Abyss

I still clearly remember what happened on my first day at this new school. Because that was just last week, although it feels like half a year has passed. I have never felt so tormented.

My aunt drove me to school to register on the first day, no, my parents were not busy. One of them was traveling in Southeast Asia with her current boyfriend, and I have no idea what the other one is doing, nor do I have any desire to know. Perhaps a failed marriage is inscribed in our family DNA. My aunt has also been divorced for many years, but her career has been very successful, her business is getting bigger, and she has close contacts with government officials.

She was a very talkative woman. On the way to school, she told me about my father's recent situation. After marrying a woman, he had a daughter, old news, now the daughter is in elementary school, and she is going to the school where I had attended. My aunt is a sharp-tongued person, and she said bluntly that the girl looks so much like her mother, so hideous. I sneered at the passenger seat as if doubting about my father's taste in women.

I was quite skeptical that I had overpacked, I had never lived on campus before and I didn’t know exactly what to bring. Reaching the school gate, I felt relieved to see that few residential students brought less luggage than me. My aunt parked the car at the gate, blocking the bike lane, and wanted to drop me off at my dorm room. I found it embarrassing but then it seemed that other students were also accompanied by their parents.

“Can’t we park the car here?” I looked around and said to my aunt.

“Whatever, it’s just a fine of a hundred something. Your aunt is rich.” She spoke with disdain for the rules.

I was so nervous about the new environment that I didn't want to argue with her.

We walked side by side, I was carrying most of the luggage, while she carried the brand-new pillow she had prepared for me. Suddenly, she nudged my arm with her elbow, prompting me to look at the boy ahead. The boy was nothing special. His mother was carrying most of his luggage, while he was carrying a guitar on his back.

"Your school actually allows musical instruments to be brought to school."

"Musical instruments are not dangerous weapons, so why can't they?"

She insisted that the boy must have brought the guitar to pick up girls because when she was in college, boys who played musical instruments usually had only this purpose. I didn't agree with her. I thought maybe he hadn't played well enough to impress a girl yet and was just learning.

We didn't go straight to the dormitory. Instead, we turned into the hall on the first floor of the main building, where there was a wall covered with dark stone and deliberately made to look magnificent. On it was the large name of the school, which seemed to have been written by an old leader from our province. She insisted on taking a picture of me carrying my luggage and this wall, saying that she would send it to my mother as if this would be a memorable moment.

We were not the latest to arrive at the dorm, but there was already a bed made, and the owner of the bed was sitting at the desk under the bed reading, with no parents around him. And the guy with the guitar on his back turned out to be on the bed next to mine. I finally saw his face, which was full of acne, dark skin, and thick but dry hair. He greeted me first, "Hello, my name is Ye Huang. If you don't understand anything, just ask me." His tone was very gentle, not like a boy of this age. Then the door to the balcony opened, and a guy who looked even less like a boy of this age came in. He smiled shyly at me, and Huang immediately pointed at him and started introducing him to me. It seemed that they had a good relationship. This boy’s name is Sosa. He was not fully developed, merely started. He was short and looked very childish, but he was also very cute. Strangely enough, the boy who had been reading got up and came over to me, introducing himself. But what made me uncomfortable was that the conversation quickly turned to my grades, which made me feel a little bored. The last one to arrive was another transfer student, whom we called Monkey Tsai. His Mandarin was not very standard. At first, we thought he was from another city, but later we learned that he had come to the city in elementary school. As soon as all the parents left, Sosa kept asking him why he had transferred schools. He said that he had started a band in his old school. The band was very popular and he had a girlfriend, but someone was jealous of him and told the teacher that he and the girl had been in a hotel room together. The incident caused quite a stir, the band was forced to disband, and he was so angry that he did not go to school for months, and was eventually arranged to transfer schools. As the only non-virgin in the dorm, and even in our class, Monkey Tsai was like a hero. He would also vividly describe the sex to us when we were all in bed at night.

The first night was not so hard to get through. After dinner, we went to the classroom. The evening self-study time was from 7 pm to 9 pm. Since it was the registration day, we were allowed to get out of class half an hour early. Ye and Sosa took Monkey and me for a walk around the school. I guess it was mainly because Monkey was cool and had sexual experience. I just tagged along. The school was newly built and it was only in its third year. Sosa and the others were the first batch of students, so they were called the veterans. This new semester was of great significance to the school. It was the first time in the school's history that all six grades from junior high to high school had students, and it officially began to operate at full capacity. But Sosa was not happy about it. He thought that there were too many people in the school now and he would have to queue up no matter what he did. I had no interest in the history or even the future of the school. I had already begun to miss my life at home. I am, without a doubt, a homebody. Although Sosa was childish, he was surprisingly perceptive. He could tell I was homesick and tried his best to cheer me up all the time. After Ye and Monkey went back to the dormitory to practice their guitar skills, Sosa took me to the eighth-grade floor. We passed by Class Four, and he pointed to a girl inside, so subtly that I almost didn't notice. He told me that was his crush. I was a little surprised because I thought a guy like him was not testosterone-charged enough to be interested in romance.

