Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“I wouldn’t touch them if I were you,” Boyang said.

“Why?” Ruyu said. “Will your mother notice?”

“Notice? There is nothing she doesn’t notice.”

“Will she mind?”

“No, she won’t. Rather, you might give her the wrong idea that I’m into her research now, and who knows, maybe the next time I see her, she’ll give me a whole folder of papers.”

“What kind of research does she do?” Ruyu said.

Boyang shrugged and said it was too complicated a subject to be interesting to anyone but his mother.

“Will you study chemistry when you go to college?” Ruyu asked.

“No,” he said. “Too boring.”

“What subject will you major in?”

“I don’t know. Something useful. Engineering. Or something with computer programming. What will you study?”

Ruyu did not answer, and turned to ask Moran what she was planning to study. Until recently, Moran had thought she would major in whatever Boyang chose. It had seemed sensible, as he knew these things better, but now it would sound ridiculous if she said engineering or computer programming. “Maybe chemistry,” she said. “I don’t mind boring subjects.”

Boyang laughed and said that statement alone would set his mother off. “But since when have you thought about studying chemistry?”

Moran shook her head confusedly, aware that Ruyu was watching her with an intensity she did not understand. She changed the subject and asked Boyang a few questions about his mother’s graduate students, but she could see that his heart was not in the topic. He was uncommonly quiet.

Their conversation lagged a little, though neither Boyang nor Ruyu seemed in a hurry to leave. The sun had set, and from the only window in the office they could see the slanted roof of the neighboring building, its terra-cotta tiles, once painted golden and green, all faded now. A crow croaked in a nearby tree, and immediately someone cursed loudly the bad luck a crow’s cry would bring.

Something about the evening — the dinner away from home, the closeness of the world that carried on its mundane business outside the window, their freedom unintruded upon — made Moran feel as though at long last she had arrived at the threshold of her real life, for which she had been rehearsing as a diligent child. Trust and loyalty, disappointment and resignation, happiness and sadness, friendship and love — in this new life, unlike in a rehearsal, everything was in place, and nothing would stop the play from moving toward curtain fall. Moran looked at her friends: confident, they appeared better prepared.

What if nothing could be changed, and she would always be given that minor role? What if there was nothing in her that made her lovable? But there must be something lovable in every one of us, or else why would we go from one day to the next? In her despondence, unknown to herself, Moran held out seeking hands to her friends: a smile, an affectionate gesture, a wordless affirmation — it does not take much to save one from despair, but they, untouched by the urgency devouring her, watched the dusk fall in their intimate obliviousness.

Moran wished she could be part of that quietness; her own, forced upon her, only made her heart ache for words. But if she spoke, she would be a thoughtless crow, disturbing a dream, gaining nothing but a silent curse.

Ruyu stood up and said she would be back in a moment, and Boyang nodded, saying that the ladies’ room was down the hallway. When she left, Moran turned to him, but he was still looking at the roof across the yard, and she knew that he had something on his mind. She wished she were the same person she used to be, the one who would not hesitate to ask him. There had never been secrets between them.

“Isn’t she a special person?” Boyang whispered, turning to Moran with a pleading look, as though by not mentioning Ruyu’s name, she would be kept a treasure.

Moran smiled and agreed.

“Do you really think so, too?” Boyang asked eagerly.

“We’ve never met someone like her,” Moran said.

Boyang looked happy. “I wonder what she would study at the university.”

“I think she wants to go to America.”

“I know. We can go, too.”

It both comforted and pained Moran that, like a sibling, she was still included in every plan he made. “And then what?” she said.

Boyang seemed not to detect any change in her mood. “We could rent a house together,” he said. “Imagine that, a real house, with a yard and an attic. I know you can do that in America.”

Innocently — yet with the cruelty that only the innocent can execute — Boyang had made Moran see herself as a chair in that house, a poster on the wall, a curtain half-pulled. They were good matches for each other, she thought, both handsome, smart, both special in ways that she herself would never be. She should count herself lucky to be invited into their lives in any manner, but when the time came, there would not be a place for her in that house. She had enough pride not to be a piece of furniture or a decoration in anyone else’s life, but it would not be her pride that separated her from them but the truth he was unable to see now: when the time came, she knew, he would have forgotten that he had ever issued the invitation.

Listless, Moran stood up and said she would be back in a minute. Again Boyang pointed the way to the ladies’ room down the hallway, yet this time he seemed to be doing so in a dream, his eyes looking for something outside in the dusk. The sky had turned from the bright colors of sunset to a deeper gradient of red, magenta, and blue. Love can make an ordinary evening poetic. Sadness, too, can do that.

When Moran exited the office, she saw Ruyu standing next to the fume hood, and when she heard Moran’s steps, she turned to face her, both hands in her pockets. Instinctively Moran glanced at the brown bottles in the hood. The light and the fume switches were on. “Have you two had a good talk?” Ruyu said, and turned the switches off. “I didn’t want to disturb you, in case you needed some private time.”

Flustered, Moran said that they had been waiting for her.

Later in the evening, Moran waited at the bus stop for Ruyu. Boyang had gone to his parents’ apartment, but before he left, he had said several times that Moran was to meet Ruyu’s bus so that the latter would not get lost on the way home. How could she? Moran wished she could ask; the bus stop was only a ten-minute walk from the quadrangle, and it wasn’t late enough for any real safety risk. But she had agreed, promising that she would make sure all went well.

Ruyu looked tired when she stepped down from the bus, yet when Moran asked her to hop onto the back of her bicycle, Ruyu only shook her head. “Go ahead and ride home,” she said. “I’ll walk.”

Moran said she was not in a hurry in any case. She pushed her bicycle and walked next to Ruyu, knowing that she must be a nuisance in Ruyu’s eyes. After a moment of silence, Moran asked Ruyu what she’d thought of the university.

“What do you think?” Ruyu said.

“Beautiful campus, isn’t it?” Moran asked. When Ruyu did not say anything, Moran added, “It’d be wonderful if we could all go there after high school.”

“Do you really think so?” Ruyu asked, and stopped to look sideways at Moran.

What she thought of anything was a question she could no longer answer with confidence. It dawned on her that when people asked for her opinions, they were not truly interested in hearing them. “Why did you want to see the lab?” Moran said.

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I thought you would be more interested in seeing the campus. I didn’t know you were interested in chemistry labs.”

“But we saw the campus, too.”