Alcohol and gas burn quietly when they catch fire.
Only wood makes that crackling, popping sound as it burns.
"Hello? Is there anything I can help you with?"
After a dozen or so seconds of silence on the other end of the line,
A bottle dropped. Something seemed to spill out, and the fire flared up.
"Hello! Is anyone there?"
The call had been picked up, which meant someone was standing near the phone.
"Could it be a fire?! Are you okay? Please tell me your location right now!"
Chen Ge tensed up and shouted.
The fire kept burning. Rising through the flames was another voice.
"Can I talk with you for a while?"
His voice was quite pleasant, just hoarse.
"Sure, I've got nothing going on right now." Chen Ge was worried the person would stay silent — as long as there was communication, he could gather useful information. "What would you like to talk about?"
It took a long time before he replied: "I don't know."
He spoke very slowly, as if he had been mulling things over the whole time.
Chen Ge picked up on the wrongness in his tone and didn't dare speak carelessly, worried he might set the other person off.
"Let's think about something happy?"
"There are plenty of happy things. Everyone else is happy. I know I should seem happy too, but I just can't feel it."
"Relax. Then how about we think about some beautiful memories?"
"Memories?" The man fell silent again, but the sound of the fire burning on the other end of the phone grew ever clearer. "When I was young, my parents fought all the time. About life."
From the very first sentence, Chen Ge knew something was off — this wasn't going to be any beautiful memory. He wanted to cut in, but the man on the other end showed no sign of stopping.
"My mother was very strict with me. She wanted me to become something great, and I was always a well-behaved kid — a bit shy, didn't talk much."
"In elementary school my grades were pretty decent, but in six years I only ever got one 'Three Good Student' certificate."
"In middle school, my English was terrible. My grades were average. In my third year, my mother hired an English tutor to work with me one-on-one. After school I still had to go to class — until nine-thirty at night. By the time I got home it was already ten."
"That teacher was really good. When I took the entrance exam, I scored over ninety in English. Even though I didn't do well in math and Chinese, which were supposed to be my strengths, my overall score still put me in the top ten of the class — I think it was around five hundred and sixty-something."
"That score would have gotten me into any high school in the city except the No. 1 High School."
"I never really understood why they have to slap a label on a kid at that age."
"The No. 1 High School was the best in the city. I was over twenty points short. If I wanted to go there, my family had to pay an extra eighteen thousand yuan in tuition."
"My parents' combined monthly salary was just over four thousand. To give me a better starting point, they scraped together that money and sent me to the No. 1 High School."
"Was I grateful?"
"I don't really know myself. Maybe it was the fear of letting them down. For those first three months I worked myself to the bone. I was terrified someone would find out — that people would know you didn't get in on your own merit, that you were the one who'd slipped in through the back door."
"In truth, nobody really cared that much. Maybe deep down I was a proud person. Or maybe I just didn't want to be different from everyone else."
"In the entrance placement test, my score was in the upper-middle range, which secretly thrilled me. I started working even harder."
"But by midterms, my grades had slipped to the lower end of the middle."
"I couldn't figure out why. Maybe my study methods were wrong. Maybe I just wasn't trying hard enough."
"Fine. I'd push through."
"When the final exam results came out, my ranking had dropped again — straight to the bottom of the class."
"A student who'd once been at the top had become a failing student. The label had changed, but psychologically there was still an adjustment period."
"When you start adjusting mentally too, you stop being a student who's struggling and become a full-on failing student."
"I was a strange case, I suppose. I was one of those failing students with too much pride."
"When we split into arts and sciences, I met someone I liked. It's hard to describe the feeling — just seeing her made me happy."
"She was the kind of student who excelled and worked incredibly hard. She always got to the classroom really early in the morning."
"The classroom key was kept by the class monitor. Every morning I'd get up absurdly early so I could get there before the monitor arrived, climb through the window, and unlock the door for her."
"There were lots of little things like that. When she went to the cafeteria for lunch, I'd stand in the hallway with my English textbook, memorizing vocabulary, waiting for her to come back — watching her walk from the cafeteria into the school building."
"Embarrassingly enough, after a whole semester of memorizing words, I scored just over thirty on my English final."
"My grades kept getting worse, steadily landing me in the bottom ten. By senior year, when everyone else was giving it everything they had for the final push, my main interests were reading and writing."
"I devoured all kinds of books — web novels, magazines, every sci-fi and mystery novel I could find, Chinese and foreign alike."
"The more I read, the more a world would form in my head — a world of my own making. That was also when I first created an author account online and started trying to write."
"With a little over a hundred days left before the college entrance exam, the regulars at the night market one by one got their act together, while I kept sneaking out past the security cameras to write."
"At the hundred-day rally, the school administrators were up on stage giving their big motivational speech. I looked up at him, but all I could think about was the books I loved, the authors I admired — I wanted to become like them. To build a world that many people would love."
"After the exam, those four words could be read two ways."
"One: the exam is over. Two: I'm done for."
"I only cleared the cutoff for a two-year college. Compared to the people who'd scored into top-tier universities and were still unhappy, planning to retake the year, I decided to seize my last chance and confess my feelings."
"As it turned out, nothing changed. I still couldn't bring myself to speak up, and I watched the girl I liked get together with the class monitor."
"I went and shaved my head bald. As the only student in the key class of the city's top high school heading to a two-year college, I figured I should at least carry myself with a certain composure."
"I wasn't planning to keep in touch with any of them. Maybe because the stronger someone's pride is, the less they want anyone's pity."
"Even a failing student should be one with a dream."
"After I started college, writing became everything. I was going to create a mythological epic that combined every element from ancient and modern, East and West."