Fat little Zhang Yifan looked foolishly at Luo Wenzhou.
Luo Wenzhou put the envelopes on the table. He laughed angrily. "You want to buy off a police officer with 300,000? Isn't that pretty ridiculous?"
Zhang Yifan didn't hear that this was a joke; he actually took it for the truth. His round little face showed a trace of the panic of someone who had come to his wits' end. He haltingly said, "But…this really is all I have…"
"Where did you learn this from? Encounter any trouble, and you pull out two cards to deal with it." Luo Wenzhou's smile gradually cooled. He looked sternly at the boy. "You think you can resolve a murder with money? What wretched teacher taught you this? Tell me, and I'll have them out of education tomorrow!"
At home, Zhang Yifan was afraid of his dad. Outside, he was also afraid of stern and powerful men like his father. He was scared silent as a cicada in winter by Luo Wenzhou, not making a sound.
"If Xia Xiaonan killed someone, it doesn't matter whether she did it with her own hands or colluded with someone else. She still has to pay the price. Covering up from the police where a criminal who's been wanted for fifteen years has gone, colluding with a wanted criminal, harming a classmate—what kind of resentment warrants such deranged behavior?"
With every sentence Luo Wenzhou spoke, the boy's face grew whiter.
"Never mind killing someone, there's also dismemberment—"
That day at the City Bureau, the police had only questioned them; they hadn't told the students the details of Feng Bin's death. The teacher and parents of course wouldn't have mentioned such bloody things either. Zhang Yifan had been locked up since coming home and hadn't yet returned to school. Suddenly hearing the word "dismemberment," he was so scared he jumped up off the couch. "Dismemberment? Feng Bin was… was…"
Luo Wenzhou very much wanted to describe how Feng Bin had looked in death, but when the words reached his lips, he looked at that still childish face and swallowed them down. He only asked, "Why did you want to run away? Who egged you on? Who wanted to hurt Feng Bin?"
"No-no one! No one wanted to hurt him!" Zhang Yifan shook his head over and over again. As if he'd learned his lines a thousand times over, he blurted out, "We went to celebrate Christmas…"
Fei Du put his cup on the table and quietly interrupted Zhang Yifan.
"Christmas?" he asked. "What's special about Christmas?"
Zhang Yifan was like a squirrel with its neck squeezed. His pupils contracted, and he curled up. A frightening silence spread through the exquisitely-decorated living room of his home.
After a good while, the boy could hold back no longer. He began to sob unrestrainedly.
"I'll call your parents." Luo Wenzhou reached out to pick up his phone from the table. "What are they doing attending a dinner party? Are they dining with the Chairman?"
Zhang Yifan threw himself at him immediately, holding Luo Wenzhou back with both hands.
His palms were soaked with sweat, sticking to the back of Luo Wenzhou's hand. They were ice-cold.
Luo Wenzhou felt that his ten fingers together didn't feel like those of a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old strapping young man but instead like those of a weak and clumsy lost child. Because he lacked strength, he couldn't even trust his own fingers; he instinctively used his whole hand when grabbing things, as if that was the only way he could get a firm grip.
"Don't…don't call…" The pudgy boy squeezed the words out from his viscera. "I'm scared."
"What are you scared of?" Fei Du didn't turn a hair. Seeing Zhang Yifan immediately look away after inadvertently meeting his gaze, he keenly asked, "Are you scared of me, or some person who's a lot like me?"
"Zhang Yifan," Luo Wenzhou continued in a low voice, "what was it you wanted to tell me yesterday at the City Bureau?"
Zhang Yifan was sobbing so hard he could barely sit still. He twitched all over, failing again and again to spit out clear speech.
Fei Du looked him over. The boy wasn't tall. He had small features, a pleasant and fortuitous appearance.
Because he'd run away, he wasn't wearing his school uniform. His t-shirt was pulled tight over his body, a somewhat round little belly sticking out. Over the little belly was Superman, flexing his biceps. On the back of the shirt was a huge fist. Looking only at the "packaging," you would have thought that this cloth covered a body full of strength, that of a great and powerful man of ample proportions.
