With a sudden shove, the boy pushed the girl away and snapped, “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m a complete hooligan. I’ve fooled around with more girls than I can count, so you’d better stay away from me. There are plenty of other boys around. Why hang yourself from one tree?”
The blush disappeared from the girl’s face, leaving her deathly pale. Chen Youzai felt a stab of guilt at the sight, but he had already gone this far. Backing out now would make everything he had done pointless.
“You’re lying to me, aren’t you? You’re testing me, right? I told you already. In my eyes, no one can compare to you.”
“But there’s someone who likes you more than I do, someone who wants to treat you even better. I’ve decided to give you to him.”
“Who?” the girl asked, tears gathering in her eyes. Then she added, “It doesn’t matter who it is. I won’t fall for him.”
The boy sighed. “Can’t you tell? Chen Youzai secretly follows you on the way to school every morning. He goes to your classroom to borrow books just so he can see you. He even buys you all kinds of snacks and slips them into your desk…”
“Hmph… ha.” The girl gave a bitter laugh. “Even if you’ve fallen for someone else, you don’t have to drag him out just to insult me.”
The boy completely missed her meaning and kept slandering himself. “Fine, I’ll tell you everything. I’m incredibly stingy. If I could spend one cent twice, I would. I’m filthy too. I’ll eat things I pick out of the trash. I go a month without brushing my teeth and half a year without washing my feet. And I’m a total creep. I sneak into the girls’ dormitory to steal underwear and keep it under my bed…”
“Enough!” The girl burst into tears and pointed at him. “Even if all that were true, you’d still be better than Chen Youzai. Stop trying to disgust me… I can’t take it anymore.”
The boy looked utterly miserable. “Is Chen Youzai really that bad?”
The girl clearly did not want to discuss Chen Youzai at a time like this, but the boy would not let it go. At last she cried, furious, “Stop it! In my eyes, he’s worse than the old gatekeeper at our school. Even if every man in the world died, I still wouldn’t fall for Chen Youzai! If you want to break up with me, just say so…”
Chen Youzai stopped hearing whatever she said after that. All that remained in his mind was her tear-streaked face and those final words. He returned to his own body and wandered down the street in a daze. He did not even dare walk too close to the glass storefronts, afraid that if he saw his own face now, he would hate it too.
“Even if every man in the world died, I still wouldn’t fall for Chen Youzai…” He muttered the sentence over and over as he walked. At first, the words tore at him. Gradually, they seemed to hurt less, until at last he kicked a pebble down the road and cursed, “You don’t want me? Well, I don’t want you either!”
That night, Chen Youzai dreamed he was back beside the lake. A man stood at the water’s edge with his back turned. Even from behind, he carried himself with unmistakable poise, and he was dressed in ancient clothing.
When the man turned around, however, he had the face of Chen Youzai’s love rival. Then the face swelled several times larger, looming before him like the Sphinx. Funeral music began playing all around him, and then countless lips came rushing toward him from every direction…
Chen Youzai jolted awake before dawn. In the darkness, he vividly remembered being kissed by his love rival earlier that day. He spat on the floor, wiped his mouth, and finally went back to sleep.