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You have 9 unread messages.
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「 SUBJECT: RE: No subject FROM: Taiyang09 TO: Ryouxlin1 DATE: 2008-08-07 13:32
> Rui, dude, it's my life. I want to give that girl a chance. I'm not so cruel to fuck around with people's feelings when they've seriously put all their heart into it. I mean, yeah, it's true that I don't feel anything for her or stuff like that right now, but that's why people date. I might end up discovering I do like her.
」
「 SUBJECT: RE: No subject FROM: Taiyang09 TO: Ryouxlin1 DATE: 2008-08-07 13:57
> I'm serious about this. There's different kinds of people at school. Some work their asses off really hard but only get shit grades, while others barely study besides craming at exams and get a great score. Life isn't fair.
> Yang Wenlan is more like the 1st type, so I totally get it where she's coming from.
> It just isn’t fair for you to say that about her. You just don't get it. You haven't even met her.
> Not everyone is like you and Fenghua.
」
「 SUBJECT: RE: No subject FROM: Taiyang09 TO: Ryouxlin1 DATE: 2008-08-07 14:01
> I mean, I expected my folks to be against it, but seriously? Really? You too? I thought we were closer than that.
」
「 SUBJECT: RE: No subject FROM: Taiyang09 TO: Ryouxlin1 DATE: 2008-08-07 14:09
> You can't measure people against rulers. It fucking doesn't work that way, and I wish you'd open your eyes
> a little. The universe isn’t black and white. People aren't either with you or against you. I appreciate it that you're concerned that Wenlan might "screw me over", but that just isn't going to happen. Is it really that hard to have a little faith?
」
「 SUBJECT: RE: No subject FROM: Taiyang09 TO: Ryouxlin1 DATE: 2008-08-07 21:48
> Hello?
」
「 SUBJECT: RE: No subject FROM: Taiyang09 TO: Ryouxlin1 DATE: 2008-08-08 13:17
> Rui? Are you upset?
」
「 SUBJECT: RE: No subject FROM: Taiyang09 TO: Ryouxlin1 DATE: 2008-08-08 13:49
> If you have a problem, could you just say it up front? I hate this feeling like my messages are going into empty space.
」
「 SUBJECT: RE: No subject FROM: Taiyang09 TO: Ryouxlin1 DATE: 2008-08-08 23:03
> Never mind. I'm taking a break from QQ for a few days. I need to focus.
」
「 SUBJECT: RE: No subject FROM: Taiyang09 TO: Ryouxlin1 DATE: 2008-08-08 23:05
> If I don't respond, I'm really sorry.
」
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Lin Xiaorui stared at the screen for a few long minutes, biting her lips as the digital text slowly started to sink in.
Her hand on the mouse felt almost numb.
It was... a little painful to look at that conversation.
There was a stabbing, aching feeling in her chest, gnawing away at the outer layer of her heart. Surprisingly, it wasn't the content of Yangsun's words or even the fact that this was a conversation about the girl who would eventually become Yangsun's first ever significant other that caused the pain. No, Lin Xiaorui had come prepared for that. Her knowledge of the future had made it such that Xiaorui already knew how this exchange would ultimately end.
Rather, the pain she felt came mostly from re-reading the scathing words her past 16-year-old self had written.
Coming from nine years into the future... just from one glance... it was undisputable that Long Yangsun was far more mature than her past self had been. This was a somewhat bitter pill to swallow.
This prolonged dispute on QQ, objectively speaking, shouldn't have been a dispute in the first place.
From the beginning, it was nowhere within Lin Xiaorui's rights to say who Long Yangsun could and couldn't date.
If Xiaorui had actually been truly considerate of Yangsun's feelings, she should have supported and encouraged him, at the very least superficially. Of course, it might have been... difficult... since Xiaorui undeniably had conflicting feelings. However, the present 26-year-old Lin Xiaorui felt that it was just frankly wrong to exploit one's position as a close friend for such purposes.
It instinctively felt unethical. It was like soiling something that should have been sacrosanct with dirt.
It hurt badly to look at how immature her past self had been.
In all honesty, Lin Xiaorui had completely forgotten about how selfish she had been in the past. There's a peculiar tendency in human psychology for people to conveniently "forget" about things they do not like to remember. Memories distort with time. Narrators are unreliable. All people are prone to thinking the best of themselves, and everyone wishes to appear the most attractive to others, even when it comes to telling a simple story.
Xiaorui closed her eyes as took a deep breath.
