Gu Linzhi · Chat

The September sunlight slanted into the classroom of Class 3, Grade 11, exposing every speck of dust floating before the podium. You stood there, your knuckles faintly white where you gripped your backpack straps, silently running through the introduction you had long since prepared—really just a few sentences: your name, where you came from, please take care of me—but when the words finally rolled out of your throat, they came out dry and rough, like someone else's voice. Forty-three pairs of eyes looked at you from the seats below, quiet and orderly, like row upon row of closed books. No one clapped. No one whispered. No one even let their gaze linger one extra second. The girl in the front row lowered her head and turned a page of her textbook; the boy by the window yawned; by the back door, someone tapped the desk with the tip of a pen, once and again, the sound cutting through the silence with unnatural clarity, pressing tight against your eardrums. Then, applause rang out. The sound came from the back of the classroom—unhurried, one clap, then another, bouncing alone off the white walls on every side before echoing back into your ears. You followed it to its source and saw a boy leaning back in his chair. It was none other than Gu Linzhi. One arm rested on the edge of the empty desk beside him, and a faint, barely-there curve hung at the corner of his mouth. His gaze settled steadily on your face. It wasn't a gentle look—more like he was appraising something freshly unsealed whose use was not yet known: amused, intrigued, with a faint, covert appraisal. The teacher seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, smiled gratefully in that direction, then turned to you and said, “Then go sit next to him.” Clutching your backpack, you walked over. As you passed between the rows of desks, you could feel the gazes on both sides pricking your back like fine, tight stitches—light, quick, withdrawn the instant they touched. You sat down in the empty seat beside him. He pulled his arm back without a word. You lowered your eyes and saw a line of small characters carved into the desktop with the point of a compass, worn and blurred, no longer legible. In the days that followed, you slowly came to understand that the way that applause had rung out on your first day might be something to guard against even more than silence. No one ever spoke to you first, and that alone wasn't the worst of it—the real isolation was that no one ever told you anything that concerned you. When teams were split for P.E., you stood in the middle of the court and waited until the very end, only to be carelessly shoved into the team with the fewest people by the teacher. When the card reader in the cafeteria broke down, you queued all the way to the window before realizing it, with a dozen or so people behind you and not one of them bothering to warn you. The worst was when the Chinese class representative came around collecting homework and walked straight past your seat without a sideways glance—you had no idea, until the teacher called your name and sent you to stand at the back of the classroom. “No homework handed in, so stand and listen.” You stood up, the chair legs scraping a harsh screech across the floor. The whole class's gaze snapped to you in unison, then snapped away just as quickly, as if scalded. You walked to the back of the room and leaned against the cold wall. The smell of chalk dust mingled with the osmanthus fragrance drifting in from outside the window—cloyingly sweet, with a sharp, choking astringency. When your legs had grown sore from standing, you glimpsed a figure out of the corner of your eye. He tilted his head slightly, his gaze passing over the shoulder of the classmate sitting diagonally ahead of him, and let his eyes drift over you for a moment, feather-light. That look was exactly the same as on the first day—amused, quiet, as if waiting for something. You lowered your head, staring at the bit of dust smudged on the toe of your shoe, wondering what he was really looking at.