After dinner, Gu Jianian pretended to casually ask his grandmother about Chi Yan.
"Did I know him when I was a kid? He was the one with the creeper villa."
Grandma placed the mosquito coils between two bamboo chairs.
The scarlet dot slowly circled the black coil, and the faint smoke drifted away, slowly disappearing into the summer night.
Grandma didn't know what she remembered, and the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes were smiling deeply: "You remember him?"
Gu Jianian shook his head.
Perhaps life in Beilin was too depressing and unbearable, so that his memories before the age of seven are very vague.
Gu Jianian pushed his hair to the side of his face to cover his slightly red ears, and said slowly: "It was Chi... He said that he gave me my name. Did he also live in Yunmosheng when he was a child?"
"yes."
Grandma seemed to be lost in memory: "He was less than ten years old that year, right? He came to Yunmo Countryside to study by himself. His grandfather called me and asked me to help take care of him. But he usually lived in the school, and only came to our house for dinner on weekends."
Gu Jianian was surprised and asked, "He has also eaten at our house? Every weekend?"
"Um."
Grandma talked about the naming again: "You were only three years old at the time. Your parents called and said they wanted to take you to Beilin kindergarten in advance and give you a formal name. They were both intellectuals, but they were very superstitious and insisted on finding someone to do a fortune telling. In the end, the fortune teller they found had different opinions and they were deadlocked and couldn't come to a definite answer. So I said I would give the name."
"I haven't read much, and I couldn't find a clue when I looked it up in the dictionary. Finally, Chi Yan mentioned this name when we were having dinner at our house."
"He said that since the year you were born, Yunmo has been a good year every year. I thought the child had literary talent and the name had a good meaning, so I used it. But after the name was chosen, something went wrong with your parents, and they didn't come to pick you up until you were seven years old."
Gu Jianian didn't expect that she and Chi Yan had such a connection, so she quickly asked, "Then why did he transfer to Yunmo to study? And he came alone? Where are his parents?"
She didn't notice at all that her attention was all on Chi Yan.
Fortunately, my grandmother didn't seem to notice: "His family is in Zhushan, and his parents are probably busy with work."
Zhushan City is a southern city as big as Beilin, only two hours' drive from Yunmo.
"As for why he transferred to Yunmo... I only know that he often skipped classes and fought when he was in Zhushan, and was punished by the school. His family had no choice but to agree to let him transfer to the countryside. However, he only studied here for one semester before his grandfather took him back to Zhushan."
"In the following years, he lived with his grandfather in Zhushan."
When Gu Jianian heard this, he was shocked.
I didn’t expect Chi Yan to skip classes and fight at such a young age.
He was also punished by the school.
She clenched her hands involuntarily.
"It's funny to say that, during the half year he was at Yunmo, you often looked forward to having dinner and playing games with him on weekends. When he left, you even held his hand and cried. I didn't expect that you have completely forgotten it now. You are such a heartless little girl."
*
That night, Gu Jianian lay in bed hugging the quilt. As soon as he closed his eyes, he could think of Chi Yan's face hidden behind the smoke, his fingers shaking the wine glass, and those eyes that were always filled with impatience.