Zhang Yifan's bedroom was visible from the living room couch. The bedroom door wasn't closed; behind the door hung a decorative sandbag and a pair of boxing gloves. There were superhero movie posters stuck to the wall. A corner of the bed was visible, too; it had a roaring mountain lion printed on it, looking out from the bed with incomparable disdain.
Zhang Yifan's living space was so uniform that even the little posters displayed his parents' inexpressible expectations for him. They would have loved to turn into a knife blade, pare the fat off his body by any means necessary, pare him down into a Mike Tyson, into a Wolverine, into an indomitable real man with skin of copper and bones of iron.
But things turned out contrary to their wishes; the child was still a trembling crybaby.
"Do you like Superman?" Fei Du suddenly asked. "You can nod or shake your head."
Zhang Yifan looked at him evasively, gave a forceful whimper, and shook his head.
"Oh, I get it. Your mom and dad like to buy you clothes with Superman on them, right? There's always some discrepancy between your way of thinking and your parents'. When I was little, I also often ran counter to my father's expectations." At this point, Fei Du paused slightly. Luo Wenzhou subconsciously looked at him, saw that his voice was gentle, and there was a smile at the corners of his mouth, as if talking about a childhood experience in which warmth and contradiction coexisted; there was no sign that he was making anything up.
Fei Du continued, "At those times, we'd often have to come to terms. You have to be brought up by someone, right? But I also had my own means of rebelling."
Zhang Yifan, weeping, stared abjectly at him.
Fei Du smiled at him. "I'll tell you about it in a while.—Did you go to Yufen for junior middle, too?"
Zhang Yifan nodded.
"Junior middle school belongs to the nine years of compulsory education. Public schools ordinarily don't charge fees for it, but your school does, and they're expensive, right? I hear that there's a special Western restaurant in your school cafeteria?"
Fei Du asked the boy some questions as though making idle chat, all questions that could be answered with a nod or a shake of the head.
Zhang Yifan's rapid breathing gradually calmed. Fei Du considered his expression, reckoning that he was about ready to speak normally. Thereupon he scooped up some sugar cubes from the odds and ends basket under the coffee table and put them into Zhang Yifan's cup, picked up the tea pot next to him, and poured some hot water for him, waiting patiently for him to drink most of it before he tossed out the next question.
Fei Du said, "Do you like school?"
Zhang Yifan paused, then shook his head hard.
Fei Du leaned forward slightly, leaning his elbows on his knees, bringing his line of sight even with Zhang Yifan's. He slowed his voice. "Have you been bullied at school?"
This time, Zhang Yifan was silent for a longer time, then he shook his head very firmly.
As if weighing something, Fei Du folded a sugar cube wrapper over and over, considering the pudgy boy's expression—Zhang Yifan had more or less calmed down; there'd been no fluctuation in his emotions during his silence just now. Judging by his body language, he seemed to have just been recalling. When he'd shaken his head, his movements hadn't been at all forced.
Either it was true, or he believed he hadn't been bullied.
Fei Du said, "Then have Feng Bin, Xia Xiaonan, and the others been bullied?"
At first Zhang Yifan nodded. Then he hesitated for a moment and shook his head, quietly saying, "…Feng Bin wasn't bullied, he was with them, but he…he wasn't the same, he was pretty nice."
Fei Du's fingers, tapping on the wrapper, paused.
Feng Bin had been with "them"; he'd belonged to the faction of bullies.
"They…they got their eyes on Xia Xiaonan," Zhang Yifan said without introduction or conclusion. "We had to run. That was what Feng…Feng Bin said."
His words were disconnected, but Luo Wenzhou somehow heard something ghastly behind them. He followed up, "Who got their eyes on Xia Xiaonan?"
"Them… The masters."
Luo Wenzhou nearly suspected his own ears had gone on the fritz. "Who? The masters? Then what on earth are you? A slave?"
"I'm not a slave, I'm an ordinary person, a 'commoner,'" Zhang Yifan said quietly. "Wang Xiao and the others are the slaves."
Aside from Feng Bin and Xia Xiaonan, there were four other students who'd run away. Wang Xiao was the one girl among them—Xiao Haiyang and his colleague had been turned away at the door by the girl's parents because she'd had a fever, and they hadn't seen her.
"Wang Xiao was the girl who was with you guys?" Seeing Zhang Yifan nod, Luo Wenzhou asked, "You said 'Wang Xiao and the others.' Who are the 'others'? The other two boys?"