The other girl wasn't anything special so I couldn't make a judgment about Sosa's tastes. But the girl next to her caught my attention, and I immediately asked Sosa who she was. He told me that her name was Pear and that she was Wanjei Wei's best friend, his crush. They were always attached at the hip. At that moment, Pear looked up at us, and she tapped Wanjei's shoulder. Wanjei looked up and saw us, then waved at Sosa. Sosa got excited, and his face turned red. He waved back and quickly dragged me along.

"Is that it?" I said in disappointment.

"What do you expect me to do? I don't dare talk to her."

"But she knows who you are."

Sosa told me that he and Wanjei had gone to the same elementary school, which was how they met. Sosa had graduated and temporarily forgotten about his crush. But a year later, Wanjei ended up at the same private school, rekindling his feelings. He called it "fate." But all I could think about was Pear's bright eyes, which had met mine for just a moment.

Back in the dorms, Ye and Monkey were still honing their musical chops. I heard Ye sing for the first time, and it gave me goosebumps. I could picture it so clearly in my mind: Ye stepping out of a black limo, screaming girls being held back by security. His voice had that kind of potential. I'd been alive for fourteen years and never heard anything like it. His guitar, however, was less impressive. It was covered in stickers of Singaporean singer JJ Lin. When you watched him play, it was like fifteen JJ Lin were staring at you. But that wasn't the reason I got goosebumps. Monkey is indeed a guitarist, with no singing skills. His thick lips make it seem like he wasn't born to sing. So you can imagine how good he is at playing guitar to be able to pick up girls—he can barely sing in tune, but surprisingly, he can imitate Linkin Park's explosive power, even though his pronunciation is a mess, which makes the English class representative next to him so anxious.

After another two songs, our head teacher appeared at the door, looking at Ye with disdain.

"Your singing is getting better and better, but your grades haven't improved at all," he said sarcastically.

Ye put the guitar aside and faked a smile.

"I told your mom before the start of term that you shouldn't bring the guitar now that you're in your third year," he said.

Sosa interjected from the side, "Music is Ye's life, Mr. Lu.”

"Shut up! The head of the 8th grade just called me. You brought the new student to a different floor, didn't you? Were you looking for a girlfriend for the new student?"

"No, no," Sosa laughed awkwardly and scratched the back of his head, which made him look even more suspicious.

Mr. Lu turned to me and Monkey. "It's not easy for your parents to send you here. You need to learn from good students, like our dorm leader, Dunyi. He's always been the top student in our grade. You should ask him for advice more often."

Dunyi was the guy who asked me about my grades that afternoon, but he didn't react at all to the compliment. It seemed like he was completely used to this kind of praise.

Mr. Lu was mainly visiting us to see if the two of us new students had settled down. He reminded Monkey and me to keep our collective sense of honor and quickly integrate into the class and dormitory. Later, he called Ye and Sosa out to give them a talking-to. It wasn’t until then that I learned from the other classmates that the school had strict rules: students from different grades were strictly prohibited from visiting each other unless in special circumstances. That’s called “cross-grade.” Dunyi was gloating on the side, saying that he’d heard from the director of the Department of Moral Education that because there are more students in school this semester, the school wanted to regulate the proximity between boys and girls after class more precisely. He mentioned, casually but intentionally, that his father had invited the principal and the head teacher to dinner during the summer vacation, and that he had been there too. I couldn’t believe such regulation would come true until the next day the director announced it in the morning briefing.

The first night I slept very well. It was a rare experience to sleep in a room with eight people. Getting up the next day was painful. I dawdled and in the end, didn’t even have time to eat breakfast in the dining hall. I bought a disgusting factory-made bread roll and quickly ate it after morning reading class.

I never understood the morning reading, what’s the point of spending half an hour reading all those texts from the Chinese textbook? Those articles are ancient, half of them were propaganda. English textbooks are even worse, the dialogue is silly and unauthentic, and the teacher forces you to memorize them, I get the purpose, which is to learn phrases, but the repeating makes the students lose all their interest in learning a language.

