Bro | Chapter 33

In the blink of an eye, the semester was at its end, and final exams arrived.

The day the exams finished, the students in the school surged out like a swarm. Song Xiaobao’s skirt was accidentally snagged by a little boy who ran past whooping and yelling, and the zipper on his backpack caught right on the hollowed lace trim. With one sharp tug, it ripped a long, ugly tear.

Xiao Bao knit her brows hard, but the little troublemaker, who hadn’t even realized what he’d done, had already vanished. There was nothing she could do.

When Wei Zhiyuan got home, Grandma Song still hadn’t returned. He saw Song Xiaobao sitting on the sofa, Grandma Song’s usual sewing box set by her legs. She had torn off all the ruined lace from the bottom of her skirt, lowered her head, and very carefully folded the hem upward. Clutching needle and thread in an awkward grip, she tried to whip-stitch a new edge, the stitches bending and twisting into a crooked line.

Wei Zhiyuan asked, “What are you doing?”

He spoke all of a sudden. Xiao Bao was caught off guard and jabbed her finger. She shook her hand, baring her teeth in pain as she complained, “Aiyo, Ge, you scared me. The hem on this skirt got yanked, it can’t be fixed, so I can only tear all of it off and sew a new edge.”

She paused, tilted her head, and took a look. “Crap, it looks kind of crooked.”

Comrade Xiao Bao’s handicraft ability was nowhere near the basic level of the hardworking masses. Her hands were even clumsier than her feet, and she had never sewn clothes herself before. With their family’s current finances, sure, designer brands were out of the question, but buying the little girl a new piece of clothing was still nothing.

Yet Song Xiaobao, that big, pampered princess who “would act spoiled when conditions allowed, and if conditions didn’t allow it, she’d create them so she could still act spoiled,” didn’t even bring it up.

Only then did Wei Zhiyuan realize that big brother’s disappearance wasn’t putting pressure on just him alone.

Xiao Bao had sewn it crooked, so she had to use her small scissors to snip the thread, undo it, and start again. Unfortunately, not long after, it went crooked all over again.

Unable to stand it, she let out a sigh and tossed the needle and thread back into the sewing box. She was probably feeling wronged too. Her nose twitched as if she wanted to cry, but she lifted her eyes and saw that only she and Wei Zhiyuan were home, so she forced the tears back down.

She only looked small. She actually wasn’t that little anymore. In her heart, Wei Zhiyuan wasn’t the same as big brother and Grandma. Big brother was more like a powerful father figure, but with a deep generation gap. Wei Zhiyuan was a peer, an older brother close to her age. She was embarrassed to act that childish in front of him.

After a while, Xiao Bao walked over and took Wei Zhiyuan’s ruler. “Er-ge, lend me your long ruler for a bit.”

After saying that, she bent over and lay across the table, using the ruler to press down the edge as she pushed the needle through with great difficulty, trying to keep herself from sewing crooked again.

Wei Zhiyuan kept his head down like he was reading, but the book in front of him didn’t turn a single page. More than once, he wanted to look up and tell Xiao Bao, Stop sewing, tomorrow I’ll buy you a new skirt.

But he didn’t dare.

Even if the family looked comfortable for the moment, losing big brother was almost the same as losing their source of income. Money that had no source would, one day, be spent clean.

They both carried the same fear in their hearts, and it was as if they had a silent understanding not to pierce that thin layer and say it out loud.

Just then, San Pang came over.

San Pang always looked like he was in high spirits. This guy could be happy in poverty day after day, like there was an endless supply of things to laugh about. In Wei Qian’s words, San Pang’s face was “always glowing red like he’d just finished drinking wedding liquor.”

San Pang craned his neck and looked around the room, then asked in confusion, “Hey, your brother, that unlucky brat, still hasn’t come back? Did he get snatched away somewhere to be a live-in son-in-law, and now he’s having so much fun he doesn’t want to come home?”

At Wei Zhiyuan’s insistence, no one had told San Pang about how Wei Qian and the others had lost contact. San Pang was still being optimistically kept in the dark.