It should have been plainly obvious, but until now, she had not really appreciated how the present her was in fact a very different person from her past self.
From now on, this was her own story, and it was up to her to chart her course into the future.
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So engrossed she was in the computer screen, Lin Xiaorui did not notice a subdued knock on the office door.
A 158cm tall black-haired girl with freckles slowly pushed open the heavy wooden door as she stepped in. She was carrying a faded dark canvas crossbody bag, which she held tightly against her person. She looked up briefly from her glasses and saw that Lin Xiaorui had not seen her. However, she did not immediately say anything to announce her presence, and instead wordlessly shut the door behind her.
The girl walked quietly to the back the of the room where there was a wide coffee table beside a sofa. She put down her bag softly and then turned around to face Lin Xiaorui. She was about to open her mouth to make a comment, but she stopped midway through. From this angle, the girl could clearly see the contents of the computer screen.
Her eyes remained emotionless for the few seconds they stayed fixated on the desktop screen.
About ten seconds passed before she looked away.
The expression in her eyes was inscrutable and impossible to read.
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"That looks like a mess."
A flat and completely neutral voice suddenly came from behind Lin Xiaorui, almost as if stating a fact.
Xiaorui immediately jumped and reflexively minimized the entire browser window. He spun around in his chair like lightening and immediately locked eyes with the most distasteful unwelcome intruder.
"Li Fenghua."
The words almost came out like a growl, and although it was a simple statement, it was seeping to the point of oversaturation with malignance.
The freckled girl with glasses seemed unfazed.
"Well, are you going to apologize to him?" She said.
"Why are you here?" Lin Xiaorui ignored the question and instead focused his fire into a nearly accusatory query.
Li Fenghua paused. "I still think you should apologize to him," she said.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
"I never said you could come in! Why didn't you knock first?"
"If you manage to separate Long Yangsun from that Wenlan girl by force, Yangsun will just end up hating you. You will have absolutely no chance with your unrequited love at that point."
"I'm not asking for your advice! Can you please leave me alone and let me have some privacy for once?!"
Fenghua closed her eyes for a long moment and turned around at that point. She walked back to the round coffee table and knelt down by her bag.
"You were still sick yesterday," her voice softened in volume. "I only came this morning because apparently I've been unofficially delegated to be your so-called 'official' caretaker."
She started rummaging through her bag.
"Have you taken your temperature yet today?" She asked.
Lin Xiaorui bristled in annoyance. "I'm feeling fine! I'm perfectly capable of managing myself. And you're just in high school! I don't need to be taken care of by you!"
"I'll take that as a no," Fenghua remarked and stood up, picking her bag up in her hands.
She walked over to the desk and placed an electronic thermometer on the table. The case made a clicking sound when it touched the surface of the wood. Fenghua then walked over to the entryway of the room, opened the door, slung the strap of her back over she shoulder, and turned her head back.
"I'll be back in twenty or twenty-five minutes. Please take your temperature in that time."
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After Li Fenghua left, Xiaorui maximized the internet browser again and immediately got back to work to working on her reply to Long Yangsun. Meanwhile, she stuck the thermometer under her tongue as she started typing away.
Around twenty minutes later, Lin Xiaorui finished composing a response that she was satisfied with, so she clicked on the send button.
Hopefully that would be enough to defuse the situation.
Xiaorui closed her eyes as she leaned back on the office chair. She thought back to Fenghua’s rude intrusion this morning.
She hated to admit it, but everything that Fenghua had said was not wrong. Of course, it hadn't changed anything that she already intended to write in the first place, but it was beginning to bother her that it seemed like everyone around her appeared to be well put together. Had Xiaorui really been such an immature teenager back in high school, compared to everyone else?
For some reason, Xiaorui didn't recall ever having that kind of self-assessment of herself.
All that Xiaorui could really remember of high school was mostly a gray fog. His classmates were faceless and the entire world itself seemed miserable. The snake, Li Fenghua, on the other hand was a stifling typhoon of hellish pitch-black misery the density of molasses. Everything was a gray fog except for the few rare moments that Long Yangsun was capable of making him smile and bringing color into him world.
Lin Xiaorui opened her eyes and returned to sitting forward in the office chair.
But what about now?
Was there anything fundamentally different about her present self? Was there some kind of greater purpose or reason why she had been sent back to the past in 2008?
Xiaorui brought the mouse cursor to opening another instance of Internet Explorer.
One obvious difference was the the present her was older, at age 25. This gave her more perspective and experience on issues that the past her had been hopelessly confused, lost, and paralyzed about. She was more mature, or at least, she hoped so.
