Drifting on a String - Chapter 26
Chapter 26
Chen Piaopiao felt like she was dreaming again.
Or like she'd been shouted awake from a dream, her scalp tingling.
Her heart suddenly clenched, drained of all its blood, with only the faintest strength left to beat.
She knew...? How could she know? How was it possible? She had never told anyone about this account. Had some connection leaked it? Friend recommendations? Her contact list?
Chen Piaopiao's expression was numb, but her mind was racing. For the first time, she viscerally understood what it meant for one's head to be buzzing.
Seeing her face turn pale, Tao Jin reached out and took her hand, gently rubbing her fingertips. Then she took the phone, leaned over to find an alcohol wipe in a drawer, and meticulously cleaned the grease from the screen.
The comments on the screen were a chaotic mess. After wiping it clean, she glanced at it and smiled. She scrolled down a couple of times, waiting for the flushed Chen Piaopiao to come to her senses before calmly handing the phone back. Then, she turned to the side and took out her own phone.
No... way... Chen Piaopiao sat there woodenly, raising a wooden eyebrow.
This wasn't going to be some cliché drama plot like, "The senior I slept with is the rival I fought with on the forums," was it?
She watched Tao Jin with a mixture of suspicion and apprehension. Tao Jin looked down and opened QQ, and a familiar group chat icon appeared.
The members in the chat interface were also familiar. Just a few hours ago, they had been checking in, saying "Good morning."
Chen Piaopiao felt like her scalp was about to explode.
She looked at Tao Jin, then at the group chat, then back at Tao Jin.
The Lesbian Chat Group? The one Gaogao created? The group where she spent all day making small talk and playing the part of an enthusiastic junior???
Question marks bombarded Chen Piaopiao one after another, making her dizzy. She tentatively reached out a hand but didn't dare take Tao Jin's phone. Instead, she ducked her head, pulled out her own, and opened the group chat.
Her own phone gave her a greater sense of security.
At the same time, she let down the hair she had tucked behind her ear to cover her flushed neck.
Cold sweat still washed over her in waves. She couldn't help but try to recall everything she had said in the group. Then, with a trembling heart and her thoughts in a tangled mess, she began to scroll through the member list.
"This one is me," Tao Jin said, pointing to a name on the list.
Huh?
The corners of Chen Piaopiao's mouth froze.
It was a side account with a penguin avatar, and the nickname was "T."
When she first joined the group, "T" had greeted her and they'd exchanged a few words, but she'd thought the nickname screamed "stone butch"—a confident one, at that—and hadn't wanted to interact with her.
It turned out it wasn't just the letter T, but the "T" from "Tao Jin."
...
Chen Piaopiao reached up to scratch her hairline, suspecting she was still drunk. She blinked hard, staring at Tao Jin in a daze.
She remembered now. That "T" had immediately said, "Hello, junior." Paired with the avatar, she'd thought it was so old-fashioned, like some stone butch who had graduated years ago, couldn't find a girlfriend, and was still lingering in a campus group chat trying to hit on the younger girls.
No, wait. Chen Piaopiao was starting to lose it. She looked at Tao Jin, her delicate brows furrowed and her eyes moist.
Why? Why was she... Why was she in the group? Why...
The words were jumbled in her throat, tangled into a knot, and she couldn't speak.
What kind of legendary figure, what kind of unattainable campus goddess, uses a side account to join a lesbian chat group?
Chen Piaopiao's mouth hung open, her gaze growing even more numb.
She looked absolutely adorable like this. Tao Jin's eyes curved into a smile as she patted her head. "I was always there."
Tao Jin's face was also a little flushed, because she wanted to kiss Chen Piaopiao again.
She had always been there. Ever since she realized she was gay, she had seen this group on the forum. She was curious and had originally joined to see what everyone talked about, but she later found it was no different from any other group chat—they gossiped, talked about current events, and made plans to eat together.
So she became a lurker. And then, she met Chen Piaopiao.
It was summer break, and no one had joined the group for a long time. Suddenly, a girl with a rabbit avatar popped in. Everyone was probably out having fun, so for a while after she joined, no one said anything.
Tao Jin had always been the one to take care of everyone's feelings, so she put down her bowl and chopsticks and welcomed her: "Hello."
Then she asked why she was joining during the summer break, since they usually didn't check the school forums much during the holidays.