The first class was taught by our head teacher Mr. Lu, he took 5 minutes to introduce me and Monkey Tsai we took 5 minutes to be forced to introduce ourselves to the class. I didn’t know what to say, I just told them my name and which school I was from. I did mention I like music and art. Monkey’s was before mine but I was all nervous so I didn’t remember anything he said. Mr. Lu teaches us Chinese, a subject which I think is a joke. I sat in the last row, and we each had our own desk, unlike my old school, a desk is shared by two. You can see that the school is newly built, the top of our desk is all plastic, not wooden, rare to see in the whole city. Then there’s the morning brief. First of all, it was Monday, every school had a flag-raising ceremony, and no one should care so much about a piece of cloth. Then, a speech from the school's boss, welcoming the new students, which were just the freshmen and the seventh graders. I guess we transfer students didn't warrant a mention in his speech, or maybe we just weren't welcome at all. The boss’ speech was short, but then the principal gave a long one, and I didn’t listen. He looked kind and approachable, which made Director Lin from the Department of Moral Education, who was standing next to him, seem particularly ferocious. I can't be sure. I am a little bit nearsighted, but the doctor says I don't need to wear glasses. Director Lin’s speech was the real bomb, all about forbidding this and forbidding that, garbage problem, late for school punishment, dorm order, discipline, discipline, discipline.

After that amazing concert, the math class seemed mediocre. The boy on my left was good at math, eager to show off his process, annoying. The boy on my right doesn’t talk much, when he was thinking, he frowned, biting down on the button of the ballpoint pen and holding it in his mouth. When we survived to the English, he relaxed so much that made me think he was somebody else. He was good at English, just like me, but the teacher didn’t trust my old grades, pointing me to answer questions 5 times, which was record-breaking-ly boring but I answered all correctly. Ren, the boy on my right, stopped listening after 20 minutes and started reading a magazine about PC. He reads magazines, we could be friends. I thought.

It’s a miracle to survive to the lunchtime.

The dining hall was as crowded as Sosa had predicted. After the four of us had bought our food, we couldn’t find any seats. Then a senior boy greeted Ye and invited us to sit with them. There were about a dozen of them, all 12th-graders. While we were eating, Sosa whispered to me that these seniors belonged to a small school clique called The Goodmen. They were the oldest and also the toughest. Nobody dared to mess with them. They had been at the school since it was founded, so they were practically alumni. They had a pretty good relationship with our year group. Everyone knew Ye because he sang at school events every year, and he was pretty easygoing. Zhaozhao Ji, The Goodmen’s no.2, was quite friendly to Ye.

"How the hell are we supposed to maintain a 1.5-meter distance to girls in this damn crowded place?” I overheard Zhaozhao say sarcastically halfway through lunch.

Beside him is a refined-looking senior, Jing Bian. He looks bookish but is actually very sturdy. His official girlfriend is sitting beside him. Sosa said that Jing Bian is the overlord of our school and also the leader of The Goodman. He is the only one who dares to have a public relationship at school, and he can even hold hands with his girlfriend at school. I could hear Sosa's yearning to hold hands, he’d never tried. Despite being not the actual boss of the school, Jing Bian is rumored to be a relative of the chairman of the board, thus his rampant behavior in school seems quite reasonable. However, The Goodmen led by him seemed to be doing good indeed. He championed justice and fairness and unlike many other school overlords, his grades were splendid with liberal arts always ranking among the best. Zhaozhao was the opposite. He was good at science and math, which made people suspect he wasn't very emotionally intelligent, and it was thought to be the reason for his lack of romantic experience. The Goodmen's top fighter was Baoda Ho, who sat across from Bian at mealtimes. He looked like a gym instructor, as strong as an ox. If he'd charged at me, I'd have run away screaming. Baoda Ho was one of the core members, just behind Zhaozhao. Sosa should, by all rights, have known The Goodmen's history inside out, but even he couldn't explain how these three seniors had got together. He only remembered that Zhaozhao had been a loner in his first year. He came from the countryside, and the other rich kids looked down on him a bit. As to how he became Bian's partner later, Sosa still knows nothing.

"Who are you two?" Zhaozhao stopped eating to ask us bluntly. It sounded a bit aggressive.

Worried that Monkey would say something inappropriate, Ye quickly replied, "New transfers."

"Why would anyone want to come to a place like this?" Zhaozhao mumbled. "I heard there was another transfer."

"Another one?" Sosa looked up with a piece of fried chicken thigh in his mouth.

"I think is in Class 1. Seems like your intel isn't very good,” Zhaozhao replied.

Suddenly, Ye gestured for us to look towards the entrance of the dining hall. Two girls came in. One was the class monitor from Class One. Sosa had mentioned her to me during last night's self-study. The guys didn't recognize the other girl. "That must be her. She's a girl," Ye said excitedly as if the fact that she was a girl meant she could be his girlfriend.