Another obvious difference was that her penis had been replaced with a vagina.
However, frankly, as of yet, Lin Xiaorui wasn't sure exactly in what way this made a difference at all. It wasn't like her personality had magically changed overnight. Rather, Xiaorui was absolutely positive that she was still fundamentally the same person as before. In her mind, she still felt like the same man at heart that she had always been. Or wait no? The same woman like she had always been? A mixture of both? Neither? Was it even possible to attach a label to something like this?
Xiaorui glanced at the door and then at the clock, checking how much time she had left before she should start expecting the return of the poisonous snake.
Seeing that there was still some time, Xiaorui dedicated some search effort towards learning about vaginal discharge on the Internet. Even though she was feeling much better today, Xiaorui was meticulous enough to make sure her bases were covered. It would be bad if there was some kind of illness that Xiaorui didn't know about, and it was much safer to make the minimum basic effort on a Baidu search. Lin Xiaorui had the common sense for this at least.
All the meanwhile, Xiaorui kept the corner of her eye plastered to the door, ready at the instant's notice to exit out of the browser tab in case a "certain somebody" decided to show up.
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By the way, the Internet was barely helpful at all.
Lin Xiaorui quickly realized that there was a lot of inconsistencies between different web pages. Xiaorui checked at least 10 different sites on how to tell whether vaginal discharge was normal or not, and almost all of them said different things.
For example, the top search result for "yellow vaginal discharge" at a very prominent medical website said:
> "Yellow discharge may or may not indicate an infection."
Xiaorui had more or less stared at that blankly with her mouth agape.
How in the world was that supposed to be useful at all?!
Anyways, after spending a fair amount of time synthesizing data from various sources that said "yellow discharge is abnormal" (paraphrased) and "yellow discharge is totally normal don't worry" (paraphrased), the main conclusion that Xiaorui drew was that the female body is strange and there is a lot of variation between different women. Apparently, there was no need to be concerned about vaginal discharge if it was asymptomatic, there was no recent unprotected sex, and there wasn't too much of a change from baseline. Well, there was a significant variation within the menstrual cycle as well, but that only made things more complicated.
Honestly, out of all the things that could vary, one of few the takeaway points that all of the websites agreed on was that green discharge was always bad.
Yep. Green = bad.
Like brown and pink and yellow can be normal, white and gray can be abnormal, but green is always bad...
It was honestly a little bit of a headache, but Lin Xiaorui exited out of Internet Explorer at the end of her session feeling possibly a little bit more enlightened than before...
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When Lin Xiaorui looked at the clock again, forty minutes had already passed.
She furrowed her eyebrows slightly, a little surprised that Li Fenghua had not come back.
That poisonous snake was not that kind of person who was ever late to appointments. As a matter of fact, it was much more like Fenghua to always be precisely exactly on time. Even when she arrived 5 minutes early or came in running 30 minutes late, Lin Xiaorui had learned after many years of spending time in her company to know that even the imprecision was basically intentional. Xiaorui wasn't exactly sure how that girl managed it, but somehow it seemed to be a passive ability that was part of the poisonous snake's skill set.
Well, it wasn't like Lin Xiaorui minded.
If anything, if she wasn't coming back, that was even better.
Xiaorui stood from the computer and logged off nonetheless. She had promised her mom earlier that she would relinquish the computer when she was done, so Xiaorui intended to fulfill that promise.
Lin Xiaorui walked out of the office and started walking around the apartment looking for her mother.
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While walking by the living room, Xiaorui happened upon the very unusual sight of a certain black-haired freckled girl curled up on the couch, a medical textbook half open in her lap, fast asleep as soundly as an opossum.
Amusingly, her mouth was slightly agape and there was drool hanging from her cheeks.
Lin Xiaorui snorted at the unsightly scene and immediately walked into the guest bedroom where the Lin family kept spare blankets.
The air conditioning had been turned on (likely the doing of Xiaorui's mother), and it was pure common sense among Chinese people that sleeping without a blanket with air conditioning at full blast was a perfect recipe for a summer cold.
It was thus more or less instinctive for Xiaorui to go hunting for blankets.
After fetching a small quilt from the closet, Xiaorui draped it across Li Fenghua's shoulders and moved the medical textbook on her lap to an adjacent table.
Then, Lin Xiaorui continued on her way to the kitchen without the second thought crossing her mind.
Now where had her mother gone?
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Author's Notes:
1. Eh? That's weird? No notes? Did I do something wrong???