Zhang Yifan nodded again.
"'Masters,' 'commoners,' and 'slaves,'" Luo Wenzhou repeated the appellations he'd heard come out of Zhang Yifan's mouth, feeling an aura of middle school hit him in the face. It was simply rather absurd; these brats seemed to be earnestly playing a large-scale real life version of a board game, but there was a chill unceasingly surging upwards form his feet. "You mean that Feng Bin belonged with the 'masters,' Wang Xiao and those others belong with the 'slaves,' and only you are a 'commoner.' I've got that right, haven't I?—So what is Xia Xiaonan?"
"Xia Xiaonan is…the 'deer.'" Zhang Yifan squeezed the words out of his throat, his not yet fully developed voice thin as a thread, seeming about to collapse any time. "Every year at Christmas, after the Christmas party organized by the English teachers, the students have their own activity. The school doesn't close for Christmas or New Years, and the dormitories aren't locked up. We can play all night. Starting from junior middle, each year, there'd be…"
Luo Wenzhou had a feeling that the "activity" wasn't gathering together to play Fight the Landlord. He asked at once, "Play all night? Play what?"
"Play a hunting game, like the kind in Surviving the Game." Zhang Yifan involuntarily lowered his voice. "Every year they have a lottery before Christmas and pick five people out of the 'commoners' who can participate in the hunting game, and if you win you can join them."
"Join them? You mean you can stop being an ordinary person and become one of the group of 'masters?' What are the benefits of joining? You can bully whoever you want?"
"If you join, you'll be safe," the pudgy boy said pitifully to Luo Wenzhou. "As long as you don't get into a disagreement with the other 'masters,' then you won't be bullied at random, won't become a 'slave,' and you won't somehow become 'prey.' You can go to the cafeteria right away after class and don't have to avoid the 'masters.' You can have the keys to your dormitory and the dormitory building and not have to be afraid of getting locked out, you can…you can go to school in peace."
Unable to resist, you could only strive to join them in order to receive the treatment due to an ordinary student.
"Even during Yuan Shikai's restoration, he didn't dare to restore the Mongol dynasty system. Your school's students are really something," Luo Wenzhou said slowly. "You were picked by the lottery this year?"
Zhang Yifan looked at him, silently acknowledging it.
Luo Wenzhou said, "How do you play this hunting game of yours?"
Zhang Yifan clenched his fists. The big clock in the in the living room went forward a step at a time, the ticking second hand moving with a metallic sound, going step by step towards the endless future. When it had made a long trek, Zhang Yifan finally got up enough courage to open his mouth—
"After it starts, everyone participating in the game has to find the 'deer.' They'll only announce who the 'deer' is when the game starts. Before that, no one knows who it's going to be. After they've announced it, the 'deer' has five minutes to run and hide, and then the 'hunters' have until daybreak to catch them. Whoever catches them wins."
"Your school is so big, with so many classroom buildings and dormitories. With one person hiding and five people searching, how can they find them?" Luo Wenzhou asked. "And a little girl like Xia Xiaonan, wouldn't she be able to find any random nook and hide all night?"
"It's not five people searching," Fei Du said lightly next to him. "It's the whole school looking for her."
Luo Wenzhou froze at once.
But Zhang Yifan nodded.
The clique of bullies at school held the right to speak, and the ordinary students were like common folk under a tyrant's despotic rule. Like Zhang Yifan, they only wanted to live in peace, only asked not to somehow become the person being bullied. Once they accepted this order, they would instinctively submit, like people who saw their classmates being bullied and felt discontented about it but only dared to look on from the sidelines.
The people who could participate in the game were "candidates." Each candidate was a stock with the potential to increase in value.
If you gave one of the candidates the critical information about the 'deer' that he needed to join the clique, that person would naturally protect you—no, perhaps the more quick-witted would already have joined that certain person's faction before the start of the game.
The five candidates in the so-called "hunting game" had all been chosen by lottery?
The pudgy boy had obviously lied about this. Looking at his practiced conduct in attempting to bribe a police officer, you could just about deduce how he'd gotten his place.
"When the deer has been caught," Fei Du asked, "what happens?"
Zhang Yifan's face was ashen.