Wei Zhiyuan said, “Should be about one or two more weeks. I heard yesterday he’s already on the way back.”

“Oh.” San Pang saw his calm expression and didn’t take it to heart. He lowered his head and looked at what Xiao Bao was doing. “Bao’er, you planning to become a tailor?”

Xiao Bao lifted her head, her gaze colliding with Wei Zhiyuan’s. Since she was little, she’d never been good at reading faces, but for some reason, in that instant, she suddenly evolved to a new level. She could understand what people were saying with their eyes.

So Xiao Bao cooperated and threw out a not-very-convincing lie. “I don’t like this lace anymore. I want to take it off.”

San Pang said, like it was the most natural thing in the world, “If you don’t like it, tell your brother to buy you a new one. Why work this hard?”

Song Xiaobao was an honest kid and rarely made up stories. For a moment she didn’t know what to say, so she hurriedly lowered her head, suspecting she was about to give herself away.

After quite a while, she pressed her lips together and forced out, “I… I want to save a little.”

San Pang jolted in surprise and said, without a thought, “Look at our little sister, so sensible. If your brother heard that, he could really close his eyes in peace.”

He meant it as a joke. San Pang was the kind of loudmouth who fired off whatever came to mind, with no restraint at all. Even when he bantered with Wei Qian, he never cared whether it was coarse or improper. Everything, salty talk and plain talk alike, poured out of his mouth. Nothing was taboo.

But the moment those words fell, Xiao Yuan and Xiao Bao both looked up at him at the same time. Both kids’ expressions were horribly ugly. Just ugly, and neither of them made a sound.

San Pang reacted fast. After a brief stunned pause, he immediately gave his own mouth a light smack. “Peh. Look at me and my foul mouth, running nonsense like that. It’s fine, it’s fine. Don’t take it to heart.”

Only after a long while did Wei Zhiyuan squeeze out a smile at him. Xiao Bao had no such composure. She couldn’t smile at all. She grabbed the skirt and the sewing box, dropped a quiet sentence, “It’s hard to see here. I’m going back to my room to do it.”

Then she turned and left.

By this point, even San Pang, no matter how dense he was, understood that something was off.

He opened his mouth toward Wei Zhiyuan, about to ask, but one look at the stubbornness hidden in the boy’s eyes told him he wouldn’t get anything out of him.

San Pang finally saw it clearly. These two kids both felt awful, but with him present, they were forcing themselves to hold it in and not let it show.

“Fine,” San Pang thought. “I should go. If I stay here any longer, I’ll suffocate these two little brats.”

He said goodbye to Wei Zhiyuan and left, deciding to corner Grandma Song that night and ask everything straight.

And Wei Zhiyuan still remembered he had one thing left unfinished.

The next day, he chose a quiet, silent afternoon and went out. Before he left, Wei Zhiyuan took out the money Wei Qian had given him for summer camp. He looked at it, then stuffed it, envelope and all, into his schoolbag.

This was what his brother had left him. Wei Zhiyuan wanted to keep it on him, so his heart could feel steady.

After he finished that thing, he planned to use this money to buy Xiao Bao new clothes. Anyway, if his brother truly didn’t come back, he wasn’t going to summer camp either. There would be no point.

At that hour, people who had work were already at work, and people who didn’t were taking their noon rest in the blazing summer heat.

Wei Zhiyuan had already gotten it straight. That pervert had been married once before, then divorced, and now lived alone. Wei Zhiyuan had the man’s full duty roster, and he knew that on this day the pervert was scheduled from afternoon until midnight, meaning he wouldn’t be home.

Wei Zhiyuan had already tailed him and scouted the area, circling the man’s building four or five times.

He climbed nimbly onto the wall near the tube-style apartment building. With a kick, a grip, and a pull, he vaulted onto the second-floor balcony in one leap.

Using the small knife he carried, Wei Zhiyuan sliced a slit in the man’s screen window, just barely large enough to stuff one hand through. Then he pulled his hand into the long-sleeved jacket he had deliberately worn, and reached in through the fabric, using the sleeve as a barrier while he felt for the latch inside, flipped it open, and climbed in through the window.

