by
Jiaqi
Li
Yuelong Ma was a transfer student. For
almost two years, he was in our class, but his presence was hardly felt. Our
inability to take notice of him wasn’t his fault; my previous headteacher
ruined things for him from the very beginning. On his first day with us, the
headteacher briefly introduced him, saying only “Yuelong Ma used to study in
class 8, but from today on, he will be with us.” He was sort of lanky. He had big
eyes. Before I could cast a second glance, the headteacher sent him to her
office to do some errand so that he would not hear the rest of her speech. But
when the door closed, she hesitated to resume, knitting her brows and biting
her lips. She was a very young teacher, and in retrospect, it must have been a
tough issue for a novice headteacher like her to address. She wanted to do
right. The silence built to a depressing note, and we started to whisper to
each other. She cleared her throat and said, “There were some irreconcilable
issues in his old class, and I volunteered to accept him into our class as I
think he is kind.” She paused, glancing at our faces, and continued, “But he is
still a bad student. You guys should never play with him. Just leave him be.”
This took place in grade two. We got a
new headteacher in grade three, but from that first day when the teacher
introduced him, every time I saw Yuelong Ma, I couldn’t help thinking to
myself, “He is a bad student, and I should not play with him.” I guess it was
the same with my other classmates.
He sat alone, and his seat was never
changed, always the one next to the platform, where it was the easiest for
teachers to watch for when he was distracted.
I liked my second-grade math teacher. He
was nice and even a little indulgent of me. I guess it was because I always did
fine on math. Not teacher’s pet fine, but fine nonetheless. Sometimes, when he
caught me talking in class, he would not criticize me to my face. He would just
give me a “detention” where I tutored other students for half an hour of math
after school. Even when I was accused of cheating, on the grounds that I
flunked the pop quiz but got a perfect score on the exam, he stood by me. But in
Yuelong’s mind, perhaps, our teacher was a complete monster.
The math teacher beat him.
We had seventy-eight students in our
class. When Yuelong and our teacher fought by the platform, the seventy-seven
of us watched quietly as if it were a movie.
The math teacher first struck Yuelong’s
head with a textbook, criticizing that he did not study. Yuelong talked back.
In a flush of embarrassment, the math teacher thumped Yuelong’s head a few more
times, this time with his knuckles, while continuing to mock and berate him. He
did not to expect Yuelong to dare retort again. When he did, the math teacher grew
madder still. He kicked Yuelong in the stomach, setting Yuelong in a flying
trajectory into the corner where we stored cleaning tools. Yuelong disappeared
from my sight, but I could hear the clash of brooms, mops, and dustpans. A few
seconds later, though, he stood with the look of a bull gone berserk. He
charged forward. At this point we were dumb struck, the seventy-seven of us. The
scene did not feel real; it was like watching a violent film. And we didn’t
know what to do aside from being an audience. Given the difference in age and build,
the math teacher easily broke Yuelong’s attack strategy, kicking him back into
the corner within the disarray of cleaning tools, even before Yuelong could
establish a wrestling stance. The duel repeated itself several times, until
Yuelong couldn’t gather enough strength to stand up.
Still, no one spoke.
The math teacher ambled back to the
center of the classroom and resumed the class. Several minutes later, Yuelong
crept from the corner to his desk. When the bell rang, the boys ran out
immediately, and the girls refilled the classroom with the sound of their chitchatting,
as usual.
In grade two, our Chinese teacher had a
reward rule for her pop quizzes. If the student could identify a vocabulary
flashcard she randomly chose, she would give the vocabulary card to that
student as a gift. It was just a plain piece of cardboard with a red Chinese
character in the center of the white background. However, it was a big deal
among the students. Kids love the weirdest things. And to a certain extent, it
not only meant you were good at Chinese, but also meant the teacher liked you,
which was self-evident as her favorite students had the most cards. For two
years, I only got one chance to answer a quiz. I had a “胸,”
which means chest. Though I felt very excited about winning the card, as a
girl, I felt a little embarrassed with this word. Therefore, I left the card in
my bookcase.
One day, while we were lining up on the
playground for the crossing guard to take us home, I noticed that Yuelong Ma
also had a vocabulary card. He might have got it from his pervious class. It
read “差.” This word has different connotations
in different contexts, but generally, especially for students in primary
school, it means different, mistakes, or poor. In short, bad. Yuelong put the
card in his backpack. He placed it exactly where there was a transparent
compartment on his backpack for everyone to easily see.
The sunset dyed the sky orange. Laughter
was everywhere on the playground, but Yuelong stood in a shadow by himself,
with a flashcard that said “差,” conspicuously red on an innocent
white backdrop.
As children do, we learned things from
each other. Sometimes we heard rumors about Yuelong. Stories about him floated
around the school like tarnished feathers. Stories like “He is an apprentice of
a bully in grade six. They hold up girls on the bridge next to our school and
kiss them.” It was a bunch of he-said-she-said tales. Everyone seemed to know
them, but no one actually witnessed the events described. My friends and I
passed the bridge often enough and never for once did we see the kidnapped
girls suffering from forced kisses. But Yuelong was a bad student, or so were
we told. And we believed the rumors about him with all our hearts.
By third grade, Yuelong Ma didn’t appear
all that special anymore. He shrank into his designated seat as if he were no
more than a ball of feathers.
Nothing changed. Not his seat. Not his
unwillingness to participate in any activities. Not his failure to meet any
academic requirement. Our new headteacher just let him be.