“Don’t be in such a hurry to get hard, okay?” Zhaozhao teased, scooping up a large spoonful of rice and stuffing it into his mouth.

Our big group must have been quite conspicuous in the dining hall. As the class monitor passed by, her gaze fell on Sosa, and she frowned. I made eye contact with the transfer student. She had obvious freckles on her face. To be honest, I hadn't seen many people with freckles before, and I thought she was quite cute.

“She seems pretty innocent,” Zhaozhao said.

“And what were you hoping for? Another whore?” Bian jokingly said, finally breaking his silence, the first time I heard his voice.

"A whore?” Monkey perked up.

"I'll tell you later," Sosa whispered.

After lunch, we had to go back to our dorms. As a rule, boarding students should not take naps in the classrooms during the noon break. It was super hot outside, about 95 degrees, and there were a few standing air conditioners in the dining hall blowing out cold air, but even with those, I was still sweating profusely after I finished eating. And the dorms already smelled like a bunch of dirty socks. The small air conditioner in our room was strong enough to make the whole room nice and cool, though. I'm not in the habit of taking naps, or rather, I think taking a nap in the middle of the day is a waste of time. Ye said he had to take a nap or he'd be too tired for the rest of the day. Sosa said that if Monkey and I didn't want to sleep, he'd hang out with us. Monkey didn't want to sleep, and he didn't want to hang out either. He took off his uniform, got on his top bunk, shirtless, and started reading a book on his subpar mobile player.

Sosa took me to an empty dorm at the end of the hallway. The school had opened it up this semester for ninth graders who wished to continue studying after returning to the dorm. It was hopping at night, but empty during the noon break. There wasn't anything in the room except a bunch of desks shoved together in the middle of the room and a few metal bunk beds.

I had just sat down, still sweating, when the dorm supervisor, Mr. Li, showed up. He looked strict and wore a pair of cheap-looking, plastic glasses. I thought he was going to scold us for not studying and coming to the study room instead, but he didn’t say anything like that. He just asked Sosa if he had gone anywhere fun over the summer vacation. When he left, he reminded us to turn off the air conditioning when we went to class in the afternoon, and then he patted Sosa’s firm little butt.

Sosa and I chatted the whole noon break, with Monkey stopping by once, still without a shirt on. Sosa filled us in on all the details about that whore which Bian had mentioned at lunch. It was not the kind of story that should be discussed in the cafeteria. When Sosa was in eighth grade, a new girl transferred to seventh grade. She didn’t do well in school and her character was poor, so the other students never really accepted her. It wasn’t long before it was discovered that after school, she would put on the uniform from the vocational high school nearby and sneak into the boys’ dorms. What went on there was no secret to Bian, who was good at gathering information, and soon everyone knew that she was messing around with a lot of boys at the vocational school. Not only that, but she was also specifically targeting guys from our school who came from wealthy families, including Bian. At that time, Bian and his current girlfriend were already together, but the girl still made many crazy moves to seduce Bian, even fabricating rumors saying that he had done something outrageous with her, which made Bian very annoyed and helpless at the time. Later, she dropped out of school, and no one knew why.

Monkey seemed more interested in why she had dropped out of school, but I was more curious about what kind of intelligence network the overlord Bian has. I happened to know someone who was also good at collecting intelligence, Neco Yan, my nemesis in elementary school. But later in junior high, we became good friends. She helped me through a lot of tough times. I depended on her somehow, especially during and after the school transfer storm. After evening self-study, I used the payphone in the dorm hallway to dial her mobile phone number, which I could recite backward. Hearing her voice, I couldn't help but complain about all my pain: the crowded dormitory, the terrible dining hall, the boring evening self-study, and how much I felt like a prisoner doing my time. She didn't say anything too phony baloney to comfort me. She just said that when I was released, she would come and see me. I asked her if she knew Jing Bian, the overlord here. She said that she might have heard of him, maybe he was a friend of a friend or a friend of a friend of a friend. In a parental tone, she asked me if I had made any new friends. I briefly introduced Sosa to her, and she seemed satisfied that I had such a new friend. After hanging up the phone, I long to leave here, which now feels extremely distant and hopeless. A ninth-grader is required to attend a morning class even on Saturday. Before, I lived with my grandmother, which was near my old school. Now it’s quite far, and I don’t wish to live with the elderly. It seems as if our views are antithetical on everything; in discussing certain matters, it always feels as if one of us will be angered to death. Although my aunt has ample funds, she did not receive a cent from her ex-husband after the divorce, and she lives alone in a single apartment. I suppose that the excessive space just makes her feel lonely. Perhaps I have to reconsider living with my grandmother to attain a brief sense of freedom on the weekends. There are simply too many things to reconsider, and too many choices that have to be made.