Winter Time Rendering

"Did you two know each other before?"

"No way." Before Gu Qiuyan could speak, Zhang Shutong immediately shook his head. "You’re overthinking it, Sir. How would I have ever met her?"

They were both kids from the "big city," but their lifestyles were completely different.

Even if they had gone to the same amusement park, it would have been him waiting in a long line outside the main gate while the girl leisurely walked through the VIP entrance. It wasn’t out of the question that she had an annual pass.

He recalled how Gu Qiuyan used to take her Pokémon off the island to have fun: a grand procession of taxis heading for the largest shopping plaza.

Then, she would step onto the polished marble floors, flanked by dazzling fashion boutiques. She’d lead the way while people followed behind, carrying shopping bags of all sizes. A trip to a KTV to book an enormous private room was inevitable... As for other forms of entertainment, Zhang Shutong’s imagination failed him; he couldn’t think of any more for the moment.

The reason he thought this was because he’d suddenly noticed that Gu Qiuyan rarely wore the same clothes twice, except for that one scarf. It was unlike him; he could make a single overcoat last a whole week.

That’s why he found it all rather dramatic. She was clearly a rich young lady who should have been living a carefree life, yet she was the one being targeted for revenge, the one whose life was in danger. He really didn’t know if that was a blessing or a curse.

"Why do I get the feeling you two have been acting strange from the very beginning?" Song wasn’t ready to give up.

"Then your feeling is wrong."

’I never realized Song was such a gossip,’ Zhang Shutong thought. He wanted to roll his eyes but held back, saving the eye-roll for Gu Qiuyan. ’The girl would surely say irritably, "Ugh, Sir, you’re so annoying..."’

But that didn’t happen. Gu Qiuyan seemed oblivious to their conversation, as if she had just surfaced from the long river of memory. She belatedly nodded and said softly:

"Right, we don’t know each other."

Then, without turning her head, she asked Zhang Shutong:

"I usually live on Luu Lane. Where’s your place?"

Zhang Shutong had never heard the name, yet it sounded vaguely familiar. ’It must be some famous, ultra-high-end residential community,’ he thought. ’In any case, given my family’s circumstances, it’s not a place I should have heard of.’ He gave the name of a neighborhood on par with something like "Cozy Homes," and just as he expected, Gu Qiuyan said she hadn’t heard of it either.

"Then it’s even more impossible," the girl said decisively.

Song’s curiosity was left unsatisfied. He muttered:

"That’s true. We’re not on the island, and the provincial capital is much bigger than that..."

But no one chimed in, and the car seemed to fall silent again in an instant.

Right now, Zhang Shutong just wanted to wait until Gu Qiuyan was safely home, hear what this "important matter" Song had mentioned about the girl was, and then go do what he needed to do.

At that moment, the Fox was about to turn onto a small road winding around a mountain. The path ahead was empty, with the mountain on one side and a lake on the other. This meant they had left the city center far behind. Having driven this far, Song Nanshan relaxed, turned on the radio again, and was even in the mood to fiddle with the stations.

A crackling sound came from the speakers, sometimes mixed with a woman’s muffled voice. The signal was probably bad. After fiddling with it for a while without finding a frequency, he just told Gu Qiuyan to find a CD in the armrest compartment.

With one eye on the road and the other on the armrest compartment, he gave directions. "That’s it. It’s called *Poetry of the Day After*, the cover has a big tree on it..."

The CD was loaded, and the sound of a strumming guitar filled the car. Song Nanshan didn’t forget to add:

"Listening to Mayday should be fine, right? Don’t all you kids like their songs..."

Zhang Shutong didn’t mind. Quietly listening to music was nice. The sky had already darkened, and a few drops of water had appeared on the front windshield at some point. As the car moved forward, more and more drops accumulated.

It was raining.

It had started without any warning.

For some reason, it made Zhang Shutong feel that coming along might have been the right decision.