Wondering if she'd joined by mistake, Tao Jin casually clicked on her QQ profile. At the time, Chen Piaopiao's QQ Space was public. At a glance, she saw a pale, delicate-looking girl who seemed to be at a high school graduation party. She was sitting on a KTV sofa, tilting her head back with a faint smile, but her eyes weren't smiling.
The photo was taken with a flash and the angle wasn't great, but she had posted it with an air of indifference.
The caption read: It's over. Bye-bye.
Switching back to the chat, the rabbit girl enthusiastically introduced herself, saying she'd been accepted to An University and was an incoming freshman, hoping the seniors would look after her.
She was a smooth talker. As people in the group gradually became active, Chen Piaopiao became even sweeter. Tao Jin accomplished her mission and retreated, saying no more, but she couldn't shake the feeling that her online persona and the indifferent face in the photo didn't belong to the same person.
Intuitively, Tao Jin felt that the person in the photo was unhappy.
She clicked on her Space again, only to find it had been locked.
Chen Piaopiao probably wanted to lock away her past, starting from that moment.
Throughout the summer, she watched her blend in with the girls in the group, but Tao Jin didn't pay too much attention. Then, one afternoon a week before school started, Chen Piaopiao shared a screenshot of some celebrity gossip in the group, saying: "Hahahahahaha, I can't be the only one laughing."
Tao Jin had always enjoyed memes, and she was free that day, so she casually clicked on it. But the first thing she saw wasn't the joke, but Chen Piaopiao's forum username in the top-right corner.
She was logged in and had accidentally included it in the screenshot.
It was "Eat Rabbit Keep Skin."
Two seconds later, the screenshot disappeared. Chen Piaopiao had retracted it.
No one else saw it. Except for Tao Jin.
Except for Tao Jin, who had always been meticulous and possessed an astonishing memory.
The ID was very interesting and piqued Tao Jin's curiosity. So she logged into the forum, searched for the ID, and saw Chen Piaopiao's post history.
It was... shocking.
She frowned as she watched the sweet, naive junior from the group chat hold court on the forums, making scathing comments. Her daily hobby was picking fights with creeps, her words sharp and witty, dropping one meme after another, leaving her opponents speechless.
Moreover, she had a lot of free time, posting up to six threads a day. When she was in the mood, she would stay on the forum until three or four in the morning.
Was this really her? Tao Jin was highly skeptical.
Tao Jin began to observe this junior, who had three different personas.
The little warrior on the forums was earnest and cute. If she argued with the wrong person, she would apologize and post a kneeling emoji. Once, when there was an issue with a TV show's set design, she spent two days studying the history of antique folding screens, then posted a thread citing historical sources, essentially writing a short thesis.
But the person she had been arguing with, who claimed the set was fine, had long since moved on. She was quite unhappy about it, asking, "Why didn't you wait for me?"
Tao Jin laughed out loud. No wonder. Someone who loved gossip this much could still get into An University.
She navigated the entertainment world with the spirit of a scholar.
During freshman registration, Tao Jin saw Chen Piaopiao in person for the first time at the welcome party. She was tiny and as white as an untainted gardenia flower, huddled in an oversized T-shirt and short skirt, blatantly looking down at her phone. Tao Jin went over to speak with her counselor and glanced at her phone. So that was how she held her phone. She wondered if she was on the forum or in the group chat.
A week later was the club recruitment drive.
Tao Jin was originally in her dorm. Tired from doing homework, she massaged her sore neck and picked up her phone.
The group chat was buzzing with messages as everyone discussed which clubs to sign up for. Chen Piaopiao said she was in line for the Musical Theater Club and was about to pass out.
A group member asked curiously why she wanted to join the Musical Theater Club.
She said: "I like Senior Tao Jin (*^_^*)"
The group members started teasing, "So that's your type, Rabbit?"
Someone else joked, "Rabbit, I suggest you back down before you get hurt."
Chen Piaopiao didn't reply. Tao Jin thought for a moment. Her homework was mostly done. She locked her phone and headed for the lecture hall where the interviews were being held.
And then? She watched her waiting in line, sweaty, her hair bunched up at her neck as if she didn't know how to tie it up at all. She watched her bump into her, her eyes not panicked but sparkling, like they held a tiny hook. She watched her pretend not to know her, and then watched her perform with poise and grace.
