She opens her eyes, gets up, dresses, brushes her teeth, wipes away the foam at the corner of her mouth with a towel. Above her, a section of the rose—colored wallpaper applied to the ceiling droops down. This is the fourth place where this has happened. They sit down together to have a lavish breakfast: soy milk, eggs, pan—fried baozi , porridge. Xiaoyi eats without speaking. Her mother pretends not to see as she turns to do the dishes. Xiaoyi walks past her mother and the money on the table and closes the door.
She can no longer hear the water. The school is on the other side of the city, and Xiaoyi has to transfer buses three times to get there. Being chauffeured around in a BMW is very comfortable. School was so boring anyway; it was like riding another bus. Since she had to ride the bus, as it were, what did it matter where she got on? They would never appear at the school, which makes school even more boring.
Xiaoyi sits in the last row, next to the window. All day long, she sits and broods. She has no friends. No one talks to her. No one sees her. The girls like to form cliques: those with bigger boobs in one clique, those with smaller boobs in another. Once in a while a busty girl might be friends with a flat—chested girl, but that never lasts. Xiaoyi is different from all of them. Many found this odd.
Then, the girls found out about them. So, wherever Xiaoyi went, there would be a sudden circle of silence. No one knows what to do with her. Bingbing sits down next to her and starts babbling. Once in a while, she pauses in her monologue and takes a drag from her cigarette. Is it true? Are they all really old and really rich?
Are they richer than my dad? How much do they pay you each time? Xiaoyi rests her chin on a palm and stares out the window. The lunch queue outside the cafeteria grows longer and longer, all the way to the wutong tree at the school gate. Just then a nondescript little car stops at the gate. The car door opens, but no one gets out. Xiaoyi stands up slowly and strides out of the classroom, her steps lightly echoing against the ground, her hair waving over her shoulder, as though a breeze is blowing in her face.