The windshield wipers swept languidly. The yellow, candle-like headlights illuminated the road ahead, and only the sound of music filled his ears. The car’s interior grew dim. Perhaps the sudden light rain had washed away some kind of pretense, allowing Zhang Shutong to see that all three of them were lost in their own thoughts.

He looked out the window, realizing that Gu Qiuyan had to take this road every day. The scenery could only be described as average.

The car drove down the dim road.

The small car wasn’t in great condition. From a future perspective, it was an old car, outdated in every way. But even now, in 2012, it wasn’t exactly new. It had probably been a used car before Song got his hands on it. Every time they went over a pothole, the chassis would SQUEAK AND CREAK. Zhang Shutong was being jostled around quite a bit, something he’d never noticed before.

Only now did he notice that besides the chassis, the grayish-white cloth interior had yellowed, the headliner was torn in one spot, foam was poking out of the seats, and the soft-touch plastic on the dashboard was cracked. The little car had been with Song for so many years; it really had a rough life.

But Song Nanshan was just that kind of rough-around-the-edges guy.

He probably didn’t care about these things.

But for some reason, there was a Bulbasaur figurine on the dashboard. A metal spring connected to the Pokémon’s belly made it bobble every time they hit a rough patch of road. That figurine was probably the newest-looking thing in the car, well-protected as if he’d just bought it while out shopping yesterday, although it was a bit faded if you looked closely.

The little guy was "ugly-cute," with a big mouth and teal-colored skin. It was said to be the most steady and docile of the three starters. Zhang Shutong never used to know why Song kept it in his car. Maybe he drove too fast and was afraid of getting into an accident, keeping it in the car in an attempt to get a blessing from the great god Bulbasaur.

But now he had a new theory.

He asked if the frog was a gift from Song’s ex-girlfriend. The man nodded and said yes, then grinned and flicked the garlic-headed turtle.

"Actually, I bought it for her, as a decoration for her desk. But then she turned around and glued it to my car’s dashboard. This ugly thing... if it wasn’t stuck on so tight, I would’ve thrown it out long ago."

’Song is such a tsundere,’ Zhang Shutong thought. ’An old tsundere, at that.’

Who would have thought Song would suddenly add:

"But if I threw it out, I wouldn’t be able to buy another one. It’s a bootleg. I shouldn’t have been lazy and bought a knockoff back then. See? The turtle’s eyes are yellow."

Zhang Shutong took a closer look. A yellow-eyed Bulbasaur was indeed one of a kind.

He couldn’t smoke in the car, so he started rambling instead:

"It was at that amusement park I just told you about. There was a little stall, twenty yuan for one. You could get it for five yuan anywhere else. I had just started working not long before that, was dirt poor, but I figured, ’The world is vast, but romance is vaster!’ So I steeled my heart and bought it.

"Turns out, after I bought it, I found out her favorite was a yellow mouse. Or at the very least, a blue turtle would’ve been fine. She said that this frog was the ugliest one after it evolved. I looked it up online, and she was right. Tell me, are the people at the game company sick in the head or something? Why couldn’t they just draw a cute pet that all girls would like? Why did they have to make a frog so ugly? Did a frog do something to their whole family...?"

Just then, the radio switched to a new track. He suddenly stopped talking. He seemed to have been waiting for it for a long time, quieting down to listen intently. Zhang Shutong listened along for a few lines. The song’s name seemed to be *Like Smoke*.

The little car entered a curve, accompanied by the music. As the car turned, a minivan suddenly came barreling toward them from the opposite direction. It was going very fast, one of its wheels already over the center line. Zhang Shutong had been staring straight ahead, and before he could even shout a warning, Song Nanshan violently jerked the steering wheel, making the tires screech.

The two vehicles barely scraped past each other, but the Fox’s right side-view mirror had already scraped against the mountainside.

"...The hell’s wrong with your driving?"

Song wanted to curse, but with two students next to him, he forced himself to hold it back. He didn’t dare let his guard down now. Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, he slowed the car down a bit.

The car’s headlights cut through the slanting threads of rain, and amidst the silence of the rest of the drive, they finally illuminated the building ahead.