Before doing this, he had seriously thought through every detail, including what accidents might happen at which step. He was almost fully confident.

It was as if Wei Zhiyuan had been born to steal. His first time flowed smoothly, like a practiced offender, silent and clean, done in one breath.

Even so, he still kept a rigorous attitude. With the mindset of making bold assumptions and verifying carefully, the first thing he did was “tour” the man’s home.

Very quickly, he understood that his careful verification was completely unnecessary.

In the filthy, chaotic bedroom, he found piles of pornographic posters and pictures, most of them using children as the main subjects. From what was shown, this person seemed to have a special preference for little boys and girls around six to eight or nine years old, children who hadn’t developed yet. Because he lived alone, the bastard didn’t even bother hiding any of it. The walls were plastered from end to end.

Wei Zhiyuan didn’t want to leave traces. Keeping his hand inside his sleeve, he flipped through the stuff and calculated whether reporting him was feasible.

Then he rejected the idea.

From a few scattered remarks by big brother and San-ge, Wei Zhiyuan had heard that this pervert seemed to have caused the death of a little girl, but that was years ago. The child was long dead and couldn’t testify, and even her family refused to call the police. Wei Zhiyuan had no evidence to say it was this man.

As for what had happened to Wei Zhiyuan himself, at most it counted as an attempt that failed. If the other party insisted he had only meant to rob a child’s pocket money, that excuse could still pass.

And as for keeping child pornography in his home, even if it brought this man some trouble, so what could that really change? A person could always argue about what they “keep at home,” and it was hard to make it hurt where it mattered.

The man wouldn’t be sentenced heavily for this, and what Wei Zhiyuan had done, from stalking to breaking into a private home, was all the kind of thing that could never be put under the light.

He already had enough trouble. He couldn’t afford to get tangled in even more trouble because of this.

In the end, Wei Zhiyuan opened another drawer and found things that clearly belonged to children. Cartoon hair clips for little girls, a uniform button from their own school that he recognized, and there were even a few pieces of children’s underwear.

Beside it sat a stack of videotapes.

Wei Zhiyuan pulled out the top one and put it into an old-style VCR nearby. After the hiss of noise and dancing white specks, the screen showed an obscene video with a little girl of about ten as the main subject.

Wei Zhiyuan wasn’t interested in that. He frowned and fast-forwarded, only to see something absurd. An entire tape, over and over, was just that one little girl. Over and over, it was the same content, and it even “performed” several crude themes like it was acting out a show.

Wei Zhiyuan didn’t feel like he was “punishing evil for the people.” He only felt that having such a person alive in the world was disgusting.

He’d had enough. He was about to press pause, eject the tape, and leave quietly to carry out his next step.

But in the instant before he hit the pause button, the fast-forward jumped into a new segment.

These tapes were all rough, bootleg copies. The person who dubbed them probably wasn’t careful and mixed in a piece of some other video. Under fast-forward, the first few frames flashed by in a blur. Wei Zhiyuan glanced once and felt the background style had changed, and his hand, about to press down, unconsciously stopped.

Then he suddenly gaped, eyes widening.

He saw two tall, big-built Western men, dressed very lightly. They exchanged two lines of dialogue that barely connected, then, to his shock, clung to each other in a suggestive way. They kissed, kissed, and then rolled together.

At some point, Wei Zhiyuan didn’t know when he’d stopped fast-forwarding. He stared at the two men on the screen without blinking. Both “male leads” were lean and powerful, muscles sharp and defined, and where it counted, they absolutely had everything. None of it was fake.

And those two male leads, incomprehensible as they were to him, seemed to be enjoying it immensely.

Wei Zhiyuan stood there dumbly, his hand frozen in midair. He completely forgot to pull it back. Just as the two men in the video were groaning, swearing, and charging straight into the main act, there was a sudden knock at the door outside.

Wei Zhiyuan was struck like thunder. He snapped off the VCR at once, held his breath, and stood perfectly still in the unfamiliar, messy living room.

Someone outside shouted, “Collecting the electric fee. Anybody home?”

