.
She was still standing by the curtain, not coming closer. But her eyes were red, and both hands had crushed the paper bag out of shape.
I wanted to ask whether she was afraid of me.
I didn't dare.
The man outside the curtain was still crying. The nurse called for someone to bring fresh gauze, and Lu Bo'an told the onlookers to move back. Voices layered over one another, and once again I couldn't tell who was speaking with their own mouth.
I pulled the thermal blanket up to my chin and leaned my back against the wall.
At least I knew one thing.
Lin Xu wasn't all-knowing.
She only knew the parts she'd seen, heard, or stolen.
There was still a bus route in my heart that she had never taken.
And there was the thing from my twelfth birthday that I'd hidden away.
I didn't give them the answers.
I couldn't.
Those answers weren't weapons.
I didn't even dare recite them in full in my mind, afraid my expression, my eyes, or my lips might give something away. Only the first stop of the bus route surfaced as a single word before I forced myself to count the ceiling lights instead.
One, two, three, five.
Wrong again.
Cheng Xiaoqing watched me and asked softly, "Do you want me to go outside?"
I wanted to nod.
But there were people all over the other side of the curtain. If she went out, I'd be left with nothing but those shadows of shoes that might turn around at any moment. If she stayed, I'd have to keep waiting for her to become Lin Xu.
My neck felt as if two hands were pulling it in opposite directions. I could neither nod nor shake my head.
"Stay," I finally forced out.
Cheng Xiaoqing didn't press me.
"Okay."
She remained where she was.
That word briefly reminded me that a few minutes earlier, when I'd said no, she'd answered with the same word.
I almost wanted to believe her.
The paper bag in Cheng Xiaoqing's hands suddenly stopped trembling.
She lifted her face.
The fear was still in her eyes, but the corners of her mouth slowly curved upward.
"So you were still hiding this much from me."
It was Lin Xu's voice.
Tears fell from Cheng Xiaoqing's eyes, but her lips continued moving against her will.
"It's okay."
She took one step forward.
Then another.
"Tell me everything you know that I don't."
She stopped one hand's breadth away from me, smiling as she looked at me.
"Starting with the bus's first stop."