Tao Jin hadn't been wrong. Chen Piaopiao was a natural performer, because she had a face that could hold layers of stories, and features that could be adjusted into various expressions.
She was like a vessel. From the very beginning, she was highly adaptable. And not just in bed.
Tao Jin's observation of Chen Piaopiao was constant, so she could capture every detail about her.
Under Tao Jin's gaze, she grew fox ears, which would sometimes twitch cheerfully and at other times droop in despair.
But her core was stubborn, just as she was on the forums. Even if it meant studying archaeology for two days, she had to get to the bottom of an issue.
Tao Jin could feel that she herself seemed to be one of the "issues" Chen Piaopiao wanted to figure out—or rather, to "conquer."
It wasn't the first time she had been the target of someone's "conquest," but it was the first time she found it so intriguing.
Tao Jin was good at summarizing and reasoning. Within a few days, she had figured out Chen Piaopiao's patterns. She didn't actually love picking fights; she usually did it when she was unhappy, randomly selecting some creep and commanding him to be the unlucky soul to face her wrath.
On the day of the club gathering, Chen Piaopiao got into another fight with a creep, exchanging insults for over thirty rounds.
Finally, she said: "Fuck, I'm gonna throw up."
The other person reported her for personal attacks and demanded her account be banned.
Chen Piaopiao pleaded her case, presenting evidence: "Dear admin, I wasn't attacking him. I'm really going to throw up. I ate fifteen bacon rolls at a party today, and now I'm squatting on the athletic field, so full I'm about to puke."
Tao Jin laughed out loud.
Sitting in her chair, she turned and asked Xiao Ma, "Are there any Jianwei Xiaoshi Tablets left?"
She placed the tablets Xiao Ma handed her on the desk. Tao Jin tapped her left fingertips lightly while sending Chen Piaopiao a WeChat message with her right hand: "Come up and get them."
One wanted to get closer, and the other wanted to indulge her. It was only natural that they would become familiar with each other.
Tao Jin didn't know when she had started to like Chen Piaopiao, but she felt it was an especially natural course of events.
She watched as the little fox haphazardly dug burrows around her. She had repeatedly reminded Chen Piaopiao that there was a shortcut—the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But the little fox didn't take it. She was like a GIF Tao Jin had seen online, tirelessly shaking out her fur, jumping into the snow again and again, freezing to the bone, climbing out, and jumping back in.
It was probably during the few days Chen Piaopiao's grandma was visiting that Tao Jin discovered her fourth persona.
Beneath this persona, Chen Piaopiao was not sharp-tongued, not decadent, and not delicate. She leaned against her grandma, clean and tired, smiling unconsciously, being playful unconsciously, wrinkling her nose unconsciously. Even her speech was unconscious as she squatted down to pack things.
She was soft-spoken and down-to-earth, with a gentleness that seemed to have been ironed out from the very marrow of her bones.
At that moment, Tao Jin wished that Chen Piaopiao could always be like this—speaking without having to weigh her words, looking without having to retract her gaze, smiling without having to be precise.
She was only eighteen. She should be able to enjoy herself without restraint, to rely on others without restraint.
The day they saw her grandma off, Tao Jin looked at the dazed Chen Piaopiao and clearly realized that a protective instinct had grown in her heart. It was different from the everyday care she showed her classmates; this protectiveness was directed, exclusive.
Like a lush, dense tree, she hoped Chen Piaopiao would come and lean on her.
However, after a few rounds of back-and-forth, she didn't know if Chen Piaopiao wanted to or not.
She wasn't sure if Chen Piaopiao's so-called "like" was just a new game in a new environment, or if she was serious, had thought it through, and truly wanted to be with her.
The atmosphere between them was great those few days. They had almost kissed. But after pulling the bed curtain shut, she saw a light on from Chen Piaopiao's side.
Acting on a hunch, she opened her phone. As expected, she was in the group chat.
Rabbit was very happy, enthusiastically and actively saying she wanted to go to the mixer.
"Okay, okay, okay."
"Where? When?"
"We're going to be drinking at the mixer, are you okay with that?"
Chen Piaopiao replied: No problem.jpg.
Tao Jin blinked slowly and silently, watching the rabbit avatar bouncing around in the group chat, while the person herself was right there, in the closest possible place, sleeping in the adjacent bed.