Wei Zhiyuan shut his eyes, clenched his fist at his side, and silently counted the thunder of his own heartbeat.

He drew in a deep breath. The layout of the entire place spun once through his mind, and in an instant he picked out several escape routes. If the person outside suddenly opened the door, or if something happened…

Luckily, the person outside waited a bit, then cursed in a low voice, “The moment it’s time to collect money, nobody’s here. What kind of person is this, peh.”

Then they seemed to leave.

Only then did Wei Zhiyuan finally let out his breath.

His back was soaked through with sweat, but his movements stayed orderly. First, he ejected the tape. Then he carefully restored everything he’d touched to the way it was. Finally, under a small cabinet, he found the spot where cash was kept, and he pulled out three hundred-yuan.

His heartbeat had eased somewhat, but his face was still burning red. He turned back and pressed the slit in the screen window flat, then watched through the door’s peephole for a while. After confirming the hallway was empty, not a single person in sight, and after confirming the pervert hadn’t double-locked the door when he left, he carefully opened the door, slipped out, and pulled it shut behind him, leaving without a sound.

Wei Zhiyuan felt like there was a fire in his chest, scorching his throat dry. It was like something sticky and lingering was clinging to him. He suspected it was from rage and nausea, so he bought a bottle of Beibingyang with ice crystals floating inside, and downed it in three gulps. Only then did that fire finally go out.

Wei Zhiyuan went home calmly, wrote Xiao Bao a note saying he’d gone to the city library to borrow materials and that they didn’t need to wait for him at dinner, and then he went straight to the factory where that pervert worked.

On the last page of his secret notebook were the three characters “Qiu Jianguo,” and over them he had drawn a big red X.

Right, Qiu Jianguo was the name of that pedophile.

That night, Qiu Jianguo ate in the canteen like he always did.

Recently, he had set his sights on a little boy who looked like a little girl. Boys at that age loved to play, and during summer vacation they ran around everywhere. Their parents were also more careless, which made it especially easy to find an opening. In fact, it was even easier than with girls.

Just as he finished eating, the gate guard came over carrying several bottles of liquor. “Your order. It just got delivered.”

Qiu Jianguo froze. “Mine? I didn’t order anything.”

The guard vaguely knew there was something off about this man. He didn’t know exactly what kind of “off,” but instinctively he didn’t want to deal with him more than necessary. He only gave him a cool look, then set the liquor and the signature slip down in front of him. “It’s yours. Your name is on it. If you didn’t order it, who did? Money’s already been paid, over three hundred, pretty expensive.”

After saying that, the guard didn’t want to bother with him. He only told him to bring the signed slip to the guardroom before his shift ended, then turned and left.

Qiu Jianguo checked the slip. It was a delivery note from a small tavern nearby that he frequented often, and it really did have his name on it. Nothing wrong.

He figured maybe the tavern wrote down the wrong name when they delivered. Most of the people who went there were regulars, so mistakes like that could happen. Anyway, the money had already been paid. Only an idiot would refuse free stuff. If someone came looking later, he could just play dumb and deny it. It would be the tavern’s mistake, not his problem.

So he accepted the liquor with a clear conscience and drank it. With a small saucer of peanuts, he got three bottles down, and the whole man turned into a puddle of rotten mud. He slumped into the recliner like a lump, “playing corpse,” with not the slightest awareness that he was on duty. Neglecting his post felt as natural to him as breathing.

Half asleep, half awake, he heard a “ka-da” click. He didn’t care, only rolled over.

A while later, he heard the crisp voice of a little girl speaking.

It was that kind of voice, not yet developed, so tender it sounded like you could squeeze water out of it.

He was drifting in a drunken haze, savoring it. In an instant he reacted, eyes turning red as he jerked upright.

The voice came from outside the door. The little girl seemed to be talking to herself. Now and then she hummed a couple lines of a song to herself, accompanied by small, broken footsteps, as if she were bouncing along.

He knew that in the workers’ dorms up ahead, there was a female worker living with her eight-year-old daughter. Every time he saw that little girl, he itched inside, but he was cautious. He didn’t like to strike too close to home, so he had only been holding it in.

