Not Really Understanding

Xu Zhitong thought it over in silence.

Viewed from this angle, everything made sense again.

Why there were no chat records between her and Lin Yang.

Why there were, instead, a few awkward chat records with Lin Yang’s alternate account, as if they were just polite strangers.

Why Lin Yang’s reaction to seeing her injured and amnesiac had been a little strange, nowhere near as anxious or worried as Xu Zhitong had expected.

Why Lin Yang didn’t sleep in the master bedroom or the second bedroom, even though it was obvious there was a room for her at home.

And so on, and so on.

So they’d been fighting.

Xu Zhitong had seen her mother and Mami in a cold war before. Not to mention moving out and not speaking at all; at the time, her mother had even gone on a business trip out of town for three months.

Xu Zhitong had cried then and asked Mommy if she was going to lose her mother.

There were still some things she didn’t quite understand, but Xu Zhitong felt these strange, unexplainable details were probably caused by her missing memories.

With those thoughts in mind, she followed Lin Yang around the supermarket, bought some side dishes and picked out a few snacks, then went home to cook.

Back when they were students, Lin Yang really had been a proper young lady who never lifted a finger.

Let alone cooking for herself, she hadn’t even tried street food—fried skewers, hot braised snacks, sticky rice balls...

Not until high school, when Xu Zhitong dragged her to try it for the first time.

Xu Zhitong still remembered how adorably Lin Yang had reacted then. After one bite of stinky tofu, she’d frowned, stuck out the tip of her tongue, and hissed softly, “It’s a little too spicy... but it doesn’t taste as weird as it smells.”

Later, Xu Zhitong had brought Lin Yang to her place for a meal. In the kitchen, she’d shown off her cooking skills to the fullest while Lin Yang stood at the doorway, watching with curiosity and even trying to help.

Xu Zhitong had forbidden her from coming anywhere near the kitchen.

Sixteen-year-old Xu Zhitong had practically had her tail in the air as she declared that she was cooking for Lin Yang’s birthday, and that every single grain of rice Lin Yang ate had to be made by her.

Now the roles had reversed. Lin Yang was the one busy in the kitchen, while Xu Zhitong leaned against the island counter, her gaze following every move.

Lin Yang moved with practiced ease, blotting the blood from the beef with paper towels.

Back then, Lin Yang used to wrinkle her nose at raw meat.

Xu Zhitong couldn’t help asking, “Do you cook a lot when you’re abroad?”

Lin Yang said, “Not really. Just occasionally. Most of the time I still eat at restaurants or order takeout.”

Xu Zhitong blinked, then asked, “Then when you eat out, do you go alone? Or with classmates?”

“...”

Lin Yang glanced at Xu Zhitong and, knowing what she really wanted to ask, answered indulgently, “I didn’t have any really close friends. Most of the time, I ate alone.”

Xu Zhitong immediately felt a little relieved. As expected, over all these years, only she and Lin Yang had been each other’s closest people.

Leaning against the island with her hands in her pockets, she thought it over and then asked with a hint of worry, “But you spent six years abroad all by yourself, with no close friends, and you were separated from me by the ocean and the time difference. Weren’t you lonely?”

“...”

Lin Yang’s hand, which had been sprinkling salt, paused. She turned to look at Xu Zhitong.

Xu Zhitong was looking straight at her too, her bright eyes full of open concern.

Lin Yang went slightly dazed.

Her thoughts almost drifted very far away; it took a long moment before she smiled and said, “It was okay.”

“Hm?”

“I did sometimes have people I got along with; we’d eat together once in a while.”

“Huh?!”

Xu Zhitong’s eyes widened. She immediately panicked and asked directly, “Who was it? Do I know them?”

A moment ago she’d been all tenderness; the instant she heard Lin Yang really had a new friend, she turned into someone who looked ready to die on the spot if it were true.

Seeing her like that, Lin Yang couldn’t help smiling. Her lips curved faintly. “Also from Jiangshi. A senior sister; she was in the same year as me. She’s very nice and helped me a lot at school.”

And she was even praising her!

Xu Zhitong was practically about to leap up in outrage, angry to death, yet also aware she didn’t have much ground to stand on. Her eyes were wide open as she stared at Lin Yang with obvious dissatisfaction.

Everything she felt was written all over her face.

Lin Yang had had enough fun. She said softly, “I’m joking. We weren’t that close.”

Xu Zhitong could tell there was some teasing in it, but she still wouldn’t let it go.

“Let me see what she looks like. Do you have any photos together?” She leaned over, reaching as if to fish Lin Yang’s phone out of her hand.

Lin Yang sidestepped half a step, her tone softening as she begged for mercy. “No. We just occasionally ate together. She was just a meal buddy; why would we take photos?”

Xu Zhitong was puzzled. “What does meal buddy mean?”

Lin Yang said, “Someone you team up with to eat.”

Xu Zhitong was half skeptical, half convinced. Another new term she didn’t know. She murmured, “But we don’t really seem to have any photos together either.”

Lin Yang: “...”

Another loophole.

It wasn’t hard to explain. She could just coax Xu Zhitong a little, say that she didn’t really like taking photos with other people nowadays, and Xu Zhitong definitely wouldn’t dig any deeper.

Xu Zhitong had a kind of almost sharp intuition, but she wasn’t hard to deal with.

Or maybe she should just reveal even more flaws.

Let Xu Zhitong slowly puzzle it out, slowly realize that they had long since lost whatever relationship they once had; that the woman in front of her was a liar.

Thinking about the heartache of being judged like that, Lin Yang’s hand trembled slightly as she set the marinated steak aside.

Xu Zhitong really didn’t press the matter. She said, “She’s in Jiangshi, right? Bring me along to eat with her next time.”

“Okay.”