His presence in our class faded frame by
frame like a discarded feather slowly disintegrating.
I was on the verge of forgetting his
existence, if not for my infatuation with origami. One day, I brought a deck of
lovely paper strips to a music class and distributed them to friends around me
for completing my mission of making 999 paper stars in a month. There was no
purpose behind making the stars, nor were they intended as gifts; I made them
simply because I wanted to do so.. I was easily obsessed with such things. As I
said, kids do the stupidest things. My hands were busily folding the strips of paper
into stars while I pretended to memorize the notes of a new song we were
required to learn. Suddenly, I heard a voice say, “Would you mind giving me
some paper strips?” I looked up and was shocked.
Yuelong Ma was next to me!
We were free to sit wherever we wanted
in music and art classes and somehow, I ended up his neighbor that day. I
passed him some paper rapidly without a second thought. His image of a bad
student was so successfully fixated in my mind that I was afraid if I refused,
he would get mad and become violent with me, like he had done with the math
teacher.
I thought he was just bored with the
class and needed a distraction. After passing him the paper, I shifted my
attention back to my sacred origami mission, forcibly not allowing myself to
look at Yuelong to see what he was doing with the paper. I hastened my efforts,
afraid if he were to demand more paper from me, I might run low on the material
and not be able to finish before my self-imposed deadline. However, just before
the class ended, someone’s hand blocked my view of my desk. When it was removed,
I saw several neatly-folded paper stars on my desk. Some were better than my
work.
“Thank you,” I said. I managed two
words. He did not reply. He just smiled and turned away.
It was a smile just like anyone’s. A
smile that almost convinced me he was a normal student. I looked at his back,
the clean white shirt, desiring to talk more with him.
This was the last time I saw him at
school.
One week later, during a break, our
headteacher barged into the classroom and asked us whether we had seen Yuelong
during the past week. The classroom was still noisy. No one answered his
question, so our headteacher asked again.
Now he had our attention. I stopped
chatting and looked at him. His sleeves were rolled up and his frown carved
steep ditches on his forehead. Something must have happened. I looked at
Yuelong’s corner and suddenly realized that his seat had been empty for the
whole week. The classroom was silent for a moment, and the headteacher asked
for the third time. Still, no one spoke. And we went back to our break.
When they finally found Yuelong, only
pieces of him remained.
He had been killed and his body had been
dismembered.
The next day, we dedicated a whole class
to Yuelong. Our headteacher brought the newspaper for each of us, and we read
the article about him, silently, for forty-five minutes.
In a picture that covered half of the
newspaper’s first page, a worker cleaning the crime scene picked up a
transparent bag where there was a leg, while a crowd of onlookers gathered in
the background like an audience..
We mourned as if we knew him well, as if
he was ever part of us.
The murder was cliché, almost corny,
like you’d see on old time TV series.
Yuelong Ma was abducted while in an
arcade. The man next to him, apparently a veteran video gamer, invited Yuelong
to his home to show him vintage games. Yuelong hesitated briefly, according to
the paper, but ultimately went with him. It was in the man’s home that Yuelong
was drugged, killed, and mutilated. When the man recalled the process, he said
he was taken aback when “the little boy” woke up from the drug dose. Grasping
what was going on, Yuelong, according to the man’s confession, begged for his
life. Over and over he pleaded for mercy, “Please, please do not kill me. I
will not tell the police.” His pleas did not move the man. Yuelong was not the
man’s first prey. He had let his first victim, a girl, go and was jailed anyway.
He had sworn to himself that he would get even with the society and go through
with the job this time no matter what.
He cut Yuelong into pieces. Several days
after sleeping with his girlfriend on the very bed under which he had put all
the pieces of Yuelong Ma, he decided to get rid of the body. As if for dramatic
effect, he decided to scatter the pieces all over the city.
We barely thought of Yuelong Ma, but
sometimes, we were excited to gossip about rumors that had surfaced. Kids. On some
level, we knew the grave seriousness of death, but such realization lasted only
for a little while before we became distracted by something else. We heard
rumors that Yuelong Ma’s father had been in jail and it was because of this
that his parents had divorced. Just as there were rumors that his mother worked
some lowly job and did not visit him often. We heard that Yuelong Ma had lived
with his grandmother, who had been the only person who cared about him, and who
came to school often in the days following his murder demanding reparation.
I once overheard parents while
at my dance school. They were waiting for their children and were talking about
Yuelong’s abduction and murder.
They said, “How silly the boy is to fall
for such an easy trick.”
They said, “I never let my child walk
alone from school to home.”
They said, “A child who goes to the arcade
must be a bad student, and of course, he would get this kind of result.”
It was a ballroom dance class. Parents
were talking, and wonderful waltz songs were playing. Boys and girls whirled
around the room, ethereal and gentle, like feathers.
I recalled the afternoon when Yuelong
helped me fold stars. When he gave the folded stars back to me, he smiled. It
was the first time that I was able to see his face closely. His enormous,
watery eyes recalled something said by my previous headteacher when she first
introduced him to the class: “He is a kind boy.” When the music class was over,
we even waved goodbye to each other. “He is not that bad.” I thought as I stood
by the school gate, carrying a little steel container with 999 folded stars.
It was summer. Childhood memories were
liveliest in summer, both the best and the worst. That summer, Yuelong faded into the shadow of
trees and never came back.
Jiaqi
Li was born and raised in
Xiangyang, China. She currently studies at Stony Brook University and majors in
civil engineering. Li hopes to eventually become an architect and to continue
chronicling her life experiences.
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