Her heart felt tight and uncomfortable. Tao Jin locked her phone and pressed it against her collarbone. Through a gap in the bed curtain, she looked toward the other side and could still see the faint glow of a phone screen.
The spot pressed by the phone ached with a fine, dense pain, like being pricked by needles.
Tao Jin was a proud Leo. Although few people knew she was proud, she had her own ways. For the next week, she didn't contact Chen Piaopiao, and Chen Piaopiao didn't contact her either.
The mixer was a week later, in the evening. Tao Jin sat in her dorm, watching the group members discuss the meeting point and then take a taxi over. A junior who was there told the others in the group: "Rabbit is so pretty, you guys should hurry over! Quick, quick, quick, quick, quick."
Someone said: "Really? Wait for me, I just got out of my evening study session."
Another replied: "For real. She's so goofy in the group chat, the contrast is huge. You really have to come see for yourself."
What clothes was she wearing? What was her hairstyle? Tao Jin reached out and stroked the edge of her computer, lost in thought for a while.
She looked down, wanting to contact Chen Piaopiao, to find an excuse to ask if she wanted to shower and see how she'd reply. But her thoughts took a detour. She put on her slippers, left the room, and went to Gaogao's dorm.
She knocked once or twice. No one answered. She stood at the door and sent Gaogao a message.
She knew Chen Piaopiao would definitely see it. She also knew that Gaogao had only told her Chen Piaopiao was gay after confirming it with Chen Piaopiao herself.
Tao Jin knew Gaogao well; she wouldn't have said anything without permission.
And so, Tao Jin and Chen Piaopiao tested each other, advancing and retreating, with Gaogao's phone screen between them.
"She's at a party?"
—Are you at a party?
"She is?"
—You are?
Since you are, and since I know you are, don't you think you should redefine your deliberate attempts to get close to me, all that ambiguity, and come explain it to me clearly?
After finishing her conversation with Gaogao, Tao Jin sat back down in her dorm. She waited for a while, but no message came from Chen Piaopiao.
She let out a soft breath. There was a tender ache between her ribs, and her neck felt hot. She instinctively reached a hand back to gather the ends of her hair. And she thought of Chen Piaopiao again.
It must be hot in the bar, too. She didn't know how to tie up her hair. She wondered if anyone had tied it up for her.
Tao Jin glanced distractedly at the clock on her desk. She wanted to go, but she didn't.
Thinking of how Chen Piaopiao had been excitedly looking forward to the mixer on the very night they had almost kissed, she didn't want to go.
Thinking of how Chen Piaopiao, knowing full well that she knew her sexual orientation, still remained indifferent and made no move, she didn't want to go.
She pressed her lips together and worked on her group project. She wrote for ten minutes, then glanced at the group chat.
It was almost lights-out. Wasn't she coming back?
If she came back late, did she have a plan B?
A little after ten, the group finally announced that the party was over. And she finally couldn't hold back any longer. She sent Chen Piaopiao a message: "Want to shower?"
She was rejected.
Then she opened her Moments and saw Le Chu's photo.
At that moment, Tao Jin thought that perhaps this ambiguous game of a junior chasing a senior was over.
She turned her head to look at the light and shadows on the floor-to-ceiling window. It was still the same office building she and Chen Piaopiao had looked at during their late-night talk.
At the time, while chatting with the junior beside her, Tao Jin's mind had wandered for a second. She had wondered what kind of companies were in that building. She was planning to graduate two years early; if she worked across the street, wouldn't it be more convenient? Maybe she could have dinner with Chen Piaopiao after work.
The fleeting thought made her heart give a sudden, gentle leap.
Tao Jin was gradually becoming unable to understand herself, unable to understand Chen Piaopiao, just as Chen Piaopiao felt she couldn't understand Tao Jin.
Thankfully, there was alcohol. Thankfully, there was courage. Thankfully, there was the stubborn Chen Piaopiao, and that all-or-nothing kiss.
It saved the possibility between Tao Jin and Chen Piaopiao.
Tao Jin finished speaking softly. Finally, she raised a hand and touched the stunned Chen Piaopiao's face. "You said yesterday that you'd been thinking about it for a long time."
"Actually…"
"The first time I brought you home, you could have had a relationship with me."
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