Chapter 5: Indifference

Qiao Lan So it's possible to get it all right!

Qiao Lan did not do well in English and almost all of her homework was copied and not written, such as memorising texts and words.

This morning Qiao Lan even asked her to dictate the words in her unit and she clearly didn't even know where she had learned them.

But now, she actually got it all right!

Not only did she write all the words in this unit correctly, but Qiao Lan also got all the words in the previous units right, even the ones she got wrong.

So Qiao Lan actually knew which unit she was going to dictate and had memorized the words, so she asked her as if she hadn't!

When I think of the thoughts I had in my mind when I deliberately ignored Qiao Lan in the morning, this moment, apart from the pain in my face, I also resent Qiao Lan for deliberately pretending to make her look bad.

Mr. Liu was very pleased with Qiao Lan's sudden change of attitude and complimented him for a while, but when he turned his head and saw Qin Yang staring at Qiao Lan with a blank expression on her face, Mr. Liu was immediately angry again.

"What are you looking at? Look at what they've written, look at what you've written. 14 out of 23 words are wrong, even a pig is smarter than you. All of you, except Qiao Lan, write the wrong words a hundred times and bring them to me for inspection!"

The table's face got even darker.

She was already a good writer, but because of Qiao Lan, she was also the one who was punished. When she returned to her seat with a black face, she was probably furious and thought Qiao Lan was still the same old Qiao Lan, so she asked Qiao Lan without thinking, "Didn't you memorise it?"

Qiao Lan leisurely turns a page in the book.

What did you say? It was too windy for me to hear.

Shit! Qiao Lan is pretending not to hear her?

The table was shocked and the table was blue with anger.

It's just a compliment from Mr. Liu, and you're really going to be in heaven? Song Yao has already made up her mind to reject Qiao Lan, and now she's pissed her off, so let's wait and see who regrets it later!

After the study session, the students at the same table ran to some of their classmates who usually play well together, talking about something and looking at Qiao Lan while talking.

Qiao Lan's tablemate said that Qiao Lan had deliberately asked her about the words she had memorized, saying that she had a deep heart.

"What are you pretending for? Who doesn't know what she's like", they said, getting more and more excited, "only Song Yao is kind-hearted enough to feel sorry for her."

"Yes, yes, Song Yao is so kind to her, she doesn't thank Song Yao at all, but she likes Chen Yaoyang, how can she do that?"

"She still likes Chen Yaoyang, who cares about her? If I were Song Yao, I'd be disgusted by her."

The boy sitting next to him in silence had even less of a clue what to think.

Chen Yaoyang's grades were top of the class and he was so handsome that 80 to 90 percent of the girls in his class liked him. The girls who scolded Qiao Lan even said the other day that Chen Yaoyang liked him here and there.

You all love Chen Yaoyang, so why aren't you all disgusted?

However, I didn't dare to say anything because I was an introvert, but I thought I'd better change seats with my current tablemate when I had the chance, so I'd rather not deal with people who chew behind my back.

Qiao Lan's classmates took advantage of the classroom to pull a bunch of Avengers, making Qiao Lan's ostracism even worse. Qiao Lan didn't react to this, she went to the bathroom and came back to Tan Mo who had just slowly entered the classroom in her wheelchair.

Tan Mo, his school uniform clean again, fresh gauze wrapped around his hands, his head bowed as usual, silent and lifeless.

Qiao Lan thought about it and walked up at a faster pace.

She remembers that Asperger syndrome is different from autism in that autism is a rejection of alienation whereas Asperger syndrome is actually a desire for friendship, but social misunderstandings always lead to misunderstandings.

The crowds of people coming and going around him make Tan Mo uncontrollably nervous, his muscles become stiff and his emotions become very restless.

Once when he was still living with his mother in the United States, she took him to see a psychologist who, after getting to know him a bit, said to his mother, "The pressure your child feels inside when faced with a crowd is incremental in proportion to the number of people in the room."

He was only about ten years old at the time, but already fully understood the meaning of incremental, and he quickly worked out in his head, using mathematical formulas and geometric figures, what the doctor meant: two people interacting with one connection, three with three, four with six, five with ten...

And at this point there were too many connections around to even count, and no one could see what intense tension and anxiety he was facing inside beneath his silent, dead face.

In such a situation, Tan Mo subconsciously thinks that he has misheard someone who calls his name.

It was not until the voice shouted once more that Tan Mo's superior hearing identified the direction of the voice's origin at the first opportunity.

He looked up and saw the girl who had said sorry to her yesterday and pushed his wheelchair, standing nearly 1.5 metres from him and smiling at her.

"Good morning," the girl said.

Tan Mo's thin white fingers gripped the wheelchair tightly, his amber eyes fixed on Qiao Lan, his facial muscles as if they were necrotic, his whole face without a trace of expression.

He could tell that it was a simple greeting, and unlike when he was very young and couldn't tell if someone was crying or laughing, he could now be sure that the girl in front of him was smiling at him.

But that's all.

There are many kinds of smiles, smiles, smiles, smiles, smiles, smiles, smiles, smiles, smiles, smiles, smiles and so on.

Tan Mo had looked up the meaning of each word in the dictionary, but the Asperger syndrome still eluded him. It took him a long time to simply distinguish between smiling and laughing, and to mentally remember the facial expressions of people when they smile and laugh.

His mother told him to smile when she took his picture and told him that a smile was a slight grin, with the corners of his lips slightly up and even a little bit of his teeth showing, and that a big smile was because someone once laughed out loud and brought tears to his eyes.

The girl in front of him was smiling at him.

But remembering the expression behind the smile, Tan Mo ducked his head again, like a machine that had received the wrong instructions, and after a brief moment of discernment returned to his old silence.

He remembered how, at the age of seven, the neighbourhood boy had talked to him in a very friendly manner, with such a smile on his face, but the next moment the boy had pushed him so hard that he hit the hard concrete floor, and as the blood slid down his cheek, all he could hear was the sound of his mother shouting his name in the distance, and the boy's unconcealed harrumphing.

He also remembered that when he was ten years old, he was approached by his classmates who had often teased him about being a fool, and they told him that they were ashamed of the pranks they had played on him in the past and asked him if he would accept their apology. He forgave them and they gave him a bottle of soda which he opened only to have a mad hornet fly out of it.

Such teasing and bullying never ceased and the rest of the children usually took pleasure in it.

They called him a fool because he fell for it again and again, but he couldn't help it. He could not distinguish between malice and goodness, between good people and bad people, between help and trickery, because all trickery begins with "good help".

In time, whether good or bad, he attributed them all to malice, and he stopped trusting anyone but his mother so that there would be no more being chased and no more pain of being hurt again every time he believed.

So, with his head still bowed, he passed Qiao Lan in silence, giving her no reaction.

No one will like him or treat him kindly.

He was born mentally insane, an abandoned wreck.

And the residuals.

Destined not to be accepted by anyone.