But now… it was late and quiet.

His alcohol-heated brain blew up with a loud boom.

The hairs all over his body stood up in excitement. He licked his lips in thirst, rubbed his crotch impatiently, then stood. He was still drunk, his vision a white blur, but he followed that voice as it drifted near and far, stumbling forward with a heavy head and light feet.

As he walked, a chill swept over him. He shuddered and sobered a little. He frowned and realized he had wandered into the low-temperature cold storage used to keep meat products, and there were faint rustling sounds coming from inside.

With a bit of sense returning, he called in, “Hey, you can’t just go into the cold storage!”

The little girl seemed to mutter something back, but it was too soft and he couldn’t make it out. His throat bobbed obscenely. Reason struggled in his chest for a moment against desire, and desire won.

He glanced at the big clock by the warehouse entrance. There was still more than an hour before the midnight shift change. He knew that in the daytime, when new stock came in at any time, the door was only secured with a small lock, not the big padlock. Staff all had keys. Only in the back half of the night, at shift change, would the oncoming people add the big lock and seal it shut, and it would only be opened on time at six the next morning.

More than an hour was enough to do a lot.

He softened his voice. “Little sister, you can’t run around in here. Come out with Uncle. Uncle will take you to eat something good…”

He walked straight in, completely failing to notice that the clock had already stopped long ago.

Following the “girl’s” voice, he went deeper and deeper, farther and farther in, until he finally caught it. It was behind a wall. The man licked his lips and suddenly lunged forward. “Caught…”

There was no little girl there.

There was only an old cellphone he’d discarded two or three years ago, playing the same ringtone on repeat. The ambiguous childlike voice rang again and again.

Then, as if the battery died, the ringtone stopped.

The entire cold storage went dead silent.

The man’s scalp went cold. In that instant, there was a huge bang behind him.

He knew that sound all too well. It was the sound of the outer door being slammed shut, and the heavy padlock dropping into place.

Wait. It wasn’t time to change shifts yet. How could someone be locking it now?

He rushed to the door and screamed himself hoarse, “There’s still someone inside. Let me out. Let me out!”

Wei Zhiyuan waited until after midnight, then burned his secret notebook, and went straight home. He spread a thick stack of scratchwork across his bed, putting on the appearance of working hard. Grandma and Xiao Bao had never been to the library, so neither of them knew what time it closed.

He had damp night-dew on him from outside. He had thought that after turning into a rotten sort of kid like this, he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Who knew that the moment his head touched the pillow, a kind of comfort spread through every limb and bone. He placed Wei Qian’s pillow beside him, as if that meant big brother was right there, keeping him company…

Wei Zhiyuan fell asleep in that comfort mixed with guilt and hidden worry. Half conscious, he had a dream.

In the dream, his brother wore nothing but a shirt with the buttons undone, lying on the bed and looking at him. His body was covered in scars, yet they didn’t ruin the beautiful lines of that body at all.

Wei Qian’s eyes resembled their mother’s, but inside them was a clear, sharp edge. His nose bridge was high, and on his lips was something… something that came from Wei Zhiyuan’s own imagination, a smile he couldn’t describe.

Seeing his brother’s bared body, that sticky feeling seemed to come back and coil around him again. Like he was bewitched, the boy walked over, and some devilish impulse seized him. He wanted to do something outrageous and touch him.

In the dream, big brother only looked at him lazily, and actually let him. Wei Zhiyuan’s excitement surged out of control, and he couldn’t help giving birth to something even stranger, even deeper, a desire he’d never known before.

A string of phone rings startled Wei Zhiyuan awake. He sat bolt upright, his face blank for a second, and inside his chest was a storm like a tidal wave.

His lower body was cold. He hesitated, then climbed off the bed in an awkward posture and picked up the phone.

“Hello…”

“Me.” A familiar voice came through the receiver, a little hoarse. “Not awake yet, huh? Something happened on my side, my phone couldn’t be used for a bit. Tell Grandma not to panic. I’ll be back in a couple days.”

Wei Zhiyuan didn’t even know how he managed to answer the call. He only felt that his whole body had gone numb.