“And these next few days, you have to cook for me. Make everything you know how to make.”

“Okay.”

Xu Zhitong hadn’t expected her “excessive demands” to be met so easily; she was instantly delighted. “Yangbao, you’re so good to me.”

“You’ve said that eight hundred times,” Lin Yang said flatly.

Xu Zhitong thought Lin Yang was getting annoyed by her questions and became very obedient. “I won’t let you do it all the time. We’ll take turns. I want to cook for you too.”

“Why?”

Lin Yang turned back to wash her hands, thinking Xu Zhitong might simply be feeling insecure again and want to do something for her, to confirm her existence in this world.

As water ran over the back of her hand, someone suddenly touched her waist without restraint.

Through the knit fabric, the fingers landed right in the sensitive hollow of her waist; the touch was there and gone in an instant.

Lin Yang’s body had always been sensitive, and after years without any intimate contact, her hand jerked. She shut off the tap and turned around in surprise to look at Xu Zhitong.

Xu Zhitong, meanwhile, let out a sigh, looking rather troubled.

“You’re so thin now, Yangbao. How did I not fatten you up a little?”

Lin Yang didn’t know why Xu Zhitong thought it was her responsibility to fatten her up.

Xu Zhitong gestured at herself. “I’ve gotten so much thinner too. Is this what’s in style now?”

Lin Yang: “...As people grow up, their digestion gets worse, so they naturally get a little thinner.”

“And when we cook for ourselves, it’s not like back when we were in school. Auntie made us all kinds of nutritious meals every day, worried we wouldn’t get enough nutrition to keep up with studying, right?”

That explanation sounded so scientific that Xu Zhitong, with only a second-year-high-school level of knowledge, believed it.

She said, “Oh, right. I’m an adult now.”

Seeing her like that, Lin Yang almost wanted to say that adults were supposed to keep a proper distance from each other; they couldn’t keep being this physically close.

Let alone touching waists, even holding hands in public already looked like a couple to outsiders.

Otherwise, why would the supermarket clerk have assumed they were together?

Xu Zhitong had just lost her memory, so she was probably still a little slow to catch on. Maybe psychologically, she was still a child without any real concept of romance, so she hadn’t reacted at all to what the clerk had said.

The words reached her lips, but for some reason, she swallowed them back down.

-

Xu Zhitong praised the steak Lin Yang had pan-fried to the heavens and back.

After finishing, she obediently went to wash the plates on her own.

Lin Yang stayed in the living room, putting away the snacks they had bought into the snack cart, one by one.

After the supermarket bags were emptied, Xu Zhitong’s phone was left beside them.

The screen lit up; a message had come in.

Lin Yang thought for a moment, then picked it up and unlocked it.

She didn’t know when Xu Zhitong had turned on Do Not Disturb.

More than 99 WeChat messages, along with a number of texts and missed calls, had all been left unread.

Lin Yang sighed helplessly and checked the calls and texts for her. One of the texts was from Xu Zhitong’s mother, asking how she was doing.

Then she opened WeChat.

When she’d previously used Xu Zhitong’s phone to request leave for her, she’d been in a hurry and only glanced briefly.

Now that she was reading it carefully, she found that most of the messages were from fans, and several moderators in the group were talking about fan activity and passing along everyone’s concern.

They had @Xu Zhitong, asking BlueBlue when she would be going live again. The fans wanted a more definite answer.

That was because conspiracy theories had started circulating, saying that SleepyBlue had actually been involved in some accident and that the person who’d sent the leave notice wasn’t really her.

Some even claimed that SleepyBlue had gone offline to meet a big donor in person, only to get anti-fanned and end up seriously injured in the hospital... there were all kinds of rumors.

In WeChat, there were also major supporters asking Xu Zhitong what was really going on with BlueBlue, saying there had been no news at all and it was terrifying.

There were also some streamers she’d crossed paths with before, asking out of courtesy or for other reasons why she hadn’t been streaming lately and whether she was feeling all right.

Lin Yang knew Xu Zhitong’s account had a lot of traffic, and that she’d always been very attractive to people.

She had already built up resistance to this over the years of watching Xu Zhitong stream.

She skipped past those messages and saw that Fish Dudu’s inbox also had more than ten unread messages.

The latest one read: [Are you really okay? Don’t ignore me; I’m very worried about you.]

Unlike the tone of the other streamers and major supporters, this person was obviously much closer to the Xu Zhitong who existed before her memory loss.

Lin Yang stared at the unread message for a long time, privately guessing at their relationship. The thought made her not want to think further, so she backed out and opened the app for the supermarket downstairs.

She scrolled through the orders and, as expected, Xu Zhitong had only ever placed delivery orders from the supermarket; there were very few electronic receipts from in-person shopping.

No wonder...

No wonder she never ran into Xu Zhitong at the supermarket.

In truth, Lin Yang didn’t really like crowded places; naturally, she didn’t much like grocery shopping either.

But she knew Xu Zhitong liked wandering around supermarkets and shops, liked buying all sorts of everyday things and little novelty items.

So ever since Lin Yang had returned to the country, even though she didn’t really live in this neighborhood, she often came here with her property card just to walk around the supermarket.

She carried a heart full of unverifiable hope for an “accidental” meeting.

To the point that even the sales clerks had become familiar with her.

Lin Yang had always thought she’d just been a little unlucky, which was why she’d never run into Xu Zhitong at the supermarket.

It turned out Xu Zhitong’s spending habits had changed; she no longer went to the supermarket in person.

Lin Yang thought: so I don’t really understand her all that well either.

Author’s Note:

Tongzi: Babe, you’re your own person. Babe, if you’re lonely while studying abroad, I’ll feel bad for you. Babe, have fun eating with the senior sister.

Tongzi: Babe, I’ll die right in front of you